[Dialogue] 10/11/18, Progressing Spirit: Sandlin: On a New Gendering of God; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Oct 11 07:37:05 PDT 2018
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!important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9965082011 #yiv9965082011templateFooter .yiv9965082011mcnTextContent, #yiv9965082011 #yiv9965082011templateFooter .yiv9965082011mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } Naming God is difficult at best, divisive even in its mildest form, and can be thought of as sacrilegious at its worst.
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On a New Gendering of God
Column by Rev. Mark Sandlin
October 11, 2018
Naming God is difficult at best, divisive even in its mildest form, and can be thought of as sacrilegious at its worst. I was confronted squarely with this reality as I entered divinity school. I can only begin to tell you how excited I was to be accepted into divinity school at Wake Forest. I had only applied to Princeton, Duke, and Wake Forest, and quite frankly had low hopes of being accepted into any of them.I still remember the day my acceptance letter arrived at the house. As I opened it standing midway up the driveway, I was overwhelmed with joy and relieved to finally be able to pursue the thing which I believed I was supposed to be doing.
Well, my first day of orientation at Wake made me forget about all of that, as this divine calling I had answered, as this desire deep in the core of my soul to talk about the God that I love and what that God wants for this world, was given parameters. More specifically, we spent a great deal of time discussing the topic of “gender neutral language.” “Discussing” is a bit of a misnomer here. What we had was not so much a discussion as it was being told what we were going to do – which was: don’t use words like ‘father,’ ‘he,’ or ‘him’ in referring to God. Then we were allowed to vent our frustrations and articulate cogent theological perspectives of the problems with being told how we can talk about God, and then we were told, once again, what we were going to do, which was, don’t use words like ‘father,’ ‘he,’ or ‘him’ in referring to God.
Jump forward a year. My daughter Kayli was about 7 years old and had received a praying doll as a gift. Each night as I tucked her in bed, she would say her prayers – she would say them with her doll. “Our Father who art in heaven.” Night after night I heard that. At the same time, day after day, I was in school listening to my theology professor, Dr. Frank Tupper, remind those who chose to refer to God as ‘he,’ that “God does not have a penis.” At night, in the innocence of a young girl’s voice I would hear God called “Father” as her own father tucked her in and during the day a man who dedicated his life to thinking about God would remind me that God does not have male genitalia.That’s where I want to enter this conversation about the gendering of God. That slice of my life. That moment in time when a young girl embraced the image of God as male and an older man refuted the image of God as male.
The Bible frequently presents God with a feminine image. In Genesis men and women are created in God’s image. In Hosea (11:3-4,13:8) God is described as a mother and a mother bear. In Proverbs as Lady Wisdom. In Deuteronomy (32:18) God gives birth. In Isaiah God is a pregnant woman crying out in pain (49:15). In Jeremiah (44:25), Queen of Heaven. In Matthew (23:37) a Mother Hen. In Luke (15:8-10) a woman looking for her lost coin. And possibly one of the most endearing images of God captured in the song “On Eagles Wings.” Deuteronomy (32:11-12) says, God will care for us just as a mother eagle “stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions.” And all of those are just to name a few of the Bible’s instances of feminine imaging of God.
One night, after tucking the kids in to bed and hearing my daughter pray to “Our Father in heaven,” I sat up thinking about what she was saying. About how the language of the church, of her prayers, and language in sermons, worship, and music, seem to be teaching her that God is male, or at least more like a man than a woman; that God is more fittingly addressed as male than female – effectively subordinating women and devaluing the understanding of women as being created equally in the image of God, a God who clearly can be understood just as well (and in some cases better) through feminine imagery.
I checked back in on Kayli before going to bed. As I looked at my daughter resting, I was struck with a deep need for the church to begin reprogramming itself to have a fuller understanding of God, one that subordinates no one because everyone is created equally in God’s image.
Also, I checked on my son, Hunter, before I went to bed. He was about three and a half at the time. I thought about him growing up in a church that allowed him to believe that on some level he is made more in the image of God than his sister, than any woman for that matter. I decided to teach him and Kayli both, to paraphrase Dr. Tupper, God has no male parts.
The next morning Kayli and I had a talk about who God is. We talked about God in the Bible, what God did, who God was, and who God is. We talked about what moms and dads do for us and mean to us. We talked about how she felt about calling God “Father.” That night when Kayli prayed, she prayed new words, words of her own choosing, “Our Creator who art in heaven…” Amen.It is time for a paradigm shift in the Christian church in how we present God in terms of gender and in the beliefs that come along with masculine dominated language. Frankly, those kinds of beliefs are a big part of the reprehensible behavior we saw last week from the Senate Judiciary Committee.But, the change I think it is time for may not be the change you are thinking of, I believe it is time for a genderqueer God. Here’s the first line from Wikipedia’s entry on genderqueer: “Genderqueer is a catch-all category for gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine, which are outside the gender binary and cisnormativity. Genderqueer people may express a combination of masculinity and femininity, or neither, in their gender expression.”I believe that as humanity has expanded its understanding of gender identity, we’ve hit upon an understanding that more fully encompasses the gender-fluid presentation of God that we find in the Bible. Genderqueer certainly is representative of not only how the Bible depicts God, but of what theologians (like Dr. Tupper) have been saying for quite some time.Frankly, many of us who are aware of developing understandings of gender identity are still getting use to how to use the correct language. For instance, when it comes to using non-gendered language for God, it actually takes a great deal of practice and creativity to not fall back on the traditional pronouns of he/she. But, it can be done. When you are talking about a person, it’s much more difficult. The emerging solution is to use the pronouns, they/them/their.Admittedly, those of us who grew up hearing those as plural pronouns, might find that using them to identify a particular person may sit somewhat awkwardly on the ear, but in time it does become quite normal.Also, it is a wonderful solution to the problem of the gendering of God that I was introduced to on that first day in divinity school. I wonder how comfortable we will be with that? Can we see God as genderqueer?~ Rev. Mark Sandlin
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About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on “The Huffington Post,” “Sojourners,” “Time,” “Church World Services,” and even the “Richard Dawkins Foundation.” He’s been featured on PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and NPR’s “The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin |
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This Rabbi On That Rabbi
A modern Portland, Oregon rabbi explains
Jesus’s messages. A 6-Part Video Series View this exclusive video content below
Born Again - Following is the summary of Part 1
A story
I want to tell you a story that’s told by people of the northern hills of Thailand.
The story goes like this:
.....The gods noticed that human beings made mistakes.
.....Human beings made mistakes, and, no matter how hard they tried,
.....they could never undo the mistakes they made.
.....Humanity seemed doomed as the inflow of the mistakes and their
.....consequences was greater than the outflow of forgiveness.
.....One day, one of the gods had an idea to solve this.
.....This loving and clever deity hatched a plan to annul this seemingly-
.....infinite number of transgressions. This god compressed its infinite
.....self into the finite package of a human being and then sacrificed
.....itself as reparations.
.....The story continues that, because of this infinite sacrifice, all people
.....from that day forward were liberated.
That’s a beautiful story.
I have told this tale to many people, and many people have enjoyed it. What I don’t tell them, at least initially, is that this story is told by the Christians in Northern Thailand. And that it’s the story of Jesus told by Christians throughout the world.
And I intentionally obfuscate the locale, referring instead to remote Thailand, because when it’s heard as the Jesus story, there tends to be some resistance to it.
When we can hear this story with new ears and look at it with new eyes, we can see it as the beautiful story it’s meant to be.
I, as an ordained Rabbi, want you – no matter your religious affiliation – to hear this beautiful story for what it is: a story of love between God and humanity.
We get so confused; we get so filled with the baggage behind the story that we miss the love story it is meant to convey.
I welcome you to put the bags down and be born again into a sense of religious rebirth.
Born without baggage
Let’s look anew at the meaning of the phrase “born again.”
When Jesus was talking about being born again, he used the word “anothen” – ἄνωθεν’ It’s true that anothen means “again,” but there’s another meaning, and it fits better here. That other meaning is: “from above.”
In this context, he expressed that everyone comes into this world through water – vaginal birth. He went on to say that one must be born “from above” as well as “again.”
.....John 3:1-8
.....Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member
.....of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi,
.....we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could
.....perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
.....Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God
.....unless they are born again.”
.....“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked.
.....“Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to
.....be born!”
.....Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of
.....God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to
.....flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at
.....my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it
.....pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or
.....where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
While Jesus was a mystic and was immersed in the river by John, Jesus was not talking about being born again through water. He was talking about being born again from above, from having a relationship with the Kingdom of Heaven.
The message is that it is not until you are born again into a new relationship with (the) God (of your understanding) and realize your true worth, that you are truly loved and truly forgiven.
That is what we refer to as one’s salvation. It is the soothing life-giving salve for the soul. Giving oneself over to God is what the phrase the “good news” is all about in the Bible.
The Jewish Part
I understand the idea of redemption. I’m an ordained rabbi. The core of Judaism is understanding this same notion that God so loves us in but, in my tradition, our focus in clarifying this truth is the story of the Exodus.
When we realize our connection to the infinite, we are born again.
But, in my tradition, we don’t use that phrase.
I think of it as the Buddhist story of five monks standing on a hilltop all pointing their fingers at the moon. The important thing is the moon, not the fingers. (Or, much more crassly, as my Buddhist teacher Nagy would say regarding different religions, “Same shit, different shovels...and don’t forget that shit is an excellent fertilizer.”)
Jesus as the way
Most Christians are familiar with the phrase stated by Jesus, “I am the way the truth and the life. No one gets to the Father except through me.”
A Jewish understanding helps unpack this phrase.
Jesus was not pointing to himself and saying he, personally, was the way to get to God.
The easiest way for me to explain this is with a lyric from the Led Zeppelin song “Houses of the Holy.”
“Let the music be your master. Heed the master’s call.”
Whose call are you to heed? The music’s.
Jesus was making the same type of analogy.
What Jesus was saying is “A=B,” and if you need to get to B, you can use A.
No one gets to God except through me. But what is me? Me is those three things he spoke about. Jesus meant that the path to God means following Jesus’s example of living a life full of the law of God, full of the truth of God, and full of zeal for the life of God. Jesus was saying that all God-seeking people must follow that path and that he was following it as well himself.
Note: the word “way” is a bit lost in translation if you don’t know the culture of the ancient Near East In Hebrew, the word for the commandments of God is halacha – a word which is best translated as “the way one does things.” Jesus here, again, is underscoring the importance of following God’s law.
Conclusion
Thank you so much for joining me as I attempt to reinterpret and re-explain some of these beautiful teachings.
With lots of love,
Rabbi Brian
Note
I want to be clear – and I will get to this again in a later edition – I’m not a Messianic Jew. I’m a Jew who loves his traditions and the teachings found throughout the New Testament. I’m a Jew who understands what modern scholars like John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, and others have been teaching that the New Testament was written by Jews, and that it is meant to be understood as Jewish text. To truly understand the gospels, one must look at them with Jewish eyes. And I’m honored to be your guide.
-rb
--
Rabbi Brian is the C.E.O. of Religion-Outside-The-Box, an internet-based, non-denominational congregation nourishing spiritual hunger. Find out more about newsletter, podcasts, videos, and other good ROTB.org is doing for thousands every week.
This Rabbi on That Rabbi is a co-production of Religion-Outside-The-Box and Progressing Spirit.
This is a 6-part video series also available for purchase here, it is made available to our subscribers to purchase as a gift or for a study group - the course contains six videos and audios along with their written companion PDFs.
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
Can Christian Theology once again be enabled to interact with contemporary knowledge?
A: By Rev. Brandan Robertson
Dear Reader,My answer to this question is a complex one. On one hand, I believe there are tremendous riches in the Christian tradition. It’s a 4,000+ year theological lineage which contains endless metaphors, parables, and doctrines which have helped foster human evolution and have sparked some of the greatest social reform movements in history. That must be acknowledged and celebrated.On the other hand, there are spiritual and theological traditions that predate Christianity and that happened geographically around Christianity that have been buried beneath Christianity’s dominance that I believe might speak even more profoundly to our world today, simply because most of them have not be usurped by empires like Christianity and thus require a lot less deconstructing and decoding to get to the heart of.So, to be brief, I will say that of course, Christian theology can evolve and interact with contemporary knowledge. It will certainly require us to step outside of traditional “orthodoxy”, but that has happened in every new era of human thought for the past 2,000 years. The Christian tradition is rich and enduring, and because of its nearly universal reach, it will remain a helpful way for talking and explaining new knowledge.However, we should also be looking to indigenous theologies and traditions- Celtic, African, American, and Asian spiritual ties- that have a lot more to say (and a lot more credibility to speak) about humanities current crises with tribalism, environmentalism, and colonialism than Christianity. The images, traditions, and deep perennial wisdom that they can teach us will be much more potent in the coming era and we would be wise to harken to the voices of our pre-Christian ancestors. In fact, I would suggest that this is precisely what Rabbi Yeshua would have wanted us to do.~ Rev. Brandan Robertson
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About the Author
Rev. Brandan Robertson is a noted spiritual thought-leader, contemplative activist, and commentator, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal and the author of Nomad: A Spirituality For Travelling Light and writes regularly for Patheos, Beliefnet, and The Huffington Post. He has published countless articles in respected outlets such as TIME, NBC, The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Dallas Morning News. As sought out commentator of faith, culture, and public life, he is a regular contributor to national media outlets and has been interviewed by outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, SiriusXM, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
A Life Well Lived
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on June 14, 2006
Reading obituaries is a remarkably insightful pastime. Each of us does it more and more as we grow older. The obituary writer obviously cannot recall all the twists and turns of a single life. Indeed, for the world to take note of a particular death in the obituary pages of a major newspaper at all, there has to be something special, something significant that lifts that particular life into a dimension of human meaning. So one searches the obituaries to discover that source of his or her qualification. Longevity without meaning is not necessarily noteworthy.I recall that story in the Book of Genesis about a man named Methuselah, who is said to be the oldest man described in the Bible. The biblical text says of him: “Methuselah lived 969 years and he died.” I have always thought that was a remarkably negative commentary on his life. Even though Methuselah lived 969 years, all that anyone deemed noteworthy about him was that he died! I thought about Methuselah a few weeks ago, while I was in Montreal, Canada doing a series of lectures. Each morning I read Montreal’s English speaking daily known as “The Gazette.” One day the obituary page featured five persons whose deaths were treated as being of national or international note. The one that intrigued me was the story of an 83-year-old Mississippi woman named Florence Mars. Her name called up no images from my memory bank and rang no bells of recognition. Why, I wondered, was the death of an 83-year-old Mississippi native receiving attention in the Montreal Gazette? Reading the story, I discovered much about what gives value to human life.Florence Mars was born in 1923 and grew up in Philadelphia, not the well-known port in Pennsylvania, but a small Mississippi town by the same name, located in Neshoba County. This town was not unlike many towns in the rural south in those early years of the 20th century in that its citizens seemed to believe unquestionably in white supremacy and its corollary of segregation. Indeed this racist conviction was called “the invisible hand” that directed the public and private life of people in this region. The story of the South in the 20th century was the story of conflict that arose and intensified, as this prejudice was first challenged and then began to die. By the late fifties and middle sixties that conflict had actually begun to recede, yet in parts of the South it still fed deep emotions of hatred. In 1964, ten years after the Supreme Court ruling on desegregation but a year before Congress was to pass the National Voter Rights Act, three civil rights workers whose stated task was to register black voters came to Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their names were Michael Schwerner, 24, James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20. That summer was destined to be a hot and unforgettable time. The idealism of these three young men, two of whom were white and one black, collided with that unrelenting racism that had long informed the South’s way of life. After a short time these three civil rights workers disappeared. The official story passed around among local people was that their disappearance was part of a hoax invented by outside agitators to gain national attention. Some of Philadelphia’s citizens even questioned whether the presence of these young men had actually been itself just a rumor to agitate the local people. If their presence was deemed to be nothing more than a rumor, then their disappearance was reduced to the status of sheer fantasy. In that same time frame a black church in Philadelphia had been burned. The Ku Klux Klan claimed credit for that but the local folks dismissed even that burning as one more publicity stunt orchestrated by outsiders, designed to split and embarrass the white community. This “common wisdom” was generally regarded as “the gospel truth” by the white community, with one solitary exception. A forty-one year old local businesswoman, a daughter of the town, named Florence Mars was publicly skeptical.She had actually seen these three young men in Philadelphia. She knew their presence was not fabricated. She also suspected that their disappearance was not just real but the result of foul play, so she began her own quiet investigation, listening, watching and questioning. On one occasion, she confronted the editor of the local paper about his prejudiced coverage of the racial violence that was gripping her town. She quickly emerged as the unwanted and disturbing “conscience” of Philadelphia, but her continued efforts kept the issue alive until searchers finally discovered a deserted place where the surface of the earth had been disturbed. Digging in this place, federal authorities uncovered the bullet-riddled bodies of the three victims. However, even after these murders were revealed, there was no prosecution and no arrests. This crime thus entered the records of Philadelphia’s “unsolved” murders. Florence Mars, however, continued to speak out, making it impossible for this episode to fade into the forgotten past. It, therefore, became one of the wrenching and memorable incidents of the civil rights movement.The white community, eager for this crime to be forgotten struck back with a vengeance at Florence Mars. She was vilified and harassed, as so often happens when guilt is not allowed to be eased. She was ostracized and threatened with death and violence. The KKK launched a successful boycott that ruined a cattle auction business she ran, forcing her to sell out at a depressed price. She was even arrested and jailed on a bogus charge of drunk driving as part of a planned campaign of public harassment. Pressure from members of her church forced her to resign from her position as a Sunday school teacher. Ten years later, she wrote a book entitled, Witness in Philadelphia that kept the pressure on even after charges for these murders against suspected Klan killers had been either dropped or dismissed by hung juries. Her work finally met with success in 2005, 41 years after these murders, when 86-year-old Ray Killen, a local preacher and Klan member, was convicted of these murders and sentenced to jail for the balance of his life. In a wheel chair, Florence Mars attended every minute of that trial, overjoyed that justice had finally come to her town.At her recent death she was memorialized throughout the nation. Her role in this episode had made her life one of great significance. A local attorney, a member of an interracial organization known as the “Philadelphia Coalition,” that had lobbied for the reopening of this case and the subsequent trial and conviction of Killen, said of her, “I shudder to think how little progress we would have made if not for Florence. She was our guide along the path to resolution and redemption for our community.” Florence Mars' single gift was that she was not willing to be silenced or to be passive in the face of evil. She had little obvious power. No one thought of her as a community leader. Armed only with the conviction that if citizens can murder one another because they do not like their victim’s opinions, then no life is finally safe. In obedience to that conviction Florence Mars found the courage that enabled her to absorb the slings and arrows of a dying racism. She lived to see her faith in that conviction vindicated and to gain the appreciation of her world.It is because of people like Florence Mars that a new consciousness about what it means to be human was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where this woman lived her entire life. Because she lived her life so well serving a universal human principle, her death was noticed around the world. The obituary in the Montreal Gazette was a signal tribute to the power of her life.Heroic activity is not always reserved for heroes.In almost every sense of the world, Florence Mars was an ordinary person. She lived on a very small stage, in a place not likely to be noticed by the world’s power brokers. Yet in the commonplace action of raising her voice against hatred and of lifting her conscience against intolerance, she changed her world. She left this earth a better place for having been in it.Is that not the ultimate criterion on which all life must be assessed? Wealthy people who dominate great industries retire and die every day and are quickly forgotten. Political figures who achieve great power in one century are lost in the pages of history in another. How many Americans today can relate any fact about such persons as Franklin Pierce, James K. Polk or Millard Fillmore? Yet each was elected in the 19th century to the highest office of this land. Millions of best selling authors suffer the fate of being unknown twenty years after their deaths. Who in 2050 will know the name of Dan Brown? These things cause me to wonder about the value system under which we live. The discovery of meaning is something that touches the dimensions of timelessness and eternity and access to meaning is within every person’s ability to achieve. It demands only that we escape our self-centered zone of comfort and place an ideal at the center of our lives from which we never waver. To enhance life is a virtue. To diminish life is a vice. To seek truth is a virtue. To kill truth in the service of prejudice is a vice. That is all it takes to enter into the realm of meaning. Florence Mars did just that. That was why she was remembered at the time of her death the world over. To serve truth without compromise, to be willing to pay the personal cost of abuse, harassment and rejection in the service of that truth is the pathway into meaning and thus I believe the pathway into God. Truth does not compromise to achieve a lesser goal like unity, popularity or personal well-being. Unity is never a substitute for truth or justice. That was the simple lesson that Florence Mars knew well. It is a pity that so many of our political and religious leaders have not yet embraced this elementary understanding of reality.Florence Mars was not born to lead but lead she did and history will remember her. How many of us will it occur to the editors of the Montreal Gazette to memorialize when we come to the end of our days?~ John Shelby Spong |
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