Parenting the Church

My youngest turned four on Monday.  Typing that is surreal. The past almost six years of my life have been a holy blur of snot, too little sleep, food & toy messes, nursing and pumping, doctor's appointments, and countless nights falling asleep on the couch with too much left undone. For one glorious month, until our twins turned two, my partner and I had three children under 2 suddenly in our care. Moments of contemplation, devotion, and prayer, if I'm truly honest, were few and far between – admits the ordained minister employed by churches.  The guilt I've felt from time to time about my lack of religious devotion has been met by countless mothers and parents of young children who've confided:

"I used to be an activist, now I don't know who I am!" 

"We never make it to church anymore."

"I can't remember the last time I thought about God."

I was 35 weeks pregnant with my third while serving at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in midtown Manhattan. My responsibilities of Outreach and Mission kept me away from Family Ministry. But that morning, a mother invited me to join the parents group. I stepped away from (what I thought were) my morning responsibilities and sat in for the visiting lecturer. I can't remember her name (apologies, wonderful human!), but I will never forget how she opened.  

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me,  I was naked, and you gave me clothing, I was sick, and you took care of me."

Matthew 25 35-40 

Tears welled up in my eyes. 

I got it. 

Yes. My daily mundane tasks are holy, are “doing to the least of these” right in front of me, are ordained. 

For I was screaming in the middle of the night and you woke up to help me

For I was learning to walk and you held my hand 

For I was having a tantrum and you helped me through it 

My 4 year old passed me her virus on Sunday, putting my entire week out of whack – so much so that this very article is late. Nothing was coming to me. I didn't have time to think. I couldn't get up early enough to write.    

I can't remember the last time I thought about God. 

And then I remembered. 

For I was sick and you took care of me.  

And there within is God. 

There within is my frontline of truth, my wisdom for the moment to share with the world.

Meister Eckhart says that God is at home. It's we who have gone out for a walk.

Where are we going for a walk, intellectualizing away the very God in our midst? Where are we overthinking what we have upon which to reflect, to miss the God of the mundane? Matthew Redmond says that "We are not saved from mediocrity and obscurity, the ordinary and the mundane. We are saved in the midst of it. We are not redeemed from the mundane. We are redeemed from the slavery of thinking our mundane life is not enough."  

While I don't think slavery is the appropriate word to use here, Redmond is right. Our mundane life is where the divine lives. 

"What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world," writes Barbara Brown Taylor in "Alters to the World."  

One of the reasons parents with young children don't come to Church is because they aren't seen. The morning routine to get out the door is a marathon. The stressful "will my child cry", have to go to the bathroom, run down the aisle, interrupt the sermon mind juggle is REAL.  

Do we want young people at Church? Do we WANT caregivers in Church? Our actions, or lack thereof, provide the answers. And here's the real truth. Not only SHOULD we be actively encouraging and supporting parents, helping them see the sacredness of their routines, but the Church has quite a lot to learn from the youngest minds and would benefit from centering those small voices. 

Jesus knew what he was doing, after all, when he said in Matthew to his disciples, "Let the children alone, don't prevent them from coming to me. God's kingdom is made up of people like these."

I FaceTimed one of my five-year-olds right before stepping into our Ash Wednesday service. (Night services are hard for parents with young children!) While explaining what I was about to do, he asked, "but why do we need ashes to get us to Easter?" And then my entire intro to worship changed.  

God's kin-dom is made up of people like these.  

And it's made up of the parents and caregivers, aunties, friends, grandparents who give them something to drink when they are thirsty. 

Parents and caregivers, you are on the frontlines of the revolution. You are raising humans that will perpetuate white supremacy, or be actively anti-racist. You are raising humans that can break down walls rather than build them.  So stop thinking your praying has ended, or your activism decreased. 

Your homes are the very grounds upon which Jesus walks. Every day. And sometimes, in the middle of the night when we'd really rather be asleep.  

For you were tired, mom, and I held you.

For you didn't have enough time, dad, and I gave you grace. 

For you think you're doing a bad job, parent, and I rejoice in your being.  

For you question your call, caregiver, and I sing praises for your holy care.  

For you didn't know what to write, minister, and this was it.  

Where are we, in our Churches, downplaying, "othering" or infantilizing the ministry of parents or the prophetic-ness of children? Whether you’re a parent or not, this question is for all of us who care about the future of the Church. 

My four-year-old’s sickness passed to me reminds me that this is my most immediate and pressing call, and that attending to that provides grace and truth the world needs.  What is your most immediate and pressing call?  What is your Church's?  What is right in front of you today?  Do you believe God can speak there?  I do.  And I believe your listening and sharing that wisdom ushers in the kin-dom of God. 

May it be so.

~ Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft

Read online here

About the Author
Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft is an activist, organizer, Baptist minister, and mother of five-year-old twins Zane and Levi and four-year-old Skyler.  She is the Executive Minister for Justice and Movement Building at Middle Collegiate Church and the founder of Raising Imagination, a platform that examines social change at the intersections of faith, parenting and politics. Her activism has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, Refinery29, and Bust and she is a regular writer and inaugural board member of The Resistance Prays.  She and her family live in the East Village of Manhattan and fight the patriarchy and examine their racism and spirituality together, one cheerio at a time.

Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader
I agree with you on evolution, homosexuality and more. However, I think we need to appreciate the fact that the conservatives" problem with evolution is based on more than Genesis. The premise of the Old Testament is that God does stuff on earth - lots of stuff. If God is not managing how life forms on earth are created, what else isn't He (She) managing or doing? The notion that the messes we create on earth are not part of God's plan and that God is not going to intervene and fix them is a scary thought. The question is how can we get the conservatives to accept the idea that we are responsible? Jesus showed us what to do. How can we get them to accept that now it is up to us to do it?

A: By Rev. Gretta Vosper

If I understand you correctly, you are attempting to pull the limited perspective you believe progressive Christians hold with respect to the concerns of conservative Christians back to see a broader picture; namely, that it is naïve to think problems evangelicals have with evolution flow simply from the anti-evolution perspective taken from a literal reading of the book of Genesis. You are arguing that their beliefs are grounded not only in the creation myths of the Hebrew Scriptures, but also in their belief in the ongoing manifestation of the works undertaken by the god called God throughout the entirety of the Bible. Recognizing that there have been a lot of hiccups along the way from then to now, many of them creating havoc in the lives or extinctions of various species on Earth – including humans – you note the challenges inherent in giving up the belief that all of that proceeds forth from God’s hands.

The notion that the messes we create on earth are not part of God's plan and that God is not going to intervene and fix them is a scary thought.

That is a scary thought, indeed, if it is one that challenges your worldview; that is, if you have sincerely believed the biblical premise, “Good and bad each happen at the command of God Most High,” (Lamentations 3:38 CEV) and then lose faith in that premise, well, you’re not going to feel comfortable for a long, long time. If E.V.E.R.

Convincing a conservative Christian that it is we, all of humanity, who have the “whole wide world in our hands”, is about as likely to happen as convincing a seaside village to head for the hills when those who most skilled at predicting tsunamis see absolutely no sign of one on its way. Or, tragically, convincing a government that a new virus has the potential to trigger a global catastrophe, a pandemic. Dr. Li Wenliang, 34, died trying.

We ignore our fears on a moment by moment basis. Even when a threat does break free of our inner reflexes and responses and reaches our awareness, a healthy mind will often rationalize it away if it isn’t in keeping with one’s underlying worldview, resting as that does upon innumerable assumptions and inherent beliefs. An evangelical perspective provides a compelling interpretation for the devastations we see unfolding around the world. What we see is human destruction; what they see is God’s retribution.

Bishop Spong, after years of arguments with evangelicals about homosexuality, decided to refuse to engage on the topic. He had said what he had to say; those who had ears to hear did and those whose ears were stoppered didn’t. In moving on, he continued to be a remarkable catalyst for change. But a catalyst, remember, is not consumed by the reaction it instigates. Neither was Jack Spong. He simply shifted his focus and placed what he had to offer before those to whom it would make a difference, those whose hearts would be fortified by his words.

I encourage you to do this same thing. Find ways to inspire and engage those with whom you share a basic worldview. There will be sufficient convincing to be done there, I expect. “The notion that the messes we create on earth are not part of God's plan and that God is not going to intervene and fix them” is such a scary thought as to invite the kind of break from reality that turns us away from what needs to be done rather than toward. But we must lean in; our weakness often holds our greatest strength within its folds. Share your strength; invite people beyond their fear. There is much to do and much, much more counting upon our doing it.

~ Rev. Gretta Vosper

Read and share online here

About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. Visit her website here.
 

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Origins of the Bible, Part XXI:
Jonah and the Prophetic Lesson Against Prejudice

It was a profound shock to the people of Judah when the City of Jerusalem fell to the army of the Babylonians in the early years of the 6th century BCE. This city had not been conquered by an invading power since 1000 BCE, when David himself had taken it from the Jebusites to make it the capital of his newly unified country. When Solomon erected the Temple in Jerusalem, the people began to think that this holy city now lived under the protection of its indwelling deity. That idea was shattered with the city’s fall in 596. The subsequent relocation of the Jewish people into a Babylonian exile only continued the shock and increased the despair.

The depth and pain of these reactions was located in the firm belief that somehow the Jews were God’s chosen and favored people. Yet the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the people seemed a strange way for the “chosen people” to be treated by their God. Life has to be endured as it comes, however, and so the Jews lived apart from their holy city and their sacred soil for several generations. Finally, the Persians defeated the Babylonians and allowed the descendants of the exiled Jews to return and resettle their native land. Jewish pilgrims returned in smaller and larger groups over the next two centuries.

The Jews dealt with this trauma in their history by trying to explain why God had allowed the defeat and exile of the chosen people. All of their understanding of God drove them to find some rationality in this experience. This was especially true when a sufficient number had returned to allow them finally to begin to rebuild their country.

They wanted to make sure that God’s wrath would not descend on them again. They needed to know how they had offended God so that this behavior would never be repeated. Their first explanation was emotionally unsatisfying for it placed blame for unfaithfulness on their own ancestors and dishonored their parents, in direct violation of the Ten Commandments. Then they hit on what seemed a better idea. Alien influences were to blame, they said, “Some of our weaker ancestors had married foreign partners. These Gentile elements then brought corruption to our nation by polluting the true faith and the racial purity of God’s people.” The way to avoid a future disaster thus seemed clear. They must purge the nation of its non-Jewish elements by banishing them from the land. The half-breed children of these unholy unions must also go. The new land of the Jews must be for Jews only. So the law was decreed and vigilante squads were loosed on the people with instructions to check blood lines to the tenth generation in order to guarantee the racial purity of the newly established Jewish state. The true worship of a pure Jewish people was the only way to secure God’s blessing. The Jewish state thus entered a period of internal violence.

It was because of the atmosphere produced by this mentality that an unknown Jewish person, presumably a man since women were not taught to write at this time, went to his home to devise a means of challenging these prevailing attitudes. He could not attack them openly in a public, political way, for that would be interpreted as running the risk of new defeat and a new exile. He had to confront these attitudes obliquely until their destructiveness was made clear. He had to find a way to hold up a mirror and to force the ruling authorities to look directly into it. Taking his quill in hand he decided to write a fanciful story filled with the exaggeration of a world of make believe, but so enchanting that everyone would want to hear it. In the privacy of his home, he did just that. When he had finished, a text of this story appeared suddenly and anonymously in Jerusalem at the height of the ethnic cleansing. The town crier gathered some people around him in a public square and this is the story he read.

Once upon a time there was a prophet in Israel whose name was Jonah. God called to Jonah and told him that he must go to preach to the people of Nineveh. “Nineveh,” said Jonah, “you must be kidding. That is an unclean Gentile city. Why would you want me to do something that weird?” God was adamant, however, and God’s message was clear, so Jonah had to respond. He did so in the classic way that people do when they are told by an authority figure to do something they really do not want to do, that is, Jonah said “Yes” but he meant “No” since he had no intention of obeying. Jonah, however, went through all the motions. He went to his home, packed a suitcase, went down to the port and booked passage on a boat, but to Tarshish and not to Nineveh. One does not go by sea to Nineveh. If caught, he reasoned, he could claim that he had misunderstood and by this time, God surely would have had second thoughts. All went well as Jonah boarded, unpacked his suitcase in his stateroom, put on his Bermuda shorts, got a good book and positioned himself topside in a deck chair as the ship pulled out into the Mediterranean Sea. The trip was uneventful until a dark cloud in the sky seemed to be shadowing the boat. Aware of this dark presence, the captain tried to escape it by turning the boat both to the right and to the left, but the cloud responded by turning in concert with the boat. While the rest of the sky was clear and blue, this cloud got darker and darker and from within it came flashes of lightning, the roar of thunder and finally rain. So strange was this phenomenon that the captain drew the obvious conclusion, “Someone up there does not like someone down here.” In what he regarded as a scientific fashion, he sought to identify the culprit. He drew straws and the lot fell on Jonah. “What is this that you have done, Jonah?” “Well, God did tell me to go preach to the Ninevites, but I knew that God did not really care for the Ninevites, so I booked passage on this boat.” The captain, who did not care for Ninevites either, understood and thought he would ride out the storm until a bolt of lightning struck near and a wave from the sea swept over the boat, hurling Jonah’s deck chair from one end of the ship to the other. That was when the captain weighed his own security against Jonah’s decision and decided that Jonah had to go. So, with the help of three deck hands, Jonah was seized by his limbs and on the count of three they heaved him overboard.

Jonah never hit the sea. God had created a great fish (the word whale never occurs in this story) that had been swimming in tandem with this boat waiting for its moment in the drama. Jonah fell into its open jaws, which closed over him, and Jonah found himself living in the belly of this great fish. Jonah had amazing adaptive qualities, so he settled down to make his new home comfortable by rearranging the furniture and hanging the curtains. For three days and nights, Jonah lived in this new, but somewhat confining, Mediterranean condominium until even the great fish got tired of Jonah (I think he smoked) and so, with a great primeval belch, the fish threw up Jonah, who tumbled head over heels onto a conveniently located sandbar. Jonah was clearing his head and taking in his new situation, when he heard a voice saying, “Jonah how would you like to preach to the people of Nineveh?” “Okay, God,” he said, “You win. I’ll go.”

In one verse Jonah was in Nineveh, but still convinced that God was making a mistake, so he opted for a new form of resistance. In Frank Sinatra fashion, he concluded, “I’ll do it, but I’ll do it my way! I’ll preach to the Ninevites, but I’ll do it by muttering under my breath and only on the back streets and alley ways of the city.” Around the city he went saying: “God says to repent. Repent and turn to God,” hoping no one would hear. To his amazement everyone heard. Crowds gathered from every house and condominium confessing their sins, tearing their clothes in repentance and begging for God’s mercy. Jonah was the most successful evangelist in the history of the world. Jerry Falwell would have eaten his heart out for this kind of response.

Jonah, however, was angry. Storming out of town, he said: “I knew this would happen, God. That is why I did not want to come. These wretched people deserve punishment. I know you, God! I know you will forgive! Why does your love not stop at the boundary of my love?”

Jonah found a spot outside the city where he sat and sulked. The sounds of the revival could be heard as “Sweet Hour of Prayer” was being sung by the penitents. God was strangely silent and night fell. When Jonah awoke, a giant plant had grown up near his head. During the day Jonah found protection from the desert sun in its foliage and sanctuary from the biting desert wind in its trunk. That night God created a worm that ate the giant tree, leaving only a small pile of sawdust. When Jonah awoke, he was distraught at the loss of his beloved tree. He wept, mourned and felt the depth of bereavement. Finally, God broke the divine silence and said, “Jonah, how is it that you can have such passionate feelings about this tree and yet no compassion for the 120,000 people of Nineveh, to say nothing of their cattle?”

The Book of Jonah ends there. Imagine that story being read on the streets of Jerusalem while ethnic cleansing was taking place in the city. As the story unfolded, the people roared at the depth of Jonah’s bigotry until they realized that Jonah was a fictional portrayal of themselves.

The Book of Jonah remains in the Bible to this day to counter human attempts to say that the love of God is limited to the limits of my love or my religion’s ability to love. There are no boundaries on the love of God. That is the message of Jonah. In God there are no distinctions between Jew and Gentile, male and female, black and white, gay and straight, left handed and right handed. God’s invitation is “Come unto me, all ye” not “some of ye.” We are to come “just as we are, without one plea.” How dare Popes or Archbishops of Canterbury or religious institutions anywhere define anyone as beyond the limits of God’s embracing love! When any ecclesiastical leader or religious tradition excludes or diminishes any child of God for the sake of “unity” or by defining God’s love as limited, the Book of Jonah stands as biblical judgment on that leader and those attitudes.

~  John Shelby Spong

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We all know it. These are hard days for women who are clergy, writers, spiritual directors, and educators in faith communities and public callings. We persist, but feel exhausted. We speak, but struggle for wisdom. We serve, but forget ourselves.

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