Being gracious and healing on the Sabbath.

 Sometimes it's hard to be gracious.

Luke 13:10-17
10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. 11And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, 'Woman, you are set free from your ailment.' 13When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, 'There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.' 15But the Lord answered him and said, 'You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? 16And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?' 17When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

Why do we get our feelings hurt when God does things for other people?   The urge to nitpick is so strong, it's irresistible.  The pharisee in this story is jealous.  Jesus had done something for that woman that he could not do.  He nitpicks.  He looks for someone wrong about the wonderful thing that had just happened. 

You shouldn't work on the sabbath.  

I should point out that I'm guilty of this same thing with similarly decent intentions. I am ritualist.  I want everything to be done "right".  Is it OCD?  No.  Is it righteous? Sometimes.  I do it mostly because I care.  I think every time I see that acolyte lighting the Paschal candle last, it should be burning before ANYONE comes in here and you should light your candles off it!  Am I right? Yes. Do I need to worry about stupid crap like that? Not really...

In the case of the pharisee, definitely not. It's jealousy, pure and simple.  The rules are made for people, not people for the rules.  So the next time you find yourself worrying about the rules more than you are the person breaking them, ask yourself if you would treat your pet that way.   If you wouldn't, why the hell would God want you to treat his child that way? That's what the Lord's telling us in this story.  People are more important to God than rules.   Meet people where they are, and give them what they need. 

I keep telling my brain to shut up, but it won't, so I'll inflict some of my thoughts on you guys this evening.  Few more housekeeping items about me and Christianity and all the ways I actually am both the tie dyed liberal sheep of the family and a Christian.

A few things you might find shocking:

1. I actually believe in the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.   Yes, I know that dead people typically stay dead.  I'm not stupid.  I do know that scientifically it is very difficult to reanimate a corpse.  I really do believe it happened though, and I have several reasons for doing so.  I'm not sure any of them pass a scientific litmus test, but here goes:

  A) People in the first century actually saw crucifixions and were not all that eager to try them on for themselves.   Claiming to be followers of a risen-from-dead-Jewish messiah was a surefire way to get a chance to give it a shot. . See, the common theory on the messiah at the time was that he was going to be a military hero who was going to kick ass, take names and kick the Romans out of Palestine.  Encouraging this kind of behavior was, shall we say, discouraged

 B)  Did I mention the Romans were really good at killing people who weren't good at being polytheists? 

C) This crazy god-man story stuck around.  It also came from the Jews, whose god did not, to sugar coat other mythologies in the region, often "fall in love" with mortal women.  It not only stuck around, it survived its proprietors all dying violent deaths and several centuries of pretty intense (on again off again) persecution.   It even resulted in a Roman emperor, who didn't get baptised until he was near death because he had a lot more people to kill and the church was pacifist at the time, making it legal eventually.  

2.  I also actually believe in the virgin birth.   See 1.C. for details.  This is not something about which I actually worry.  Do not get excited.

3.  I take the Bible to seriously to take it literally.   On some level it would be easier to believe it was dictated to men by God, but that would devalue it.   Seriously.  It's far more interesting as it actually is.  Collections of poetry, prophecy, histories, and crazy letters about infighting in the actually church are far more fun and tell us a lot more about God and his relationship with us than a magic book written by a sky daddy with genocidal tendencies.

That being said, don't you freaking dare blame genocide on religion.  Humans do that just fine without religious intent being involved.   Religion is the excuse, the salt if you will to make it seem more palatable, but human beings come up with some pretty sick stuff to do to each other all on their own.

Another thing:  You can be an Episcopalian and believe in dinosaurs.  No, really.  You can believe in evolution.  You can believe that God doesn't have to tell us EVERYTHING about creation.

4.I really do believe in miracles.  I just find them harder to believe when they come in a commercial package from a guy with a "donation" line and a $4,000 suit.

5.  I am pro-choice because I believe that letting people make decisions for other people is bad.  I find abortion for birth control abhorant, personally.  It's sad, it sucks, and it should be perfectly legal.  Why?  Because God does not want to be in the exam room with you and your doctor unless you invite him.  Because women have a God given right to control over their own bodies.  Because God trusts women with this kind of power (Men can't carry babies after all) and you should too.  Because not all abortions end healthy pregnancies.  Because not all abortions are removing living tissue from the human body. (If you're not big on subtlety, I'm talking about removing a fetus after miscarriage.)   Because the human body aborts more pregnancies than any clinic ever thought about NATURALLY.  Sometimes pregnancies just don't work out and I pray that never happens to anyone, but if it does, leave the government out of it.   The early church was opposed to abortion because it was something done to women by men who had absolute control over their lives. It was dirty, dangerous, and deadly... to the women.  I can't say if it was preferable to the pater familias ordering a new born left out to die of exposure because the baby was inconvenient, but the Church was largely concerned about this as an abuse of women, not an abuse by women.

The Baptismal Covenant, or Why being a liberal goes with being a Christian for me

I got to thinking this morning about what it was like for me when I first became a believer during church.  Part of it was the sermon, the other part involved questions a friend of mine had about my religion.

Do they say offensive things about glbt people or women's rights?

It made me remember the first chip in my armor as a teenager.  One of the things about growing up un-churched is that even f you land in a place where they practice infant baptism, which I did, you get to remember your baptism.  You're not 2 months old when it happens.  Not that there's anything wrong with being two months old when it happens.  Some of the most religious/sanctified/Holy Spirit oozing people I know were baptised as children.

The Episcopal Church doesn't just try and drown you in front of a bunch of people for a baptism.  No, instead we ask hard questions and ask people to make hard promises.  It's those promises that come back to me every time I'm tempted to dismiss another human being as worthless or less than.

Specifically:

 Celebrant     Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
People          I will, with God’s help.
Celebrant      Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?             
 People          I will, with God’s help
.Celebrant      Will you strive for justice and peace among all
                 people, and respect the dignity of every human
                 being?

People          I will, with God’s help.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons?   There's no wiggle room there.   There's no "but not the gays" clause, or "not the women" or "not the poors",  or "not the Republicans" in there.  It's ALL persons.  All of them.  In case you don't get it, they add a clincher:   Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being?  

For me, that's pretty clear.  Crystal.   Just in case I don't get it reading the gospels or having them read to me every week, it's right there in the promises I made to God when I formally joined his family.  It's why I wholly reject the words of people who parade around, purporting to speak in the name of God, and compare homosexuals to people who screw ducks or abuse children.  This isn't respecting their dignity, it's a blatant attempt to stip them of it.  That isn't my Jesus.  I don't like this guy they keep talking about.  Yes, Christ wasn't afraid to call out sins, as they like to say, but it was never sexual sins he was calling it.  It was hypocrisy, keeping people away from God by declaring them outlaws, and condemning others when they themselves were mired in dirt up to their necks.  Somehow I think we need to stop straining out gnats and swallowing camels.

I am, for the record, ridiculously happy that I learned how to love God where I did.  Ecstatic even.  The other deal breaker for my friend?  Evolution.   Yes, we get to believe in dinosaurs.

  

Quick, someone bring me some wine!

Have I told you guys I know a ridiculous amount of clergy people?   Well, thanks to the internet and college (campus ministry makes you meet people) I do.   They're not all Episcopal priests either.  (Some of them aren't even Christian.  I have a batshit crazy woman rabbi in my rolodex.  We compared notes on exorcisms, houses and people, but that's a story for another day.)  I'm unusually belligerent today and one of my particularly crunchy (Read: Liberal hippy type)  Methodist priest pastor acquaintances set me off.

Someone needs to bring me some wine.   Seriously.  This is getting ridiculous.   It was innocent enough.

Well, here it is:
 

I suppose the real problem was the caption: We can no longer say that (most) Episcopal churches are hypocritical about marriage. (remember how that denomination got its start? : )

Are you, pardon me for saying it this way, fucking serious?   Really?  From a guy whose church just defrocked a man for officiating at his child's wedding?  Whose church is, pardon me for pointing this out, so closely related to my own that my church and his church couldn't get married in most states because they're basically first cousins?

I want to point out that the popular conception of Henry VIII isn't really fair on this.  I don't defend dead British monarchs lightly, and he was a bit of a creep in a lot of ways, but hear me out.  Henry's first wife was married to his BROTHER first.  She claimed the marriage was never consummated, but who knows?   Henry became convinced that God was punishing him for marrying his brother's wife (Dude was dead, I figure sis is fair game theologically but he was more of a theological scholar than I am so I don't get to have an opinion.) and he asked the Pope for an ANNULMENT.  Now, his lack of knowledge of how biology works, and the fact that it was his perfect sperm that kept producing girls (have you ever seen a Y chromosome? It looks like a broken X chromosome) aside, he really thought this.  He legitimately thought it was his sin (too many mistresses didn't help?) that was keeping Catherine of Argonne from producing a much needed male heir to the throne.  So he asked the Pope for an annulment.

An annulment means the marriage NEVER HAPPENED.   This is different from a divorce which says it happened but it didn't work out.  It's an important difference. With an annulment, for example, if you're say, the King of England, you don't have to give her half your stuff if you split up. Or half your money.  Or the crown jewels. Or West Essex.  It also means you haven't sinned in getting married again--which you can't do in the church unless your first wife is dead.   If he simply divorced Catherine, he'd have to prove her unfaithful, which since he was the King, was also treason, so no good there, he'd have to make her dead.  Annulment was actually the least shitty option he could come up with to dispose of his wife.  (Except, of course, the one he came up with for a subsequent wife he simply didn't find attractive.  He declared her his sister, put her up in a castle and basically hemmed and ha'd his way out of that one, much to the irritation of Germany, from whence she had come, and his advisors, who had arranged it.)

All asides aside, this would delegitimize the marriage.   Catherine was furious.  She already had a daughter by Henry and this would make her a bastard.  (Mary ended up being Bloody Mary, so yikes!  Don't try and annul your marriage to your kid's mum.)  Good thing for Catherine, the Pope was more afraid of Spain, where she was from, than he was of England.  Bad thing for the Pope?  Henry wasn't afraid of him.   Henry was the frickin King of England and he had theological training and he just told the Pope that he was cutting ties with Rome.

Is this unexpected?  Do you know anything about the English and foreigners telling them how to do things?  They don't like it.  Ask Hitler about that.   Christianity was in the British Isles long before the Bishop of Rome ever sent anybody there.   The Church of England was never really theirs anyway.  So meh!

Is the Episcopal Church late to the party on this?  Heck yeah.  Are we getting there sooner than I or many of my friends ever thought we would? Hells yes.  Did we beat the Methodists?  Yeah buddy.  The Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, and the Roman Catholics.  We dealt with this before they did and you'd better believe they watched with bated breath to see how it went for us.  We did it first and it cost us a lot of our friends.  It wasn't fun, but like Henry and the end of his first marriage, we had to think we had a damn good reason to do it first.

The UCC beat all of us to the punch, but you know what?  That's okay.   We have a lot of baggage (history) to carry with us and it takes a while to get all that to the train station.

Uptight and White....and that's alright.

 Enter his gates with thanksgiving; 

go into his courts with praise; 

give thanks to him and call upon his Name.

I've been hearing a lot lately about what a chore it is to go to church.   How it doesn't feel right for one reason or another, or it makes people uncomfortable, or they go there and they hear people being put down by the preacher or other members.   It shouldn't be that way.  Sometimes it is.

I think the trick is figuring out why it doesn't feel right.  Is because someone is making unreasonable demands?  Did you have a falling out with a fellow member?  Is the pastor a total dick? (This is always a possibility.)  Do you know you're supposed to be somewhere else?

A long time ago, high school-ish, I did what teenagers do and let a friend of mine convince me to visit his church.  I think they were going to give him pizza or something if he brought the most people.   My friend either didn't know or didn't admit to being gay.  Skinny, ginger, sweet, 17 but looked 12.  At this point in our lives he's around 30 and looks 24 so I guess that was a mixed curse.   He conned me into it, and I hopped into his father's huge mini-van and rode out to Meno.

I should point out that I am uptight, white, and absolutely not a demonstrative person during worship.  More so then than now.  I like/d the scriptedness of Episcopal Church for a reason.  It matches my personality.  I'm not touchy, I'm not feely, when I'm huggy it's learned freaking behavior.  That's just me.   So when I wandered into a non-denominational church, you can say it was because my friend was persuasive.

Entirely because he was persuasive.   The church was/is a converted high school.  There are stairs everywhere.  The second I walked through the doors, I got an eerie feeling.   Stupid me, I just assumed it was because the building was probably haunted.  My church is haunted.  Lots of churches are haunted.  I tried to dismiss it as a cranky spook.  The kids had talked about being drunk on the Holy Spirit like some kids talked about drinking everclear.   (Not exaggerating)  We went up some stairs and down some stairs (Salvador Dali painting?) and into the 'youth room'.   There was a lovely painting of Jesus on the wall that another friend of mine had done.  We sat down and listed to youth pastor preach.  He talked about David and Bathsheba, totally threw poor Bathsheba under the bus and made David sound like an innocent victim of her being a female who dared to take a bath.   I got really pretty pissed at him and wanted to mouth off but I didn't want to embarrass my friends.  Their parents went there, they had to live with this asshole.  Then he tells the entire room that he wasn't a virgin when they got married but his wife was, *wink* wink* and I wanted to punch him in the face.  

Believe it or not, this wasn't the moment I knew for sure that God didn't want me there. No, no, it wasn't.  It wasn't until they began doing something they called a concert of prayer that this moment came. A 'concert of prayer'is when everybody prays at once but doesn't pray the same thing.  From what I was hearing, it was more a cacophony of prayer.  I was standing there, feeling uptight and white and like I was being lame.  I decided I was going to try this and I started to get on my knees in an attempt to participate..  Then it happened.  My friend passed out at my feet.  Right at the spot where I was going to kneel.  His pale ginger ass was lying on the floor 'slain in the Spirit' as they say.  The Lord had given me a sign!!!  I was supposed to lie low until I could get the hell out of there.

Church shouldn't feel like that.  You shouldn't feel assaulted and abused.  You should be able to be quiet if you want to without feeling like a jackass.  The pastor/priest should probably talk about Jesus and not about David's huge creeper psycho moment that everyone, including God, blamed him for like it was the poor girl's fault.   He probably shouldn't talk about his relationship with his wife like a dirty old man either.  Worship should feel like something bigger than the moment in which it takes place.  It should BE bigger than that moment.  It should be about something other us and something other the preacher.

It should be about entering his gates with Thanksgiving and his courts with praise.

Not about some dick with a huge ego.  Just sayin'.  The Episcopal Church: Where even a dick with a huge ego can't hijack the entire Eucharist because well, this isn't about him.  He only gets fifteen minutes of extemporaneous time, and the rest of it is out of his hands.

Happy birthday, Jack!

I mean that title in the freakiest most convoluted dorky Christian  the day you day is your heavenly birthday sense...

And yes, I meant to write this yesterday.  Yesterday, however, turned out to be far too full of fun stuff to make that happen.  I have a quarter sized funky lump under the skin above my left breast that yesterday looked like a spider bite.  Today it's just a sore lump that's kind of pink.  A fact I attribute to the doctor giving me prednisone at the Urgent Care last night.  I've never been smart and gone to the doctor the DAY I noticed a critter bite before, so maybe this will be my new pattern of behavior.  (I find softball sized sores full of icky stuff interesting in a scientific sense of "what the hell's going to come out of it next?" but they are painful and they scar...)

Anyway, back to the topic:

When I was a teenager, reading Mere Christianity changed my life.  I have friends who dislike it as a theological tome.  Find problems with the arguments etc.  What it did for me was show me a new way to talk to people about religion.  Logical conversation wasn't out.  Looking at them like they're insane when they say something like "You're a Christian, so you believe in dinosaurs, sky elevators and crazy shit like goblins under the earth poking people with sticks, right?" was suddenly not the best option.   I still look at them like they're crazy, but I can go on to have a somewhat civil conversation with them and maybe have them not think we've all drank the proverbial Kool Aid.  Unfortunately, thanks to my peers in other churches they usually walk away thinking they've just met a unicorn . But it got me thinking.

I honestly believe that was the point of the whole thing for the author.   Considering I read everything he wrote I could get my hands on before the age of twenty five, I should know.   Narnia.  Didn't read it until I was in my twenties.  Makes me sad that I waited that long.  It was like walking into another universe.   A different universe.  A beautiful one.  Encounters with God everywhere.  Brave people doing the right thing in the face of evil.  It was really nice. I could totally live there.   I've since read articles that point out the subtle (sort of) racism in it since then and wondered why I didn't catch it.  Unlike Peter Pan, where the native peoples on the island are members of the pickaninny tribe, most of it can be forgiven.  (I am not making that shit up, read the original book and be horrified. Heck, watch the Disney flick as an adult.  The good news is that if your kids are Okies and have contact with actual native americans, they will see the "injuns" on the island as caricatures and not relate them to any actual humans until they are old enough to have their mouths gape in horror as they realize that one of their favorite childhood flicks is a wee bit totally full of racist moments. Tis hilarious anyway, but only because we know better.)  The thing about Lewis that I like the most is that he was aware of his racism and tried like hell to keep it in check.  I like self aware people.  This is a good thing.

Out of the Silent Planet was the first book I read where the descriptions of the beings we call angels had any bearing on my experience of them.   It's an awesome little sci-fi book with some heavy theological stuff thrown in.  Read it.   Read the whole trilogy.   Till We Have Faces changed my life too.  It showed a life from the point of view of the one living it and then turned a mirror on it so it could be truly seen.  It made me see my own life in a different way.   Read it.

To wrap this up, I really like this guy.  Not just as an author but as a person.  A man I've never met.  Who would undoubtedly find my political and social views baffling.  I hope we'd get along.  Happy birthday, Jack.