The biblical writers have more imagination than their readers.
The Bible we use as a Episcopalians and as Christians does not begin with the New Testament.
There is an abundance of feminine and masculine descriptive imagery for God well before father language is introduced.
At no point did Jesus say that father language was the only language we should use to pray, not even when using that language to teach us how to pray.
When Jesus used the expression “wisdom is justified by her children” to refer to himself, he was using expensive and feminine God-language.
When Jesus told the parable of the male shepherd looking for his lost sheep he was using a masculine image for God. When he told the parable of the woman looking for the lost coin he was using a feminine image for God.
Note, those parables are deliberately placed back to back and have the same ending, rejoicing over the lost one. They are different versions of the same parable describing the God who seeks those who are lost using male and female figures to represent God.
As far as the wealth of feminine imagery, particularly in the Hebrew Bible: the uncontestable feminine grammar of God’s spirit, the God who gives birth and writhes in labor, the God who loves from the womb b/c the verb רחם includes the word womb lost when translated compassion.
Changing the prayerbook is not changing the Bible. What we are asking is to be more biblical in the prayerbook, to use more of the Bibles language and imagery, specifically feminine language and imagery that is already there.
When God describes Godself using anatomical language, God speaks only of a womb and not of male organs asking: From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven?
And God asks: Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?
All of this rich language is available to us. To deprive ourselves of it is to deliberately impoverish ourselves, our liturgies and our prayers.
The texts of Hosea and Jeremiah present prophets who heard and spoke for God in and through the vernacular of their culture. As Dr. Weems taught us, that vernacular was androcentric with a mean misogynistic streak...
...and in a shame/honor society the worst thing you can call a man is a bad woman. But I know that God is bigger than all of our images and idioms including biblical ones, and I know no one is disposable no matter how the text frames them.
Jesus didn’t just stand with good men like Botham Shem Jean, but he stood with and died with the criminally corrupt bearing his cross along with them, receiving a final beating at the hands of the police before his execution. wilgafney.com/2018/09/16/the…
Jesus’s cross was the empire’s death sentence for revolutionaries. Is your faith revolutionary? Is your faith visible outside of the walls of this sanctuary? Jesus call us to take up our cross and follow him into the world’s broken places and make a difference.
What does it look like to bear a cross on which you might be tortured & killed? ...standing against policies that consign primarily people of color to death, incarceration, exile & poverty absent access to healthcare..cutting funds to refugee service organizations in Palestinine.
Y'all. I got a sho' nuff word in the middle of my lecture on Judges in intro:
Qayin (Kain/Cain) was a murderer. A fratricide. A brother killer. He was guilty. He did it. Even in an unjust system some folk locked up are guilty. Somebody’s son, father, uncle, cousin, brother...
sister, mother, daughter, auntie is locked up and locked down because they did it. And some folk want to throw them away for ever, use them for cheap labor, throw their bodies at forest fires, leave them behind to die in hurricanes...
and if they make it out, make it impossible for them to find legal work to support themselves and their families. And then as the icing on the cake, strip their voting rights from them so they can’t help reform the system that they know better than anyone else.
Time for the first grading thread of the semester. Starting with a reality check:
"I am middle-class but am currently trending towards lower class due to student loan debt as well as working a lower-income position as a pastor."
Representation matters. It matters that faculty and their syllabi are well read beyond their own identities. In short, glad to be able to recommend some Pacific Basin biblical scholarship by Jione Havea.+
Jione Havea: Sea of Readings: The Bible in the South Pacific and Islands, Islanders, and the Bible: RumInations
Today in #BriteBible: Ancient Israel's androcentric hierarchy is not true patriarchy with all males, or even all male heads of households holding power and authority over all women and children.
Rather, certain males (Moshe over Aaron, kings and priests over virtually all others) and occasionally certain females (reigning queens, e. g. Athaliah and some female prophets, e. g. Deborah and Huldah) held sway over all others. #BriteBible
Biblical Israel’s androcentric hierarchy should not be misidentified as misogynistic. Women were valuable contributors to society and preservers of the cultural heritage. #BriteBible