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