Tish Harrison Warren writing on Christmas in The New York Times: Having a Hard Christmas? Jesus Did Too

By Tish Harrison Warren

Opinion Writer

Among my most treasured memories is one Christmas Day when I was around 6 or 7 years old. Christmases in my childhood were fairly magical, with good food, lots of family, presents and fun. But that Christmas I was miserable. I lay in bed at my grandmother’s house, where we went for our Christmas feast, with a stomach bug, separated from the rest of the family so as not to spread my Yuletide germs. Alone and unable to eat, I listened sadly to the laughter and glee down the hall. Then my dad popped his head in the door. He brought me a ginger ale with a straw and sat at the end of the bed. He touched my forehead with the back of his hand to check my fever and joked with me gently and kindly.

My father was a complicated man who kept to himself at home and was often distant. We knew he loved us but he showed that more through mowing the lawn and filling up the gas tank rather than giving us hugs or telling us so. But that morning my father left the healthy people, the party and the food and came to spend time with me, just me. I don’t remember what gifts I got that year. I don’t remember what the decorations looked like or what food I missed out on, but I remember my father’s face, his voice, his hands, his smile.

This story comes back to me this time of year because the holidays are often a lonely time for many of us. And in some ways for all of us. No matter how many family members or friends we have, no matter how delicious the food on the table, in quiet moments, many of us still feel a lack, a pang in our hearts, the recurrent ache of longing. We long for peace that we cannot conjure on our own. We long for justice and truth to win out. We long for a joy that isn’t quite so elusive. We long for relationships that last. No matter one’s political affiliation, race, income or education level, we share a common human yearning for a wholeness and flourishing that we do not yet know on this convulsed and suffering planet.
It was my father’s presence that transformed that childhood Christmas, giving it meaning beyond just misery, making it burn bright in my memory. This little moment was a tiny, imperfect picture to me as a kid of what Christians celebrate this morning in nearly every language around the globe: God, like my father, entered our room. The radical claim that Christians make is that God has not remained aloof, transcendent, resplendent in majesty and glory, but became one of us, to be with us in the finitude, the bewilderment, the loneliness and longing of being human.

The analogy falls short. Christians believe that, unlike my father, Jesus was not simply a human messenger visiting us in our suffering. He was God-made flesh, “infinity dwindled to infancy,” as the 19th-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. The Christmas story tells us that therefore Emmanuel — which means “God with us” in Hebrew — is in fact with us in the whole of our actual lives, in our celebration and merrymaking, in our mundane days, and in sickness, sorrows, doubts, failures and disappointments.

Christians believe that because God himself entered humanity, humanity is being transformed even as we speak. Because God took on a human body, all human bodies are holy and worthy of respect. Because God worked, sweating under our sun with difficulty and toil, all human labor can be hallowed. Because God had a human family and friends, our relationships too are eternal and sacred. If God became a human who spent most of his life in quotidian ways, then all of our lives, in all of their granularity, are transformed into the site of God’s surprising presence.

Yet what astounds me most about the Christmas story is not merely the notion that God became a baby or that God got calluses and cavities, had fingernails and friends, and enjoyed good naps and good parties. Christians proclaim today that God actually took on or assumed our sickness, loneliness and misery. God knows the depths of human pain, not in theory but because he has felt it himself. From his earliest moments, Jesus would have been considered a nobody, a loser, another overlooked child born into poverty, an ethnic minority in a vast, oppressive and seemingly all-powerful empire. We have tamed the Christmas story with over-familiarity and sentimentality — little lambs and shepherds, tinsel and stockings — so we fail to notice the depth of pain, chaos and danger into which Jesus was born.
God identifies himself most with the hungry and the vulnerable, with those in chronic pain, with victims of violence, with the outcasts and the despised. In “The Message,” a poetic paraphrase of the scriptures, the pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson translates John 1 by saying, “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” When Jesus, the Word, “moved into the neighborhood,” it was not into a posh home in a cozy Christmas movie but instead into a place of hardship and sorrow.

The hope of Christmas is that God did not — and therefore will not — leave us alone. In the midst of our doubts and suffering comes a baby. This child, Christians claim, is God’s embodied response to all of our human aching. In his book “Unapologetic,” Francis Spufford writes that Christians “don’t have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story.” This story is one of God moving into the neighborhood.

Christianity hasn’t answered all my questions. It has not made me perfectly happy. It has not satisfied my sense of longing. If anything, my (often feeble) attempts to live as a Christian have heightened it. But the Christian story tells me that my deepest longings are not just farce, that they point to something true and therefore should be listened to. This Christmas I long not just for love, but for eternal love. I long for a deeper purity and righteousness than I can muster by good behavior. I long for a justice more profound than Congress can ever deliver. I long for “peace on earth and good will toward men” that is more complete and all-encompassing than we’ve ever known. I long for meaning that is more lasting than I can create. I believe that this baby born in Bethlehem is the mystery our hearts keep chasing, the end of our all quests and the longing we cannot shake.

So, friends, I hope you know longing this Christmas, and even more so, I hope you know hope.

Merry Christmas!

One woman's testimony of faith

It is not a shame to be Muslim and wear a hijab.

But I love and trust in Jesus Christ

Who raised the dead and healed the blind by the testimony of the Quran

It is not a shame to love the greatest who came to earth

He gave the best heavenly message in loving humans

I adore the teachings of Christ and the sermons he gave.

Note: In the great beauty of this world people will search for and find many ways to be who they are or represent who they are and who they wish to become. It can be beautiful and maddening all at once, but it is always difficult to find your own combinations in a world that insists on being one kind of person and rejects complexity and intersectionality. Be patient and help one another to grow and self-develop. It is one thing to be disciplined and work within your tradition, but it is another matter to force conformity and uniformity.

On our journeys...

I know that these images become for many of us an idealized and sentimentalized aspect of the Christmas story and that they do some harm to the reality and meaning of that story. On the other hand, they communicate something that few Christians talk about---God's Presence in every thing. The theologian Richard Rohr makes the point in one of his books that in learning to love God we should start with loving what is small (a rock, for instance) and build on that to the point that we approach God. I don't think that Rohr is saying that the rock is God or Christ or Jesus, but that God, Christ and Jesus live both within and beyond matter and that things and animals and all of creation are in a relationship with us because God is with us and within us and we are matter as well. So---look to the sky or to wherever or at whatever you find on your journey and see if you can see God in it and love it.
 

Some things to study on

I shall shine my light

My inner loving light, so bright

Through the day and through the night

So that it might

Be seen, for alls delight

A little Poem by Athey Thompson

Art by Lennart Helji

Taken from Tales of the Old Forest Faeries

From Virginia Lee Photography and Hidden Bedside

A reflection on white conservative Christians and me

I posted a two-part article on this blog in November about preachers, priests, ministers, and pastors and how I relate or don't relate to churches and what I look for and hope for in religion and faith. I also mixed into those articles much about how some people in my circles have compelling personal testimonies. You can read those posts here and here.

Something of what I was talking about last month shows up in a post by Matt Tebbe that is making the rounds. Mr. Tebbe writes:

A convo I've had dozens of times:

White conservative Christian: "You're a liberal why do you hate Christians and the church so much."

Me: "I am a Christian; I've been in vocational church ministry for a quarter century."

WCC: "Well you sure do pick and choose how you interpret the Bible and you're really hard on Christians your exegesis is awful."

Me: "We all pick and choose. I try to choose what hasn't been picked very often in my experience."

WCC: "Well everything you talk about sounds marxist and you've abandoned the gospel for social justice."

Me: "Are you referring to the fact that I talk about women, racism, and money a lot?"

WCC: "The woke agenda yes."

Me: "'Woke' is an AAVE term (African American Vernacular English) used by Black people in a positive manner that was then appropriated by white people and turned into an insult, to cast aspersions on those seeking to redress the destructiveness of white supremacy. Reconsider using it as a slur for the sake of your neighbor."

WCC: "I see you've been brainwashed."

Me: "I'm attempting to conserve some Scripture teaching on wealth, property, debt, the human dignity and equality of all people, and the destructive impact of systemic partiality. Also: I think there's places to progress past an ancient ethic that held to the ontological inferiority of women, that slavery was a given, that women were basically property of their husbands/fathers, etc."

WCC: "You think that Scripture errs?"

Me: "Be curious about why you think dealing with systemic injustice, financial greed and inequality, racism, and misogyny are liberal issues. Why aren't they considered conservative issues?"

WCC: "I knew it you deny the authority of Scripture. And you're being divisive."

Me: "The truth will do that, divide and such. You seem to have no qualms about division when you accuse me of wrongdoing."

WCC: "I'll be praying for you."

Me: "May your justice increase so that your prayer would availeth much."

**it just never goes anywhere, beloved. But this Advent I again choose hope.**

That is a pretty limited conversation or encounter, or perhaps it's just reaching towards some name-calling. By the standards of current-day social media its calm, and perhaps it documents that most people will not say in one-on-one encounters what they will say on social media.

I steer away from these conversations and look for commonality or to hold the line and perhaps influence someone in the future. "Commonality" for me is founded on common experiences, a love for what is beautiful, sympathy. It is not founded on agreeing to disagree. I look for some understanding of solidarity at a time when the existence of society and the solidarity that is needed as society's underpinnings is so at risk. Many working-class conservatives (more about this below) where I come from understand that solidarity and support or embody it, something that I think often transcends politics and religion. It's about decency and humanity and my side does not have the corner on either anymore. Many get that, perhaps many more don't. For that matter, lots of liberal and progressive people who I know don't get it either. 

When such conversations do occur, face-to-face or on social media, they can escalate rather quickly and can end on a bad note. I try to save something for the future with most people even when it means my holding something back. My bottom lines, I hope, are racism/anti-racism, sexism, and solidarity. Loving the people more than hating the oppressors.

Truth be told, this is less about right vs. left or progressive vs. reactionary. Over the past few weeks I've had some bitter encounters with others on the left, people who I considered comrades and a couple who I considered influences in my life. The depth of that bitterness has made my head spin. It feels as if we are drowning in arguments, whether its in our political or religious or social and family circles. There are too many paths open to nihilism. I find myself feeling as if I have to defend the concepts of society and social order and kindness and solidarity. Is it really raining despair and hatred? Is there any shelter in this storm?

Danny Bowling recently published the following on the Appalachian Americans Facebook page and I believe that it has some relevancy here because religion and the church have often served as shelters in a tough world.

Church used to be everyone come to the choir.
Now it’s a praise team.
People used to feel free to testify of the good things of God.
Now that's not in our plans.
People used to be faithful to church every service, Now they only come on Sunday morning.....
People would pack the Altar for prayer and cry out to God, Now the Altar is empty....
Preacher’s used to read, study and pray for the message.
Many today read the internet and study how to deliver someone else’s message.
Church music was part of the worship experience.
Now it’s so loud and has become the focal point.
Church used to pray for God to send them a pastor.
Now it’s a beauty contest. We know him and he would fit in nicely. Caring less if they even meet the biblical qualifications.
Church used to have the Holy Ghost leading the services.
Now we have emotions leading the church.
Let’s seek out the old paths and walk in them AGAIN !!!
CHURCH we need to be CHRIST centered and
following the leadership of the HOLY GHOST.

This reads as a poem to me, sad or angry or despairing or demanding. Many of the people who have read the post found a subtext in Mr. Bowling's words that (I think) validated their points of view, and this has been overwhelmingly conservative. For whatever its worth, I also feel what Mr. Bowling is saying if we just take his words at face value and without the heavy weight of conservative context. And because I feel this with some intensity I stay as connected as I can to Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, the Poor Peoples Campaign, and a few other churches and religious communities that I consider to be Spirt-filled.

We have two sets of problems, two arguments being made that miss one another. Mr. Tebbe is taking on white conservative Christians and not getting very far. Mr. Bowling has a vision of what church could be and memories of what he has seen church be. There are fears and anger on all sides here and these are only going to deepen unless the contradictions between them are resolved. I hope that there will be a willingness to engage in ways that move us forward.

Mr. Tebbe's white conservative Christians have no identity beyond the labels he gives them. We don't know if they are female or male, what their economic situations are, what generations they come from, if their politics derive from their religion or if something else is going on, what sections of the country they come from. Mr. Bowling is somewhat sentimental about the forms that religion often took in Appalachia and about a time and place that has been ground down by deindustrialization, oppression and corruption, and, most recently, deliberate efforts to create widespread substance abuse. Mr. Tebbe enters his discussion able to debate about racism and anti-racism. Mr. Bowling and most of his supporters seem unable or unwilling to do so. Mr. Tebbe seems to assume a political equality between believers, and he and the people he is arguing with all seem to accept a "politicized" religion, for lack of a better word, though they take opposing political sides. Mr. Bowling seems to believe in an equality of all believers before God that is based on our fallen natures, God's grace, and the work of the Holy Spirit. This is worked out for him, I believe, in a Christian community that is Spirit-led but that rests on anointed leaders and people who feel a personal connection to Jesus Christ.

Mr. Tebbe may be sanding with the wrong kind of planer when he focuses on whites. White people often come to these arguments feeling that we have something to protect, and white middle-class conservatives have a Republican Party and its power behind them for validation and refuge and as their means of interpreting and spinning their experiences in ways that reinforce their power and excuse their faults. There are the legacies of slavery, racism, and the defeat of Reconstruction, and the denials of civil and human rights to contend with here, and few churches have been innocent bystanders or in opposition when it comes to the United States' racialized oppression. Saying this does not imply hatred of the U.S.

But it is my observation that as we move from the arguments with the middle-class white Christian conservative to talking with white working-class Christians and then with white working-class Christians who are union members that something helpful begins to surface. These white workers who have the experiences of unionization and the hope that it offers feel a greater commonality or shared interest with people of color, there are common reference points and more to talk about. This is especially true where people have the experience s of working in groups in which workers depend on one another, like mine workers or nurses. The conversation is still not one between people with equal standing before the law or with the same de facto political rights, but it begins to bend in that direction. Motivations shift. The arc of justice bends because we have so many people who know how to weld in the working-class. Sections of the Black Church have remained a part of working-class struggles. The president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists is a minister. There are few white churches, and no white leaders who I know of, who can meet the Black Church and faith-inspired Black working-class leaders where they stand. Until that changes we will all suffer greatly---and separately. The salvation of the working-class majority in the U.S. is in Black and Brown hands now.

Working-class conservatism and working-class liberalism or radicalism have their own dynamics apart from what Mr. Tebbe is up against. This makes it possible for working-class people to shoehorn political and theological radicalism in the old institutions and social structures. Our challenge is not to explain theology or to talk about white privilege when people of color and working-class whites encounter one another, but to find the means of identifying long-term self-interests and common interests and take those to church and into politics. Leadership is with and from Christ and the Holy Spirit, but we will have our Moseses and our prophets. Intercommunal survival, building leadership and capacity, and finding the right structures are our biggest immediate and so far unresolved problems. Perhaps the structures we're looking for are hiding in plain sight. 

The church that Mr. Bowling is hoping for could be the church that a multiracial and self-aware working-class lands in with some adjustments made. A Christ-centered and Holy Ghost-led church filled with people of color and working-class whites who have made the connections between their personal relationships with Jesus Christ and communal salvation and who have experienced victories in their communities that bring everyone up will be a deeply politicized church, so deeply politicized that the very definitions of "politics" and "religion" will change. We're all going to be surprised when the Holy Spirit touches us, but I have this inescapable feeling that when the Holy Spirit touches white churches they're going to be taken to task for segregation and all that has kept them white that was in their control to fix. The falls under the heading of "some adjustments," I guess. 

Mr. Bowling is opening one door, Mr. Tebbe another. The differences that they point to are real. And in a country that is as close to civil war as ours is, these differences can be magnified and taken to dangerous ends. The solution is not with dialogue and a search for some kind of center or middle point, but with a radical embrace of a liberating and Christ- and Bible-based theology and church. Take Mr. Tebbe's hope and Mr. Bowling's best observations and build on them. If that project succeeds, I think that the white Christian conservatives who Mr. Tebbe is arguing with can be converted.

Reading Amy-Jill Levine's "The Difficult Words of Jesus"

The Difficult Words of Jesus--A Beginner's Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings
Amy-Jill Levine
Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2021
157 pp., $17.99 (paper); $17.99 (ebook)

Abingdon Press has an excellent introduction to this book and to Professor Amy-Jill Levine that can be accessed here. I purchased the book and did not buy the DVD and Leader Guide that goes with this. I believe that this is a book that might be better read in a group than individually, as I did. The book goes fast.

Amy-Jill Levine knows what she's talking about. If you look her up you will find that she is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. We learn from her biography that she is a renowned scholar and teacher, and that she has written five books on Christian theology and coedited the Jewish Annotated New Testament. We also learn that she taught New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute and was the first Jew to do so. She attends an Orthodox synagogue. Given the span of her work and interests, it might be better to say that the five books she has written deal with Jewish and Christian or monotheistic theologies. And who am I to argue with her?

I got a little anxious when I read that she self-describes as a "Yankee Jewish feminist" who taught New Testament "in a Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt." It's a great thing to be a Jewish feminist with an understanding of the New Testament, but "Yankee" and "the buckle of the Bible Belt" do bother me.

Amplify Media is running a study and learning session on Professor Levine's Signs and Wonders: A Beginner's Guide to the Miracles of Jesus and has resources available to help with individual and group study. You can access that here.

The Difficult Words of Jesus has an introduction, six chapters, and an afterword. It's short on footnotes. The introduction lays out the approach that the author intended to take, but I believe that the chapters depart a bit from that. The afterword also struck me as a departure. Amy-Jill Levine keeps the conversation going throughout the book, and real conversations wander. I can imagine having dinner with her and a few others and there never being an uncomfortable silence. And for all of her considerable academic qualifications, this is an easy-to-read book.

It helps greatly that the author comes to the texts that she is examining with several translations of the Bible close by and the courage to ask some hard questions and suggest alternate readings and understandings. It also helps that she is familiar with divergent Christian traditions and reasoning and that she usually refrains from judging. She examines Mark 10:21, Luke 14:26-27, Mark 10:44, Matthew 10:5b-6, Matthew 25:30, and John 8:44a.

Levine's examination of Matthew 25:30 fell easy to me because I tend towards universalism, or the idea that there is no eternal hell or damnation. The look at Mark 10:44 ("Whoever wishes to be first among you must be a slave to all.") helped give me a different understanding of the text than she intended, and I struggled to understand what the problem is that she is addressing. The fault there is mine, not the author's. The sixth chapter of the book takes up John 8:44a ("You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires.") and ends inconclusively after Levine makes a strong case for Christians taking on the responsibility of dealing with anti-Semitism in our churches and faith communities. The brief afterword is a kind of backstop or safe space that encourages further study, but it falls short on making concrete suggestions on how to proceed. Perhaps it is not Levine's place or purpose to tell others how to manage their homes, but we would benefit from a gentle push.

Along the way through the book there are a few surprises. Levine makes a passing comment that Jewish law is, or was, easy to follow without going into detail. In another place she says that John Chrysostom (347-407), the archbishop of Constantinople whose theology and insights still inform Orthodox Christianity, complained that Christians in Antioch were attending synagogue worship in his day. This yells for explanation. That explanation may begin with her point that Jewish-Gentile theological relations in Jerusalem prior to and during Christ's lifetime were not as bad as many Christians believe. There are places where she says that something in the Christian Bible is not true or accurate but does not explain why or how what is being said got there or what the context for the phrase is. She's great with translations and suggesting logical alternate translations that give the reader a new, and usually better, understanding of the text. Her reminder to Christians that Abraham was not a Jew is made almost in passing, but there is much in the book to help Christians remember that monotheism extends beyond Judaism and Christianity.

Christians who understand that the 66 books of the Hebrew and Christian Testaments were given by divine inspiration and inerrantly reveal the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation, and who believe that whatever is not contained therein is not to be enjoined as an article of faith (loosely quoting from the Articles of Faith of the Church of the Nazarene and understanding that this is a commonly held Christian view), will struggle with this. Levine sometimes anticipates arguments against what she is saying and counters those views. If Levine is correct and the text is wrong, then the text is not inerrantly revealing the will of God. Then what?

The easy answer that requires hard struggle---the one that I think Levine is suggesting---is that people of faith make doubt and dialogue with God part of their living faith. Levine is good when she talks about love and faith as being involuntary. "As I understand it," she says, "faith is something to which one is called---a vocation---and not the conclusion of a logical argument." She even makes a case for a kind of predestination, a conservative position for someone who is on the liberal side of the spectrum, before she backs out of the gray area she has created. And she is open to more than the 66 books referenced above.

Here I want to suggest that predestination might be a theological fact, but who is predestined to salvation may only be known to God. If I am somehow correct in this, I then have to question my own universalism. What happens to everyone else? Levine doesn't take up this question in the way that I am formulating it, but she lets this flow into the more common (and perhaps more interesting) question of free will. She wants to interrogate everything.

Levine makes a common contrast between a morally and ethically driven Judaism that encourages inquiry and that is not motivated by guilt and fear and a Christianity that claims to hold answers and final authority and often does inspire guilt and fear. She does not say this, but it seems inescapable that any religion claiming such authority will always be in battle mode and will experience fracturing and factionalism over time. One of the leading concerns in the book is how Scripture is used (or misused) to hurt and oppress others. Levine knows that Christians will be defensive on these points and is firm but understanding as she makes her case that this happens and why it happens.

I think that Levine also understands that many Christians want something like the Judaism that she is describing. There are at least two problems here that I see. One is that there are lines of Jewish thought and practices that are not so open to questioning and that also carry the weight of assumed final authority. The commentary that I use in understanding Genesis comes from Rashi, the great Jewish scholar, and it is not "Gentile-friendly." Zionism, not to be equated with Judaism but claiming Judaism as its own nonetheless, oppresses Palestinians on the basis of particular readings of ancient texts. Another problem is that we don't yet have a way forward in creating a liberating monotheism. It isn't Levine's job to suggest a way forward, but if we don't find liberation in the sacred texts and a level of agreement on their meaning then there is the danger of people either losing their faith (or their attachment to the texts) or giving up and settling for fundamentalisms.

Readers beware. Every door that is opened in The Difficult Words of Jesus seems to lead to a wall. How can predestination square with universalism? How can faith be a calling to some but still accessible to all? Where is the line between understanding the difficult words of Jesus and finding the basis for them in the Hebrew Bible and believing that all that is in the Hebrew Bible anticipates the Christian Bible? How do Christians search for themselves in the Hebrew Bible and avoid cultural-religious appropriation and feeling defeated? The truth that Levine hits hard on is that it is up to us to do the work and that we can live in faith communities without accepting all of their explanations and practices. 

No book of this length can take up every difficult passage in the Christian Bible. Levine does a great job of giving readers a method to approach what we find difficult, but I'm not sure that many Christian scholars are available to us and are doing the work that Levine is doing and making it readily available to us. We need people with her knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic and her familiarity with both the Hebrew and Christian texts and her ability to put complex ideas and arguments into common language. We need to get past trying to solve problems and learn how to live and work with contradictions.

That said, I wish that Levine had dealt with atonement theology and the forecast or prophesy of the destruction of Jerusalem that appears in the Christian Bible. Did Jesus have to die on the cross? How should we understand the destruction of Jerusalem? What have both done to Christian-Jewish relations? I am disappointed that Levine did not engage with the theologians who have worked with liberation theology in Latin America and Africa, and in particular with those who connected the Hebrew and Christian bibles in their work. Levine is open to alternate readings that are on the road to liberation, but she doesn't spend much time discussing these. I do wish that she had referred to Islamic texts and perhaps stayed away from some of her humor. I get that she's not an authority on the Islamic texts, but she could have quoted from scholars who are. And I do understand that many people need her humor as they work through the difficult passages that she is wrestling with.  

I worry that the Christians who will most benefit from Levine's work won't read it because she is a questioning Jewish feminist and scholar. I'll close with an ask---if you have ever found passages in the Christian Bible difficult, please give this book a read.

Here is a taste:

        

"When we allow people of other races, cultures or religions to be oppressed and marginalized we have become the antithesis of all Jesus taught and lived."

Taken from Nazarenes United for Peace:

"One of the most distressing aspects of the current political and social crisis we are experiencing in the USA is the rising passion of White Christian Nationalism. The virulent racism embraced by folks who claim Christ as their savior and lord denies everything Jesus stood for, what he gave his life to overcome, and what he poured out his Spirit to enable in his Church.

White Christian Nationalism is a reincarnation of what the Roman Emperor Constantine foisted on the Church of Jesus Christ 1,700 years ago. He used the Church to attempt to conquer the world, and to eliminate those who opposed him, who were not like those he preferred. It was grotesque, destructive, and utterly unChristian.

 
When Christians rely on any government to give them permission to 'be Christian' something is terribly awry. When we allow people of other races, cultures or religions to be oppressed and marginalized we have become the antithesis of all Jesus taught and lived.

 
To be holy is to be being perfected in love, for all people, living a transparent holiness, protecting the rights and the welfare of others, even if it is not profitable for us, or if we disagree with their choices...

Co-suffering love, selfless service to others, robust courage to live Christlike lives in a broken world, and the refusal to demonize anyone who differs with us — that is holiness!!" -- Jesse C Middendorf

On Dogs, Religion & Salvation, Rigidity & Beauty

Introduction

This is a two-part post with the common thread of how our experiences with animals can connect us to the divine and how our experiences with animals can lead to a universalism and a rejection of certain kinds of dogmatic rigidity.

The first post was written by Chuck F. Queen and was taken from the Progressive Methodists Facebook page with Chuck's permission.

The second post comes from me.

I do not share the view that rigid and conservative people, including Christians, can't or shouldn't change. I don't think that their refusal to change in the face of facts and Scripture and outstanding human needs and planetary crises is okay. More needs to be said here about organizing and solidarity. But I do appreciate the universalism and humanism expressed here and the insight into how anxiety drives rigidity and conservatism and the conservative appropriation of religion.

First Part---Chuck F. Queen

Julie, our Down Syndrome adult daughter who lives in our home, has a little dog named Cuma, part Yorkie and part Chiwawa. Cuma has been a means God has used to teach me about God’s love. Cuma needs to be loved, and you see her cry for love and affection in her eyes and face. She is up in age now and there are days when it is obvious she is hurting, because her face reflects it. I can see the suffering of creation in her eyes. When she was young and full of life and energy, she would bark continuously at people or animals she saw outside, which would sometimes drive us crazy. Now, with her health failing and loss of energy, there are days we will place her in front of the open front door to encourage her to bark. Sometimes that works. What always seems to work, however, is the prospect of table food, and I’m the easy pick. She can no longer jump down from the couch, so if she sees me pull up to the table she starts yelping to be lifted down to the floor so she can come over and get some food. She has always been a highly anxious dog and that hasn’t changed. If someone she is unfamiliar with enters our house, she barks and barks and barks. I pick her up, hold her, pet her head which she loves, and say, “Cuma, this is a good person; she is not going to hurt you.” But no matter what I do, she is going to keep barking. She cannot see what is through her anxiety.

There are many, many religious people, Christian people just like Cuma. They are blind to the oneness of creation and to the universality of the indwelling Spirit. They think their faith is the right, correct faith; that only through their Jesus can a person know their God. Their ego will not allow them to believe that we are all children of God, that we are all one people, that we all belong, that we all live within the force field of God’s unconditional love regardless of what stage we are in along the path of moral and spiritual evolution. Their ego insists that others must be “saved” in the same way they think they are saved, not realizing that “salvation” is a process of becoming. They make scripture bend to their programmed beliefs to justify their faith in a tribal God. And no matter how much we try to shake their foundation, no matter how excellent and often we reason with them using the best logic and common sense available, all our efforts tend to be futile. Like Julie’s little dog, Cuma, they are not going to change. And God will speak softly to them and draw then close like I do for Cuma, and keep loving them, and they will go to their grave believing and worshiping and serving a little, tribal god. And God will welcome them and love them and enlighten them as they are able to receive it.

And that is what we must do. We don’t need to yield to them or bend to their will or in any way cater to their exclusive Christian beliefs and practices. If we are living within the flow of God’s Spirit, we will keep on loving them, accepting that in all likelihood they are not going to change (at least not in this lifetime). And that is okay. I was as dogmatic and exclusive in my Christian faith as anyone at one time, but then a crack opened in my ego and the light burst forth. It does happen. Not often, but there are breakthroughs. God needs a few people who will keep at it, praying, sharing, teaching, reasoning, writing, talking, arguing, and all the while loving and hoping a crack will appear that will let the light in. And when it does, when it happens, like the shepherd who found the one lost sheep, there is much joy and gratitude.

Second Part---Bob Rossi

Many years ago when I lived in West Virginia I heard about a woman in a community pretty far out of the way who had some hounds for sale. Hounds are my favorite breeds and I went out to find her and take a look. She showed me to the barn and yard where the dogs lived. It was feeding time so she set out some trays of food and a litter of puppies and their mama came running out of the barn.

One dog in particular, the only male of the litter, made it out first by pushing, bumping, and jumping ahead. But he didn't eat the food. Instead, he grabbed the main tray in his mouth and dragged it going backwards as the other puppies charged. He backed up with the tray in his mouth all of the way to the fence, or about six feet. And then he tried to push his sisters away. 

Now, I knew right then that I wanted that dog. Any of those others would have made great companions and hunting dogs, but I liked that little guy's spirit and sense of humor. I bought him and we had a pretty good time together.

I think about that adventure quite often these days. You can focus on something that is good or functional or smart and you will be okay. And I do understand that you need to look at everything from many different angles in order to understand what you're looking at, know history, and understand context and development. But, you know, I used to look in that dog's eyes and watch it pick up and follow a scent or watch it running through the brush with what I'm sure was a smile and know that that dog was part of a history that I did not share. There were times when I knew that that dog had an entirely different intelligence and had sense that I lacked. There is a great beauty in that, and beauty has to figure in to this.

What's my point? Well, when I hear someone talking about religion or politics or organizing and solidarity these days I think more often about whether or not beauty and history intersects in what they're talking about. I say this after almost 30 years spent as a union organizer: every project that we embark on in order to find salvation or make change should be a work of beauty, following its indigenous directions and intelligence with spirit and a sense of humor. And you should be able to hear the echo of what we're doing as if you were there with us in the dark night in an abandoned strip mine full of Jerusalem Artichokes us much as we could hear the hounds miles ahead when we went hunting. And we would pause, look up at the sky and follow the stars and the dogs leading us up far ahead in the darkness and know that we were never really going to get lost. Our movement and our salvation needs to work like that.

I think about the bad things going on in the world today. I fight back---not as hard as I should, though. But I also know that I'm in this for as long as I draw breath, and in order to stay in the fight I have to look at things sometimes as if there is a pack of hounds there in front of me and I get to take one home and into my heart. I watch for that one thing that crosses my path every day that has spirit and humor, history and strength, to it and I try to hold on to that and let the rest go on.       

Notes To The Church At A Time Of Difficulty & Promise

Patriotism and Christianity in the United States

Tertullian, referred to above, is generally regarded as "the father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology" according to the Wikipedia entry about him. There is much in his work that does not stand up to conditions today, and some of his work caused both the Eastern and Western churches to not regard him as a saint. But it is impossible to ignore his lasting influences and what he got right if you're exploring Christian history. I think that the quote provided above is something that he got right.
 

7 VERSES CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS MUST IGNORE

I'm not sure if I agree with everything said in this post or not, but I do agree with its central points: This comes from Jim Rigby writing on the Progressive Methodists Facebook page.

7 VERSES CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS MUST IGNORE

“A TIME FOR EVERY PURPOSE UNDER HEAVEN”
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 is a strange little passage that rejects any rigid moral absolutes. Instead, Ecclesiastes says “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

“THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR HUMANS NOT HUMANS FOR THE SABBATH”
Fundamentalists sometimes attack progressives as "humanists." In Mark 2:27 Jesus defends those who place human need over religious institutions. He says the Sabbath (perhaps a metaphor for all religion) was always intended to serve human beings not the other way around. The Sabbath was understood as a call to value human rights and ecological sustainability over religious rules and institutions long before Christianity.

“LITERALISM KILLS”
2 Corinthians 3:6 says, “God has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” If Christianity is to be a religion of love it must come from internalized compassion not heartless and mindless obedience to an external law.

“THE NEW COVENANT OF CHRISTIANITY DOES NOT DISPLACE JUDAISM”
The “new” covenant was being talked about long before Christianity. Jeremiah and Isaiah both spoke of a new covenant for Israel that would be written in people’s hearts and minds not just in external codes (See Jeremiah 31:31-38)

“JUSTICE IS NOT LIMITED BY ANY BORDER”
Leviticus 19: 34 says, “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am your God.” Deuteronomy 27:19 goes even further, “Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the orphan or the widow.” Capitalistic Christian nationalism completely rejects this foundation.

YOU CAN’T LOVE GOD AND HATE PEOPLE
The First Epistle of John says in chapter 4 that we can’t love God and be indifferent to human beings. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates a member of their human family, that person is a liar; for one who does not love their human family whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. And this commandment we have from Jesus: whoever loves God must also love their human family”

“WHOEVER HAS LOVE HAS GOD”
The Epistle of John also says, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” In other words, a loving Atheist is closer to the message of Christ than a loveless Christian.

And a note from us:

Some notes for Christians