Bev's blog

from Bev's blog:

Does religion cause the violation of women's rights?

As I read through the Bible this year I am taking note of the story of men, women, and God as it unfolds. I have already noted that though men are definitely the power brokers, at least the women were not circumcised in Genesis. Okay, so a virgin daughter or two are offered to crowds of men in lieu of offering male house guests—virtual strangers for—sex. Okay, so Abraham gives his wife with benefits to several men to avoid being killed.

Observe, I still, even after reading more than twenty chapters in Genesis, hold out hope for a good story to unfold for women.

Also note, I made a decision when I was about 24 years old to keep my mouth shut about woman’s role in the church. I convinced myself that I would not have any credibility in the Church of Christ unless I could prove that I could be a good wife and mother. I would have to hold my tongue on my the view that women are marginalized in church practice due to a misappropriation of a few select verses written by the good bachelor Apostle Paul—until I was 50.

Well, I would not approach the issue with such reasoning today—now that I am well over 50. Certainly titles, offices, and power are not what Jesus sought. He did, however, come to “preach good tidings to the poor...proclaim the release of the captives...to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Throughout the world, women fall into these categories day in and day out.

Juxtapose the above proclamation of Jesus with a comment I heard many times through the years in women’s Bible studies in Churches of Christ, "Remember, in Christ, we have no rights.”

Did you ever hear this? How would you have responded? Sometimes people would say it in response to the hymn in Phillipians 2 in which Jesus did not claim his equality with God, but made himself a servant. However, how damaging is it to re-write this and tell women they should not claim rights?

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, in his January 9 piece entitled, "Religion and Women" challenges leaders in world religions, those who devote their lives to their faith, to take steps to stop the oppression of women. He says, “Today, when religious institutions exclude women from their hierarchies and rituals, the inevitable implication is that females are inferior.”

I have a thought, and I wonder if you agree. Many leaders in Churches of Christ agree that women can speak in the regular assembly—as they do in Sunday school classes, small groups, and after the “closing prayer,” but they do not make it a practice in their churches for fear of offending some—in particular, the more conservative women. When will those male leaders in our churches stand up for the women of the church whose gifts are stymied and marginalized while they enjoy using their talents in full employ?

I think most of the church leader fellows I know are nice guys thinking they do not want to rock the boat for the more conservative members of their congregation. I wonder if they ever consider that they may be part of a very big global problem?

What do you think?

Stephen Colbert picked up the Conservapedia Bible re-write story. Brilliant. But even better is this, from Conservapedia's entry, "Stephen Colbert":

"After learning about Conservapedia's initiative to remove "liberal bias" from the Bible, Stephen Colbert urged his followers to insert him into the planned conservative rewrite as a Biblical figure. This was followed by mass vandalism by Colbert fans."

Google lists this among results for keywords "conservapedia Colbert": "Oct 12, 2009 ... Stephen Colbert is God, He is the original creator who created the world in six days. He is the God of all beings in this universe."

I'm consistently intrigued by these gimmicks. Re-writing the truthiness of conserviwikiality is such a beautiful statement on epistemology...and here the fusion of hermeneutics and epistemology could not be more ironically or clearly stated.

question only question?

Is "what does the Bible say?" the only question we must ask?

is your Bible too liberal?

Just. Wow.

by J. Brent Bates: Bathsheba's Voice

The story of David and Bathsheba is another episode in the soap opera that is the Old Testament with its drama, deception, passion, and plotting. This is one of those stories where David does just plain wrong and nothing goes right. He abuses his power, sleeps with another man’s wife, lies, and worse, conspires to murder, and then acts like nothing happened, that is until he’s caught. Sounds like the perfect plot for a soap opera to me. Of course, it’s easy to condemn the shenanigans of the actors in the Old Testament soap opera. But it’s always a good idea to try to read sympathetically—after all, these are people’s lives we’re reading about, and not just a script for a television show. So let’s consider David’s perspective, how it might have felt to be David in this story, minding our own business on the rooftop, and then finding ourselves so overwhelmed by emotion that we do something wrong and foolish, and then panic, lie, and get caught in the snowballing consequences of our mistake. I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we can relate to David and understand what it’s like to get trapped in something where every move we make only makes things worse.

But wait; I think an even more important consideration is how the oppressed victim of the story must have felt. How does this story look from, say, Uriah’s perspective? God condemns David specifically for abusing his power to oppress the poor and powerless Uriah, by taking his wife and then killing him (2 Sam. 12:9). Can you imagine how Uriah must have felt? In actuality, one of the great tragedies of this story is that Uriah is completely clueless. Here he is a loyal soldier off doing his duty for his nation and for his king, and the king himself is betraying him. Unbeknownst to him, while he is off fighting David’s battles, his own wife is sleeping with the king. And Uriah isn’t even allowed the dignity to find out this is happening before David sends him off to the front lines to be killed by the Ammonites. Tragedy and disgrace.

But not so fast. In this story, the oppressed is not so much Uriah as it is Bathsheba, this woman who is often not even called by her own name, but merely “the wife of Uriah.” She is defined by who she is married to; her worth is derivative. Bathsheba is rarely given a voice to speak, but listen we must. Bathsheba has often been vilified as if it were somehow her fault for tempting David. In fact, it is not David who was minding his own business on the roof top, but Bathsheba! And the text does not indicate that she went willingly, because it says “David sent messengers to get her.” Besides, who can say “no” to the king? On top of all this that she suffers, the consequence of David’s sin, we learn later, is that her child dies. Now, how is that fair?

One of the things that this story does is highlight the reality of the oppression of women throughout human history, especially with the complicity of religion and power. Sacred texts have often been used to uphold inequalities, oppression, and even abuse. I was interested to read this week of former president Jimmy Carter who explained that he had officially disaffiliated from the Southern Baptist Convention because of its treatment of women, especially because this was one of the several reasons I left my former tradition. And perhaps we have made many strides forward in our society; we had our first female candidate for president. And much progress has been made in the Episcopal Church, as women are at every level of ministry of our church, including the office of Presiding Bishop. And yet there are still many inequalities. I know this primarily because I have been listening to the stories of women, from friends and family, from you, from the news. I know this, because taking into account as strongly as I feel about the issue and as much as I try to uphold equality, when I take the time to reflect on my own life, I can still see traces of inequality. Consider the inequality of household labor. Very often within two-income households, a woman is the one who by default does the majority of laundry, cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Consider the persistent disregard for the specific needs of women in the workforce. While much progress has been made over the past few decades, and while there are certainly exceptions, there are still overall inequalities in pay and a glass ceiling in corporate America. Even more seriously, as pointed to in our text this morning, there is the reality of domestic abuse, both physical and emotional. This doesn’t just happen in small towns and far away countries; it happens across every socio-economic group. Our General Convention passed this year a resolution to raise awareness and speak out against the widespread practice of domestic violence. They say: “According to Department of Justice statistics, in the last five years, more women in the US have been killed by the men they live with, or used to live with, than American soldiers have been killed by war. The loss of these precious lives, and the grief suffered by their families, is a national tragedy. Thousands more women are battered, abused, and humiliated…. Yet, where is the outrage against the cycle of violence? Who will speak for these victims?”

The final perspective on this story of David and Bathsheba is God’s perspective. It may be tempting to locate God’s perspective as a 3rd-person-omniscient, condemning narrator—judging David, perhaps judging Bathsheba. There is, after all, so much to judge. But our God is a God of compassion, not detached judgment; God does not remain distant but enters our life stories, no matter how messy and unappealing and sinful. So where is God’s perspective in this story? Where does God enter this narrative? Where is God’s compassionate presence? God’s voice is in the missing voice of this story … and that’s not just Uriah’s missing voice. God’s voice in this story is Bathsheba’s missing voice, the voice that would protest the abuse of power, the disregard of other persons, the victimization of the vulnerable. The voice that would say these things, if it were given a place in the text, but which is displaced, only to show up later and secondarily in the male voice of Nathan the prophet, calling David to account.

While scripture undoubtedly has layers of patriarchy in its pages, its true message, the true voice of God is one of justice and equality. The scriptures include women of great ability, from Deborah the mighty Judge of Israel to Dorcas the disciple of Jesus known for her aid to the poor. Women were among Jesus’ closest followers, who buried Jesus while the men fled for their lives, and first to proclaim the resurrection of the gospel after his rising. St. Paul, who is rightly criticized for upholding first-century norms of gender inequality, nonetheless, clearly preaches an ideal of equality. Paul says: “There is no longer male and female; for all … are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). At its heart, the gospel of Christ is a message of equality, respect, and love for every human being. Our God is a God who constantly seeks to breathe life into our broken experiences. Our God is a God who affirms us as we are, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, disabled and able, gay and straight, female and male. Our God is a God who has special concern for the underprivileged, who feeds a mass of 5,000 people who have nothing to eat. Our God is a God who moves us beyond the debilitating cycles of oppression and victimization, overcoming evil with good and empowering people by the Holy Spirit. May we seek to overcome the inequalities in our lives and within the structures of our society. May we see our lives from the perspective of God. Amen.

for the Bible tells me so

On Saturday night Brent and I went and saw For the Bible Tells Me So.

I was the only woman in the theatre.

Apart from that, my main observation about the film is that I was pleasantly surprised that the inevitable negativity toward Christianity was not the whole message, but was rather well-balanced by the stories of Jake Reitan (Lutheran), Bishop Robinson (who grew up Disciples of Christ in KY but now, obviously, Episcopalian), and others. Rather than simply dismissing Christianity as a religion too hateful and xenophobic to accept gay people, the film makes the case that hatred is not the center of the Christian gospel.

from the Sundance review article:

Karslake mostly avoids demonizing the religious right, instead simply
holding up the families at the heart of his story and saying: Here they are.
These are the gay people you so fear, and they are your sons and daughters, your
brothers and sisters, the neighbors you've known for years. Karslake has made a
powerful film, one that I hope will be widely seen, because it addresses the
fulcrum of the religious right's objection to homosexuality without attacking
those who hold those beliefs. Rather than smacking down with a righteous hammer,
Karslake instead simply takes those who would believe that there is no common
ground between faith and homosexuality and gently, relentlessly chisels away at
every argument that bolsters those beliefs.

One of the more striking things about the film is the difference in the quality of religious speech made so obvious by the film. Karslake "mostly avoids demonizing the religious right" because the religious right's own words--from the mouths of Jimmy Swaggart, Dr. James Dobson and others--so self-evidently angry and fearful and hateful, do the job without any outside help. The vitriol is paired against the quiet, ultra-reasonable, peaceful replies of people like retired Bishop Desmond Tutu, and the difference is never directly commented upon but allowed to remain implicit and yet unmistakeable.

My one disappointment: that I was the only woman in the theatre, and Brent and I probably the only two straight people. This isn't, in the end, a film for gay people or for welcoming and affirming Christians. It's a plea directed toward those people, like the families featured in the film, who find themselves caught in the middle between intolerant beliefs and the moral imperative to change. But those people weren't there. And they weren't likely to be, at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village. Will the film reach the people for whom it is an offering? I don't know. But if it does not, in fact, make it to a theatre near you (in Abilene or Oklahoma or Tennessee or wherever you are)...Netflix.

veils, anyone?

So, would anyone like to tell me just how they make sense of 1 Corinthians 11:1-16?

Just wondering.