Good Stuff - January 2015

Here are some of the best things I've seen online this month.  I've given a little taste of each post below the link.

Epiphany: Jesus Wept by Fred Clark at Slacktivist:

“Life seems pretty unfair and bewildering to us humans,” Job says. 

“Well,” God replies, “you’re just going to have to trust me.” 

“But you don’t understand what it’s like to be us,” Job says. “You don’t understand how all this looks from our point of view.” 

“Yeah, well, you don’t understand how it looks from my point of view, either,” God says. “One of us loosed the cords of Orion and laid the foundation of the earth and the last time I checked, it wasn’t you. So just trust me, OK? I’ve got this.” 

And that’s the end of the conversation. . . .

When Job learned that his children had died, he wept. But God did not weep. 

Jesus wept. 

That’s famously the shortest verse in the Bible, but there’s an awful lot packed into those two words. . .  

And when Jesus saw Lazarus’ sisters weeping, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” And then God Almighty — God who laid the foundation of the earth, who determined its measurements when the morning stars sang together, God who commands the morning and causes the dawn to know its place, God who bound the chains of the Pleiades and loosed the cords of Orion — wept. 

That’s an epiphany. That’s the Epiphany we celebrate today.

I Came to Your Bible Study by PerfectNumber at Tell Me Why the World is Weird:

I came to your bible study, and you talked about Jesus, and I felt so lonely. Do I just nod along in agreement, or do I mention that I disagree with some parts? It's okay with me that we disagree; the important thing is we are both Christians and we love God. But I need to know if it's okay with you. 

I mentioned that I view it differently, and you flipped forward to Acts, to give an explanation supporting your point of view. But really, I don't need you to teach me. I already understand what you said. I just need to know if you can accept that I believe differently. . .

I want to know if you can believe that I am a Christian, even if I disagree with you on some topics. But more than that, I want to know if you can believe that the reason I hold those beliefs- the reason I don't believe in hell, the reason I said love is more important than reading the bible- is because I am a Christian, is because I love God, is because I have studied the bible. 

Can you believe I am a Christian, but not a Christian who is innocently confused about these topics and needs someone to teach her the correct Christian view? Can you believe that at the points where we disagree, my opinions are rooted in my own study of the bible and my own deep love for God? I believe that about you, would you believe it about me?

Post-Evangelicals and Why We Can't Just Get Over It by Rachel Held Evans at her blog of the same name:

Like it or not, our religious traditions help forge our identities. The great challenge, the one that took me a book to articulate and which I suspect will take me a lifetime to work out, is to hold every piece of my faith experience in love, even the broken bits, even the parts that still cut my hands and make them bleed.

We are all post-something.

We are all caught between who we once were and who we will be, the ghosts of past certainties gripping at our ankles.*

There’s no just getting over it. There’s no easy moving on. 

So I ask for grace—from the communities that now receive me and from the one that first taught me what that word means.

Ask a Womanist Biblical Scholar (Response) by Reverend Wil Gafney, also on Rachel Held Evans' blog:

Womanism is black women’s interpretation but it is not only for black women. Womanist biblical interpretation enriches every person and every community’s understanding of the biblical text. There are things you will never see in the text without reading in the company of black women. In the post-colonial, post-Atlantic slave trade world, it is crucial that peoples who have historically benefited from the sale and plunder of black women’s bodies, justifying those practices with their readings of scripture learn to hear and the scriptures in our voices and through our eyes.

And another from Rev. Gafney's own blog:  A Gospel of Policing: Serve with Integrity:

Integrity is a difficult path. It means acknowledging and dealing with your own individual racism and that of the system in which you live and work. It means taking a hard look at your own arrest statistics and those of your department. It means coming to terms with the way your own biases shape the way you see, respond and police. It means operating against your biases against black bodies – seeing black boys as men, black girls as promiscuous, black women as prostitutes and black men as thugs. Serving with integrity means holding yourself, your sister and brother officers and your department to a higher standard.

They Say the Church is Too Feminine by Kate Wallace at The Junia Project:

The Barna Group has been studying Church trends over the last 20 years and they have found that women actually represent the biggest shift away from the Church. They also found that the gap between unchurched men and women is no longer a significant one. “It remains true that churchless people are somewhat more likely to be men than women, but the gap is not huge and has been steadily closing…the gap between men and women has plummeted from 20 points in 2003 to just 8 points currently.” And this is not just in protestant churches. . . . 

Women may indeed make up the majority of people in the pews (for now), but they do not make up even half of the people who make decisions about church services or experience. If men really aren’t going to church, it doesn’t seem to be the fault of women. Perhaps the Church leaders who are making these claims should stop shaming the faithful, and start asking them for help. 

Do I care that men aren’t going to church? Of course I do! I also care that women are leaving the Church! We should be concerned about everyone in the Church and how we can better minister to and disciple them. Instead of playing the gender blame game, let’s use our critical thinking skills to better analyze the situation. 

Yes we need men in our pews. We also need women in our pulpits, on our elder boards, at the communion tables, on the worship teams, and in our denominational leadership. 

The Church is “too feminine”? No. I’d say the Church isn’t feminine enough.

And Fred Clark at Slacktivist again with Slavery and the Creation of a Counterfeit "Biblical" Civilization in America:

The King James Version of the Bible was completed in 1611. The first African slaves were imported into Jamestown in 1619. “Biblical” Christianity and the idea of “biblical civilization” grew up alongside slavery. The latter shaped the former, and the two things have been inextricably intertwined ever since.

The invention of “biblical” Christianity and of the idea of “biblical civilization” was for the purpose of accommodating slavery. That may not have been its exclusive purpose, but it was an essential function of the thing. It was a concept shaped and designed and tailored so that it could and would defend and perpetuate slavery.

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*Best-written sentence prize goes to Ms. Evans!

Note: all emphases are in the originals.