"Leave Her Alone"

Today's Gospel lesson

The other day I happened to visit the blog of a certain Reformed-tradition Evangelical author and professor -- it was one of those links-you-stumble-on-while-looking-for-something-else -- who regularly opens his page up to contributing bloggers. Reading through some of the guest-blogger posts, I noticed that whenever a woman was guest blogger, the reader responses became more critical, more patronizing, more preachy; lots of imperious mansplaining going on. (Sidebar: For an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, read Tony Jones' recent blog query "Where Are the Women?", the response of some women, and the response of Jones and other men to those responses.)

"Leave her alone," I found myself thinking as I read through post after post by nitpicking, tall-stick-afflicted know-it-alls dogpiling on one female guest blogger.

Even though this was all going on in a religious milieu different from my own, I felt a certain kinship with this woman. Like most of us, I suspect, I've been at the receiving end of nonconstructive criticism, scorn or outright bullying for being who I am, for saying what I think, for expressing how I feel -- sometimes as a perceived personal attack, sometimes as a perceived attack on a group to which I belong. (This essay, for instance, makes me feel that I'm not young enough, heterosexual enough or fertile enough to be part of this pastor's vision of the Reign of God. What I hear in this "missional" message is, "So die already.")

"Leave her alone." "Leave them alone." Sometimes I'd love to hear those phrases resounding from heaven.

But, thinking about this week's Gospel lesson, I wonder about the times when I'm the one needing a calling-out by Jesus for disparaging other people's expressions of faith.

This past month our church has been collecting surveys from parishoners. They ask what's been working for people and what hasn't in terms of worship, education and so on. FT and I completed our surveys after a particularly unfocused Sunday that just seemed to highlight things about our parish life that tend to drive both of us crazy, and so we expressed some of those frustrations in some detail. It felt very brave and liberating at the time. But in retrospect -- what if some line item we've chalked up to carelessness or incompetence is actually just the act of someone who, like Mary, is simply "doing what she can," however inexplicably or imperfectly, for the love of God? Even with the understanding that we were being asked to be candid and specific, were all of our critical observations valid, or were some of them simply projections of our own psychological stuff? I mean, I can be OCD; I'm someone who notices typos and crooked pictures hanging on walls and flat notes. If there are enough of those things going on, I get anxious and wanting to get busy "fixing" so the world is returned to my idea of wholeness. At what point is does that element of my personality cross the line from being a useful quality in a community setting to being a destructive force? How do I know?

But nowhere in this story do we hear Jesus telling either Mary or Judas, "Leave me alone." And maybe there's a lesson in that, whether we're the beleaguered recipients of others' negative judgments or the highhanded judges ourselves. That gives me hope.

Bored by the Bible

FT and I had lunch the other day with someone who does children's ministry in our congregation. While  telling us about some of the things she was doing with the younger members of our church she confessed that she was finding it difficult to keep the youngsters interested in Bible stories. You see, she's a masterful storyteller who can make up tall tales on the fly; and the kids, frankly, get much more engaged in her own highly imaginative stories than in the Scriptural stories the tall tales are intended to lead into.

I have to admit that, many if most days, I'm with the kids here. Sometimes, to me, the Bible is pretty boring. Sometimes boring on the level of slogging through the Gilgamesh saga, one of my recent Great Books projects and one of the most neuron-numbingly incoherent and dull stories I've ever encountered; sometimes boring on the level of, say, sitting in a church council meeting where some concrete thinker has spent the last 20 minutes parsing an obscure line in the church constitution that may or may not really have anything to do with buying a part from Home Depot to fix the broken furnace, and while sitting there wearing your meeting game face you're actually thinking (unless you've already dozed off), "Who the hell cares what it says in the footnote to line 10 of subarticle D?"

Leviticus...Numbers...I and II Chronicles...great swaths of the New Testament epistles...Revelation...for me they're kind of like the Gilgamesh bromance and/or the Council Meeting From Hell.

Yes, it's true: It is sometimes very difficult for me to engage with Scripture, especially the non-narrative texts, in a lively way. I can fake it by reading commentaries and contextual aids, looking for new insights there, or by reading sermons and essays describing what other people in my religious milieu have gotten out of their own Bible reading; but just reading it to read it-- not so much. 

I'm sure some of my readers will find this distressing or appalling. But in the spirit of Lent, even in the context of my very minimal observance of Lent this year (which is pretty much, "Oh -- I'm observing that now it's Lent), confession is good for the soul. 

The last time I was really geeked about Scripture was when I was in training for lay ministry and got to study and discuss it  in an academic way with professors who knew what they were talking about and who were able to convincingly articulate the idea that the whole of any given text, and of the canon of Scripture as a whole, was greater than the sum of its parts. But that mojo is hard to keep going outside a particular kind of supported atmosphere.

It makes me wonder how other non-fundamentalist Christians -- people who don't have an oracular, magick-book approach to reading the Bible, but who read and study it in different ways as part of an ongoing spiritual discipline -- power through the drearier parts. What keeps you reading? Have you ever consigned a particular book or part of a book to the land of  "been there, done that, ain't readin' it no more"? What are some pluses of tackling the entirety of Scripture -- good, bad, ugly, boring? I'm genuinely interested in how others deal with this dilemma...or if it even is a dilemma.

Bible Study With the Church Ladies

Tomorrow I will be, in our pastor's absence, leading women's Bible study at our church. This venerable institution has been going on pretty much since World War I, and most of the participants are the true matriarchs of our congregation.

I recall, a few years ago on this blog, expressing my intense dislike of group Bible studies, so it's another indication of God's sense of humor that I have been tasked with this assignment. It helps that I enjoy the participants -- they're right-on women who take their faith seriously but can cut loose in a way that the uptight church ladies of my childhood did not. I think we'll have fun. Might learn something too.

My New Year's Resolutions

Today I came across a blog written by a con-evo Intervarsity type -- someone who seems to embrace the sort of Pietistic scrupulosity an online acquaintance of mine once referred to as "Is picking my nose Scriptural?" -- who suggested that New Year's resolutions have a whiff of Pelagianism about them. This made me chuckle -- a neo-Puritan wringing his hands over other people's perceived works-righteousness. Off to the pillory for you, dude.

But anyway: I have found making resolutions to be less than helpful, not because I think of them as a Pelagian stairway to heaven but because they generally don't take; which isn't surprising since it takes about 21 days, so I'm told, to train oneself into a new habit, and that the average human being can't handle more than about three of these new habits at once.

Nonetheless, I have made a couple of small and I think doable resolutions for the coming year.

One is intended to solve an ongoing annoyance/stressor in my life: Using the many cloth grocery bags we have obtained over the last year in the way they were intended -- hauling groceries -- instead of keeping them stashed behind the pie chest in our entryway or using them for carrying shoes, last-minute travel supplies, empty bottles, dog toys -- everything except groceries. We have at least a half-dozen of these things; my goal is to keep two of them in each of our vehicles, and the spares stowed in the entryway. We bring a full bag of groceries into the house, we take an empty bag back out. I think we can do this.

My other resolution is a joint venture with Fellow Traveler: We really want to start a weekly Bible study at home, on a designated "front room" evening. FT has a difficult time with our church's Sunday morning Bible study, which covers the day's lectionary lessons, because in the herding-cats milieu of the regulars' group the discussion tends to fall off the topical trolley rather quickly, and because a couple of the participants frankly use the hour for impromptu group therapy rather than actually discussing the texts at hand. FT says, "I know I'm not being patient -- but I'm a very concrete, task-oriented thinker. If I'm going to commit to an hour of Bible study I want it to be Bible study and not hearing the same stories about people's personal issues over and over again." (Don't tell FT, but I think she'd really dig the seminary-professor-taught biblical studies sections of the Lay Ministry Training Program, which are pretty down-to-business simply because of the volume of information being presented within a limited amount of time.)

So -- we're trying to come up with something workable. Since I do a mini-study every week on Sunday lectionary texts for our church blog, that might seem to be a logical starting point; but FT has noted that, when she reads these, and then hears our pastor's sermons that will touch on some broad theme of the week but that often don't directly engage the texts for very long, she feels like something's missing.

My thought is to just start at the beginning of one book and go right though the whole thing, using all our available study-Bible and other reference tools but then also re-approaching the text from a more immediate, personal "What does this mean for me at this time?" perspective. We might just start at Genesis. I'm sharing Luther Seminary's Enter the Bible website with FT to see if that resonates with her.

FT is an eager student ready to, as Kelly Fryer puts it, swim out to the deeper end of the pool, so I think we'll have some fun with this.

Bait-and-Switch Bible Study

When my day is going too smoothly -- when I don't have enough tension in my day to ramp up my blood pressure to a satisfactory level -- I read the comments on the ELCA's Facebook page.

Don't get me wrong. I think that this project is one of the smartest things the ELCA has done in a long time. Each day some Internet-savvy elf on Higgins Road posts prayers or quotes, and a question of the day. It's encouraging to see the interaction and information sharing going on. And perhaps the folks at the other end of the computer are learning more about the laity from reading their responses.

But inevitably the conversations, no matter where they begin, seem to wind up in the realm of The Troubles. And I have to read, again, about people's "pain" and "struggle" and "anguish" about being asked to accept partnered gay and lesbian members of our denomination as full participants in all ministries.

My gut reaction is, "Pain? Oh, please." An ileostomy is pain. A breast biopsy is pain. Being asked to share a church body -- not necessarily even your own congregation! -- with a pastor or deacon or other rostered leader who happens to be gay and partnered is not pain. Get over it.

But there's this one guy who keeps writing on the Wall, who keeps reiterating his state of upset, whose recent comments inadvertently stumbled upon an issue that I think actually underlies much of the controversy over the role of gay people in the Church. The other day he said, more or less: So what else are you going to tell me is wrong in the Bible? Because apparently, through his attempts to understand the CWA vote, he was exposed to people discussing the Bible using an historical-critical interpretative methodology. This stuff is honestly news to him. His applecart of faith is starting to shake.

I grew up in the LCMS. I cut my theological milk teeth on the Seminex controversy; my ueber-conservative uncle subscribed my sympathetic, but not quite as exciteable, father to a newsletter that breathlessly reported, month after month, on the heretical, Bible-hating shenanigans going on in Lutheran seminaries. I didn't find the accusations, once one got past the hyperbolics of the authors, all that awful; it was kind of a relief, actually, for a pious but precocious Missouri Synodian teen, to discover that I didn't have to believe in a six-day creation, or in an historical Adam and Eve, or a real guy named Jonah swallowed by a real fish, in order to be a Christian. And then I went away to school and took biblical studies courses (taught by two excellent professors, one Methodist and one Presbyterian, who happened to be pastors as well as scholars) that provided more context with which to understand what I was reading, and the controversy between biblical literalism and a more nuanced reading of the texts.

But that illustrates the gap between people whose biblical education is more like mine and people whose understanding of the Bible has been formed solely by grade-school-level religious education,  Sunday preaching and devotional reading (which is what most adult Bible studies are, really). The Troubles with Teh Gay in the ELCA are, as personally frustrating to me, just a symptom, I believe, of a bigger Trouble -- the Bible gap.

The confused soul on Facebook feels as if he's been played in a game of biblical bait-and-switch. And you really can't blame him.

I told him that I don't think that that is the intent at all of preachers and teachers. But I do wonder what damage has been wrought in our church body and its predecessors over the decades by the sort of intellectual elitism that, in both children's and adults' religious education, has tended to provide only lightweight, principally devotionally oriented Bible study to the laity. This is the Reformation that Luther risked his life for? Bunny-slope Bible study for average laypeople, versus a rigorous, contextual Bible study for a special few? Because the peasants really aren't up to learning how to read the Bible critically and contextually, and besides, we don't want them getting all riled up? Really?

I think the ELCA's Book of Faith Initiative is a modest attempt to rectify this situation. I hope it works. But I think it may be too late for some church members who have taken the apparent low expectations of Church leadership to heart, to the point where they can't/won't process what they're hearing when the elite exegete and hermeneute. And honestly -- how are our kids learning to read the Bible? Same ol', same ol', so that by the time they hit adulthood we'll have the same conceptual gap?

Tongue-Tied

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield  fresh. -- from the Epistle of James

I'm still chewing on our epistle lesson from last Sunday.

Maybe that's because, as if on cue,  current events have been filled with stories of intemperate people -- Joe Wilson, Kanye West, Serena Williams, Glenn Beck, et al -- shooting off their mouths in public. Granted, James is speaking to the Christian community, not the world at large; but it's the same problem, with the same consequences.

But I've also been thinking about other examples of people, particularly people with spiritual or social gravitas, using words in a destructive way.

I regularly read an opinion column by a political writer who constantly writes hand-wringing jeremiads about The End of the World As We Know It. Multiply him by every other influence in the media and the world of letters for whom every change in demographics, in politics, in the environment, in society, is a catastrophe. Yes, sometimes change is unfortunate; yes, it's natural to mourn the loss of the familiar and feel anxiety about the new. But a constant drumbeat of "The sky is falling" -- does that not have the power to send others, especially anxious others, into despair? Or -- when the sky does not in fact fall -- cynicism? How does one balance the need to talk about perceived "bad news" with the need to keep people's hope alive? "Without a vision the people perish."

Likewise, I've been thinking about a tendency that I find in myself; an impatience with biblical literalists that gives me almost a kind of impious pleasure in kicking over their right strawy cradles of simpleminded interpretation. Getting into pissing matches with aggressive Bible bangers is one thing -- but is it really so important to overwhelm the doe-eyed newbie in Bible study with historical-critical analysis in response to one of her innocent comments about a text? What is the desired outcome here? What's the more likely outcome? Am I really concerned about learning happening? Is there a better way to respond -- one with less risk of knocking over a spiritually vulnerable person's applecart of faith?

See, folks -- the lectionary does work. If presented well, the texts keep percolating in your brain long after Sunday.