This morning's reflection for the series: What Do We Hunger and Thirst For? is a repost from the Bethlehem Blogger. I could not get these images out of my mind this morning and felt that they were compelling images for us to meditate on as we walk with Jesus towards the Cross.
Each month I am invited to contribute to a synchroblog with other Christian bloggers. This month's topic - All About Eve which I posted on yesterday has stimulated a lot of discussion.
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It’s Women’s History month and International Women’s Day is March 8. Women’s rights have been all over the news recently, from bills in Congress and state representative bodies to crass “jokes” by national broadcasters. The idea that women are or should be equal to men has become a polarizing topic of discussion on the national stage. So we thought Synchroblog might jump right in. Anything concerning women in general, women and the church, balancing women’s rights with religious freedoms, the differences between men and women … these are all good topics for blog posts. There is one caveat, we are asking that the Synchroblog be a voice of moderation and temperance. You may have strong beliefs on this subject and that is good. Giving voice those beliefs in a spirit of cooperation and bridge-building is also good. We would like these posts to step in that direction. Here are a couple of great examples of moderate writing on women’s issues to prime your writing … –> An Apology From Limbaugh, But The Damage Is Done by Denny Burke - –> And now…on the other side (critique of extreme complementarianism) by Roger E. Olsen This topic idea brought to you by Wendy McCaig and Katherine Gunn (aka Jeannette Ailtes) … thank you for your help, ladies. The link list is below … Michelle Morr Krabill – Why I Love Being a Woman Marta Layton – The War on Terror and the War on Women Ellen Haroutounian – March Synchroblog – All About Eve Jeremy Myers – Women Must Lead the Church Carol Kuniholm – Rethinking Hupotasso Wendy McCaig – Fear Letting Junia Fly Tammy Carter – Pat Summit: Changing the Game & Changing the World Jeanette Altes – On Being Female kathy escobar – replacing the f-word with the d-word (no not those ones) Melody Hanson – Call Me Crazy, But I Talk To Jesus Too Glenn Hager – Walked Into A Bar Steve Hayes – St. Christina of Persi Leah Sophia – March Syncroblog-All About Eve Liz Dyer – The Problem Is Not That I See Sexism Everywhere… Sonja Andrews – International Women’s Day Sonnie Swenston-Forbes – The Women Christine Sine – It All Begins With Love K.W. Leslie – Undoing the Subordination of Women Carie Good – The Math of Mr. Cardinal Dan Brennan – Ten Women I Want To Honor
[caption id="attachment_6516" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="It all begins with Love"]
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When I was first asked to contribute to this synchroblog I must confess I was not particularly excited. Here we go again I thought bringing up all the same arguments as to why women are equal to men and what we need to do about it. And after forty years of struggling and arguing about that I am not sure how much I felt I had to add.
Then I came across Kenneth Bailey's commentary on 1 Corinthians Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes. and Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, books that I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to have their understanding of many theological issues turned upside down. Suddenly I felt I was reading a new book one in which love and forgiveness not hate and repression were the halmarks of how we treated each other.
Bailey suggests that 1 Corinthians 13 and its focus on the royal command of love is the center of Paul's beliefs on women and their participation in worship. I could not help but applaud as I read through his gentle commentary that suggested the admonition for women not to chat in church was because they belonged to an oral culture that did not train them how to focus on spoken sermons. It had nothing to do with their subservience.
God's royal command - the practice of love - at the centre of all things I thought. If we focused on that in any context it would radically change the way we treated each other be we male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free. All the rhetoric we can so easily get embroiled in fades into insignificance when we start with love no matter what we are talking about.
Sixteenth century mystic Madame Guyon called prayer "an exercise in love". Or maybe it should be: "love is an exercise in prayer." It is the forming of an intimate relationship between us and the loving heart of God. Perhaps the reason that women's voices were silenced for so long is because it is the more feminine qualities of feeling, mysticism and the ability to develop personal relationships that are at the core of love and therefore at the core of our relationship to God. Discovering the heart of God's love means breaking down the barriers that divide men and women, slave and free, Jew and Greek. In our world today women need to be heard more than ever and so I have realized that it is not time to step out of this debate. I want my voice to be heard, not in argument and rhetoric but in love and forgiveness. That is the only thing that will reveal to all humankind the heart of our God who is love.
Here are the links for the other contributions to this synchroblog:
Michelle Morr Krabill – Why I Love Being a Woman
Marta Layton – The War on Terror and the War on Women
Ellen Haroutounian – March Synchroblog – All About Eve
Jeremy Myers – Women Must Lead the Church
Carol Kuniholm – Rethinking Hupotasso
Wendy McCaig – Fear Letting Junia Fly
Tammy Carter – Pat Summit: Changing the Game & Changing the World
Jeanette Altes – On Being Female
kathy escobar – replacing the f-word with the d-word (no not those ones)
Melody Hanson – Call Me Crazy, But I Talk To Jesus Too
Glenn Hager – Walked Into A Bar
Steve Hayes – St. Christina of Persi
Leah Sophia – March Syncroblog-All About Eve
Liz Dyer – The Problem Is Not That I See Sexism Everywhere…
Sonja Andrews – International Women’s Day
Sonnie Swenston-Forbes – The Women
Christine Sine – It All Begins With Love
K.W. Leslie – Undoing the Subordination of Women
Carie Good – The Math of Mr. Cardinal
Dan Brennan – Ten Women I Want To Honor
[/caption]
When I was first asked to contribute to this synchroblog I must confess I was not particularly excited. Here we go again I thought bringing up all the same arguments as to why women are equal to men and what we need to do about it. And after forty years of struggling and arguing about that I am not sure how much I felt I had to add.
Then I came across Kenneth Bailey's commentary on 1 Corinthians Paul Through Mediterranean Eyes. and Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, books that I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to have their understanding of many theological issues turned upside down. Suddenly I felt I was reading a new book one in which love and forgiveness not hate and repression were the halmarks of how we treated each other.
Bailey suggests that 1 Corinthians 13 and its focus on the royal command of love is the center of Paul's beliefs on women and their participation in worship. I could not help but applaud as I read through his gentle commentary that suggested the admonition for women not to chat in church was because they belonged to an oral culture that did not train them how to focus on spoken sermons. It had nothing to do with their subservience.
God's royal command - the practice of love - at the centre of all things I thought. If we focused on that in any context it would radically change the way we treated each other be we male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free. All the rhetoric we can so easily get embroiled in fades into insignificance when we start with love no matter what we are talking about.
Sixteenth century mystic Madame Guyon called prayer "an exercise in love". Or maybe it should be: "love is an exercise in prayer." It is the forming of an intimate relationship between us and the loving heart of God. Perhaps the reason that women's voices were silenced for so long is because it is the more feminine qualities of feeling, mysticism and the ability to develop personal relationships that are at the core of love and therefore at the core of our relationship to God. Discovering the heart of God's love means breaking down the barriers that divide men and women, slave and free, Jew and Greek. In our world today women need to be heard more than ever and so I have realized that it is not time to step out of this debate. I want my voice to be heard, not in argument and rhetoric but in love and forgiveness. That is the only thing that will reveal to all humankind the heart of our God who is love.
Here are the links for the other contributions to this synchroblog:
Michelle Morr Krabill – Why I Love Being a Woman
Marta Layton – The War on Terror and the War on Women
Ellen Haroutounian – March Synchroblog – All About Eve
Jeremy Myers – Women Must Lead the Church
Carol Kuniholm – Rethinking Hupotasso
Wendy McCaig – Fear Letting Junia Fly
Tammy Carter – Pat Summit: Changing the Game & Changing the World
Jeanette Altes – On Being Female
kathy escobar – replacing the f-word with the d-word (no not those ones)
Melody Hanson – Call Me Crazy, But I Talk To Jesus Too
Glenn Hager – Walked Into A Bar
Steve Hayes – St. Christina of Persi
Leah Sophia – March Syncroblog-All About Eve
Liz Dyer – The Problem Is Not That I See Sexism Everywhere…
Sonja Andrews – International Women’s Day
Sonnie Swenston-Forbes – The Women
Christine Sine – It All Begins With Love
K.W. Leslie – Undoing the Subordination of Women
Carie Good – The Math of Mr. Cardinal
Dan Brennan – Ten Women I Want To Honor
Today's post in the Lenten series Easter is Coming: What Do We Hunger and Thirst For? comes from Martha Hopler. Martha Hopler a social worker for 15 years in Philadelphia PA before moving to Seattle where she attended The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. She is now a social worker medical case manager at Project access Northwest. She attends Seattle First Seattle baptist church.
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It’s time to go back to the desert. It’s time sit with the God above and realize it’s not 40 years… it’s forty days. I will go as Jesus did after he was reminded of his call to ministry. I will enter Lent with silence and seriously give up something I have found so helpful in my journey. Not just half way but all the way. This part of the journey is mine. It is not about what everyone else should do it’s about me and God – and I am not alone. This will be the Lent of all Lents for it will lead to new. It will lead to living into who I was created to be: I am a warrior princess I am a child of God I am a woman who loves with all she has and then gives a bit more And I am ready for the new race… The race of love and truth together. The ‘giving up’ is not to say what I had was a bad thing, it is so I can “trade one addiction for another” (Tim Phillips). And ‘tis not forever! It’s for forty days because I serve a God of mercy and Grace. I choose this day to give up TV for Forty Days because it will create space for a new day. I have learned over the last years as I was introduced to Lent that for me this is what it is about. It is about giving up something so I can be in a space that is different. It creates discipline and anyone who knows me knows I hate discipline. I hate the square I have been boxed into… meaning those times that it has been demanded of me to be what works for the group. I have been boxed in a corner where all I have known is anger and screaming at time. Even as I write these words I hear those who want to take my journey and make it theirs and then they will argue with me about why it will not work. Trust me; I have had all the difficulty in relationship. I love my favorite shows. I love connecting with people. TV it has worked in places where I had nothing in common with another and yet our personalities find common ground and connection through story. I hate it when people make broad sweeping statements about TV as if God is never there… For I have watched amazing shows where whole discussions regarding God are more of a church experience than church itself. This forty days, for me, is acknowledging just how much I would rather live in the pretend – in the place where God has made all things right. I have been on a journey toward choosing life and the purpose of God for ten years. Not that I have not lived for God for all of my adult life and not to say that after this forty days I will have arrived, but to say that I will be more focused in moving toward what I have believe to be a call. However I must warn you that those who want to believe that know that I am subject to forgetting that this journey continues beyond these 40 days… It really is 40 years and I am still in the middle but closer to end. That is a story for another day. But for now I will choose forty days of no TV and journal about it every day… Forty entries and moving into the New. Easter is coming.
This morning’s post in the series Easter is Coming: What Do We Hunger and Thirst For? is contributed by Thomas Turner. You can find the original post and more from his blog here.
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When Christ tells us to “hunger and thirst after righteousness” or to pray that God “give us our daily bread” our full, first world bellies automatically think in spiritual terms. Most of us know nothing of hunger accept when we choose hunger for spiritual reasons, like fasting during Lent. For better or worse, we are intertwined in an agriculture system that has distorted our relationship with food. We live divorced from food. Our food comes to us in saran wrap and cans, comfortably packaged so that we have as little mess, fuss or contact with the dirty world of food and food preparation. We do not know where the tuna in a can or the burger on a bed of foam comes from, and we are happy with that. It is what our mothers and grandmothers worked so hard to obtain after the Great Depression. Time spent doing such laborious and revolting chores like baking and cooking have been minimized or gotten rid of altogether, and we can live in a wonderful world of pre-packaged, ready-to-eat meals, fast food and take out. We have conquered the evil specter of reliance on the seasons and freshness. We have taught ourselves to believe that we have conquered rotting and death. We have, in a way, but that has come at a great cost of justice. When we are hungry or thirsty, we now live in a world where our hunger and thirst are actual ethical choices. When we hunger and thirst after righteousness it is more than spiritual, it is literal. It is the choice between fair trade coffee or coffee grown at great cost to the land and to workers. It is a choice between organic vegetables or the heavy use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers that pollute and destroy the earth and our own bodies. It is a choice between buying food from a local farmer and supporting a local economy or by buying from large, multi-national businesses that seek to destroy local farmers through lawsuits and business practices that are unfair and unethical. It is a choice to eat meat that is from ethically treated animals or to buy meat that comes from animals that have been treated in horrendous, inhumane ways that are not right for any person to participate in, directly or not. We cannot accept the lie from marketers, advertisers and politicians that food can be compartmentalized and treated like a sterile science. Food is the fruit of an intricate web of cycles in creation that affect every aspect of our daily lives and touches every aspect of creation. We are all in this together. Our food choices are ethical choices. We can no longer afford to interpret hunger and thirst for righteousness as a spiritual choice. That is to buy into our society’s lie that we can divorce body and soul. Our spirituality is embodied. We live in the light of Christ’s physical resurrection, and our remembrance of his death and resurrection during Lent is a constant reminder that food is a means of grace and righteousness in our world. Christ’s presence is there whenever we break bread. So, when we hunger and thirst for the bread and the cup, let us in the same way hunger and thirst for a great breakfast of coffee, toast, eggs and bacon that are products of integrity, righteousness and justice, and not the empty food of a world focused on greed, ill-treatment and consumption.
Shortly before his death in 2008, the late Irish poet John O'Donohue recited his poem, meaning blessing, during an interview with Krista Tippett. Here we see it presented woven his close friends' photographs of him in his Celtic landscapes with this reading. I love it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfvS2LYbZLQ&feature=player_embedded#!]
I also highly recommend this inspiring episode of the podcast On Being with Krista Tippet.
https://youtu.be/aqalrRkYP14
[caption id="attachment_6491" align="alignnone" width="224"]
Christ on the Cross[/caption]
This beautiful and compelling rendition of the Lord's prayer was posted by the Society of the Sacred Heart. I thought that it made a great addition to our Lenten collection of prayers.
Our God who is in heaven,
And all of us here on earth;
The hungry, the oppressed, the excluded.
Holy is your name.
May your reign come.
May your reign come and your will be done:
In our choice to struggle with the complexities of this world,
And to confront greed and the desire for power in our selves,
In our nation and in the global community.
May your reign come.
Give us this day our daily bread;
Bread that we are called to share,
Bread that you have given us abundantly
And that we must distribute fairly, ensuring security for all.
May your reign come.
Forgive us our trespasses;
Times we have turned away from the struggles
Of other people and countries,
Times when we have thought only of our own security.
May your reign come.
Lead us not into temptation;
The temptation to close our minds, ears, and eyes
To the unfair global systems that create
Larger and larger gaps between the rich and the poor;
The temptation to think it is too difficult
To bring about more just alternatives.
May your reign come.
Deliver us from evil;
The evil of a world where violence happens in your name,
Where wealth for a few us more important
Than economic rights for all,
Where gates and barriers between people
Are so hard to bring down
May your reign come.
May your reign come, for yours is the kingdom,
the power and the glory forever and ever. AMEN!
Christ on the Cross[/caption]
This beautiful and compelling rendition of the Lord's prayer was posted by the Society of the Sacred Heart. I thought that it made a great addition to our Lenten collection of prayers.
Our God who is in heaven,
And all of us here on earth;
The hungry, the oppressed, the excluded.
Holy is your name.
May your reign come.
May your reign come and your will be done:
In our choice to struggle with the complexities of this world,
And to confront greed and the desire for power in our selves,
In our nation and in the global community.
May your reign come.
Give us this day our daily bread;
Bread that we are called to share,
Bread that you have given us abundantly
And that we must distribute fairly, ensuring security for all.
May your reign come.
Forgive us our trespasses;
Times we have turned away from the struggles
Of other people and countries,
Times when we have thought only of our own security.
May your reign come.
Lead us not into temptation;
The temptation to close our minds, ears, and eyes
To the unfair global systems that create
Larger and larger gaps between the rich and the poor;
The temptation to think it is too difficult
To bring about more just alternatives.
May your reign come.
Deliver us from evil;
The evil of a world where violence happens in your name,
Where wealth for a few us more important
Than economic rights for all,
Where gates and barriers between people
Are so hard to bring down
May your reign come.
May your reign come, for yours is the kingdom,
the power and the glory forever and ever. AMEN! As an Amazon Associate, I receive a small amount for purchases made through appropriate links.
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