Aedificium

Apparently Pat Robertson is a mite jealous over Chuck’s receipt of the JSU! Award; not to be outdone, we get this brilliant piece from the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of The 700 Club on Monday night’s show:

There you have it. “Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant (sic) on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law.”

Yikes. Not only do we need to present Pat with his own JSU! Award, but we may have to institute the F-Bomb Award for Religious Ignorance (see here, here, and here, all on Aedificium) as well.

There are something like 2.3 million or so Muslims in the US alone. That means that we Christians are more likely to bump into Muslims in the grocery store than we are to bump into Episcopalians. Pat’s, and Chuck’s, comments ought to be as unwelcome to those of us who are Christians as they are to our Muslim friends and neighbors. Neither of these guys speaks for the majority of Christians, but they’re the ones getting the airtime.

It’s not like we can get Pat off the air, I guess, but those of us in the rank-and-file of American Christians can still be active in denouncing this kind of extremism through our relationships with our Muslim friends, neighbors, colleagues, co-workers, and so forth, in pretty much the same way that American Muslims denounce terrorism and extremism. We can blog, we can call in to radio shows, we can write op-ed pieces, and engage in other creative ways of rejecting this kind of influence.

Upshot: Islam is a religion. And it’s a sibling of Christianity and Judaism. Spread the word.

Where the Wind Blows: Sermon for Pentecost Sunday

I suspect that many people reading this have experienced in one way or another, as I have, the destruction and damage that a sudden, violent wind can cause with the least amount of warning. When I worked for the State Park Service in Ohio, I was often on call on weekends for cleanup of wind and storm damage on our buildings, in the campground, the beach, and the trails and picnic areas. My equipment consisted of a dump truck and a chainsaw, and occasionally an axe and a sledgehammer as well. It was not unusual for the wind to rip out trees that had stood for over a hundred years and drop them onto structures built up by the state or the park service over the years or across roads and trails that could no longer guide travelers from one part of the park to another. I spent hundreds of hours hacking through such trees to clear out roadways and paths and occasionally knocking down various structures that once served an important purpose but which now, through the violence of wind, were now rendered useless; the best I could often do was salvage what I could to be used in another time, and even in another place, while the rest of the structure would be removed completely. Fences erected between private and public land were often mangled, permitting civilized humans and wild animals alike to run free and ignore the divisions between “our” land and “their” properties.

What was also interesting is that it often seemed like these windstorms, whether they were tornadoes or micro-bursts, seemed to us to always hit the same areas, which on the one hand annoyed the heck out of us laborers but on the other hand permitted a certain amount of planning and preparation. If bad weather was forecast for Saturday, I would often get the trucks ready and chainsaws oiled and sharpened on Friday afternoon. On the other hand, though, it seemed like the park administration never figured this out, or else never believed us, and I remember an outhouse that was flattened twice in the same summer, being rebuilt yet a third time that fall, only to be flattened again the following spring. When I left the park service, they were building it yet again in the same spot. I knew, as did most of the laborers, that we weren’t dealing with geniuses in these decisions to simply keep doing things the same way that they’ve always been done, under the same bylaws and regulations that have been in place for 100 years, despite the fact that the wind, obviously, didn’t give a hoot for the rules, regulations, budget constraints, and conventional wisdoms of the board of directors.

The ancient Hebrews knew the Spirit of God as ru’ach elohim as in Genesis 1.2 and dozens of places elsewhere in the Old Testament. The word itself basically means “wind” or “breath”. The Hebrews took this concept a step further in their thinking, as well, and they recognized that God is the source of life; his granting of “spirit” to Adam was an act of unprecedented newness by which adam, “man,” became a living being (Genesis 2.7) with power to create, sustain (Genesis 6.3; Job 27.3; 34.14-15, others), and renew life (as in Ps. 104:29-30; Isaiah 32.15).

The concept of the Spirit of God as the powerful wind of life led to the Hebrews seeing the Spirit as who God sends to accomplish his goals as the divine power at work in the world. Scripture shows us repeatedly that God’s Spirit acts in special ways in the lives of people in order to accomplish special tasks. The Old Testament shows that the presence of God’s Wind, God’s Spirit, provided the recipient with whatever was needed to complete a divinely ordained job. It is God’s spirit, and not solely or even primarily human intellect or ability or committees and so forth that was the indispensable provision for accomplishing God’s program (see Zech. 4.6) against all fears (see Haggai 2.4-5).

Along these lines, the Prophets dreamed of and hoped for a day when the fullness of God’s Spirit, God’s Wind, God’s Life, would rest on an Anointed One (Isaiah 42.2) who would in turn pour out his Spirit on the House of Israel (Ezekiel 39.29) and all of God’s people, which would inaugurate the universal experience of the presence of God (see Joel 2.28-29).

But the prophets, like seamen and those whose livelihoods depend on the seas, also seemed to know instinctively that a massive influx of God’s Wind blowing into this world would radically alter everything we think we know about him and everything we do that we think honors him. The sudden rush of a violent wind threatens to break down barriers and boundaries and destroy some structures while transfiguring others for new uses, of closing old paths and opening new roads. The sudden rush of life would likewise signal an end to old patterns of knowing and doing, an expiration of the old, and the inspiration of the new.

And what newness! The Day of Pentecost has always been a festival of newness and renewal in Jewish tradition; it marked the end of the celebration of the spring harvest as the Feast of Weeks, or Shavuot. It was considered in Jesus’ day to be the day of the giving of the Law at Sinai (see Jubilees 1.17). For the church, the 50^th day after Passover, when Jews from all over the Mediterranean were on hand to celebrate God’s bounty of life and the giving of the covenant and to renew their covenantal relationship to yhwh, was the Day that signaled the end of the chaos of Babel (Genesis 11.1-9) and the beginning of the Church’s mission, a mission that would accomplish things even greater than Jesus had done, as he promised his disciples in the passage we read from John today. On Pentecost, the sudden rush of Spirit-Wind over the rag-tag gathering of Jews from all over enabled not just a common language to be understood by all men, but a new speech entirely, one that refused the stock answers of all the traditions of their various cultures and politics and religious practices and ideologies. The Jews that day heard the new speech of new prophets, as it were, in the new language of the Gospel of Christ.

We live in a world today that presumes, and even trusts and hopes, that there is no new Wind that will challenge all our trusted structures, even when these structures turn out to be little more than outhouses in a park. We hope that when such a Wind does blow that we can contain and control it by moving it through ordered, legitimated channels and finely engineered and constructed “wind tunnels.” But the threat of Pentecost is exactly that the Wind of the Holy Spirit will not cooperate, and when it comes it is an egalitarian Wind that blows on all present. God’s Wind doesn’t care about our judgments on “who’s in” and “who’s out.” God’s Wind doesn’t care about our finely constructed systematic theologies or our popular versions of conservative and liberal interpretations. The threat of Pentecost is that God’s Wind will blow where it will blow! And, like when a strong wind levels out old, gigantic trees in a forest, a new space for growth, a clearing for new life in an ecosystem perhaps hundreds of years old, begins to emerge.

We in the church are right to be apprehensive, for we know, as I knew in the Park Service, that while the Spirit of God blows where it wants to, when it wants to, it always seems to come back to the same place. The Church is that place; it is the site where the Wind of God returns again and again to dismantle our structures when they become oppressive and unjust or just flat out wrong, no matter how long we have been “doing church” or “thinking Christian” in the way we have. The Spirit of God labors, sometimes with us, and often against us, in bringing out God’s missional activity in the world. We, like the buildings in my old park, are always being challenged by the force of the Spirit of God. Our God, through the mission of the Gospel of Christ, has singled us out to accomplish his ends, to do Kingdom work. And to do that, we as the Church of Jesus the Christ and those called to the Gospel need the Wind of God at our back, not in our face.

As we celebrate the birthday of the Church today, may we speak the new speech of the life of the Gospel; and may we humbly yield to whatever direction the Wind of the Holy Spirit may take us. Oh Lord, ‘Let your wind blow!’

I’m sitting here doing a little reading from Davis McCombs’ Ultima Thule, a collection of the author’s poems inspired by Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Told from the vantage point of a slave cavern guide to tourists of Mammoth Cave in the 19th century, these poems are stunning reflections on beauty and provide some pretty awesome metaphors for life, spirituality, the whole bit. As a religionist and student of scriptures who also views the natural world in metaphoric terms for deep spirituality and community ethics, I was particularly taken by the poem “Tours:”

Tours

The services of a guide cannot, as a rule,
be dispensed with; we alone can disentangle
the winding passageways. I will admit
the tours for me grow burdensome.
How long must I endure their need to fill
with talk the natural silence? I have heard
it all before, their proposed improvements:
Widen the trails so that two carriages
may pass abreast … Here, a capacious ballroom.
Mere fancies. And yet beneath their words
I have discerned a kind of rough-hewn fear.
From drawing rooms and formal gardens
they come to me, from sunlit lives they enter
the chill, grand and instantaneous night. (Ultima Thule, p. 17)

This is such a striking metaphor for what we as educators do. It also speaks to me in terms of stewardship; like the poet, we have all heard of proposed improvements to just about everything from Bibles to Bayous. Despite my vocation, I do feel moved to sometimes just turn off the exegesis, turn off the exposition, the discussion, and just let the text/landscape speak for itself, in silence.

And the rough-hewn fear … yeah, for both student and educator, laity and pastor, reader and expositor.

To do this poem justice, I must cease now, and let it speak to you in the silence.

John Kimbrough of the University of Chicago Library, recently submitted a thoughtful piece to the university’s Divinity School publication “Sightings“ on the implications of being a librarian of faith who views his job as “library ministry.” As a former (and, God knows, perhaps eventually a future) academic librarian who shares the Christian tradition, this article caught my eye last week.

Kimbrough makes what most of us in the library field would concede as an obvious point, and indeed, most of the teaching faculty would concede it as well. He notes that “Entering undergraduates often do not know how to use our collections effectively.” Absolutely true, although I would stick my neck out just a little further to emend the last phrase to “do not know how to use our collections at all.” It is also my own observation that graduating seniors and, heaven help us, graduate students are only marginally better at effective collection use. And yes, the internet is partly to blame; Kimbrough rightly points out that “the library is just another website among thousands that students have at their disposal.” But this is a smoke-screen for the larger problem, which is that the librarians themselves are promoting this mentality by providing more and more bibliographies that are available on the library’s websites or reference kiosks that give students the impression that all they could possibly need for their study of religion (or whatever) can simply be picked up at their convenience. I have been guilty of this myself, having developed a number of such bibliographies and research guides. As a reference librarian, students would trickle in for reference assistance, but it was exceedingly rare for a researcher to actually ask a serious research question. Librarian (me): Can I help you with something? Student: No, I think I’m all set, I just grabbed this research guide. Thanks, though. Librarians who are better than I was might pursue the student’s interests a little more here, but usually the student was more than happy to take his or her three-page printed list of reference works and websites and go home and write their paper. And then, the library directors and trustees are perplexed by ever-declining reference statistics and bemoan the loss of the library and its budget.

Now, I’m all for using whatever information resources we as scholars, students, researchers, and teachers have at our disposal. But these can only take us so far if we truly seek knowledge and not simply “information.” Knowledge implies being able to separate the sheep from the goats (theological librarians will understand that remark). In the field of religion, this means assisting in imparting knowledge about texts such as the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Qur’an in the Abrahamic faiths, for example. Library ministry here, as Kimbrough expresses it, would imply the librarian’s ability to sensitively direct students to these texts as well as to sources about them (and there’s no shortage of that). Yet not every student that seeks to read the Hebrew Bible is Jewish, and still less may that student be a religion major, and even less may the student be seeking an academic career in religion. It should be the librarian’s duty, or “ministry,” to grant these students genuine opportunities for authentic textual encounters with the sacred texts and religions of the world.

Late last week I put up a post on Hermeneutics and Experience, that interpreting and reading Scripture depends on our ability to read the Book of Our Experience. Since then I’ve been running another, related topic through my mind. I think a lot about what happens when we read a text of any sort, or even engage in a conversation. When one person says a particular word to another person, there are certain things that can happen in response: (a) apathy, or no response (b) a “connection” is made between speaker and listener where both parties mutually understand what the word is supposed to imply, as in “inside jokes,” and (c) the speaker means one thing, but the listener “hears” or understands something totally different. The old joke about the woman who promises her new husband that “tonight is going to be the most beautiful night of your life,” who promptly spends his entire night looking expectantly out the window, comes to mind here. There is also the possibility that the speaker will use a word in a completely erroneous way, or use the wrong word in a given situation, which causes further complications in humorous or, unfortunately, destructive ways. And often enough, translation issues come up that can cause all kinds of confusion, especially in cases where a person might technically use the “right” word, but in the context it was spoken, might be exactly what the individual did NOT want to say, or has meanings to the hearer that the speaker would never have dreamed of.

Speech, though, is usually tailored and customized so that the listener gets maximum effect from what is said. Obviously this is true in politics, and it’s just as true in religion, and it’s just as true in the academy and anywhere else. Even though two parties might share the exact same word vocabulary in the exact same language, if the speaker ignores the fact that the listener does NOT share the same conceptual meaning behind the words spoken, the message will be either lost or radically misunderstood until the two can figure out what their common ground is. For example, if in speaking of where someone is, I might say “She’s off to the left.” Some hearers will now think “She’s a Democrat.” Others will think “She’s a liberal.” Others think “She’s a Mainline Protestant.” Others might come to the conclusion that she is physically to the left of where I’m referencing.

Texts and books work the same way, I think. When we read something, we’re taking in what the writer “says.” The writer, if she’s worth her salt, writes in such a way that her specific word will mean something that her readership will connect with in a way that both writer and reader mutually understand to be the same thing. He depends on the ability of a particular word or phrase to invoke specific images in the mind of the reader. Psychological, emotional, intellectual, mental, spiritual, and even physical responses can be stimulated by virtually any word we read, and these stimuli lie behind the word choice of the writer in the first place.

What I’m getting at is words can’t have a static, once-for-all-time meaning, especially when they’re translated from other languages, like Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, and so forth. We, on the receiving end of the written text, simply cannot always know with absolute certainty what the text is really trying to say. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t try; we certainly should, and we should use every available tool at our disposal to at least establish a high degree of probability what a certain word or phrase or text might or probably means. When we reduce texts to one particular meaning, then the preacher I mentioned the other day is right, because we let our experience completely dominate whatever the text says, either what it really says, what it might say to us still, and what we silence the text form saying at all. Obviously this kind of reductionism is absurd, whether it’s the reductionism of the professional academic biblical source critic who analyzes the words and rhetoric of texts thought to lie behind the text as it exists, or the Fundamentalist who harmonizes away all the tensions and smooths out all the rough edges with a mishmash of selective literal and allegorical interpretations and who silences passages that, left on their own and understood in a more plain sense, might be offensive to moral sensibilities.

Close with an example. The Book of Ruth is a great narrative, but it uses a particular metaphor, or more specifically a particular euphemism, that Bible translators translate into English but which absolutely destroys the scene it takes place in. The Hebrew phrase in question is normally translated as “uncovered his feet.” In the scene, Ruth gets Boaz drunk and then, after he’s gone to bed, goes to his bed and “uncovers his feet” and lies down at “his feet.” I’ll let you all look it up yourselves, it’s Ruth 3. In Hebrew idiom, Ruth definitely uncovered something of Boaz, but it was definitely not his feet. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a foot is just as foot (as in the case of the woman in Mark 14 who washed Jesus’ feet or Mary in John 12 who anointed his feet with oil or when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet in John 13). And sometimes, as in Ruth, it’s not. The whole book, for those with eyes to see and ear to hear, is loaded with sexual tension, not with little cartoons and flannel-graphs of Ruth lying down at the foot of Boaz’ bed.

This is a deliberately provocative example, but the point is that even in an obvious case, such as this, it is all too easy to deliberately or unwittingly misread what we read; in fact, in a book like the Bible, so laden with parables, poetry, parodies, and deliberately rich symbolic imagery, writers go out of their way to make sure that some things have two, three, four, or a hundred possible meanings. There is simply no way to prevent the words of a speaker or writer (or both, in the case of stories with dialog!) from taking on meanings beyond what their original symbolic intent was, especially when the texts are constructed on the images, metaphors, and genres of other texts, some of which we have, and some of which we don’t. Reducing these text of Scripture to the absurd is so tempting in the face of so many potential questions and misreadings; but it is precisely that potential that allows for 2000 years of interpretive tradition, a stream in which ours are just small tributaries that flows into a mighty river.

Not long ago I heard a sermon about “Scripture and Experience” that basically said that when we let our experience interpret Scripture we err. (Errrrrrrrr!) We can’t interpret Scripture based on our experience; instead, he said, we must interpret our experience using Scripture.

I still find myself somewhere in between completely disagreeing and agreeing in part, and only conditionally in what I do agree with. The Bible cannot be understood or even really read independently of our experience. The reason is because the various books of the Bible were all written in response to experiences of the writers and the communities that experienced them. The finished product took perhaps 1,000 years, several ancient Mediterranean languages, a number of genres, even more authors, and various excruciating and exhilerating experiences that the Biblical authors were moved to respond to. Elohim comes to us and speaks to us where we are (which is one reason why, today, so few claim to have heard God speak to them or to know him, ours being a generation that is increasingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time). The Gospels themselves are interpretations of the Hebrew Bible based on the life and experiences of Jesus of Nazareth and on the experiences of this Jesus that specific communities subsequently reinterpreted based on their own experiences. And so it continues.

So the Word only reaches us where we are. If we read a scripture that moves us, convicts us, stirs compunction in us, we need to look at what we are experiencing here and now in our world. Why did this word come to me now? Why not three years ago, or whatever? It’s because I am experientially at a place where I needed to hear this word. How we accept that word is an act of interpretation; a hermeneutics of experience.

I don’t think we can read and interpret the Bible without our experience. But I do think that when we respond to the word, in an act of interpretation, we can interpret our experience in light of Scripture. It is a constant dialectic, a conversation, and sometimes even a disputatio. The Bible doesn’t read itself. It never speaks to us in isolation. We have to engage it and grapple with it, just as we have to engage and grapple with Elohim himself, as Jacob found out and as the example of Israel demonstrates.

St. Bernard was on to something when he counseled that truly loving God meant reading and interpreting the book of our experience, our liber experientiae. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, then, “take and read; take and read!”

St. Paul informs his readers that he is “astonished” that many in the nascent church(es) in Galatia are turning to “a different gospel - not that there is another gospel” in the Letter to the Galatians. He’s pretty ticked off in the whole letter, in fact, and engages in a passionate defense of his ministry and his legitimacy as a real Apostle; and, by extension, the legitimacy of the particular gospel message he proclaimed when he was in town. If he’s not legit, then neither must his gospel be.

We contemporary readers find it surprising, in some ways, to hear Paul say this, since, as we all know, there’s only one Gospel, right? And there’s always been only one Gospel, right? Well, yes and no. I’m of the persuasion that Christ proclaimed just one. I’m also of the persuasion that Paul proclaimed just one. And so did John. So did Peter. So did James, Jude, and the writer of Hebrews. But were they all exactly the same? Ehhhhhhh. THAT I’m not so sure about.

Neither were the early Christians. Paul’s flock(s) in Galatia and throughout the Aegean were getting conflicting reports about what “the Gospel” was and what was important, and there’s plenty of examples of this within the New Testament itself. Paul recognizes this in Galatians and elsewhere, and so does John in the Letters, where the writer pleads for some sense of unity. The second century saw the publication of some two dozen gospel texts, including the four in the New Testament.

Today, of course, we’re inundated with “other gospels,” by which we always mean “other than the one that I subscribe to… which is the real one the Jesus proclaimed and that Paul received!” We’ve got the New Prosperity Gospel, the Pacifist Gospel, the Republican American Gospel, the Born-Again Gospel, the Purpose-Driven Gospel, the Anti-Poverty Gospel, and a host of others. This doesn’t even include recent takes on the NT Four and the various gospels of the Disciples that were rediscovered in the last 60 years. (Let the reader understand…) In other words, nothing’s changed since a clearly exasperated Paul wrote those words back in the middle of the first century, has it.

But why the popular attraction of the DaVinci Code, James Cameron’s new film in the works, the Gospel of Judas, and so forth? Besides the media blitz on these, which would be a good topic for another day, I think it’s because so much of the public is disgusted and generally just completely put off by what many perceive to be the dominant flavor of Christianity in this country and/or Western history in general. People are simply not being fed; evangelical Christianity is so “yesterday;” postmodern Christianity is so “relative;” even “emergent faith” is becoming institutionalized, despite its best efforts; Protestant Christians are all bookish and head-knowledgeable; Catholic and Orthodox Christians are all just ritual bells and liturgical whistles, and so forth. I think that the popularity of “other gospels” today, both textual and ideological, reflects some serious unrest, desire, and need in expressions and practice of our faith today. People want to get beyond literalism and avoid both reductionism and relativism. Christianity is all academic, or it’s over-spiritualized, or it’s hidden and bogged down with cultural and ritualistic accretions, or compromised by political ideologies. People are sick of seeing these guys always supporting the “Christian” status quo, whatever it is and whatever it is perceived to be. People want to see some life here. They want to see a Jesus who struggled with what it means to be human; a Paul who had major doubts and identity crises; a John who agonized over the role of Christians in a world of Empire.

Can we provide that? Yeah, and we need to get to work. Hand me the hammer and the nails. I’ve found a carpenter who needs an apprentice.

Hmmmmm… carnival in Church? A fun idea! Today’s service scrambled the usual liturgy beyond recognition, and we had a series of clowns performing and “aiding” worship, and it was complete with a “reverse offering” where the plates were passed for the congregation to draw from, rather than contribute to (some of us had an exceedingly hard time with this, depositing our pledges into the plate even as we withdrew, but I digress). Instead of a “Word to the Children,” we had a “Word to the Parents,” where all of us with kids between 4 and 13 or so were called forward to the steps of the platform (alas, we were forbidden to go to “children’s church”). And of course, being the circus it was, we even had an ordination today before having our clownish assistants help us bury the Alleluias during a festive dirge on the piano.

Earlier in the week I was contemplating someone else’s post about upsetting the status quo (might have been PB+J, but I’m not sure!), and this was a classic example of it. I can’t imagine upsetting the liturgical apple cart like this in our last church. Liturgy and ritual are part of every church, regardless of denomination and regardless of people who vehemently deny that they have any ritual or liturgy (but who, nevertheless, insist on doing the same thing over and over and over again ). Shaking things up a bit, even creating a carnivalesque atmosphere in church, is a reminder of the work of Jesus, the Prophets, and St. Paul, or at least it should be; and it should force us to resist the temptation to freeze expressions of our faith into unchanging forms, lest we become completely irrelevant, and above all, remind us that our faith and expressions of it are supposed to be fun.

Thoughts?

“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God,” I (Adso) said, disheartened.
“Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?” William asked…
–Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

The implications of a quote like this are, to my mind, simply staggering. Indeed, where among us would God feel at home? In our churches, where we deceive ourselves by crying “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD” (as in Jeremiah 7)? In the United States of “God Bless” America, where 1 in 6 children live in poverty and where thousands - millions! - are living tonight without heat, without electricity, without warm clothes, without food or water? Would God feel at home in our “shining city on a hill?” If the Shekinah has departed and forsaken these lands, who are we to blame him? Is Adso right? And if he is, is William’s remark any consolation?

When I reflect on this I’m led back to where Jesus of Nazareth chose to live, to earn his keep and pay his rent. He didn’t choose the Holy City of Jerusalem, the dwelling place of The Presence. He didn’t choose Rome, the residence of the Powers and Principalities. He didn’t choose Athens, the home of sophia, and he didn’t choose Alexandria, the scientific capital of the Mediterranean. No, it was the bad neighborhoods where he earned his stripes; it was the unsavory nature of the company he kept, choosing to eat with those who could barely cull a meal of any sort together, let alone a kosher one, and refusing to cast the first stone against those who, by the definitions of the day, deserved it. (He’d have needed a LOT of rocks.)

May God help us. Where should we look to find him today? Mars Hill? In Purpose-Driven churches? In Postmodern Parishes? In the Religious Right? In Pat Robertson’s “diet shake” labs? Or maybe in our Christian schools and universities, our yeshivot and our madrasas?

Maybe we need to start in our bad neighborhoods, the places where we would least expect to find him. For some of us, that may very well mean with ourselves. If the Kingdom of God is here and now, as our Gospels proclaim, I fear that we’ve been looking for it in the wrong places for too long.

Proof that our church knows what it’s doing by ordaining my wife and not me…:

Top Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained

10. A man’s place is in the army.

9. For men who have children, their duties might distract them from the responsibility of being a parent.

8. Men’s physical build indicates that they are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling with mountain lions. It would be unnatural for them to do other forms of work.

7. Man was created before woman, obviously as a prototype. Thus, men represent an experiment rather than the crowning achievement of creation.

6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. Their conduct at football games and cricket matches shows this.

5. Some men are handsome; they will distract women worshippers.

4. The task of an ordained pastor is to nurture the congregation. But this is not a traditional male role. Throughout history, women have been considered to be not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more fervently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.

3. Men are overly prone to violence. No really manly man wants to settle disputes other than by fighting about it. Thus, they would be poor role models, as well as being dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.

2. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, and maybe even lead singing on Father’s Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the church.

1. In the New Testament account, the person who betrayed Jesus was a man. Thus, his lack of faith and ensuing punishment stands as a symbol of the subordinated position that all men should take.

Dr. David Scholer presented this list in 1998 at Fuller Follies. It was taken, with small modifications, from a November 24, 1997 e-mail communication from W. Ward and Laurel Gasque. It is not known whether they are the authors. From http://www.fuller.edu/student_life/semi/PDFs/Spring%2003/Spr2003_week2.pdf