Category Archives: Christian feminist (radical and otherwise- or is it all radical?)

A modest proposal as to why and how it is okay for Christians to celebrate a Passover Seder

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My dear friend and celebrated scholar, Dr. Monica A. Coleman sent me a link to a blog by the Rev. J. Mary Luti who is pondering the question of Christians celebrating Seders.

http://sicutlocutusest.com/2014/04/11/no-christian-seders-please/

This is a thoughtful and well argued piece and I actually agree with most of her assertions but I think the topic requires further imagination.

First, the Seder as we have come to know it is not the precise meal Jesus celebrated with his disciples on Good Friday. Seders  did not begin to develop until after the destruction of the Temple, 70 C.E.  But it is likely that Jesus  was remembering the Exodus event in some fashion as the festival is prescribed in Exodus 12:14,  “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it  as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”

At that meal Jesus invited us to another act of remembering in what we now celebrate as our communion meal. The Eucharist, for Christians, is an act of remembering spiritual liberation.  That being  said, I am not sure if it would be appropriate to insert Communion into a Seder celebration. But  if we did make that addition it would  be adding our story to the story of our ancestors- which every haggadah (telling) I have ever had the privilege to read or share in encourages the practitioners to do.

Rev. Luti also argues that ritual originates and arises from a community’s shared experience. As Christians, she asserts, we cannot celebrate a Seder out of anything like the lived experience of Jews.  I would respond with both ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  Yes, we cannot, nor should we attempt to claim that our lived experience ‘remotely resembles’ the lived experience of Jews. But if scripture is our shared story, and indeed a universal story, then it is also our story to tell. (I would note here that not all Christians are white and privileged.  And those who are white and/or privileged,  confront the pharaoh within when telling the Exodus story.)

As pastor of a progressive, feminist church (note the orange on the Seder plate) with a community of women and men, many races, gender identifications and sexual orientations, the Seder is a time of remembering Godde’s promises, given and fulfilled, and Godde’s call for us to live into freedom. In the remembering and telling the story each year we are encouraged, renewed, challenged and sent forth with hope.

I agree that the celebration of the Seder meal should never supplant the Exodus story with the Christian story as the ‘conclusion’ of Godde’s activity in history. The point of the Seder is to remember who we are, to remember Godde’s intention, desire and liberating acts for humanity, to own the places where we participate in our own oppression and the oppression of others, and to depart with the hope  of Godde’s continued redemption of humankind.

It is not a Christo-centric story. Neither is a story exclusive to Jews. It is our story, wherever we find ourselves in it. It is a story that brings both judgment and hope. It speaks to Godde’s movement in history and to the journey of the community of faith and of individual souls.  It frames for us an understanding of who Godde is and how Godde acts.  In the telling of our story each year,  we learn as we hear and speak the words,  listen with our bodies when we eat the lessons, and sing with our hearts as we insert our personal journeys and lives into the story.  This ritual returns us to spiritual center.

If Christians can celebrate a Seder meal in those ways then so we should for it opens us to greater understandings and deeper experiences. If we hear echoes of Jesus’ words for us to remember him in the story, then let our hearts be open to ways the Exodus journey might illuminate those words.

 

 

 

Christian, feminist and church…

A Gracious Heresy, Christian feminist (radical and otherwise- or is it all radical?), Circle of Grace, everyday theology, musings, retro-Wednesday

originally posted in 2010

My friend and our non-resident theologian, Dr. Monica A. Coleman, recently visited a feminist church at a conference at which she presented.  She then posted an idea on facebook inviting all feminist churches to hook up.  I snickered and posted back, “What, all two of us?”

      There may be more but we are so far apart and disconnected that it is hard to find one another.  On some level we may not believe that the other exists.  And then there is the question of what makes a spiritual community feminist.

      First of all, there are a lot of understandings about what it means to be feminist (among feminists as well as outside the feminist community).  After lengthy discussion Circle of Grace distilled our understanding down to a short paragraph:

        Circle of Grace is a feminist Christian worshipping community.  We are non-doctrinal and seek to re- imagine understandings of language and stories, symbols and metaphors.  Our commitment is to inclusivity.  We honor each one’s truth and each one’s journey and feel called into community as a way of faithful response.  We understand feminism to be a critique of power.

 Spelled out it means: 

  1-we don’t all have to (nor do we) believe the same things. Nothing is written in stone.  For us the journey of the spirit requires a certain fluidity (uncomfortable at times).  Theologically, members of our community range the gamut of understandings.  Biblical authority, atonement, – you name it.  This hooks up with the last sentence in our statement: we honor each one’s truth and each one’s journey.  As in, I can’t tell you what your experience of the Sacred is, nor will I try to dissuade you of it.  Need I say that making room for many truths is a challenge?  But we are committed to this endeavor because It is central to feminist thought.

 2-  Our images, stories, symbols and metaphors are not limited to the images, stories, symbols and metaphors available in the biblical text, though we do ‘re-imagine’ those in ways that, we hope, opens us to new understandings of Godde.  As feminists, we find any symbol that becomes rigid and/or absolute to be unhelpful and sometimes harmful to the journey of the spirit.  It is one thing to say Godde is like a father (or mother or eagle or bridegroom, etc.) and quite another to say Godde is father,etc.

 3-  We feel called to community as a way of faithful response.  All of us at Circle of Grace come together because we believe or intuit that sharing spiritual community both grounds and grows us.  It is the challenge of being (or trying to be) who Godde calls us  to be in the world and with one another that draws us together in worship, prayer, meals, time, relationship…     It is faithful (and feminist) to build community that is radically inclusive.  It is faithful (and feminist) to live our one’s journey of spirit informed by those who are not like us but offer new wisdom, insight, challenge and hope.   For me, at least, and others I believe, the call to community is the call to kin-dom living, the call to embody the kin-dom in real time as a beacon of hope for the world.  Each week at Eucharist we say something like this to one another as we pass the wine, “Drink in and become the promises of Godde.”

 4- We understand feminism to be a critique of power.  We also understand the Way of Jesus to be a critique of power.  They go hand in hand.  As feminist Christians we speak a critique of the power of the institutional church.  

       So for Circle of Grace being spiritual feminist community is about opening understandings of the Divine to include many images, it’s about making room for all kinds of differences and it’s about living out our understandings (and our struggles to understand and our inability to make sense) together.  It means that we get comfortable with not having all the answers.  It means that we make room for one another.  It means we critique power used and misused in both the culture (patriarchy) and the institutional church (with love…).

 So here’s a shout out to all the other feminist spiritual communities/churches out there (they are there, right, Monica?) – “what does it mean to you?”   

 And isn’t it great that it can mean so many different things? 

 

 

     

Retro-Wednesday: Circle of Grace as Elephant Orphanage

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This was first posted in 2010.

I received a thoughtful email from someone who used to attend Circle of Grace about my last post.  She had some insightful responses and agreed with my assessment of Circle of Grace as a place of spiritual healing.  

 She went on to remind me that many folks who ‘came through’ Circle of Grace often returned to traditional churches as she, herself, had.   She returned to the church in which she had grown up and with whom she had a deep connection but she continued, she would never had been able to do that without her time at Circle of Grace.  She said that she, too, pondered why we hadn’t grown and concluded that we needed to remain small to do the healing work we do.

 It reminds me of what my spiritual director shared with me some time ago.  She had seen a 60 Minutes special about an elephant orphanage in Africa.  A woman began a refuge for baby elephants whose mothers had been killed by poachers or who had physical defects (e.g. blindness) that had caused their ‘tribe’ to abandon them.  She and her workers take in these baby elephants and provide medical care and nourishment.  When a baby recovers sufficiently they go about the business of teaching the baby how to be an elephant- including pounding the ground with small logs to teach her/him how to read sound through the ground.   

 Some of the babies are so damaged or ill they don’t make it.  Some are able to be reunited with their ‘aunties’ and assimilate back into the wild.  Some recover but are never able to return to the wild and a new ‘tribe’ has evolved at the orphanage.   

 “That’s what Circle of Grace is like!”  she exclaimed.  “Some people heal and return to the church of their childhoods.  And some people find themselves to be more at home at Circle of Grace and become a part of its ongoing healing ministry, forming a new and different kind of ‘tribe’.”

 I remembered that comment after I got the email this week:  two very different people seeing the same thing from different perspectives.  A final thought my emailing friend shared was that she now takes stands and provides a much needed witness in her more traditional church. 

 I’ll keep pondering all these things and we’ll keep talking about these things.  For too many years I assumed we were supposed to follow a certain pattern and achieve specific things: membership, space, programs…

 Now, I just want us to walk as faithfully as we are able and do the work to which we are called.  I want us to keep on living into who we are and not into any superimposed idea of who we think we should be.  It’s an ongoing learning experience.  It is always challenging.  We’re always going to have to question our assumptions and let some of them go.  

 But I don’t guess we would do it any other way.

 

Retro- Wednesday: revisiting the beginning

Christian feminist (radical and otherwise- or is it all radical?), Circle of Grace, Uncategorized

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(this was originally posted in 2010)

Over sixteen years ago, twelve women took a class I taught entitled Christian Feminist Theology. Toward the end of the class several women said, “We want to do church that looks like this.”

For me, it was the beginning of a vision of what spiritual community could look like. Okay, then it was all women and mostly lesbians but it was s a good start. Our intent was to build community way more expansive. We didn’t want to repeat what we saw/see to be the shortcomings of the traditional church. Instead, we have found plenty of our own unique shortcomings. But more on that at a later date.

At our first retreat, working to form a covenant that expressed our vision, our big question was ‘ is there anyone who would not be welcome?’ followed by a lot of ‘what if’ questions: what if a skinhead came? what if someone showed up naked? or drunk? would those folks be welcome?

Our answer was: everyone is welcome, even those who we find distasteful. The only criteria is that their intent not be to disrupt worship. And by the way, for a long while, someone had a blanket in the trunk of the car, to cover the naked person so s/he didn’t disrupt worship.

The bigger vision we held, and still hold, is a community of women and men, children and elders, LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered, queer-identified, and intrasexed), heterosexuals, people with physical and mental disabilities, people with mental health challenges, Asian, African-American, and Latino folk- and anyone we hadn’t thought of yet. We wanted and want to create a community that is inclusive. And not merely inclusive of the kind of people who show up, but inclusive in the building relationships, making space for one another and struggling with all the messiness of living in dynamic community.
That kind of community can be built in many contexts but, to me is the imperative of christian life. The vision of all-inclusive community is a vision of the kin-dom. It is how we live Godde’s future in the now. Or as theologians would say: it is living eschatologically.
To that end this is the covenant we hammered out early on:
We, the Circle of Grace Community Church, as christians, covenant with God and one another to intentionally and self-reflectively:
* live with compassion and seek justice
* continually discern that to which God calls us
* build spiritual community that is inclusive of race, gender, sexuality, abilities, class,
culture, age and religious backgrounds.
* provide safe haven
* worship and pray together and our worship and prayer and that in our worship and
prayer our language about God and humanity will be inclusive.
* live in right relationship with God and each other
* speak truth to power.

Clearly ambitious and not particularly comfortable, building expansive spiritual community is like building a path in the wilderness: many people have to walk the way before the path becomes either clear or firm. We’re walking. We’re sometimes screwing it up. We’re sometimes the glory of what human beings can be. Mostly, we’re walking. We’re rolling. We’re limping or crawling. We are making a way together through the wilderness.
Stay tuned for more about the good, the bad, the ugly, the profane and the sacredness of our journey together.