Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Famous Science YouTuber Admits He Has Unhealthy Relationship With AI After Facing Backlash Over Recent Video (July 31, via) "Longtime YouTuber and science content creator Hank Green has announced that his main channel will likely be “paused” as he deals with his admitted overreliance on ChatGPT and other AI tools after some fans claimed a recent video included him reading AI-generated language."

2. The Underlying Misogyny of Grand Romantic Gestures (July 27, 47-minute video) "If you meet your best friend's fiance and all you can think is, 'oh man, she's so hot, let me film intense close-ups of her, then go home and edit them into a weird montage that I will keep in a VHS tape to fantasize about in my house', you're just weird."

Another good line from the video: "It is only by doing the little things, the daily, mundane work, that you can build to a place where your relationship is healthy enough to also accommodate fun gestures and surprises."

And: "No matter how much women say, stop, leave me alone, I don't want to be with you, we'll never be together, the grand romantic gesture argues that it's all just all just pretense. It's this fake defense that women use, almost as a filter to weed out the guys who aren't romantic enough to keep pursuing them."

3. How China Delivers a 14-Yuan Bouquet Over 2,000 Kilometers (August 3) "On China’s major e-commerce platforms, a bouquet of fresh-cut roses from the southwestern Yunnan province sells for just 14 yuan ($2), with free delivery to most parts of the country."

Also from Sixth Tone: Check in, Log on, Stay for Months: Life at China’s 9-Cent Internet Café (August 5)

4.  Is Captain Pike's Tragic Fate Actually a Happy Ending? (July 22, 31-minute video) An analysis of Captain Pike's disability in "Star Trek": how it is viewed in different ways in different "Star Trek" series (the 1960's vs now), and the parallels between Captain Pike and the lives of disabled people in the real world.

5. Works of culture from age to age (July 28) "But the other thing Card does here also seems utterly alien to contemporary MAGA worship and MAGA religion: He identifies God through the eyes of Hagar, the abused and discarded concubine, the refugee."

6. The Pastor No One Can Correct (July 11) Posting this because it's related to the question of whether or not children can/should take communion in church, which we were talking about when we read "The Kingdom of Children." Apparently Doug Wilson said "we commune children", and first of all, I have never heard "commune" used as a verb meaning "give communion to", and second, this is definitely a different thing than what "The Kingdom of Children" was talking about. (If you don't know who Doug Wilson is- he's a pastor who is so extremely racist and sexist, like, I didn't even know there were people who were that racist and sexist.)

I guess you can imagine a spectrum going from "we make infants/children/everyone eat communion, whether they want to or not" (is this Wilson's position?) to "we let everyone (children and adults) take communion if they choose to" to "we have an official vetting process to make sure you're a real Christian before you can take communion, and children cannot pass this vetting process." [Okay maybe this isn't a one-dimensional spectrum, maybe it's several dimensions.] What is the role of choice, and what is the role of "understanding" (understanding what communion means, understanding what it means to be a Christian, understanding the meaning of Jesus' death)? 

"The Kingdom of Children" talks about communion as "the family meal"- like it's about being included as part of the community, rather than about your own individual feelings/understanding about Jesus- to me, this sounds like if you're at church, you take communion, because that's what everyone's doing. It would be weird if you're having a meal, and some people are eating and some people are just sitting there not eating while it happens around them- but that always happens at church during communion. It's totally fine if some people choose not to do it while everyone else does, maybe because they're not Christians, or for any other reason. It's not weird. I *don't* think children should have communion just because "oh, it's time for us all to have communion now"; I think there should be some "understanding" of what it is. I don't think "The Kingdom of Children" addressed that- it was mainly talking about churches which exclude children who *want* to take communion. The main point of "The Kingdom of Children" was that children should be able to make their own choices about religion.

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Oh turns out I haven't been following the news this week so I don't have any links

The Kingdom of Children: Communion and Baptism

Communion cracker and small cup of juice. Image source.

I've been reading R. L. Stollar's book, "The Kingdom of Children." Here's a part of the book that talks about including children in communion. From pages 167-168:

Excluding People In Case God Wants Us To

At the moment of Jesus' death, "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." (Matthew 27:51) Image source. 

In some churches, women aren't allowed to volunteer as ushers, or to serve communion, or to read Scripture to the congregation. Because, the bible says women should not speak in church, and a woman must not have authority over a man.

There are also churches that believe men and women are fully equal, and women can have all the same leadership positions that men can. They interpret those bible verses as only applicable to the first-century churches they were written to, and not absolute rules for all time.

Suppose you don't know which side of this debate to believe. It certainly seems sexist and wrong to put restrictions on women, but at the same time, it's right there in the bible, so maybe God really does want us to do it?

Maybe it would be wise to err on the side of caution, and not allow women to do things. It's difficult- it's difficult to obey God in this way- everyone will call you a sexist, and also if you exclude all the women volunteers, maybe you don't even have enough men volunteers to run your church service. One could argue that obedience to God is in fact supposed to be difficult like this. It's so hard, it's a sacrifice, look how we are sacrificing so much for God. Much more righteous than taking the easy way out and just letting women have all the same roles that men can have, right?

The problem with this framework is, it has God above us, and we are down here trying to please him, trying to follow the rules correctly, for him. God has high standards, and we have to work really hard, exclude people just in case God wants them excluded, the narrower the better, no sacrifice is too great if we are doing it for God.

But God is not up there, waiting for us to present our carefully-screened representatives to perform worship in our best attempt to follow Their rules. God is here. God is in us. All humans bear the image of God. If your church excludes women from volunteer/leadership roles, you are excluding God.

If you restrict women, you're not "erring on the side of caution." You're cutting off part of the body of Christ. You're cutting off God.

---

Gay Christians face a similar debate. The traditional interpretation of the bible says only hetero relationships are allowed, and sex is only for one-man-one-woman marriage. On the other side, you have gay Christians making the argument that those bible verses were written for the people in the ancient Near East, and they don't apply to us now.

But if you're not sure who to believe, what do you do? Maybe don't ever date a same-sex partner, just in case it's a sin. Maybe a church should not do same-sex weddings, or have queer people in leadership. High standards, for God.

But again, you're cutting off God. God is in queer people, queer joy, the way that we thrive when we're able to accept ourselves for who we are. Don't ask people to repress themselves for God- you're repressing God. All the diversity and beauty of the image of God, living in so many different people with so many different experiences and perspectives, and we're trying to cut it down, fit it in a box, make it fit the straight and narrow "rules."

---

Another example is that time in college that we brought a friend to church, and he said he was a Christian, but we "knew" he wasn't a "real" Christian. I wrote about this in my post The Worst Bible Story:

On another occasion, a friend of mine, let’s call him Hector, brought another friend, let’s call him Carl, to church. Carl claimed to be a Christian, but he hadn’t been attending church or anything, and Hector and I knew that he didn’t have a real “relationship with God”, you know, because evangelical Christians are all about judging who is and who isn’t a “real Christian.”

So Carl came to church. And that week, we had communion, and Hector stopped him and explained, you know, honestly, you’re not a real Christian, so you shouldn’t take communion. And Carl was really hurt by it (can you imagine), but I admired Hector for taking a stand like that. Defending the wafers and grape juice from those who don’t have the “correct” view on Jesus.

I would never have done what Hector did, because I was not confident enough in my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 and I had never seen anyone stopped from taking communion before. ...

I would never have done that, but I really admired Hector for the way he stepped out in faith and took a stand for God, even though other people didn't accept it.

Excluding Christians from communion because we think they're not "really" Christians. Because we believed God was above us, judging whether we stayed in the lines or not, and God was offended by anyone who came forward and ate a little wafer but didn't meet the standards of how to believe in Jesus the "correct" way.

We thought that if someone felt hurt by being blocked from taking communion, well, that was a small price to pay to keep up the highest standards of respect for God. Making sure that only people who were definitely the right kind of Christian were allowed to participate.

We were actually excluding God.

---

Matthew 1 contains [one version of] Jesus' genealogy. It traces his ancestry from father to son, through Abraham, down through David and the kings of ancient Judah, down to Joseph, the husband of Mary. I've often heard Christians point out how interesting it is that this genealogy mentions some women. I mean, it's a typical patriarchal genealogy in that it's all about "so-and-so was the father of so-and-so," but at a few points in the list of fathers and sons, it also mentions who someone's mother was.

Specifically, the women included in the Matthew 1 genealogy are: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.

Tamar, whose first husband Er was wicked, so the Lord put him to death. Then she was required to marry his brother, Onan, who was also wicked and the Lord put him to death. Then she was supposed to marry the remaining brother, but her father-in-law Judah didn't let her, so she disguised herself as a prostitute to get Judah to have sex with her, and she became pregnant that way. 

Rahab, a prostitute and foreigner, a resident of Jericho, whose city was attacked and the people killed by Joshua and his army.

Ruth, a widow and foreigner from Moab, which was one of Israel's enemies.

Bathsheba, who was raped by King David. She became pregnant, so David murdered her husband Uriah, and married her.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was a virgin but probably had people judging her for being unmarried and pregnant.

This is not exactly the dream team that you would assemble if you wanted good, respectable, uncomplicated role models. So why did Matthew go out of his way to point out that these women were part of Jesus' family line? 

One way I've heard this explained is, this is great because it shows that even if we're not perfect, we can still be part of God's work. God can still use us to do amazing things, despite our flaws.

I want to spin it a little bit differently, though: God lives in the women that society rejects. The widows, the immigrants, the sex workers, the women in bad marriages, the rape victims. To exclude them, to say Jesus needs a perfect pure genealogy... you're excluding God.

---

Christian missionaries go to different parts of the world, encounter diverse and interesting cultures, where God is already there and alive, and tell the people to stop doing all that and follow the missionaries' religion instead.

God was already there, before any Christians came. The people have the image of God, and they have their own culture and religion, which is important and meaningful to them. The missionaries tell them to cut it off, to repress it, that it's *bad* because it's worshipping the wrong gods- you're cutting off God.

---

Deuteronomy 23:1 says, "No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord."

Hundreds of years later, an Ethiopian eunuch met Philip, one of the early Christians. Philip told him about Jesus, and he believed, and said, "Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" Is this legit? Can he be baptized? Can he be welcomed and included?

Philip didn't think it was an issue at all. Philip baptized him.

Throughout the bible, there are some passages about excluding people who have some kind of imperfection and therefore don't meet the standards and can't enter God's presence. And then there are other passages about God's radical inclusiveness, about marginalized people who were accepted and approved of by God. Slaves, people from the wrong nations, people from the wrong religions. 

I don't think this is a simple Old Testament/ New Testament split- it's common for Christians to claim that the Old Testament was about rules and the New Testament is about God's love- but the verse that says women can't speak in church is from the New Testament. And the Old Testament has stories about welcoming immigrants, which stand in contrast to its laws about killing everyone in every city you conquer. 

The bible has all of these threads running through it; we use our own beliefs about the nature of God to decide which bible passages to emphasize and which to disagree with.

---

1 Corinthians 12 says that we are the body of Christ.

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

This passage is about diversity. About how we need diversity, or else we are actually excluding parts of Christ.

---

The Christians who want to exclude people... well, God is in them too. We can't cut them off either. 

In practice, that means thinking about how to get people who disagree to coexist in a church. You can't just say we all accept each other even if we disagree, because these issues are about one group's basic rights on one side, vs another group's bigoted opinions on the other side. 

So you need to make sure you set up a system where people who want to exclude and restrict others are not given the power to do that. And okay that sounds complicated- but really, you have to do that anyway. All the groups of people I've mentioned in this post, as examples of people who bear the image of God and shouldn't be excluded- well, they are all imperfect people who have conflicts sometimes. We all are.

---

Is God above us, waiting to see if we are good enough to meet Their standards, requiring us to restrict and ban people who aren't good enough to participate in worshipping Them? More restrictions, higher standards, the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you."

No, God is with us, in us, and when we exclude people, we are excluding God.

---

Related:

What kind of God will judge how we treat immigrants?

Don't Protect God

"The Only Moral Virgin Birth Is My Virgin Birth"

"One Coin Found" (I love this queer Christian book)

Book cover for "One Coin Found"

I read the book One Coin Found: How God's Love Stretches to the Margins by Emmy Kegler (published in 2019), and it was great!

Kegler grew up in a mainline Christian tradition, and she didn't see any reason why her faith would have any kind of problem with the fact that she is a lesbian. But in the Christian circles she moved in- especially the ones which were more evangelical, and especially as she worked to become a pastor- well, it's more complicated than that. The overall structure of the book is about her life, but with plenty of asides where she preaches about the nature of God, the bible, etc, from a progressive/queer Christian perspective. It's so good.

I want to quote a section of the book, about communion. ("Communion" is also called "Eucharist" in some Christian traditions.) She was at a church service for college students, and was dragged into volunteering because they needed extra help. This is from pages 89-96:

Suddenly someone pushed a ceramic plate into my hands. It was heavy and cool, the polished rim pressing into my palms, the molasses bread upon it fresh from baking that morning. I looked down at the dark cross pressed into the loaf and immediately looked back up at the stranger who had handed me the plate. "I can't," I said, apologetic but clear.

...

"I can't serve," I repeated. "I'm not trained." I tried to hand off the plate to the closest possible person-- one of the campus pastors. ...

He took a moment, observing the situation as I held the plate out, my eyes declaring my unwillingness to be complicit in the unrighteousness being forced upon me. He half-took the plate back, and then peered at me again and asked: "Do you know what to say?"

I swallowed, and carefully answered, "T-the body of Christ, given for you."

He let go of the plate, and the full weight of it fell back into my hands. "There you go. You've been trained."

It could be that Pastor Benson simply needed to get one more set of hands ready. Perhaps his comment was not meant to be a theological assessment of the nature of the Eucharist. But in every moment since, in all that I have understood of Lutheran proclamation and practice, I have not yet found a sentence to better summarize what communion is. 

...

... But in the act of communion, in the promise from priest to believer that "this is the body of Christ, given for you," something grander than memory or symbol was taking place. Christ was fully present, impossibly so, in that moment of sacramental promise.

The transformation of the elements or the memory of the Last Supper became background for the work not of the priests or the believer but of Jesus: to be powerfully present in the moment of the Eucharist. An unworthy priest could still consecrate; an unworthy believer could still receive. It was not about the virtue, the knowledge, even the faith of the people involved; Luther saw humanity as far too fallible to bear that burden. It was Jesus's promise, Jesus's power in which the beauty of communion rested.

From the day that plate first rested in my hands, the promise of sacramental union rang true for me. The training that the church of my childhood had required was worthwhile, no question; if we were truly handling the body and blood of Christ, it was better to do it with reverence. But it was not required. I was a baptized and beloved child of God; the rest was the work of Christ. The promise of Christ's real presence expanded the bread and wine beyond what I could hold. In the crumbs there was a proclamation of an impossibly expansive God.

The God present in the bread was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery, who had broken the bonds of oppression and wealth and power to lead them across the sea on dry land. The God in my hands was the God who had sent quails to cover the camp at night and frost to cover it at dawn, the God who had left thin wafers of bread across the sand of the camp, the God who chuckled when the Israelites picked up the fine flaky substance and said to each other, "What is this? What is this?" This was the bread of impossibility, the bread of the promise that God could provide, that work and work and work and work was not the path to salvation or protection. Manna, the bread of the wilderness. This was the bread that made no sense and yet was there six days of each week for over two thousand weeks, skipping each Sabbath with a terrifying regularity, reminding the people again and again to rest. Each stale wafer that stuck to the roof of my mouth held the God who had fed the chosen people both with food and with freedom.

The God who found me in the communion chalice was the God who inaugurated his ministry with ridiculous abundance, with rich red wine at a wedding where everyone was already drunk. The God now held in my shaking, sweaty hands was the God who drank and ate with sinners. This was the God who had smiled with quiet pleasure at the religious expert who failed to understand the offensive nature of mercy, a God whose human feet had been washed by a woman with wet eyes and trembling hands. As Simon the Pharisee glared at the offense of a sinful woman at the feet of Jesus, this God had interrupted his internal rant. This God who I now held in my hands had proclaimed the nature of salvation: "She has anointed my feet with oil. Therefore her many sins have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love." What came first, I wondered, the forgiveness or the love? The mercy or the response to mercy? The bread or the body?

Yes, communion answered me. There was no before and after. There was no twelve-step process to my betterment before the table of the Lord. There was no demand for perfect faith, for full comprehension, for my ultimate sanctification before I could be found worthy. Christ was there, waiting for me, the timeless Divine choosing to be bound in this moment. It was all there, element and substance together, the twinkling bright eyes of Pastor Benson as his fingers gripped the bread: The body of Christ, given for you.

On the first Easter, the day of impossibility, the first day the women and disciples could do anything besides sit and grieve, there was broken bread. The women had come and told their truth: an open tomb, a body missing, a flash of light, and two messengers with a proclamation: "He is not here, but has risen." The women had run to find the disciples, their words tumbling over each other, gasping with the exertion and elation and shock. But the men had shaken their heads, disillusioned or even disgusted with another set of women's foolish talk and idle tales. And so two had set off to Emmaus, a seven-mile journey, mournfully chewing over the morning's events, throwing questions and disappointments back and forth as they walked. "We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel," they told a stranger who met them on the way, and the stranger laughed and called them mindless and slow-hearted. Moses and all the prophets had confessed to this coming prophet, his life and death and resurrection, and the stranger walked alongside them on the journey.

And in a flash, over a simple dinner, the truth was known: the women's witness was no old wives' tale. Christ was alive, risen from the dead, freed from the tomb; he was known to them in the breaking of bread.

God was there, big enough to fit into a sip of wine, close enough to hold. 

God was here. My job was to get out of the way.

I served the bread that day. My hands were so sweaty that I vacillated wildly between the fear I'd be struck dead by lightning for serving without proper training and the fear that I'd drop the plate. Neither happened, and I have barely let go of serving the bread ever since. I will freely confess that I may have been excessively captured by the revelation of the real presence of Christ.

I have been finding new and complicated layers to the communion experience since that day. Years later, when I was serving communion in a Lutheran church off-campus, a parent pulled me aside before church to explain that her children would be receiving communion today, thank you very much. I blinked at her. "I know the teaching of the church is that you have to understand before you can receive," she went on, "but do any of us really understand what's happening at communion?"

This mother's proclamation baffled me. None of this was about understanding, I thought. Who could understand what was happening here? Who has said we need to try? The promise isn't of understanding but of presence, not ours but God's. That was the entire launch-point of Luther-- that it was the work of Jesus, and nothing of our own righteousness, that saved us.

The conclusion was singular and obvious. "Of course they'll receive," I answered.

Yes, what Kegler describes in this book is the Christianity I believe in. And reading this passage about communion, it gives me all kinds of feelings, about how I miss communion and other embodied/physical/sensory religious experiences.

Growing up evangelical, we always said the important thing was your beliefs, and whether you "really meant it"- that this was what really mattered, not rituals and traditions. In fact, we regarded Catholics and other "liturgical" Christian groups very suspiciously- we thought they were just "going through the motions" of doing all these traditions, but it didn't mean anything. We said what really mattered was your own personal faith and relationship with God. Your feelings and beliefs, not the religious rituals.

And back then, taking communion (ie, eating the little wafer and drinking the grape juice) was about making myself feel really bad about my sin and Jesus' death. Getting myself into the right emotional state- manufacturing the emotions- regret and guilt and how bad and unworthy I am.

But now I see it completely differently. I don't go to church, so I don't really ever get to have communion, and on the rare occasions that I happen to go to church (like when I'm visiting my parents), if it's the week that we do communion, I really look forward to it. Because it's an actual embodied action. Something I do, concrete, the action is right there in the tangible real world, regardless of what anyone thinks or believes or feels or "really means" about it. Maybe I *don't* have the right feelings or faith or understanding, but regardless, I eat the little wafer and experience God. God comes down to us. Who can say if you had the "right" attitude or the "right" feelings or "really meant it"- what does that even mean? But you did eat the wafer and drink the juice- you can know that for sure. Experiencing God through real actions rather than constantly psychoanalyzing yourself.

I've heard that it's common for ex-evangelical Christians to end up joining more "liturgical" churches, ie, churches that have more structured traditions and rituals. (Perhaps the most well-known example of this is Rachel Held Evans.) During the time we were evangelical, we spent so much emotional energy agonizing over if our feelings were the right feelings, if we "really meant it"- our worship and our faith didn't "count" if on some level we didn't "really mean it." But in liturgical churches it's not like that. Regardless of what you feel or what you "really mean," you go through the actions of the church service. You are there and you are doing it, and that is good enough. You can stop worrying.

I miss having these embodied religious experiences. Now, I mostly just think about Jesus all the time and write about Christianity on the internet. And I feel I experience God in a lot of things, in the beauty of the world, in human connection, things like that. But I really miss the kinds of sensory experiences you have in a church-y environment. Communion, singing worship songs, kneeling to pray. I guess I could do some of that on my own, but also it feels silly, like 'oh if I kneel down and think about God, then God will give me some kind of meaningful feeling,' it feels really silly and gimmicky. Feels like I just made it up, so why am I acting like it means something? I suppose in church it's also like that- the organizers of the church service set up the environment to be a certain way and give people the feeling of connecting with God. Maybe that's also gimmicky.

But there really is something to the idea of feeling with your body, rather than just thinking and talking and believing. 

I really miss that, and it feels really personal to say so. I'm queer. I'm ex-evangelical. I know that evangelicals would say I'm not a real Christian, if they knew. And to attempt to feel God in physical, sensory ways, to openly show my desire for Them... I don't feel safe doing that in a church. Why would I show people how I really feel about God, if they don't even believe I'm a Christian? (See: Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival")

Anyway. I liked this book, "One Coin Found," and this section about communion was my favorite part. Religion as something you do with your body. God comes down to us and we can experience God, even if our feelings/beliefs are not "right."

---

Related:

"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me"

No One Can Take The Bible From Me 

Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"

"The Berenstain Bears: The Very First Easter" (kids' book review)

Book cover for "The Berenstain Bears: The Very First Easter." 

I got this book for my kids: The Berenstain Bears: The Very First Easter. Here's my review of it.

---

Summary

This is a book which gives a very basic outline of these events from the bible: Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, praying in the garden of Gethsemane, Judas's betrayal, Jesus being questioned by Pilate, the crucifixion, the angel at the tomb, and Jesus appearing to his disciples again after his resurrection. Each of these events is described pretty briefly, just a few sentences.

All the characters are depicted as bears because this is the Berenstain Bears universe.

---

My take on this book

My son is at the age where he's learning to read. My daughter is at the age where she likes to tear books with her fast little hands. This book is not for her, lol. It's paperback.

I'm starting to teach my son bible stories, but he doesn't know that many of them yet. We don't go to church, and yeah, you know from all my other blog posts that I have a lot of issues with how bible stories are typically presented to children. I want him to know the stories, but I want to avoid all the problematic messages I got from these stories when I was growing up evangelical.

For the Easter story specifically, my 2 main concerns in telling this story to kids are:

1. How much graphic violence is shown when Jesus is tortured and crucified?
2. Does it say "Jesus died for your sins" or anything like that?

The Easter story, as told in the bible, is extremely violent. Jesus is beaten, flogged, a crown of thorns is stabbed onto his head, he is forced to carry his cross, his hands and feet are nailed to the cross, and then after he dies, a soldier stabs a spear into his side. 

It's a lot!

In my experience, Christians are a little bit too enthusiastic about how graphically violent this all was. Making a big deal about how Jesus needed to die the worst death ever, to pay for all our sins. How it was so horrific but he chose to do it out of love for us, and we should feel really really bad about our sins that did this to him.

I don't view it this way any more. I've read stuff from black Christians and/or feminist Christians who do NOT see it as a good thing that Jesus [supposedly] suffered the maximum possible amount of suffering. In the book, "The Cross and the Lynching Tree," James Cone says that Jesus was lynched. American Christians should all read James Cone. I've read articles from feminist Christians about why it's harmful to portray Jesus' suffering as a good thing- this has direct consequences in the way that women are socialized to put up with bad behavior from men, and marginalized people are told to accept their oppression because suffering is good for them and God will reward them in the long run- like, hey, it's not cool to tell people that suffering is a good thing because it makes them like Jesus- how about instead, we make society better so that people don't have to suffer in the first place?

Okay but can we get back to talking about the Berenstain Bears? How does this book portray the violence of Jesus' death?

This book doesn't really show any of the violence at all- it just says Jesus was hung on a cross, and died, and the illustration shows the silhouettes of people on the three crosses, but it doesn't show any violence beyond that. No blood. Nothing at all about Jesus being beaten/flogged.

I think this approach is very good. I want my son to know the basic plot points of the story, but I don't think there's any need to show all the graphic violence to kids.

And for my second concern: Does this book say anything about "Jesus died for your sins"? Because I don't want to teach my kids that.

No, "The Berenstain Bears: The Very First Easter" doesn't say "Jesus died for your sins." It pretty much just gives a simple overview of the story, and doesn't get into any questions about why things happened or what they mean. It doesn't say anything at all about what Jesus' death and resurrection mean for us. Seriously. Nothing. It doesn't say anything about sin. There's no "so we need to believe in Jesus," nope, nothing like that at all. It's actually quite surprising.

I feel that it's really good to have a book like this, which simply tells the story without also presenting an interpretation from some particular brand of Christianity.

My son asked me a lot of "why" questions, while reading this. Why did Judas betray Jesus? Why did people want to kill Jesus? I told him a few different possible reasons, but said we don't really know for sure, and people have different interpretations.

---

In which I make a joke about Catholics

In the part about the Last Supper, the book says that Jesus said, "This bread and wine is like my body and my blood." I then remarked, "I guess this wasn't written by Catholics" and then my husband and son both said "what?" so I guess I shouldn't make any clever little remarks that reference obscure debates within Christianity like that. Turns out my household is not the right crowd for that.

(Catholics believe that when Christians have communion, the bread and wine *are* the body and blood of Jesus, rather than being *like* the body and blood of Jesus. I don't understand what that even means. I always went to churches that believed it was a symbol. Note that in the actual bible, Jesus says "this is my body" and "this is my blood"- referring to the bread and wine- so it's an interesting choice to add the word "like" when telling this version of the story.)

And I suppose I could make a lot of little observations about which details this book includes, and how it words things, and what that says about the brand of Christianity it's coming from. But I don't think that really matters- as I said above, my main concerns are the amount of violence, and whether it says we need to feel guilty about how our sin killed Jesus. This book is very good on those two points. It tells the basic story, it doesn't get into any graphically violent details, and it doesn't say anything at all about what it means for us.

I certainly have opinions on what Jesus' death and resurrection mean for us- I'm a Christian, of course I have opinions on that- but let's just teach kids the story first, before getting into that.

---

Conclusion

I like this book because it's simple, and therefore doesn't get into any of the problematic stuff that Christian children's books often get into. It gives a brief overview of the bible story of Jesus' death and resurrection. This is what I want; I want my son to know the story. It doesn't say anything at all about what Jesus' death and resurrection mean. I like that. For now I just want my son to know the story. There will be plenty of time in the future to think about what it means. Maybe I'll spend my whole life doing that.

---

Related:

Good Friday is R-Rated 

Reviews of Christian Children's Books 

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)

Blogaround

1. I was in the pro-life movement. But then, widowed with 6 kids, I prepared for an abortion. (posted October 11)

2. ‘Originalism’ = Garrison’s Constitution, a Covenant with Death (posted October 27) "The fact that this Neo-Confederate counter-revolution is being carried out under the rhetoric of 'the sanctity of life' only makes its advocacy for the covenant of death all the more reprehensible." Damn, I wish I learned this in history class.

3. This extremely informative chart:

4. when I was a pro-life hypocrite (posted February 8) "What Jamie doesn’t understand and what I didn’t understand a decade ago was nothing makes us special. Nothing makes our reasons 'good enough' and other people’s reasons 'not good enough.'"

Breastfeeding: Take and Eat; This is My Body

Artwork showing a woman breastfeeding a baby. Image source.

I find myself following Jesus' example as I breastfeed my child. Feeding this baby from my own body; in a sense, saying to him, "Take and eat; this is my body."

For the first few months of his life, he's totally dependent on my breast milk for all of his nutrition. And the results are astonishing- this baby grows so fast! He's growing and thriving and wiggling around everywhere, getting stronger and stronger, and it's all because I am feeding him from my own body.

He needs me.

And I need him too. If I don't feed him or pump for 4 or 5 hours, then my breasts get all hard and painful, and all I can think is I need to get home and feed my baby. I want to feed him so bad. He needs me and I need him.

Breast milk is the only thing that "wants" to be eaten. For other foods, we're taking something whose original purpose was to be a useful part of a plant or animal, and repurposing it as food for ourselves. (Even for something like a fruit that "wants" animals to eat it and spread its seeds, the fruit doesn't "care" about being healthy and nutritious for the animal that eats it.) And so, the normal foods we eat can be difficult to digest, and there is waste. Not so with breast milk- it is optimized for one purpose only: to be the best and most nutritious food for a growing baby. It's extremely easy for babies to digest it and then poop. It's almost impossible for breastfed babies to be constipated. And their poop is very different from formula-fed babies' poop.

Breastfeeding literally says "take and eat, this is my body" in a way that nothing else can.

And during pregnancy I could say "This is my body, broken for you." I certainly felt broken. Nausea, throwing up, heartburn, exhaustion, weird pains as the baby grows bigger and bigger and pushes up all my organs. Pregnancy is about giving up my body for another person. Like what Jesus said, except he was talking about violence and death. In my case, though, it's about creating new life.

How about the "this is my blood, shed for you" part? Well. WELL. Did you know that right after you give birth, you have THE BIGGEST PERIOD OF YOUR LIFE? It's called lochia and can last for several weeks. For the first few days at least, there's so much blood, it's soaking through giant pads. I needed to do that as part of giving life to my baby.

And now I feed him from my own body, like Jesus did.

It's beautiful and it's a special bond between me and my child, but it can also be mundane and annoying. When baby goes through a growth spurt and wants to eat CONSTANTLY. When it's the middle of the night and I just wish he would GO TO SLEEP. When he's crying in his car seat and I'm trying to figure out if I can lean over far enough that he can reach my boob.

Day in and day out, feeding my child from my body.

It's interesting to me that, from a cis man's perspective, language about eating another person's body and shedding blood is about violence and murder and death. Not the case for me. I have a uterus; I use my body to create a new life. I bled for him. I nurse him from my own breasts.

Feeding my baby, every day. In doing this, I proclaim the Lord's life and resurrection until She comes again.

------------

[Please note that this is a symbol and a metaphor. This is not some kind of command, like "if you have a uterus then you HAVE TO get pregnant and have a baby and breastfeed." That would be quite ridiculous, to take what I've written here and misinterpret it to say I'm trying to tell everyone what to do. That would be as ridiculous as reading a beautiful bit of poetry that says "you knit me together in my mother's womb" and claiming it means no one is allowed to ever have an abortion. Or something silly like that.]

Blogaround

Baby sea lion. Image source.

1. Creationist: We’ll Only Be Impressed If You Find Transitional Fossils in the Precambrian (posted January 9) "If you have to read that a few times to make sense of it, go ahead."

2. Florida Court Permanently Blocks Abortion Restriction (posted January 8) "The forced delay law was an insult to women and imposed medically unnecessary and harmful burdens, particularly on low-income patients. This law’s intention was to stop women from getting abortion care, plain and simple." Good news~

3. If You Can See The Invisible Elephant, Please Describe It (posted 2011) "You end up having to construct your understanding of the elephant from tiny snippets, little bits of information you can coax out of normal people before they get aggravated and change the subject." (a post about asexuality)

4. So here's the YMCA song, sung by minions:



5. The Case Against The Jedi (posted December 31) "Just so we're clear on what that means, according to the Jedi, it's loving relationships with another person that leads men down the path to evil." About toxic masculinity in Star Wars.

Related: Internalized Sexism and Star Wars: My Long-Overdue Apology to Luke Skywalker (posted January 9) "And I know that I’m not the only person to have ever referred to Luke as 'whiny'"

6. White evangelicalism vs. missionaries (posted January 12) "Missionaries have, in a very real sense, converted to a different religion from that of the churches supporting their work."

7. Voice in the Wind: An Anti-Semitic Gospel (posted January 12) Presenting the story of the crucifixion as "the Jews killed Jesus" is anti-Semitic. I remember occasionally hearing about that back when I was an evangelical, but of course I totally dismissed it because, well, the bible says it happened that way, so that's that. I didn't know about the whole history of Christians persecuting and killing Jews because "they killed Jesus." Presenting the bible story as "the Jews killed Jesus" is anti-Semitic because of that history. If it were just a detail in a story, isolated from any real-world effects, then it would be fine- but that's not the world we live in. We need to learn history.

8. The 1969 Easter Mass Incident (posted January 14) [content note: crucifixion] "Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring 'THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!'"

The Christianity of GCN Conference

Serving communion at GCN Conference. Image source.

I went to the Gay Christian Network conference because I really want to be in a Christian environment that's not awful for me. I miss going to church, but I don't go because I can't find any kind of church or Christian group that's not awful for my mental health.

I was hoping the Christianity of GCN conference would be the Christianity that I follow. It wasn't. But that's all right- it never tried to force me into believing anything, and there were parts that were really really good, parts that were so exactly what I needed.

First of all, the message of the entire conference, proclaimed over and over again by every speaker, was this: You are loved. God loves you. You are a beloved child of God. Maybe in the past somebody told you you can't have a relationship with God, or you can't be a worship leader or pastor, or you need to change in order for God to accept you- well they're wrong. You are loved and accepted and able to serve in the name of God exactly as you are.

LGBTQ Christians very commonly experience rejection from the church; they are excluded either directly or indirectly. So over and over, GCN conference preached a message of inclusion. At the church-like service on Sunday morning, the choir sang "Draw the Circle Wide" as we all had communion, and wow, that was powerful.

Draw the circle wide
Draw it wider still
Let this be our song
No one stands alone
Standing side by side
Draw the circle, draw the circle wide

Wow. So bizarre to me to hear a worship song with that kind of theme. (Maybe "worship song" isn't even the right term for it.) Over and over, all the speakers at the conference preached inclusion. Everyone is loved. Everyone is worthy. They didn't tell us we had to believe or do certain things in response to God's love. There was no altar call. There was no "God loves you unconditionally, therefore you need to make a decision to commit your life to him." The only thing we were commanded to do was continue to include others and spread the love.

So I'm kind of confused about this. I'm ex-evangelical; the Christianity I learned was always about trying to get people to believe certain things or obey God in specific ways. The pastors I knew would say that GCN's general message about God's love was good and true, but that it was only half of the story- and that when you leave off the other half, you're just preaching some deceptive feel-good nonsense which doesn't actually do any good. "The other half" being the things people are required to believe or do, otherwise their life will suck and/or they go to hell. If you don't warn people and let them know what the requirements are, maybe you're actually doing more harm than good- you're giving them a false sense of security. That's what I was taught; I'm not sure what to make of this "God loves you unconditionally" stuff when it's not followed by "and therefore it's totally reasonable for God to ask you to do the following things."

There are two possibilities:

1. This message of love and inclusion really is the message that GCN wants us to hear
2. GCN believes the "God loves you" stuff is only half of it, that the "here are God's requirements" part is also essential, but that many LGBTQ Christians already know it or are not in a place right now where they'll be receptive to it. Now is not the time- if we try to preach that now, it might push them away. Right now we just give them the first half, hopefully that will convince them to stick around with the church and then somebody else will tell them the second half.

I find possibility #2 to be incredibly dishonest, sort of a bait-and-switch thing. I should know, I did so much evangelism back when I was "on fire for Jesus," I know all about how to sugarcoat the idea of hell and condemnation and dress it up like it's good news.

So... could it be #1? Could it really be? I'm having trouble even comprehending that- a form of Christianity whose main message is that God loves you, a form of Christianity which isn't at all interested in forcing people to believe certain things. Wow, could that really exist? That's ... wow. I want a Christianity like that. [Note: It's possible that some of GCN's leaders and the speakers at the conference believe possibility #1 and others believe #2.]

On that note, I'd like to tell you about something that Bishop Gene Robinson said. He was one of the speakers at the conference, and was the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church. I remember when he was in the news back in 2003, back when I was a good anti-LGBT evangelical. At the conference 2 weeks ago, there was so much applause for him; he is an important role model for queer Christians who want to become pastors. To me, he had been just a symbol in the culture war, a sign of how the church is "abandoning the bible"... I had never thought about what it would be like to be told you can never be a leader in the church because you're gay, and then to see someone who proved that wrong, how powerful that would be. Anti-LGBTQ Christians don't understand how deeply their "culture war" affects the actual lives of actual people.

Anyway I want to tell you one thing Bishop Robinson said. He was talking about how he had been asked to do a prayer at Obama's inauguration, and he agonized over the words to use to make the prayer inclusive to people of different religions. He finally decided to use the phrase "God of our many understandings." Later, he heard from Jewish and Muslim people who thanked him for saying it that way.

And I just about fell out of my chair.

Did I mention I grew up evangelical? I heard all about how isn't it terrible that people water down their language to make it "inclusive," how they don't proclaim the name of Jesus because someone's going to be "offended," making some weak, meaningless prayer that's so vague it hardly says anything. Isn't it so pathetic and wrong when so-called Christians care about being respectful to other religions? Come on! They need Jesus. Don't act like those false religions are just fine- no, what those people need is to get out of those lies and follow Jesus instead.

I'm stunned, just totally stunned. I've never heard a Christian leader say it's good to be respectful to people of other religions, that it's important that they not feel excluded during a prayer at a public event. I just ... wow. This is just totally unimaginable to me. I like it, sure, but I'm still shocked. Are there churches that regularly preach such things? What would that type of Christianity even look like? Like, I want to be part of it, but it's just so unimaginable that something like that could even exist.

(Bishop Robinson also did not use pronouns for God- he never said God was a "he." I don't remember any of the speakers on the main stage calling God "he." I like that too.)

The message of GCN conference was love and inclusion. And let me tell you, it's one thing to believe that in a theoretical sense, but it's a whole different experience to see hundreds to LGBTQ Christians and allies believing it and preaching it wholeheartedly. It was an amazing thing.

But at the same time, there was a lot of Christian-culture-type language I was really not comfortable with. People talked about "God's calling" or "God's plan" or "a relationship with God." The speakers on stage would talk about something that happened to them and say "that was God"; listening to the other conference attendees, I heard many anecdotes from the "isn't it funny how God works" genre. (For example, I met a gay man whose mother has never accepted him, but now she is old and depends on him to take care of her every day. On hearing this, someone made a comment about how such an ironic situation clearly must have been brought about by God.)

Yeah, that gets all the eye rolls from me. I don't believe God actively does things in our lives. You really think that this world, a world full of systemic injustice, is the result of God intervening over and over in every Christian's life? I don't want anything to do with a God like that.

Again and again, people talked about having a relationship with God, communicating with God, how God is doing this or that in their life. There was one conversation I was part of, where this woman was talking about her job and about the kind of company she wants to work for in the future, which is sort of in a different area than her job now, but she wants to work in that area because she'll be able to make a difference in the world. She used language about how it's totally "God's plan" that she does this in the future. And then she told us about how excited she is about how some high-up person in that industry just followed her on twitter. Wow! How exciting! She only had 9 followers before that! Clearly this is GOD WORKING! God is OPENING A DOOR!

Come on. It's just a twitter follower. It doesn't mean anything.

I'm not trying to mock. I'm sad because I used to live that way. I believed I was constantly in communication with God, and I looked for meaning in every little tiny thing that happened to me. Everything is a super-huge big deal, everything is a sign that "God is working." It's so stressful to live that way.

What happens when we make a big deal out of some little thing, when we go on and on about how it's God's plan, we thank and worship God because of it, and then nothing ever comes of it? Back in college I sent out an email to a big mailing list about a bible study I was starting, and somebody called me and said she wanted to come. And I worshiped. I took it as a sign that God was totally working, God was going to do great things in this new bible study, that I was a devoted follower of Jesus right there on the front lines, that God saw all my hard work and valued it. I emailed my evangelism friends to tell them the good news. And then that girl never actually came.

What do you do with that?

(Well, the only thing you really can do is decide- with absolutely no evidence- that even though she never came to the bible study, her reading my email and calling me on the phone was a big, important step in her spiritual life, and God used it for great things even though I will never personally see those results. Yeah okay.)

It was so much stress, living that way, looking for "God working" in every little thing, constantly speculating about the meaning behind the mundane things in my day-to-day life. And sometimes it required a bit of memory loss. You know how Christians say you should keep a prayer journal so you can look back on all the prayers God has answered? I've never done that. (I kept a journal, but never organized it like a "prayer journal.") But it wouldn't have been good. What would it be like, to read back through all the things I was so excited about, where I was so sure I saw God working, so overflowing with awe and worship that I would literally bow down on the floor and pray... what would it be like to read those things, maybe a year later, with the knowledge that they never amounted to anything? (Maybe the whole "prayer journal" concept is more for "look at all the things you were so worried about, and then they never happened and you've actually forgotten about them now" rather than "look at all the things you were so excited about, how you were totally sure God was going to do certain things in the future, and then they never happened and you've actually forgotten about them now.")

All this excitement over one twitter follower in the industry "God called" her to work in... I feel sad about that. I really do.

I didn't say anything to her. I don't go around telling people that God's not actually intervening in their lives or that their "relationship with God" is bad for them. If those beliefs make them feel better, then okay fine whatever. And actually, for LGBTQ people who have been told that they're not able to have a relationship with God, it can be really good and healing for them to say they do have one. For me though, it's the opposite- I was totally devoted, followed all the rules, people admired my "relationship with God." It controlled and consumed my whole life, drove me to squash down my whole identity, my needs, and my emotions. I'm so glad I'm out of that relationship. The whole concept is really unhealthy for me now, and kind of triggering.

There was another part in the conference, where I was having a conversation about the concept of "God's calling," because one of the speakers in a breakout session had said "your calling might change" and I have no idea what they mean by that- if God wants you to do something, how on earth could that change? God changes God's mind?

Anyway, I happened to be asking this question to another random attendee, who said maybe at first God calls you to something, and then later on, God gives you a more specific direction to go in. Or maybe God calls you to do something and then later calls you to do something different in order to THROW THE DEVIL OFF.

And I was like "... I don't really believe in that."

And she said, "You don't believe in spiritual warfare?"

And, wow it would take a long time for me to answer that question. (I covered it a little bit in this post.) But wow, THANK GOD I never believed that God might "call" me to do something that God wasn't planning on me actually doing, just because God wanted to confuse the devil. Like, CAN YOU IMAGINE? That adds a whole new layer of second-guessing "God's calling." Like how's this supposed to work, I'm going to start doing all this stuff in obedience to what God said, and then satan's gonna make a bunch of plans to combat it, and then suddenly God will be like "NOPE LET'S DO THIS DIFFERENT THING INSTEAD" and satan will be all "NO ALL MY PLANS HAVE BEEN FOILED"? Like, really? That sounds like it would inconvenience me way more than it would inconvenience satan.

I'm ... wow. Still can't get over how absurd that whole idea is.

Anyway, yeah, my point is, at the conference there was a lot of talk about "God's plan" and how God did this or that specific thing in someone's life. I'm not a fan of that kind of language. But it's important to point out that, when I mentioned to people that I don't believe in "having a relationship with God", nobody tried to convince me I was wrong. Instead they asked questions and sympathized with the way I've been hurt by evangelical Christianity.

The worship time was also an interesting experience for me. When we walked in to the big "auditorium" on that first night, the song "My Savior My God" was playing. Uh. Yeah. Okay, the song itself is fine, the lyrics are fine, I don't have anything bad to say about the song itself, but ... for me, that song has the feeling of "back in 2010 when I was on fire for God" and, just, ugh.

Then the worship time started, and after a few songs, the worship leader (Darren Calhoun) said something to the effect of "I know for some of you, these songs aren't good for you. That's okay. If you need to leave for a little bit, it's okay. You can do your self-care." And that was really really good. First of all, I don't think I've ever heard a church say it's okay if you don't want to participate in this or that part of the service. I've never heard a church acknowledge that some of the songs they use might have bad associations for some people, and it's fine for those people to leave because they know their own needs. And he used the term "self-care"! That's a word I learned from the feminist blog-o-sphere, a word that goes against the whole entire ideology I learned in the evangelical church. Self-care. No, instead the church taught me to sacrifice my own needs and desires. If there was a sermon about the need to rest and take care of ourselves, it was "you need to take care of yourself or else you won't be able to serve others", not "you matter and you deserve to have your needs met."

So wow. That was really good.

And during the worship songs, I didn't really know what to do. I don't pray, and I don't sing to God, and I'm not interested in trying. I felt like the music was kind of nice though, and I wished I could be part of it somehow. So I came up with the brilliant idea of singing some kind of "harmony" part higher or lower than the melody of the song. Yeah I basically know nothing about music, but I was in a choir in college, and we had different groups (sopranos, altos, tenors, etc) and usually one group would "have the melody" and then the other groups would be singing the same words except higher or lower in such a way that they all sounded good together. (There are probably actual terms use to describe this concept. Idk. I don't know anything about music, but if you ever want to learn matlab or something, talk to me.) Yeah. So, for these worship songs at GCN, sometimes I sang the same words but either higher or lower than the melody.

I did that so I would be concentrating on how the music sounded, instead of on the words or how I feel about the song itself. Or, in evangelical-speak, I was singing but "didn't really mean it" and therefore my "worship" doesn't count. Whatever. If I was just singing the normal way, those songs would have been unbearable.

Communion was really good. I don't go to church (and I don't feel bad about it), so I hadn't been able to do communion for a long time. I know that within Christianity there are lots of different interpretations on the meaning of communion; the one I grew up with was "this is about you feeling really really guilty for your sins and sad about Jesus' death." Currently, though, my view is more like "you have a physical body that needs food, and God cares about that- your physical needs are real needs that matter." (And also a bit of "if anybody tries to tell me I can't have communion because I'm 'not a real Christian', or that my interpretation is wrong, well **** you, I'm a Christian, I have a right to be here.")

Anyway, that was the first time in a long time that I've gotten the little bread and grape juice without thinking the person serving them to me would probably not accept me if they knew what I really believe. They always say "this is the body of Christ, broken for you," but do they actually mean it's for me, or for the good-Christian-with-all-the-correct-evangelical-beliefs that they assume I am? But at GCN, I really believed they accepted me. And I may have cried a little bit. I also may have cried during the song "For Those Tears I Died."

A few other small things I want to mention: I had forgotten how American Christians have such huge misconceptions about "persecution in China." Had to set some of those myths straight. Also, I heard somebody asking people to pray for his husband to become a Christian. Ugh. (Background: My fiance is not a Christian, and I'm not okay with anyone treating that like a problem that needs to be solved.) And one of the speakers, Ling Lam, said we all have a God-shaped hole, and, well, you all know how I feel about that. (The rest of Ling Lam's talk was really really good though- it was about Jacob trying to get Isaac's blessing and how we pretend to be something we're not in order to gain approval.)

It was an environment where I could be honest about what I believed and what I didn't believe, and people wouldn't try to force me to change that. Even if they didn't agree with me, they understood what it is to be hurt and rejected by the church. And throughout the entire conference, the message of unconditional love and acceptance was preached- seriously, LGBTQ people know how to preach a better gospel than anything I've ever heard in church. But still, the Christianity of GCN Conference wasn't the Christianity I follow. There was way WAY too much talk of how God caused this or that thing to happen in someone's life, about how God "called" someone to do something, and just generally the kind of language people use when they believe in "a personal relationship with God." That's a concept that has caused me a lot of emotional trauma- honestly, I see it as all tied up with the anti-LGBTQ ideology I was taught, so it was a little jarring to hear LGBTQ Christians using those exact same words and concepts. Their experiences are different than mine (even though I'm also queer) so for them, it's possible to reject some of those teachings while keeping some others. And it can even be really healthy and good for them to say "no, I DO have a relationship with God" because of all the anti-LGBTQ Christians who told them they couldn't.

I wish I could go to church, I really do. If there was a church like GCN, I would totally go.

-------------

Related: GCN Conference Was My First Time Not Being "Just An Ally"

Christmas and Easter People

A parking lot with several cars in parking spaces, plus one car tilted up sideways so 2 of its wheels are resting on another car. Image text: "Parking at church on Easter." Image source.

Anyone who attends church regularly is familar with the phemonenom of "Christmas and Easter people." These are people who only show their faces at your church on Christmas and Easter. And oh how we judged them. We judged them so hard.

I mean, clearly, if you're only at church twice a year, then church isn't that important to you. Clearly, Christianity isn't that important to you. Clearly, you're a fake Christian and you're just at church because there's a cultural expectation that you're supposed to go to church on Christmas and Easter.

(This is the same Christian culture that produces all those blog posts about "5 stupid reasons for not going to church" which basically amount to "there is no acceptable excuse for not going to church regularly." Samantha Field has written a great post critiquing this: the not-so-ridiculous reasons people leave church.)

When I was in college, there was one year when Easter fell on the first Sunday of the month. Normally, the first Sunday was the Sunday we did communion, but on this month, they moved it to the second Sunday, so it wouldn't be on Easter. At the time, I understood the reasoning to be "on Easter, a lot of fake Christians will come to church, and it's a sin to eat communion if you're not a real Christian, so we want to avoid that." I think maybe something was said about Easter Sunday being more busy than usual, so logistically it was easier to not do communion that week- but I don't know if that was the real reason or if that was just a polite way to cover up "let's not let 'Christmas and Easter people' have the body and blood of Christ."

(And by the way: back then, communion was just this thing we did once a month, where you were supposed to remember Jesus' death and feel really really guilty for it. But now I've read about how Christians from various other denominations view communion [or Eucharist] and how it has so much more meaning and it's so important. And how, oh goodness, that's EXACTLY the kind of thing you want to be doing on Easter Sunday. And that's EXACTLY the kind of thing you want people to be able to experience, if this is the only time they're going to be at your church.)

We would joke about the "Christmas and Easter people", how funny it was that we would only see them in church twice a year. How their commitment to Jesus was such a hilarious joke.

And... yeah. Easter was last week, and I went to church, for the first time in a while. I've become a Christmas and Easter person.

If you think it's because I'm not committed to Christianity, you're wrong. I want so bad to go to church, and if I could find one that didn't cause me to have depression, you know I would be there every week. But I care SO MUCH about Easter, I care SO MUCH about resurrection, that I want to be with other Christians on that day. Even though I'm not going to fit in. Even though things will be said from the pulpit that make me feel I'm not really welcome. I'm willing to sit through that, as stressful as it is, 2 days a year, because I really really believe in resurrection and incarnation. And on Easter and Christmas, I know every church will also be celebrating resurrection and incarnation.

I hate the way I was taught to judge Christmas and Easter people. I hate the fact that, for people who live in that culture of joking about Christmas and Easter people, there's nothing I can say to convince them that I am just as much a Christian as any churchgoer.

I hate the way evangelicals are trained to be always on the lookout for "fake Christians."

But I still love resurrection.

The Worst Bible Story

Image source.

I’m currently reading The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It by Peter Enns, and I’ll be blogging my thoughts about it. Enns is a biblical scholar, and he writes about how his understanding of the bible has changed and expanded. He says that conservative Christians tend to have this idea about what the bible is “supposed to” be- it’s “Truth downloaded from heaven, God’s rulebook, a heavenly instruction manual” (p 10). And of course, these conservative Christians truly value the bible and believe we should study it very seriously- but when people actually do this, they find the bible is not so perfect and clear after all. It’s weird. And we’ve been told that Christians must believe the bible is so clear and straightforward and 100% correct and every word is applicable to our lives... so what do we do when we find it’s a book that’s not really like that at all?

He’s absolutely right. I was always encouraged to ask questions about the bible- all questions are okay!- but with the understanding that I would then find “the answer” and I’d have to accept it. In bible study, people were allowed to say “wow, what God did here sounds awful” and then we’d have a discussion about it, the goal of which was to find some explanation that would help us believe what God did actually was NOT awful.

“I think this is wrong” was not a valid opinion we could hold. It was fine to say it, to honestly give our reaction to the passage being read, but we all knew it couldn’t actually be wrong, and we trusted that with enough research it could all be explained.

In the past when I read the bible, I believed that everything it had God saying or doing was by definition good and right. There could be no “God did something really bad here” or “I think this was just the writer’s opinion, not what God actually commanded.”

Reading the bible in this way has definitely affected my view of God. Seeing all the genocide and misogyny and horrifically graphic curses and believing it all must be good and right because hey, God said it IN THE BIBLE... what kind of God does that leave me with?

Perhaps this can best be shown by an example. I present to you: The Worst Bible Story Ever. It’s a story that has lurked in the back of my mind for a long time, haunting me and causing me to wonder if God is acting in my life the way God acted in this story.

Go ahead and read it: 2 Samuel 21:1-14. 

So. Basically, God sent a famine on Israel because a long time ago, before David was the king, Saul massacred some of the Gibeonite people. Yes, Saul did this terrible thing, and then several decades later, God decided to suddenly, out of nowhere, punish David and the Israelites for not making it right.

So there’s a famine for 3 years, and David legitimately has no idea why. Eventually God tells them it’s punishment for that one time when Saul killed the Gibeonites. Long ago. So David goes and asks the Gibeonites how to make it right, and they ask for permission to execute seven of Saul's male descendents.

And that’s what David does. He hands over seven of Saul’s male relatives for the Gibeonites to kill. There’s this weird little aside about how David spared Mephibosheth because you all remember the Sunday school lesson about David showing mercy to Mephibosheth, what a nice guy. Mephibosheth is not a red shirt, so David doesn’t have him killed. Wow isn’t David so nice?

And it works. So those people- who may or may not actually have had anything to do with the human rights abuses against the Gibeonites- get killed, and God apparently approves of it all. God ends the famine and all is well.

The end.

So, you know, I read this story and the obvious question is “WTF?!” I’ve read a few commentaries about it, looking for answers, but none of them addressed the question of “WTF”. They barely mentioned this passage, or just gave some little statement like “having Saul’s relatives killed may seem barbaric to modern readers, but really it was totally legit, trust me. Nothing to see here. Anyway, this story teaches us to be obedient, like David. Isn’t David a great guy?” That’s all.

And what did I learn from this, the Worst Bible Story?

It taught me that sometimes God causes bad things in our lives as punishment for a completely unrelated sin, which we might not even be aware of. And the punishment will only stop once we figure out the specific sin and make it right- and “make it right” might mean doing some highly questionable things. You know, obeying God even when it doesn’t seem to make sense. That’s the only way to stop the punishment.

If David didn’t kill those guys, God would have let that famine go on forever. You gotta obey God, regardless of others’ opinions on what’s acceptable behavior.

And I’ve been haunted by that for a long time.

The fear that problems in my life are punishment from a God who can’t find any other way to communicate. And I’m just screwed until I figure out which sin it was that’s being punished. And it might be something I wasn’t even involved in. And then I have to do the right thing, even though it’s ridiculous and risky and actually seems like a really bad idea- but that’s the only way God will end the suffering.

(And that’s why I thought maybe if I deleted from my computer all the music I had downloaded illegally, my friend whom I had been praying for would finally become a Christian. I deleted it. She did not become a Christian.)

Less than a week after I began dating my previous boyfriend, I got sick. My stomach felt sick, constantly, and this continued for weeks. And I wondered if it was God telling me I shouldn’t be dating him. At that time, I was beginning some baby steps of rebelling against purity culture- I had committed the awful sin of acquiring a boyfriend without a clear “yes” from God. I had decided that he was a pretty great guy and it would be worth it to date him and find out if we could be compatible (and yes, that was a good decision based on the available information at the time. Not "the right" decision; there is no one magical "right" decision. Just varying degrees of good or bad decisions). 

But, you know, purity culture says that we need to wait until God shows us our perfect soul mate, and just deciding to date someone because it seemed like a good idea (while being aware that we don’t know until we try) means I don’t trust God and I’m giving in to my fleshly desires. (5 bucks to anyone who can find an example of “fleshly” being used by someone who’s not an evangelical Christian.)

And I got sick. And I wondered if God would heal me if I broke up with him. Even though there was no reason- there was nothing wrong with our relationship. Except that maybe it was a horrible sin. And maybe God sent the sickness as a punishment.

And I wondered, and I told myself, no I don’t view God that way anymore, I believe God gives us freedom to make choices like this and God wouldn’t do that. (This was right around the time I quit believing that God sends people to hell for being mistaken about religion.)

(And no I did not break up with him at that time, and I ended up getting surgery to remove my gall bladder, and everything got better, and then later we broke up for different reasons. So. Did God send that gall bladder problem as punishment? I don’t think so.)

I don’t believe in a God like that anymore. But that’s the God we see in the Worst Bible Story, and I’ve wondered and worried many times if that could be the reason for problems in my life. 

Image source.

As a bonus, I will also tell you the Second Worst Bible Story. 

Go over and read it: Numbers 25.

So, this one time, Moses was leading the Israelites through the desert, and a bunch of them started having sex with Moabite women and worshiping the Moabite idols. God was not a fan of this, so, of course, God started killing a bunch of the Israelites. But then, one courageous man, Phinehas, leapt into action. He saw a man and woman go into a tent, presumably to have the worst kind of God-hating sex, and he threw his spear and it went right through both of them and they died there and God’s honor was restored and the plague stopped. Wow what a hero!

And what did I learn from this story?

Obviously, the meaning is this: Sometimes people are doing things in their own personal lives which God considers immoral. Even though these immoral people are not directly hurting anyone, they are indirectly destroying society because God sends a plague on all of us as punishment. In some cases, the sin is so horrible that, even though it’s a situation that doesn’t involve you at all, you would be right to jump in there and just STOP THE SIN by any means possible. Even violence may be acceptable.

And I’ve even heard this story cited to show that there is a biblical argument for murdering abortion doctors. It’s definitely not something my friend who made this argument would actually seriously do- you know, because Christianity also highly disapproves of murder and we are quick to distance ourselves from the kind of person who would do that, but... there is a biblical argument for it. You need to stop the sin. There’s no time to be reasonable.

On another occasion, a friend of mine, let’s call him Hector, brought another friend, let’s call him Carl, to church. Carl claimed to be a Christian, but he hadn’t been attending church or anything, and Hector and I knew that he didn’t have a real “relationship with God”, you know, because evangelical Christians are all about judging who is and who isn’t a “real Christian.”

So Carl came to church. And that week, we had communion, and Hector stopped him and explained, you know, honestly, you’re not a real Christian, so you shouldn’t take communion. And Carl was really hurt by it (can you imagine), but I admired Hector for taking a stand like that. Defending the wafers and grape juice from those who don’t have the “correct” view on Jesus.

I would never have done what Hector did, because I was not confident enough in my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 and I had never seen anyone stopped from taking communion before. (At the church where I grew up, they clearly explain that it’s for all Christians, regardless of denomination, but it’s not like anyone’s guarding it and checking if you’re a Christian or not. And actually, one time I did invite a non-Christian friend to church and she did eat the wafer and grape juice, and I didn't say anything because ... well I mean, clearly I was more worried about what people would think of me than about honoring God. Or maybe because I was trying to be a good and loving friend. Take your pick.)

I would never have done that, but I really admired Hector for the way he stepped out in faith and took a stand for God, even though other people didn't accept it.

Remember what Phinehas did. He just jumped in there, no time to explain, no time to ask questions. Just STOP THE SIN, and it doesn’t matter who gets killed in the process. We need to defend God.

Image source.

So those are my top two Worst Bible Stories. Now I have a different view- I don’t think that’s actually how they happened; I think the writers were giving a creative interpretation of events in order to teach the readers something. (What that “something” is, I have no idea, but I’m willing to believe it’s something useful, because I value the bible. Or, you know, maybe not something useful, and it was a mistake to put them in the bible. Who knows.)

Readers, here’s my question to you: Is there something in the bible that affected you the way that these affected me? Do you have a Worst Bible Story?

And if you have any insight on the Worst and Second Worst Bible Stories I shared (if you can help address the question of “WTF”), that would be useful too. These two examples definitely need a lot of cultural background I don’t have if they’re going to come close to making any sense. So let me know what you think. (But only if you respect that I don’t have to agree and that I’m allowed to believe they are the Worst Bible Stories and still be a Christian. None of this “let’s tell Perfect Number how she clearly interpreted the bible wrong and actually nothing in the bible is bad or confusing.”)

------------

My other posts about The Bible Tells Me So:

The Worst Bible Story
Blaming the Biblical Victim (And More Horrifying Implications of Scripture) 
The Bible's Contradictions Matter, And It's Not a Logic Problem 
The Bible is a Model, So Use Your Brain 
Jesus Takes the Bible Out of Context 
The Old Testament Does Not Predict Jesus 
Peter Enns Makes Me Want to Actually Read the Bible Again

Related:

For Rizpah (or, a post about human sacrifice in the bible)
The Second-Worst Bible Story