Sixty Years of Ordination - at St. Bede's Episcopal Church

I am very happy to be here - because earlier this morning when I was changing a light bulb at home, I fell off our ten-foot ladder. (pause) I was lucky I was on the bottom rung. (I’m glad that’s over). For those of you who don’t know me, I am Tom Woodward, a retired priest who has been a member of St. Bede’s for 19 years. This is the 60th anniversary of my ordination, and first I want to thank Fr. Lucas and Jerry Nelson for their support in helping me celebrate this anniversary today. And second, I want to take this occasion to share with you some of my reflections on my life as a priest and what it means to be a priest. For me, it has always been a real privilege to be a priest in The Episcopal Church – and that has been true even when the times have been rough. And those times have been rough at times. It began way back in 1965, when I was Episcopal chaplain at the University of Kansas. It was two years after being ordained as the most conservative and one of the more racist members of my seminary class when several black students came to my office to implore me to attend their civil rights demonstration outside the Chancellor’s office. When I arrived there, reluctantly, I sat down to talk with the students who were protesting - and I quickly discovered that almost all of those students were the first ones in their family to attend college. And the stories of those young students had such power for me -- and in their stories there was so much of the presence of God I had only read about, that I joined them. So, within three hours I was arrested and jailed - . along with 103 Black students. My life changed that day more than on any other. The pain in the arrest came three months later when my bishop, who had urged his clergy to be involved in the civil rights struggle, caved into some very vindictive leaders of the diocese and, in effect, put me on half salary for the next year and a half - just as my wife and I had bought a house and adopted an infant child. I lived through that and more; and more importantly, was able to resist becoming cynical about the church as institution. Angry, yes, but never cynical. Twelve years later much the same thing happened in North Carolina when my support for gay and lesbian students cost me another job. Heartbreaks: one after the other for acting on my deepest beliefs. There have been other kinds of heartbreak, as well. In Madison, Wisconsin it was what seemed like almost weekly AIDS-related funerals at my church So often, the service was for someone who, just weeks or months before, had been in one of our pews mourning the death of one of his friends. There have not been many months in the 60 years of being a deacon and priest - without some kind of heartbreak. My ordained life has been lived on two parallel levels. On one level was the ongoing life of pastoral ministry; but the other level was wild and wooly. As priest I was arrested and jailed twice -- though later I went back to jail to coach an inmates’ chess team which then beat the University of Rochester faculty chess team – five matches to two. In earlier years, I led encounter groups hosted Allen Ginsburg and other major poets at our Coffee House ministry in Kansas, wrote three books, performed as a fire eater and juggler in several States, and in front of the Wisconsin legislature, I stood up to Bart Starr and Randy White of the Green Bay Packers on matters of human sexuality. About the same time, out of a shared conviction about the moral use of money, Tony Earl, the Wisconsin Democrat governor, appointed me to serve as one of eight trustees of the State’s Investment Board, where we oversaw the investment of over 85 billion dollars. There I teamed up with the most conservative trustee to co-author the State’s Active Investor Program. It committed us to use our enormous power to go after corporations on moral and ethical issues. Our first experience was with General Motors and I got to go head to head with their CEO, Roger Smith. We won that negotiation – and many more to follow. Later, I continued my service in the Republican administration of Governor Tommy Thompson and continued serving as liaison between SWIB and the State legislature. During this time I also served as President of Friends Outside, a non-profit organization which worked with incarcerated State and Federal prisoners, providing them with support while incarcerated and assistance as they were released. Later, I was appointed by our Presiding Bishop to serve on the Episcopal Church’s national task force on the Status of Women. As the only male (you can guess it) I was elected Secretary. And I benefitted greatly from my wife Ann’s advice to keep my mouth shut so I could learn something. It was a rare opportunity to learn and to grow. All in all, I could not dream of a more exciting or fulfilling life. But the best, the very best, was always out of the limelight with people like you, week by week, together, building up the life and ministry of our church family. That has been the deep satisfaction. As some of you know, things have changed drastically since I was ordained 60 years ago. When I was ordained, women were not allowed to serve on Vestries, girls were not allowed even to acolyte, there were separate churches for Black and white Episcopalians. When I was ordained, it was like the congregation hired a priest to be the minister. Where the priest was, there was the church: it felt like the task of the lay people was to assist the priest in his (and I mean his) ministry. Things are so much healthier now, where the real purpose of the pastor is to support you in the real ministry of the church – the living out of the Christian faith in our families, among our friends, acquaintances and the community which surrounds us. Our job as clergy is to feed, to nourish, to support, sometimes to inspire -- but then to get out of the way, because you are the ministers. So, what it is like to be a priest or pastor? On the one hand, there is a powerful intimacy with people. It is the intimacy of being privileged with the deepest doubts and the most serious questionings and struggles of so many people. What many of us have . . with two or maybe three people in our lives, a priest or pastor will have with hundreds of people over the years. But over against the intimacy is the isolation. For most of my life, when I would walk into a room with my collar on, a hush would settle over the room -- as though the collar represented Holiness, itself. One of the children in my congregation had it differently. When I asked him what the collar meant - “That’s easy,” he said: “It kills ticks and fleas on contact.” The worst came fifty-seven years ago when I announced to the congregation that my wife,Judy, and I had just adopted a baby boy. One sweet, older member of the congregation, Agnes Hungerford, cornered my wife at the coffee hour and with a loud voice that rang through the hall, announced, "What a wonderful way for a minister to have a baby!" (I won’t share my wife’s response to her). The best things about the work of ordained ministry are the people and the enormous variety of challenges and tasks and demands of the work: teaching, preaching, organizing, nurturing, administration, counseling, studying, working with community organizations. The list is endless. The worst part of all that is that no one can do all those things well. Responding, dealing with the expectations of a congregation and oneself is a life-long endeavor – and should never be done alone. I think the things for which I am most proud are also the things for which I am most grateful. Way back in 1966, a fellow college chaplain, John Simmons, asked me to join him in trying to build bridges between the church and a group the church had only oppressed – the homosexual community. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life as I was with John’s invitation – but somehow, through the grace of God, I said yes. That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Over the years I have experienced such wonderful lives and I’ve always been grateful to have played a part in the church and elsewhere in facing down the evils of homophobia we all know and remember. It has been a quite different experience with the clowning I’ve done. When I was chaplain at the University of North Carolina, I ran into a young man, Kenny Kaye, who had dropped out of school, giving up two scholarships, simply to juggle. He was so talented and so shy: shy and almost completely broke. So, with Kenny’s skill (he ended our act by juggling 3 ping pong balls out of his mouth) – with Kenny’s skill and my professional training in passing the hat, the two of us, with both of us juggling and me doing simple mime pieces, we formed “Uncle Billy’s Pocket Circus” which we performed all over the South. Kenny kept the money and I used the opportunity to share the vision of the Christian faith. For me, the clowning has always been an expression of my faith and of my ministry. It was through the clowning that I saw, more and more, the parables, the Beatitudes and so much of the life of Jesus as the ministry of the fool, the pied piper, enticing us into a different and more compelling vision of life. It was not much later when a social worker parishioner gave me my second big scare by asking me to teach two of her clients who were confined to wheelchairs with very significant cerebral palsy how to be clowns. That experience soon blossomed into “The Care Fools,” a clown troupe of severely disabled clowns who worked miracles wherever they went – real miracles for the people they encountered. Back in 1983, my church in Madison, Wisconsin along with St. Mark’s, Berkeley, where our Robbin Clark was soon rector, were the first congregations in the Episcopal Church (maybe in the country) to provide public sanctuary for political and religious refugees fleeing for their lives from El Salvador and Guatemala. We did so, knowing that as priests and parishioners we would very likely be arrested and imprisoned for doing so. Our first family, like so many along our border, was so kind and so gentle and so committed to their faith; but their bodies were covered with scars and cigarette burns from being tortured by their own government which our country was supporting. They had earned those scars, as Archbishop Romero had earned his death, by witnessing to their faith. That was a side of church that continues to touch me. And this is so important: in just about everything I’ve talked about, I was first inspired or welcomed by lay people. And I hope my ministry has always been within that context. My father always said that one good lay person equals about two priests -- and I have always benefitted from that observation. After my experience in Lawrence, Kansas I was called to a small congregation in Warrensburg, Missouri. I turned them down. because it seemed like a place where the main entertainment in town was probably going down to the barber shop to watch haircuts. But their bishop later called me into his office and said, “Tom, I am so sorry you turned those people down: the one thing that congregation does better than any other is that they do whatever it takes to make really good priests. And that is what I want that for you.” After he said that, my decision was easy: I said yes. And this is what I want to say more than anything else: may their calling be your calling, as well. Lay people, so valuable. Clergy, with our own value. We are, thank God, in this together. Amen.

Paul's Letter to the Romans

PAULUS

Thomas B. Woodward

July 26, 2020

There were two things I wanted to preach about this morning.

One was the Parable of the Leaven that we heard in Matthew

and the other was to do something like a Bible study

with the Epistle we’ve been hearing this summer, Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Romans it is, mostly because this is the place I go

when I really want to be nourished, spiritually by the Bible.

On the whole, this book of the Bible is really difficult stuff.

When Paul gets into the murky stuff -- it is really murky and confusing;

but the high points of Romans are as good as it gets in the Bible.

And that is what I want to talk about with you.

First, some background:

most of Paul's letters are occasional.

That is, they were written in response to some issue, some occasion (usually big trouble).

But Romans is different:

Romans is where Paul lays out his theological credentials

to pave the way for his coming visit to Rome.

There are times, in Romans, when Paul is really lyrical.

And there are other times when he seems to get so confused

that he argues with himself.

My favorite is when he concludes that it is usually the greatest sinners

who experience the most overwhelming grace and forgiveness.

"Well, then," he asks himself, "shall we sin the more . . . that grace may abound?" (Makes sense).

But then he quickly responds, "Me genoito."

which, loosely translated is "You've got to be out of your gourd."

This happens over and over again: first a question, then me genoito.

It is almost as though Paul had two heads,

constantly arguing with one another.

For me, there are several high points in Romans:

The first is too long to read now, so I'll leave you to it on your own time.

In Romans 9-11 Paul writes about Christianity's relationship to the Jews.

And what he says, with great power and relative clarity

had been ignored by Christians, by the church for almost 2000 years.

Then, an Episcopal theologian, Paul van Buren along with the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth,

wrote, simply: “Read what Paul is saying!"

Christians had always been taught (I was taught in seminary)

that once Jesus Christ had come, the Jewish religion was history.

But Van Buren and nearly every reputable scholar after him tell us this:

“Read what Paul writes."

What Paul says is this:

God made a promise to Abraham

that his descendants would be the people of God forever. Period.

That was a Promise. . . an Unconditional Promise.

That covenant. . . that binding relationship has not been broken,

and it will never be broken by God.”

Paul says, simply: "If God makes promises and then breaks them, God can't be trusted."

"We Christians," says Paul,

"We Christians have been grafted into that holy history."

We are a part (not the whole)

a wonderful, glorious part . . .of the whole people of God."

Our relationship to the Jews is not one of superior to inferior,

but one of gratitude . . . and dependence.

The second high point for me is from chapter 7 (which you heard 2 weeks ago)

This, we know most intimately, as parents...

but also, as church, as nation . . .. (and in all of life)

"The good that I would, I do not. . .

and that which I would not, is precisely what I do. . .”

We get so tied up in knots.

"Who," cries Paul, "who will deliver me from this body of death?"

Who will free me from my conditioning, my prejudice,

my worst impulses, my twisted self-interest, my sin?

And then Paul talks about overcoming our sin and isolation

through the reality of living “in Christ,” who heals and restores.

It’s not a matter of gritting out teeth and trying to measure up.

We get it wrong when we equate faith with belief or a set of doctrines.

Faith has to do with trust and relationships –

and at the heart of it, for Paul, is being “in Christ."

Being in Christ is like “being in the army” or being in the circus.

It is the context for our lives.

Earlier I told you about two short prayers that are at the heart of that:

One is for when you are in your bed and ready to go to sleep:

it is praying “Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit – my self”

and letting your bed be the hands of God enfolding you.

The second is for when your feet hit the floor as you get out of bed.

Feel yourself rooted in the reality of God,

flowing from the center of creation, up through the floor,

up through your feet, into your body.

Those are the bookends of your life that day, every day.

And that is at the heart of our Baptism:

Our lives are placed, entrusted into the loving care of the Risen Christ.

The third high point for me is a single sentence

and it is the key to our life in the world.       

        "Do not be conformed to this world,

        but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

That could be the mission statement of any vital Christian congregation. [repeat].

We are in, but not of. .  the world.  

As Paul also writes:  we are here as ambassadors from heaven

That is where our lives are rooted.

The fourth high point is today’s reading from Romans 8.

It’s a passage we use at funerals,

usually when there has been great suffering involved.

Paul, himself, endured awful suffering throughout his life:

first there was his daily suffering from a childhood malady

that he only refers to as his "thorn in the flesh."

And then later the deep, deep emotional and spiritual struggles within himself.

For Paul, suffering is: no one is exempt.

In fact, it may touch those who are more spiritual  . . deeper than anyone else.

But God's love is not bound by temporal limits, by "this age" or "this time."

So, Paul writes,

"I reckon that the sufferings of this time

are not worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed to us.

The whole creation has been groaning, in anticipation of its birthing

and only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit;

groan inwardly as we await our adoption as children of God.”

There is so much here.

Paul's sense of the creation -- here and in Colossians -- is astounding.

Religion is not just about people or disembodied souls.

It is about all of creation.

And the whole creation groans. . . as it awaits its rebirth, it's restoration.

Sin. . . is not just a bunch of bad choices people make:  it infects everything.

It is in genetic mutations that have gone wild. -. cancer, debilitating disease.

It's weeds and flowers and grasses struggling against one another for sustenance;

it's earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados and drought – menacing the rest of creation.

It's dogs and cats and other animals and humans, dying before their time.

Just as you and I struggle for wholeness and grace

so, in a sense does all of creation.

So, in our prayers, we are to lift up -- not only our personal problems and issues,

but creation, itself, for healing and transformation.

On a more mundane level, what this means, as well,

is that the care we have for our pets and for our gardens is ministry.

It means that the care we take, in this State, for our minerals and for our water

is spiritual work and ministry … as well as good citizenship.

The last high point for me are words that have been, for me, life-saving:

Not physically life-saving, but emotionally and physically life-saving.

When I was working as Episcopal Chaplain at the University of North Carolina

I was working collaboratively with the rector of the large Episcopal Church

which was located, literally, on the campus.

Peter was a very strong, but very jealous man.

And though I worked with him and not for him – he had all the power in the relationship.

I had never done better, more effective work as a priest (and that was the problem for Peter).

My wife and I had bought a house and just had our third child

when Peter came to me after the midweek service on Epiphany.

"I need to tell you,” he said, “that your contract will be renewed  ..  over my dead body."

And I knew he had the power to make that happen.

My wife and I, absolutely devastated. . . went to a movie at the local mall that night.

And at the mall that night was a craft fair. . .

the absolute worst craft fair either of us could have imagined. . .

except for one booth near the entrance to the theater.

It housed a religious calligrapher by the name of Michael Podesta.

He had the most gorgeous work --

and one piece in particular, named "Paul" which read:

          “If God is for us, who can be against us?

           For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life,

 nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come,

          nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,

will be able to separate us from the love of God

which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

My wife took my hand and said,  “We must never ever let anything or anyone else

take our church . . . or God . . away from us.”

And that was all I needed to know – then, and so many times later.

And that is Paul's message to each of us:

never let anything -- no priest, no fellow parishioner,

no slight or oversight, no tragedy or disappointment

no cancer or oncoming weakness or dementia

ever. . .separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.

Never, ever give anything in your life that power

which belongs, only, to God

who works in our good times, yes, and in our times of suffering,

who feeds us, whether we know we are hungry or not.

Who calls us by our names. Our Abba, Father, God.

So, as you read through Romans.

When you come to the dense parts, shake your head and move on (quickly)

Until you get to the good stuff.

Mark it with a highlighter if you want, God won’t mind.

And let that sink in . . . over and over and over again.

Things We God Wrong about the Bible & Why It's Important to Get It Right

Things We Got Wrong about the Bible & Why It's Important to Get It Right

This was my presentation at St. Bede's Adult Forum on March 24, 2019. As members of the church choir misses these forums, I am posting this for them as well as for others who missed the event.

Judas

            When I was in seminary our daily morning services consisted in Morning Prayer followed by Holy Communion. We were all expected to attend Morning Prayer, but communion was optional. Coming from a very low church, I was not at all used to daily communion, so I often joined others in leaving the chapel right after Morning Prayer. It was called "The Judas Walk," as. thought the more haughty high church seminarians, we were turning our back on Jesus as a kind of betrayal.

            So, how do you remember Judas. What happened when he identified Jesus to the soldiers with a kiss?

            In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) there are three occasions where a kiss is an important part of an event. They are found in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the story of the woman who anointed Jesus' feet in the Pharisee's house, and the betrayal of Jesus by Judas. In their accounts of Judas' betrayal of Jesus by a kiss, both Matthew and Mark (Mark being the earliest gospel) describe the kiss using the Greek verb kataphileo, which means to kiss firmly, intensely, passionately, tenderly, or warmly. As Biblical scholar Clarence Jordan has it, kissing "over and over again."

            Describing Judas' kiss, the author of Luke uses the simpler phileo (22:47) meaning, simply, "kiss" and philemati (22:48), denoting a kiss to show respect or gentle affection between friends.

Luke does use the more effusive kataphileo in the story of the woman who anointed Jesus' feet

and to describe the father's welcoming home of his son in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The events in both of those stories are highly charged and speak of the depths of human caring.

            So while Matthew and Mark describe Judas' kiss of betrayal in terms of its tenderness and intense passion, the author of Luke uses the more formal forms of the verb, phileo and philimata. When we pay attention to these differences, our understanding of  Judas' betrayal takes on a quite different meaning. Instead of the usual explanations of Judas' betrayal as stemming from greed, radical disappointment, or wanting to force Jesus to claim his kingdom by might, what we have is an intense struggle in the mind of Judas -- a struggle between his deep affection for Jesus and his pledge, for whatever reasons, to the authorities. Anguish is probably the best way to describe Judas' emotional state.  This is clearly a therapist's or an existentialist's dream - one we have missed over and over again.

            So, when Luke tones down the intensity of Matthew and Mark's description of Judas' kiss

by the use of the relatively pedestrian phileo and philemati, was that done intentionally to set off Judas' kiss from that of the woman who anointed Jesus' feet and the father who smothered his returning son with kisses? Whatever the intent, Luke's change of the form of the verb has reduced Judas  to a one dimensional figure at this point, robbing him and us of the immense power of this event.,

The Popular Claim that the Old Testament God is a God of Violence

While the God of the New Testament is a God of Love.

            In this view, the Jewish Law is seen as a burden, something thoroughly rule based and oppressive. Nowhere, the claim goes, is that more evident than in the Book of Leviticus. So I want to talk about Leviticus, this most maligned Book of Bible to see if we've gotten this theory right or wrong. I want to focus on the Holiness Code (18-20), which in some way may be the high point in Biblical morality.

            Much of Leviticus is concerned with the holy - not the ethereal, spiritual holy, but with the root sense of the word, as "set apart." The People of God had been set apart, made holy. They were different from other peoples and that was reinforced by what they were to eat, how they were related to one another sexually, and even what fabrics they could wear. It was not that they were better than anyone else: they had been chosen, in a sense, to be a city set on a hill. They belonged to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in a special way (Oddly enough, Abraham is noted for, among other things, his lying to save himself, Isaac's name meant "laughter," and Jacob stole his brother's birthright - giving us "The God of the Liar, Laughter, and the Larcenist." As Norman Ewart wrote "how odd of God to choose the Jews."

            Much of the morality of Leviticus has to do with our participation in the reality of God. Here are two high points taken from the Holiness Code in the middle of Leviticus: note that each ends with "I am the Lord your God,"

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field to its very border, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyards bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard: you shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God. Lev. 19:9-10

 When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Lev. 19:33-34.

This concern for the poor, for the stranger is probably unequalled in all of Scripture and it is enjoined because that is who God is. My last parish was as rector of John Steinbeck's parish church in Salinas, California and some of my parishioners were the leaders of the lettuce industry - and they followed those words of Leviticus, leaving a tenth of their produced for the poor. They were reflecting the very character of God. In part that is also reflected in St. Paul's urging us "to put on Christ."

            Another thing: Jews have always considered the Law as a gift, as it let them know what God expected of them. I think any of us would have been relieved to know what our boss or our supervisor expected of us.

In the Old Testament, there are several strains or traditions of morality:

            First, there is the morality based on the character of God (also, with their                                                    dietary laws, reflecting the experience of a nomadic people).

            Second, there is the practical, most clear in the delightful Book of Proverbs,                                                      where we learn how to be a moral merchant, how to choose a wife,                                    and about such character traits as laziness and generosity.

            Third, the tradition of social justice, as in Amos and the major prophets.

                        Amos 7:7-9 God requires that our morality be judged by a plumbline.

                        Amos 6:4ff. He addresses income inequality/indifference to the poor.

                        5:21-24 This is the heart of Martin Luther King Jr's faith. I believe this is the high                                      point of Biblical ethics.

NEUTERED PARABLES

            Jesus' parables have different purposes, mainly what it means to live in Kingdom of God.

The Biblical scholar Amos Wilder (Thornton Wilder's brother) wrote that they represent a paradigm in conflict with the prevailing cultural values of the time. They are an assault on our cultural paradigms: what we value or prize, how we are organized, middle class ethics, what we reward. This is clearest in the parables of the Workers in the Vineyard, the Lost Sheep, and the Lost Coin (where God's generosity is mirrored in the prodigality/generosity of the woman who spends many times the value of her lost but found coin for the party to celebrate her success!.

            There are several instances where the bite, the controversial nature of a parable is undercut by either translations or later explanations. The most striking is the Parable of the Leaven (Luke 13:21-22 and Matthew 13:33). The Pharisees have just asked Jesus to explain what he meant by "the kingdom of God."

                20. Again he said, “To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God with?  21 It is like a                    woman who took leaven and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”

There have been hundreds of thousands sermons on this parable, focusing on the way that our faith grows and grows over the years until . .  .However, there is a problem here. Recently it was pointed out that the only meaning of leaven in the New Testament is "corruption," "evil," as "beware of the leaven of the Pharisees." All of a sudden we discovered the revolutionary character of this parable. Can you imagine the horror of the Pharisees? First, a woman is the metaphor for God, but then there is what she does: she takes corruption and hides in the middle of the purity of the flour, kneads it together until the elements are indistinguishable and then it represents the Kingdom of God. What this does, it seems to me, is shift our conception of what is required to be part of the Kingdom away from personal morality - more about that at another time. But you can see how a powerful parable has been turned into a Hallmark card - just because of a mistranslation.

            The same is true with the Parable of the Unjust Judge, only here through the addition of an added explanation. Luke 18:2-5

1. And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. 2 "He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent.' 4For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by her continually coming.'" 6. And the Lord said, "Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God vindicate his elect who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will vindicate them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?

With the explanation (in italics here), the parable is an exhortation to pray diligently: if the widow finally gets what her family needs from this crooked judge, how much easier it will be with God. A gentle, kindly story. However, with the explanation removed, it is clear that the widow (again a woman) is the metaphor for God - like the hound of heaven, coming back and back until His will is fulfilled. What a great parable for those parents dealing with a child seemingly lost to drugs or criminality. God never gives up.

            The process has, in my opinion, domesticated the Parable of the Sower. The explanation focuses the parable on the soils, describing how different situations or character flaws keep us from being productive members of the kingdom, turning the parable into a theology of works! How different it is when the focus is on the Sower, sowing seeds where there is little hope for harvest. It's not only the spiritually receptive who receive the blessing, but those who through limited intellectual capacity, maybe advanced ADHD, or as a result of being sexually abused are unable to respond at the same level as the spiritually gifted. After all, it is with the outcasts with whom Jesus spent most of his time.

            You can always disregard the explanations - added by editor who "didn't get it."

             

Relationship between Christianity and Judaism/ Jews and Christians

          When I was in seminary, probably the most prevalent notion of this relationship was what was called Triumphalism, that once Jesus had come to fulfill the Law the Jewish religion had been supplanted. At its worst, Jews who had rejected Jesus as Lord were traitors. Mostly, though, Judaism was treated with tolerance and for its importance in leading up to the Christian faith.

            Fairly recently things have changed, first through the publication of Karl Barth's Commentary on Romans, published in German in 1920 and in English in 1930. Barth's conclusions on the critical nature of Romans 9-11 were popularized by the Swedish bishop and New Testament scholar, Krister Shendahl, while teaching at Harvard and Paul Van Buren, an Episcopal priest teaching at Temple University. Their critical insight or observation was that God does not break promises, therefore the promise made to Abraham that he would be the father of the people of God remains. The Jews remain the People of God and we as the Christian church have been grafted into Jewish holy history. Thus, our relationship to Judaism is one of dependence, not superiority.

                       

Same Gender Relationships

         

          For centuries, the Christian church believed that homosexuality and homosexual behavior was condemned in the Bible".       What is condemned is male Prostitution and exploitive relationships involving two men. In the Bible there is only one description of a homosexual relationship based on mutuality, sacrificial love, and commitment. That is the relationship between Jonathan and David. Though conservatives believe their relationship was not sexual, I believe the text says differently.

            The conflict within the church about homosexuality mirrors the previous debate within the church about slavery. On the one side has been those who proof texted or used selected quotes from Scripture to defend its position in favor of slavery and against tolerating homosexual relationships and acts. On the other side have been those who argued that the overall witness of Scripture is against the toleration and practice of slavery and in favor of the church's affirmation of same gender relationships and sexuality.

            My favorite piece on the matter comes from the author, Frederick Buechner. He writes that when we say God is love, one of the things we mean is that all love comes from God. There is no other source. It is not one of the things in our power. It happens through us for the other. What this tells me is what St. Paul in Galatians 5 tells us, that when we observe the marks of the Holy Spirit or the presence of agape love, that indicates the blessing of God. There is much more to say, but this is a good beginning.

           

HEBREW SCRIPTURES

            I have often heard comedian Bill Maher challenge self-identified Christians by asking "How can anyone believe in a religion with a talking snake?" The line always got a chuckle from his audience, even while demonstrating the amazing ignorance of Bill Maher, who is unaware of the role of myth and metaphor in dealing with the ultimate questions about human life. and in our  addressing our relationship with the infinite.    

          No respectable Biblical scholar of any Christian denomination believes that the stories involved in the creation narratives were intended to serve as history. Their function is etiology, trying to make sense of our place in the world, questions of meaning, purpose, guilt and shame, death and so much more. There are multiple authors of these accounts, ranging from those referred to as "J" for their use of "Yahweh" to refer to God and their existentialist bent to the school of writers called "P" or Priestly School, known for their interest in details and their interest in rituals and priestly governance. J's focus on the creation is reflected in the stories of Adam and Eve and the rest, while P devised the scheme of the seven days of creation - and if you pay close attention you can spot traces of both schools interwoven in each other's narratives in Genesis. They are also probably the first existentialists in recorded history.

            With these stories and others the question is not when or whether they took place (ala Bill Maher and other scoffers). The right question about myths is not "when did it happen?" but "where is it happening?" 

          When I was in Salinas, California I experienced all this as I observed the story of Cain and Abel being lived out in Steinbeck's "East of Eden" in the Salinas Valley. Bruce and Steve Taylor had controlling interest in Fresh Express produce, the successor to the great Bruce Church company, the largest lettuce company in the Salinas Valley. When Steve "got religion," he initiated a brutal battle, forcing Bruce out of the family business. Bruce, my parishioner, then started Taylor Farms, which is now the equal of Fresh Express. The struggles between these two brothers took place within a larger context which had continued through generations - and which has been experienced in other family and cultures. Thus, the important question about these myths of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, and the Tower of Babel should never be "When did it happen?" but "Where is it happening?" And as we will see in a future Forum, they have happened over and over again in communities, intimate relationships, and even among nations.