See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity
By Amy Frykholm
(Beacon Press: 2011), 184p.
Something is amiss at the intersection of body and soul for American Christians. It seems that church folks at large have not yet learned how integrate their sexuality into their spirituality. We are told that God made this good earth but we should forward to the day when we will “fly away” to our heavenly home. We are taught that sex is God’s gift that we should be terrified of and avoid until marriage, at which point we should expect to be magically transformed into experts of passion.
Amy Frykholm offers See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity as a deep, attentive look into the stories of nine people for whom the oxymoronic relationship between sex and spirit has become unsustainable or even deadly. By hearing these folks…
Photo by quinn.anya. Retireved from Wikimedia Commons
Reblogged from the Rev. Dr. Monica A. Coleman:
Today is the National Day of Prayer for Mental Illness Recovery and Understanding. People often ask me how they can pray for people who live with mental health challenges. I like prayer. I pray. I’m a minister who often prays for other people. I believe that God can change our hearts and our lives through our attention and focus on God and others. My colleague Susan Greg-Schroeder has some excellent resources for prayers and liturgies at Mental Health Ministries. Check them out here. But I keep thinking about how Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel talked about marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, AL. He said, “When I marched in Selma, my feet were praying.” So I was thinking about ways people can pray with their feet for mental illness. Here are ten ways.
Rev. Dr. Barry Black, Chaplain to the United States Senate, is following in the prophetic traditions of Daniel and Joseph: speaking truth to power from within. Knowing that these prayers are being offered by him from the Senate floor each morning gives me tremendous hope. I say “well done” to this, my professional colleague and spiritual brother.
These are his words, most of which were spoken in the context of prayer:
“Save us from the madness,”
“We acknowledge our transgressions, our shortcomings, our smugness, our selfishness and our pride,” he went on, his baritone voice filling the room. “Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable while being unreasonable.”
“Remove from them that stubborn pride which imagines itself to be above and beyond criticism,” he said. “Forgive them the blunders they have committed.”
“I use a biblical perspective to decide my beliefs about various issues,” Mr. Black said in an interview in his office suite on the third floor of the Capitol. “Let’s just say I’m liberal on some and conservative on others.”
“I remember once talking about self-inflicted wounds — that captured the imagination of some of our lawmakers,” he said. “Remember, my prayer is the first thing they hear every day. I have the opportunity, really, to frame the day in a special way.”
“May they remember that all that is necessary for unintended catastrophic consequences is for good people to do nothing,” he said the day of the shutdown deadline.
“Unless you empower our lawmakers,” he prayed another day, “they can comprehend their duty but not perform it.”
“I see us playing a very dangerous game,” Mr. Black said as he sat in his office the other day. “It’s like the showdown at the O.K. Corral. Who’s going to blink first? So I can’t help but have some of this spill over into my prayer. Because you’re hoping that something will get through and that cooler heads will prevail.”
If “We the People” are to help heal our ailing democracy–and if we do not, who will?–we need to develop five crucial habits of the heart. That, in turn, depends on people in positions of leadership dedicating themselves to forming these habits in the local venues I named earlier: families, neighborhoods, classrooms, congregations, voluntary associations, workplaces, and the various places of public life where “the company of strangers” gathers.
1. An understanding that we are all in this together…
2. An appreciation of the value of “otherness.”…
3. An ability to hold tension in life-giving ways…
Scientists and philosophers have been researching this theory for years and it has finally been proven as fact. There is universal consensus on this matter. I guarantee that this fact will change your life:
Life doesn’t always turn out like you planned.
I know that’s a lot to think about, so I’ll give you a second to let it sink in.
It’s true: life doesn’t always turn out like you planned.
This fact is a big problem for us modern folks, who are so attached to getting concrete ‘results’ from their plans and endeavors. When things don’t go our way, we have a tendency to get frustrated and cynical about life in general. We say things like:
“It’s a dog eat dog world!”
“Nobody cares.”
“You’ve got to look out for number one.”
“You’ve gotta get it while the gettin’s good.”
Do you know people who talk like this? Any really honest folks out there want to admit to thinking like this sometimes? I know I do (usually when I watch the news… especially this week). I admit that I get really cynical like this sometimes. I lose hope.
And that’s really the crux of bitterness and cynicism: the loss of hope. We lose hope when things don’t turn out the way we’d planned, when that business deal falls through, when that relationship doesn’t work out, when we don’t get the acceptance letter we’d been waiting for, etc. We lose hope because we don’t get the results we were looking for. And that’s where our main problem lies: Our definition of hope is too attached to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Any hope that is primarily based on results and circumstances is, in my opinion, false hope (because we never really know how our circumstances are going to work out).
But there is another kind of hope. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.” This is the other kind of hope. This is what I’m calling hope after hope.
Our Old Testament reading this morning comes from the book of Lamentations. That book gets its title from the word lament, which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “a passionate expression of grief or sorrow.” The book of Lamentations was written by Jewish people during a very dark and hopeless period of their history called the Babylonian Exile.
Here’s what happened: in 587 BCE the Babylonian Empire invaded and conquered the kingdom of Judah in southern Israel. The Jewish people were carried off to Babylon where they were expected to work as slaves and assimilate into the culture of their captors. Their beautiful capital city, with its walls, palace, and temple built by King Solomon, was burned to the ground. Those people who survived the battle lost their land, culture, and religion.
Up to that point, Jewish religion had been centered on priests performing animal sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple. Without that building, those rituals, and the priests to perform them, the people didn’t even know how to practice their faith or worship God. This became a particularly problematic issue because their Babylonian overlords were doing everything in their power to erase Jewish culture, religious freedom, and sense of human dignity. Talk about hopeless…
When we listen to the words Lamentations in the scriptures this morning, we can hear the sorrow and the pain of the Jewish people:
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!
She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks…
she lives now among the nations, and finds no resting place…
her lot is bitter…
My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.
If we look over at the Psalm we read this morning, which was written during the same period of time, we can hear the sorrow turning to anger:
By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!
I think most people would agree that these passages were written by people living in a situation that looked pretty hopeless. But the amazing thing is that the people were not hopeless. Even in these bleak circumstances, the Jewish people found something to hold onto, something worth hoping in. The author of Lamentations says:
this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”
This is a different kind of hope. It is the hope that comes alive after hope has died. The thing about this kind of hope is that, if you haven’t lived through it, you can’t understand it. If you haven’t been through the experience of poverty or failure, if you don’t what it’s like to lose everything (even your sense of control over your mind and body), then this idea of hope after hope doesn’t make any sense.
“Hoping in God” is not some meaningless, trite religious slogan that belongs on a bumper sticker. In the theological language of our Christian tradition, it means this: Wherever the creative energies of life are concerned, there is always a Plan B. To elaborate using Christian language: there is no situation so bad, messed up, or complicated that God cannot bring good out of it. In other words, God can work with whatever we bring to the table. When things don’t go according to plan, God always has a Plan B (or C, D, E, F, G… and God’s alphabet never runs out of letters). You can’t mess your life up (and life can’t mess you up) so bad that God says, “I give up. You’re on your own.”
This kind of hope is not based on circumstances. This the hope that comes alive after all those other false hopes have died. This is hope after hope. This kind of hope, which is superior to simple optimism and more than just “pie in the sky in the sweet by and by”, keeps holding on when things don’t go according to plan. This kind of hope looks for the opportunity in the crisis and seeks out the creativity in the chaos of life. The hope that comes after hope says, in the words of civil rights activist Rev. Ralph Abernathy, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.”
Hope in God transcends optimism over our circumstances.
This is the kind of hope that the author of Lamentations was talking about when he or she said, “the Lord is my portion… therefore I will hope in him.” Indeed, this is the hope that sustained the Jewish people during their time of struggle and slavery under the oppression of the Babylonian Empire. Their circumstances didn’t work out like they planned, but their hope stayed strong.
During their half century in exile, the faith of the Jewish people grew, changed, and adapted. It was during this time that they first became monotheists. Until then, they had believed in many gods, but reserved special loyalty for YHWH as their tribal patron deity. During the Babylonian Exile, they came to believe that there is really only one God who created and sustains the whole earth. This belief in one God helped sustain their faith while the Babylonians claimed that their god Marduk had beaten YHWH in battle. Likewise, their religious tradition adapted to its new situation in exile. Instead of priests making sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple, the people gathered weekly in houses of prayer, called synagogues, to study the Torah under the guidance of teachers called rabbis. This is the basic form of Judaism that continues to exist in the world today. Their suffering during the Babylonian Exile gave the Jewish people the spiritual tools that would go on to shape their faith (and ours) for thousands of years to come.
As it is with our Jewish neighbors, so it is with us. Our hope in God is a hope that begins to dawn “ten minutes after all is hopeless”. It is a hope that is not dependent on our circumstances. It is a hope that continually says, “Where God is concerned, there is always a Plan B.” It is a hope that says, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.”
That kind of hope has the power to strengthen us for the journey and sustain us through whatever life brings our way.
“Jesus doesn’t need any more admirers — he needs disciples willing to get into some Gospel trouble on God’s behalf.”
Sermon by the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson at All Saints Church, Pasadena
Celebration of Ministries Sunday, September 22, 2013.
Readings: Amos 8:4-7 and Luke 16:1-13.
For more about the work and witness of All Saints Church visit our website: http://www.allsaints-pas.org | Follow us on twitter @ASCpas
Peterson’s wisdom never fails to strike a chord. Once again, he nails it…
A couple of excerpts:
…pastoring is not a very glamorous job. It’s a very taking-out-the-laundry and changing-the-diapers kind of job. And I think I would try to disabuse them of any romantic ideas of what it is. As a pastor, you’ve got to be willing to take people as they are. And live with them where they are. And not impose your will on them. Because God has different ways of being with people, and you don’t always know what they are.
And, as someone who grew up in big churches, but has been either a member or a pastor in small churches for most of my adult life, I just love hearing this bit of advice for those who want to take Christian faith seriously:
Go to the nearest smallest church and commit yourself to being there for 6 months. If it doesn’t work out, find somewhere else. But don’t look for programs, don’t look for entertainment, and don’t look for a great preacher. A Christian congregation is not a glamorous place, not a romantic place. That’s what I always told people. If people were leaving my congregation to go to another place of work, I’d say, “The smallest church, the closest church, and stay there for 6 months.” Sometimes it doesn’t work. Some pastors are just incompetent. And some are flat out bad. So I don’t think that’s the answer to everything, but it’s a better place to start than going to the one with all the programs, the glitz, all that stuff.
‘The Poor Man Lazarus at the Rich Man’s Door’ by J.J. Tissot (circa 1890)
I’d like to say a few words this morning on the subject of chasms.
More specifically, I’d like to talk about crossing chasms.
People seem to have a kind of fascination with the crossing of chasms. The wider, the better. I saw this one guy on TV last year who walked on a tightrope across Niagara Falls. He was like a slow-motion Evel Knievel. People came out in droves to see him. Personally, I think people like to put themselves in positions where they can be amazed at what the human mind and body can be capable of when they are put to good use. In a physical sense, people like this guy broaden the horizon of what is possible for the rest of us.
Now, that’s not to say that we should all be trying circus tricks, but we like to know that it can be done, that it’s possible: because it’s that possibility that gives us hope. I might never walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope, but seeing somebody do it makes me wonder what I might be capable of in my life that I haven’t yet tried.
The crossing of chasms gives us hope for what might be possible.
I picked the subject of chasms because they factor rather highly in this morning’s reading from the gospel of Luke. The story is well known. It was a parable told by Jesus about an unnamed rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. Jesus tells us that the rich man “dressed in purple and fine linen and… feasted sumptuously every day.” Meanwhile, the poor man Lazarus was “covered with sores” and “longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.”
Jesus said that Lazarus’ usual panhandling spot was right by this rich man’s front door, meaning that the rich man had to walk by him every single day on his way to work (or whatever it is that people of his stature do with their time). Every day, he would walk by and see this man, this fellow child of God, living (not really), more like existing day to day in pain and poverty. Lazarus was within reach and this rich man certainly had the means to make a difference, but he did nothing.
Later on, after the two men died, Jesus imagines Lazarus being “carried away by the angels to be with Abraham” while the rich man is being tormented in Hades, the mythical realm of the dead in Greek culture. And then Jesus imagines a conversation taking place, not between the rich man and Lazarus, but between the rich man and Abraham, one of the founding fathers of the Jewish people.
The rich man cries out for help, but Abraham says, “No, I can’t help you.” He says, “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”
I don’t think Jesus, in this story, is trying to scare us with threats of hellfire and damnation. I think he’s trying to get our attention and draw it toward a reality that we all experience every day in this life. The reality I’m speaking of is the chasm.
In the story, there is a chasm between the rich man and Lazarus. Taken metaphorically, I believe this chasm was there between them while they were still alive. The rich man walked by Lazarus every day, but he never looked at him, never reached out to him, and never really got close to him. They were so separated (i.e. segregated) from one another so efficiently that there might as well have been a physical chasm between them.
When I look around this world we live in, I see chasms all around us.
I see chasms when I hear people say, “I don’t want my tax dollars going to pay for these poor people to get a free ride through life.” People who talk like that don’t know what it’s like to wonder where their next meal is coming from, how they’re going to make rent this month, how they’re going to get to their appointment, or how they’re going to pay for their medication. If they did, they might have more compassion for those who struggle economically.
I see chasms between nations when our country has a conflict with Syria or North Korea and somebody says, “Let’s just drop some bombs on ‘em. That’ll fix it!” That’s a chasm, right there. How about when people in one country are dying young from starvation while people in another country are dying young from obesity? That’s another chasm.
What kinds chasms do you see in this world?
I see chasms between black and white, men and women, gay and straight, Christians and Muslims, just to name a few.
Sometimes, I see chasms running through the middle of families: partners or spouses sitting next to each other in a pew who haven’t kissed or barely spoken to each other all week, parents sitting down to dinner and looking across the table at that empty chair where someone should be sitting, but she’s not because somebody can’t find the strength to say, “I’m sorry” or “I forgive you.”
These are the chasms we live with. Sometimes, they run between us so effectively that we are left feeling all alone, stranded on our own little island, out of reach and out of touch with everyone and everything. As Abraham said to the rich man, “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”
People are cut off (i.e. isolated) by the chasms (i.e. the broken relationships) that run between them. What Jesus is trying to tell us in this parable is that we, as his followers, are called by God to use the time we are given on this earth to cross those chasms in whatever way we are able.
We are called to this because that’s exactly what God does. The God of Love is a crosser of chasms. Christians believe that God, in Christ, has crossed the great chasm between heaven and earth, between sin and forgiveness, between divinity and humanity. This crossing is a grace, a gift given freely to all. And if God has crossed such a great chasm to be near us, then who are we to refuse to cross the relatively small chasms that run between us? To refuse to cross these little chasms is to deny who God is and what God has done for us in Christ. We become like the rich man in Jesus’ parable, who refused to cross the chasm between Lazarus and himself. And, in doing so, he cut himself off, not just from Lazarus, but also from Abraham. Abraham: who symbolically embodied the essence of Jewish identity. Abraham: the Exalted Ancestor. Abraham: the friend of God. Abraham: the father of the covenant. In turning his back on Lazarus, the rich man turned his back on what it means to be Jewish. He was cut off from the meaning of life. He cut himself off from God. He was in hell.
Hell, I believe, is not a place where an angry God sends people after they die. Hell is a place that we make for ourselves in this life when we refuse to cross the chasms that run between us. But the good news is that the God of Love is a crosser of chasms, even the chasm between heaven and hell. Christians believe, as it says in the Apostles’ Creed, that Christ “descended into hell,” which is to say that God meets us where we are (even in hell). In the Bible, Psalm 139 says (in the King James Version), “if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” Even in hell, God meets us.
Not only that, God refuses to let us stay in hell. Christ said he came to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth. God in Christ is invading the hell we have made for ourselves on this planet and setting up a new regime. God is here. The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
And we are invited to be part of it. You and I are God’s secret agents: infiltrating enemy territory, crossing impassable chasms by night, and sabotaging the dominion of hell in order to make way for the reign of heaven. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to make peace with your enemies, to welcome the outcast, to forgive the sinner, to heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit those in prison, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to cross the chasms that run between us.
This is a lifelong assignment. There can be no retreat, no resignation. I promise you that this world, all the powers of hell, and even the lesser impulses of your nature will fight against you in this, but we shall overcome.
I believe that we shall overcome because our commander-in-chief, who started this operation (heaven’s invasion of earth), has promised to remain with us and see it through to its end, when: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
This is our calling, our destiny, and our hope. I want you to go out from this church today and take part in it, in whatever way you are able. And remember that I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Becoming a good Christian made me a bad listener. Where I used to be unsure of myself and my ideas about the world, I suddenly felt like I had a platform, a right, even an obligation to share my ideas with everyone. I was a child of God, after all, and the vision was becoming clearer day by day. There was a sense of urgency to communicate truth before we “ran out” of time.
Instead of listening to people and their stories, I ran right over the top of them. I took my words and ideas and even my intellect and used it like a blunt object I could smack over the top of their heads. God had given me the authority, I assumed, now that I was a part of his club. I thought I was doing everyone a favor.
What I didn’t realize was that it wasn’t my responsibility to save anyone.
Charles Ringma was a professor at Regent College during my time there. I never got to take a class with him, although I wish I had…
“I’m very concerned about ‘tribalism’ and I’m very concerned about thinking in ‘little boxes’, and I believe what needs to happen is that we constantly need to be pulled out of our comfort zones into a wider and richer tradition. That’s why I believe we need to be open to other religious traditions as well.” –Charles Ringma
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 