Tales Told in the Light of Day

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
March 27, 2011  Lent 3

John 4:5-24    
5So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink'. 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, 'How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?' (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, 'If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, "Give me a drink", you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.' 11The woman said to him, 'Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?' 13Jesus said to her, 'Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.' 15The woman said to him, 'Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.'
16 Jesus said to her, 'Go, call your husband, and come back.' 17The woman answered him, 'I have no husband.' Jesus said to her, 'You are right in saying, "I have no husband"; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!' 19The woman said to him, 'Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.' 21Jesus said to her, 'Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.'

It is never really advisable to preach a sermon in segments since the audience changes pretty dramatically from week to week.  Those of you who were not here last week must simply take my word for the fact that today's gospel lesson is the other half a single piece of fabric in which John lays two mirror image conversations side by side.

Last Sunday we read the Nicodemus narrative in which Jesus has a conversation with a leading Jewish man under the cover of night.  Today Dr. Trobisch has read the second portion, which is a conversation with a member of a rather hated racial minority and a woman at that, and they are talking in broad day light.

Nicodemus was a religious leader with whom Jesus might have talked in the open quite appropriately but he came sneaking around at night.  In first century Jewish tradition, a woman doesn't speak to a man outside of her own family and certainly doesn't speak to a man in public.

This text doesn't look particularly sexy to our eyes but to it's original audience, this text begins with a good deal of tension.  An unaccompanied woman is speaking to an unaccompanied man whom she does not know.  A first century audience might have expected this Samaritan to proposition Jesus but it was actually Jesus who spoke first to her.

He is exhausted.  He is leaning against a well.  She came to draw water.... At least that is her ostensible purpose, and so he asks her for a drink of water.  Like the "whites only" and "coloreds" drinking fountains of the Jim Crow south, she replies that since he is obviously a Jew, he probably wouldn't want to drink out of her jar.

There is taunting here.

The Jews and the Samaritans had a 500 year old racially fueled mutual hatred.  At one point, when the Jews wouldn't let the Samaritans participate in Temple worship, they built their own temple on another mountain and the Jews eventually destroyed it.

When Jesus was a kid, some Samaritans came into Jerusalem just before the Passover and spread human bones around the temple, defiling it so that Passover services had to be canceled.... Both economically and religiously, it was tantamount to having to cancel Christmas in our day.

No one had to explain the polarized nature of this exchange to John's audience.

The issues, races and religions of such prejudice change through the centuries but we all know the name of the tune and the steps to the dance.  In recent years we have seen the two party system in America become so rife with prejudice that it has resulted in shutting down progress on a host of important issues and literally causing the shut down of government in some cases.

What we can see very clearly is that as long as every issue is defined as being partisan, that no intelligent solution ever emerges and even the compromises which are finally unleashed out of this insane environment looks more like Frankenstein's monster than anything produced by intelligent and well intended statesmen.

But we're familiar with the polar battle lines.  One is pro choice, the other is pro life.  Both patting themselves on the backs for belonging to the moral camp while the lives of children and young women are reduced to being little more than political talking points.

The Samaritan woman at the well had come to the well alone, which could be interpreted to mean that she had already let go of the normal moral standards of that time and place in which women tended to perform such tasks in groups so that they could keep one another safe from inappropriate contact with men.  You can see that as either being intentionally immoral or as being rather more liberated and non-conformist.

Still, faced with a lone Jewish man who was asking for a favor, she went right back to the familiar battle lines.  "You are a Jew so you must think this.  I am a Samaritan so I must behave this way."

There is almost always a good deal of truth behind racial and political prejudices.  Not all Americans who travel abroad are ugly Americans but everyone who has traveled very much has met the ugly American.  French people are not always irrationally arrogant but you don't have to spend 7 consecutive days in Paris to find out where that stereotype comes from.

You may recall a few years ago when Jesse Jackson, when talking about the immorality and irrationality of profiling, said that even he had become one of those people who became frightened when a group of black teenagers was walking behind him on a city street.  The issue is that if we treat all black teens as if they have criminal intent.... If we treat all Republicans as if they are self serving aristocrats, and all Democrats as if they were lazy welfare junkies, and all Arabs as if they were terrorists, then we are likely to continue to find our prejudices confirmed over and over again.

When Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman, he ignores her race baiting and makes the conversation personal.  He didn't speak to her as someone who was a stereo-type of all Samaritan women, he spoke to her as an individual human being who had personal tragedies and vulnerabilities and who was in need of an opportunity to forgive herself and to have a fresh start.

Yes, it is true that a disproportionately large number of black male youths have criminal records.
But it is also true that when unemployment goes down the crime rate goes down even faster.  Being afraid of the adolescent malcontents walking behind you on a dark city street is understandable but if you stop thinking of them as a stereotyped class and start to realize how angry that poverty and hopelessness can make young people then you realize that the solution to your fear is not more police and more prisons but more jobs that pay a living wage.

If getting a part time job at McDonalds is all that you can hope for in your future then turning to crime is a matter of survival.  Prejudice is a kind of psychological short hand.... It allows you to form an opinion of blacks and whites, latinos and Asians, Republicans and Democrats, southerners and those other people..... "Yankee" doesn't seem to quite capture it does it?

My good friend, Ron Hertenstein, is a Republican, a retired Air Force Colonel, and you can well imagine that we sometimes have fairly spirited conversations about how to understand global events.  But when Ron says that there has never been a terrorist who had a full-time job then he is articulating a point which conservative and liberal, Arab and American, Republican and Democrat needs to sit up and deal with as a fact, not a prejudice or an opinion, but a fact which cuts through the fog of prejudice and gets down to the real point of why our difference so often become irrationally expressed in violence.
Meaningful employment with a realistic expectation of earning a living wage could be the answer to the problems that we are trying to solve with airport security, deployed armies and air assaults against foreign nations.  If every time you hear the word "Muslim" you immediately think "terrorist," you'll never remember the tried and true phrase, "it's the economy stupid."

Of course, it's not just the economy.  And the differences between Jews and Samaritans had many more complex nuances than simple religious prejudice.  There were some substantive issues, some annoying differences, and some competition for territory and resources.  But Jesus wasn't Judaism and this woman wasn't the Samaritan nation.

He disarmingly cut through the surface junk that stood between them and spoke to the woman as an individual.  In this particular case, she was a woman whose personal life had become a narrative unacceptable to either Jews or Samaritans... unacceptable to her family and her people..... the talk about living water may not have made immediate sense to her but what was unavoidable was that he knew her and yet he accepted her and spoke to her as a fully human person and that is what had been missing in her past five husbands and probably in her mother, father, siblings, neighbors, Samaritans, Jews, Republicans, Democrats and church folks.

I want to ask you to look at the front cover of your bulletin at those 8 points we re-print nearly every week.  Let's look at points 4 and 5 again this morning:

4. By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including but not limited to): believers and agnostics,
conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, women and men,
those of all sexual orientations and gender identities,
those of all races and cultures, those of all classes and abilities,
those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope. 

And we could add here:  Samaritans or Jews, Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, Fox News viewers or MSNBC fans.  And this matters because of number 5:

5.  Believe that the way we treat one another and other people is the fullest expression of our beliefs

A religion that needs to be better than the neighbor's religion.... Nationality which needs to see itself as being some how exceptional.... Classism or race identity which needs to be superior all add up to a religion that isn't worth keeping.

When people visit here they often want to know what it is that we believe but no matter what we tell them, after they hang out here for a few months, nothing we print on the cover of the bulletin matters unless the way we treat one another is obviously worthy of all of the high sounding things we say and sing about and pray about.  May God bless our community to always be more than the surface issues, more than the printed page, more than the labels and prejudices of day.

As St John of the Cross warned his community five hundred years ago:  We either pass the love test or we will fail entirely.  Study hard my brothers and sisters because the love test comes at us every day.

Under the Cover of Darkness

Community Christian Church  
Roger L. Ray, pastor
March 20, 2011    Lent 2



John 3:1-17

The first great philosophical writings came to us from the hand of the Greek thinker, Plato, in the 4th century B.C.  And Plato did every undergraduate student for the past 24 centuries the incredible favor of writing in the form of dialogues, conversations which took place between both famous and fictional characters of ancient Greece.

Sometimes his dialogues described actual historical events and sometimes the entire setting and characters were made up in order to examine a particular idea.  But because he wrote in the form of a play he was able to convey subtle meanings in the choice of settings and characters.  For example, Plato personally despised the Greek playwright, Aristophanes, because Aristophanes had written plays in which he ridiculed Socrates which helped to turn public sentiment against Socrates leading to his execution.  So, whenever Plato uses Aristophanes as a character in a dialogue you can bet that any lines coming from Aristophanes are not to be taken seriously.

More subtly, however, things like a conversation which is taking place between two characters who are walking, if they walk through a respected area of Athens, which Plato considered to be the capital of all great thought, then you can give what the characters are saying added weight.  If they walk outside the city walls of Athens, among the common and uneducated people, you can take it for granted that this is pretty weak material.


Students of philosophy have always known to take the setting of a conversation very seriously in interpreting the dialogue.  It took Biblical scholars several more centuries to realize that we should look at Biblical narratives in a similar way.

The authors of our four gospels described the sermons, conversations and miracles of Jesus in a way to help us to understand the significance of both who Jesus was and what he said and did.  How they presented that material and in what order and in what circumstances affects the message itself.

The gospel text before us today comes from this very well known conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus.  It is very important to notice that this dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus in the third chapter of John is set in juxtaposition to the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in the fourth chapter of John. The settings are like mirror images of one another, a set of opposites.  Nicodemus was a highly respected religious leader, the Samaritan woman was a non-Jew who had a horrible reputation.

Neither conversation may be an account of something that actually happened.  John uses Jesus, the Samaritan woman and Nicodemus the way that Plato uses the characters in his philosophical dialogues.

Reading John's accounts in this way, it is important to notice then, how John sets this up in the first verse and a half:

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. 2He came to Jesus by night
It was entirely appropriate for Jesus to speak publicly with Nicodemus and yet he came to Jesus in secret.  In the text we will read next week, from the 4th chapter of John, we see the contrast.  It was totally unacceptable for a Jewish man to talk to a woman who was unescorted and yet they did so privately in an open setting.

In both dialogues, Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman keep trying to talk about surface issues, religious ideas which are out there somewhere but not of great personal importance.

Jesus kept taking the conversations deeper, confronting them with the most important truths about their own lives.  We say that honest gospel preaching is "speaking the truth to power."  Saying the things that people don't want to have said, what they want to pretend isn't true, naming the elephant in the room that everyone tries to pretend doesn't exist.   Jesus confronts Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, in very different ways, with their need for total transformation.

Nicodemus slips around at night to question Jesus privately.  But the way John writes it, Nicodemus doesn't even get to get a question out of his lips.... Notice how, in verses 2 and three that Jesus cuts him off and answers a question which has not yet been asked.... As if Jesus already knew the real reason why Nicodemus was there:

and said to him, 'Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.' 3Jesus answered him, 'Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.' 4Nicodemus said to him, 'How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?'

John has really written a brilliant dialogue here.  Nicodemus is something of a tortured soul.  He is a member of clergy.... A sort of church official, with power, standing, resources, respect.... But in his own heart he is pretty sure that he is a fraud which is OK as long as everyone around you is also a fraud.

But then Jesus comes to town and, darn it, it seems like Jesus isn't really a fraud.  He is not an official.  He does not have standing in the church.  He has no job, no money, no title and, by all reason, he shouldn't have any power and yet people flock to him and make him important even though institutional religion had shut him out.

John doesn't tell us much about Nicodemus but the text is heavy with implication.  John doesn't have to tell us because we all know him, or someone like him.  Did he come out at night to see if he could find an Achilles' heel?  Was he looking for a way to prove to himself that he didn't have to take Jesus seriously?

In the philosophical study of logic we call this the "ad homonym" fallacy.  If you can't refute what the teacher is saying, try to find some way to attack the personal life of the teacher.  This is what false piety almost always does.

I recently wrote to our state's senators to object to the proposed defunding of the Planned Parenthood programs in America.  Education and treatment regarding sexually transmitted diseases, appropriate education in contraception and women's health issues are under attack in this congress.  This is a matter of great importance to millions of young women.

One of our senators responded with a form letter which was written to appear very pious, posturing as being morally opposed to abortion while, in fact, gutting the programs which have the best track record of preventing unwanted pregnancies.

This is the religious game that Nicodemus was playing.... Sounding pious while playing dumb.  Jesus knows that Nicodemus feels like a fraud and he is trying to offer him a way out.... A way to start over, to begin again.

But then Nicodemus falls back on another favorite religious fallacy.... The fallacy of literalism.  Jesus is trying to say something profound, something life changing, something liberating, but Nicodemus, by imposing a literal interpretation on his words, tries to make him sound ridiculous...... "a grown man can't crawl back into his mother's womb can he?"

Literalists in religion use the Bible the way most of us use a toilet plunger.  You only get it out in the most unspeakable moments to deal with issues you don't want to see or think about.  A literalist will point at a biblical text condemning homosexuality which is buried in texts about not eating cheese with meat, or eating shrimp, or wearing blended fabrics..... but they will never allow you to be a literalist about anything which condemns them..... only about what condemns people that they would rather flush down the toilet anyway.

You don't use a literal interpretation of the Bible in order to understand the Bible, you use a literal interpretation to hide the meaning, to twist it, to change it.
The scriptures teach us to love, to forgive, to show compassion and tolerance but in the hands of a literalist the Bible justifies wars, racism, sexism, it gives you permission to turn your backs on the poor and to judge even your own children.

As often happens in a dream, or in Plato's dialogues, certain characters show up only to represent an idea, to utter a line, and then they disappear.  In the midst of the conversation, John just stops talking about Nicodemus and Nicodemus disappears from the reader's mind.

He has served his purpose.  He represents religion which is textual, based on rules and beliefs, but is devoid of spirit.  Surely it is not Jesus who concludes this passage, suddenly speaking of himself in the third person as if he were Bob Dole or something.  It is John interpreting what we have seen by putting Jesus beside someone who represents institutional religion.  And what does John say?  Look at verse 17:

17 'Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.' 

There is a tremendous amount of pressure on the church to fold itself up in the darkness of literalism or of ad homonym, to act pious but stay out of the way....To sound religious without ever shining the light on anything of importance.

You hear me say things like that and you may be inclined to think that I am overstating the case but let me ask you this.... Why isn't there a loud and obvious anti-war movement among religious people in America?

There were some rallies, some songs being sung, a few signs being carried back in 2002, maybe a little in 2003.  We are now engaged in a war that is on the verge of its tenth anniversary.  Are we tired?  Were we mad when it was George Bush's war but now we complacent because it is Barak Obama's war?  When a liberal is awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace and then uses the podium to mount a defense of pre-emptive war, does the church then forget about everything that Jesus said?

Where has the voice of the church been as services to the poor have been cut?  Unemployment assistance, affordable housing, Planned Parenthood, nutrition programs for poor mothers and children..... how is it that the rich can take a mortgage tax deduction for their second and third homes, their vacation homes but we can cut homelessness assistance programs because the federal budget is in trouble?

And who talks about this?  Is it the church?  Who are the famous preachers in America now talking about the war, talking about poverty, talking about racism and sexism?  I marched with hundreds of people on Martin Luther King's birthday through town to hear a speech about how we should all volunteer more for community service.

Does the NAACP think that Martin Luther King got shot for organizing boy scout troops to pick up trash beside the highways?

No, men and women, do you know is talking about war, and injustice, about tax inequality and housing and health care?  Comedians.  The best preachers in America today are Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert and Bill Maher.  And they don't have very nice things to say about the church and, frankly, why should they?

We have a Congress that can outlaw Yard Darts because they are dangerous but they can't outlaw semi-automatic weapons and if you can't laugh at a Congress like that then you.... Well, how did John say it..... "people loved darkness rather than light"...... yeah, that stings.

But I don't mean to sound too negative about all of this.... Not that there is not a lot of darkness enshrouding religion these days.... But there is a solution.... We can be born again..... we can decide to step out of the darkness and into the light.  We can learn to love the truth and hate the lies..... we can kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

The Happy(?) Fall

Community Christian Church  
Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
March 13, 2011   LENT 1

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7  
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.'

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, 'Did God say, "You shall not eat from any tree in the garden"?' 2The woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3but God said, "You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die." ' 4But the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not die; 5for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.' 6So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

I received word via e-mail while I was in Belize this week that Peter Gomes, the famous chaplain and Biblical professor at Harvard, had died.  He was an amazing man.... Both brilliant and entertaining.  I took a class on Biblical interpretation from him in 2004.  On the first day of class, he stood before the class and announced, "There will be no questions asked during our lecture sessions this fall because I have a great deal to say and you have a great deal to learn so it's best if we just accept that fact and get started."

It seems pretentious but I feel a great deal like that today because I have a great deal to say to you today and precious little time in which to say it and evidently what I have to say is not commonly known.
I need to also add the caveat that I am not all that comfortable talking about it because I want to talk about the relationship between women and theology which makes me fairly uneasy for several reasons: not the least of which is that I am not a woman and because the relationship has very often been an abusive relationship, and, honestly, because my own history with women should readily demonstrate that there are serious gaps in my knowledge.

Still, it has become painfully obvious to me that the conversation sorely needs to be had. I keep meeting women who are either out and out afraid to get involved with the church or who are so angry at the church that they would rather burn it down than set foot in it.

I had allowed myself the luxury of believing that the bad old days of religious oppression of women was a part of a distant 19th century past.  And if not that, at least the current generation of young educated women would have to learn about religious discrimination against them the way a young African American now reads about the institution of slavery..... as something they have heard of but never experienced.

The truth is that while many mainstream Christian denominations have been trying to eradicate the lines of gender prejudice for generations, most more conservative expressions of Christianity have been doing their best to erect higher and higher walls to divide the genders.

And, it should be obvious, where you can establish a foundation of discrimination in religion then you preserve a justification for discrimination in employment, economics, legal structures and domestic relationships.  It is hugely important and the ravages of gender discrimination is a dragon which should have long since been relegated to ancient mythology but it yet breaths fire into the hearts and minds of women in the present day.

Where better to start than at the beginning, literally, Genesis?  The casual reader may step gingerly along the first eleven chapters of Genesis and not be able to tell that it is not a literary whole.  By that, I mean that the stories collected there are not only not written by the same hand but they in fact were not written in the same century or the same nation.  There are different hands, different cultures and different subsets of languages involved in the composition of these stories.

There are two different creation narratives in the first and second chapters of Genesis. The stories of the creation, the garden of Eden, the murder of Abel, the flood, and the tower of Babel were never intended to be ancient accounts of either science or history.  They are religious stories, parables of sorts, intended to both teach a moral lesson and to account for the way the world is, what cultural anthropologists call an "etiology."

The story of the tower of Babel explains why there are so many languages among the nations and the story of the Garden of Eden explains why women are afraid of snakes..... most of we men are afraid of snakes too but we didn't want to see that in print in the Bible.

Biblical scholarship is not a matter of personal opinion any more than any other field of serious study.  We don't have time to explore all of the reasons why we know that the Garden of Eden text is intended to be understood metaphorically but let's just remember that the narrative revolves around a magical tree which is inhabited by a talking snake.  Anyone who wants to interpret this text literally should first be able to produce a snake which can not only talk but one who is able to win an argument with a woman.  Nuff said.

What these Genesis narratives actually are is both wonderful and complex.  They are stories which define the society in which they were created and every word is packed with meaning, more so than in most poetry.

In the narrative, the first man is created by God out of the dust of the earth.  Dust, in Hebrew, is "adamah."  The man is named "Adam."  Which is a play on words.  Then we see this almost comic play in which God wants to give the man a fitting partner.  God returns to the dust of the earth and makes one animal after another.

It is like a dating service gone crazy.  God is trying to make the perfect companion for Adam and in order to be that, the companion must be an equal to him.  And, in the humor of the story, it is as if God just can't get it right.  Every creature, when presented to Adam, is not adequate to be his partner and so he names it.  In that ancient society, to give something or someone a name was a sign of ownership and more than that, a sign of domination.  When Adam named the animals it was a form of condescension, a statement that he was superior to them.  You cannot have a full partnership with someone you are superior to.

And so, it is then as if in desperation that God gives up on trying to make Adam's partner from the same muddy stuff Adam was made from.  God causes Adam to fall into a deep sleep.  And here the text is a bit rough.  There is no word in ancient Hebrew for rib.  The word used here is "side."  The presumption in later interpreters was that the text meant to say that God had surgically removed a rib from Adam and managed to make another person from that small part.

A better understanding of the text is to take it as it is written, God took one side of Adam, literally dividing the first human into two parts, one of which was a man, the other was a woman.  Even the word used in the Hebrew for the creation of the woman is subtly different.

In the creation of Adam the word used was the same as the word used for construction.  Adam was built of dirt and named for dirt.  The woman, we are told, was created, and the word used is the word normally referencing art.  The woman's creation was God's first work of art.

And you'll notice, especially since I am pointing it out to you, that the woman is not called Eve here.  She is not named until after the nasty incident with the snake.  Adam names Eve after the fall as a sign of their broken relationship.  In the perfect creation, the man and the woman were to have been equal, partners, two halves of the same whole.  In the fallen and sinful state of humanity, the two are no longer considered equals.

Now, if you'll recall, this whole matter of looking for a partner for Adam was because he was lonely and God saw that it was not good that he should be alone.  In the fall, when they are no longer equals, the woman must suffer from male domination but the man has not won anything here, in winning domination over the female, he has become isolated again.... he is also being punished, being made lonely forever.

There are wonderful things to take note of in the unfolding of the text.  The forbidden fruit in the garden is wisdom.  It was not the man who was tempted to become wise, it was the woman.  And the man does not engage in dialogue here.

It is the woman who is interpreting the word of God, literally playing the part of a rabbi in debate with the serpent.

The man doesn't say a word.  He just shows up with his knuckles dragging the ground, scratching himself and wondering what was for supper.  He eats of the fruit of wisdom only when the woman has first had her eyes opened.  There is so much exalting of women in this text that it is tempting to believe that its original author was female.

Either way, if you are willing to let the text be properly understood, it lifts up equality as the ideal, and inequality as the sign of sinful and fallen humanity.  Male domination was a fact of human existence for most of history but it was not the ideal.  It was the result of sin.

Standing up here in this big black dress demands honesty.  There is no way to publicly read the Bible every week and not admit that it contains hundreds of examples of religiously justified and legislated male dominance and totally unequal treatment of women.

In Genesis Abraham is stopped by God's own hand from sacrificing his son Isaac. And if the story ended there we could trumpet the ancient rejection of human sacrifice.

But the truth is that later, in the eleventh chapter of Judges, we encounter the story of Jephthah's pledge to God in which he ends up sacrificing his own daughter and the story is told in a way to lead you to believe that we are to admire his faithfulness and sacrifice.

The Levitical code includes condemnations against women for nothing more than their basic biological makeup.

Punishments are unequal and blessings are decidedly tilted towards men.  The Bible does not speak with one voice only.  There are messages of compassion, images of equality.  There are stories of victorious female leaders and commandments to disregard gender and race prejudice.  But the bad stuff is there too.

In the past decade we Westerners have allowed ourselves to take a pretty dim view of the Muslim religion and we have especially pointed out passages of the Koran which institutionalize the unequal treatment of women.  However, my friends, a literal reading of much of the Old Testament would be more harsh than a literal reading of the Koran.  Fundamentalist Christians are faced with either enforcing male dominance or trying to simply not read more misogynistic passages of scripture.


The way our church is structured I, of course, cannot speak for what everyone thinks, but I can tell you what I believe.  I can say, as a Biblical scholar who has lived every day with these texts, that there are things, especially in the Levitical code and the most ancient strata of the Old Testament, which simply do not apply to us.

All of scripture, all of religion, every sermon, every prayer is an attempt on the part of women and men to reach up to the mind of God.  Like learning to ride a bicycle, there are a lot more falls than progress in the early days and even a pro will occasionally fall.  Do a Google search on "Lance Armstrong falls" and you get quite a list.  The best cyclist in the world isn't above making mistakes.

What I believe with all my heart is that the direction of sincere spirituality is always in the direction of liberation, of discovery of greater and greater truths, and always in the alleviation of oppression, bondage and prejudice.  The church along with governments, banking systems, corporations and armies has been guilty of violence and oppression towards women.

What I can tell you that I believe without the slightest shade of doubt is that God has never been behind any of those abuses.  Any religion which seeks to discriminate against women for being women is blasphemous.

In the past generation we have tried to change the way we talk in order to help change the way we think.  We've tried to reinterpret male centered language to be more inclusive but the sins of the abuse of women go deeper than any symbolic change.

When I preach in Central and South America I never fail to remind my congregation that men must never hit or sexually attack their spouses or any other women.  I have failed to say that often enough in my own pulpit. We too passively walk through a society which turns women into objects of decoration and sexual desire and I find it too easy to simply accept that role without question or pain.... until it involves my daughter.... and that too is matter of male ego.

If women would just gain the self esteem to stop attending, contributing to and cooking and cleaning for churches which discriminate against them the face of Christianity would change tomorrow.  Even the current pope would be happy to start ordaining women as priests by the end of the month if they just stopped attending the Catholic church, running Catholic hospitals and teaching in Catholic schools.  Oppression continues as long as the oppressed will put up with it.  Haven't well all had about enough of it?

And from the perspective of the dirt party, every son of Adam will continue to be lonely until we fully accept the daughters of Eve as equals, partners, the other half of our very souls.  Believe what you will but I will tell you what I believe.  I believe that the religious liberation of women will be the spiritual healing of men.