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Good Hearts and Healthy Humors

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My Column for The Elgin Review Elgin, NE May 22, 2019

The movers swooped into our house and suddenly, before I’d had opportunity to pack my clothes for the next several days, my dresser was wrapped in plastic and hauled out of the house–with all of my clean underwear still in it.

The day our heavy things were being loaded on the trailer to come to Neligh, we were so happy when the trailer was full, we let the hired, brawny movers leave–only to realize, too late, we hadn’t had them move the heavy armoire from the basement and hadn’t had them load the bed of the pickup.

We needed to be at a funeral for the father of a friend at 1:00 PM in Omaha on Monday. The sale of our Omaha home closed at 8:00 am that morning and we were still moving things out of it and cleaning into the wee hours. Mike dropped the trailer off in Neligh at 1:00 am, slept a few hours and turned around to be back in Omaha for the funeral. He’d remembered to get his suit from our borrowed apartment, but he’d forgotten a dress shirt. Could I bring one from our new Lincoln apartment where I’d spent the night after finishing cleaning our Omaha home at 2:30 am? I grabbed the shirt but got stuck in road construction traffic. If we stuck with our original plan to meet at the public library where Mike could change into his suit, we would have missed half the funeral.

I bought a package of underwear at the store. (Who can’t use new underwear, anyway?) Mike bought an appliance dolly at Menard’s and together we muscled that crazy-heavy armoire out of the basement and into the pick-up. Mike changed into his suit, minus a dress shirt, at the library, and we met in front of the church where he slipped behind a tree and changed from his tee-shirt into his dress-shirt and we made it to the funeral right on time.

Friends from Omaha and Lincoln helped us pack and load. My brother loaned us his truck. When we got to Neligh church members and their family and friends met us at the parsonage and helped us unload. Sandwiches, chips, beverages and desserts were waiting for us in the kitchen.

We’ve all had weeks we feared would never end. We’ve all had weeks so jam packed with all sorts of things that we can’t help but drop the ball time and again. We’ve all had weeks when we’re bone-tired and don’t quite know how we can make it through. But, by the grace of God, the help of our community and a healthy dose of good humor, we do.

Park Congregational United Church of Christ is a place where we practice and experience the grace of God together. It’s a congregation committed to helping our Elgin community. It’s a group of good-hearted people with healthy senses of humor. You are always welcome at Park UCC to worship, to laugh, and to be strengthened for whatever life holds in store for you this week.

Maybe it’s Time to Give Church A(nother) Try

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My Column for The Elgin Review, Elgin, NE 10.23.19

Erin was three years old with a mess of loose blonde curls and a button nose sprinkled with freckles and eyes as blue as the Kentucky sky. She was the youngest worshipper at the Sulphur Christian Church when I was their pastor as a seminary student years ago. Most Sundays there were twenty of us. One morning as we prayed the Lord’s Prayer together Erin’s little voice was louder than all of ours. “Our Faaaaaatherrrr, which art in Heaaaaaaaaaaven” she said with as much sass and vinegar as any little girl could muster. Stifling giggles, the rest of us continued praying. By the time we got to “Thy kingdom come” Erin’s voice, quite loud, insistent and still sassy as all-get-out piped-up again in her thick Kentucky accent, “No Daddy, I will not behave!”

Miss Ida and Miss Gladys were Erin’s Sunday School teachers at Sulphur Christian Church until she went off to college. Her Grannie and Grandidaddy sat with her in the pew when her mother helped lead worship. Her auntie and great aunts sat a couple pews up and one sat over, across the aisle. When her aunt was married in the church, Erin was the flower girl. When Erin played in the cemetery on the hill while Grandidaddy mowed, she stood behind a tombstone carved like an open Bible on the top and preached to the cows in the pasture across the fence.

There were two little boys in the congregation, eight or nine years old to Erin’s three years. Once, when they collected the offering as they often did, they brought it forward while the congregation sang, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” When the doxology was over and the congregation bowed their heads for me to bless the offerings, these two stinkers, giggling, scooped all the money out of the plates in one swoop and pocketed it right under my nose and open eyes. “Gentlemen,” I said when the prayer was over as I held the empty plates and gave them my best young-preacher raised eyebrow look. With twinkles in every eye in that little sanctuary those goof-balls put the money back in the plates, and oh, so proud of themselves, walked down the center aisle to sit with their mothers.

Children who grow up in small, rural churches are some of the most fortunate children on the planet. They may not have big Sunday School classes or youth groups with lots of peers, but they have this beautifully woven web of people of all ages who know them, love them, pray for them and help them grow up secure knowing they truly belong somewhere.

Studies tell us children are lonely today. Statistics tell us teenagers feel more disconnected now than ever. If you have children in your life who don’t have a church they can call their own; if you don’t have a church to call your own, where you know you are welcome even on the days when you don’t want to behave, maybe it’s time to give church a(nother) try.

You’re always welcome at Park Congregational United Church of Christ, ten miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south. We worship at 9:15 every Sunday morning.  I love hearing from you. My email is beckyzmcneil@gmail.com.

I Say There is Hope

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My Column for The Elgin Review, Elgin, Ne May 8, 2019

A member of a congregation I once served reached out to me. “If you get a minute, I could use some guidance. In a discussion with my sisters this weekend, all of them said the current political environment continues to push them further from church. They believe they see both Democrats and Republicans using Christianity to tear others apart. And if that’s true, then the church is complicit and is an underlying cause. They feel attending church is now more like belonging to a club, instead of a foundation. This breaks my heart. I know they aren’t alone in this thinking, and I have no idea how to respond. Do you have any thoughts to share? Is there any hope?”

How would you respond?  Are you with my friend? Do you see church as a foundation upon which to build your life? Or, are you more inclined toward her sisters’ view?

In my experience, and in reading church history and the news, church is as it has been throughout millennia, a mix, a collection of human beings joined together for a myriad of reasons, some holy and some wholly unholy. Political parties use Christianity to tear people apart, to sow seeds of dissension and to establish who’s in and who’s out. In far too many cases, Christians bow to the idols of power, influence and wealth and are complicit in the divisiveness of our day.

I’ve had moments when I’ve thought I would just walk away. “Please, don’t associate me with those kinds of Christians.”

I am, however, compelled by a vision of love cast by Jesus who healed and helped and welcomed and lifted up every kind of person toward wholeness and fuller lives. I am compelled by Jesus who empowered all his followers to go and do as he did. In the earliest days the church grew by leaps and bounds because people saw the ways Christians loved others.

I am compelled to cast my lot with the motley crew of the church because I saw a little boy named Calvin, snot nosed, dirty red face streaked by tears, embraced in a big hug by a man who’d never had kids when Calvin burst into a church meeting one evening, “My Daddy’s left and says he’s never coming back. What am I going to do?” Calvin’s dad never came back, but that congregation surrounded Calvin with so much love and so much support that he found his way.

I cast my lot with the church because there is a little congregation in the middle of corn fields where three pajama clad kids wandered in one Sunday morning and asked if anyone had anything to eat. Mom and Dad were still asleep (after a night of partying) and there wasn’t any food in the house. Ever since, the church serves Sunday breakfast to anyone, and now serves breakfast every school day, too, for the kids who wait for the school bus on the corner across the street.

The DNA of the Christian faith is caring for all our neighbors. Out of that DNA has sprung most of the hospitals around the world, most of the orphanages, most of the colleges, universities, and the public school movement, too, the Civil Rights movement here and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. From the church Habitat for Humanity was born, and Alcoholics Anonymous, too.

It seems to me that attending church is something fairly easy to opt in or out of when culture and politics make us all cranky, but being church is more challenging and far more compelling.

I say there is hope.

You are always welcome at Park Congregational United Church of Christ.

Freedom and Sore Testing

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In a building made of thick stone blocks, a building that stood for centuries in the center of the mountain village hymns of praise echoed in lyrical French. Early in my stay in Le Chambon sur-Lignon, thirty three years ago when I was a beginner in the language school the only parts of the worship service that I understood were the Lord’s Prayer and the Words of Institution before Communion. As the months passed and my French improved and I became acquainted with those who had worshipped in Le Temple their whole lives long, I came to understand not only the service of worship, but the service of the worshippers.

Forty years earlier the members of that congregation, led by their pastor Andre Trocme, defied their nation’s laws and opposition in their community by secretly, quietly welcoming into their homes, into hiding and safety thousands of Jewish children fleeing in terror from the Nazi occupiers. The first child came in the night with a knock on the parsonage door, and a fleeing, frightened Jewish mother pleading, “protect my child.”

Each week in worship we prayed together, “Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation, mais délivere-nous du Mal” In English we pray, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Some translations of the Lord’s prayer make the translation, “and lead us not into times of sore testing but deliver us from evil.”

The Nazi era was a time of sore testing for Christians in Germany and occupied countries like France. Would the Christians acquiesce to the civil and national authorities in order to keep themselves from harm, or would they take seriously the call of the Gospel to welcome the stranger, treat everyone as their neighbor, share bread and wine and hope in memory of Jesus? Would they be willing to risk their own lives in order to care for the “least of these” God’s children?  In Le Chambon, among the protestant congregation of Le Temple, their answer was bravely, faithfully to follow Jesus.

Though I have prayed all my life those familiar words that I would not have to live through a season of sore testing, I believe that season is upon us. This week even while we celebrate our freedoms and our liberty from tyranny as a nation, as a nation we are separating children from their families and locking them in camps–keeping them from the freedom they, and their parents have risked everything to gain.

This is not a matter of partisan politics, this is a matter of basic human decency, a matter that all good people of whatever ilk, but especially Christians, followers of Jesus Christ must stand against. We who pray to be delivered from evil, in times of sore testing must do everything in our power to deliver our neighbors from evil, too.

My Voice

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There was a large hand mashed against my chest and another against my face and I strained to yell, though muzzled, until finally, the night erupted into noise as I mustered a loud cry into the darkness, “Dad!”

My sweet husband Mike rolled over and comforted me. The nightmare was so vivid it took a while for me to remember—I am a grown, 58 year old woman, sleeping in my safe, comfortable bed, next to the love of my life, who never, not in ten million years, would ever hurt me.

I’m not usually a sleep talker. I sleep like a log. Maybe I snore (there are those who tell me I do) but I sure couldn’t testify to it. Most nights I remember nothing from the time my head hits my pillow until the alarm rings in the morning.  If I remember a dream, it’s a dream I was having as I was awakening for the day, not one I had well before midnight. That’s not the case with the nightmare that interrupted our night’s sleep a couple weeks ago. When my yell woke us up, the digital clock read 11:20. I rolled over and managed to fall back to sleep quickly, and if I dreamed more through the night, my dreams were not a continuation of the one that had thoroughly awakened us both.

In the morning the panic I felt in my sleep, the will and determination and strength it had taken to cry out to my Dad for help, left me feeling weak in my knees and emotionally weary. Over coffee I played Freud with my dream. Of course, the origin of the dream was the news reports of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations in regard to her teen-aged experience with Supreme Court nominee Brent Kavanagh, how he covered her mouth when she tried to cry out for help as he pinned her to a bed and groped her. In my dream it wasn’t clear I was being sexually assaulted. All I remember is being held down, with a strong male hand over my face muting me. Dr. Becky Freud asked herself over her coffee, “Why do you suppose you called out for your Dad when he’s been dead for almost a decade?” I replied to myself, “He always listened to you and believed in you. Your Dad encouraged you to use your voice and to speak the truth.” “And why,” Dr. Me-Freud persisted, “was this experience of being muzzled so vivid as to cause you to yell out in your sleep?” And my coffee began to quiver in its mug.

I am being silenced by men who do not like what I say. The assault I am experiencing is not against my body, but against my being. It is against my being a woman with words.

I am a woman with a clear, true voice. I am a minister gifted and called by God to preach and teach and care and lead. I speak words of love and passion and conviction. On occasion, called and ordained as I am to be a minister of the Christian Gospel I am also a prophet, speaking truth to power. Truth that the last shall be first, and we are all refugees and foreigners and black lives do matter and Jesus was a brown-skinned man and he died at the hands of an ungodly empire run amok. Truth like Jesus listened to women and gave them full voice in a world that worked devilishly hard to keep them silent and in their place. Truth that Jesus loves all the children, and so must we.

This past spring I spoke the truth to a man who could not bear to hear the truth. I spoke it to him in private to protect and preserve his dignity. I spoke in hope he would take heed and take action and take care of what only he could do. But the words I said cut too close and in a couple weeks’ time he figured out a way to silence me.

Complicit in the assault against me are other men quick to agree, “A strong woman is, by her very nature, a threat.”  Strong, as in I see things clearly and tell the truth about what I see.

Complicit in the assault against me are also women, like the contrary octogenarian who two years ago cautioned me against being so passionate about the Gospel. “Some of us just want to come to church, have a little communion with God and go on home, dear.” Complicit in the assault against me are women like the woman trained to take orders without question, because the orders of a man of higher rank supersede written policies and procedures. Complicit in the assault against me are the women who look the other way and pretend they cannot see, because if they see they’d have to speak, and if they speak, they too, may have to pay. Good girls keep quiet.

Complicit in the assault against me is a system that allows one man the power to insist I be quiet and good and keep my thoughts to myself –just roll over now, and act as if this didn’t happen, if you want a good reference, if you want to be able to work again. Don’t tell. Don’t complain. Don’t raise a fuss. Just let us sweep this under the rug and move on, because I’m busy with more important things.

Male things.

Wearing the robes and reciting the verses, like armor. Protecting the church, protecting the powers that be, protecting the “just want a little communion with God” and then go golfing crowd from gospel truth that might discomfort them and keep their pocketbooks closed when the offering plates circulate in the sanctuary. “Protecting” but not healing, not helping, not holding the church to the church’s true calling. Allowing the church to rot from within. Sick in self-serving sin.

Yours isn’t the church of Jesus Christ if you do not see the others whom God has invited to the table. Yours isn’t the church of Jesus Christ if you look blindly away from the racism and sexism and nationalism that is tearing God’s good creation apart at the seams. Yours isn’t the church of Jesus Christ if you remain complacent when injustice is done right smack dab in the very midst of you. Yours isn’t the church of Jesus Christ if you allow yourselves to be led by thin-skinned men more interested in their own power than in proclaiming and living the Gospel with integrity and truth.

My dad called “foul!” years ago when the politics inside a church became as vile as are the politics in our nation today. I was a teen-aged girl at the time.  I witnessed my father speak truth to the powers that be. And he voted with his feet and dusted off his sandals and moved on and he taught me to be unafraid, and bold and brave.  And so, I called out to him in my sleep. “Dad!”

And he is helping me to remember who and whose I am.

I am not anyone’s good girl.

I am a woman gifted and called by God, and by God,

I am reclaiming my voice.

And Was It Cold? A Prayer for the very cold first Sunday after Christmas

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And was it cold, Dear God, when Magi made their way across the desert plains?

And was it cold, Oh Lord, when angels sang to shepherds on rocky terrain?

And was it cold, Redeeming One, when first breath was taken by infant lips?

And was it cold, Light of all Light, when Joseph covered Mary quivering after labor long into the night?

Frigid is the cold outside today, but warm are we, in your embrace and each other’s company.

For those who make their way, exposed to weather’s whims,

For those who earn their living under tenuous conditions,

For those whose breaths and lungs and bodies are vulnerable and frail,

For those who can do only so much for ones they love,

We pray today, warmth of heart, the fire of hope, and the light of love

burning brightly,

newborn.

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Poop Disasters and other Perils of Parenthood

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Once upon a time, all I wanted was to be a mom. From the time I was a little girl playing with dolls, through Jr. High when I started to babysit and High School when I gave up my “real job” to go back to babysitting (even through there was always, always at least one poop disaster every single time I sat for my favorite family), through college when I was a nanny for a family, I knew, more than anything I wanted to be a mother.

I had other dreams, too. First, I thought I’d be a teacher. Then, a ballerina, then, when I had a boyfriend who I was way too serious about, I thought I’d be a nurse (so I could study in town and be close to him). Then, I experienced my call to ministry while I was still in high school. So I wanted to be a mom and a minister and I wasn’t sure I could be both at the same time.

My mother was a stay at home mom. I walked home from school for lunch every day in elementary school. In Jr. High Mom was there when I got home, or she had come to school to pick me up to get me to my ballet or piano lessons. When she picked me up she always had a bag of raisins and peanuts for me to snack on to tide me over until dinner time. Mom was an assistant troop leader for my Girl Scout troop even though she really didn’t like working with kids. Mom was my room mother when I was in first and second grade. When I was in High School, she was my younger brother’s Cub-Scout den leader, and hated it, “Becky, please come straight home from school today to help me. The boys will be here. You know I need help, especially with Kevin.” Why was she the Den Mother? Because the den needed a leader and Mom was one of the only stay at home mothers around. And she believed my brother Tom and his friends should have the experience of being Cub Scouts.

Early in High School I brought in the mail and it included a letter to Mom from the State of Nebraska. It looked official and I was curious. Mom explained it was her application for renewal of her nursing license. Mom was an RN who quit working outside the home when they adopted my older brother. “Why do you keep your nursing license?” I asked. “You haven’t worked as a nurse for years.”  It was in the mid 1970’s. Mother told me, “Becky, every woman who has children has an obligation to be able to earn a living for her family. I keep my nursing license up-to-date so that were anything to happen to your father, I could support you.”

Daddy was a pediatrician. He knew a lot about what was good for children. Once, after I was ordained, after I was a mother to young children, sometime in the early 1990’s we were home for a visit. Daddy read something in the paper that troubled him and he said, “The problem is all the women working outside the home these days.” And, I asked him, “Dad, do you mean by saying that, that I shouldn’t be a minister?” Taken aback, Dad demurred. “Well, no. But you’re different.” And I was, sort of. My husband and I were. We were both ministers and when our boys were little we shared one position. It was a choice we made. We chose to live on less income, to have fewer things than many of our friends in order to be able to be more fully present with our boys.

Dad had seen too many kids whose parents were too busy to pay them the attention children require and deserve. He allowed that maybe the problem wasn’t women working, but couples who wanted it all and in a big hurry. When my brother and I came home as babies it was to a 900 square foot home. When my parents built their dream home, it was a 1200 square foot brick ranch which they owned for thirty years. My parents built a life they could afford to live on Dad’s income alone. A life Mother could have continued to afford had something happened to Dad and she needed to return to her profession.

When it was clear my husband wasn’t happy as a minister, and we had three young children and we couldn’t count on him being able to do his part to earn a living for us in ministry I went back to school to get my Doctoral degree. I needed to be the best equipped I could be to support our family when he went back to school to learn another profession. By then, the boys were in school and preschool and my husband and I shared a 1.5 position in a church.  To earn my degree I woke up at 4:00 am to do my school work before the boys woke up, and I went to bed when they did. I studied during my days off from the church while the boys were in school and when they were home, I was attentive to them. I didn’t want their childhood to be filled with me saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t right now, I have to study.”

Once, around that same time, a friend from home called to tell me of her new lover, and the new lover’s children, and her own teenaged children’s struggles with her divorce and her re-marriage and divorce from that husband and how happy she was now she’d met this new love and how happy her daughter had been that she and her mom were finally stable. And she told me her son was really messed up, and struggling, but she knew her daughter and he’d be happier knowing she was, at last, happy. And I wanted to ask her “can’t you just wait a couple years until your kids are grown? Can’t you give them a couple years of stability before you bring another person into their home and your life? Can’t you just provide for them what they need, and think a little less about what you need for now?” My friend’s relationship with the new lover faded quickly, and her kids went through yet another transition and loss. It seemed so unfair to them. They didn’t ask for all that drama in their lives.

Then my own marriage ended. Instead of going back to school to prepare for a career other than ministry, my husband’s mental health crumbled and eventually, our family’s whole well-being rested on my shoulders.

When I had a boyfriend for a time shortly after my divorce, my thoughts about my friend with the new lover came back to me. Didn’t my sons deserve a mother whose attention wasn’t diverted by new romances and relationships throughout their teens? I became more cautious. It was eight years after I was divorced before Mike and I met. We married a year later when my youngest was a senior in High School and the other boys were grown and gone from home. My kids suffered enough trauma going through their parent’s divorce. It seemed only right to let the rest of their growing up be a lot less eventful.

I’m thinking about all of this because I just heard about a young woman I know who wants more than anything to be a mom. She’s always wanted to be a mom. More than anything else she’s ever wanted to do with her life, she’s wanted to have children. She wants to be a stay-at-home mother, too. She thinks it’s important for children to have their mother’s attention when they’re young. I applaud all of those impulses, having felt each of them myself when I was her age.

She worries me though. She worries me because she isn’t prepared to support the children she hopes to have. Right now, she imagines the man she loves will support their family. But what happens if their love fails? What happens if, like it happened to a friend of mine when we both had little babies, her husband complains of a stomach ache one week and is dead from stomach cancer the next, leaving a two year old and a six week old to rely solely on their mother?

When my sons were younger men, I said to at least one of them, “Don’t be making any babies until you’re fully prepared to take care of them, because any grandbabies of mine are going to be spectacular, and they deserve to have two parents who love them and each other and are each fully capable of being good parents for them.”

That isn’t always what come to pass. The best isn’t always what we’re able to dish up in life, but is it too much to ask that we try? Is it too much to ask that people who choose to become parents be as ready as possible to take care of their children, and ready to give up some of their own desires and pleasures in order to give their children the time and attention they need to grow up whole and healthy? Is it too much to ask that people bringing other people into the world make some contingency plans, and recognize life doesn’t always unfold the way we hope it will?

Being a mother has been the very best part of my life. It’s been filled with poop disasters (little round balls of poop falling out of one toddler boy’s diaper and the crawler right behind him, picking them up…Ugh!), sweet kisses, loads of laughter, loads and loads of laundry, some degree of heartache, creative chaos, button popping pride, and now, deep satisfaction and joy observing the good, kind men my sons have become despite all the ups and downs of their childhood.

I missed the mark in many ways raising my sons. But, I thank God every day for my mother teaching me every parent needs to be ready to take care of his or her children. I thank God every day for my pediatrician father’s example of keeping the main thing the main thing in raising children. Pay attention. Be there. Be a parent. If you’re a dad, you’re the only dad your children have. If you’re a mom, you’re your child’s only mother.

I thank God every day for the whole village that helped my sons become the men they are today. And, I don’t for a moment regret the years I invested in getting them grown and launched into life.

To my young friend and everyone like her who wants more than anything to be a mother, a father, I hope one day your dreams come true. Only, please, be sure you’re as ready as you can be. Otherwise, you could be selling yourself short, and your children, too.

And that would be so sad.

Jesus Junk

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Underneath the labyrinthine exchange of roadways, the Interstate highway, the elevated expressway, and city streets that carry the heaviest traffic in our city, at the end of the dead end road beyond the fast food and drive thru Starbucks, there’s a mega-store. My skin crawls and I feel a little sick every time I see it. I went in a couple of times just to look around and felt dirty just being there. But, sadly, I think I’m pretty alone in my revulsion over this store. Recently there were protests and the city-council spent hours trying (rightly in my opinion) to keep a strip-club from opening a couple miles to the east of this place, but, I’ve never heard of anyone being anything but pleased by this store’s presence in our fair city.

Even so, I can’t help thinking if Jesus were to come to town, there might be some serious table turning action taking place down there.

So, can we talk about Jesus junk and cheap churchy tchotchkes and bad books and those who profit, bigly, off the sales of that stuff? This mega-store is crammed wall to wall with Jesus home décor, and Jesus jewelry, with Jesus plush-throws, and Jesus tees in every size, with Jesus baby burp cloths and nativity napkins and Jesus is the Reason for the Season soup mugs. The place is filled with the scent of “manger mixed with myrrh” melted wax (you can buy it in a set with the handy light-up nativity scented wax warmer for only $25.99).

A couple times I’ve been given gift cards to the Jesus Junk store. Last year I went there thinking I could use my gift card to buy a new Bible. The cover was coming off my old leather-bound Oxford Annotated NRSV and I thought it might be time to replace it. I braved my way through the Jesus gift gallery and past the thousands of glossy-covered books selling a “God loves America Best–Jesus is your Ultimate Life Insurance–Do you Know Where you’re Going when you Die? (and, in the mean-time, Heaven on Earth can be Yours if you follow our Ten Easy Ways to make your Husband Feel like a King)” kind of pseudo-Christianity. Way in the back of the store is their fairly large Bible section.

The Women’s Thin-line Pretty in Pink King James Version Bible complete with a matching pink journal and pink pen was only fifty bucks. But nowhere, amongst all their Biblical offerings was a single Bible for which a woman was a member of the editorial board. Not one. I’ve been exaggerating a little (could you tell?) about the stuff this store sells like hot cakes, but I’m not exaggerating at all about this. Every one of the hundreds of Bibles in a breathtakingly large array of colors and covers and versions and editions was translated and edited only by men. Why does that matter? Because women, like men, were created in God’s image. Women, like men, have brains and are scholars and are capable carriers of God’s stories. The more broadly representative the editors and translators of God’s word, the more accurate, the more inclusive the important editorial decisions. The earnest salesman helped me look at every version of the Bible sold in his store. Dozens of versions, no women editors. “Isn’t this strange?” I asked him. He admitted it was. He said he’d never really thought about it before.

Isn’t that the way it is with the whole big, let’s show the world how much we love Jesus by buying stuff with his name on it charade? We just don’t think about it. We have this good citizen-consumer attitude “It’s nice we have that big Christian store selling Christian things for all the good Christian people.” But, is it nice? Or, is it maybe a sham? Is it maybe a place where day after day hour after hour God’s name is taken in vain?

Using God’s name to make a buck, using God’s name to enhance one’s own wealth, using God’s name to  please one’s investors, using God’s name to improve one’s business, using God’s name to silence half of God’s people seems to me to be risky. What I’ve read in my plain old black leather covered study Bible indicates God has never been all that pleased when people claim things in God’s name that are self-serving. Who benefits from the sale of Jesus Junk? Are the factory workers paid living wages to make all that stuff? Are they given full-benefits, do they get to take Sabbath rest? And what will happen to the Jesus junk when it’s gathered dust on our shelves and our kids have to go through our stuff after they’ve sent us to the old-folk’s home? Will it be valuable, or will it go to the landfill where it will be buried with no hope of resurrection?

Who benefits from Bibles edited only by conservative old white men? Who is being served? Is it God? And who benefits from books that trumpet piety and morality and “Christian” values that leave out the poor and the vulnerable and venerate the rich and powerful?

I don’t like the strip club in the middle of town. It’s degrading and dehumanizing. But, at least it’s not selling its’ tainted wares in the name of God.

Ben’s Box and November in Nebraska

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It’s November 27th and it was 67 degrees when I went to the grocery store an hour ago. (I live in Nebraska). We’ve had high temperatures in the mid-sixties since Thanksgiving Day, four days ago. (I live in Nebraska). The weather has been beautiful. On Black Friday Mike and I took advantage of it and hung our (minimal) Christmas lights a whole week ahead of the beginning of Advent, because we live in Nebraska and who knew when we might have another day so nice for hanging lights?

Usually, hanging lights involves snot freezing as it drips from one’s nose when tipped upside down from the ladder. Usually, hanging the twinkling cheer involves fingers frozen stiff with cold and a face lacerated by leaves whipped up into mini-tornadoes while one stands defenseless atop a ladder. Not this year. I’m not complaining, except, it is a little weird. Shorts, flip-flops and Christmas tree displays go together in Florida maybe, but not here, except today. Today even that sight made sense in a very nonsensical way.

One of the errands I ran today was to mail a box to Benjamin, my youngest son. He lives in New York City and because he started a new job in October he has no vacation time and was not able to come home for Thanksgiving. For the same reason, he won’t be coming home for Christmas. The box I mailed holds a Christmas ornament for each year of his life so far. Every year since they were babies, I bought each of my sons a new ornament for our tree. My mother did the same for me and my brothers when we were little. When we left home, she sent the ornaments with us so we’d have a little bit of home on our Christmas trees even if we lived far away. I still have the little gingerbread house, and angel with orange fluffy hair and Raggedly Ann from the trees of my childhood.  This year Benjamin will have his jointed frog that he broke and secretly fixed with chewing gum and the Santa whose arms and legs move at the tug of a string, and a delicate carved wooden ornament in the shape of Nebraska tied with a red ribbon among twenty-some others.

Once I graduated from college  I spent most of my Christmases far away from home. My first husband and I were both pastors. We served churches in Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan and since churches generally expect their pastor(s) to be present for Christmas Eve at least, getting home to Nebraska for the holidays wasn’t usually feasible. Once in a while my parents came to where we were for the holidays, but mostly we created traditions of our own with our boys and talked with my family by phone late in the day on Christmas.

That the day would come when my own children might not be home for the holidays is something I always anticipated. That  we would not always be in the same place, enjoying the same glittering tree was inherent in my buying ornaments for them to “take with them someday.” But, knowing the day would come is not the same as living that day. Dropping off that box today I felt my heart. It ripped a little bit inside my chest as I gave the woman Ben’s address.

This five day streak of near record breaking warmth in Nebraska in November just doesn’t seem right. Neither does sending Ben his box. I’m not complaining exactly, but it is a little weird.

 

Litany

~ Everydaystories ~ 3 Comments

Harvey Weinstein is not why I knitted four beautiful hot pink pussy hats and marched in the Women’s March last spring. I didn’t know about him last spring. Donald Trump was not why I marched in the Women’s March, either, but he was part of it.

Bobby, the neighbor boy who climbed the rough bricks outside our bathroom to peep in when  I was seven to see what a girl looked like after I told him, “no” when he offered me a dime to show him—Bobby started it. And Mark, the high school choir friend who was pretty immature but nice enough to hang around in a group until I told him I didn’t want to go with him to prom and I didn’t want to date him at all, after which he began loudly taunting me across the cafeteria so badly I retreated to one of the music practice rooms to eat my lunch for the rest of the year, and who yelled his usual taunt, loudly enough to be heard across the Civic Auditorium as I crossed the stage to receive my diploma at graduation. Mark added another verse to the litany being written deep inside me.

Then there was the nice divorced man from the church who had joined while I was away for my sophomore year of college who started showing up at my work place just as I clocked out at eleven pm. He was older and I didn’t like him “like that.” But, if somebody went to my church, I trusted them, because well, they went to my church and I had always trusted the people in my church. “Let’s go to coffee,” he’d say. “Sure.” I’d say. I had “go to coffee buddies” at college, why not at home during the summer, too?  Except one night he said he needed to stop by his house, did I mind tagging along? It turns out, I minded. I was ashamed. I should have known better. I didn’t tell anyone. Litany verse three.

Verse four, later that summer at the city pool. Shaken, I decided to leave after a man cornered me and would not accept my pleas of “leave me alone.”

Verse five, on my twenty-first birthday, when on a boat on the Baltic Sea as part of an  overseas study program, I left our group to return to my cabin alone and was followed by a drunken fool who tried to force his way into my cabin after me.

Verse six, the date with an exchange student during my senior year of college that turned ugly fast.

Verse seven, the seminary professor and admissions counselor at a school I visited, who looked me in the eye not once, but stared at my chest the whole time he interviewed me.

Verses eight and nine the man who tried to trick me into following him into an old barn to see some things he said were being stored there that belonged to the church where I was the pastor, and the used condom I found on the seat of my car in the pastor’s parking space outside the church a couple of weeks after I’d rebuffed him.

Litany verses ten, eleven, twelve, they’re all just more of the same. More of the same old rotten thing. More of the same thing women just chalk up to “the way things are.” Unless there’s violence, unless there’s long lasting physical harm, most of the time we women just move on and try to be “smarter” the next time—because so far, there has always been a next time.

I never added up the verses of my very personal litany, I never brought them out to see the light of day. I left them, unremembered deep in the dusty file cabinet of my life’s forgettable moments until last November, when enough people were willing to excuse a self-admitted “pussy grabber” to elect him President of the United States of America.

I marched in the march for many reasons. I knit and wore my hat for one. It was a proud defiance against the litany of disrespect shown me and women throughout the ages.

Now, let me preach a moment with the fire-like passion of the prophets:

This is not the way God intended things to be.

“At last this is flesh of my flesh,” the cry of joy from Adam in meeting Eve is not a cry of domination, but of mutuality, of partnership, of communion, of shared respect and shared pleasure.

“This is my beloved and this is my friend,” the delighted words of the bride about her groom in the Song of Solomon is not about power and possession, but about the tenderness and equality of true partners, willing the very best for each other.

“Wives submit to your husbands, Husbands love your wives like Christ loves the church,” the letter to the Christians in Ephesus is not proscribing subservient women pleasing dominating men, but, in true poetic reciprocity, each loving and serving the other with self-giving love like Jesus.

How about we start a new litany? A litany with verses about respect and tenderness?

How about verses where we march to a deeply humane beat?

How about verses in which we no longer keep quiet?

How about verses where we sing the truth?

How about verses about love?

Simply love.

What a litany.