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 It’s a couple days before Christmas, and the usual Bible Study group is meeting. The lectionary is the birth story, right out of Luke. Revised common Lectionary taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Good feelings – the regulars having coffee and kolaches, laughter and conversation about families coming home for Christmas, the shopping not completed, the expectations and hopes for the season. The Old Testament selection is read aloud, and then comes the passage from Luke; the nativity scene is laid out before us, complete with the child being wrapped in bands of cloth and then laid in a manger.
A hand goes up, the gentleman beside me patiently asks what version of the Bible are we reading from? “The NRSV”, comes the reply. “Yes, but the King James Version would be so much more poetic here; especially for the Christmas passages.” Immediately the nodding and the murmurings of agreement begin. Well, yes — the pastor can’t help but agree. “What version will be read on Christmas Eve? Won’t we be able to hear about the baby being wrapped in ‘swaddling clothes’ and not these bands of cloth?” The good Reverend knows that this is not going to go away soon. “Well, I guess the NRSV” he stammers… “Yes, the bulletin is being printed with the NSRV version; yes, the deadline for the printer…” The murmuring is growing more restless until another one of the regulars emphatically declares, “So you’re just going to STOMP all over Christmas because of a printing deadline??? We can’t hear the original Christmas story as it was intended in its original, most poetic form because of a printing deadline??”
The place erupts: laughter, shouts, accusations, dramatic cries of ‘heresy’! The preacher doesn’t know whether to laugh, or hide behind the coffee pot. As he shuffles and promises to “see what can be done” and we are laughing and pointing and elbowing each other, the gentlemen that first brought this to our attention quietly, stoically recites the King James narrative. It’s as if Linus has to remind all of us Charlie Browns what the real deal was all about.
Continue reading A Good Christmas Swaddling
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Did you see the courageous and prophetic response given by the United Methodist Church in response to the recent spate of LGBT teen suicides?
I know, me neither.
In light of these recent tragedies, perhaps it’s time to look at the church’s liability, or at least their culpability in the suicides of teens who feel repressed, hated, and bullied by society and institutions in our society.
Consider Jamie Nabozny of Ashland, Wisconsin. A public high school student in the mid 90’s who was bullied, threatened, and terrorized because of his perceived sexuality. School officials knew of the abuse, but said, “Nabozny should expect it if he’s gay.” To make a long story short, he sued, and a Federal Appeals Court finally ruled in his favor, finding that the school district could be held liable for not stopping anti-gay abuse. When the lower court then ruled that the officials were to be held liable, the district quickly settled for a million dollars.
So it follows, does the church by its pronounced stand on homosexuality have blood on its hands?
There is undoubtedly a United Methodist Church in every community that the bullied and now dead children once lived. In every community where a child committed suicide, that church was a reminder to those kids that they were not equal in the sight of God. Some of those churches are undoubtedly conflicted about that stance, and others are quite happy to remind their community that homosexuality is an abomination in the site of the Lord, “incompatible with Christian teaching,” and is not to be tolerated.
Some of us make jokes, others become enraged, and certainly we all cluck our tongues when we discuss the Catholic church’s problems with child abuse: how shameful it is that the institution has actively sheltered the abusers while leading the lambs out to the wolves. Is their error of commission any more grievous than our own errors of omission? How can we continue to ignore the cry for relief from our own discrimination?
Outside of the church, the response to the bullying deaths has been notable. The president of the United States proclaimed yesterday that “homosexuality is not a choice.”
“We’re all children of God,” Obama said. “We don’t make determinations about who we love. That’s why I think discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is wrong.”
15 year old Billy Lucas killed himself in his grandmother’s barn where his mother would find his body, hanging from the rafters. She would later refuse to write an obituary or have a public funeral for him, because “she didn’t want those kids who had hurt him to see him.”
 Billy Lucas The provocative sex columnist Dan Savage wrote in his syndicated column
” He (Billy) reportedly endured intense bullying at the hands of his classmates—classmates who called him a fag and told him to kill himself. His mother found his body…. I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.”
Savage started a website and a YouTube channel called “It Gets Better”, devoted to posting messages from people who want to counsel young people that there is a life and hope beyond the bullies. (Episcopal church bishop Gene Robinson has posted a video.) Some of the videos are incredibly poignant. Savage notes that in real life, gay adults are never allowed to even talk to children about sexuality, so his internet campaign has become an accessible way for teens to get a message of hope and not harm.
Continue reading Does the UMC have blood on its hands? From the bully pulpit…?
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What happens when faith collides with doubt and uncertainty? Doubt seems to be used as a modern day weapon, frequently hurled at people, institutions, and social/cultural groups. The faithful are often caught in the crossfire. [...]
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“Reality has a well known liberal bias” says comedian Stephen Colbert as he parodies ultra conservative pundits; evidently, the Bible has the same ‘problem’.
If interpreting scripture becomes problematic, quit fighting over interpretation and just change the scripture. At least that’s what Andrew Schlafly advocates through the Conservative Bible Project, a cornerstone of his more global Conservapedia project. Andrew is the son of Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist and Eagle Forum founder.
Andrew Schlafly complains that most English translations of the Bible contain far too much “liberal bias”. Bias like Jesus prayer from the cross, (Luke 23:34):
- Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Is this a corruption of the original, perhaps promoted by liberals without regard to its authenticity? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals, although it does not appear in the earliest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke. It should not appear in a conservative Bible, because in point of fact Jesus might never had said it at all.
Forgiveness is so liberal, so unChristian, isn’t it? Continue reading Rewriting the Bible…. Conservative Style
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Has the book of Genesis been banned in your Sunday school yet? Have those horrible scientists with all of their high fallutin’ theories and fancy learnin’ been filling your child’s mind with unBiblical nonsense? Has your Bible study come to a grinding halt, unable to reconcile the differences between the theory of evolution and the Biblical narrative?
Cue the book burners and the culture warriors.
Warriors like State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar. They tend to pull out all of the stops, and it is not pretty for our children. Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle has an excellent column on Ms. Dunbar in her role on that board, and what attitudes might influence her public policy making decisions. She summarizes and quotes Ms. Dunbar from her book One Nation Under God: How the Left Is Trying to Erase What Made Us Great, “Public education is tyrannical, unconstitutional and the Satan-following Left’s ‘subtly deceptive tool of perversion.’ And parents who surrender their children to government-run schools are ‘throwing them into the enemy’s flames even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.’”
As Dana Carvey used to proclaim on SNL as the ‘church lady’, “Well, Isn’t that special?”
When apprx. 97% of biological scientists agree that evolution is a sound and scientific theory, and creationism is not science, how does this issue keep inserting itself into public debate? And trying to rebrand creationism as “intelligent design” did little good for the fundamentalist movement, even before it was proved a sham, concocted out of whole cloth to disguise its apologist’s true goals. BTW, the Texas Freedom Network follows this subject, er, religiously, and you can find their research and links to many articles on our State Board of “Edumacation”.
Continue reading The Evolution of Creationism
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