burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

At Rest and re/New last night, Jeff Reflected on Psalm 98. He okayed the Inclusive Bible version (noting that it changed "strong arm" to "holy arm," which I found interesting given that it included "Ruler of All"). I refuse to "pronounce" the Tetragrammaton, and Keith suggested that instead of my usual "HaShem" I say something more accessible, like "God." Jeff suggested "Baby Jesus," and while this ultimately got ix-nayed, I thought it worked well, so:

1. Sing a new song to Baby Jesus,
who has worked wonders,
whose [] hand and holy arm
have brought deliverance!
2. Baby Jesus has made salvation known
and shown divine justice to the nations,
3. and has remembered in truth and love
the house of Israel.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.
4. Shout to the Most High, all the earth,
break into joyous songs of praise!
5. Sing praise to Baby Jesus with the harp,
with the harp and melodious singing!
6. With triumph and the blast of the shofar,
raise a shout to Baby Jesus, Ruler of All.
7. Let the sea and all within it thunder;
the world and all its peoples.
8. Let the rivers clap their hands
and the hills ring out their joy
9. before Baby Jesus, who comes to judge the earth,
who will rule the world with justice
and its peoples with equity.

***

Jeff talked about how after the season of waiting that is Advent, the Christ Child is come and what do we do now? What newness is breaking into our lives now?

I have become really cranky at church people talking about January 1 as "the new year" since hi, the church new year starts at Advent 1. (me: "secular Gregorian new year" / Shoshana: "Wasn't Gregory Pope?" / me: "... You with your logic." The Gregorian calendar was based on the Julian month system, though -- hay thar Wikipedia...) But Jeff's framing provides me a way to be thinking about newness in a way which overlaps with the dominant culture but is also authentic to the liturgical year.

One of the readings at Simple Shifts tonight was Romans 12, and at "Do not be conformed to the world," I thought of Ari, because we routinely invoke that exhortation when we see Christians buying into paradigms of the dominant society which we feel are in conflict with God's Will.  (For example, when someone at a church meeting says, "I can eat this cookie because I didn't have dinner tonight," and one of us comments that skipping meals is unhealthy and the first person says they don't care about whether it's healthy, they just want to lose weight.  This is where we silently scream, "We are called to be in the world but not of the world!  When Paul said, 'Do not be conformed to the world,' this is what he was talking about!")

And I thought of how yeah, it is trufax that we build each other up in faith.

Earlier, I had read aloud from Genesis 2 (we read the second Creation story) and I said "God" where the Inclusive Bible said "YHWH" because Ari won't pronounce the Tetragrammaton and I've come to feel similarly.  I'm much less comfortable with gendering Jesus as male because of her and much more comfortable gendering Jesus as female because of her; because of her I think about lesbian christology [addendum: bookmarking for my reference] and transgender eschatology; because of her I think about how it is particularly problematic to gender the (post-Easter) Christ and about how the disciples didn't recognize the risen Christ and about how resurrected bodies (Christ's and ours) are transformed and perfected and how that could mean so many different things.  And she thinks about stuff like "kin-dom" language because of me.  We push each other.  We talk for hours about church and liturgy and theology and worship and what we believe and how that comes out in the language we use and how that is or should be reflected in how we live our lives.  We tell each other, "You are a bright, brilliant, beloved child of God -- and you are beautiful to behold."  Theology and Scripture is the language we use to talk to each other.  (Also fandom, and probably other things.  We are a cunningly multi-lingual people.)

Ari and I were talking on Sunday about how our standard for romantic partners is the way we interact with each other.

I talked about this some in therapy on Tuesday, about how the woman who hit on me last week is really really into me and I'm just not that into her, and therp asked me why I'm not that into her and said it back to me that I didn't feel like this woman was deep enough, and suggested that I maybe don't need a romantic partner to be really passionate about the same things I am so long as they have things they are deep and passionate about.  I am willing to entertain this possibility, but I do think it would work much better if my partner loved Christianity the way that I do.  Yes, if there is stuff of substance that we can connect about, I have an Ari (and other people) for talking about liturgy etc.  And if I could have conversations with my partner about gender and ableism and language that marginalizes and all that, even if they weren't engaged in church, maybe that would be fine.  But I love church so much -- and it's what I do with so much of my time ... I think I would feel really disconnected if I was all talkative about church two or three or five or six days a week and my partner just nodded indulgently at me -- maybe if they were really engaged with Christianity academically it would be okay if they were non-practicing/non-believers ... but I'm growing in appreciation for the power and value of community, plus this is real to me and there's a profound disconnect if it's not real in that way for another person (though obviously plenty of Christians differ as to which things are True Myth and which are True Fact).  And of course I know that lots and lots of interfaith couples work just fine (hello, my parents) -- I'm just talking about figuring out what I think I need.  And I'm not setting up any first-date dealbreaker ultimatums anytime soon (I don't think).  But I told Ari the other day, that I was so excited that this woman loves her church like I love my church -- but I don't think she loves Christianity like I love Christianity (and I think maybe it would be more accurate to say: she loves her church like I love my church, but she doesn't love church like I love church -- though that's still not exactly it).

I recently read a Velveteen Rabbi post on Yom Kippur 5770, and I was struck by her section on king:

The word מלך, "king," is a prevalent metaphor in the High Holiday liturgy. We can see this through a new lens if we unpack the individual letters of the word:

• מ / mem: this letter can be found in the mmm of mama and ima, the m-sound at the beginning of the word mayyim (waters, both cosmic and otherwise). Mem is a letter of motherhood and water.
  
• ל / lamed: this letter begins up high, then takes a crooked path to reach the ground below. Like the flow of divine abundance which begins on high and divagates as it reaches us; like our lives, which start out straight but always wind up complicated. Lamed is a channel from high to low.
  
• כ / chaf: this letter is cupped, like hands brought together to receive.

These three letters flow together sequentially in the alef-bet. Here in our liturgy they speak to us of divine kingship or sovereignty -- and they also speak to us of the root metaphor of motherhood and divine flow, coming down through its crooked channels into our hands.

Before reciting the ha-Melech prayer on Yom Kippur morning, Simcha Zevit gives over this teaching in the name of Reb Marcia Prager, and then invites us to rise and embody it: hands waving above our heads like the rish-rush of the waters, then twisting and flowing down toward the ground, then cupped to receive abundance and then to offer it to someone else in the room. Suddenly melech doesn't seem to be so much about power-over anymore.

CWM is really uncomfortable with hierarchical language for God, and I have come to internalize that discomfort to some extent -- though at the same time I think the idea of God's sovereignty can be really useful. I really like this meditation on so many of the ideas that are included in this God we worship.

I am so so grateful to God for the fact that the past, oh, three weeks have passed without my being anxious really at all about the fact that I haven't gotten to connect with certain people I know and love.  I think it is possibly starting to wear off a bit. 

I decided to not go to LizL's installation.

SCBC

I got to SCBC at like five minutes of nine and rang the doorbell.  I stood outside reading my book.  Once it hit 9am, I considered just going home, but then someone showed up and let me in, and moments later Ross and Emily walked in.

We opened with prayers of thanksgiving.  I appreciated that Ross explicitly articulated that silence is good, too.  The only thing I could think of was that I am so grateful for the patience I've had (by the grace of God) this past month or so re: various interpersonal things.

Next we lifted up prayers for the church -- and Ross turned to me and said, "You can also lift up prayers for your church, it doesn't have to be for this church," which I appreciated.  But (a) I'm not used to praying for my church(es) specifically, (b) when I try to think of prayers for the Church, what keeps coming to mind is stuff like the "All Means All" initiative, (c) it would feel like a betrayal to gripe about one of my churches in this outsider space.

And lastly we lifted up any personal concerns that were particularly weighing on our hearts -- during which part I did lift up select prayers out loud.

People kept saying "Lord" and "Father" and "He."  I don't want to co-opt the term "double-consciousness" (esp. since I think I wouldn't really be using it correctly), but I was very conscious simultaneously of how the speakers intended the language and how it failed to resonate with me.  I've been inclined recently to use female language for God (e.g., "Mother," "She"), even though any gendered language for God makes me uncomfortable to some degree because God is so beyond our conceptions of gender.  "Mother" in particular often make me uncomfortable because I feel like the speakers are intended to conjure up this happy fluffy "if only women ruled the world we would live in socialist harmony" idea.  I was thinking about how recently I've had that fierce protective "place myself between you and the powers of darkness" urge, and how that feels to me really true to who God is and also echoes the Mama Bear response I've seen from my own mother.

"Mother is the name of God in the lips and hearts of children" [Google tells me (1) that originates with William Makepeace, (2) it was quoted in The Crow -- which is probably where it was initially familiar to me from.]

CHPC

2 Corinthians 8:1-15
Mark 5:21-43

Sermon: "Generosity Heals"

I continue to feel like we're just going through the motions.

I liked that we sang "O How Glorious, Full of Wonder" and "Take These Gifts" (though why only verses 1&3 I dunno), and "May You Run and Not Be Weary" is growing on me as a closing responsory hymn.

Various people chatted with me at Coffee Hour.  I kept expecting people to call me out on the email I sent to Session, but no one did.

CWM

I think it was in the Welcome that Tiffany said something about how we are gathered around this table, and I realized that by gathering around the Communion table, we literally mirror the Last Supper -- Christ gathering together with his friends.

Carolyn went off lectionary and preached on: Psalm 29, 1 John 4:19-21, Amos 5:18-24

She talked about how Amos' audience believed that their prosperity (though I don't think that was the exact word she used, but I totally thought, "Wow, that really undercuts the idea of the Prosperity Gospel") was the result of God's favor on them.  Retribution will come at the time it is least expected.  She also talked about how this idea of divine retribution is problematic (though I think she might have been overgenerous in stating that we liberals are uncomfortable with the idea of divine retribution raining down on our adversaries ;) ).

She said that the word translated "stream" in Amos is a word from the Noah flood story, so it's rather more intense than just the literal translation of "permanent stream that will never run dry."  She talked about how the water language of the Psalm recalls Creation and Noah -- order out of chaos.  She suggested that one lesson we could take from this is that God helps us find meaning.

Three things we can learn from this Amos passage:
1. Justice is important to God.  (On the Day of YHWH, YHWH's justice comes to fruition.  Even God's people can act counter to what God wants.)
2. God is there with us.
3. Perhaps we are called to be the prophets.

Every time Carolyn said "Yahweh," I pinged a little.  I used to really like the name "Yahweh" for God, but Ari and I have had conversations about the Tetragrammaton, and so now my immediate reaction is to find it problematic that we are pronouncing a name which was purposely unpronounceable/unpronounced.

--

Carolyn and I made plans for Fourth of July.  \o/