Time to Drive Out...?

This post refers to Susan Jarvis Bryant's poem, https://classicalpoets.org/2022/12/01/inspired-by-the-trans-jesus-sermon-check-out-your-church-by-susan-jarvis-bryant/#/ . I had enough thoughts to make a separate blog post. Trigger warning: in this post I may shake up some people's beliefs before I reaffirm them, so read the whole thing before you write me off as an heretic. Relative to some denominations I am an heretic. Relative to basic Christianity I don't think I am one.

1. I didn't hear the sermon that provoked SJB's poem, so I don't know how bad it was.

Would it have been impossible for Jesus to have been incarnate in a gender-confused body? I think there are theological reasons why it would. In the law of Moses, to whatever extent it was planned to discourage people giving their rejects to the priests for sacrifice and/or as a sign to help people recognize Jesus as the Divine Sacrifice, a sacrifice had to be "a male without blemish." Gender-confused animals were born then, too, and they were specifically forbidden as sacrifices. So Jesus couldn't have been gender-confused any more than He could have been female.

This of course says nothing about whether gender-confused people, or females, are disqualified for any role whatsoever but being the one and only Divine Sacrifice for all time. It may be worth remembering that the reasons for excluding different animals from the sacrifice were different. Female animals were too valuable; males were the ones culled and killed for food, and nearly all the sacrificial animals were of course food. (Blood, fat, and scraps were burnt offerings; roasted meat was an offering first to the priests and then to the people.) Physically abnormal animals were suspected of being unfit to eat. Since we don't eat our fellow humans these considerations may or may not be relevant to anything. Jesus' being "a male without blemish" may have been more important than His (or some other, mortal messiah's) having curly hair "like lambs' wool," or it may not.

In any case Jesus was male, and for all the torture He suffered, none of His bones was broken. Those facts were noted as fulfilments of prophecy. In some sense, for some people, they mattered a great deal. No good purpose is served by quibbling about them.

2. However, although Jesus was a strong healthy young man, a large part of His public ministry consisted of healing, comforting, and encouraging people with various disabilities. First century Roman society was not committed to accessibility--to put it mildly. People who weren't fit for work were likely to be set out on the streets to beg. The disciples asked, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Disabilities were thought to be judgments. Families were ashamed of a disabled relative. Lepers, who might have had a horrible disease that was fatal or a less fatal condition that was contagious--people had no way to tell the difference--were especially feared and shunned; people might set out food or money at some border point if the lepers stayed a very healthy distance away from everyone else. Jesus walked right up to these people, told them "Be healed," and they were healed.

We are not told that Jesus made a ministry of touching people with Hansen's Disease, as the Sisters of Charity do. That innovation became possible only with modern medication. Also, some people Jesus healed probably suffered from fungal infections that caused itching rather than numbness, and the last thing they wanted was to be touched. We are told, however, that Jesus' "keeping company with sinners" was not a matter of drinking and gambling with dissolute people. People who had suffered from diseases were presumed sinners. Jesus went to a dinner at the home of a man called both Simon the Pharisee and Simon the Leper, a member of a demonstrative and evangelical sect who had been healed of a disease that would have caused him to abandon his house and live in a tent or a cave outside the town limits. At that dinner even Simon the Leper worried about His association with another "sinner," who was probably Mary Magdalene, the great saint "out of whom went seven devils." 

The Bible writers had phrases for "familiar spirits" or "spirit guides" such as some people claim to channel today. The phrase for Mary Magdalene's "devils" was different. It referred to a disease that was alarming enough to be blamed on evil spirits. People who "had a devil" were not described as consciously wicked or malevolent. They were described as suffering from seizures, falling down and frothing at the mouth,  babbling incoherently, suffering from delusions or hallucinations, sometimes throwing themselves into fire or water, and struggling violently when restrained  Such a horrifying disease would obviously have been thought to affect only the worst of sinners. Simon, who probably had had something to repent of when Jesus healed him, might have thought that even he could hardly have been as bad as Mary Magdalene.

If Jesus were to preach in your church, Gentle Reader, would He let Simon the Leper and Mary Magdalene attend church? Of course. Then how much more would He let someone who was merely born gender-confused, a physical condition that is not dangerous to others and that humans share with innocent animals? 

What Jesus might have to say to "drag queens" who, if not homosexual prostitutes themselves, actively create a market for homosexual prostitution, may have been different. Jesus told some open and notorious sinners that their sins were forgiven, but Jesus also had a supernatural ability to know when these people had truly repented. I suspect that "drag queens" Jesus forgave would go straight out and wash their faces, and leave their "drag" clothes at home from that day forward. But we are told nothing. Homosexual prostitution existed in Jesus' time but it is not documented in the places He frequented.

Men tried to sneak into women's territory then, too. According to Greek sources it could be punished by mutilation of the offender. Roman sources seem to have preferred to deny that a real Roman man would stoop to such disgraceful behavior but Rome did not try to abridge the rights of the women's cults to punish spies as they saw fit. There are also stories of ancient Greek men, including Hercules, disguising themselves as women with the consent of the women who helped them hide from or spy on their enemies...but if men tried to spy on women without those women's consent, penalties included making sure that what they'd seen was the last thing those men ever saw, that they wouldn't be able to talk or write about it, and/or that they would no longer be accepted as men. We are not told that Jesus said a word about this, either.

But it's hard to imagine that Jesus would have looked at people who seem actually to be "non-binary" or "gender queer" differently than He looked at people born with other physical irregularities. "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." Jesus loves us, with whatever kind of mixed-up DNA it's part of the Great Design for us to be living with, just the way we are. He wants to transform our spiritual lives; apart from a few simple guidelines for use He leaves our bodies alone.

3. The pronouns in the Bible have been tweaked a long time ago--about as long as the Bible has been translated into English. The Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek. Both of those languages have grammatical gender: things that don't have physical sex, like "wisdom" or "rock," are arbitrarily assigned "he" or "she" word forms. English has natural gender: pronouns are about the only distinction we make among "he," "she," "it," and "they" words, and we use them according to the physical sex, if any. Translation has changed some pronouns and lost some meanings. Some Bible writers, including Jesus Himself, were given to wordplay, and the wordplay is lost in translation.

Thus we are told that Jesus, who knew too many people called Simon to be strictly convenient, said unto Simon son of Jona, "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." Reading that "Peter" is an English form of petros, a stone, we might think that Jesus was calling the man we know as St. Peter the rock on which He meant to found the Church. He wasn't. The rock in "upon this rock" is petras. Petros is the word for a rock you might pick up and throw. Petras is a bigger rock, the mommy rock off which the baby rock you could pick up has calved. St. Peter was being mildly rebuked--it must have happened a hundred times a day--as one piece of rock that had detached itself from the body of the disciples, who were the foundation of the church.

God the Father, in the Bible, is always "he." But He has metaphoric breasts (Shaddai describes a top-heavy figure, either a muscular man or a busty woman, and God is imagined holding His people as a nursing mother holds a baby) and a metaphoric uterus (ruhamah, rahmones, and also Al-Rahman Al-Rahim, all refer to motherly love as something based in a uterus, which the King James Version grotesquely calls "bowels of compassion"). Additionally His "Holy" Name ends in an H, which generally indicates a feminine form, although associated pronouns, verbs, and adjectives are "he" words. His other Name ends in an -im, which is normally a plural ending, although again the associated pronouns, verbs, and adjectives are "he" not "they." And His title--oh, does this one ever cause confusion! In the KJV we see "the Lord" used as a title for God and "Baal" used as a title for false gods. In Hebrew they were all ba'al. It means "lord and master." The Bible could hardly talk about God without using words for things the human brain can imagine, but the Bible writers seem to have been taking care not to use words to set up a false image. In Hebrew God is a motherly She and a mysterious They and also a dominant He. The effect of such confusing images must have been to reinforce the teaching that God was not bound to any sort of body the mortal mind can conceive of, unlike the pagan deities who were said to be bound into "graven images."

And God's people are told that, as they draw nearer to the Great Spirit in devotion, they will "call me Ishi and no longer Baali." Ancient Hebrew gentlemen of status, like Abraham, were called baali by their wives in public, the wives taking pride in the husbands' social rank, but ishi, which means "my man," in private. In the New Testament God is addressed in prayer as Avi, the proper word for "my father," but Jesus also said, and the Bible writers encourage us to say, Abba, the nursery form of av analogous to "Papa" or "Daddy."  

Obviously an infinite Creator does not and cannot expect to be fully understood by a finite creation. We are invited to pray to God by whatever name we know. Dare-to-be-trendy edits to the Bible are disgusting but that's not because the existing translations are perfect. C.S. Lewis, in Letters to Malcolm, mentioned reaching a level of enlightenment at which he began to pray "Not to what I imagine Thou art but to what Thou knowest Thyself to be."

4. I think there was a time--when people who had been slaves, and their children, were still alive--when reparation fees for slavery would have been appropriate. I think that time is gone. If living people can claim any sort of "reparations for slavery" it would be people who have been cheated out of wages for work done. If we start taking seriously any claims for what our great-great-grandparents might have done to one another, many people don't even know who their great-great-grandparents were, and the rest of us are likely to owe "reparations" to ourselves since our ancestors include both oppressed and oppressors. 

Because claims for "reparation" are unworkable, should White Americans ignore the "privileges" well-off middle-class backgrounds give them relative to younger people from the welfare class? By no means. But first, they should recognize what the problems and prejudices really are, and then, they should let that recognition guide them to what their consciences are really calling them to do about injustice against those younger people. 

Young Black Americans are disproportionately and unreasonably distrusted, punished more severely for less serious offenses, punished for the offenses actually given by someone else who looks a bit like them, not so much because they are Black as because they are young and because they are poor. Time will take care of people's being young; let them enjoy the good side of that. Well-off Christians are called to do something about people's being poor. What they are called to do is not to feed them zucchini and dress them in our fashion mistakes, and not to demand that society treat poverty as a disability and give all poor people pensions, but to give poor people opportunities to work and pay them fair wages. Use those "benevolent funds" not to cook more and more pots of soup for people who have bartered their government food benefits for drinks and drugs, but to invest in job sites and stores and restaurants where the poor can climb out of poverty. 

The monstrous government handout machine is taking care of people who are satisfied to loll around in subsidized housing stuffing their bloated bodies on handed-out food. Christians are still called to help people who want to be men and women, not maggots; who want to give as well as take, and relate to the rest of society on equal terms. Helping people like that sounds like, "Thank you, Sir and Madame, for your willingness to help us invest our funds in our own community. Here are some things we know we need; can you help with those, or have you any other suggestions?" 

5. Because discrimination, oppression, and petty persecution of introverts as such take place in so many churches, I learned to find my Christian fellowship among other Christian writers--by reading their books--before I had the blessing of finding it in a like-minded husband, and again after he died. I was tempted to chortle at the people who felt that their spiritual lives were being cut off when churches were closed during the coronavirus panic. Yes, churchgoers do touch too much, often as a display of one of those little social hierarchies extroverts love and thus a display of disrespect for the human rights of those at the lower end, and yes, the touching spreads infectious diseases. Seventh-Day Adventists, the group with whom I spent the most time, love to remind people of the dramatically lower rates of cardiovascular disease and venereal disease and some forms of cancer in the church. Yes, their old traditional rules of abstinence (which most churches have recently discarded) did reduce the risk of several deadly diseases. But does that mean that students at a  Seventh-Day Adventist school are healthier than students at the nearby public school? No, the Adventists have more colds! It was healthy that these people were told to stay home and stop coughing on one another. 

Older churches sometimes placed physical barriers between different pews on the same benches to reduce the disease germ exchange rate in church. Separate chairs, well spaced, would be an even better idea if ministers could get over their infatuation with the idea of preaching to a packed hall, however few people have to be packed onto one bench to achieve the right look in some churches. But more services preached to better spaced congregations might be a beneficial change. 

Meanwhile Christians might have considered that, as my delightful "Aunt Dotty" once put it, after passively attending Sunday School for years one does start to feel ready to graduate. We never outgrow the need to be fed, and when the themes for the quarterly lesson guides start to repeat we can probably benefit from a little review, but some of us may need to be spending more of our time in active service rather than classroom study. We are told to prepare for times of active persecution that may go far beyond shutting down the disease germ exchanges. Perhaps we needed to have the churches locked down so that we could develop ways for each believer to minister to one or two others, at a good healthy distance, in private homes or outdoors.

I am of course writing this without trying very hard to understand the plight of people whose lives were dramatically changed by quarantine rules--people who had packed themselves into such overcrowded places that they had nowhere to soak up sunshine alone, who could shop only on the way home from jobs that released big crowds of people at one time, who lived in apartment blocks and were ordered to avoid common areas by basically staying in their flats for days on end. I've only been saying for years that people should get out of those situations if they've got into them, in the first place. Helping one another escape from slums would be a worthwhile use of church funds.

So...now perhaps you can understand why, although I have no problem with abstinence from drinking and gambling and even painting an artificial "sex flush" onto my face, and I do believe that Saturday is the proper day for rest and worship and that Christ could return to this world in a physical form at any time, I could be classified as a very "liberal" Seventh-Day Adventist if I were classifiable as being one at all. I think we can all benefit with a dialogue with the world beyond the denominational publishing ghetto, anyway. I don't think Christians need to consider ever being Muslims, Buddhists, or Pagans, but instead of agonizing about the fact that our friends left their parents' churches to affiliate with those groups, I think we can stand to ask why, what real spiritual benefit they felt they were not getting from Christianity and were finding wherever else they went. If we belong to churches that have inadvertently hired the Reverend Doctor Trendfollower, we can probably benefit from a dialogue with him (her, it, them) too.

And then we can fairly and reasonably require Trendfollower to bring per little petros of a self back to the Petras, to reaffirm the foundation of faith we all have in common. And if person can't do that, person may very reasonably be dismissed from church employment, or even church membership.

There are things the Bible just does not teach, that a Bible-based church cannot endorse. 

"Gay" is not "as good as straight," even if "straight" were understood to mean merely heterosexual. When "straight" was used as slang in the United States it actually meant honest, "straightforward," frank, single-minded--it was the antonym of "hypocritical" and "phony," not of "gay." I think the pejoration of the use of "straight" may indicate something about some people's phobia of the idea that other people are actually finding it possible to live by their moral standards. But the fact remains that the Bible teaches us to choose between two physical uses for whatever sexual feelings we have: either get married and have a baby, or stay single and don't take chances. The Bible says nothing against expressing affection in other ways except that one specific male homosexual act (the act most likely to spread AIDS) is an abomination. 

Sex work is not the unpardonable sin. Whether it was on Mary Magdalene's list or some other saint's, we are not told, but we are clearly told that sex workers can become saints. Sex work is, however, a sin members of the church are called ro renounce, if they have ever committed it or been tempted by it.

Jesus was a man. Jesus prayed to His heavenly Father. God in God's mercy may hear our prayers to whatever name we know. God may be trusted to recognize when "re-imaging God" is a way of praying through emotional trauma, and when it is a blasphemous mockery of prayer. We are not qualified to judge which individuals are doing what. We can say, though, that making a blasphemous mockery of prayer is very close to being the unpardonable sin. The unpardonable sin is not to repent, but making a blasphemous mockery of prayer is hard to repent of.

Christians are called to help the poor, and if they think that supporting a socialist government is a way around doing that, themselves, they need to talk to more actual poor people who have survived the horrors of socialism, the sucking bog of welfarism, and/or the joy of profitable self-employment. Talk about racism and other forms of bigotry, real and perceived, and what triggers people's feelings that they may be being victimized again, is all very well but it's not to be confused with actually helping the poor to stop being poor.

Christians are called to heal the sick, and one way the least trained and least fit among us can do that is by keeping our germs at a good healthy distance. The church should waste no time on bitterness about the mistakes this or that person made, presumably in good faith, during the coronavirus panic. Both sides made horrible mistakes. Virus deniers laughed at the idea that a chest cold could hurt anyone they knew, had coronavirus parties, and then watched friends die from the silly little virus that didn't cause any painful symptoms for them. Virus-panic-prone types urged friends and relatives to be vaccinated against the disease they'd already had, and then watched them die from reactions to the vaccine. (I didn't urge my Significant Other to have the vaccine--he urged me to have it--but he's gone, just the same.) All indicators for Christian forgiveness are present. But we can and should speak out, and thunderously, against any kind of vaccine mandates, or government mandates for any other medical treatment whatsoever, in any situation. We can uphold the God-given right of every person to free individual choice about their own medical treatment.

We can and should take a stand against the erosion of any kind of personal liberty, in the United States, that is currently being urged as a way to bring the United States back into compliance with old Europe so that we can enjoy the so-called benefit of a global government based in Europe--in other words, to restore colonialism, only this time under the more tyrannical rule of Brussels rather than the relatively benign one of London. 

We can even try, when and where people seriously believe such things are possible, to cast out the "devils" that might be inspiring bad ideas. Jesus did it. He also warned that such "devils" are likely to come back, after being cast out. In the same spirit in which I rebuke my own inner "devils" of temptation, I once commanded Satan to depart from a Christian who was verbally abusing me. (I am not attached to any belief about evil thoughts having independent personal lives, but I believe some thoughts are evil and need to be cast out.) The results were remarkable but not transformative...and Jesus said that, even for Him...

What the Bible writers advised Christians to do, when people or groups claim to be Christians but are not practicing what Jesus taught, was to drive ourselves out of those groups. (Or walk, roll, cycle away, as the case may be!) It may be necessary to banish people from our fellowship; it may be enough to separate ourselves from theirs. "Come out of Babylon," we are told, and "touch not the unclean thing." 

The Reverend Doctor Trendsetter may need to walk into a large hall and find himself preaching to empty seats, as the sincere Christians meet elsewhere and the ones who merely came for the social experience are not finding the right members of society at church any more.