2024.07.07 Who DID Write the New Testament Anyway? Lyn G. Brakeman, blog post

When I read biblical readings about politics, the politics of St. Paul stand out! Paul  frantically wrote to fulfill his calling to spread the good news preached by Jesus of Nazareth, or Galilee, or Ephesus, or Corinth, or in your heart. Paul was a convert, not programmed to endear many, and admitting he was wrong—sometimes.   

I remember the omnipresent and ever-irritating examination question in the final exam for the course in New Testament at Yale Divinity School. Students knew it was coming. We had been well prepared. We knew our stuff, yet everyone quivered.

WAS there a “right” answer? 

The question:  Who wrote the New Testament, Jesus or Paul? 

                                   *  *  * *  

I plunged fearlessly in with every intention of making my case for Jesus. I ended up with Paul. Why? In short, my personality is just like Paul’s. Thanks to the patriarchal culture of  his day (mine as well!) it took time. This Jesus was not selling yet another religion, or himself as THE Messiah, but rather a gospel full of parabolic stories about people who broke rules for the sake of justice. It got Jesus crucified of course, but Paul picked up the roots and the wings by which ALL Creation could connect and live peacefully. 

The Great Commandment: Do NOT do to others what you would not have them do to you. God, how boldly simple that is?  To call it LOVE is dramatically misleading. You simply have to treat all living things (land, plants, animals, yourself, all neighbors) with compassion and respect, just as their Creator does.  

                             *  *  *  * 

In the 1970s in the Episcopal Church, I jumped into my own simmering desire to stand behind an altar as a priest of the Eucharist, rather than kneel at a rail, my hands up, my tongue extended, begging to be fed. I know “they” called such a posture humility, but I experienced it as humiliating. 

The Episcopal Church had its own hoops through which an aspirant would jump.The screening committee told me I would be embarking on a “dual vocation.” I could not be a mother AND a priest. I thought of Paul rushing about nagging anyone who would listen, grabbing himself a travel companion, revising his manuscript as he went, and traversing a huge desert called “holy.” I followed. 

It took me well over the expected time it took anyone to get ordained. I did not get tossed into prison like Paul, but if I had I’d have tried to sing hymns, as Paul did. Like Paul, I found friends and allies along my way. Also, I wrote letters to God who from the beginning had listened to my ramblings, dwelled in my heart, and taken me seriously. 

*  *  *  *

My memoir, God Is Not a Boy’s Name. Becoming Woman. Becoming Priest, was published in 2016. Like Paul, I’ve continued to hammer and chisel away at the patriarchal armor through which the expansive love of God continues to shine, no matter what. Like Paul, I trusted divine omnipresence more than divine omnipotence. Paul’s first letter to the squabbling new churches in Corinth felt familiar. “The Spirit searches everything—even the depths of God. . .” (I Cor. 2)

Paul never gave up, broke every law on the books, fiercely and naively insisted that divinity was greater than all our imaginings. He did not found any single church! WE did. 

*  *  *  *

So who did write the New Testament? Paul of course! Jesus didn’t have time to write!

Now I’m 85 years old. I’m still talking and writing without ceasing about that steadfast God Paul trusted. Me too.

 

5/19/2024 PENTECOST. Lyn G. Brakeman. Spiritual Lemons, blog post.

Once I preached a sermon at Pentecost in which I declared that this day when we celebrate the MINISTRY of the Holy Spirit, NOT the arrival of that unitive spirit of God! She has been here from the beginning of all Creation. 

After the Sunday worship ended with a dismissal, a woman came to me and said: “But Pentecost is the BIRTHday of the CHURCH!” I chose to disagree but not argue. 

How in the world could we Christians restrict/confine the spiritual activity of the ONE GOD /CREATOR to one day, one people, one time, one religion, one church, one doctrine, one spirit called holy?  

HUMBUG.  

*  *  *  * 

I am extremely pleased that the Diocese of Massachusetts elected a woman for our diocesan bishop, a first. Her speech was short, sweet and tender. We so need such a voice, such a clear softness without sloppiness.  “I will love you,” she said. 

And Connecticut already elected its first (as far as we know) openly gay diocesan bishop.

Pretty soon the HS Herself will penetrate the Roman Catholic patriarchy too!  The present pope is on it—slowly and surely, trying not to become a dead martyr like Lincoln or Kennedy, et. al. 

As to Pentecost, the Holy Spirit Herself must not, can not, should not, will not be disregarded for Her inclusive non-gendered politics. This Holy Spirit did not arrive on one day, in one doctrine, inhabiting one gender, one religion, dressed in one color, for god’s sake! Jesus was a Jewish man on earth.  The Risen Christ has no gender, no one religion. Plus, we’ve always been smart enough to pray with and to all the Mamas!    

Ya think the Spirit of Pentecost has ONE gender?!   Or ONE religion?   Or ONE doctrine?  Or ONE people?  ONE history or ONE story? Good lawd ‘amighty.  

Get a grip peoples. 

2020.06.07 Trinity Sunday

Today, for Christians, is Trinity Sunday. To keep it simple, Trinity means Diversity within Unity, neither compromising the other— all of it divine.

The Trinity is a vision to emulate, especially at this time in the United States of America—a time when we are struggling to be united and free of our original and ongoing sin of rank-ordering our common humanity according to skin color, sexuality, social class, ability, political leanings, mental health, or religious preferences. We are murdering each other, thanks to this sin-sick practice.

I do not need to rehearse the events in history or just last week; nor do I need once again to remind us all about the purposeful misinterpretation of the Creator’s charge to humanity to care for all creation. Dominion does not mean domination, unless rank-ordering is the ethic, a practice that destroys Oneness, Diversity and Goodness.

As a therapist and spiritual director and priest I know that deep wounds interrupt the flow of Life itself. There are many ideas out there about what America’s wounds are. Racial injustice tops the list right now. I agree, yet I think the deeper wound is that we Americans are afraid.
    -afraid of ourselves
    -afraid of each other
    -afraid not to be great
    -afraid to be great
    -afraid to weep rather than shout,
    -afraid even to touch our wound.

Slowly, yet deliberately,
I touch the painful place.
I don’t know why;
I just need to.

Is there a strange kind of comfort in acknowledging the
pain?
The wound?

Strangely, the rollercoaster slows.
I hear the words,
“Pay attention. This is your life. This is Sacred.”

                                     
Mary Ann Bigelow, Spiritual Director, above words first published in 
Presence, International Journal of Spiritual Direction, March, 2020

To heal our wound we—together— must touch it, hallow it, give it belonging, a voice, bless it, talk about it in conversation, pray it, make it holy.  This is spiritual intelligence. This is Trinity.

P.S. Happy 86th Wedding Anniversary, Mom and Dad. 

2019.03.03 Annual, Annual, Annual—Perennial

The annual meeting of an Episcopal parish church can be an occasion for groaning and dread among parish leaders. Our own parish annual meeting this year was quite different from the usual saved-up and savored gripe session.

First, it happened later than usual, because of the rector’s three-month absence as he healed from an accident, followed  immediately by the election as bishop of his spouse—an obvious move out of the diocese for the bishop-elect and our rector. The result of all this was that the annual meeting, frankly, left little room for more than business (confirm a budget and elect officers), kudos and appreciations, and a few well-bestowed gifts.

The normal tenor of many a parish annual meeting, and I’ve seen my share, wasn’t present. I’ve learned to expect:
    -long-held complaints, aired annually for their own sake
    -the annual question from the annual questioner who protests the parish’s annual assessment for diocesan ministries, read, poor-little-us, followed by the same explanation—it’s your taxes, get a grip!
    -what’s a bishop really worth—we only see her or him annually at best, and even then, we have to put on the dog with a super duper coffee hour
    - contesting a slate of officers with the secret wish that you yourself would be nominated by acclaim
    -self-nominations from the floor, which instigates a challenge, requiring a lengthy debate
    -endless budgetary petty picking like why do we spend so much on envelopes? 

All too often the loudest annual-only complainers are those who rarely attend on Sundays, seldom help with parish fund raisers or attend other annuals, like the fair, the rummage sale, Easter. I exaggerate for humor’s sake of course—but not too much.

Honestly, I was grateful that there was no petty tedium this year. Perhaps that’s because we have extremely capable and efficient parish officers and a treasurer who knows how to “treasure” money properly. Perhaps it’s because people were caught up in their own anger and uncertainty, reversal of expectations, fear about the future, pain at the thought of more change, trying to feel joy for the bishop-elect—and yes, plain old abandonment. I don’t know. I do know that I felt more sure than ever I have that this small community will thrive, financially and spiritually and that it will not be by some grace-in-the-sky miracle, but because of the Spirit’s lithe and effective use of our own focused efforts and gifts and prayers.

Lent and buried Alleluiahs aside, we are in Easter now. NOW.   

Henceforth therefore, I will think of Annual Meetings as perennials—Lilies or my favorite black-eyed Susans.

Perennials are enduring, recurring, and apparently infinite. Perennials symbolize hope. They are faithful. They show up. They are like us. Like the Church that goes up and down and dies, not quite, and returns again ready to bloom. Why? Because we keep on planting—day by day and year by year. We sing perennial hymns. We pray perennial prayers and variations thereof, generation to generation. We keep on doing what our founder insisted on—over and over and over—because we are perennials of hope, no matter what.


P.S. I cannot help but add this stunning metaphor the Warden used to describe the parish church. He said "We are getting this stagecoach moving on time and up to speed." Stagecoach? Yippee Kayay!😂😃 

2013.07.14 Ask the Beasts: Spirituality and the Evolving Earth

“Ask the beasts and they will teach you;
    the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth an they will teach you;
           and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among those does not know
    that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing,
    and the breath of every human being.”  (Job 12:7-10) 

Yesterday at Boston College I heard a brilliant talk by Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, professor of theology at Fordham. She used as her biblical text the above passage from the biblical book of Job.

Poor old Job, impatient for a change in traditional theological thought and having to suffer further because of righteous friends who kept insisting that his sufferings and loss must be divine retribution. Just search your soul, confess, repent and be right with God, they said. 

NO, NO, NO said Job, you’re full of claptrap. I did NOT cause my misfortunes. I am innocent. Just ask the beasts—and every living thing. (This means plants, animals and people—all)

So how do all these living things answer? 
    Their science story: We all evolved over 3.5 billion years. We are all connected in a grand molecular/biological schema on a tree of life and continue to modify, branch and diversify in order to grow and multiply. The more diversified we become the more success each species will have in life.  One beast has evolved with no diversification—the horseshoe crab. One plant the same—the jingo tree. Some of us, of course, will die out.
    Their theology story: We all owe our origins in existence to God. God will transform us into a new creation, a future of life with God who never abandons. Most importantly, God sustains us moment to moment—creatio continua. This is the Tree of Life, home of every living thing.

Johnson's core point was that all living things evolve, thrive in the same intricately connected ecological web, and are in the hand of God/the Lord—now and forever.  Divine creativity is active all the time or there would be no world! AND, "pay attention to biology!"

In ancient times science and religion agreed on these convergences. Darwin was a faithful scientist, a beholder of every living thing. Unlike some righteous religionists (like Job's friends) Darwin shined praises on the minutiae of biological life in a way that brought about his theory of evolution.

He wrote "...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." He marveled that the bone structure of the human hand (for grasping), the mole’s paw (for digging), the fish’s fin (for paddling), and the bird’s wing (for flying) are all exactly the same skeletally. 

So what happened?  The history is too much for me to go into here, but you might say the same hubris that motivated the putative apple caper in Eden caused humanity to forget that it was only ONE species among every living thing that God held in hand.  We placed ourselves at the top of an ascendancy scale. We're still doing it! Recently the Occupy Movement made witness to such hubris.  Johnson's case, however, was that we humans have left every living thing except ourselves behind, discounted, outside of our concern and God's as well. 

How will we heal this rending?  Ironically, by not paying so much attention to sin and the spiritual state of our own narcissistic souls and looking out the window at the whole order of which we are one part. "LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!!" Johnson said. "We need a robust pneumtology."

It is She, the Holy Spirit who in our Christian Nicene Creed is called "the giver of life." The Latin words mean vivifier.  I can't resist commenting here that I would so love it if we could at least stop referring to the Holy Spirit as HE in the creed. Please! Three men on top—too much. 

Tears came to my eyes more than once as Johnson talked about the Spirit— the spiritual radiance of  plants and animals as well as human beings. 

LOOK OUT THE WINDOW. LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF NATURE. GET OVER YOURSELF.

A few irresistible wise tidbits that beg to be heard:
    -Creation is a cosmic event.
    -Deep Incarnation means that God in the flesh goes beyond Jesus' flesh, even beyond human flesh,  and into the flesh of the whole natural living world—every living thing again. Flesh ( Greek sarx)  means everything that is vulnerable, perishable, fragile and transitory. That's the whole enchilada.  
    -The Exultet Christians chant at the Easter Vigil begins with: Rejoice all earth...(not all humanity)
    -The extinction of a species means the end of birth (Darwin) 27,000 species are lost each year!  We are a species!
    -For Christians: Jesus is made of the same molecular dust as we all are. In Christ’s resurrection the earth itself arose. Resurrection redeems from DEATH, not just sin!
    - Birds have the power to fly; for the ancients birds went where humans couldn’t reach, so the bird, symbol of the Goddess of Love, became the symbol for the the divine Spirit in both testaments of the Bible.
    -There are two bibles: Nature and Scripture
   
If the Church is too tied into the resources of corporate wealth to divest from fossil fuel investments, then the Church is irrelevant and voiceless, as mostly it has been already.  (NB the United Church of Christ has just voted to divest, and so did the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.)
 “If you push for such things, you may end up despised,” Johnson said with a compelling grin.

When I went home I rushed to Genesis and back to the Garden of Eden. I knew all about the good and evil morality tree whose fruit was death.  But wasn’t there another special tree?  

YES.... in Genesis 3:22: the tree of life. The story gives us a glimpse no more of an opportunity for humanity “to reach out his/her hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 

We can perpetuate the schema of the great Darwinian/ biblical Tree of All Life.  The beasts and all green life ask no less of us than to act now to save the earth, to help God’s creatio continua.

Is NOW the time to reach with all our might and wit and resources for that tree of life and save all earth—and ourselves with it?

IF NOT NOW, WHEN? 




   

2013.03.17 Stormy Weather?

It’s amusing to watch the weather people this winter here in New England.  They usually don’t get much air time, but with all these storms they are front and center in our living rooms.  Weather newscasters shout the latest disaster and its terrific drama almost ecstatically. They dance close to roiling waters, mikes in hand, while nearly being soaked by a blast of sea, or blown over by a fresh strong gust of snow-wind. 

The weather is Cecil B. DeMille calibre.

But I’m tired of everything, from the latest economic news to D.C. political plots, being cast as a disaster, a catastrophe, a crisis. The “weather”of this culture is like the weather outside, so hyper it could blow us away.

Does everything have to be an opera in rehearsal? It’s hard to slow down, hard not to snap at people I love, hard to concentrate on what really matters when everything seems to demand attention—hard to love.

I even suffered the base theological temptation of wondering if God, through the weather, was getting even with us for being scornful and forgetting Divinity. We, as well as God, can get lost in the swift currents of a world in a panicky race. Many religious folks worry —silently or aloud—that God destroys as well as creates. But Godde has nothing to do with the weather. Nature’s will is as free as ours. And Love does not destroy.

Still, I’m tired of adrenaline rushes. My soul is ready for some peace. If it snows or blows or implodes I want to hear the news in a clear, calm way that gives the facts, advisories, and predictions.

There is a difference between an apocalypticist (the end is near and it isn't pretty, so get afraid now) and an eschatologist (we don't know how, or if, the world will end, so we live each day in hope).

Then a gift came my way.  It is a storm photo, but it’s not stormy. The bird mid-flight looks more like the Spirit to me than the “almighty” weather. She is free, lithe, peaceful, and true, in all weathers. Not dramatic, but so powerful—sort of like the white smoke over the Vatican, symbol of hope-in-flight.  We'll see.   Thank you.

2012.05.30 Necessary Drunkenness?

One of the scornful accusations leveled at the people in the pentecostal parable in the New Testament, in which hundreds went ecstatic and spoke and understood in many languages, was that these religious nuts were drunk! 

Excuses were quickly made by Peter: “No, no they can’t be drunk. It’s only 9 a.m.!”  When that story is read in church everyone usually laughs— out loud.

I’ve often made excuses about my spiritual experience, even though I’m not the ecstasy type. Anglo/WASP/New England, you know.

Not long ago we went to New York's Museum of Modern Art to see a special exhibit  featuring Willem deKooning’s  paintings of Woman and a major work, Excavation, his largest painting up to 1950. 

We liked Excavation but found it somewhat colorless, drab, and overly gray.  I felt guilty. This man was acclaimed. I remembered liking his work somewhere in my own ancient history, like college. Maybe it was because we were getting old and graying ourselves.

As we moved through the exhibit the paintings took on more color, flamboyance. And more abstraction. Nary a nose or a big eye to let you know there was supposed to be a person—and no outsized nippled breasts either! 

And we loved it!

Later I told an artist friend we’d been a bit disappointed by the work that had been touted as his best. She gave a wry snort and said something like “Well, the colorful stuff was painted when he was drinking more and more.” We laughed.

“Hey,” I told Dick. “The de Kooning stuff we liked the best was his alkie stuff!” 

Of course I know sobriety is a better bet, but there’s a reason why the Bible remembers the grandiose biblical story of collective spiritual ecstasy at Pentecost.  It wasn’t the first appearance of Spirit but this one was a big splash—rushing winds, tongues of fire.  They were speaking about God and God’s mighty deeds so I suppose anything could happen—and it did.

Peter’s attempt to explain it away, but certainly not as morning-after “drunkenness,” was funny.  

 About as funny as our preferring the alcohol-inspired work of a great artist.

I think everyone is an alcoholic at some level and some time, or at least we all go through necessary drunkenness to break into the divine outer, even for just a day or a minute or for the sake of a couple of blow-out paintings.