David's blog: Christianity

Sunday, December 3rd, 2006

Real Christians only, please

If you read my blog last month, you know already what ChMS stands for and that some ChMS companies don't care for churches who cater to alternative lifestyles. Despite a few setbacks my church's search for the right web-enabled ChMS has been continuing, with the latest possible candidate being Ekklesia 360, a system that does everything from managing web content to attracting online traffic to involving your community in the ministry to spreading the gospel.

Yes, gospel is spelled with a lower-case "g" on Ekklesia's website, although as it turns out, I'm thinking they should be capitalizing it, because The Gospel's pretty important to them. You see, after we contacted Ekklesia, they took a look at our website and told us they didn't want to do business with us, though not for the reason you might expect, that we're soft on homosexuality. No, it's because of the shocking news, featured on the front page of our website, that a Jew was coming to Cross Creek to preach, and not to preach the Good News that Jesus is Christ.

Rabbi Judy Chessin

Our Jewish guest this weekend was none other than Temple Beth Or's founding rabbi, Rabbi Judy Chessin, an interesting choice for the first weekend of Advent, the season during which we anticipate Christ's birth.

Rabbi Chessin did not come to proclaim that she was a Jew for Jesus but rather explained that she does not believe Jesus was the Messiah. She was quite tactful about it, explaining the criteria outlined in Jewish tradition for what it takes to be the Messiah. A person must fulfill every one of these criteria to be the Messiah, and at least one of them, worldwide peace, is a humdinger. Logically, Rabbi Chessin said, we wouldn't expect there ever to be someone who could qualify. Even Christians don't believe Jesus achieved world peace during his time on Earth, hence the need for a Second Coming.

However, it was our similarities, not our differences, that Rabbi Chessin wanted to stress. We all are waiting for the Messianic age, whether it is marked by the Messiah's return or by his (or her, Rabbi Chessin said) initial arrival. We all need to work together to bring about this time when there'll be no more injustice or ignorance or disease or poverty.

Ekklesia's not having any of this ecumenism (it can't be a coincidence that ecumenism about rhymes with secular humanism, can it?) though. If we're willing to have a rabbi, and a woman nonetheless, stand up in our church and say that Jesus isn't Christ, no matter what she might say about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men, then we're not Ekklesia's type of Christians, and God knows, if they took just any type of Christians, they might as well rename their software Ecumenia 360.

Friday, April 14th, 2006

This year was the first year that my church, Cross Creek Community Church, participated in the annual Good Friday Stations of the Cross walk for justice and peace, along with people from College Hill Presbyterian Church, our partner church. The walk combines the traditional stations with important social justice issues of today and relevant contemporary quotes about each issue. Our church's Justice and Witness committee thought it would be good for us to participate; we got to sponsor station 8, where we talked about discrimination.

So many people think that this week is all about Jesus' having died as part of some convoluted way through which his father could forgive us all for our sins (God couldn't just choose to extend grace to all of us?). Whether or not that is true, I do think that the historical Jesus was a witness for peace and justice, and by calling attention to issues he would have cared about, we take a step towards following his example.

You can see more pictures from the walk in the galleries.

Saturday, May 22nd, 2004

If you've browsed the books I've gotten lately, you might have noticed The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament. I haven't gotten too far in it since I only read it in bed. I usually read for pleasure just before going to sleep, but not for the reason you may be thinking (the book's not about gay erotic stories, although I do have a book or two of those).

Theodore Jennings' argument is that Jesus' beloved disciple, mentioned thusly only in the Gospel of John, was not only a man but Jesus' gay lover. I've never really considered this before, nor, I'd bet, have most people. Certainly people have considered that Jesus might not have been celibate, but perhaps the best known candidate as a mate for Jesus would be Mary Magdalene, especially given the popularity (notoriety?) of works such as The Last Temptation of Christ and The Da Vinci Code.

I wouldn't be upset if the people who think Mary Magdalene was Jesus' lover or wife are right, but they have some explaining to do about the disciple whom Jesus loved. Jesus did have more disciples than the 12 apostles, and some of those disciples were women, but Mary Magdalene was not the disciple whom Jesus loved. During the crucifixion (see John 19:25-27), Mary Magdalene stood at the cross with, among others, the disciple whom Jesus loved. Jesus then presented his mother Mary and that disciple to each other as son and mother, and Jesus' beloved took Mary into his home. So if Mary Magdalene were Jesus' lover and especially if she were the mother of his children (the Merovingian dynasty?!), why is Jesus sending Mary his mother to live with some man instead of with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren?

Of course there are many theories about Jesus' life, the predominant one being that he was celibate, sinless and divine (How can I consider myself Christian if I consider that just a theory? That'd be a whole other blog entry, if not a book). From what I've read so far Jennings does a pretty convincing job of dealing with these other theories, although he acknowledges that gay people may be predisposed to accepting that Jesus was gay (just as homophobes might be predisposed to reject such an argument).

In the chapter I'm reading now (5, "The Hidden Tradition"), Jennings reveals something that is not only surprising to me but that was also surprising to him, namely that this idea that Jesus and the disciple he loved were gay lovers is not new. For example, at the inquest of the death of Christopher Marlowe, one of the men accused of murdering him tried to justify it by complaining that Marlowe had said that "St. John [who many people, but not Jennings, think was the disciple Jesus loved] was bedfellow to Christ." That's just one example Jennings found. Accuse him of being a revisionist homosexual activist if you want, but he's not the only one.

Sunday, April 18th

Today was the last day of the Alliance of Baptists convocation held here in Dayton. I went to the worship service last night, at which the main speaker was Charles Kimball of Wake Forest University, to a dialogue this morning with James Fowler of the Emory University Center for Ethics and Public Policy Research, and to the worship service this morning, at which the main speaker was Karen Thomas Smith of Al Akhawayn University in Morocco.

Jeremiah Wright on Friday night was a very dynamic speaker, and I really enjoyed Karen Thomas Smith today.

The daughter of a Baptist preacher, she became one herself and now serves as ecumenical chaplain at Al Akhawayn, a university founded by the King of Morocco in part to promote dialogue and work among people of different faith backgrounds. Part of what she stressed was that Christians who try to convert people of other faiths not only cause others to question Christians' motives but also lose an opportunity to learn what other faiths have to teach. She's definitely a woman who believes that Jesus had some important things to teach us but that Jesus is not the sole path to a relationship with God and God's creation.

If that's not enough to make you realize that the Alliance of Baptists are different from their more fundamental brethren, two books I bought today at the convocation's bookstore might be. Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible on its own might be enough to rile some Southern Baptists, but The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament would certainly make them indignant.

Friday, April 16th, 2004

You may know that I'm a member of Cross Creek Community Church, and you may know that Cross Creek is part of the United Church of Christ, but did you know that Cross Creek is also affiliated with the Alliance of Baptists? Just as some people make certain assumptions when they hear the word Christian so too do they make similar assumptions when they hear Baptist. There are of course Baptists and Christians who are pretty vocal about their beliefs, thus fostering those assumptions, but

there are other Baptists and Christians who put a different emphasis on their beliefs. Southern Baptists might be representative of the former group; the Alliance of Baptists is representative of the latter.

Cross Creek's pastor, Mike Castle, comes from a Southern Baptist background, and after leaving the Southern Baptists and coming to the UCC (with a brief visit to the United Methodists), he wanted Cross Creek to have a connection to the Baptist tradition, at least the parts of that tradition that Cross Creek could affirm. So Cross Creek has been affiliated with the Alliance of Baptists since Cross Creek's founding.

Last year the UCC as a denomination decided to partner with the Alliance of Baptists along with the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ (with whom the UCC already partnered for foreign missions).

The theme for the convocation is "Lifting Our Lights Together: Celebrating Our Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations"

So to make a long story at least somewhat short, this year the 18th annual convocation of the Alliance of Baptists is being held here in Dayton, and Cross Creek is the host church, providing volunteers to staff tables, cook and serve food, house participants and other tasks. Since our building is too small for all the participants, the event is being held downtown at First Baptist Church, an American Baptist church that's also part of the Alliance of Baptists.

I chose an easy task for my volunteer duties, namely providing housing to a participant. My guest this weekend is David Reese, a religion major at Oberlin College. He's got an interesting web site, and apparently he's a comedian who's part of the group Piscapo's Arm.

I'm not participating in the workshops at the convocation, but I am going to the worship services. Tonight's started off fairly slow with all the officials of the hosting congregations and the three denominations taking a long time to say how glad they were that they, each other, and all of us were there. The pace picked up when Timothy Tutt, pastor of United Christian Church in Austin, Texas, explained ecumenism by comparing it to jazz, with some musical help from Winton Reynolds, Phil Borrero and Brad Taylor's jazz trio.

The highlight of the service was a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah H. Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. This man has a style that's decidedly "African American Baptist preacher," which had me wondering where he was going (was he heading to Biblical literalism? Jesus as Christ is the only path to God?), but by the middle of his sermon he was saying some things I could definitely agree with. I'd be very surprised if any members of his congregation were ardent Bush supporters or strident believers that homosexuality is a sin.

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