RSS Feed

Category Archives: Thoughts

Uncle Sugar is Bad Theology, as well as creepy.

Posted on January 28, 2014 by megancastellan
Last week, I was at a meeting for about 2 hours.  When I wandered back to my computer, the Interwebz were spinning themselves into a tizzy.  A politician of a certain stripe had said this in a speech:

“If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government then so be it! Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be,” Huckabee said.

Huckabee argued that Democrats “think that women are nothing more than helpless and hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have the government provide for them birth control medication.”

“The fact is the Republicans don’t have a war on women, they have a war for women, to empower them to be something other than victims of their gender,” Huckabee said.

(Emphasis mine.)

source: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/huckabee-dems-tell-women-they-can-t-control-their-libido


And this is how he defended his comments later:

My whole point was that the women I know are intelligent, thoughtful, educated, capable of running things, capable of making big decisions – and they didn’t need the government to hold their hands. They were not victims of their gender. (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/25/huckabee-defends-comments-as-miley-cyrus-cosmo-weigh-in/)

Ah.

Well, then.

Let’s agree, shall we, that there are a few problems with his line of thought (birth control doesn’t work like that, Uncle Sugar sounds like a nightmarish cartoon villain, that’s not how apologies work, biology was taught in his school district, yes?, etc) the one that really caught me was the last line.

‘To empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.‘

That, right there.  That’s the real kicker.

Because this implies a worldview where my gender, by virtue of it being a girly one, might attack me.  Might sneak up and bludgeon me with a candlestick, smother me with a pillow while I sleep, make me snuggle a kitten, do all manner of unspeakable things to me.

But it definitely renders me less-than, second-class, vulnerable, somehow.  I must fight my gender, lest I become a victim of it.*

In Mike Huckabee’s world, if you weren’t born a man (or white, or straight, or rich, or any number of things), then you’re already a step behind, you’re already a problem, and you better fight like hell not to fall entirely victim to your unfortunate lot in life.

And the minute you say it out loud, you should hear the problem here.  (If you’re not Mike Huckabee, whom I’ve decided was wearing earplugs during this speech.)

If women all might fall victim to their gender in your mind, then there’s no way women are created equal in your mind.  Especially when compared to men, who, curiously, are not described as needing to corral their gender.

Women are then just imperfect, incomplete men–It’s Thomas of Aquinas’ theory, back from its medieval casket–and as such, they can’t be trusted or treated as equals.

Why, oh why, oh why, does this nonsense get trotted out by modern-day Christians?  Mike Huckabee is a Baptist pastor.  He should know better, in at least 17 different ways.**

I understand that Thomas “T-Bone” Aquinas is amazing, and well-loved.  He was very smart.  But a.) He was one guy. b.) He lived in the Middle Ages.  Picture what he would have done with an iPhone. c.) Even he was aware that he was frequently wrong.

Which brings me to my final point.

God created male and female in the image and likeness of God.  All genders. Everybody.  God wasn’t working through some issues, or working out some kinks in the system.  God is God, and doesn’t make trash.  (And I’m surprised I have to point that out to folks who rely on that EXACT POINT when it comes to evolution, but irony is fun for us all, I suppose.)

If you’re convinced that 51% of the world’s population is made faulty in some way that they must be on guard against, then that’s a really awful slander against their Creator.  I mean, yikes. Either God is really bad at his job in your mind, or God is just getting a bit sadistic with a whole lot of people.

No God I know would do that.  No God I read about in the gospel does that.  No God whom Jesus describes would do that.

The God I know made me as I am on purpose: an opinionated, sarcastic woman who is very fond of shoes and waves her hands around too much.   The God I know makes each of us, like a different fingerprint, on purpose, because this God is tickled by variety.  Each different person, a new facet of God’s image.  Like a new side of a prism, shining in the light.   And each side, a gift.

I wrote last week that nothing convinced me more of an all-powerful Creator than being reminded of the diversity of people.

To flatten this variety into ‘better-than’ vs ‘less-than’ is to flatten God out, too.

So, while Gov. Huckabee is worried about women being ‘victims of their gender‘, he should be worrying about God falling victim to his poor theology.

*I’m not sure what this entails in Mike Huckabee’s mind.  Buy a switchblade?  Stop wearing heels?  Take up kickboxing?  He doesn’t elaborate. HOW SHOULD I DEFEAT MY GENDER, GOV. HUCKABEE?!

**and that’s not counting the fact that in any local church, women have kept everything running since Jesus learned to walk.  Seriously, Mike Huckabee.  Cross the Altar Guild or the ECW one day and see what happens.

They are the ones who knock, Governor.  Mark my words.

3 Comments

Posted in Thoughts and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Christmas with South Sudan

Posted on January 24, 2014 by megancastellan
St. Paul’s hosts a Sudanese mission congregation every Sunday at 1pm.  Their priest, John,  comes in, and leads worship for them every week, after most of us have left.  I pass them in the halls as they enter, and we say hello.  But normally, for the congregations, the most contact we have with each other is to wonder idly how an Arabic Bible ended up in our pew.
But in the last months, the world has watched as the newly formed nation of South Sudan has been ripped apart by violence, in what feels like a bad replay of the Sudanese civil war of the 1990s.  For our Sudanese congregation here, the violence was happening to brothers, sisters, parents, neighbors.  Everyone they’d left behind in South Sudan to come here.  Pastor John would call the office, with accounts of late-night phone calls from South Sudan: people heard from, and people still missing.
It’s been our practice to unite the two congregations for the late Christmas Eve service.  This year it seemed to me to be especially appropriate, as we traded song verses and prayers, back and forth, English and Dinka.  Fr. Stan, Pastor John, and I stood side by side behind the altar at the consecration, singing the sanctus and the Lord’s Prayer in our own varied languages, as we asked the Holy Spirit to come among us.
The vastness of nature as a barometer of God’s transcendence I’ve always thought was overrated.  Nature is lovely, very big, but also impersonal.  Nature doesn’t convince me of God.
What always impresses me with God’s vastness is people.
In our complexity, and our infinite diversity, and all the myriad ways we come up with to damage ourselves and creation.
And all the myriad ways we come up with to do better, and be utterly amazing.
So here we all of us were, on Christmas, all together in all our variedness, praying for Kansas City, and Bor, for those killed and those missing, and those doing the fighting.  For the refugees, and the politicians.  For everyone here and everyone there.  Such a rising chorus of prayer.
And at the heart of all of those prayers–a little helpless Divine Infant, who came to share in our vast, marvelous human diversity.

Leave a comment

Posted in Thoughts and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

On Preaching, Part 3

Posted on October 17, 2013 by megancastellan

Oh hey, and we’re done!  If you’ve been cowering somewhere in a corner, waiting for this meta- preaching blog series to end, hooray!  Almost there!

Part 1 is here.  Part 2 is here.

5. It’s alive.

There is an ongoing debate over whether manuscripts are evil, or whether the pulpit confines the Spirit, and roaming down on the floor is the only way to go.  Those are primarily cosmetic, I think.

The important thing to bear in mind is that any good sermon happens as a chemistry experiment between you, the Spirit, the moment and place in time where you are preaching, and the people who hear it.  Remove or change one of those elements, and it won’t work.

So you have to go into sermon-prep paying attention to ALL those elements.  Not just the ones that seem obvious.

You can’t get so caught up in the intricacies of the text that you forget that the people you’re talking to have to pay bills and go to school and work the next morning.  And you can’t get so involved in the grind of daily life that you forget to listen to the text, and the whisper of God.

Your job, as preacher, is to let the elements interact.  How does the text speak to people with jobs, to people who have retired?  To people whose spouse has just died, or whose parent has just died?  To people who have just had a baby or gotten married?  To people who have just started at a new school and don’t know anyone, or whose biggest problem is learning fractions?

And how does the text speak to the whole gathered community, in this moment in time?  How does this text sound different today, than it did three years ago?

At every point, while reading, while thinking, while writing, and while speaking, you need to leave room for the Spirit.  On a practical level, this means that, regardless of whether you use a full manuscript, notes, outline or memorize it, you need to know your sermon well enough that you can be watching your congregation at least 80% of the time.  It’s in this watching that the chemistry happens–you’ll know when you need to add something, change something, get louder or softer, in order to keep your audience with you.  And it frees you up if you realize halfway through that you need to go in a slightly different direction than you’d planned.

In this way, good preaching is like good liturgy (perhaps good anything)—you should prepare so much in advance that everyone watching assumes that you aren’t trying at all.

6. All you need is love.

I really love preaching.  For one thing, I don’t mind public speaking. Not everyone shares this affinity, which I understand.  (A priest I knew once told me he still took blood pressure medication before he preached, to help with nerves.  He’s a bishop now.)

But more importantly, preaching is an opportunity to talk about something that matters with people you care about each week.  That comes from love.

You need to love the people you preach to, or at least, be able to access God’s love for them (if you don’t know them).  And you need to love the message you’re telling them, or at least what it will do for your common life.

You can’t give a good sermon out of anger*, or disinterest, or annoyance, or disappointment, or anything else, really. Good sermons come out of being fired up with excitement about how much you like these people, and how much you want to tell them this ONE GREAT THING you’ve discovered.  As a preacher, you’re like a kid who worked all day on a finger painting, and all you want to do is show your mom when she comes to pick you up.

That level of excitement.

And that comes only from love.

And once you find that, you’ll be an unstoppable, utterly awesome, preacher.

*I should clarify that: anger, in general, isn’t bad.  Anger at injustice has led to some incredible sermons.  But it’s always rooted back in profound love for the people you’re serving.  Not at them.  There’s a big difference.

2 Comments

Posted in Thoughts and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

On preaching, Part 1

Posted on October 15, 2013 by megancastellan

A few weeks ago, a friend from Arizona wrote and asked me if I’d come up with some do’s and don’ts of preaching for a seminarian. “Something short, off the top of your head,” he urged.

My friend is a wonderful person, but I have never not had multiple opinions on anything. So coming up with a Buzzfeed-worthy listsicle on preaching wasn’t in the cards.

What I tried to do, instead, was to think about what made sermons compelling to me, and what I’ve learned in the short time I’ve been preaching.

Here’s what I came up with.

It is long, so this will be broken up into three posts, over three days.

On Preaching:
I have lots of thoughts about preaching, because I have lots of thoughts about pretty much everything. But I’ll do my hardest to contain myself, and put them into some sort of understandable format.

1. The pulpit is powerful.

This isn’t a do or don’t, so much as a rule that undergirds the rest.
When you step up to preach, you assume a lot of authority—whether ordained or not—by virtue of the fact that you are speaking within the liturgy, and as Episcopalians, it would take no less than the return of Jesus Himself for a congregant to stand up and contradict you openly. (And even then, I’m pretty sure the Altar Guild would consider it very bad form.) You have so many minutes to speak to your people about your common life and what God is up to and those people aren’t going anywhere. It’s the very definition of a captive audience (You are quite literally preaching to the choir) and what’s more, the vast majority of that audience will put, at least, some stock in what you’re saying.
It’s both a golden opportunity to say something important and life-affirming, and a huge risk to say something hurtful and alienating if you aren’t careful. So never underestimate the power of the pulpit, for good or for ill.

That being said…

2. Don’t lie from the pulpit.

Don’t EVER lie from the pulpit.
This may sound like a no-brainer, but I’m amazed at how often I hear people do it, and mostly unintentionally. Things like saying “When Matthew wrote this story…” (anyone who’s taken EFM knows that’s not how it went down), or glossing over textual contradictions. (I about walked out of church once in college when I heard a lay reader declare that this was “a lesson from Deuteronomy, which was written by Moses.” Gah.)
But there’s another layer to this, too—don’t feel the need to ‘prettify’ the Bible. Don’t smooth away the parts of the parables that make no sense, don’t try to pretend that the Johannine Jesus is more comprehensible than he is, don’t ignore the violence and the awful gender politics and the excuses for slavery that runs through the Bible.
Don’t lie by omission.
If you don’t directly address the ugly parts of the Bible, and the parts that don’t make sense, then people are left to either adopt whatever interpretation they hear, or just continue in a vague fog of Biblical misunderstanding left over from the 1930s. Neither one have served us well. You’re the preacher. It’s your job to expound and confront that text. Sometimes your job will be hard, but that doesn’t mean you get to avoid it. If there are no good answers, say that. If it’s a hard story, say that.
The more you can confront and name the discomfort in the safety of the liturgy, the more your people can confront and name the discomfort in the wider world.

2 Comments

Posted in Thoughts and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Yes, and….Part 2

Posted on August 3, 2013 by megancastellan

If you’re just joining us, you can read Part 1 here. You can read Rachel Held Evans’ original post here.
And now, there’s more!

3. There are Millennials who like to go to church.

Sweet 7lb, 9oz baby Jesus.
There actually are young adults in our churches. We are not Bigfoot.
But, honestly, it does, on occasion, become exhausting to go to a church (even one where you are, say, the supply priest for the week) only to hear how “You really should be out having fun, not being in boring old church! You’re way too young for this!”
Or “Wow. I only expect to see folks like you here after they get married and have kids! How old are you anyway?”
Look:
I like church. I’ve always liked church, ever since I was a baby. Seriously. There are colorful things to look at, there are pretty songs to sing. There is incense sometimes. Sometimes, there’s stuff to light on fire.
Church is how I learned to read, and it’s how I learned to read music. It’s how I learned that people other than my parents liked me. It’s where I got lollipops every week when I was a kid. It’s where I learned to speak in public, and read aloud, and not gag on wine.
This is not counting the mystery, transcendence, and magic, and beauty, and transformation, and awe and wonder.
So, please, do me a favor. Next time you see someone you don’t expect at church, someone who surprises you….just tell them that you’re happy that they’re there. And assume that they’re there to enjoy the same experience of God as you.

4. Millennials do stay. We should find out why.

This was wisely pointed out by Meghan Florian who points out that most young adults are in the church now because someone invited them in: asked them to join the Altar Guild, or teach a class, or help with something, or run for vestry. (She doesn’t say it, but this would be where programs like Young Adult Service Corps and Episcopal Service Internship become vital.)

But also, it should be stated, it starts before that.
I stayed in the church because when I was eight, I decided, in my childhood wisdom, a.) that my church needed a Christmas pageant and b) the reason we didn’t have one was that no one had written one yet. (My logic had some holes.)
Therefore, I took it upon myself that summer to write one, on my parents’ typewriter.
For whatever reason, I decided it needed to be a modern interpretation. Mary and Joseph were teenagers, who wore very ugly clothing, which prompted their removal from several chain hotels, before finally giving birth in the parking garage of a Doubletree Inn. Then, “they wrapped him in oily rags, and laid him in a hubcap.” (It goes on from there.) (There may be rapping involved. It was the early 90s.)
Not knowing what to do with me, my mother told me to show our rector my story. To his eternal credit, Fr. Ted did not immediately expel me to the outer darkness where dwell those who mock the Glorious Birth of Our Dear Savior. Instead, he laughed really hard, and said, “Oh great! Now we have a Christmas pageant!” He threw the weight of the church behind it, and we performed it that year. (And Fr. Ted went on to be bishop in Kentucky.)

As a result, in later years, when I was told that I was too young to have written a newsletter article, or I was too young to consider ordination, I didn’t hear it as the church telling me No. I heard it as evidence that the church was momentarily broken, so I should hold out for a bit, or else, fix it. Because the church wasn’t really like that. And sure enough, I eventually found a church community that thought me plenty qualified to write and seek ordination and do pretty much whatever else.

Moral is: when you welcome people (ALL PEOPLE. Even, and especially kids.) and treat them like they’re important and valued members of your community, then they will generally come to love and value your community in return.

And isn’t that what Jesus would do?

Leave a comment

Posted in Thoughts and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.
← Older Posts
Newer Posts →