This post is intended to introduce you to me and to set the tone for future posts. I want to explain my past and my process. I want you to know where I came from, and how God met me there, but didn't leave me there. I hope this post, the blog as a whole, can help you on your journey of faith like so many helped me.
I grew up in a working class family in East Tennessee. My daddy's daddy and his daddy before him made moonshine. My daddy gave up the family business, but would still make wine out of Hawaiian punch leftover from VBS. If that's not enough to paint us as a stereotypical Appalachian family, I'll add that I once hit a deer with my truck on the way to pick my dad and brother up from a hunting trip. They didn't have their own kill, so we picked mine up on the way home. He was delicious.
We were also stereotypical in less fun ways. I was often told as a child not to put something in my mouth at the store because a black man may have touched it. It was the 90s, if you were wondering how a 110 year old was writing a blog. We were in church every time the doors were open. I went door to door with the youth group inviting people to church (the whole body cringe that thought gives me now is violent enough to count for my workout today). I went to the altar to get saved about a hundred times because an angry white man foaming at the mouth from behind the pulpit is real convincing and I didn't want to go to hell. I walked around in a cycle of "sin" and guilt, asking for forgiveness and promising to never do it again and still knowing that I was probably going to hell - even though I had been baptized in an actual river, which everyone knows is much more effective than an indoor container, twice - because I just couldn't get it right and I had serious doubts because some of this stuff just didn't make sense.
The Bible was the Infallible Word of God and God didn't seem to like us much. I remember laying in bed at night and wondering how could God send all the little kids in the jungle to hell because they hadn't been saved. How could they be when there was no white man there to save them?
Why did God make us exactly the way we are,
just to not like half of us
and send us to hell because of it?
Other things closer to home didn't make sense either. Like, why was my uncle allowed to be a preacher even though everyone knew he'd molested my aunt when he was a teenager and she was 3 years old? Or how come "Mr. Smith" was allowed to be divorced and still be a preacher but my parents had to have screaming fights every night because the Bible says divorce is wrong.
At 17, I went off to Maryville College, despite the warnings from many that this place was a liberal hotbed and I would get turned into a lesbian (I guess they were half right, that's pretty good for a fortune teller). It didn't take long for me to let go in a way that I had never had a chance in my strict upbringing: Drinking to excess so often that my friends staged an intervention, sleeping around, trying drugs. I'm not implying that drinking or not being a virgin when you get married or smoking weed are mortal sins, but I was doing those things in a way that harmed me and that was the problem. I was finally getting to "sin" in a more fun way than just having bad thoughts, but I wasn't able to let go of those Baptist teachings. I struggled with accepting that the college minister was a woman. I didn't go back to the bible study on campus because the girl leading it started all her prayers with "Father God, Mother God" and that's just so weird it had to be wrong. I might have shown up to church on Sunday with alcohol on my breath, but I still showed up. I wasn't pure or humble or classy or modest, like a good Christian woman should be, but I had the good Christian sense to feel guilty about it on Sunday mornings. Sure, I dated a girl, but in my defense, I kept that to myself for the most part and made sure to read Leviticus 20:13 every time I went to church to feel sufficiently chastised and frightened. And when I went to church with her, I was on edge waiting for lightening to strike.
I wasn't living life like Jesus did, but I had a plan for how I would do that later in life. I wouldn't date girls forever. I'd start reading my Bible more. I'd pray without ceasing - even when I didn't need anything. I'd quit cussing and drinking and flirting with whoever would give me attention and lying to my parents. I was keeping track of my transgressions to ask forgiveness for when I was finally ready to settle down. I wasn't falling for all those women priests and hippie dippie bible study leaders that the scary liberals were trying to force on me. I was going to church more that most people I knew. I read The Case for Christ during the semester I took Old Testament Studies so I wouldn't fall for the professor trying to tell me the Bible wasn't trustworthy. I was doing ok. I was keeping it between the lines.
We'll skip over my gap year and grad school for now and get to my post-education life. This is where I started doing a little better than ok. I was married to a man, so I didn't have to worry about being put to death for who I was kissing anymore - what a relief! Maybe I still drank too much, but I wasn't compounding that with other sins against my flesh (just being mean to my husband and not remembering it the next day, I still regret that). I went to church every Sunday. I was part of a small group. I read the Bible verses on the church's Bible app designed to get you through the Bible in a year. I tithed. I got better at the rules than I had been for a long time and I felt pretty good about that.
The main thing I want to stress about my life before I got my mind changed is this: Before, I believed that any issues I had in following the Church's teaching were because I was a faithless twin to doubting Thomas. I had been told my entire life that I was a sinner and the way to know my sins was to read the Bible, the Infallible Word of God. If I couldn't follow that book to the letter, I needed to repent. The problem was with me, not with the Bible or with the Church's interpretation of the Bible. The act of questioning the Bible was itself a sin because you were questioning an Almighty God who had whispered into the ears of the prophets and used His omnipotence to guide the hands of the scribes through the ages.
So I didn't question the rules. I kept up with them until I couldn't stomach them. Until the rules didn't make sense. Until Father God, Mother God, my gentle parent, whispered to me again and again until I listened, that the rules weren't really the rules of Jesus. Until I couldn't deny that I wasn't ok, that I couldn't feel good about myself anymore. Until I realized that keeping it between the lines was keeping me locked up and keeping me from helping other people be set free.
At the time, I wasn't so sure that it was the Spirit talking to me. I was having doubts and "God is not the author of confusion". All I knew was that I couldn't stomach the way the pastors would talk about abortion from the pulpit- like it was good versus evil with no nuance. I couldn't breathe when I listened to elementary aged children give their testimony - or I should say recite a list of phrases they'd heard their parents say - before their baptism. My heart broke for those children because I could see myself in them, I could see that these words were a magic spell to them like they were to me. A way to protect myself from the angry and vengeful God who sent people to hell. A simple solution in a world that was so difficult to understand and so scary in the strangeness, in the terrible constancy of every day's new unknowns. A solution they had gotten from their parents that would turn into hell on earth if they happened to be gay or a woman in an abusive relationship with a "Christian man".
I couldn't help but look around during the worship portion of the service and notice how the darkened room with only stage lighting and the way the worship leaders moved and held up their hands and said "Thank you Lord" in the same whispered reverent tone at exactly the right time, all seemed designed to create some sort of trance in us that would make us more pliable to whatever message the straight white man was going to give us today. Those men stood up there behind a pulpit I wasn't allowed to stand behind and told me that when the Bible said women were to submit to men it was for our own good -- AND THEY SAID IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE. I started to see the flaws in the logic of the sermons and the inconsistencies in the Bible itself that were never addressed, the way the preachers had to do mental gymnastics to somehow take the Bible literally in the world we live in without coming across as hypocritical cherry pickers. I mean, they were, but somehow they managed to be really good at hiding that fact. God, please forgive me for that unkindness and please, if you can, fix the large part of me that isn't even a little sorry about it.
Jokes aside, I fully admit that I still have a good way to go in forgiving these type of Christians and I pray about it daily.
So I called the pastor assigned to me to tell him I was leaving the church. I was expecting him to... well, actually, I'm not sure what I was really expecting. For some reason though, I was expecting this exit interview to go differently than it did. If I would have stopped to think about my interview for membership, I wouldn't have been so surprised. During that initial interview, he asked if I had any reservations about what I had learned of the church's bylaws. I said I had 2: the place of women in the church and their stance against homosexuality. For the first point, he agreed that there COULD BE some debate. "Many smart people are on both sides of that issue. We work closely with ministers who do feel women can be preachers, but our church doesn't." Wow! How cool that a man, a preacher no less, allowed me to have that misgiving. That's practically a pat on the head! For the second issue, there was no discussion. He opened his hands on the table in a low shrug. "The Bible says homosexuality is a sin. We believe the Bible." Case closed, nothing to say except to remind me that the problem was with my feelings, my unbelief. The Bible says it. If you don't believe it, that's a sin you need to pray about, a problem you need God to fix for you.
During the phone call, I tried to explain to this man how I was feeling, what I was seeing and hearing from that elevated stage that didn't sit right with me. I tried to explain that the sermons were too conveniently packaged. The way they were making the Bible out to be as some sort of Fantasy Fiction series where it was a cohesive story from cover to cover about the main character (Jesus, of course) was making it really difficult for me to understand it in the real world.
The way I saw it, they were telling me that Jesus had come down from heaven, been adopted into the family of the first man Adam- a kind of step-descendant through his adoptive earthly Father's line from men who had lied and stolen and raped and colonized and pillaged and all manner of sins against women and the weak and the poor - so that we could be adopted into his heavenly father's house as sons and daughters.
What a beautiful plan that God had executed! He, in his almightiness, had used all that violence and hate and separateness of the chosen from the heathen to bring about the radical love and acceptance of all people through his son Jesus Christ.
Honestly, that is a beautiful story to me. It is the story I actually believe. That God created us (probably not as is presented in Genesis's creation myth, either the one in Chapter 1 or the completely different one in Chapter 2), gave us free will which we then used as a weapon (as we do now) to gain power and resources to feel safe without too much thought about the other guy, and then sent Jesus down to earth to show us a better way. The Way, as the early church called it. The way that we don't have to be separate. The way that we don't have to rely on archaic and arbitrary rules that are designed to exclude and control certain groups. Jesus told us and showed us through his actions that all people are one family. Jesus told us and showed us through his actions that we are to love God and to love our neighbor - that we did not have to separate, exclude, or control our neighbor in order to love God or serve God as was practiced previously.
Except, that isn't what this church was teaching. This church was guilty of the same things many of the powerful, influential men in the early church were guilty of: trying to hold on to some of those archaic and arbitrary rules while still believing in the message of Jesus.
I tried to tell this man that I couldn't continue to sit under the leadership of men who didn't believe women were equal to men in God's Kingdom. (I know people who believe in male headship will balk at this and will retort that they believe that women and men are equal, but have different roles, different gifts if you will. What's up Separate but Equal 2.0? Seriously though, you cannot say that two groups are equal when one group is given complete leadership and final say over the other. If two people cannot do the same job in the Kingdom of God - mind you that doesn't rely on the very real physical differences between men and women ((people without wombs obviously cannot give birth)) - how can you say they are equal? It does not compute. If you think God only trusts men to preach His word, you don't think God believes woman are equal to men.) He had acknowledged to me that the male leadership of the church knew that there are "very smart people on both sides" and that there are Biblical and historical examples of women spiritual leaders, priests, heads of churches. Still, even with their acknowledgement of this, they were rejecting Jesus's message of radical love and denial of the law and were still insisting on male headship. How terrible to acknowledge that it isn't necessarily a sin to believe that women can be spiritual leaders, but to still chose to lead people down a path where you force them to continue to draw lines between groups of people simply based on a chance of birth. I tried to tell him that I could see clearly how this idea of male headship, of greater reliance on the words of men than women, was keeping Christian women down today. In fact, that it was creating a wider culture that allowed a range of abuses against women, from emotional or physical abuses in the home to the gender wage gap.
Do you know what he told me? This man who I was pouring my heart out to. This man who I trusted enough to tell that I was so upset and confused as to how I could believe in a God or in the story of a God who would send us His own son to show us a different way only for nothing to change. This man who I was trying to show my heart for those excluded and separated from God's love to.
He told me that I needed to figure out if I believed in Jesus at all before I started worrying about modern problems.
When I hung up with him, the only thing I could think was, "That asshole!" Self righteous anger was so hot within me I can still feel the echo of it in my sternum as I relive that phone call for you. It was hot. It burned for months and years. It is still a smoldering fire of resentment that I often have to take a deep breath in and let it out over the coals to keep it from starting a wildfire.
Fine, I thought in response. You want it that way, have it that way. I took my heart for service and the call that had kept me in church through all the seasons of my life and my tithe money and my little lady brain and I left that church. I left all churches. I found it difficult to even refer to myself as a Christian in my own heart.
Jesus didn't leave me.
The call never left me. It took awhile for me to be able to heed that call again. When I did, I realized that I was going to have to do a lot of soul searching, a lot of reading, a lot of independent study before I could go back. I didn't want to repeat the pattern of believing whatever mainstream Christianity told me, feeling it was wrong but not trusting that feeling, and then leaving the church.
My anger really only ebbed when I realized that the pastor I spoke to or the other leaders of that church or the church of my youth are not examples I want to look up to, not people I want leading me. They are misguided men who let fear and the need for control, for power, for rightness, for rules keep them from the radical love of Jesus. That pastor was just the last in a long line of older-than-me white men who I told me that I was the problem. The last in a long line of men whose interpretation of the Scriptures I had to believe before I could even call myself a Christian.
So I did the reading. I did the praying. I did the studying and thinking with my little lady brain without a man to guide me. (To be very clear, neither that pastor or any other had ever explicitly told me I had a little lady brain - that's just how they made me feel).
I found there was a church that shared my vision. A church that acknowledged the violence toward and the control over women and minorities of all kinds and the weak and the poor are not "modern problems". They are still problems in modern times because they weren't dealt with properly through the last several centuries. Through my research, and I truly believe through the Holy Spirit Herself, I found the Episcopal Church.
My first Sunday at St. Andrew's, the priest - who is an older-than-me white man who I will admit to being skeptical of before I knew him - during his sermon called out the violence against the queer community by bringing attention to and denouncing the shooting at a gay night club in Florida. He prayed for the victims. I cried tears of joy. On another early visit to that church, my now good friend Deacon Carol delivered the sermon. She was allowed to preach, y'all! And she turned her sermon notes over with deep red fingernails. I cried tears of joy.
I had found a home. I place where I saw what I believed to be the true message of Jesus being lived out - radical love of our neighbors. All our neighbors. Even when I would explain what led me to their church, about how I couldn't believe in what was preached from the pulpit of the other church, no one bashed that other type of Christian. They even love those people! They acknowledge them as children of the Lord. Most of the people I've come to know at St. Andrew's wouldn't stand for some of the things being preached at that other church, but they still love them enough to not gossip or condemn them. Again, WOW.
So I had found a like-minded congregation. Not hard to do, when you think about it. Sometimes serial killers find each other in this great big world of non-murders and are able to work together. I still wasn't super comfortable in having left the other church. Shaking off 30 years of teachings is hard to do. There was still a part of me who thought that I was the problem, that maybe all this Episcopal Church doctrine was just a watered down and kinda heretical version of Christianity after all. I still wasn't able to fully trust my feelings or beliefs, but I knew I couldn't go back. If this was a watered down version, so be it, it was the only thing my stomach could handle.
During a class Father John hosted for new comers to the Episcopal tradition, he said something that changed my life. He said, "We don't just believe that women can be priests and that queer people are as fully accepted as the rest of us because we believe that's the socially responsible or politically correct thing to do. We believe there is a Biblical basis for it."
Um. Excuse you? What about Leviticus 20:13? Huh?
And this is when he introduced me to the framework of the Episcopal faith: the 3 legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.
"The threefold sources of authority in Anglicanism are scripture, tradition, and reason. These three sources uphold and critique each other in a dynamic way. Scripture is the normative source for God's revelation and the source for all Christian teaching and reflection. Tradition passes down from generation to generation the church's ongoing experience of God's presence and activity. Reason is understood to include the human capacity to discern the truth in both rational and intuitive ways. It is not limited to logic as such. It takes into account and includes experience. Each of the three sources of authority must be perceived and interpreted in light of the other two."Â
-From "An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church" on The Episcopal
Church's website
And so I changed my mind, once. Once led to a million times. But none of that could have happened without this framework. Without believing that God had given me reason and expected me to use it. That I could read the Bible and see that some parts that had been presented to me as instructions for living were actually giant cautionary tales. I can now read the Bible as the Word of God, knowing it is inspired but not infallible. All the free will that God gave us led to some powerful men making choices in the writing and entering into cannon books and verses that kept them safe at the time and for other powerful men through time eternal to make choices in interpreting that cannon in ways that keep them safe and in power. I can now read the Bible and take the scriptures seriously, but not literally. I can recognize all the outright historical lies and all the inconsistencies and all the terrible, non-sensical violence and oppression for the "human" part of the Bible and still see the overall message of grace and love that has been passed down against all odds.
If I could have one wish, it would be that all Christians would take as their Mere Christianity the radical love of Jesus. The way I have found to do that, is to read the Bible and to practice my faith with an equal dose of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.
This does not mean that I or the Episcopal Church in general has an anything goes mentality. I still believe sin exists in anything that keeps us from God - I just don't think that things that make us separate from the majority are the same things that keep us from God. I believe I sin and that I must ask for forgiveness for those sins. That I need to pray for Mother Christ to help me grow and change and be more like Jesus. There are still rules to follow, but those rules aren't to clench my fists against the temptation to sin by loving the "wrong kind" of person or to hold myself back from the "sinful pride" that leads me to want to be as fully part of the kingdom of God as any man.
The rules are to keep my arms open, upward to God and outward to all humans.
In closing, I want to bring up another saying I have heard since joining St. Andrew's. "All may, some should, none must". That explains why you'll see some of us making the sign of the cross or kneeling for prayer and not others during a service. To me, this means that the way we worship in a church isn't the most important thing. I don't want to dissolve all other forms of Christianity. I don't want to covert all people to the Anglican tradition or make them follow the liturgical calendar. I don't care what you believe about baptism: do it once, do it to babies or adults, do it in a river or in a cattle trough or with some water spritzed on your head. I don't care what type of worship you feel most comfortable in: beat a drum with the accompaniment of a steel guitar or pipe organ only, thank you very much. I don't care if your preacher wears robes or a full suit or a T-shirt and cargo shorts. I don't care if you take communion only during the Easter season or every service or with Hawaiian buns or with pre-packaged, cross stamped wafers.
I truly believe that no matter how you worship, if Jesus were to walk into your service, He would say, "All may."
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