Mothers, wives and “prostitutes” – the trivialising of women in our tradition

For Mary Magdalene 24.7.22 

 There are so many patriarchal traps when attempting to talk about Mary Magdalene, and given the short space of time I have now, it will be hard to unpack that with any degree of nuance. Being a non-binary person however, I am willing to avoiding the extremes and binaries involved. We need to recentre what saints like Mary Magdalene can teach us, back into the heart of our faith, acknowledging all our sisters, all the women within and outside of the church.

Mary Magdalene has been mostly constructed for us through a male lens. She is marginalised in the gospel stories which is bad enough, the twelve didn’t listen to her which is absolutely shameful but it has only gone downhill from there. How do I quarrel with the people who have circulated unhelpful stories and stereotypes around the great apostle (and rebel) Mary, without casting shade in turn on women even more vulnerable? Well, I have to attempt it!

The patriarchs and mansplainers of the early centuries of the church, tended to portray Mary Magdalene as a prostitute or adulteress. More recently I have heard male preachers, who consider themselves “pro-feminist” extoll her as Jesus’ girlfriend and claim that is a liberative reading because it is “sex positive”. Ok it’s an attractive idea, and like many heterosexual men I enjoyed the portrayal of her in Jesus Christ superstar. A beautiful woman lights candles and gets out the oils to tell you “everything’s alright”, to reassure you, yeah that’s pretty cool for the person she is seducing! But I have questions.

It’s less clear how that is a liberative message for anyone who identifies with Mary Magdalene. There are people who are burdened with all the emotional labour, caring labour, even the sexual labour that holds other people and families together. These people are almost always women. On the other hand the minute the same woman who is making other people’s life bearable has any agency or pleasure of her own within these roles she is judged for that as immoral. Reducing women to WAGs (wives and girlfriends) for heroes is not a wholesome version of “sex positive” it’s merely patriarchy positive. At the same time if I get my grumpy middle-aged prude on and dismiss the sexualised and caring components of this picture, I risk heaping even more erasure and contempt on women who do bear those aspects of the fully human. The fully human includes caring labour!

Now; without going off on a tangent about sex-work, it’s worth nothing that portraying women who have sex for money or rent as either as malicious temptresses or as victims is not a fair or adequate response to their realities. We need to move away from “slut-shaming”; to understand the complexities of the economic system we have and the way it is grounded in the gender order. We need to recognise the right and need of to exercise whatever agency they have within that. People seek survival for themselves and their children, but dignity is also a human need and depends on being able to choose some of your own terms. There’s a big conversation to be had here, but perhaps it’s mostly outside the scope of today’s celebration.

Similarly, women who do make their main identity in life being the partner of someone or the nurturer of children, who don’t have the mental energy, capacity or access to another role deserve out sisterhood not our contempt. Wives are valid, girlfriends are valid, messy emotional humans who just want to connect are at least as valid as hardened individuals, if not more so. For this reason I stuck to that lovely, romantic reading from the Song of Songs. We don’t need to dismiss the romantic and the affectionate in people’s experiences or desires.

I am left wanting to talk back to these men who have decided she was a sinner, or a sex-worker, or a wife; And while rolling my eyes that good women always have to be mothers or wives and bad women are always sexualised; I don’t want to close off these meanings for Mary Magdalene either. I find the texts that comprise the gospels imperfect and full of human error but they have one really great strength in my opinion and that is the slipperiness of categories, the vagueness of labels within them. Was Mary the same woman who anointed Jesus’ feet? Probably not but let’s talk about both these women! Was Mary the beloved disciple or was that John? Which reading is liberating, probably either can be depending what you need liberating from!

If we look at the apocryphal gospels where Jesus turned Mary Magdalene into a trans-man and commissioned him to lead, that also can be liberative (or it can be used to reify painful stereotypes that only men can lead…but we should not use it that way). So the very gaps and silences in the gospel lead me to question, lead me to find many possible Marys. The mis-readings by a patriarchal tradition demand two layers of answer. Firstly, if you are going to label her, I will argue that she is not necessarily who and what you say she is. Secondly, even if she fits any of these categories, that does not diminish her worthiness or her importance. I am left with a multiplicity of Marys a proliferation of Marys and since Mary means rebel, the rebels are proliferating.

I return with this idea to today’s gospel and immediately it bears fruit. “The twelve” here are the tip of the iceberg. Some women were there too (on some level we knew that). Now we go back and reread other stories where women are not mentioned and wonder them back into the frame, what were they doing when they were ignored? Mary. Joanna. Susanna and many others!

The many others remind me of my favourite interpretation of the “beloved disciple” in the gospel of John (I don’t remember where I heard this interpretation)”  It was proposed that the name was intentionally left blank to draw the reader in to the story. The beloved was you. It was me. All the disciples. All the women. Mary, Joanna, Susanna and all our mothers, all our sisters and all the women who had a vocation but were passed over by the patriarchal church. They broke bread with Jesus- fed him, homed him, listened to him, debated with him and cried over him at the crucifixion. To reclaim Mary we should reclaim every disinherited, erased or demonised woman. And regardless of gender, each of us could also reclaim our own capacity to be emotionally present in the ups and downs of life, to connect with affection and loyalty to another human being, to express appropriate emotion.

With the feminist biblical scholars who have gleaned what we have for us, we reclaim our sister Grief, her daughter Anger. We welcome our mothers Joy and Laughter and acknowledge in ourselves the need to be seen and listened to. Let us sit for a moment with the emotions and contradictions of Mary Magdalene and other women disciples. Let us find such contradictions, tangles and loyalty also in our own selves and each other.

Corpus Christi

Remember when I used to blog about the readings every single week? I haven’t psoted since April, because I got the feeling that my very few readers were just catching my work as it happened in real time. Today someone reminded me I have a blog so I will post the three reflections I have done this year (and soon I will post this Sunday’s too). This was back in June for the feast of Corpus Christi.

After some very spiritually focused big Sundays- Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, we are reminded to come back to the material and every day, the stuff of real human life. Bread. Sharing food book-ends the passion of Christ. The events of Good Friday and Easter occur between the “Last Supper” and post-resurrection meals shared.

In a society where we have overabundance, I struggle with a tendency to overeat, to make every meeting up with friends centre on coffee or wine or a meal…but this is because psychologically and physically food is so central to life. We need food to live and it needs to be more than fuel for us. I would not see it as progress if we could simply swallow a nutrition pill each day, for all the hassle of growing or buying food, deciding, preparing, cleaning up, our senses blossom into joy at the scents, tastes, textures and colours of food, the sound of sizzling, the satisfying crunch of celery, the pounding together of spices with a mortar and pestle. Some people manage to make lifestyles where they escape ever working with food- such people are missing out.

Even ineptly and resentfully throwing together two-minute noodles is sacramental. Making food is providing self or others with life. Growing food is the same, the blush of tomatoes ripening or the full bushy greenness that shows the carrots underground are almost ready. The birds collecting nectar or fruit noisily from the trees know sacrament just as surely as my cat licking dew from the grass knows that water is life.

Melchizedek in the first reading knows that more than words are needed for blessing. Food seals the connection between people, invokes God’s everyday orientation toward blessing the world. Food speaks of earth and air and water, the fire of quickening, the elements and our own connectedness and dependency to the broader sweep of creation. Extinction Rebellion when they stop traffic sometimes give out cupcakes or bickies, treats for the drivers as an apology for the inconvenience, but also because if we want to keep enjoying cupcakes and breathing and having somewhere to go we need to cut out our dependency to fossil fuels.

We were wrong to let ourselves believe we could get mastery over creation. Jesus did not say “I am the plough or I am the goldmine” he said “I am bread”. Elsewhere he talked about grains of wheat- dying to give birth to many, falling on fertile ground, the wheat becomes bread, becomes more than the instrumental basics of life (hence wine too) but becomes connection and sharing and the Word that is more than words.

Sometimes there are people whose words or even more so whose listening to us is like bread, we walk away satisfied and hopeful and ready to be our best self. In the darkest hour Jesus doesn’t say “I will be your guilt trip, I will be your judge” he comes as servant, he comes as bread. Washing, feeding, making the quiet warm moment that allows us to go on, into the dark and shocking moments where his disciples will be ripped apart from everything they know. They would have been traumatised when he was seized but did they remember that he was bread, that he was wine?

After the resurrection he proved his real presence by eating, by preparing food for them. We celebrate this real presence by the way we celebrate Eucharist, by waiting for each other to eat together, by allowing some peace around our eating but also by having coffee and morning tea at Sophia every month. We bring Eucharist back out into our worlds of families we need to feed, work colleagues we share food with, friends we make time to have a glass of wine with. “I haven’t seen you for too long, let’s do coffee” is a way of saying “you are alive to me, I want to be alive to you”.

When we share food and friendship, when we listen to the wisdom of friend or neighbour, when we meet together to make the world a little bit better; may we be proclaiming the Risen One, the Wisdom who is Bread, the one who calls us to feed all bellies and comfort all hearts.

I invite you to take a moment in silence to reflect on where the Bread that feeds you comes from, then we will break the bread of our thoughts together, before moving on to breaking the bread of the Eucharist.

Look beyond Herod to the Wisdom that threatens power.

It seems as if the lectionary, which we know was put together by powerful men who were currying favour with earthly powers (the church’s history is scandalous that way) has once more missed the point of the gospel, in the juxtapositions it chooses to highlight. In theological college we were encouraged to look beyond the short pericopes of the daily readings, to read each exerpt in it’s wider textual context and not to make assumptions based on shortened, decontextualised versions of a translation.

I am no scholar, and I won’t pretend to come out with some “right” version for all time, but I think it is worth engaging with the empiphany ethically, and given the colonialist message the lectionary (and many loud-mouthed Christians) try to steer us to, somewhat critically and deconstructively.

Because so much harm has been done by the missionary zeal, the form of “evangelism” which is not “good news” at all to people expected to give up their identities and bow to someone else’s religion which becomes perverted into economic relations of exploitation and a racist politics. And a brown little working-class baby, from an ethnicity which was oppressed by empire, has been used as a tool to further the sorts of oppressions, that Jesus grew up to oppose to the extent of offending and threatning empire and being put to death.

So Constantine was wrong, we do not need a new Christian empire and the magi are bringing not tribute but gift. They are not having their best extracted from them as a show of power, they are choosing to put effort and expense into showing generous love. Notice I am not saying “3 kings” or “wise men” because we actually don’t know that they were 3, or kings or men (I like to think they were wise enough to be drawn to Baby Wisdom).

Ok, so here’s the gospel story without assuming all the kyriearchal stuff about kings and tribute and colonisation:

There were these magi and they used their own spiritual practices which seems to have involved some star-gazing. So you can stop looking down on your friends who like astrology right now. You don’t have to believe what they believe but you also don’t have to force them to see things your way. It seems that Godde can speak/beckon through stars and practices other than Christian.

❤

So these Magi knew from the signs of their own non-Judeo-Christian spirituality that something significant had happened. Because they lived in a kyriearchal world their best interpretation of what/who had been born was a “king”. We too are limited by our social-political worlds and discourses. Logically they figured a King would be born in a palace, they went to ask Herod about him.

Herod knew that this “king” was nothing to do with him, was going to challenge or undermine him one way or the other. But he didn’t want to challenge these influential people and cause a diplomatic incident. Herod to me seems like the first ever political leader to label himself Christian: “I will do him homage”, without letting the Christ child actually transform his values or practice.

I do call out and judge the powers of the day. I think it is far worse to pretend to be “Christian” and still torture and abuse people, than it is to just be straight-forwardly evil. Not that torturing and abusing is ever admirable. There are little brown children kept in cages- large or small cages in this country, in other wealthy countries; and the leaders who allow this to happen are Herods. I feel unapologetic for judging people more powerful and privileged than myself (whilst acknowledging I have some responsibility not to support oppression).

So the magi, being drawn to wisdom finally worked out that Herod was not connected to the important star-baby and they found this unprepossessing child in a manger (or maybe a house by now) with his young mother and carpenter father. They brought him gifts that were rare and hard to come by, that sparkled and gave off fragrance. The world is a world of beauty; of stars and flowers as much or more than Herods and Emperors. They gave it to one who would not be able to reward them in this world; as a token of love and respect not as the “quid pro quo” of politics.

But being star-gazers they were also dreamers, in touch with unconscious, unarticulated truths. Something about Herod had given off red flags, they could not trust him. After meeting the real Wisdom at the heart of the universe, the herods and emperors are as nothing. You might say they practiced civil disobedience. They went home another way. They were not “converted” or brought into the fold, they remained Eastern magi and continued to find Wisdom in their own religion- because Godde can be present there too.

Please consider following some of the hyperlinks in this blog post to people wiser than me giving you more nuanced information but I leave you with a couple of questions.

How do we learn to focus little displaced baby Wisdom more and the narcissistic herods less in the lifestyle choices and politics of our everyday life?

Where is Wisdom, what start can guide us there? Are we going to abandon our every-day concerns long enough and generously enough to find the baby?

Happy epiphany

Rest ye merry

I didn’t post this on the 25th because I don’t actully want to ruin your Christmas. It’s been a hard year, we’ve all worked hard and most of us want to hold our loved ones close and not think any hard thoughts for a while.

But when I reflect on the words of many of the carols, on the messages about consumption, “beauty” (in the narrow and privileged sense), and the good life at Christmas I see a disconnect between the lavish and smug way we sink into our entitlement about excesses of food, piles of presents for the children to swim in, and new decorations year after year.

Our poor planet. Where is the Wisdom in this? Would the shepherds even be welcome at our table? Would the Herods of our modern world feel remotely threatened by the joy we claim?

I don’t want to think these thoughts, I want to rest but they come to me like a plaintive call by a widow to an unjust judge. They sit next to the pain in my heart where the church I grew up in consistently labels me as “sinful”, for my lack of conformity to the phallocentric world-view that is all too comfortable with inequities. I will speak my truth.

On whom “His” favour rests

The children gather with joy

so cute with garlands of tinsel and bells.

The Great King comes again

enthroned among us with many gifts.

We come to do him homage,

to receive his bounty and sing him songs.

We eat our fill and more,

laugh in contentment and rest full of peace

and one last piece of cake.

“Peace on earth” we say

deluded by our overfull troughs,

our beautifully decorated sties of contentment.

Behind barbed wire and in war-torn lands,

newborn again

scrawny wisdom without beauty, without majesty

wails her hungry plea

unheard among our joyful carols.

The Visitation

Fourth Sunday in Advent

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel has become famous for a tongue in cheek comment she put into the mouth of one of her “Dykes to watch out for”. This character says she only watches movies that have a scene where two named female characters have a conversation about something other than a man. This means the character has not been to the movies for several decades. It’s more than just a joke, when people bring the “Bechdel test” to popular culture and the classics, very few things pass the test.

If you are already spotting that the test is flawed, you’d have that in common with many commentators, but it needs to be remembered that this comes from a cartoon, as a provocation rather than a rigorous hermeneutic tool. Flawed or not I find it useful. As you can imagine, very few bible stories pass the Bechdel test. In the Old Testament we have Ruth and Naomi, a story that does not seem to feature in the Sunday lectionary. In the New Testament we have today’s absolute gem of a story.

Like John the Baptist I leapt for joy when I saw that I was rostered alongside what is possibly my favourite gospel story the ONLY ONE THAT PASSES THE BECHDEL TEST. I have several times written about it in my blog, but I feel I will never exhaust my love for this reading.

I have chosen to lengthen the pericope given in the man-made lectionary. I think I am justified in doing so, but it takes up time so I will be careful not to speak for long and just briefly skim over some of the points that strike me. This is a rich story we could return to again and again, always for more meaning.

Notably, this good news centres not only two women, but the women’s powerful, courageous and somewhat revolutionary voices.  The man-made lectionary seems to miss this point, cutting out Mary’s rant. It’s more cosy for the patriarchy if we think of Mary and Elizabeth as two nurturing wombs – Elizabeth is old but has miraculously been turned back into something that is useful for patriarchy after all. For those of us who are casualised workers, or whose worth is somehow seen as contingent on usefulness to others this reading is constricting. Similarly Mary is often read as kind and unselfish, as always putting the needs of others before her own. Thus dealt with, the patriarchal reading pushes the two women into the background, as if the only real characters here are the two unborn babies. I wonder if you can think of any chilling contemporary parallels to this in America, or even closer to home.

The feminist reading comes to the text asking what if a woman is more than just her ability to reproduce and nurture? In the hope of finding any stories of faith that pass the Bechdel test, we can look at the reading centring the worth of Mary and Elizabeth to themselves as characters, as social agents, as more than just a vehicle for men’s birth or salvation.

Elizabeth needs to have a baby, it is true. Her age and seeming infertility have been a huge misfortune not because all women can only be happy or complete with a baby, not because of a biological fate determined by God, but because of a social fate determined by man. Man, despite the assumptions our social world run on, is not God. Elizabeth finds herself in a patriarchal culture, her economic wellbeing is tied to her kinship to a father, a husband or finally a son.

Mary’s long journey to see her is not just “kindness” but is a startling act of independence, empowerment and a centring of a relationship between two women. They both have a need for this relationship of friendship, not economic dependency. They need someone to talk to who will listen and understand, there’s affection here and solidarity but definitely something more than just baby talk.

As soon as Elizabeth hears Mary’s greeting the child leaps for joy. Elizabeth is carrying not just any baby, but perhaps the greatest prophet of Holy Wisdom bar one. The rest of this reflection will show who the even greater prophet is. So the child who leaps for joy is John the Baptist, who will grow into a truly courageous, relentless and revolutionary voice that threatens the status quo, specifically in the person of Herod. I guess John the Baptist would know good news when he hears it, and the good news that he reacts to here is the VOICE of Mary resounding. Before even her words are formed, there is resonance that something vital and worth hearing will be told.

We know Jesus as the word of God, but if we say he was fully human we must acknowledge that someone had to teach him language and moral discourse. Jesus the child grew up closely following and listening to the same voice that John the Baptist is so impressed by even before he is born. Mary has been chosen not just as a womb but as a prophetic voice of reason, of right relation, of revolution.

So if Mary’s voice has excited the prophet John the Baptist, and been the foundation for developing Jesus, himself, how dare we cut off the story without listening to her words. We too should be excited to hear her and should find the potential in her words to make God’s Wisdom present. I have previously reflected that we should not get so bound up in words and spiritual things that we neglect the body. Now I acknowledge that nor is it fair to reduce women to bodies and reproductive capabilities only, to thus deny them the Godde-given capacity to preach that is so clearly outlined in this reading. Mary preaches to Elizabeth and seemingly little ears are preparing themselves to listen too. John’s preaching later (see last week’s gospel) contains more than traces of Mary’s subversive politics. Mary was chosen by God for her voice, her mind, her integrity at least as much as for her previously unoccupied womb.

Outspoken, courageous, strong Mary with her BFF and cousin Elizabeth (she of the loud voice in today’s gospel) refuse to be cut out of the gospels. At Cana again Mary will show her inability to remain silent and will kick-start her son’s ministry. Elizabeth’s husband has been temporarily silenced by the truth of her underestimated body.

The Almighty does indeed cast down the mighty and elevate the invisible- such as women. God’s preferential option is for the poor, the refugee, the exploited worker, the single- mother, the one outside the gates.

In what way are we the hungry who will be filled by Godde with every good thing?

In what way do we allow ourselves to be the privileged, who miss the point of grace and are sent empty away?

Wisdom is so near to us this time of year, let us reflect on Mary’s certainty that God’s kindom runs counter to the inequitable status quo.

Christ our kin

I was asked to give a reflection on the feast of “Christ the King” but I conscienciously object to monarchs. The more history I learn the stronger my conviction that kings are always oppressive (yes always) and that they are grounded in always/already oppressive ways of relating. So what could I say? Apologies that it has taken me until the eve of the 3rd Sunday of Advent to even post this.

I’m Latvian, part of a tiny country that was taken over by powers from other countries. I associate kings with colonising, enslaving, exploiting. I also play chess where the king needs protecting but is a useless bit of dead wood and the queen has to do literally everything and protect the pawns so they become queens. Perhaps you could say I am biased, but it is not possible for me to sincerely see the metaphor of “king” or “kingship” in a positive way.

In the past I have attempted the convoluted spiritual gymnastics where I take language that is alienating, and relations that are in real life oppressive and try to twist them. #NotAllKings or something like that. But I am a simple history teacher, I am tired and not feeling very philosophically or theologically agile. I want a faith that heals and feeds me in a heartbreaking and frightening world. I don’t want to have to twist the word of Godde to make it pronounceable. I don’t want to have to take the stale bread that is Word yet again and soak it to try to bring back some goodness.

Patriarchy, the rule of men over women has been analysed as being kyriearchal[1]. Even most men are oppressed within such a rigid hierarchical structure. Having brought up sons I have witnessed their heartbreak and confusion when their heart wants to connect with the world, but there are so many messages out there for young men trying to forbid it. Forbidding connection leads to having powerful men in our world who think thrusting an expensive rocket into space is a higher priority than saving our fragile blue bead on the necklace of the deep, our planet. Forbidding relationality and vulnerability leads to the rape culture in parliament house and the denial and avoidance of deep shame that comes with it. Layers upon layers of lies. We become less human. Instead of a loving parent, sibling or song we have a king. We build an institution. We construct rules and walls to keep the wrong people out. We use shame and punishment and pomp and ceremony to hide from the emptiness we fear may be at the heart of it all.

We can refuse that.

Vicki and Jane have sensibly provided us with a theme for today “God of tender care, you have loved us into birth.” That image to me sounds more like midwife than king and I am tempted to drop the “g” as we sometimes do and celebrate Christ the kin. Kin not just to you and me, the privileged ones but kin to the refugee and the dispossessed. Kin to the creeks[2] and mountains that make up Country. Kin to the butterflies who pollinate the plants so we will still have bread tomorrow. Donna Harraway says that in the face of the way humans have irreparably changed the natural world there is no place for hope OR despair but only for making kin and learning to live wisely without hiding in an innocence that does not convince[3].

Harraway says “make kin”, and talks about string games where many hands have to pass the pattern to each other -watching and trusting, receiving and then relinquishing the shape of the whole. Can I “make kin” anywhere within todays readings?

The second reading is a beautiful contrast to the first, as a string game, like cat’s cradle it has all the power of juxtaposition and movement. Daniel has taken his substances his vision inducing herbs and is trying to articulate the greatness and exceptionalism of a God who is greater than humans, but lacks the imagination to take this outside of patriarchal fantasies of power over. The hymn discreetly subverts invoking an “Everyday God” a God who makes kin of us, a God who works collaboratively even within their own trinitarian self.

I love that I just used the pronoun “they” for God by the way.

In the gospel we have Pilate, who is only concerned with human, phallocentric politics trying to trip up Jesus who is more of a rebel than even Pilate understands. Jesus comes across as frustrated, “you are reducing me to king, that’s your language, that’s your narrow worldview, it’s not quite what I am claiming” but I’d venture to suggest none of us fully understand any identity claim by Christ. It has to be bigger than this delusional talk of “kings” and “governing” and the trickling down of the practically empty rivers and the hell our govenrments seem intent on building upon the fracked and desolate earth.

Jesus’ body too is fracked and made desolate by the empires of the greed and vanity of men (and let’s be honest given the chance women too can be greedy and vain). Jesus is the land that is burning in the too hot, too dry summer. Jesus is the young shoot hit by a hailstone as large as a golfball. I don’t believe that God will magically make climate change go away, any more than God sent legions of angels to take away the agony of the cross from Jesus.

But stubborn Jesus testifies to the truth and so can we. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to the truth and so might we. We might call Christ the “king” or “midwife” or “blade of wheat” or “water of life” but the words are our words, we are expressing our own world-view and identity in what we try to limit Jesus to. The Word of God will not play that game with us any more than Jesus did with pilate.

King is a human term, our salvation is not in kings but in the whole truth albeit we can’t grasp the totality of it.

---

[1] Fiorenza, E. S. (1992). But she said: Feminist practices of biblical interpretation. Beacon Press.

[2] Povinelli, E. A. (2016). Geontologies. Duke University Press.

[3] Haraway, D. J. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene.

“Bread for all and roses too”

19^th week Ordinary Time: year b. 8.8.2021

Stef Rozitis

“Bread for all and roses too” the quote from suffragist Helen Todd, which has become popular in the unions is on my mind as I reflect on today’s readings.

The religious people in the gospel are under the misconception that familiar, ordinary things, cannot be divine. They know Jesus, he’s ordinary he’s one of them and they are reluctant to see more in him. He’s remarkable in not being limited by that.

In my life, I have had teachers who have said “Look, there is something inside you, you can be more than this.” or they say “what you are telling me is true,” and help me articulate or develop it. Jesus did not have that support, he was lost among people who wanted to push him down, to prevent him from overtaking them, to put him back in his place. Maybe this was even well intentioned, when people do this to their children they call it “managing their expectations”. We need to stop trying to “manage the expectations” of our young, we need to stop telling them they can’t have roses and their bread must be stale and made from ashes.

Every child we meet might be a powerful prophet- imagine if Greta Thunberg had been taught to know her place and dial down her voice?

I’m not subscribing to the narrative that she will save us. We’re overburdening the young when we tell them they are our leaders, they are our saviours, they are our only hope. This is a twisted role reversal, it’s an abuse. We should hear the children and teens who are asking for a cleaner, fairer world and then WE need to oppose fracking, and refuse to vote for alleged rapists, and stop buying so much plastic!! WE need to do something for our beautiful earth, for our living bread, for the body of Christ- the body we are born from and feed on.

The women’s suffrage activists, the union women said that we should have more than bread. We should have roses too. They meant that a human life cannot be reduced to “basics” (the Indue card is all wrong). Jesus said something similar “You cannot live on bread alone”. He was talking about the beauty of the Word, but roses are a Word of beauty too. They are scented like heaven, the petals are so soft and velvety that when I was little I couldn’t stop rubbing them on my face until the poor roses were bedraggled. Roses are so sensuous, and strangely hardy even in an Australian summer. For butterflies and bees they are like bread- they are the necessary food to sustain life and keep their species going. If we love our non-human cousins we will grow them flowers.

Flowers are surprisingly important, despite often being seen as a symbol of the unproductive and the vain.

In the first reading, God shows us how to deal with someone who is too depressed to be “productive”. Fed twice, Elijah’s energy and willingness to live and do God’s work comes back. I love that the feeding happens twice…we often try to rush people into being “better” the minute we do anything for them. God realises that healing is like gardening, it takes time, you have to commit to it. Fed twice, Elijah learns that God will not abandon him. Fed more than just the once Elijah realises he is cared for and the care will not only be in proportion to his usefulness. We are so quick to establish “mutual obligations” or conditions when we help someone, to turn it into a debt not a gift.

When I say “We” I am aware that there are people in this community and other parts of my life who are the opposite, who are only ever generous but we need to spread wider that sort of energy to society not just in individual interactions. As a society we give up on people too easily, or use them. We encourage them to give up on themselves.

We are told not to make the Holy Spirit sad in the second reading, as a child I read that in an almost gaslighting way- as if I was never allowed to feel angry or stand up for myself or others. I don’t think it means that- for example I am not going to smile and feel cosy that billionaires are wasting precious resources of the planet simply to make expensive joyrides out beyond the atmosphere. They could put that energy to better use to solve the world’s problems- or just stop stealing the wages of the poor and pay their taxes.

Nevertheless we are responsible to God for the cultures we build, and for our interactions; the ways of treating people that we normalise and for seeking to be respectful even when we disagree. A small point that I like at the end is where Christ as a sacrifice is said to be a “fragrant aroma”. Roses again!

I’ll be honest I don’t know what “eternal life” means. This life here and now is mystery enough and I can leave the rest to God. But Jesus says he comes to us as bread. He comes to feed us. His flesh is here for the life of the world. We also are called to become bread- to be the presence that feeds, strengthens and brings life. I’ve put pictures of bread in the prayer-sheet today which are not just basics for grudgingly keeping an exploitable body going. I have deliberately chosen to picture bread of luxury and enjoyment.

The life we are called to (bread AND roses) is rich in meaning, connection, and every good thing. Let us reflect on bread which is better than manna, a sacrifice which is fragrant, rain on rose petals, crusts falling open to reveal the softness of bread.

I danced on a Friday when the sun turned black

it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back

At last a portrayal of Jesus that is theologically reputable. Here we don’t have violence and abuse written into the system as necessary or even desirable. The idea of God the Father, in control, allowing the abuse like an incompetent LNP Prime Minister has always shocked and saddened me at a gut level but this song sees it differently.

“The devil” is trying to repress the dance. Jesus in this song is “emotionally intelligent” in a way usually associated with women. He is trying to dance, trying to survive, keeping the positivity alive for others in his suffering. It’s only a metaphor, but a strong one for Australia in 2021.

Grace Tame. Brittany Higgins. Dhanya Mani. And the poor brave soul who tried to live with her emotional wounds after a rape and mockery and abandonment by her colleagues and superiors. Suicide is a word that attempts to put responsibility back on an individual for complex and painful situations. Jesus was bullied to death by the Roman Empire and this woman was bullied to death by a toxic and misogynist government, a petty but hurtful bunch of tyrants.

She didn’t kill herself straight away, oh she tried to dance with a devil on her back. Jesus did not die immediately, he had to endure abandonment, mocking, various forms of physical and psychological torture and even the moral torture of “your work has achieved nothing” but his last words “it is accomplished” were defiant. People argue over which words in the gospel the historical Jesus actually said and which (probably most of them) were scripted in later by the community. What of it? The community is putting defiance into the mouth of Jesus and thus proving him right. When we carry on the hopeless and yet hope-building struggle against men’s violence, rich people’s entitlement, social and economic injustice we are proving that Jesus’ work touched and liberated us, called us out, inspired us (and not in a soppy social media way).

Meanwhile two beloved little girls are still growing up in detention. Corona virus still affects the poor more than the rich. The Australian government has once again reduced welfare payments which puts a burden on families and literally starves those who have no family. It also makes it harder for small business to survive.

We haven’t learned from the pandemic (predicted by scientists since the 80s) or from the bushfires and coal mining, fracking and buying too much shit is still the main basis of our society. The militarism of absolutely everywhere is increasing. South Australia is “celebrating” that we will make weapons to incite wars all over the world, making the refugees we don’t want to take in. The nuclear dump keeps being slipped back onto the table for discussion. Black lives are still overwhelmingly arrested, tortured, put to death like a certain carpenter’s son we were talking about a moment ago.

Smaller hurts like insecure work and wage theft also slowly break us.

It’s hard to dance.

It’s hard to dance.

It’s hard to dance.

Let’s acknowledge the pain and hardship but

Let’s dance

Here are a few more

and probably my favourite

I have a shoulder injury. I “dance” by just listening to the music and being unapologetic for existing.

Tropes, activists, the whole self and permission to rest

14^th Sunday Ordinary time year a

5 July 2020 Stef Rozitis

As a writer of fiction, I love to take a trope – some character or situation that the reader thinks they recognise and twist it. Subvert it. It may not surprise you that I normally either queer it or add a feminist twist, or sometimes both. To me the first reading is doing the same thing, beginning with a trope, something we think we understand the pattern of and giving it a twist.

We have our trope, the victorious king returning to his admiring beloved. The plot twist is he is humble, he is riding on a donkey with an agenda of demilitarisation. I only wish our own government would take that idea up too. Instead we have huge public spending on missiles and semi-automatic weapons while there are cuts to education, health, welfare and the abc. Remember that oppression by Romans was Jesus’ lived reality and that the Jewish Scriptures are largely about a small nation struggling with one oppressive power after another and having to be reminded time and again to keep their sense of justice and compassion- kindness to the widow and orphan. This was not charity, the widow and orphan were entitled to be kept it was more like welfare.

  If the bible reveals Wisdom, I feel it reveals a humorous Wisdom who is great company and subverts rather than nagging us. She is always doing or saying something unexpected to make us have to reconsider business as usual. This occurs in both the Jewish scriptures and the New Testament, the words of Jesus are particularly prone to have a sting in the tail, a reversal, a push beyond what is comfortable. Here the trope of the powerful king-saviour becomes a disarming force.

This is not comforting for those of us who have privilege, unless we choose to wilfully misunderstand it. Anyone invested in inequity will lose out in the new regime, and let’s be honest that could be us. But as Christians we are called to justice, to right relation and through the sacraments we develop a taste for what is fair a hunger for God’s reign. In our intersecting networks of the social, material and economic world we have to navigate, this humble, pacifist, powerful Godde is both comfort and threat.

Yesterday I went to the Bla(c)k Lives Matter rally. From the moment I sanitised my hands I had a feeling that I was walking into a church, that there was something holy going on. Notice how COVID has brought back the rituals of washing our hands before entering church and before Communion with a new importance?

The MC kept telling us to “open our ears” when she introduced each speaker and she reminded me of Mark’s Jesus in the way she said that and in the way she could show compassion for people without messing around or interrupting the flow of the event. She said uncomfortable things, but that’s not really a point of difference from Jesus either. One of the speakers told us we needed to develop a “hunger and thirst” for justice and then came the Black Virus.

The Black Virus is the nickname of an Aboriginal Elder who was old enough that he needed a folding chair to address us. He started with humour and mischief but as he went on he couldn’t help himself  and began to share an obviously beloved vision of a demilitarised, respectful, loving future. He expressed love especially for the young ones of his people, that was something that the rally was full of- inter-generational affirmations from old to young and from young to old. AS he spoke a cloud parted and a ray of light suddenly bathed him and he said “there you see? This is what the ancestors want. My ancestors and yours” and he went on to say that his vision would benefit everyone whether they were Aboriginal or not and it was what we owed to future generations.

To the Black Virus (who I am sure also has a real name), as an Aboriginal man there is a sacred law that is based on caring for land and for other people. This was his ethic, tied in with his spirituality that there is a law and that we will all be happier if we follow it. He saw his way as not only more compassionate than the rule of the market but also more sustainable. “But first put down your weapons so we can talk” he said.

We need a response to global events that does not create an arms race. We need solutions in society that open doors for people and provide for their needs not that view people as merely a means to create profits thought production and consumption. We need a leader on a donkey not a warhorse, one who breaks the bow.

I feel wary of the second reading, because I have learned not to trust the spirit/flesh dichotomy, I prefer to consider myself as body-mind-soul all one. God has charged me to take care of my body, my soul, my mind as a unified entity not a war against itself. Our selves are the smallest kindom we inhabit and we ought to befriend our own imperfect, sometimes wobbly and always ageing bodies. However looking past the dichotomy which surely shows the influence of some patriarchal philosopher, might we find a useful take home message here too?

 There is a world of the obvious, of what Gramsci has called “common sense” (not necessarily “good sense”) the taken for granted needs that are actually socially constructed. So if I say I need a “job” that is a socially constructed need, whereas if I say I need to do meaningful work that benefits my family and my community that is closer to what the actual need behind it is. Something that is socially constructed can of course be real and is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be opened up for questioning and allowed to evolve whereas the deeper truth behind it though harder to define is set. Another example if I say “I need a burger” it’s a fairly crude socially constructed version of my actual need to feed myself.

 So if we live with needs that are socially constructed we also socially construct ways of being bodies, ways of enacting our earthliness. God might call us to question our way of being or doing body, might call us to a deeper, more engaged life of contemplation, compassion and connection. While individually trying to get in touch with our deeper selves and live closer to God is a good thing, there is a dimension of this which needs to be collective and social. How do we build a world grounded in the Spirit of the risen Christ?

We have so internalised ideas like “productivity” and we measure so many things about ourselves so that we might always fall short and have to try harder. But in the Spirit of the resurrected Christ we owe no debts to some idea of being productive, or allowing our own oppression, or the oppression of others and the tangles of responsibility which require that oppression to remain unquestioned. Our call is to be radically free, and this is only confirmed in the gospel.

I have to admit that when I initially read the gospel for this week I yelled out “are you kidding me?” because here Jesus is saying “my yoke is light” but elsewhere he is saying” take up your cross and follow me” and “whatever you do to others you do to me” and neither of those concepts is a light yoke. God is used to my not very pious outbursts and let me think on that as I cooked myself dinner.

My current thinking, which people here or life or God might push me to develop further is that the cross is not of Jesus’ making. Jesus was not made for suffering and violent death he was made for providing wine at a wedding, and stories and bread to the multitudes, and healing to the sick but then the commitment that he had to us meant he couldn’t back out. The cross is our yoke on Jesus and on each other not Jesus’ yoke on us. We would not have to work ourselves into weariness trying to advocate for and heal and help the underprivileged if we just all worked together to make loving-kindness the rule and if all were treated as if they matter. Black lives matter- oh yes they do just like a Galilean fisherman of dubious parentage mattered when he was being tortured and killed for who he was.

But Jesus is not calling us into a yoke of oppression or exploitation. I could paraphrase his words as: “learn from me because I am not invested in the rat race and if you work with me I will liberate you”. One thing I need to take note of is that rest is definitely permitted. Rest is mandated. Jesus wants us to rest.

So take a moment to ponder or even just to rest. Be in this beautiful space and know that God wants to liberate you from all that burdens you, the tangles and inequities and frustrations of a world that has yet to put down its weapons, break out of its habits of greed and fear and just rest in Wisdom.

We need each other too so after a few moments please feel free to share your thoughts with those a safe distance away but closest to you.

Birth, death, sexuality…human love is WORTHY

13th Sunday in Ordinary time, year a

28 June 2020,

Stef Rozitis

“Loving God in your graciousness you make us worthy to receive you. Only say the word and my soul shall be healed”

It’s no secret that I love doing reflections, that I say “yes” when asked before I even look at the readings. How lucky that I can trust God and the community and risk being honest instead of careful in what I say. I know everyone here will consider my words, draw what insights you can from them but not blindly follow me into thoughts that come from my own standpoint and are only part of the whole.

The concept of “worthiness” has troubled me since high school. I had a really good friend who was raised Catholic but left the church over the idea that a male-only clergy expect us to come in and say that we are “unworthy” every week. This friend provoked my thinking and nurtured my baby feminism and I came to see what I had felt but not known how to process: I felt deeply insulted at times by liturgy and the lectionary as well as the fact that gatekeepers to both were exclusively men. Repressing knowledge that I was being insulted made it impossible for me to come to terms with myself or to be honest in my relationships.

I too could have left the church, especially since my overthinking of everything led me irresistibly into theology in which space, I thought I would gain some answers. Instead, I was encouraged to risk being honest about my feelings, thoughts and experiences. I had first felt that feeling of disconnect and experienced that deep rejection when I was 4 and first told that I could not follow my strong desire to be a priest, could not even explore it. I probably should have considered the religious life but it was explained to me as a complete denial of your own will, desires and needs. I am sure that this is not a fair portrayal of it but I knew myself well enough to know I was not noble enough to empty myself out and exist only for others. I frequently found others difficult, while my own tumultuous and poorly articulated inner life made me not self-sufficient enough.

So, first I fell pregnant and then married despite having been brought up that the opposite order was better. There was no way I could have known back then just how unfit for marriage I was but there I was suddenly with a family. As I looked down on the face of my own tiny baby, I did not feel he was particularly beautiful or special in any way (that came later) yet I felt a fierce love for him that was not based on him needing to be special but that threw everything I had been taught about worthiness and unworthiness into disarray. One does not ever become worthy of love, love is not a reward for an assessment, it ticks no check-boxes, it meets no rubric it just undoes us all from our ego and our human constructions of worth or status or difference.

I don’t want to romanticise it. Human love is not perfect. If it was we would not have wars, we would not have detention camps, we would definitely not have poverty, exploitation or violence.

But as I looked at my child I was forced to pray:

“God I can’t trick you into thinking I love you more than anyone now.

This changes everything.

If I was asked to choose between you and my child…well I just couldn’t not choose my child”

I thought with disgust of the story of Abraham being prepared to sacrifice Isaac. I had to rethink what I had been taught about the theology of the cross too, about God sacrificing His child. I wondered if all mothers were heretics and why more fathers were not but when I spoke about this to Aragorn’s father he happily joined me in heresy. Our child was our first priority.

Surely though, if God is greater than me and perfect in love and loves my child more than I do then there is nothing risked by me loving my child.

And yet, this is not just an academic question, “Who do you love more?” or “what is infinity plus one”. There are to many “good” Christian parents who throw their own child out on the street for getting pregnant, or having an abortion of even just for being lesbian or gay or trans. Happily there are also parents who when faced with their child’s lifestyle or identity, allow love to challenge, change and grow their faith rather than reject their own. Why do we fear that we can shrink God down to our own small and fear-filled capacity for love? And why would we choose worthiness before love? And would God really want us to?

***

When my mother died I was angry. I was angry at her for leaving me. “Mothers don’t do this” I raged which of course was neither accurate nor fair but I was so devastated that I stayed with anger for quite some time. My church tradition was supposed to be a comfort but it really wasn’t. I felt I had to pander to other people’s uncontradictory and patriarchal views of my mother, where she was worthy only because of the services she had provided to others, the ways she had been useful or quiet. My experience of her was certainly not that she was quiet- apart from when she was quietly sarcastic.

I had often had conflict with her and I felt that to turn her into a placid and patient saint was to lose her again and again each time we pretended that mother-and-wife as an identity was all or was enough. I stayed angry long after I thought I had moved on. Six months after her death I remember leaving church in angry tears in the middle of the gospel reading because was I supposed to believe that God gave Lazarus back to his family and yet would not give me back my much needed and beloved mother?

***

The third time I realised that flawed, human love was stronger than anything I was told to believe, stronger than my commitment to my faith was the day I realised I had fallen in love with a woman- again completely against the rules. In my life, apparently, love is always a subversive force, however there was also irony in that event (non-event) in that just before that I had finally kicked the habit of going to church and realised I could get along fine as an atheist but then I met her (an atheist) and craved the beauty of God again and as a result I am here most Sunday mornings. That’s not how she would have liked to have influenced me.

This may seem self-indulgent, perhaps all I have done so far is confess my unworthiness. I love my child, my mother, even some atheist I met more than I love Godde. Or do I?

Can it be that when we convince ourselves that Jesus is asking us to narrow or dilute our capacity for love then we are mistaken and fllowing a false Jesus? Perhaps we need to question the idea of

“more than” and refused to be defined as “worthy”. I’m looking for clues in the second half of today’s gospel. If we receive someone who God loves we receive Christ and therefore God. Love of one is not so separated out. We love humans as part of the continuum of God’s love which shaped and called us, which is the stuff of our breath and body as well as our souls.

We say in this community not that we are unworthy but that God makes us “worthy”. We are made of the stuff of Godness and our vocation is to love more broadly not less strongly. We have to give a cup of water to the thirsty one or in 2020 perhaps we give the roll of toilet paper to the one who did not get to the shop on time. We have to love the one who needs love not only the one we are hardwired toward.

I will not perform “worthiness” for an idolatrous conception of a God that has been used by the church to unhook parents from their children enough so that certain clergy have been able to abuse them. I will not turn my back on the only thing I can offer the world- which is an ability to love. My child and my parent are both made in the image of the true God, to love the light shining through them is perhaps my only access to the source of that light.

What I WILL do is allow God to challenge and provoke me to love even those I do not immediately feel drawn to, children I did not give birth to and old people who did not carry me when I was small. I will take up God’s challenge to see her image in all creation, in seas gasping to be saved from plastic and parrots pleading for trees to nest in. My love does not need to be less strong, but only less parochial.

In the words of the Beatles:

“All you need is love All you need is love All you need is love, love Love [and a hermeneutic of suspicion] is all you need”

Please take a moment to think of all the ways God has touched your own life through love, and where your own worthy and beautiful love may be needed next.