Yesteryear centers around the story of Natalie Heller Mills, an influencer who lives with her husband Caleb and five children on a farm in Idaho. Her account @Yesteryearfarm has gone viral and Natalie spends her days making sourdough and supposedly doing farm chores for the camera. Behind the scenes is a team of nannies and hired farm hands. Her Shaker-style kitchen cabinets hide her modern appliances and her husband’s failing cattle farm and “organic” vegetable garden hardly produces enough food to feed a family.

With Natalie as our narrator, the timelines of the book fluctuate between the supposed present where she is losing control of the online empire, her past upbringing, her education at Harvard (where she discovers all the “angry women,” and vows to live a life different than that of her peers) and her engagement and marriage to Caleb (the youngest son of a GOP career politician). As they build their family, they set out with a plan. Backed by this father-in-law’s enormous fortune, the Mills intend to cosplay homesteading in Idaho. Natalie is driven—by keeping up appearances, by avoiding suffering, by finding acceptance from an online following, by anything that keeps her from actually settling into the reality of herself and her own life. She is delusional and infuriating because deep down, we are all a little like Natalie.

And who was I? A flawless Christian woman. The manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies. The mother every woman wanted to be, and the wife every man wanted to come home to…My name is Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.1

The book’s plot twist occurs when present Natalie wakes up to find herself actually living in the same Idaho farmhouse, but in 1855. She is disoriented and desperate to find her way back to the old present. The labyrinth of appearances she has built becomes a trap she can’t escape from.

Although the book currently sits at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, it has caused a serious stir. I think some of the most controversial aspects of the story (its portrayal of religion and women) are actually its greatest strengths. As Burke said recently in an interview, “We were all sold a bill of false goods, and that’s true for conservative women and it’s true for liberal women. … The point of the book is that no one wins.” Every culture script described falls short and the way Burke paints Natalie and her world serves as a cautionary tale for us all.

The Game of Pretend

Two competing cultural scripts emerge early on in Yesteryear. Natalie is confronted with a world of girl-boss inspired, driven, feminist peers during her time at Harvard. She hates these women, but also is obsessed with them. Driven by her hate, she decides to take a hard right turn for herself. Happiness, she decides, is to build a kingdom of motherhood. She strives just as hard as her liberal feminist peers and her job of keeping up the performance has more in common with her corporate climbing former roommate than she cares to admit.

I have long been fascinated by the confluence of influencer tradwife content and liberal feminism. What is billed as a return to God’s plan for women in being a traditional wife and mother (while capturing it as content and making money doing it), is ironically only possible because of the contributions of second and third wave feminism. We all recognize the failures of post-enlightenment modernity and long for a return to simpler times. Tradwife content provides the escape out of the rat race we long for. But it turns out, most of the time the influencers making the content driving this desire are pretending. Or are backed by enormous fortunes and are privileged enough to take the risk.

Some of the magic has worn off recently in tradwife influencer culture as scandals emerge. Last year, a disorienting interview of Hannah Neelman of Ballerina Farm, one of the most successful tradwife influencers to date, showed that all may not be as it seems, or at least not as effortless and shiny. In Yesteryear, Burke pulls the psychological and physical curtain back to reveal where this promise of a simpler life falls short. In fact, it’s all a game of pretend that requires an enormous amount of effort.

Online Natalie was merely posturing herself as a homesteader and Offline Natalie was never actually homesteading. Natalie makes a fantasy world so her husband can feel useful, her father-in-law can feel justified, and so she herself can feel validated and accepted:

I wanted the whole entire world to see itself through my eyes.2

Natalie’s entire life is pretend. All of it. Her marriage is a sham, she doesn’t really like being a mother, and as she discovers, the thing that kept her own mom going was “pretending someone was watching.” So Natalie embarks on her own version of this—she lives for her online following. Natalie is well aware of this and she also knows that her online audience only needs the appearance of authenticity to be satisfied. Because tradwife content is an escape, it only has to have the appearance of cottage cozy comfort because actual pioneer life was honestly brutal and not at all cozy.

These women wanted their content to be every bit as mindless and pleasurable as their lives were not. These women wanted—no they needed—perfection from me. After all, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.3

The life Online Natalie presents as one of not striving but simply and effortlessly keeping house and raising children, is in fact a mirage. The product of Offline Natalie’s intense performance looks simple but is just the result of her tireless efforts. The tradwife influencer life isn’t anymore an escape than the girl-boss corporate grind.

The Authentic Self and Religious Realism

Some recent reviews have criticized Burke for constructing a main character that doesn’t seem like a real person. Natalie doesn’t feel very realistic, I think, because she never truly learned how to be a person. This is most evident in all her relationships—with God and with virtually everyone else in her life. One minute she is praising God for “the Inheritance,” the next she is cursing out some woman in Target. She seemingly has no idea how to have a real friendship, or how to to really connect with her children or her dopey husband. Her mother is constantly reminding her to exhibit basic human traits, like kindness. Natalie’s personality shifts and changes at Burke’s whim to fit the narrative because she is a hollow shell of a fully grown woman.

Some readers are rightfully frustrated with this. But I think as Serena Siglitto argues in her recent review, Natalie “has no stable sense of self, only a series of personas that she inhabits in order to get what she wants in any given situation. As a result, Natalie is unable to truly encounter any of the people around her, including her husband. She cannot see them as persons. She cannot even see herself as a single integrated person. Instead, she treats herself as a product that exists for the entertainment and consumption of others.”

She is a commodity, and she exists in order to commodify others. In our moment, we live in a culture of narcissism. We are all tempted to lose the plot, seeing only ourselves and living for only ourselves. Natalie fails to see anyone around her as a person, because she doesn’t know herself. Her inner emptiness leads her to objectify others and see the world as a place where her only worth is in her own performance, self-objectification, and self-love. Again, Siglitto:

“Even those who eschew social media may unconsciously begin to view themselves through the dehumanizing lens of performative commodification. If women do not possess a stable sense of their own personhood, lovability, and inherent worth, they can easily fall into the trap of believing that they must construct one.”

Not only is Natalie’s personhood self-constructed, but her Christianity is as well. Natalie feels like a satire of a woman raised in fundamentalism because she is. And I will admit, in the beginning of the novel, I found the descriptions of religion off-putting. It all felt so generic and ambiguous. Is this a CREC cult, or Mormonism, or some kind of IFB holdout? But as I read, I wondered if the author intentionally left the particular sect of Christianity ambiguous on purpose.

Bits and pieces of the brand of Christianity Natalie practices are familiar to most of us. It is conservative, yes, but beyond this, it is a tightly controlled Gospel of hierarchy. Everyone in this system knows their place and their roles and doesn’t stray from them. This is God and Country faith at its finest. And as the novel goes on, we find how these ideas of God, country, and family are ultimately all interchangeable with one thing: politics (and behind that: power).

In a recent interview with The Rumpus, Burke said that “whether it’s Mormonism or evangelicalism or Jehovah’s Witness, it’s really all the same in terms of how women are treated and what the expectations are for them.”

I don’t think the point of Yesteryear was to accurately sketch the complex inner workings of a woman in a high control form of Christianity or to mine the depths of its theological or social impacts. Natalie feels like a paper doll version of a good Christian wife and mother because the cultural script she has been handed literally is that—she is to play house. Real women in fundamentalism are much more nuanced and their lives contain both beauty and hardship. The strength of a generic Jesus and John Wayne flavor of Christianity in the novel is that it becomes a striking contrast to the secular feminist script. In fact, from the strictest fundamentalism to Evangelicalism, women are often told that their worth and value are in God’s plan for them as wives and mothers and this supposedly stands in direct opposition to what “the culture” expects of them.

The Maze

The ultimate brilliance of Yesteryear is that it shows how these two seemingly rival cultural scripts for women actually have much more in common than we have been led to believe. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. What the cult of biblical womanhood and the secular girl-boss script have in common is that they both place immense burdens on women and the results they promise come up short.

One of my absolute favorite moments in the book is when Natalie is interviewing Shannon, a 19 year old east coast cultural elite college drop out who is not only interested in coming alongside Natalie as a producer, but is a huge fan of her account.

“Everyone at my school loves you, you know. They think you’re a feminist icon.”

For a moment my guard dropped. I leaned back and snorted. “Really?”

She laughed. “Hell yeah! I mean, no one I know wants to go spend their one wild and magical life being a shill for some billionaire tech a**hole, just so they can get access to s****y healthcare and put away like five dollars a month for their retirement.”

“Just so they can breastfeed in a broom closet someday,” I added quickly. I was familiar with this game.

Shannon pointed a finger at my chest, dead-on, like a pistol. “Exactly. What they want is what you have, Natalie.”

“Which is what?” She smiled and said softly, “Freedom, of course.”

“So I’m—what?” I said. “Some kind of catharsis for girls your age?”

“It’s not catharsis,” Shannon said. “It’s more like a road map.” She was speaking with the kind of urgent self-seriousness that only a twenty-year-old can have. “What you’re doing on your farm, with the homesteading and the farm-to-table and the keeping your kids away from technology? Building a business with your husband, and owning all the means of production, and running it from the comfort of your house? That’s the future, Natalie. That’s the way out.”

“The way out of what?” “Oh,” she said, like it was obvious. “The maze.”4

Gen Z Shannon is disillusioned with the girl-boss empowerment 90’s feminism has made possible for her. And Natalie has seemingly found a way out of the maze: freedom in a self-made life. The only problem is, Natalie’s life is actually all pretend (except for the very real Inheritance funding her pursuits). There is no cultural script that offers a way out of the maze. Natalie has just created a new variation of the maze, one still based on striving and performing.

Natalie’s faith isn’t even an antidote to the maze she has found herself in. Jesus is around, but more as someone who is ready to reward and bless only when properly obeyed. Her constant scrutiny of herself is a reflection of God’s supposed constant scrutiny of her. There is no good news, no grace, for herself or anyone else. Her entire life as a woman is a test; she can either pull herself up by her bootstraps or fail. The future of her soul is entirely dependent on her success as a Christian woman. Natalie’s perfectionism couldn’t secure for her the outcome she desired.

The Way Out is the Way Back

How boring. How deeply and utterly unfair. I did everything I was supposed to. I had the children and married the man and created a universe for all of us to live in, and what was I going to get for it?5

In the end, it’s too late for Natalie. She loses the plot and she loses not only herself but everything she has tried to build. But there is one character who gets out and pulls others out along with her. The end of the novel wraps up almost a bit too quickly, but the sudden emergence of Natalie’s oldest daughter, Clementine, shines a light into the darkness. Clementine has spent her life in the internet’s spotlight, crafted in the image of her mother. At 16 she leaves home to find herself. And in doing so, returns to bring her younger siblings out of the chaos her mother has constructed.

Clementine has nothing to prove but her court order. She has no justification for her return except a concern for the welfare of those left behind. Whether she is driven by justice, love, or spite, she does what her mother could never do: she sees others as full persons in need of love and care.

Regardless of the cultural script we adhere to, what gives us the freedom to act in this kind of self-denying love? We all ultimately just want a script; we want to be told what to do. If we can do it well enough, maybe then we can secure for ourselves the kind of real stability, acceptance, and rest from the constant striving we truly desire.

But real acceptance and rest isn’t something we can manufacture for ourselves. It has to come from outside of us. Apart from grace breaking in and re-orienting us, we will never have know the freedom it is to take our gaze off of ourselves and give ourselves as a gift to others. The way out of the maze isn’t in disappearing or running as fast or as hard as we can. It’s in finding our true selves rooted in Love and surrendering to the grace of God already at work in us. True freedom comes in being rooted in this love and grace, and having nothing to lose in giving ourselves up for others.

When Jesus said he offers rest for the weary and that his yoke is easy and burden light, do we believe he really meant it? Striving or grasping for power won’t bring us the outcomes we can only find in resting in the abundant life he has secured for us and offers freely. You don’t have to run anymore.

In Summary:

I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway…6

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A few years ago, someone asked me if I would recommend Tim and Kathy Keller’s book on marriage, The Meaning of Marriage. I hadn't read it in a decade, but could remember how helpful it was. Not so much on a practical level, but I remember saying, “If you want to read one ‘theology of marriage’ book, this is a great one.” Fast forward to this year, and I read a note pointing out that although, yes, The Meaning of Marriage is a great book, it is missing something. In the Kellers’ chapter on the marriage union, they fail to mention that one of the purposes of the marriage union is to bear children. At first I was a bit astonished. But then remembered that, yes, this basic fact was lacking.

Maybe it is just too obvious? Of course the by-product of the marriage union may include children. And the eighth chapter in Keller’s book offered a kind of freedom I hadn’t seen in a Christian marriage book up to the point I first read it years ago. In a world of marriage books that remind us what we owe one another physically and make marital sex out to be a kind of burden women must bear with a smile or a necessity to keep a partner from seeking pleasure elsewhere, Keller’s vision of reciprocal giving and receiving was a welcome paradigm. But even this vision of giving ourselves to one another falls short when procreation is not also a part of this vision (hold on to this fact, I’ll circle back to it).2

I point out this example as a kind of microcosm of most Protestant thinking on the theology of the body. Others have done extraordinary work calling attention to the deficiencies in Protestant teaching on this topic,3 and there is far more work to be done. I don’t think I am offering anything new here, but hope to condense my observations down to some concise and helpful thoughts for consideration. And maybe offer a kind of solution (or at least, an additional angle to consider).

In Hope in Times of Fear, another book of Keller’s I can heartily recommend, he describes the marriage union in much the same way.4 He argues that sex, at its core, is about vulnerability and union. The New Testament takes sexual sin so seriously for this very reason. A night with a prostitute isn’t a casual affair, Paul argues. It’s so serious that Paul writes that the result is being made “one with” the other’s body.5 This is a bit mind-bending to our modern ears. But this is so serious because it is all designed to point us to something.

Paul goes on to say that our bodies as believers are “members with Christ himself” and that our bodies house the Holy Spirit.6 We experience this rich union with God in Christ, because he gave himself up for us. Jesus saved us through “sacrifice and resurrection.”7 This pattern of self-giving and vulnerability is mirrored in the marriage relationship and points us to the self-giving of Christ.

That’s lovely and true. But I couldn’t help finishing the chapter with a weird “Sex is the greatest thing in all the world!” vibe. Especially after this quote:

“Christianity says that sex is a way for the individual to connect your life to the self-giving divine love that is at the heart of the universe and the meaning of history.”8

A huge part of the marriage relationship is this mutual giving and receiving. And in it, we catch a glimpse of the reality of how the Godhead operates. But what if you don’t ever experience sexual union with a spouse? Do you miss out on some kind of insider spiritual experience? Are there other ways one comes to participate in this self-giving and receiving in this life, apart from sex? Help!

Never fear, John Paul II is here to help! Years ago in the fever dream that is postpartum, I read through John Paul II’s seminal work on the body, Theology of the Body. Delivered as a series of lectures at the monthly Cardinal luncheon, the work attempts to shed light on what the body is for after a backlash to the Catholic Church’s revised stance on contraceptives in the late 1960’s. As the years have gone on, bits and pieces of this book have come to my mind as I read and think through how this can apply to our Protestant understanding.

A lot of people misunderstand Theology of the Body as a kind of Catholic sex-ed book. It is not that, however. What Theology of the Body gives us is a comprehensive look at what the body is, what it is for, and the spiritual realities it points us to. What stuck out to me the most was not only how John Paul II elevates marriage, but how he also elevates and dignifies singleness. Constructing a theology of the body not only through the lense of the marriage union, but also through one of celibacy, gives us a complete picture of how our bodies are made to point to greater realities. There are two concepts in general I think would greatly assist Protestants in how we think about the body: spousal meaning and generative potential.

First up, spousal meaning. This term is found over 100 times in Theology of the Body. According to John Paul II, the basic job of the body is to express the person, to make us visible in the world. This visibility also makes us vulnerable. But instead of masking this vulnerability, we are called to love and give. Our bodies aren’t meant to exist in isolation, but in relation with other bodies.

Thus, the spousal meaning of the body means that through this giving and welcoming, accepting and finding, our bodies proclaim to us the eternal truth that “happiness is being rooted in Love” (TOB 16:2).9

Because God himself is self-gift, we are made for self-gifting. We are created to give ourselves generously to God and to other people. Angela Franks points out that the main way the body does this is as a sexed body and as a result, is how human generation works:

“The reproductive system is the only bodily system that needs another person to successfully complete it. I don’t need anyone else to digest or breathe in air, but I need another person to generate a new human being.”10

The body is incomplete when it comes to generation and this points us to the truth that God himself is ordered towards relationship and self-gift. Again, Angela Franks reminds us that “we are only made happy when we are ordered to something beyond ourselves.”11 This reflects the very nature of God, that the Trinity is ordered in this same way.

This idea that we are designed to reflect the character of God in our bodies and how we relate to one another leads John Paul II to describe the body as “sacramental,” visible symbols of an invisible reality. Our bodies are for revealing an invisible reality. They speak of a larger story about who we are and who we are made to be: image bearers in relationship with God.

The second idea is that of generative potential. Because God is self-gift and love, the Trinity has eternally enjoyed relationship with one another. This relationship leads God to bring forth life—to create in order to share this love with a universe called to know and respond to him in love. We, as sexed male and female humans, have the potential within our bodies to bring forth others who can participate in this gift of life. But we need one another to do so (back to spousal meaning).

This concept of “generative potential” is hugely important. And because we Protestants don’t speak of it often, we find ourselves in a bind when talking about the body.12 If our bodies are sacramental, if they point to some greater truth or reality, then the way we are made as sexed men and women has a point. Whether we are married or single, our bodies are designed to be generative and we are made to live out this pattern of self-giving and receiving. How so?

In the marriage relationship, the one flesh union may result in children. The legitimacy of marriage itself isn’t dependent on giving birth to children, but it is one potential result. This tells the story that apart from this dependance, vulnerability, and self-giving that we can’t as humans bring life into the world. We image how God loved us in Christ when we as husbands and wives submit to one another in Christ and love and care for one another as our own bodies, just as the Godhead has been eternally loving and preferring one another.

And here is the beautiful thing: single men and women embody these realities as well. As a woman, your body tells the world something about who God is. He made you to image him, to love and care for others, to give yourself for others, to depend on others. And you do this in a unique way as a woman. As a man, your body tells the world something about who God is. He made you to image him, to love and care for others, to give yourself for others, to depend on others. And you do this in a unique way as a man.

A single man or woman may never parent children, but each still has a kind of generative potential to nurture life. John Paul II adds to this that in the same way a husband and wife fulfill the purpose of spousal meaning in a marriage union, in giving themselves to the mission of the church, single Christians can experience both spousal union and generative potential spiritually:

Christ revealed to man and woman, over and above the vocation to marriage, another vocation namely, that of renouncing marriage, in view of the kingdom of heaven. With this vocation, he highlighted the same truth about the human person. If a man or a woman is capable of making a gift of himself for the kingdom of heaven, this proves in its turn (and perhaps even more) that there is the freedom of the gift in the human body. It means that this body possesses a full nuptial meaning.13

Jesus himself reminds us of this in the Great Commission. Jesus, a single, celibate man who never had physical progeny is said to “look to his offspring”14 —a host of spiritual progeny who would come to be made one with God through him. Jesus’ command to “go and make disciples of all nations” mirrors the Genesis 1 command to be “fruitful and multiply.”15 Embodying the Gospel story with our lives and drawing others into this life of spiritual fruitfulness is every believer’s calling, married or single.

So the marriage relationship is about vulnerability and union. It points us to a greater reality, because our bodies are meant to point us to a greater reality. But the additional ideas of the body as a kind of sacrament, spousal giving, and generative potential expand this understanding. If Jesus has risen from the dead, and inaugurated a new reality, and a coming resurrected world, then the way we exist in the world here and now as embodied humans in relationship with one another points to this story.

The mystery of our bodies here and now is that the way we give of ourselves points to the Wedding that is coming. The marriage relationship uniquely points to the relationship of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church. But every believer (as the Bride, a part of the church) lives out the reality that anticipates the return of the Bridegroom. The world is the potential guest list and we are called to beckon others to come to the great Marriage Supper of the Lamb, in a new, restored heaven and earth.

In Summary:

“For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch the rhythm not only of all creation, but of all being.” - C.S. Lewis, from The Problem of Pain

For more on this topic:

-Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, John Paul II

-the [female] body and the [desecrated] body,

-The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory,

-Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith,

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The God of love is kneeling at our feet.

Though we betray Him, though it is the night.

He meets us here and loves us into light.

-from Maundy Thursday, Malcolm Guite

I remember it was several years back in a church that was trying out something new. The COVID-era self-serve melt-away paper wafers and cough syrup-like juice were thankfully a thing of the past. However, communion in a gym family-style was a new attempt to rethink the Eucharist in the church I was attending. Sitting at a table with several other adults while trying to wrangle my own 18 month old, I was passed a styrofoam cup of grape juice and a cracker. Celebrating the Lord’s Supper as a communal meal is by no means wrong. But in my heart that day, it felt so off. I gulped down the juice and left the gym before munching on the crackers (mostly due to the toddler’s deteriorating behavior) and spent the rest of the afternoon stomping with said toddler through rainy puddles behind our row house trying to discern why I felt so uncomfortable.

A few weeks later, on Maundy Thursday, I would join some friends and attend an Anglican Church. I had been to Episcopal services before, but this would be my first time in an Anglican high church setting. First up was the procession and acclamation. The ministers walked in behind a female celebrant carrying a cross. Once at the front, she led us in the Collect:

Almighty Father, whose most dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it in thankful remembrance of Jesus Christ our Savior, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.1

She then read the Old Testament passage for the day. I had never felt seen and known by God in the way I did in the pew that night seeing a female congregant, just like the rest of us, read Scripture out loud. But the most impactful part of the night was the observance of Communion. Towards the end of the service, the priest called us to come forward. We knelt, extended our hands, and received the bread and wine as he placed it in our mouths. He spoke over us, reminding us of God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf, and prayed that we would receive the grace offered to us.

I knelt there holding back tears. The walking to the front, the posture of humility and utter need, the priest reminding us of what we already knew but needed to hear again- it all undid me in a way I hadn’t experienced before in an observance of the Lord’s Supper. I tasted and saw that atonement and grace was something I could only receive at my very weakest.

My whole life up until this point, had been spent in churches where church and faith were more about what I could bring to the table than what God could give me. Growing up in Baptist fundamentalism meant that I learned early on what kinds of acts of service would be most rewarded. As I grew older, even though I loved the Lord and loved the church, serving became a way to hide, to avoid scrutiny. If I was a quiet, obedient, teenager who accompanied the choir every week, who was to question my life outside the walls of the church building? While my fellow youth group friends skateboarded on church property and had public MySpace profiles, I too skateboarded and had a secret online life, but did it all on my own time. My worst nightmare would have been being found out or exposed and I did everything I could to divert others from looking too closely at my life outside of the three weekly church services.

For years, I was constantly torn between my earnest dedication to the Lord and my unwillingness to accept that I was unable to work or perform for grace. I was confronted with the wrath of God reserved for sinners every week, but figured if I kept it up long enough, the shame and guilt could be outweighed by acts of service and God would be placated. Atonement was something I knew Jesus had secured for me, and yet, it felt like something elusive. Something that could be lost if I wasn’t careful enough to cover my tracks.

The pinnacle of this performative faith was the monthly observance of Communion. It was the ultimate test of my worthiness to receive grace. The sacrament was never dared called a sacrament, but was merely a remembrance. But even the term remembrance doesn’t quite capture the event. What it was was a somber time of reflection and confession. We were to plumb the depths of our souls, leave no sin or errant deed unidentified. Only then would we be worthy of coming to the table. Judgement would fall on us if we held anything back. This was the way to find peace with God: my own efforts and spiritual pride that I had cleansed my heart and become worthy of receiving his sacrifice afresh.

It would take time and suffering for grace to finally break through. Abruptly moving away from this childhood church when I was 17 caused me to come to terms with my own frailty and inability to secure my standing with the Lord on my own. But somehow spiritual pride always has a way of coming back to the forefront. It wasn’t until that moment on a weekday evening in that Anglican church in Baltimore that atonement would finally make sense to me as something I could only receive at my lowest point.

And I was finally at my lowest point. The church we had been a part of planting for nearly eight years was drastically changing and everything I thought was sure up until then had come undone. My relationships with some church leaders were strained as pressure mounted and our differences became apparent. My efforts had failed and my preconceived notions about what God wanted from me had come up short. Like the woman who caught the hem of Jesus’s robe in the crowd as he passed by, this night in this church felt like a desperate attempt to grasp at spiritual straws. Would I come up short again? Or would I finally know rest and wholeness?

Sitting in the pew, the grace of God broke into my dismay. I saw Christ’s strength in weakness in the liturgy- a Savior who strips down to wash his hypocritical disciples’ feet as his last unexpected act of love before dying for them. My faith was battered but as I dragged myself to the altar that evening, knelt down on my knees and opened my hands, the priest placed the bread into my mouth like I was a helpless baby. All I could do was receive this sacrament of grace, and I wept at the picture of God meeting my faltering faith that this was. I finally understood atonement in a way I had never seen it before.

A state of humility and desperation is the very point at which God meets us and fills us. Atonement, being at one with God, isn’t something I could conjure up for myself. It was only in my utter need that I could receive what He has done for me on my behalf. My hiding was over and my soul had been laid bare. But there He was, faithfully ready to receive me. Shame and guilt are no match for this God who poured himself out and continues to give us himself again and again.

In Summary:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

- from Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne

*parts of this essay are adapted from a previous post.

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But there are only two stories that make any difference-God’s story and the human story. We all are living out different versions of those two stories with an infinite number of variations. God’s story, or the story of God and man, is simple-God made the world and loved the world, the world got lost, and God has spent the rest of human history trying somehow to bring the world back to himself. That is the story of God and man as I think each one of us has experienced it. It’s really as simple as that and as complex as that.

In the process of living out our own stories, God’s story intersects with ours.1

Last time, I explored the idea that the Bible is not meant to be seen as just a collection of facts or moral guidelines, but is first and foremost, a story. God gave us a story because it is what we most need. We need a meta-narrative to tune us to the reality of things and to in turn, help us see ourselves as participants in this story of redemption.

One idea I have been thinking about for a long time is the tension between the Bible as story (myth) and the Bible as ultimate reality (fact). These things are both true, but how? Ross Byrd captured this quite well in an article from January 2025. He bases his observations in the famous Joe Rogan/Wesley Huff interview. A theme that emerged in that conversation was the tension between Jesus as fact and Jesus as myth. C.S. Lewis had a lot to say about the nature of myth and how we as humans are wired for it. He also concluded that there is no tension. In fact, truth flows from the myth and the myth is the means by which we come to know the truth. Ross writes:

Lewis then suggests that, just as myth is the partial solution to the problem of knowing, Christ, in his incarnation, is the ultimate solution to the problem of myth, the means by which the truest imagined story becomes actual, real-life fact:

Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth that is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens at a particular date in a particular place. By becoming fact, it does not cease to be myth. That is the miracle.- C.S. Lewis2

From myth flows reality, from reality flows truth. This is the way in which the Biblical story permeates our world and shapes our faith and our participation in the world. This is not just an abstract activity or an intellectual exercise. It is an embodied, everyday participation in the life of the Crucified and Risen Christ. And the way the biblical story and the Person of Jesus crashes into our reality is through our own stories.

How then is the Biblical story the lens by which we view reality and our own stories? God is a God of consistent action. He is a God who does the same things over and over again. Part of the reason for the “rhyming” of the biblical stories is for us to make these connections, to compare and contrast similar stories and draw out meaning from the themes and types. But the Biblical story is cyclical also because history, and therefore our own lives, are cyclical. If this is true, we can look to the details in our own stories that occur again and again as a way to see God at work and to find meaning in his purposes for us.

Our stories call our attention to the love and grace of God alive and at work in the world. Frederick Buechner summarizes the importance of paying attention to our own lives for our spiritual benefit the following way:

It is well to remember because it keeps our eyes on the central fact that the Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all of us involved with, stub our toes on, flounder around in trying to look as if we have good sense…If the God you believe in as an idea doesn’t start showing up in what happens to you in your own life, you have as much cause for concern as if the God you don’t believe in as an idea does start showing up.

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives. If God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then you might as well give up the whole business3

Studying Colossians this past semester helped me come to realize how Paul is an amazing example of this. Paul’s whole deal is that he sees himself as a participant in God’s story of redemption. In fact, this truth is what grounds him in his work and gives him confidence in God’s purposes as he risks his life to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles. The times in his epistles that Paul lists his credentials and recounts his life story aren’t just Paul flashing his apostleship badge to silence his critics. He recounts the details of his life as a way of showing how God has always been at work in his story and has now made him a part of a bigger story. This reality is what frees and propels Paul forward: he has seen grace at work in his life and is convinced that it will keep showing up as God’s plan of redemption continues on.

Jesus himself, as the fulfillment of all the Biblical stories, was grounded in the story of redemption as well. Jesus came not only to fulfill the promises of God made to his people, but to actually embody the story of the Scriptures, which all pointed to him. The more I think about this, the wilder it is. Jesus is the true Israel, and his life re-enacted the story of Israel. He is born into obscurity (like Israel is not chosen because of status), his family is forced to flee to Egypt, then returns to Israel. He is circumcised, baptized and sojourns 40 days in the wilderness. His encounter with the Samaritan woman is at the well of Jacob, which is also where Jacob had first encountered Rachel (a recapitulation of a prior event in the life of Isaac). Time and time again, the insignificant details of Jesus’s life are recapitulations of past stories, and yet, he is the fulfillment of each of these events. And unlike the original people involved, he enters through them perfectly.

The road to Emmaus may be the pinnacle of this theme. Jesus recounts the stories of the Old Testament and how they point to him. But even after this history lesson, the disciples he walks with fail to recognize him. Finally in the breaking of bread, something he must have done countless times in their presence before his death, they see who he is. It is not just in the story of the Bible and in the sacraments that we encounter God, but in the common everyday cycles of our lives that we recognize his work and presence.

An embodied faith doesn't just exist in the realm of facts and ideas. It is flesh and blood, true experienced reality. It’s no wonder then, that the Biblical story is meant to be the thing that grounds us, that interprets reality and our own particular stories for us. The Bible gives us access not to some pretend world, but to how the world actually is. The Bible, in some ways, is the truest version of a pattern that fills everything, a tuning fork for all of life.4

But paying attention is hard. We are often moving too quickly to settle down and assess where God may be at work or how he is showing up in the mundane or the frenzied chaos. It takes conscious effort to rest, reflect, and discover how God is revealing himself or has offered us grace in the day to day. And to be honest, sometimes like Job, we don’t always get the answers right away. We may never understand everything, but we can be confident in the master Storyteller who has entered our world, made us a part of his ongoing story of redemption and promises to bring it all to a grand conclusion when the cosmos are remade and restored.

As Jordan Peterson admitted, “Sometimes…the objective world and the narrative world…touch.” This is either the greatest miracle we have known or it is the most terrifying fact imaginable. Peterson, through tears, goes on to say “It’s too terrifying a reality to fully believe. I don’t know what would happen to you if you fully believed this, that these realities touch.”5

What would happen to us if we fully believed that both fact and myth coincide in the person of Jesus? That God entered our world and continues to break in. That he has not only made a way for us to know him and be loved by him, but has made us participants in a story bigger than ourselves, one that contains all of our own stories and is in itself, the culmination of every story?

Someone who asked this same question in her art and life was Flannery O’Connor. In dozens of short stories and two novels, she constructed hard-hearted and self-absorbed characters who thrive on the assumption that they are the best interpreters of their realities. But the subterranean grace of God breaks in by way of ordinary means: a prosthetic leg, a book thrown across the room, a tattooed back, a visit to the doctor’s office, a bus ride, a sunset. These events shock her characters into seeing reality as it really is and their place in it.

What if, like Flannery O’Connor’s characters, we allowed grace to break in, sometimes subtly, sometimes like a violent blow? What if we were to interpret the details of our lives as God breaking in, stripping us of our pride and self-centeredness, and reorienting our understanding of reality? Our story, like the Biblical story, is just that. He is kind enough not to leave us as we are, but he continually meets us in our need, leading us back to himself and reminding us of what is true and real: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

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“Are you an out-doorsy kind of gal? I had one of those once.” I looked over to see that the question had been asked by a tall, elderly man. He had long white hair, a kind face, and eyes that were deep pools of blue. Somehow, miraculously, he was balancing a Tower of Babel worth of mixing bowls and assorted kitchen utensils in his spindly arms. I stood clutching my found paperback copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and a kids-sized cowboy hat I knew the five year old would be delighted with. “Umm, not really.” I hesitantly reply. “This is kind of just what I wear everyday.” I divert my eyes to some baking pans, hoping he will let me be now that I have given my halting answer.

My default when approached by strangers in public hasn’t changed much since childhood. Growing up, kid’s shows on PBS were always reminding us of the dangers of strangers, hot on the heels of the ‘80’s Milk Carton Kids and ‘90’s Satanic Panic. But it’s not fear that keeps me from interacting with strangers on the regular. It is a sense that interruptions of any kind are unwelcome. My default mode of operation is that I am not prepared to take a moment out of my very scheduled day to entertain unwanted questions or unwanted needs, for that matter.

There is a sense of self-preservation that accompanies this, if I am really honest. Straight from undergrad, I moved with my husband to Baltimore, MD, a city I love deeply but where I had to learn to keep my guard up. We always lived on the very edge of a decent neighborhood. In Baltimore, one block from the next can alternate between half a million dollar row homes and neighborhoods crippled by systemic and generational poverty and addiction. A few times a month I would tramp through the discarded remains of chicken box lunches and crushed cans of Natty-Boh beer to get to our closest grocery store. Along the way I would pass a bus stop and without fail, every time, was met with cat-calling and a haze of curse words. I quickly learned how to keep my head down.

So self-preservation, yes. But there was something about this older man in that Goodwill in Easley on the edge of polite civilization that Thursday morning that brought my guard down. Maybe it was just the town itself. My experiences in Easley previously had left me curious and open to any human encounters I could experience. The Publix in Easley is somehow the most haphazard shopping experience you will ever have. Much like a Chick-Fil-A in Brooklyn, the locals have overpowered any corporate attempts at decency and order. People of Easley: 1, Publix: 0.

The DMV in Easley is also a fascinating study, as most DMVs are. I spent an afternoon here, sitting across from a one armed man who never took his eyes off the wall in front of him, and I couldn’t decide if the experience was more akin to a Flannery O’Connor short story or a David Lynch film.

This Goodwill has a certain aura, though. One must be ready to talk about Jesus or Donald Trump (which in some shoppers opinions, are one in the same) when you darken the door to browse. Today was no exception. But somehow, I was more curious than normal. What did I have to loose?

“Are you an out-doorsy kind of gal? I had one of those once.”

“Umm, not really…This is kind of just what I wear everyday.”

“Ah, well my outdoorsy girl died in a car crash in 1987. Left me with four children, ages 10, 8, 6, and 4. That was time!”

Somehow I was not expecting this to take such a morbid turn. Should I ask more about the dead wife? Should I offer my sympathies? Should I just nod and head for the door? No, let’s keep this dialogue going for a while.

“That is terrible! I am so sorry for your loss. That must have been so hard.”

“Ahh it was. But we made it! Jesus has never failed me yet! In fact, I am a walking miracle.”

He then proceeded to tell me about his heart condition. I glazed over for bit while he went on, but something about an enlarged heart, “the worst the doctors had seen!” and when it was time to operate, a scan showed his problems had miraculously disappeared. “My son, who is a surgeon, says medical journals are going to be written about me! Jesus did a miracle on my heart.”

Jesus did a miracle on my heart. The words ring in my ears as I shift back and forth on my feet and marvel that his leaning tower of Tupperware is still, somehow, standing.

He continued on like this for a while. I finally managed to say that I was glad to hear that he had been healed and had found Jesus to be such a comfort and a caring Savior. Slowly, I moved on, pretending that a crumpled pile of Halloween trick or treat bins had caught my eye. He nonetheless, followed me.

“Are you a student?”

“In a sense, but no, I finished school a long time ago.”

“Well let me tell you, you never stop learning. I was a park ranger for many years, and my current wife is an outdoorsy gal - in fact we are going camping this weekend, thus all this,” (he gestured at his load of bowls) “We have been married for 20 years and I am still learning her. You never can know everything there is to know about a woman.”

“True. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Enjoy your camping trip!”

“Oh I will! Remember, Jesus never fails. He gave me a whole new heart.”

And with that, he at last headed to check out, where he began to strike up a conversation with the tired looking employee who was manning the cash register. What word would he have for her? I wondered.

Jesus did a miracle on my heart. Sometimes I forget this. Sometimes I forget that the miracle is not just that I have been declared guilt-free, but that this new status frees me to love. The miracle is that my cold and disinterested heart has been set free to love and offer grace, because I have been loved and given grace. This old man reminded me that this miracle isn’t one and done. In fact, it’s an ongoing work that never ceases to be any less miraculous than the first time I let down my guard and opened myself up to someone else. Interruptions are often the means by which grace breaks through my stony heart when I am willing and able to see that this unwanted disruption may be more than meets the eye. May I have eyes to see and ears to hear the grace that lurks even at the Goodwill.

From my time in KJV only fundamentalism when I read my NIV cover to cover out of spite (because, after all, we were supposed to read thorough the whole Bible every year) to my time in churches that placed a high value on expository teaching and spent years preaching through a single four chapter epistle leaving no Greek word unturned,1 I have had many different understandings of what the Bible is for. My younger self was desperate to have certain doctrinal questions answered: the problem of evil, election, salvation, the nature of God’s character. Sometimes I found those answers. But spaces that treated the Bible like an instruction manual or science textbook always confused me. This didn’t seem to fit with my experience of Scripture. The Bible is the final word on things pertaining to salvation and faith, but even the WCF admits there are some things we won’t have clear answers for, but need to use “the light of nature” and “prudence” to figure out.2 So what is the point? Are we to see the Scriptures as just a guide for living or is it partly that and yet also something more?

The Bible is first and foremost a book, a story. Why, if God meant for us to have all the answers, would he give us a book of stories and poems? Why a book at all? Approaching the Bible as what it is- a work of literature that contains several different genres that all require their own means of interpretation and understanding- has changed my perspective dramatically. What if what we need most isn’t an operations manual, but a story? Humans seek meaning and meta-narrative and this is what the story of Scripture offers. God speaks to us at the very level at which we all desperately want to be spoken to. If anything, the main questions Scripture seeks to answer are:

who is God?

how does he relates to the world?

and how do we fit into this story?

The way the Scripture is laid out if you are approaching it as an answer key is endlessly frustrating. How do we make sense of two creation accounts and four Gospel accounts? Why are timelines often jumbled? Why do some books like Judges and Jonah end without resolution? Why does Job ask questions for 35 chapters only for God to answer with a poem about how he delights in creation? Why can Jesus never answer a question directly and instead loves to respond with a seemingly unrelated parable? What on earth is the book of Revelation? Because the way the Bible lays out narratives is meant to cause us to compare and contrast them with surrounding stories, revealing deeper meaning. We are meant to trace threads and motifs throughout the entire biblical story. The typology and symbolism woven throughout the Bible over thousands of years and dozens of authors is one of the greatest achievements in all of literature and it is unlike any other book.

The stories and poems offered in response to some of life’s hardest questions actually do more for us than a straight answer would. They cause us to confront our questions and probe our deepest desires. The parables Jesus the Master Storyteller told get to the heart of the question far better than any other kind of response would. Jesus’ parables endlessly frustrated the Pharisees. They were baffled by his actions and missed the point of the Incarnation. But for those who are humble enough to see their need and the great feast of grace offered by God Incarnate, the stories are an invitation to a greater reality. They are exactly what we are looking for and the answer to our deepest longings. Maybe it turns out, that what we most need isn’t a cosmic Q&A, but a story.

What if instead of having all the answers, we are meant to see ourselves in this great story that is unfolding and has been unfolding for thousands of years, starting with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God entered into the world and in acting upon it, brought something where there was nothing and gave meaning where there wasn’t. And he continued to act. Throughout the Biblical narrative are accounts of ordinary people that God accomplished his purposes through. Their very lives became a part of the grand story and they themselves came to embody the story of redemption.

One of my favorite current ways this is demonstrated is in the latest installment in the Knives Out film series, Wake Up Dead Man. I won’t offer my review beyond pointing out that the film encapsulates tensions I have felt in my own life in the church.3 It also focuses on the tension between longing to have all of our questions answered and instead being given a faith that is a call to embody a story.

When Detective Blanc shows up in Father Jud’s church to crack the case, he postures himself as a man of reason, a fact gatherer who comes to conclusions about truth based on his own reasoning power. What he comes to learn though is that in being a detective, he isn’t so much a fact finder but is in fact a master storyteller. In gathering clues, he constructs a narrative. The story he discovers is the means by which he comes to know the truth. In offering grace, he himself becomes a participant in the story of redemption. He has much more in common with Jud the Priest than he realizes.

Fr. Jud initially thinks he will best serve his congregation by finding the answers to every question regarding the case. What he realizes though is that the work of the church is slow and personal. He rushes through a conversation with a lady who has information he desperately needs only to be stopped in his tracks when confronted with her grief and need of grace. His work as priest must be unhurried- he must not use people as a means to an end. Monsignor Wicks, on the other hand, pursues power in radicalizing a small group of people and going viral online for his angry, fear-based tirades. Living out the story of Christianity is about being a means of grace in the lives of others, not attainting wealth and power in this life.

Blanc: “I kneel at the altar of the rational.”

Fr Jud: “It’s storytelling. This church building isn’t medieval. We’re in New York. It has more in common with Disneyland than Notre Dame. And the rites and the rituals and the costumes… all of it. It’s storytelling.

I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that is profoundly true… that we can’t express any other way except storytelling?”

There is truth in scripture, the stories are true, but the kind of answers we crave aren’t always so tidy. Or maybe tidy answers aren’t the point. Maybe the point is getting to know this God of Scripture who offers us His very self and all along has been longing for relationship with us. And the way we come to know him best in this world, is to come to know the story of how he is at work in the world and has called us into his grand narrative of redemption. Our deepest questions and all of our longing for resolution culminate in Jesus, God’s yes and amen, the One to whom all the stories in Scripture point.

It is not just that the Bible is a book about things that happened once in a far off place. God entered our world and continues to break in. This God became flesh and blood and conquered death so that we could be caught up in his redeeming work in the world. And now it’s the followers of Christ, the church, who embody the story. The Word is living and active and our lives are in a continual conversation with it. As Christians, we gather every week to rehearse the story of redemption to ourselves and to one another, and to re-encounter the grace of Jesus again and again. Hymns, Scripture readings, creeds, the word and sacraments, all of these things are reminders of the story of salvation and our place in it. We go out then every week to serve all of creation with the truths of this story ringing in our ears, drawing others into this work of grace.

Next time, I will continue on with more thoughts about the Bible as a story and how we encounter God in our own stories (with a little help from Frederick Buechner, C.S. Lewis, and Flannery O’Connor).

In Summary:

It is well to remember what the ancient creeds of the Christian faith declare credence in: God of God, Light of Light... for us and for our salvation came down from heaven... born of the Virgin Mary. Suffered. Crucified. Dead. Buried. Rose again. Seated at the right hand of God. Shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead. That is not a theological idea of a religious system. It is a series of largely flesh and blood events that happened, are happening, will happen, in time and space. For better or worse, it is a story. - Frederick Buechner

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1. I would get a deeper understanding of how women functioned in the western church before the Gregorian reforms

2. I would continue to uncover how Aristotle influenced the medieval mind (and church leaders and councils)

If these are things that keep you up at night, read on, because I found some answers!

I have seen it hinted elsewhere that before the Gregorian and Lateran council reforms of the 1200 and 1300’s, the western church was a very different institution. 1200 years is a long time! We are only 700 years past these reforms so for the majority of church history, things looked very different.

Macy takes a lot of time to carefully define “ordination.” Most modern theologians (and some historians) make the mistake of using our current working definitions of ordination and forcing it on the church before 1200. The modern Catholic understanding of ordination is tied to a granting of special power linked to liturgy at the altar.1 In Protestant churches it is more of a formal recognition of qualification to serve as a pastor or elder. Before the Gregorian reforms, ordination was not so much about this supernatural power and authority as it was about commissioning a particular person in a particular church community to serve within that community, much more like it is in current Protestant ecclesiology. The theology of transubstantiation would not be fully codified until the 13th century reforms, so ordination had little to do with the Eucharist before then.

However, ordination wasn’t limited just to the offices of bishop, priest, and deacon. Nearly everyone who served in an official capacity in a church was ordained. We also find in documents and books of church rites that prior to the 13th century, the words, “ordination,” “blessing,” “commission,” and “dedication” are used interchangeably. There are rites for the ordination of a door keeper, blessings for the cutting of beards, commissioning of bishops, and dedications of widows. The specific use of ordination as we think of it today was just not used in the same way then.

Churches in Europe in the early middle ages largely functioned on a “family model.” There were several attempts before 1200 to enforce clerical celibacy, but it never really stuck on a large scale until the Gregorian reforms. Most church offices (including deacon and deaconesses) would become celibate positions as the church moved towards a “monastery model” in which the church was more isolated from the community and those in its service represented the “third gender” of celibate, ordained offices.2 The office of nun and abbess would eventually replace the office of widow and deaconess when these reforms were complete.

The Gregorian reforms were the first time widespread reforms actually made an impact. Churches were a part of local communities and if papal reforms or councils made sense for that community, they were adopted. But often they were largely ignored. What was so drastic about the Gregorian reforms is that they restructured the hierarchy of the church so that power was consolidated at the top. No longer would there be churches on land owned by the priest and his family. The lands would all be owned by the church at large (as a part of the ongoing struggle for land between the papal lords and secular lords). Children of priests would no longer inherit the family business of the church or the land it was on but were declared bastards. The wives of priests, similarly, were all considered illegitimate and given the status of concubines.

This resulted in a dramatic change in the daily functioning of the church. It became a church with top down authority, and a specific way to advance in rank from deacon to pope. (Interestingly, between 700 and 900 AD, there were 10 deacons who went straight to the papacy. This would never happen after 1300.)

No longer was ordination just about how one served in a particular church, there was spiritual power allocated to those ordained. According to Macy, now “ordination [was] tied…to power rather than to vocation, to status not to appointment.” This was especially true for priests. Only a priest could perform the miracle of changing the bread and wine into Christ’s body. This further divided the laity from the priesthood. Priests were given the Holy Spirit in ordination and could not lose their spiritual rights as priests (even if excommunicated and later restored, they would not be re-ordained). Ordination stuck for life and had eternal weight as well.

So where do women fit in to all of this history? Before the Gregorian reforms and Lateran councils, we have ample evidence of women being ordained to the role of deaconess. There are a handful of records of women as presbyterae and episcopa but it is inconclusive whether these women were the wives of priests or bishops (and so functioned as ministry partners along with them) or functioned as a separate ordained order. Nonetheless, they were legitimately ordained by the definitions of ordination at the time.3 They helped in preparing and distributing the Eucharist, read aloud the Gospel readings, and assisted in house calls and baptisms. Abesses heard their nuns’ confessions and gave absolution. Deaconesses made things for the parishes (linens, vestments, etc.) and helped maintain the buildings and properties. The ordination rites for female deacons are identical to those of male deacons in several surviving books of church rites.4

We have one example of a woman being ordained a bishop in the 9th century. But it was an accident. I kid you not, the priest was “overcome by the spirit” and administered all the rites of ordination. When he came to and realized what he had done, the rites were honored and Brigid of Kildare served as a bishop within her church community and was apparently highly effective.5 We have one lovely fresco from the Priscilla Catacombs, the fractio panis, of a woman (alongside several men) who appears to be administering the Eucharist (or at least sharing a communion meal). But other than these and a few other scraps of history, evidence for women as priests and bishops is scarce.6

The evidence for ordained deaconesses and widows, however, is ample. From the beginning of the church, women served in these roles and assisted in worship. Whether it was because there weren't enough men around or cultural norms necessitated women serve women in specific ways (such as in baptism, which was done nude), women were deaconesses. And this was an ordained role (by the definition of the time). There is so much evidence for this, that a slash and burn campaign was waged by the church during the Gregorian era to discount the nature and character of women and to erase the history of their service in the church for the 1200 years prior.

Three things fueled the new rhetoric about women:

1. Reinterpretation of a few key biblical passages

2. The revival of Aristotle

3. A return to patriarchal Roman Law

Several theological changes were made regarding women. The Roman church law would became the predominant (canon) church law in Europe at the time. This document was known as Decretum Gratiani. It argued, with a bit of help from Aristotle, that women were not made in the image of God (from 1 Cor. 10:7) and were therefore incapable of receiving church orders. A rediscovery of a 4th century commentary attributed to Ambrose on 1 Timothy also facilitated a retranslation of 1 Tim 3:11. From the 5th-12th century this had been interpreted as Paul’s instructions to female deacons. Now it was only about the wives of deacons.

Prior to the reforms, men and women were educated side by side in educational settings such as the Benedictine order of church.7 After the reforms, women would be cut off from access to the education of the newly formed universities. Along with the founding of the university was a return to the classics, which at this time meant Aristotle, who conveniently had a lot to say about how terrible women are. This revival of Aristotle’s thinking was so influential that even the Protestant Reformers 300 years later (who brought back the “church as family model” in a way) still maintained quite a bit of misogyny and quipped about women being physically and emotionally inferior (but not as spiritually inferior as the Gregorian reforms made women out to be, so a step in the right direction).

When the Decretum became the predominant church law in Europe at the time, there was also a revival of Roman civic codes. Allison Morgan summarizes this in her review of Macy’s book:

Roman law had become interwoven with Church law since Gratian; the second version of the Decretum expanded it further. Canon law chose to follow the parts of Roman law which stressed the control of the paterfamilias over children and spouse (Roman law itself gave women many legal rights including public activity and owning/controlling property). Women were seen as unreliable and intellectually inferior to men; and therefore subject to them.8

The new interpretations of 1 Cor 10, 1 Tim 3, the return to Aristotle, and Roman patriarchal law had vast implications for women in the church. Because women were seen as more prone to lust and deceit, and their minds, character, and natures were weaker, it was argued that they were metaphysically incapable of receiving any kinds of rites of ordination. Maybe they had received them in the past, it was argued, but they were all illegitimate because women, by their nature, can’t receive the spiritual gifts ordination imparts, nor are they fit to touch the consecrated body and blood.9

Women’s bodies were such a liability that clerical celibacy was essential. A male priest was forbidden to have sexual relations with a woman if he was also going to handle the body and blood of Christ. Women weren’t just relegated to the status of laypeople in the church; they were now, in fact, lower than laymen. What was once a beautiful, but imperfect, model of men and women using their gifts to serve alongside one another for the benefit of a particular church community became a top-down hierarchy where only men could serve and women were forced out.

So what does this mean for us? The Catholic church recently concluded a years long study on revising the role of female deacons in the church. The consensus was once again, “no thank you.” But Catholic teaching about the function of the priesthood and their understanding of the Eucharist is directly tied to a male-only priesthood and diaconate. What about protestants? If we want to hold to a high view of the office of elder (as resevered for men only, for whatever biblical or historical reasons we have) would that not open up other roles of service for unordained men and women? Would it be possible to revert to a pre-1200 understanding of ordination or commissioning of qualified men and women to serve and assist in the work and worship of the church?

In our modern evangelical world, the discussion is often a two sided one. Pick egalitarianism with women ordained to the roles of priest and beyond, or pick complementarianism where men are the only ones allowed to occupy church offices. The more I read about church history and the history of church offices, the weirder it is to map our current protestant understanding of ordination and church offices onto the past. This is often demonstrated on X, that cesspool of evangelical talking-heads. But it is a microcosm for the modern American church in a way.

Two examples come to mind. Conservative global Anglicans, who maintain the three-fold ordained offices of the church, and evangelical baptist kinds are always talking past one another on the issue of women in ministry because they have different working definitions of ordination. An ordained deaconess in a conservative Anglican Church may or may not be commissioned to preach, but in the minds of a lot of American Baptist pastors, ordaining a woman to any church role signals the slippery slope to liberalism. A woman simply can’t be “in charge.” But church offices aren’t necessarily about authority as much as they are about service and commissioning qualified people to serve.

A recent exchange between Matthew Barrett (former Southern Baptist professor who became Anglican last year) and Colin Smothers (acting head of CBMW) on church offices also reveals how American evangelicals have muddied the waters on historic church offices. Barrett is arguing for a return to the three-fold offices and Smothers misses the point and posts his Venn diagram that collapses the biblical terms for these offices into a single office of “pastor.”10

In churches where one man at the top is the pastor, male deacons function as ruling elders, and trustees serve as deacons, it’s no wonder we don’t have categories for church offices beyond “the man who preaches for an hour every week and makes the decisions.” By collapsing the biblical terms of deacon, elder, and bishop into one office of pastor, we force women out and also hurt unordained men in the church as well. I think we can do better.

I have seen this modeled so well in my current church, but even within our denomination, it is constantly challenged. Even if we hold to male only elders, there can be a multitude of offices open to women within the scope of “complementarianism.” Women can lead women’s, children’s, and counseling ministries. Women can serve as deaconesses, property managers, staff counselors, church accountants, and lead efforts for poverty alleviation, and community engagement. If an unordained male church member can pass out bulletins, so can a woman. Unordained male and female church members can even assist in the service, by reading scripture or helping distribute communion. This is not an exhaustive list: Anything an unordained man can do, so can an unordained woman. The result of this is men and women serving alongside one another while also holding the office of elder (as the one who administers the word and sacrament) in high regard. Not every church position is a pastoral one. In fact, 98 percent of church roles are not pastoral.

However, if we have a male-centric view of the church that allows any man to fill a role just by nature of being a man, we are actually hurting the office of elder we say we hold in such high regard. Not everyone should be a priest, nor should every role in the church eventually lead to the priesthood. But as a family of believers in community together, where spiritual fathers, mothers, and brothers and sisters serve in love, we would be elevating the role of elder if we opened up more offices of service in support of the church.

We need a vision of complementarity that doesn’t see our bodies as a liability but one that envisions mutuality, reciprocity, and giving. Our differences shouldn’t stack us in hierarchies or set terms about who can best image Christ. Men and women were meant to serve and worship along side one another. The fall disordered our affections but Christ has come to remake us into his Image. Abigail Favale reminds us that, “It is holiness that makes our sexual difference truly iconic, enabling our visible bodies to proclaim what is invisible, to reveal the glory of God—the man and the woman who are fully alive.”11 This vision for the church images the beauty of the Gospel and the God who came to make all things new.

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Adults are not so different than children. We, too, make meaning and identity out of our lives by shaping circumstances, pain, suffering, joy, and grief into a narrative that makes sense. Politics, religion, relationships- all of these things are built on narratives that attempt to tell us who we are, where we are going, and how we can find meaning along the way.

As Christians, we believe that God also loves stories. So much so that he has given us a book. The past few years I have come back around to reading the Bible, not as a book of commands or systematic doctrine, but like literature- a story. And just like all other stories, this Story is where we find out who we are and specifically, how we fit into God’s grand narrative of redemption. But this year, as I read and reread Christmas books, I can’t help but think what an odd story the Incarnation is. As rote as it can be, it still strikes me as so bizarre. So unexpected. So upside-down.

A young girl is chosen and chooses to bear life1. A union of two people begins in scandal, and a journey to Bethlehem. A savior is born among animals. The first to hear the news are the lowliest of the low, shepherds. All the while, God is appearing to people in dreams, and delivering messages by way of angels. Something new is happening. And God is using the poorest and humblest things of the world to accomplish it.

In her essay, Magnificat, Joelle Chase reminds us that this pattern of using the weak and broken things of the world is actually a thread woven throughout all of Scripture. It is in fact the way God prefers to work:

It seems to be the clearest pattern in Scripture, particularly in Jesus’ life. God is persistently coming to people in slavery, poverty, homelessness, prison, and death, while making foolish and ridiculous the wisdom, strength, and wealth of the upper crust. The mystery of God becoming human through a humble young woman and a baby in a manger is an echo of this truth. Emmanuel-God is with and in our earthy, fully human existence.2

We are at our core, profoundly broken and weak. God coming in the flesh meant that Christ would identify with this very weakness. This thing we think holds us back as humanity, our very embodiment in all its neediness and dependence, is what God himself takes on. He doesn’t come in some angelic or ghostly form. He doesn’t even show up as a fully grown man. He starts as an embryo. In the darkness of a womb, God comes to us as one of us.

And the older I get, the more I am drawn to this detail of the story: Jesus didn’t despise physicality. Birth and embodiment aren’t things sidestepped by the Godhead. Embodiment is central to the story of redemption and unites body and spirit in holy union. Kat Armas puts it this way: “Birth is its own liturgy- wholly material and wholly spiritual, a reminder that flesh and spirit were never meant to be separate.”3

This common human experience is elevated in the Incarnation. As Anne Riddler says so beautifully in her poem, Christmas and the Common Birth, “Christmas declares the glory of the flesh.” And yet, we are so quick to disregard our own embodiment. To downplay the goodness of this flesh and bone. We long to transcend the physical. And yet, God not only calls this body good, but takes it on Himself. Forever. He entered a woman’s body, affirming the beauty and dignity of Mary as mother and woman. She becomes a literal temple, physically bearing the Savior.

So what does this have to do with Advent? Advent is a time of waiting, much like seasons of pregnancy and birth. Pregnancy is a bit of a microcosm for all of life: we enter this world in extreme vulnerability and neediness, and we exit this world the same way. We can pretend that we can disregard this frailty, but birth, like death, puts it front and center.

Pregnancy also puts a woman at enormous risk. Humanity is naturally vulnerable, but carrying life puts us all the more in harm’s way. Even for those who will not bear children, Advent is a reminder of patient waiting and hope, even in uncertainty and darkness. We place ourselves into the story of the Incarnation and wait, as Mary did, in patient hope and expectation. As Mary waited for the fulfillment of her Magnificat in the birth of her Son, so too do we wait:

“Descent into darkness is necessary to all life, to transformation and to fresh, new revelations of God. Even in darkness, something is forming. We recite the promise of Messiah’s coming, remembering the months of gestation preceding Jesus’ birth. We declare, “This is our God—the One who scatters the proud, puts down the mighty, exalts the lowly, fills the hungry, sends the rich away empty, creates beauty and brilliance within our womb, mothers the world with fierce and tender love.”4

Like much our embodied experiences, birth removes self from the center. There are unknowns and details that can’t always be planned perfectly. Birth is effort and pain,5 as is living all of life. Motherhood and parenting are often acts of desperation, an “annihilation of self.”6 But paradoxically, the result is freedom. Freedom from self. Freedom to love and give and give again. Freedom to love and care for those who depend on us and in turn, admit our dependance on others.

Birth makes an inconvenient demand;

Like all holy things

It is frequently a nuisance, and its needs never end;

Freedom it brings: We should welcome release

From its long merciless rehearsal of peace.7

Like all of life, we are free now because this Savior was born to love and serve both neighbors and enemies alike, to become participants in the upside-down kingdom. The humble and the needy are welcomed in. The story of the Incarnation is our story, in all of its topsy turvy ways.

This year, I see that my body is good and is necessary. Just as it was for Christ. I see that somehow apart from an incarnate body, the redemption of the cosmos could not have happened. As much as I want to escape my body, with all of its pain and sadness, Jesus himself came in a body. He came not to rescue me from my body, but to redeem it. Advent is a time when we remember that even now, he comes to walk alongside us. In all of the joys, sorrows, sickness, and brokenness of embodied living, he points us ahead to a time when all will be made well.

We have become partakers of the goodness and grace of God because of this first coming of Christ and wait for the renewal of all things. And just as now, we will not be disembodied spirits serving a spirit savior. No, we will live as embodied and perfected creatures and serve an embodied and forever perfect Lord. By choosing to take on flesh and be born of a woman, Christ dignifies the common human experience of birth and embodiment. It is in our embodiment that we can know Christ and God has made himself known to us in Christ. Eugene Peterson puts it like this:

“When God chose to reveal himself to us completely, he didn’t do it in words or ideas. He became flesh and lived in the neighborhood with us. Which means that our bodies are capable of receiving God and participating in God, not just with our minds or our emotions or our ‘hearts’ as we sometimes say, but with these actual flesh-and-blood, skin-and-muscle bodies”8

During this season of Advent we place ourselves not only in the story of the Nativity and identify with the longing, joys, and fears of Mary, but we rejoice in the Savior who entered our world. He became one of us and elevates our embodied, creaturely state. Advent is about remembering that “by God’s birth, our common birth is holy.”9

In Summary:

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see

Hail the Incarnate Deity

Pleased as man with men to dwell

Jesus, our Emmanuel10

For other posts in the advent series, see here:

Advent and Auden

Advent and John the Baptist

Advent and Flannery O’Connor

Advent and Annunciation

Advent Darkness and Hope

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“ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.”

In this, we identify with those who longed for the initial Advent of Messiah. They awaited a promised King who would destroy their enemies, and rule and reign in a restored creation. They longed for all things to be made right and for the nations to stream into the city of God. A perfect communion with God and conformity to His ways and words, just as Isaiah expresses in Is. 2:1–5, are what we long for as well.

A theme woven throughout this time of Advent is eschatological hope- the tension between the already and not yet, the breaking in of the kingdom and its awaited consummation. We so often look to a future dwelling place called heaven but forget that what we ultimately should long for is the hope of resurrection and the consummation of all things when Jesus returns and puts all things right- in physical bodies, in a physical new heavens and earth. This isn’t just a far off event we hope will happen. Jesus’ first coming- his Incarnation, death, resurrection and current rule-have implications for us here and now. Advent considers all of these things.

There is great darkness and Advent is a time to sit, wait, and consider it. But then the lights come on. We remember that the world is on its way to being set right because Jesus came the first time. It’s finished. We may not see the effects of this fully now, but it is a reality that wasn’t before Christ’s Incarnation and the power to put all things to right has been secured. When he returns, all his enemies will be placed under his feet (even death), and the justice, beauty, restored relationships, and fellowship with God we long for will be made perfect. As we long for perfect communion with God and conformity into the restored Image of God he is remaking in us, we look to this future with hope.

This One who promised and came before, is coming again. And in this time of Advent, he continues to come. Heaven and Earth were made to overlap, and someday they will finally “completely, utterly, and gloriously”1 fit together as one.

“Christiantiy is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this–the finding, the saving, the giving of new life–in Jesus. He has done it. With Jesus, God’s rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut.”2

For last year’s advent series, see here:

Advent and Auden

Advent and John the Baptist

Advent and Flannery O’Connor

Advent and Annunciation

And keep reading this month for more!

In Summary:

What is the great lesson of Advent? It’s the many-sided truth of God’s perpetual coming to his creatures in secret and humble ways; the nearness of his saving care and energizing grace. “Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes.”

-Evelyn Underhill3

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This week, I want to connect the “feminine vice of wokeness” language that Andrews uses to some current discussions about women in the American Evangelical church. (I won’t attempt a coherent definition of wokeness, since it’s really a word more about the “vibes” than anything else). There are important and interesting overlaps and I think that Sargeant’s solutions can offer the church a way forward as well. So here we go!

We have several thousand years of Greek philosophy-infused views of women and the female body to sort through, even as modern evangelicals. Women have gone from being responsible for the fall of humanity due to their innate lack of morality and ease of manipulation, to the Victorian saviors of mankind and the only virtuous sex. And here we are today, back to woman as manipulative and solely responsible for the leftward drift of the church.1 Historically, there have always been more women in the global church than men so it’s not like the “great feminization”2 of the church is a new, novel thing. But some more recent discussion has placed the blame on women in the evangelical church for wanting more or infecting their inherent vice into the church itself.

Something I am very curious about is how the narrative Andrews portrays about women has crept into the American evangelical church, particularly in conservative Baptist and CREC spaces. For several years now, Joe Rigney (formerly of Bethlehem Seminary and now at New St. Andrews College and Doug Wilson’s flagship CREC church) has written and spoken about “the sin of empathy.” In Rigney’s mind, this is a distinctly feminine vice, a kind of uniquely feminine care and compassion gone off the rails that the women in your church may use to get you as a pastor to sin or sympathize with their concerns (regardless of the concern’s legitimacy).

Or worse, they may manipulate you into joining their supposed feminist, leftist crusade (a slippery slope that will lead to female ordination and beyond!). It creates an us-versus-them style church, with concerned congregants on one side and a pastor who refuses to be “steered” on the other. Hardly a healthy church model, but one of a tight hierarchy being maintained and everyone knowing their place. No problems happen here!

Conservative politics has even co-opted this idea for its own gains. Commentators and journalists Allie Beth Stuckey and Megan Basham have leveraged this same idea of toxic female empathy into book deals and speaking engagements at right-wing conferences. They, as women, routinely blame women for wokeness and the downfall of America. They are some of the only women regularly platformed at these events. One wonders if this is only because they are willing to tell the men in the room exactly what they want to hear.

Side note: Interestingly, Stuckey came under fire a few weeks ago after suggesting at a TPUSA event that young men lay off the porn. This opinion, seemingly uncontroversial at a conference hosted by a conservative organization, caused a mild internet firestorm. Some CREC affiliated pastors even demanded on X, “Where is her husband?!” Being the token lady in this crowd has its drawbacks, apparently.

Wokeness and Abuse in the Church

The idea (implicit or not) that women are a leftward force in the church has consequences down the line. Some in the SBC3 have downplayed the enormous scale of clerical sexual abuse within the convention. They claim that the scores of victims (mostly female) and the loudest voices calling for justice (also mostly women) shouldn’t be heeded because they are manipulating the men in charge and ultimately want to take control of pulpits. The tactic, then, is just to malign victims and deny that abuse has taken place at the scale at which it has been reported. Dealing with abuse would just be surrendering to “wokeness” since women’s voices and influence are a progressive force in the church. And women just want to take over and make you feel bad, right?

This is a wild response to “wokeness.” Thorough and cautious investigation of every allegation would be a reasonable response. It’s quite another to say problems don’t exist and female victims are manipulative liars gunning for control of institutions.

Abuse and racism and injustice are real. Denying or silencing the voices that call them to account won’t help the problem. It’s how we go about enacting change that will ultimately do good.

Of Virtues and Vices

At the core of both the Sargeant/Andrews debate and the recent rhetoric from the church is the idea that men and women have altogether different natures. Rigney portrays men as more “black and white” and “theologically rigid.” Women are the more caring sex. Therefore, they are more easily swayed on matters of morality because they will be tempted to care about others (and care for others never led to moral decisions, clearly).

Andrews also understands men and women similarly. She often cites a book (Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes by psychology professor Joyce Benenson) that lays out an old school evolutionary biology argument that men are warriors and women are worriers. Or put another way, men are good at ideas, debate, and resolving conflict and women are not so they revert to subtle and emotionally manipulative tactics.4

Rigney has a hard time coming up with examples of feminine virtues, or male vices for that matter. Andrews suffers from the same problem but is able to sum up male vice simply as, “testosterone-fueled behavior in the workplace.”5 Rigney likes to talk about how men are really good at protecting and leading but fails to admit that power and authority can be corrupting. Men wouldn’t have to get tough if women would just stay in their place, after all. The world Rigney and Andrews offer is one of men and women at odds with one another, a polarizing world where gender differences are so profound the only way to achieve peace is a strict hierarchy.

Wokeness and Dependence

Whether it’s a workplace, higher-ed institution, or church, wokeness can’t always rightly answer questions like, “What do I do with my grief?” or “How do I make this right?” But the fact that we as a society (and church) even now ask these questions when it comes to abuse or racism is a step in the right direction. Much like Rigney and Wilson, Andrews seems to advocate for a position that says “stop being needy and if you are hurt, we don’t want to hear about it.” But this response really is a masked laziness. Instead of facing the hard realities that people in institutions can and do harm others, it’s easier to place the blame on those who have been hurt, to double down and protect the institution at all costs instead of admitting failure. And even harder, to seek change and do right by those harmed. As Sargeant said in the debate, “How you put it right is not primarily through self-flagellation. It’s through actively doing good.”6

So is the neediness of women really to blame for society’s ills? Will reverting to 1950’s-era gender roles solve issues in the workplace or church? I doubt it. The way forward I think looks a bit more like what Sargeant suggests. It has to do with how we think about weakness and dependence.

What do we do with the weak? Is dependance really a defect or is it common to human experience? So common, in fact, that we shouldn’t just make provisions for it as if it is a back up plan, but should expect it and orient our society in a way that we can care and love well. Both women agree that the world as it is right now isn’t so accommodating to women. Andrews sees this as women’s fault (somehow by our nature we have just brought this on ourselves) but Sargeant sees this as something we as a society can change. In the church and beyond, dealing with abuse and injustice and making changes that allow both men and women to flourish and be heard and seen can go a long way in healing the gender divides we experience.

Instead of writing off empathizing with suffering or abuse as “wokeness,” what if we followed the example of Christ and entered into the suffering of others? As Dani Treweek wrote in her thorough review of Rigney’s latest book:

“If we accept that reason, truth, and justice stand in opposition to joining people in their suffering, what are we to make of the incarnation of Christ? Surely, the Word becoming flesh and making his dwelling amongst us (John 1:15) is the most profound act of empathy the world has ever known?”7

Entering into the suffering of others (or taking it seriously for that matter) doesn’t have to mean we leave truth, reason, or morality at the door. In fact, we follow the example of Christ who became God Incarnate and entered into our suffering, not only to identify with us, but to suffer. Not out of pity or guilt, but out of love.

There are no truly feminine or masculine virtues, just Christlike ones. As Sargeant said, “All men and women are called to faith, hope and charity. They’re all called to fortitude.”8 The way this fortitude expresses itself may change based on our state of life but as men and women (particularly in the church) our call is the same: to live out the love we have been shown. Wokeness in and of itself won’t solve the world’s problems. But incarnational love is a step in the right direction.

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Remember when the pagan philosopher Celcus bemoaned Christianity as the religion of women and slaves?

Word from the Bird

When Christianity was Pro-Woman, Pro-Child, and Pro-Slave

A while back I tweeted this…

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5 years ago · 27 likes · 5 comments · Michael F. Bird

Andrews is a particular kind of conservative who laments the swing to “wokeness” institutions have faced in the last decade. This is to blame, she suggests, primarily because women have entered these spaces in historic numbers and have polluted them with their “feminine vices” of empathy, gossip, and untruthfulness. We women like to complain about and report injustice and discrimination, which has led to a kind of corruption of the courts (who have swung in favor of victims) and now the entire integrity of our legal system is at stake. Thanks, ladies. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent underlying logic here. If there is, the premises are so unpalatable she doesn’t dare state them clearly.

Due to their nature, women aren’t good at truth telling or problem solving, they can only “suggest or persuade.” The culture of wokeness we are steeped in now is entirely because women have entered the chat. Andrews says in her original piece, “All cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” Because of the influence of women, we now experience culture-wide wokeness, a kind of “failure to compartmentalize.” Our biggest problem as a society is that “no civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses.” But, unfortunately, “the problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.”

She does make some interesting points, to be fair. But a lot of the piece reads like a parody, or as a friend pointed out, a stunt. Is she really serious? There are obviously problems with institutions and our faith in them as a society really has shifted in the last decade. But is the nature of women to blame? I think the least satisfying thing about her argument is that it doesn’t really offer a solution. She speaks of going back to separate feminine and masculine work environments, of taking the “thumbs off the scale” and doing away with anti-discrimination laws that “requires that every workplace be feminized.” But what does that even mean? Is placing both genders in an office really the cause of these issues?

In her latest book, The Dignity of Dependence, Sargeant points out that the problem we have with women is their dependency. Because women are biologically life-giving, we are vulnerable. Pregnancy and childbearing place women closer to death than the average man. We cause trouble for employers when we go out on leave to have babies, or need childcare and flexible work hours. Or worse yet, insist that motherhood and career can function alongside each other.

Second wave feminism promised a world in which women could inhabit male spaces just fine, but the price to entry is fitting our bodies as best we can into a world still designed for men. This really isn’t a solution for women but asks that we trade our childbearing and care-giving for a seat at the table. But women aren’t just better men, and equality doesn’t have to mean interchangeability. “A feminism that fears acknowledging differences will be unable to advocate fully for women or children.”2 Because of this, the grand vision of second-wave feminism requires a world where women, children, the weak, and dependent are treated as collateral damage, or baggage we just quietly put away as a society (and not collectively seek to care for). Sargeant advocates for a world where dependence and the unique needs of women aren’t something we pretend aren’t a factor, but that we as a society seek to embrace. As she says, “vulnerability cannot be solved, it can only be shared.”3

Unlike Sargeant, Andrews doesn’t seem to have any positive vision to cast. Her argument against women and their neediness seems to be a slightly revamped version of Aristotle’s “women are deformed men” take. It’s not even as refined as Simone De Beauvoir’s “women should just be better men” solution. Andrews’s proposal of a return to gender segregated work spaces feels like a throw back to a Mad Men style office in which perpetually drunk male executives do whatever they please with the bodies of their female secretaries. And the secretaries don’t rat them out to the Title IX coordinator.

Is welcoming women, then, into previously male-dominated spaces a DEI conspiracy theory or a step in the right direction? As Rachel Darnall pointed out in her latest piece, “We’re all discovering something our grandmothers and great-grandmothers could have told us: even in the most progressive society, people look at men as a constant, and women as a variable.”4 Asking men to change their behavior is out of the question so the best way forward is just to remove the variable of women. Or for women to just be happy we have been given a spot and stop whining.

To conclude this first installment, Andrews seems to believe that women are a corrupting influence on institutions and should perhaps be kept out of them. The actual implications of her argument are very uncomfortable, however. So much so, that she doesn’t dare draw us to its logical conclusions. As Sophia Gilbert observes, “Andrews doesn’t propose any policy suggestions or alternatives to the Great Feminization, presumably because, as Matthew Yglesias has written, the only viable solution would be ‘widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms. And neither she nor her allies are willing to actually make the case for it, because it would be horrifying.’”5

Sargeant paints a picture of a world where men and women are different (or at least not interchangeable) but equal. The differences should be embraced and the world will be better for it. This would require a kind of social and moral revolution. One in which dependence isn’t demonized and caring for others isn’t seen as a less than dignified task. Only our autonomy, worship of productivity, and inability to see anyone’s worth beyond their utility stands in the way.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for part 2. I’ll write about how the “great feminization” theory has manifest itself in the evangelical church in recent years. And in the meantime, if you have solved feminism, let me know in the comments.

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Try It Again, Without the Women, Rachel Darnall

Rachel’s Substack

"Try it again, without the women."

“Did women ruin the workplace?” the New York Times asked earlier this month. The title (later changed to “did liberal feminism ruin the workplace?”) - framed a debate between Helen Andrews (in the “for” position) and Leah Libresco Sargeant (in …

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7 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Rachel Darnall

It feels that this is the question at the center of so much misunderstanding among Christians in the last few weeks. And honestly has been the key point of contention at the center of most misunderstandings for the last five years. The gospel message is that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and defeated sin and death and rules over every inch of the universe. The cosmos is headed towards restoration. But there seems to be a disagreement among Christians about how this restoration comes about. Or at least about how we display to the world this message of coming restoration.

On one side are those who would say that what is most Christlike is speaking truth to power and that empathy holds us back from doing this best. Loving our enemies is really about making sure they know where we stand and that they are in the wrong. This is the most loving thing we can do (even when done in a brash “debate me bro” kind of way). Some of the same would say that Charlie Kirk was a good Christian because he held the same political values and wasn’t afraid to speak “the truth.” Charlie Kirk is our example and we are all Charlie Kirk. I have even read from a local pastor this past week that “Charlie Kirk died for me.” He has become not only a figure to emulate but a savior of sorts.

But when I read the gospels, I don’t see a savior who primarily debated people in the public square who disagreed with him. It seems that he preferred to spend his time in the lowliest of places, among the sick and oppressed, the outcasts and poor.1 Not with the people in high places but those who needed the hope of the kingdom of heaven more than anyone else.

Jesus could turn tables (something he did once, maybe twice2). But his most condemning rhetoric he reserved for the hypocritical religious leaders, those who twisted the words of God and crushed their fellow Israelites under the burden of an added-to law and who were hell bent on kicking out Rome or gaining political power and influence for themselves. This should cause us to pause in our own political moment. It sure stops me in my tracks. Do I equate folks who attend prayer vigils in parking lots for a murdered conservative political activist with the growth of the kingdom of God? Or does the kingdom of heaven look more like the small and quiet deeds of kindness and hospitality?

Is Charlie Kirk’s death a call for Christians to further politically mobilize, to gird our loins for persecution? Those who feel this threat responded similarly in 2020. I was confused by it then, just as I am now. Is it love to follow public health mandates in the wake of a global health pandemic when we don’t know all the facts about the disease? Or is it a kind of persecution, like we faced when public health officials advised we wear masks and space out in church in 2020? I think those who fell on one side in 2020 are still coming to the same conclusions about what love and faithfulness to Jesus looks like now.

Maybe there is so much misunderstanding and talking past each other because at the heart of our different approaches to all of these things is a different set of values. I have written before about the differing views on orthopraxy and orthodoxy as it relates to holiness. But I think there is a similar value judgement at play here. Those who would praise Kirk or Trump or even Wilson hold to a very black and white vision of the truth. They are purveyors of the “truth” and those who don’t hold to these same ideals are outside the camp, so to speak. This leads to tribalism and the persecution mentality is a downstream result of that.

Those who hold to this value system may take issue with the brash or dogmatic rhetoric of the truthtellers (i.e. the practice of the truth or orthopraxy) but the truth itself is what they like (orthodoxy). They may say “we like their dogmatics even if we don’t like their practice.” But it seems that those who come to champion this approach will eventually end up coming around on the rhetoric too.

This presents a problem, however, because the medium isn’t irrelevant to the message. In the case of Kirk or Wilson, the method of communicating the message is in fact part of the message itself.3 In the book of Judges-like fashion, Kirk was brutally murdered under a tent with the banner “Prove Me Wrong” and his final word was “violence.” You can’t make that up.

So is the truth the problem or the way in which it is presented? Those who would hold to virtue and seek to first and foremost live kindly and attempt to make the message of the truth attractive are often accused of cultural compromise. “But we live in negative world now!” they will say. “This is war!” Why do our hearts always long for the strong man? Why do we continue to chant for Barabbas instead of Jesus? We’ll gladly take the thief and political agitator over the gentle and lowly savior. That savior did defeat sin and death and is coming again to set all things right. What more of a strong man do we need?

I’m not sure I know how to bridge the divide. I have hope that trusting God and living a quiet and peaceful life can shine light and grace to both the unsaved and those whose politics and religion are the same project. Maybe it looks like patience. To be prepared to give an answer for the hope we have, but in love and gentleness.

So what does faithfulness to Jesus mean then? It seems to me that it means living into this very reality: that we have been made a part of this redemption story. This is the better kingdom and the hope we wait for. In the here and now, we work towards the redemption of all things, shining the light of grace even into the darkness and suffering. It means I am free to love my neighbor (both my friend and my enemy) because I have been set free by grace and love in Christ.

The triage of “obey God/love others” is a tricky one. But these things are not at odds. Truth and love go hand in hand. In an ideal world “mercy and truth shall meet, righteousness and peace shall kiss.”4 This should be the goal in all of our relationships and discourse. It’s not one or the other. It’s both/and. Jesus modeled that so perfectly for us and it’s only through grace that we can display both of these things to a watching world.

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Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

Theology in the Raw, Ep #1316, What Happens When You Say Women Should Have Agency and Influence in the Church: Aimee Byrd. This was one of my dream podcasts- two people I hoped would have a conversation someday. Byrd shared a bit of her story and healing from wild church and denomination hurt. As a woman in conservative reformed spaces trying to encourage friendship between men and women in the church and advocate for women’s discipleship, she has faced enormous push back and sought to continue to write and grow. Just some lovely comments about finding refuge in church post-hurt and the influence of Til We Have Faces on her faith (same here). This was a beautiful conversation

Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America by Bridget Read. Several friends have recommended this so here we go! Four chapters into the audiobook and I am convinced MLMs are an inherently and quintessentially American creation. All the pieces were there for it to start in the New Deal era and here we are today with it at the forefront of politics again. Not to mention its forever connections to women and homemakers trying to make a living and also care for their families. This story has it all.

Current Reading

The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Somehow I have never read this book. And somehow this is classified as Southern Gothic (the genre for October with the lovely local book club I am a part of). I know very little about the book besides, Oprah, and that Alice Walker was Flannery O’Connor’s neighbor at one point. And that of course, it is a classic.

The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace in a Worn-out World by David Zahl. My husband is reading this for a men’s book study at church so it’s around. I am half-way through and it’s a beautiful look at the relief grace should lead us to. If your Christianity looks like striving or a project or just trying to do better next time, this book reminds us that that’s not what Christianity is supposed to be. It reminds me of Theocast works or Gretchen Ronnevik’s amazing book. Another syllabus idea for the“rest in grace” course that I need to keep taking over and over again.

“Grace is the answer the Bible gives to the question of God’s disposition toward troubled people like you and me…Grace is the most evergreen reason that people become Christians, and it is the most compelling reason to remain one5”

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Winter by Phyllis Tickle. I went through the Spring prayer book this year and really missed it over the summer. This one starts in October and also includes Advent. She breaks each day into 4 “hours” for prayer (morning, afternoon, evening, compline) and pulls from hymns, psalms, BCP, and other historical texts and prayers. Each hour is a little shorter than the traditional Daily Office readings so it’s been a great way to pause and add prayer to parts of the day.

This murder felt different in a way. More like the death of Malcom X than any previous attempt on a president’s life. He was only 31, which I used to think was old, but as I enter my mid-thirties and still feel unsettled about most things, feels rather young. I kept ruminating on the words of Hannah Arendt that evening. In On Violence, she speaks of political violence as a means of chaos, not just because of the violence itself, but because it breaks apart the seams of social and political spaces. It leaves a sense of unbalance. The spaces we thought were safe for discourse and understanding one another have been torn apart and we are left on shaky ground, uncertain of the future of the democratic process. In this sense, the chaos of a young right-wing political commentator being shot down felt more like the uncertainty of January 6. Could this really happen in this country?

It has been disappointing to see how evangelicals have responded to this death (but probably shouldn’t be seeing that much of broader evangelicalism lost the “WWJD plot” when they closed their eyes and hitched their wagon to Trump in 2016). Kirk has been propped up as a martyr shot down for his faith. I am not here to call him an evangelist or a hypocrite. Sometimes he quoted the Bible on Twitter. Sometimes he said things that were completely antithetical to the words of Christ. But his life mattered, as does the life of every image bearer, and his death was tragic. It is tragic not only because he was brutally murdered and leaves behind a young family, but because he himself was so young. Maybe in 10 years he would have changed his mind and come to see the value of empathy and compassion in discourse. Who knows.

But back up to the previous Sunday. A dear lady in our church who had been slowly declining for over 10 years passed away. I hardly knew her and had only spoken to her a few times. But her story was present, even when she became too weak to attend church or bible study. Her funeral was this past weekend, and what a service it was. She was a beloved mother and wife, raising 6 children, and left behind a legacy of faith and beauty. Her children all spoke of her love of Jesus, before a brain tumor changed who she was, and of her quiet peace and faith, even up to her final moments.

This was not a spectacular death. It was one that had been expected for years. She wasn’t famous and didn’t champion any political causes. It was an ordinary, faithful life. But her 13 years of decline and her family’s subsequent suffering spoke volumes about the abundant mercy of Christ, even in the midst of circumstances that didn’t have answers.

Our pastor1 spoke on 2 Corinthians 4:

We have seen the light of the Gospel of Jesus, who is the image of God. He has shown his light into the darkness of our hearts. And now what? Are expected to go do extraordinary things for Jesus? No. We are cracked jars of clay. We always carry the death of Jesus in our body, so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed in our body. Why? So that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us. So that Jesus’s life may also be displayed in our mortal flesh. Because we have hope that the very Jesus who was raised will one day raise us. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory.2

He reminded us that it’s not as Leonard Cohen sang, that the cracks are how the light gets in3. The cracks are the way in which the light gets out. The light of God’s grace shines through us in our weaknesses and suffering. That was evident in this woman’s life and in the lives of her family who suffered along with her so beautifully. They were met with deep grace, and shone it out to those around them.

We are so quick to exchange the hidden life we have in Christ for the promise of worldly power. We want a seat at any other table than the one we have been offered a seat at by life and death of Jesus. The holy ordinary of the eternal kingdom’s treasure hidden in a field often pales in comparison to what the kingdoms of this world seem to offer here and now.

So don’t worry about living large for Jesus and being prepared to die a spectacular martyr’s death. No one is threatening to silence your faith (at least not in modern day America). But be prepared to receive grace in suffering and shine out the light of grace into the darkness. To love and show compassion to those whom you don’t agree with. For such is the kingdom of heaven.

Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

I have fallen off the podcast wagon in a serious way trying to finish up my three months of free Audible. Some highlights though:

Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament: by Sandra Glahn. This has been on my TBR for a while now. Glahn’s scholarship and voice has been helpful to me in thinking not only about women place in church now, but historically. Along with Luci Peppiatt’s work, I would give this book to anyone who reads Paul and is frustrated with passages like 1 Tim 2 and 1 Cor 11. Is Paul a mysogynist or does he just like to contradict himself? Or would some historic context shed light on what on earth he is talking about? Perhaps the later. Glahn does a wonderful job introducing us to the Artemis cult and how three of our NT epistles are written to churches located in the worship epicenter of the empire’s most beloved goddess. And, exciting!, we actually have new scholarship and artifacts that help us better understand who she was and the challenges the people of Ephesus faced as believers in Christ.

Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity by Nadya Williams. I am a little late to the game on this and there are plenty of good reviews already out there. Williams beautifully weaves together St. Augustine, Perpetua, Wendell Berry, and Greek and Roman history to illustrate that the culture of death we find ourselves in now has been the status quo for a long time. The early church faced it head on by dignifying women, slaves, and children in a way that was wildly counter-cultural. This would be a good book to pair with Oliver O’Donavan’s Begotten or Made in my imaginary course on bio-ethics and faith.

Current Reading

The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong. There really aren’t words for this one. One review on Goodreads just said “Now what am I supposed to do with myself?” and I concur. The prose is gorgeous and the story is devastating in all the best possible ways. If you liked Marytr! by Kavah Akbar, do yourself a favor and read this too. Maybe not back to back though…give it space for reflection.

The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers. I have always appreciated Sayers since reading of her exchange with her friend CS Lewis on women’s ordination (they famously did not see eye to eye on this). And she is a true renaissance woman. But I am having a hard time getting into this one. Maybe it was the racist limerick she quotes in a footnote in the first chapter on natural law? (which is not at all helping my beef with natural law). Or maybe it’ll just take some time. Stay tuned.

Something that I have been thinking about lately are the different metrics Christians use to measure holiness. One of the most common metrics is a separatist approach to orthopraxy. In this view, holiness is primarily measured by how separate you are from the world and its ways. While connected to concerns about doctrinal purity, this separation approach to holiness is more a “way of life” purity: how one dresses, the media one consumes, the places one goes, associations one holds. Christians are meant to be distinct from the world and the way this is accomplished is by adherence to a code of conduct that is meant to be distinctly different. 

This on its own may not be entirely problematic. The problem I have been thinking through, however, is that this pietistic version of holiness often is so inward facing that it is antithetical to welcome and hospitality. It is meant to be a way for the world to look at Christians and say “Hey! That’s different. I want to know more about that” but instead it often excludes and alienates. If rules and regulations breed infighting and excommunication, the result is not a welcoming apologetic but a repellant. 

So what is a holiness that welcomes? What is a holiness that looks distinct from the world but invites others to share in its grace? We know God is holy but what does that mean? It seems that holiness is what the world is originally meant to be. It is a world with an absence of pain, suffering, oppression, and death. God created the cosmos to be an expression of who He is, a self-giving God who made the world to be united to Him and share in his love. And it is where the world is headed. God has initiated his cosmic reconstruction project, uniting all things in heaven and earth to Himself in Christ. And this cosmic renewal starts in our hearts- the creatures who have messed up the world. 

Holiness then means imaging God. It is about placing my hope in this God and the promises He has made in Christ and not in other things. Christians are people who can and do say no to things (Peter and Paul call these the passions of the flesh). But holiness is also about imitating the love and grace that saves us. If God is a loving and self-giving God, then this is what should primarily mark believers’ lives. Holiness isn’t a self-improvement project by which we finally get our lives straight. It’s not an end in itself. It is an outward focus and thinking that mimics the love of God and proclaims his goodness. 

The church is a visible expression of this kind of living. We leave the rules of status and success at the door. Holiness looks different from the world not because we present as shiny, happy people but because we submit to and prefer one another in love. This is crazy. And is still as countercultural today as when Paul wrote his epistles. 

Holiness is not that we have our hair and clothes just so (modesty as appropriateness and humility is important however) but that we open our hands and hearts and homes in ways that seem radical to the world and make those who haven't encountered Jesus think “I want to be loved by this God and freed to love others because of that love.” Holiness is about being so secure in this love that we are freed to love and live with open hands.1

Snapshots of Life Lately

Traveling all up and down the east coast- PA, NYC, DC

And the Baltics with 10 college students and two faculty friends.

Current Listening

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert. This is the book I have always wanted to read. Gilbert looks at sociology and pop culture from the 90’s through the mid-aughts. If you are like me (early to mid 30s), you grew up with a strong dose of post-feminism and girl power because it was the literal cultural air we breathed. Gilbert looks at the ways in which post-feminism failed to deliver and how we crashed and burned into #metoo and our current pornified culture which has left women no better off. Her conclusion that porn influences art and art influences culture is something I will be thinking about for a while.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. A nice follow up to Girl on Girl. Wynn-Williams, a former UN diplomat, highlights her time at Facebook as head of global policy. Starting in 2011, when Facebook barely knew what potential it had as a political tool, this account of the inner workings of the company and what it was really like to be a woman in tech (sorry Sheryl Sandberg) is fascinating!

Theology in the Raw, episode 1293, Sex, Procreation, and How Our Bodies Tell God's Story with Christopher West. I always enjoy a Chris West interview! The first 20 minutes, which is mostly West’s testimony of coming out of aestheticism to an embodied, incarnational faith are so worth the listen (“The incarnation wasn’t asexual, it was virginal. Mary’s gender and body were fully involved in the incarnation.” !!) I wish Preston pushed back a bit more on stuff West said about contraception and his theological reasoning for it, but I am continually impressed with the consistency of the Catholic understanding of these issues.

Current Reading

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I finally read Dream Count this spring and am going back around on Adichie’s other novels a for second and third time. They are just as enjoyable to return to although I really do wish I could experience them again for the first time.

Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power Since World War II by Elizabeth H. Flowers. I finished Beth Allison Barr’s latest work a few months back and have many thoughts2. But one book she cites constantly is this 20th century history of the SBC so I thought I would read it for myself. I have long had questions about the famed SBC conservative resurgence: Did the good guys really win? How liberal really were the professors that were purged from the seminaries? Were female pastors in the SBC even really a thing in the 70s? So far this is an excellent work that is answering my questions. More on this in the future.

This NYtimes article on the decline of the liberal arts education (spoiler alert- the kids want it, administrators are killing it). This makes me think a lot about how ill-prepared higher ed has been to deal with AI. If education is just about getting a degree for a job and not about educating the whole person, it makes sense.

This New Yorker article on a lesser known Louisa May Alcott novel on women’s work- both domestic and creative. Adding this book to the reading list ASAP.

A few weeks later, I would join some friends and attend an Anglican Church. I had been to Episcopal services before, but this would be my first time in an Anglican high church setting (on Maundy Thursday, a day I didn’t know was a day to add to the newness). First up was the procession and acclamation. The ministers walked in behind a female celebrant carrying a cross. Once at the front, she led us in the Collect:

Almighty Father, whose most dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it in thankful remembrance of Jesus Christ our Savior, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.1

She then read the OT passage for the day. There is much more to be said of the impact that a visible woman assisting in the liturgy and worship had on me. I had never felt seen and known by God in the way I did in the pew that night seeing a female congregant, just like the rest of us, read scripture out loud. But the most impactful part of the night was the observance of the Eucharist. Towards the end of the service, the priest called us to come forward. We knelt, extended our hands, and received the bread and wine as he placed it in our mouths. He spoke over us, reminding us of God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf, and prayed that we would receive the grace offered to us.

I knelt there holding back tears. The walking to the front, the posture of humility and utter need, the priest reminding us of what we already knew but needed to hear again- it all undid me in a way I hadn't experienced before in an observance of the Lord’s Supper. Which got me to think- what is actually happening here?

There are as many answers to this question as there were reformers for Protestants (Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all famously not agreeing), but the general consensus is that Christ is with us in a special way in the Eucharist and this observance serves to remind us of our need of grace. Not only are we merely reminded, we are given the assurance and grace in this meal that God’s promises to us in Christ are real. There are many variations on this, of course, within the spectrum of Protestant orthodoxy, but this Maundy Thursday in a mid-Atlantic Anglican church made me think, “Something tangible and real is happening here.”

Enter NT Wright! A theme in both Surprised by Hope and Simply Christian is the overlap of heaven and earth in this world, particularly in the sacraments. The place to start is God’s original intent for the world. Our world was meant to be a place where God lived with his creation. And in the new creation, God intends to once again dwell on earth with his people. In the meantime, there are things in our world that not only point to this coming new creation, but become themselves moments when the curtain is pulled back and God himself is with us. As Wright says in Surprised by Hope, “Sacraments are best understood within the theology of creation and new creation, and of the overlapping of heaven and earth.”2

So by way of the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s new creation project has been initiated. “The created order, which God has begun to redeem in the resurrection of Jesus, is a world in which heaven and earth are designed not to be separated but to come together.”3 Every time we observe this meal, we anticipate the coming day when heaven and earth will be made one and celebrate God’s commitment to making the world new in Christ.

Jesus has gone ahead into God's new creation…we find that he comes to meet us in and through the symbols of creation, the bread and the wine, which are thus taken up into the Christ story, the event of new creation itself, and become vessels, carriers, of God's new world and the saving events that enable us to share it. Within this framework, that of a true Easter understanding of creation and new creation, we can understand the Eucharist most fully as the anticipation of the banquet when heaven and earth are made new, the marriage supper of the Lamb… It is the breaking in of God's future, the Advent future, into our present time.4

There is a pointing forward to final redemption and the true marriage of heaven and earth, but there is also a pointing backwards. Wright reminds us that the Jewish sacred meals, such as Passover, historically place participants back at the origin of the meal. The Jewish people for centuries have celebrated the Passover in remembrance of that original Passover meal and in doing so, literally place themselves at the table along with those who experienced the original Exodus. “Within the sacramental world, past and present are one. Together they point forward to the still future liberation.”5

Likewise in observing the Eucharist we find ourselves not only at the place where heaven and earth meet, but past and present. In this meal, “God's future and God's past (that is, events like Jesus’ death and resurrection) arrive in the present.”6 The Christian life and worship are all about living in this overlap of heaven and earth. Our lives become an interwoven part of the story of redemption.

When we break the bread and drink the wine, we find ourselves joining the disciples in the Upper Room. We are united with Jesus himself as he prays in Gethsemane and stands before Caiaphas and Pilate. We become one with him as he hangs on the cross and rises from the tomb. Past and present come together. Events from long ago are fused with the meal we are sharing here and now.7

What happens in the Eucharist is that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, this future dimension is brought sharply into play: We break this bread to share in the body of Christ; we do it in remembrance of him; we become for a moment the disciples sitting around the table at the Last Supper. Yet if we stop there we've only said the half of it. To make any headway in understanding the Eucharist, we must see it as the arrival of God's future in the present, not just the extension of God's past (or of Jesus's past) into our present. We do not simply remember a long-since dead Jesus; we celebrate the presence of the living Lord. And he lives, through the resurrection, precisely as the one who has gone on ahead into the new creation, the transformed new world, as the one who is himself its prototype. The Jesus who gives himself to us as food and drink is himself the beginning of God's new world.8

So in this sacrament of the Eucharist, there is a merging of past and future in the present. There is a looking back and looking forward. What is most astonishing to me are the words of Christ in foreshadowing not only the Last Supper, but the means by which we enter the kingdom. After the miraculous feeding of the 5000, Jesus tells his followers, “Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves,” and again, “The one who feeds on me will live because of me.”9 Eat my flesh and drink my blood. It’s brutal, confusing. And yet, God uses the most common of everyday things, bread, and a drink of joy and celebration, wine, to speak to us of his love and grace. These everyday objects become not only symbols, but also vehicles of grace that point us to the nature of reality and the way God intends to remake even the most common and mundane aspects of our lives.

Partaking of this meal is not about our commitment and devotion but God’s commitment to us in Christ, not only to redeem all things, but to show us love and mercy again and again. We are called to taste and see that he is good, how he has loved us and gave himself for us. We are to receive and go out in joy remembering the work of redemption and renewal that was promised in the garden, inaugurated in the resurrection, and that will be consummated in the new heavens and earth. We stand somewhere in between all of these things, looking forward and backwards, and are reminded and assured of his grace in this meal.

Somehow, Christ himself feeds us with his body.

Jesus— the real Jesus, the living Jesus, the Jesus who dwells in heaven and rules over earth as well, the Jesus who has brought God's future into the present-—wants not just to influence us, but to rescue us; not just to inform us, but to heal us; not just to give us something to think about, but to feed us, and to feed us with himself. That's what this meal is all about.10

Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Reading

Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide by Hawon Jung. Ok this book is amazing, but don’t listen to the audiobook with your windows down while driving around town. Or maybe we all should…I am in part four now, which is what I was really in it for. The history of abortion in Korea is fascinating and much complex than our US pro-choice/pro-life debate. Widespread abortion and contraceptive efforts were largely funded by the US starting in the 60’s in an attempt to restrict potentially communist populations (the average number of children a woman had in 1960 was six and within a decade plummeted to one) and its wild how that history has shaped the culture’s understanding of natality.

The Korean government is a model for family-friendly economic policies but strict traditional gender roles and expectations, insane work hours and housing costs, and the growing social divide between men and women have all contributed to a replacement rate of under 1- the lowest in the developed world. So many thoughts on all of this!

Arcadia by Lauren Groff. Somehow I missed this novel! I am a big fan of Matrix and the Florida short story collection. Told from the vantage point of Bit, a child growing up in a hippie commune, it’s been a fun read so far.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. This will be a re-read for a book club. I remember not really liking this trilogy when I read it a few years ago, but Death Comes for the Archbishop was one of my tops reads last year. So maybe this re-read will sit better.

Current Listening

Devil in the Deep Blue Sea, Episode 1: The Devil Went Down to Arkansas with Mike Cosper- I remember quite vividly listening through the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast the summer it was released, as it paralleled the story I found myself in and the questions I was wrestling with about faith and leadership and the church. This is a very different story, but equally as well told. If you grew up in the 90’s and talk of demons, rock music, youths dabbling in witchcraft, or conspiracies theories pertaining to such things was at all a part of the rhetoric, this one is for you!

They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos M.N. Eire. Starting this 16 hour audiobook this week. I am fascinated by the history of mystical/supernatural experiences both in the church and outside. One of my favorite places in the world is the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore which is packed with wild art from visionaries and mystics. So to learn more, and how empiricism impacted the way we think of these things culturally, this is the next project.

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“Many people think that being Christian makes you sort of subhuman or, at least, less than fully human. Guys out there on the street (people think) are having a wonderful time enjoying human life to the fullest, and we in the church are sort of cramped and constricted. Well, things shouldn't be that way. Being a Christian is supposed to make you more truly human, more fully yourself. That means that you are supposed to become somebody who is reflecting the image of God.” - NT Wright, Socrates in the City lecture series, 2011

In the various Christian traditions I have found myself in, the predominant view of man, or so called “biblical anthropology,” that has been taught has been a kind of Calvinist “total depravity but saved and on the way to glorification” model. I’m not going to argue against this, necessarily, but the model I have been intrigued by in the last few years is rooted more in the theological concept of the imago dei. I am also deeply intrigued by the Orthodox understanding of theosis- this ultimate oneness and union with God that we are all meant to experience and how this plays out in our understanding of what it means to be human.

These ideas are not at odds and in fact complement one another nicely. There is also much historic precedence for them, even within the Reformed tradition. NT Wright himself, being an Anglican, isn’t deviating from anything that wasn't already in place. He combines both the ideas of imago dei and theosis in Simply Christian.

One of the four longings Wright says are common to all humans is the desire and need for relationship. Man was made to be in fellowship with others and to be deeply known and loved. Not only by fellow humans, but ultimately by his Creator, being made in the image of the Creator God for this very purpose. God opened himself up and created a world out of love. And likewise, mankind was made for this knowledge of God, self, and others in light of the Creator. Wright elaborates:

Relationship was part of the way in which we were meant to be fully human, not for our own sake, but as part of a much larger scheme of things. pg 37

After the fall, mankind is set on self-annihilation and this brokenness with God, self, and others impacts every aspect of relationships between God and people, and humans with all of creation. If mankind was meant to live in communion with God and others but this has been broken, how then is it reclaimed? The God who made everything for the purpose of communion has set about a way to redeem it in Christ and to remake mankind and if we are humble enough to recognize our own inability to set things right, we are made a part of this story by grace. Salvation is about new creation.

Christianity is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this-the finding, the saving, the giving of new life— in Jesus. He has done it. With Jesus, God's rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. It's the door to the prison where we've been kept chained up. We are offered freedom: freedom to experience God's rescue for ourselves, to go through the open door and explore the new world to which we now have access. Heaven and earth…overlap and interlock mysteriously in a number of ways; and the God who made both heaven and earth is at work from within the world as well as from without, sharing the pain of the world- indeed, taking its full weight upon his own shoulders. pg. 115-116

(The call of faith) is to believe that the true God, the world's creator, has loved the whole world so much, you and me included, that he has come himself in the person of his Son and has died and risen again to exhaust the power of evil and create a new world in which everything will be put to rights and joy will replace sorrow. The more conscious we are of our own inability to get it right, perhaps even our own flagrant disloyalty to the call to live as genuine human beings, the more we will hear this call as what it most deeply is. It is the offer of forgiveness. pg. 207-208

So if relationship with God can be restored, what about the remaking part? What’s so freeing about worshiping a God who is on a mission to remake us? Seems contradictory at best. This gets to the heart of what “being human” is actually all about. If we are made in God’s image to know and to worship him, but are broken by sin and death, there is some recreation needed to restore the image of God in man. This remaking and being formed into the image of Christ is actually what makes us most ourselves. It frees us of ourselves and make us into people who are free to love and serve others without fear, because we have been so loved. It also anticipates the redemption of all things that is yet to come:

Your own human self, your personality, your body, is being reclaimed, so that instead of being simply part of the old creation, a place of sorrow and injustice and ultimately the shame of death itself, you can be both part of the new creation in advance and someone through whom it begins to happen here and now! pg 126

New creation is not a denial of our humanness but it’s reaffirmation…learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being, anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption. pg 223

In other words, precisely because the ultimate goal is neither a disembodied heaven nor a mere rearrangement of life on the present earth, but the redemption of the whole creation, our calling is to live in our bodies now in a way which anticipates the life we shall live then. pg. 232

So if it is true that we are broken and need rescue and forgiveness and grace, God would be cruel to leave us like he found us. It’s a grace that in making us a part of the story of redemption, he remakes us into what we were meant to be as a kind of “first fruits” of what the whole world will become at the end of the age.

The thing about this is that we are changed and shaped by our loves and desires whether we want to be or not. “You are what you worship” as the old adage goes. And we also reflect what we worship. Wright uses the analogy of “becoming more human” when we live into the image of God and “dehumanization” when we reject living into it. Sin is a kind of “missing the mark,” a failure to “hit the target of complete, genuine, glorious humanness.”1 This reminds me a bit of Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the “banality of evil”2 and the dehumanization that results in participating in it. Sin actually dehumanizes because it is the opposite of who God is and who we and the world are meant to be. So then, worship of God, whom we are meant to reflect, makes us “more human.”

So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain? The answer comes in the second golden rule: because you were made in God's image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive. Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn't, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part of the creation as though it were the Creator himself-in other words, when you worship an idol—you may well feel a brief "high." But, like a hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost: when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That is the price of idolatry. pg 148

If salvation means the announcement of God’s kingdom, Christ’s rule, and the new creation, then following Jesus isn’t merely a “checking of the box” but allowing one’s life to be “totally reshaped by him” leading to a “genuine life in the present and to a complete, glorious, and resurrected life” in the future.3 This living into the image of God is often referred to as “holiness” in Scriptures and the renewal of affections and actions is called “santification.” It’s not an automatic process and no believer is perfect at it. We still make choices that dehumanize ourselves and others and are reliant on the Holy Spirit, who is at work in us and the world, to bring about this new creation. But the difference now is the grace we have been shown. If we have been pursued and loved by God, we are now free and empowered to show this grace to others and be signposts in the world of the coming redemption. But how does holiness benefit us? How does the Christian life and the “rules” or ethics that come along with it actually provide freedom?

“We are to be informed by the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus; by the leading of the Spirit; by the wisdom we find in scripture; by the fact of our baptism and all that it means; by the sense of God's presence and guidance through prayer; and by the fellowship of other Christians, both our contemporaries and those of other ages whose lives and writings are ours to use as wise guides…Only when we have set all that out quite clearly can we ever speak of "rules." There are rules, of course. The New Testament has plenty of them…The rules are to be understood, not as arbitrary laws thought up by a distant God to stop us from having fun (or to set us some ethical hoops to jump through as a kind of moral examination), but as the signposts to a way of life in which heaven and earth overlap, in which God's future breaks into the present, in which we discover what genuine humanness looks and feels like in practice.” pg 224-225

I think a big shift in my own thinking has been that this life of knowing God and being remade into the image of Christ isn’t just a matter of “denying something good” but is actually “about growing up and grasping something even better.”4 True freedom comes in being known by God, knowing God, and being freed by grace to love others. This is definitely counter-intuitive. This process doesn’t feel like “freedom” as we usually define it and faith doesn't often make life easier. But in God’s work of recreation, we are being made into all that we were meant to be and anticipate the day when all will be made right again.

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role as agents, heralds, stewards, of the new day that is dawning. that quite simply is what it means to be a Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us. pg. 237

Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Reading

The Flourishing Family by Dr David and Amanda Erickson

Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide by Hawon Jung- I have been fascinated by not only the male backlash to #metoo in Korea over the last 10 years but also the ways in which it has shaped female experience and male/female relations in the country. And also the ways in which a mix of very traditional gender roles and an insane work culture has caused the collapse of the family. A great overview here:

• The Real Reasons Koreas Aren’t Having Babies- the Atlantic

• Women in South Korea Are on Strike Against Being “Baby-Making Machines”- NYTimes

• The New Political Cry in South Korea: Out With Men-Haters- NYTimes

The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams by Daniel Nayeri- Having loved Everything Sad is Untrue, I am excited to read more of Nayeri’s work.

Current Listening

The Civil Wars- returning to bands I loved in my early twenties. And apparently still love.

Sons of Patriarchy, Ep 12- The Trinity and Gender Roles- I kind of love the Jeff Moss “once deep in CREC now Orthodox Christian” character. He knows his stuff. And once again, historic confessional theology matters and if you have to mess with Trinitarian theology to defend some version of gender roles, maybe you should reconsider. I kind of wish they had gone a little deeper on the issues with the gender roles position (or at least talked to Aimee Byrd) but it’s worth the listen.

Theology in the Raw, Ep 1249, The Beauty of Complementarity with Gregg Allison - I have really appreciated this on-going series Preston is doing with both Complementarian and Egalitarian scholars! Some of my favorite interviews have been:

• Lynn Cohick

• Cindy Westphall

• Lucy Peppiatt (Her interpretation of 1 Cor. 11 is so intriguing!)

• Gerry Breshears

• Michelle Lee-Barnewell

• Dani Treweek

I fell in love with Wright for multiple reasons. The first was his unshakeable commitment to the Christian faith and story. I was also exploring Anglicanism at the time so doctrinally I was on board. However, it wasn’t doctrine but the way he outlined the tenets of the Christian faith that reoriented my belief in this story and the God of this story. Wright is inherently eschatologically focused. If the resurrection is true, this does change everything. The Christian faith isn’t a guarantee for a nice, safe passage to heaven but has a radical impact on our lives here and now, thanks to the breaking in of the kingdom through Christ’s first coming and resurrection. 

For most of my life, “Where will you spend eternity?” was the opening statement to any explanation of the gospel I had heard. In this angle, the choice to follow God is ultimately about securing your place in heaven and not hell in the future. This is, of course, the part of the end result of faith. We are creatures with an orientation towards the eternal, created in the image of God to love, serve, and enjoy him forever. But so often when the gospel is presented in this “fire insurance” way, the radical effects that the gospel and the kingdom have here and now are missing. 

We may look to a future dwelling place called “heaven” but forget that what we ultimately should long for is the hope of resurrection and the consummation of all things when Jesus returns and puts all things right. In physical bodies, in a physical new heavens and earth. This isn't only a far off event we hope will happen. Jesus' first coming, his incarnation, death, resurrection and current rule have implications for us here and now. 

Wright argues that there are four things that every human longs for: echoes of a voice that speak to us that the world isn't right and that we long for it to be. We long for justice, spirituality, beauty, and relationships. He then goes on to show how pantheism and deism miss the mark but how the God of Christianity not only desires these things as well but has made a way for them to be fully realized and for us to fully know them. 

And not only in the far off future. The world is on its way to being set right because Jesus came the first time. It's finished. We may not see the effects of this fully now, but it is a reality that wasn't before Christ's death and resurrection and the power to put all things to right has been secured. When he returns, all his enemies will be placed under his feet, even death, and the justice, beauty, restored relationships, and fellowship with God we long for will be made perfect.  

So how does that effect us here and now? How should Christians live and what's the purpose of the church? To snatch sinners from the gates of hell but leave the world behind to burn? There is so much more to our calling as followers of Christ. Here are a few of my favorite quotes: 

Resurrection isn't a fancy way of saying, ‘Going to Heaven after you die.’ It’s not about “life after death” as such. Rather, it's a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead…If Jesus has been raised, that means that God’s new world, God’s kingdom, has indeed arrived; and that means we have a job to do. The world must hear what the God of Israel, the creator God, has achieved through his Messiah. ppg 92-3

Christianity is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this–the finding, the saving, the giving of new life–in Jesus. He has done it. With Jesus, God’s rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. pg 92

The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights. Earth and heaven were made to overlap with one another, not fitfully, mysteriously, and partially as they do at the moment, but completely, gloriously, and utterly…The great drama will end, not with “saved souls” being snatched up into heaven, away from the wicked earth and mortal bodies that drag us down into sin, but with the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, so that “the dwelling of God is with humans” (Rev. 21:3). pg 217

God’s plan is not to abandon this world, the would which he said was “very good.” Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does, he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. This is the promise of the Christian Gospel. pg 219

…the ultimate goal is neither a disembodied heaven nor a mere rearrangement of life on the present earth, but the redemption of the whole creation, our calling to live in our bodies now in a way which anticipates the life we shall live then. pg 232

The way to make sense of it all is to look ahead. Look to the coming time when the earth shall be filled with the knowledge and glory of God as the waters cover the sea; and then live in the present in the light of that promise, sure that it will come fully true because it was already fulfilled when God did for Jesus at Easter what he is going to do for the whole of creation. Gradually we are glimpsing a truth which cannot be overemphasized: that the tasks which await us as Christians, the paths we must walk and the lessons we must learn, are part of the great vocation which reaches us in God’s word–the word of the gospel, the word of Jesus and the Spirit. We are called to be part of God’s new creation, called to be agents of that new creation here and now. We are called to model and display that new creation in symphonies and family life, in restorative justice and poetry, in holiness and service to the poor, in politics and painting.  pg 236

I will hopefully post on two more of my favorite ideas from Simply Christian in the coming weeks: Wright’s understanding of what it means to be fully human, and how Heaven meets Earth in Word and Sacrament.

Snapshots of Life Lately

Current Listening

Sons of Patriarchy, Ep. 11- Reformed is (Not) Enough

My “yay reformed theology!” flame ran out a long time ago, but this is a masterful reminder of the importance of the historic confessions and creeds as doctrinal guardrails. If you have any need to know what on earth Federal Vision teaches and how it is a significant departure from all other historically orthodox protestant views, this is a great listen.

The Russell Moore Show- Harm, Trauma, and Church Abuse: Diane Langberg

Langberg’s book, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church, was an incredible read and her insight on all topics involving spiritual and sexual abuse is unmatched.

Theology in the Raw, Ep. 1246- The Toxic War on Masculinity: Nancy Pearcy

I really appreciated Love Thy Body years back but have been curious and a bit suspicious of Pearcy’s latest work. This was a great conversation, however!

Current Reading

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero

The Flourishing Family by Dr David and Amanda Erickson

Ambition Monster by Jennifer Romolini - I am obsessed with this book currently!

Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church by Nijay K. Gupta

Throughout the Biblical narrative, God has a habit of entering human history so we shouldn’t be shocked by the appearance of an angel to Mary. The OT contains numerous accounts of either God showing up in bodily form (to Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, and Jacob to name a few) or sending divine messengers on his behalf. But there is a shocking description of Mary in Gabriel’s opening words. Mary is said to be “highly favored” according to Gabriel. Not only because she has been singled out for the task of being the mother of Jesus, God Incarnate, but she is favored to be presented with God’s grace in such a tangible way in the form of this divine visitor. 

Gabriel moves next to the bulk of his message. Mary will bear a son. This must have been a bit strange for her to hear. She is an engaged teenager, probably hopeful that she will bear children in the future, but it may not have been on her current radar. This is good news though. Not only will Mary not face barrenness, like many women including her cousin Elizabeth, and she will bear a healthy son and survive the birth herself, this son will be the seed of promise, the fulfillment of all of God’s promises to her and the world. So there is a particular grace given to Mary, but also a general grace. In her masterpiece, Women and the Gender of God, Amy Peeler explains:

“By announcing God's particular grace to Mary, at the same time, Gabriel proclaims God's general graciousness of keeping promises to her entire people and, through them, the world. God is gracious to descend, to preserve, and to honor Mary, and in so doing to elevate her by keeping the ancient promises to Israel and the nations through her. She has reason to rejoice indeed, for Gabriel has brought her good news, that is, gospel (euangelion).”1 

In her poetic response, the Magnificat, Mary seems to understand all of this. This God-man will not only be her child, but will be the fulfillment of all she and her people have been longing for.

However, Luke describes her initial response to Gabriel’s proposition as hesitant and literally, disturbed. Maybe it’s the presence of the divine being. Or the message itself. What exactly is she going to be given grace for? This seems like a weighty proposal. Mary ponders the statement of the angel and asks a follow up question, “How will this be?” But unlike the previous question of Zechariah, which on the surface seems almost identical, Mary’s question is more about logistics, “How can this be for I am a virgin?” Will the Messiah come through her eventual union with Joseph or by some other means? Zechariah was visited by the angel in the holy of holies and yet, Mary is promised that this very presence will reside in her womb. 

One of the most fascinating elements of Luke’s narrative is not only how much detail Mary is given about what is to happen to her body but also that she is graciously given agency. Peeler writes:

“The danger for Mary is that the statements of Gabriel are proclamations in the indicative: You will conceive; you will bear a son; you will name him Jesus, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Most High will overshadow you. It does not sound like the messenger is asking, but rather telling. As the story continues, however, Luke moves through the danger to show that God honors Mary, not only by giving grace and blessing in a non-violating way, but also by creating space for her agency.” 2

The ancient world is full of tales of women being violated by gods or entering unions with them. Zeus was well known to have impregnated many human women. Why then does the biblical story of the Annunciation feel familiar to other ancient texts and yet remains strikingly different? Not only does Luke record the proposition of the angel, he records Mary’s careful response and curious questioning. Mary is given a voice in this narrative that is lacking in other similar stories. For example, Mary is the only woman referred to by name in the Quran, and yet in its account of the Annunciation, Mary never actually accepts.3 She asks the same question she does in Luke’s narrative, but she is never given any agency to respond. Only in the biblical account is she given specific details about how the Messiah will come into the world through her body and her consent is recorded for us. 

Lest this talk of consent seems like a modern or feminist reading, a quick survey of Catholic and Orthodox tradition shows that this interpretation of Luke’s story has a long history. Even Protestant theologians such as Richard Bauckham, Beverly Gaventa, and Cynthia Rigby hold to this view.4 Peeler helps us here as well:

The consensus of Christian tradition is therefore on solid footing. God has not oppressed Mary with the birth of the Messiah; instead, God has presented her with a great honor. Equally important, it is an honor she has accepted willingly. Therein lies the paradox; in her humility before God, Mary is active and even esteemed. 5

Not only does Gabriel answer her questions about logistics, there seems to be a bit of careful encouragement for her to accept on Gabriel’s behalf too. In a sort of out of the way tangent, Gabriel proceeds to inform Mary of her cousin’s similarly miraculous conception. By bringing up Elizabeth, Gabriel encourages Mary that “with God all things are possible” and that the power and grace of God has already been at work in her family. Her cousin Elizabeth would bear the forerunner of Messiah, Mary’s child. 

After Gabriel’s answer, Mary thoughtfully accepts. Peeler writes:

“The grammar of her response itself illuminates the dynamics. γένοιτο (genoito), "let it be," is a verb in the middle voice, a territory that is neither active nor passive. It is, instead, reflexive. The action is initiated by God, and yet Mary permits its impact. The mood of the verb is an optative. Optatives express a wish, as in "Might this be true." Such language is not resignation. It is agreement to an invitation, an agreement motivated by desire.

In both of her statements, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord!" and "Let it be unto me according to your word," Luke presents the delicate balance of both self-respect and humility. Look at me! I am a slave of the Lord. Let the good and hard word happen to me.6

Mary’s view of herself is amazing. Mary has worth as a “highly favored, God-created being”7 and draws attention to herself in the opening of her speech, “Behold!” This is however almost negated by the term she uses to refer to herself, a “handmaiden of the Lord.” This is a prelude to the theme of her Magnificat, which is the nature of the upside-down kingdom of God. She has been granted unprecedented access to this divine salvation plan and placed at its very center, and yet, sees herself merely as a servant of this very Savior. This is consistent with how Jesus himself would speak about the nature of discipleship. The apostles, most famously Paul, consistently refer to themselves as servants or slaves of Jesus. Jesus himself would come in the form of a slave (Phil 2:7). “To be a handmaiden of this Lord is to stand in a position of blessing and honor among other believers who follow the one who took this position of service himself.”8

Mary doesn’t seek this privilege or position of honor. The Lord seeks her out and she receives it. The other aspect of the story that sets it apart from other similar ones is the very nature of this God. He is anything but a belligerent deity bent on manipulating mankind for his own purposes. How does Mary view this God who seeks her out? In her Magnificat, Mary portrays God as one who fulfills promises, is trustworthy, is good to his people and enacts justice and righteousness on their behalf, lifts up the oppressed and brings down the oppressor. This God she says “yes” to is a God who is not a tyrant but comes to heal and love and restore. Mary is stunningly receptive to this God of love, reversing the pattern of unfaithfulness and the rejection of God which has previously broken Shalom. She offers herself and becomes a “co-worker with God for the providence of mankind.”9

In identifying herself as a servant of the God she knows has her good in mind and submitting to his plan, Mary becomes the first disciple of the coming Jesus to believe and heed the call to service and obedience. Along with Elizabeth, the spirit of God will overshadow and fill her. These women became some of the first New Testament believers. And yet, Mary will later be seen in Mark 3 along with Jesus’s brothers desperately calling for him to shut down his ministry and come home. They doubt him and his work and think he is crazy. This confusion in regard to his ministry seems a long way off from Mary’s original “yes” to God's plan or even her instructions to the attendants at the Wedding of Cana which speak of her trust in her Son, “Do whatever he tells you!”

But this is the nature of faith. Sometimes in the confusion of the present, the past surrender and belief seems distant. But God is still at work in Mary, even in the confusion of how God’s plan for the salvation of the world will play out. This is somehow strangely comforting to me- that the mother of God Incarnate faced disappointments and difficulty understanding what Jesus was up to and yet, she will later appear by Jesus’s side at the foot of the cross, devoted to him until his dying breath. The last time we see Mary in the opening chapters of Acts, she appears along with the other disciples waiting for the birth of the church with great anticipation in the upper room. God would fulfill his word and does, and it is often in ways we least expect.  

This pattern of surrender and humility and trust in the God who has made promises to us is therefore the pattern for each one who comes to know and be known by God. Mary is essential because she models for us what true discipleship looks like in the face of uncertainty and doubt. 

Lastly, the significance of God indwelling a woman and being born of a woman is astonishing. Stay with me. Jesus could have shown up as a fully grown man. Plenty of Greek gods moved about the world in bodily form without being born in ancient mythology. Why is the Incarnation different? This uncreated, eternally begotten Son of God, comes to earth just like every other human does. As the old carol reminds us:

“God of God, Light of Light,

lo, He abhors not the virgin's womb;

very God, begotten not created”10

In Gabriel’s coming to Mary and giving her the details of this salvation plan, God honors her body and her participation. With Mary’s “yes,” not only does God include a woman in the story of the Incarnation but a woman’s body and its good, created design are now at the very center of the story. The process of gestation, birth, and nursing are experiences the Son of God was not beyond identifying with. In the ancient world, birth itself was seen as a gory and shameful act, much like death. And yet, the Son of God will experience both of these things common to every other human being. This is unheard of in any other ancient story- that a divine being would seek to identify with his creation in this way and go to these depths to restore the world and his relationship with it. 

What does this mean for us? Just as Mary was sought out by God, given favor and grace, and invited to partner with God’s work in the world, we too are called to say “yes” to this God who breaks into our world, shines light into the darkness, and promises to one day redeem all things. Jesus came as a human man, but through the body of a woman. God valued Mary’s dignity and she responded in humility and acceptance.

I’ll leave you with John Donne’s words that perfectly capture not only the Luke narrative, but the beauty of a divine, human Savior being born of a poor, yet highly favored, girl.

Annunciation

Salvation to all that will is nigh;

That All, which always is all everywhere,

Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,

Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,

Lo, faithful virgin, yields Himself to lie

In prison, in thy womb; and though He there

Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He will wear,

Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try.

Ere by the spheres time was created, thou

Wast in His mind, who is thy Son and Brother;

Whom thou conceivst, conceived; yea thou art now

Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother;

Thou hast light in dark, and shutst in little room,

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.11

For this reason, Flannery is the perfect Advent author. Her stories are rich with the realities of the darkness and brokenness of the world, including most often, the “Christ-haunted South.” But grace always find a way to break in and shock characters into a moment of self-recognition and repentance. Her stories are also marked by violence. She explained that she didn’t enjoy violence but used it as a means to shock her readers into seeing themselves for who they really are. “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”1 Her solution to the deafness of the modern age was to shout about the work of grace and our dire need for it.

She rooted her defense of the use of violence in the center piece of the Christian faith: the crucifixion. As Jessica Hooten Williams wrote “God works through the tradegies we cause for our redemption. What is the crucifixion but the bloody mess we make when God offers us his love? Yet we praise him for the salvation and resurrection that he works through our destructiveness.”2 This is the same way by which grace works itself into the lives of her own characters.

O’Connor’s works are deeply creative and imaginative. They are set in this world, but have a sort of magical realism, heaven meets earth, feel. They are also sacramental. Like other Catholic writers, (think Tolkien) grace is not a physical object, but meaning is often found in the things themselves- a prosthetic leg, a tattooed back, a visit to the doctor’s office, a bus ride. Flannery saw the physical world as a testament to spiritual realities and her characters often encounter grace by these unlikely physical means. She saw her own work as a “hymn to the Eucharist,” pointing to the very real physical and spiritual realities in the everyday lives of her characters. On O’Connor’s understanding of grace, Jordan, A. Haddad writes “While grace does not arise as the product of nature, God has so ordained it that grace is communicated in and through the mediation of nature, which is wholly consistent with the reality found in the Son of God’s Incarnation.”3 For O’Connor this was the connection point between her work, the spiritual realities of the Eucharist, and the everyday breaking in of the grace of God into our world.

So what does this have to do with Advent? Everything, I would argue. Advent is a time to take a hard look at the darkness and sin of the world. For O’Connor, sin isn’t something to be taken lightly but the fatal enemy at the core of all that is broken and wrong with the world. She saw fiction as a necessary means of exposing the darkness and pointing to the hope beyond it. “It is almost impossible to write about supernatural grace in fiction,” she once wrote. “We almost have to approach it negatively. As to natural grace, we have to take that the way it comes – through nature. In any case, it [grace] operates surrounded by evil.” 4 And sometimes it’s this very darkness that shows us our need for grace. “Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.”5 she wrote in Mystery and Manners.

For O’ Connor, “reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost.”6 The cost of her characters’ faith and repentance is often great and painful, but it is a cost and pain worth enduring. Her use of the profane doesn't seek to explain away or sweeten the dark realities of our world, or our deepest selves, but the violent episodes are “invasions of God’s grace”7 and are meant to shine a light on our need for redemption and creation’s restoration. Our hope isn’t in ourselves but in this work of grace that breaks in and shows us who we really are and points us to a hope outside of ourselves.

Advent’s goal is the same. Advent begins in the dark and moves to the breaking in of grace into our world through the Incarnation. What began as the very real and bloody entry of human birth and ended with a shocking and violent death, the Incarnation of Christ is God’s way of jolting us out of our apathy and self-centeredness, exposing us not only to the reality of our fallen world and selves but to the utter depths of his love and pursuit of us and creation. Advent is a time to return to this reality and once again, renew our hope in the grace of the One who came and who is coming again.

—

PS- If you have never read any of Flannery O’Connor’s work, I love this audio recording of her reading her short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Here is the man in the wilderness: an outcast of society, dressed in strange garments, not eating food fit for human consumption, calling for repentance, and announcing the coming of the Kingdom. He stands in the gap between the Old Testament and the New, bridging the divide and ushering in the fulfillment of prophecy and the coming of Messiah. His appearance may be meek, but his message to the unbelieving and skeptical religious leaders is anything but meek, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matt. 3:7). This Tom Bombadil-like character is anything but warm and fuzzy. His admonition, to “bear fruit leading to repentance,” is one for us all (Matt 3:8). The kingdom is at hand. Awake sleepers, and keep your lamps lit.

John the Baptist, with all his course and strange ways, would later be declared by Christ to be the “greatest born among women”. Why? His mission is singular. He is to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah. There is coming a restoration, a renewal, and a peace (Is 11:1–10), but along with that, a fierce judgment in which the enemies of the light will be judged and crushed. Why? “They shall no longer hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain” (Is 11:9). There is no peace without the removal of the darkness.

Just as Advent is about holding the already and not yet of Christ’s coming in tension, so it is about holding both the comfort of the coming renewal and the terror of the purifying judgement (Matt 3:10, 12). With this first Advent of Messiah, the wheels begin to turn on the coming Apocalypse. The ruler of this world is cast down, and wrongs are on their way to being set right. The Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of the first Advent of Christ set the stage for the coming one.

But do I truly “love the dreadful coming day of Judgement,” as Rutledge asks on page 172? With all of creation, do I “wait with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” (Rom 8:19) at the end of the age? Advent celebrates the coming of Christ as a baby, but also points to the coming of Christ as Judge at the end of the age. Rutledge reminds us throughout her writings on Advent that although this may seem uncomfortable for us because we have so much to lose, the announcement of a coming Judge who will restore all things and judge every evil is actually a great comfort to the weak, poor, and oppressed. The appearance of John the Baptist on the scene at this time of year “exposes our pretensions for what they really are.” The kingdom of God is precisely for the weak, oppressed, wounded, and poor. But I need power from outside myself to truly repent and look forward in eager expectation for this coming Kingdom and Judgment.

Where is the hope in this, then? In one of my favorite Rutledge articles on John the Baptist, Rutledge comforts us with the hope that the Evangelist pointed to, the hope outside of ourselves that comes to us:

“The witness is from God; the light is from God; the preaching is from God — all for the purpose of revealing Jesus, Immanuel, God-with-us. The preacher is nothing; the Word is everything. Jesus is everything. He comes; he comes at the end of the ages, and he comes in the hearts of all human beings who even now relinquish all human claims in the face of the God who is coming in power.”