It feels apocalyptic right now. A worldwide pandemic, a potential break-down in food distribution systems, cataclysmic weather patterns, violence, economic struggles, and now something no one expected, killer hornets! It’s enough to make us go crazy. That is, if we didn’t already have a story to guide us through. A story that tells us there is not only a way in the wilderness, but the wilderness is the way.
“Stories hold the world together,” as storyteller Michael Meade has said. There’s a wonderful story hidden in the Bible that can help us find our way through these chaotic and uncertain times, a story of the woman clothed with the sun with the moon at her feet. She wears a crown on her head of twelve stars and she represents the people of God, the goodness of creation itself. We come across her in chapter twelve in one of the books most of us have spent our lives avoiding, Revelation. She appears on the scene just as a war is breaking out in heaven, giving birth to something new while fighting off evil in the form of the world’s most powerful dragon. He was so powerful, in fact, that he had seven heads and he swept a third of the stars from heaven with his tail.
Just as she gives birth to a son who is to be a great leader for the nations, the dragon tries to devour her baby. But God saves him, and gives her the wings of an eagle to fly off into the wilderness to be nourished there, for a time and times and half a time, as the story goes. This is when the dragon gets really angry and declares war on the world. But the woman watches from the wilderness, where she is strengthened and nurtured by God. While God and all God’s angels fight the war in heaven, eventually defeating the dragon forever, the death of evil .
She is nourished in the wilderness, and so are we. This motif is in many stories in the Bible. The way is made clear, not in the heat of battle, but in the forced retreat to the wilderness. None of us go there willingly, or so the story goes. Hagar is banished to the wilderness and finds the way, led by God. The Israelites escape to the wilderness and find a whole new future. Jesus is forced into the wilderness by the Spirit and finds the strength to carry out his mission there. We are tested in the wilderness, but it is also the place we are taken to be nourished, nurtured and learn to depend on a power greater than ourselves. It’s the place where we let go and learn to trust in God who shows us that there is not only a way in the wilderness, but the wilderness is the Way.
The Wilderness is the Way.
It feels like we are all on a very long wilderness journey, thanks to COVID19. The days are long without much direction, we are anxious about how our needs will be met and often wondering what to do next. We need a story to guide us, to hold us together, to tell us who we are, to ground us in something bigger than the evidence of the day. The woman clothed with the sun steps into this dark book of revelation and into the darkness of our world, and reveals something new. This something new can be a navigation point for all of us as we try to figure out what to do with each day’s chaos. God is doing a new thing, even and especially in the wilderness, in the uncertainty of our days, in the chaos of our world.
We may feel like we are at the end of a story, but the woman clothed with the sun shows us it just may be a new beginning. This feeling that we are doomed and that chaos is the only thing that rules the day is actually a trick the seven headed dragon, and the chaos monsters of our world, play upon us. The darkness of chaos is always trying to convince us that the world is full of doom and gloom and that our best days are behind us. But the woman clothed with the sun tells us, “don’t fall for it.” Resist and wait, resist and pray. God will surely come and give you rest, nurture and a way forward. Giving you the uplift of eagle’s wings just when you need it the most.
The seven headed dragon would have you believe that chaos is in control, it exists to create the chaos of uncertainty in the world. But it also feeds off of our lack of faith, our fear. Revelation tells us that God wins the war in heaven and it’s the death of evil, forever. It’s a scenario that plays out a million times a day, all over the world. Though the dragon takes its bite, love always wins. Love is the most powerful force in the universe.
This story shows us that God walks through the dark hills of our lives, too, lifting us up when we have no more strength to fight. Saving the evidence we have created out of goodness. God gives us rest and nurture, even in the middle of the fight. God not only makes a way in the wilderness, the wilderness becomes the way itself. To new life, new creation and the experience of God’s love invading the world.
Trust that God will meet you when you face the chaos monsters of your days, and give you what you need to find rest, renewal and peace. God will even fight the battle for you, when you are ready to let go.
Check out more hidden stories of women of the Bible in this free resource, click here to download the free PDF
Have you ever played the game where people sit in a circle and a story is whispered in someone’s ear, then passed on by whispering to the next person, then the next? If so, then you understand the challenges of biblical translation. By the time the story reaches the end of the circle, the details have usually changed. Sometimes, even the meaning of the story has changed, too.
Translating any language is a tricky job, particularly when it comes to the ancient languages that make up the Bible: Hebrew, Greek, and some Aramaic. Details are often lost in in the great circle of time that spans almost two thousand years of biblical translation. Oddly, the details that seem to get lost the most in the Bible have to do with the stories of women.
In all fairness, when you’re tackling something as monumental as the Bible, you can expect that some stories will just get lost, or rather, hidden in plain sight. After all, the original stories have been whispered from two thousand years plus! It just so happens that many of the stories that have been lost in biblical translation are about women, especially powerful women. Women who were called by God to lead God’s people. The good news for us is that they haven’t been lost forever. These days, women’s stories are being excavated like buried treasure, which helps us locate some of the lost pieces of women’s history. Including some of the hidden fragments of our own stories that have been missing for a very long time.
How did the stories of powerful women, warriors, prophets, and heroes, become so buried in the Bible? Wouldn’t we want to celebrate and honor these women of renown?
One of the main theories that has been developed by biblical scholars such as Wil Gafney, Elizabeth A. Clark, Tikva Frymer-Kinsky, Esther Fuchs and many others, is that gender bias played a huge role in the process of the hiding.
Since most biblical translation throughout history has been done primarily by men, and most often through the lens of a patriarchal culture, women’s stories were largely out of focus, in the background, hidden or completely buried. Nothing against men, but, when a good portion of Christian theology was formed, there were a few influential men who had some pretty twisted theories about women.
Some of these men were responsible for creating the foundational concepts of biblical theology as we know it today. Our beloved church fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries: Augustine, Ambrose of Milan and John Chrysostom,1 among others. They were men of their time, a time in which women were viewed as utilitarian – producing babies and serving men. What they saw in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 oddly enough, looked a lot like the world around them. A world in which women had very few rights.
For example, Ambrose of Milan wrote in his treatise, On Paradise, “even though man was created outside Paradise (an inferior place), he is found to be superior, while woman, though created in a better place (inside Paradise) is found inferior. For the woman was the first to be deceived and she deceived the man.”2 It’s odd logic, but somehow we bought it. The belief that women were inferior to men and should be viewed with suspicion due to their so called “deceptive” nature colored the lens through which our church fathers interpreted the Bible. This belief then colored the interpretations following them, and ultimately many of the belief systems that were foundational for how we’ve practiced Christianity for a very long time.
Some scholars think that the church fathers just didn’t understand Hebrew all that well. It makes sense, it’s a complex and fluid language. Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, Hebrew scholar, believes that there are many female prophets (and women warriors) hidden in the masculine grammar. 3 What else did they happen to miss?
Through insisting on male dominance as God’s design for humanity and hiding the women who were in leadership roles in Hebrew culture, former biblical interpretations have often created an imbalanced and unfair view of God and people.
On top of that, the insistence of these interpretations as “right” has made for a lot of human suffering for women. But today, all of these things are under the microscope, so to speak, of biblical studies. What they overlooked is changing the way we read the Bible, which is good news not just for women, but for everyone.
Explore more lost stories of women of the Bible in this free resource, download your free PDF here.
Elizabeth A. Clark, Women In the Early Church, (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, Inc. 1983) p 27-76. [↩]
Elizabeth A. Clark, Women In the Early Church, (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, Inc. 1983) p 30. [↩]
Wilda C. Gafney, Daughters of Miriam, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018) Preface. [↩]
I’m in the middle of a big transition and it’s scary. It’s anxiety producing and I have no idea how it’s all going to turn out. It’s a magnified version of that feeling I had as a kid reading “There’s a Monster At The End of This Book.” Pages and pages of Grover doing all kinds of creative things to keep me from turning the page, from getting closer to the monster at the end of the book. Only to find out, at the end, the monster is Grover himself! A funny, blue muppet staring back at me.
I find myself thinking about what I’m leaving behind a lot. The security of a regular paycheck, a job I know how to do well, a community and not to mention the factor of being a known person with networks of trust. I am leaving the familiar for the unfamiliar, the known for the unknown, all because I’m on a journey of becoming who I am meant to be here on planet earth and sometimes, that requires risk. I know this intellectually, but the reality of it is something else altogether. It’s just plain scary.
Of course, as always, I am given a text this week to deal with in light of my current anxieties. The Israelites wondering in the wilderness and telling Moses that they’d really rather go back to a life of slavery, because at least there they had something to eat! At least they had four walls and a bed to sleep in. That panicked awareness that being broken out of slavery isn’t what they thought it would be. Sure, they were elated at first, but now that they’ve had time to reflect, they feel cheated. They expected that freedom would mean something more than starving, more than the endless wandering, more than having to feel their feelings of fear, anxiety and the ever looming presence of self-doubt.
So Moses, the epic, archetypal leader, once again speaks to God and hears what seems like a way forward. They don’t really buy it, but God comes through anyway, in yet another spectacular way, I might add. Sending bread and meat from heaven in the form of manna and quail. A fire by night and a cloud by day, the equivalent of an ancient, wilderness compass. Quite creative. But it’s still not enough. Even though God has proven God’s ability to meet their needs, even in a hostile wilderness, the children of God are still riddled with doubt and they continue reluctantly, impatiently, full of anxiety and fear. Like Grover, trying to do everything to prevent the turning of the page.
Still, day by day, God feeds them, gives them water, leads them with signs and wonders, promises them a new life and a promised land. They go on, grumbling, dragging their feet, making huge mistakes but still moving forward, inch by inch. It’s painful to observe and know that this is the same journey I’m on, too. A wilderness journey into the unknown, fighting the urge to build daily barriers that would keep me from turning the page into what I know is my truest life.
The Israelites weren’t just learning to trust God, they were learning to trust themselves. Somehow, these two things go hand in hand. In a world that teaches us that we must be the masters of our own destiny, create a super hero, artificial version of ourselves to conquer our fear, win friends and influence people, build wealth and look good while we’re doing it, the wilderness journey strips all of those things away. On the wilderness journey, we are forced to look within for the resources to make it through. It’s incredibly disorienting at first, none of our usual tricks seem to work on the journey to true freedom.
But over time, we learn on the wilderness journey that there are other resources we knew very little about, and these resources are very powerful because they are connected to God, to the eternal and to our truer selves. These new resources we find are the created ones that were given to us as the image of God within. Only in the emptiness of the wilderness journey can we learn to draw them up, like water from a deeper well, and use them to create life. A true one, not an artificial one. All of this takes time, a long time. For the Israelites, it took forty years. My mentor likes to say, “the story says Moses led them in a circle for forty years because they weren’t quite ready for their freedom.”
We are re-programming our brains, and it takes time. Richard Rohr and Eckhart Toile teach that about 90% of our brain’s thinking is spent either re-processing the past or worrying about the future. We certainly see this in the story of the Israelite journey. They say it is almost impossible for us to think ourselves into the present, we have to learn to think with our hearts. To make this impossible thing possible, we have to be put in situations in which we learn to rely on something deeper than our magnificent brains, the heart itself. Beyond the physical task of pumping our blood, the heart is also the place of our connection with God, it’s where the word “courage” comes from. The root of the word courage is “cor,” the Latin word for “heart.”
I have to remember that although change feels like a death, there is some pretty amazing birth going on inside of me. It is during this period that God is re-ordering the chaos within, creating new pathways by revealing what is stored in my very own heart. Some old ways of thinking will pass away. During this incredibly awkward and uncomfortable time, I am making some pretty major leaps, moving from self-doubt to self-confidence. From all my stored anxiety God is re-creating peace and serenity by providing my needs as they arise and as I am willing to take the next step, to turn the next page on my journey of faith. God is breaking me free from the thinking that has enslaved my heart. God is parting the impassable obstacle before me so that I can enter into the journey I must take to build the tools I will certainly need to become my truest self.
In a cut throat world where violence, hatred, jealousy and competition rule, I am becoming part of a community that is ruled by a covenant and ethic of love. It’s not some idyllic vision of a utopian world, it’s learning how to love in the midst of suffering, uncertainty and anxiety. That love becomes my cloud by day and my fire by night, it becomes my guiding force.
The Israelites didn’t somehow just stop being human beings, they still grumbled, lost their way, hurt one another, and took their own sweet time to get where they were going. But the important thing is that they continued to turn the page, take another step, and even though grumbling, learned to trust their hearts and live from that center where love ruled. At least, they gave it their best, and that is all we are asked to do, that is all I can do on any given day.
Sometimes my best is just showing up, being present in the moment. I don’t have to do the re-programming, I have a Higher Power that can lift from me the old patterns of re-hashing past pain and freaking out about the future. I’m discovering another way to live, in the present, trusting my heart, trusting the wilderness within that has been created by a greater hand. Trusting that God is building order out of the chaos, day by day, one day, one moment at a time. Giving me the courage to turn the page, even when it’s scary.
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Do you like witch stories? There is a wonderful little encounter tucked away in the Bible, in 1 Samuel 28:3-25. Here’s a fun re-telling of it here in a little theater show I did with Tennessee storyteller, Michael Williams, where his story and my song are featured:
…the kind of imagination it will take to re-invent the world.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes said that the words “wild” and “woman” create a fairytale knock on the door of heart. Theologian Paul Ricoeur convinced us that words create worlds. “Deplorables” as a word used to describe a group of people with heartbeats who pay taxes and love their children is unacceptable, too.
Words create worlds and we are all wondering what kind of world we will wake up to on Nov. 9th. Whatever that world looks like, the reality is, it will be up to us to re-invent it and it will require a great deal of imagination and care for the words we choose.
The truth is, as much as I am reluctant to admit it, one whose very profession is studying the nature of God in the world,much of our impoverished imagination comes directly from the ways in which we have interpreted Bible.
Depth Psychologist C.G. Jung said that in order to understand the American psyche, one must read the Bible. And what he meant by that was that America was built largely through an early partnership between politics and church. My own denomination, Methodism, was the largest Protestant sect in early America, forming towns, cities, schools, hospitals and was the a great center of the civilizing force of our country. Ulysses S. Grant said that there were three great political parties in America: Republicans, Democrats and Methodists. The best selling book in the world, the Bible, still has major game and influence when it comes to worldview.
The wake up call for us is that the Bible’s social and political framework for a delivery system for the Word of God was patriarchy, and not necessarily the benevolent kind. The stories that narrate our faith world and have formed the psyche of a nation, the stories that make up the best selling book ever in the world, the stories that tell us who we are as a people are often hostile to over half of our national population. That said, even this realization hasn’t hindered individuals and faith communities from practicing the Bible’s mandate of unconditional love, it just doesn’t seem to make the daily news.
What we realize, faith communities who choose to re-imagine faith in the 21st Century, is that just because the Word of God came to us in the framework of a social and political system beginning over three thousand years ago known as patriarchy, doesn’t mean faith communities are confined to a system that is oppressive for many people. In fact, even Jesus challenged to reform by saying to his followers “you will do greater things than me.” And we all know he was a liberator of those oppressed by the system, particularly women.
And just because the candidates for leaders of the free world (one of them Methodist) may lack imagination in the words they use to describe one another doesn’t mean we have to go and do likewise. In fact, we can do better.
Our world will only be as good as we can imagine it to be. Because imagination is actually our built in communication system with God, we can even re-imagine our interpretations of Bible. Because there are also stories that tell of a counter-narrative, hidden in the Bible’s unexplored territories in which women rise above their status as property and become leaders: warriors, prophets and military heroes.
We don’t have to throw out our old traditions in order to grow to a place that creates an environment of flourishing for everyone. In fact, that would be tragic. We hold on to the traditions that help us move forward even as we let go of the ones that hold us back. Tradition pulls one way, progress pulls the other, and we arrive at a third way forward. That is how we grow. Because love is always preferenced as the way of God in the end and to love is to allow people to grow. Too much emphasis on either tradition or progress causes stagnancy or deterioration. We learn to grow best in the tension. Our democratic system is actually built for positive movement forward, that is, if we can only imagine it.
On November 9th, we will all have a new reality no matter who is elected and the truth is, we will all have a big job on our hands, the re-imagination of our world. Perhaps the true leadership is in our hands and our hearts and yes, even and especially in our faith communities.
