Inclusion in the desert

Recently, my Facebook friend Idelette, editor of SheLovesMagazine.com posted this beautiful piece on her friend’s blog. It’s gorgeous, and touched me deeply. It doesn’t just speak to me, I commented on Facebook right after I read it. It speaks for me. When I commented on Facebook, I wrote out of a deep frustration and yes, even a tiny little bit of despair:

To my Jesus-loving brothers…please. Try to understand this. Careless jokes from the pulpit, bold statements about how women should not lead men at leadership workshops led by women, and yes, even pronouns…they hurt. They exclude and they hurt. Please just try to understand.

It was in spring of last year when I was attending a leadership workshop that was led and organized by a woman. Throughout the course of the 9-month workshop, we’d heard from a number of powerful, brilliant women in leadership, including Frances Hesselbein, a woman that both Peter Drucker, so-called “Father of American Management” and West Point saw fit to place in ridiculously high leadership positions. It was thrilling to hear from these women — just as it was thrilling to hear from the incredibly strong male leaders that workshop brought in to speak to us.

And then one day — the last day — one of the men at my table said to a woman siting nearby, “I don’t allow women to lead over men.” She nodded, wide-eyed, because that’s what we’ve all been trained to do when we’re in a room full of pastors. Or maybe she agreed with him. To be honest, I’m not sure.

Recently, I was really enjoying a talk by a speaker at a church somewhere when out of nowhere, he attempted a really bad joke. We were looking at the parable of the talents — you know the one. The master-dude is going away and he gives one servant a ton of talents, another a medium amount, and to one servant he gives only one talent, and that servant hides it away. When the master returns to discover this, he calls the servant “lazy and wicked.” When the speaker got to that point — the part about “lazy and wicked” — he said, I think we should think of that servant as a woman.

The joke bombed. It’s not really a joke, anyway. It’s more a stupid, random blob of words strung together that should have remained unsaid. If thoughts are subject to evolution, this sentence would be considered an ameoba, a crusty ectoplasm of a thought. Something quite obviously not fully formed; I’m sure it was a vague precursor of what he really meant to say, something raw and hardly indicative of what the final product would be. At least, I hope that’s what it was.

My emotional response to this comment was immediate and distracting. I had to struggle and pray to pay attention to the rest of the talk, which had been so good before that point and continued to be after. But I was still in shock that this had happened — that once again such a hurtful thing could come from my brother in Jesus. And from the power of the pulpit, no less! My thoughts followed the ususal pattern.

First: anger. A W-T-F kind of Jersey girl attitude. A You want some of this? kind of emotion. My fight-club girl got up.

Then: excuses. He’s a nice guy, I’ve worked with him before. He didn’t mean it that way.

Next: the activist. Just because he’s a nice guy doesn’t make it right. You need to say something to him.

After that: the fear. They will all think you’re such a troublemaker. Again. As usual. Why can’t you just let things be? Why does it always have to be a thing?

Then: emotion, again. Because it hurts. And it’s not what God meant. It’s not what God meant at all.

Jesus loves me like crazy, just as much as he loves any man, and best of all, throughout his ministry here on earth he regularly restored us to a place of equality. He showed himself to us, he included us in his work here, even if the Great Patriarchal Scripture Scribes in the sky didn’t see fit to mention us all that much in the story.

In fact, the whole Jesus story starts with a woman. While I don’t believe in the deification of Mary, I think the Catholics are on to something when they give her some kudos that maybe the rest of us can learn from. Mary said a very important Yes to God. Her Yes is important because it demonstrates how God chooses to use the disempowered and disenfranchised. In Mary’s world, none could be more lowly than a young, poor Jewish girl living in the Roman state.

That makes me realize something:

God’s first act of the new creation was the restoration of women through his choice of mothers.

Then, this morning, I stumbled upon the same verse that Idelette read with her daughter, except my version was in The Message. Eugene Peterson translated that passage using inclusive language:

Now we look inside and what we see is that <em>anyone</em> united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

See how easy that was? Look there. That passage includes everyone. You go, Eugene. You go.

I felt another rush of gratefulness to Reverend Peterson, and I remembered the two letters he wrote to me a while back. I wrote about the first one here. When I wrote to thank him for his response, I told him that I would think of his mom, a Pastor, often. He wrote again:

It makes me grateful every time my mother gets mentioned for her courageous determination to be a pastor. Did I tell you that she established a new congregation in a town not far from here and my dad built it and took care of all the housekeeping details (he was a butcher — owned and operated a meat market).

I wonder. I wonder about that man at that table at that workshop, who with such confidence and authority stated, “I don’t allow women to lead men.” I wonder what he would think if he could read Reverend Peterson’s letter. I wonder if there’s even a moment when Jesus looked at the church that Reverend Peterson’s mother built, and considered her wicked and lazy for building it. Wicked and lazy. I wonder — how wicked and lazy we women must be to put up with this crap for so damn long.

It’s exhausting to pretend to be less than we are so that others can feel that they are all they should be.

And we wicked and lazy women have been doing it, wide-eyed and nodding, for centuries. I think back to that man at that table and again: I don’t allow women to lead over men. Then I remember again one of my favorite verses, when Paul gets a little bit snarky (I love it when Paul gets snarky) — Such things sound impressive when said in a deep enough voice.

Such things sound impressive when said in a deep enough voice!

Ha! I chuckle. I snort with Paul and his blessed, blessed, sarcasm. At least when we’re in eternity together arguing our views over headcovering, we’ll have a laugh with our shared sense of humor, a good sarcastic snicker over our tea and manna.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to do the uncomfortable work of writing things like this. The exhausting work of call outs — calling out the inappropriate behavior, the leaders who are not behaving. I will continue to say, “Hey, hold up there, Skippy,” when faced with blatant sexism. I’ll continue this exhausting work, because it is not what Jesus had in mind. Because some people may have deep voices, but none is as deep and wide and long as the thunder in the desert. No.

That’s the voice of my Jesus, and he sings a song over me of inclusion.