The Peregrinating Parson

Maybe it’s because I just finished reading a paper on Ephesians 5 by a friend who is in seminary. Maybe it’s because #MeToo. More likely, it’s because bad theology that dehumanizes and disempowers anyone drives me up a wall. And when Kaitlin Curtice issued a challenge on Twitter to reply to a post called “Husbands, Get Her Ready for Jesus” by Bryan Stoudt at Desiring God (John Piper’s website promoting what he calls “Christian Hedonism”, which in practice sounds to me a lot more like “Christian Judgmentalism and Legalism Wrapped Up in Gilt Paper and Tied with a Velvet Bow”, but that could be another post for another time), I decided I’m all over it. Because I am SO DONE WITH PATRIARCHY. A simplistic but ultimately ineffectual post would be to copy Stoudt’s post and swap every husband and wife reference so it puts women in the position of power. Alas, “the Bible doesn’t say that!” would negate the argument right off, so instead, I need to recap and then respond. According to S

Dark and Light Devotional for the United Church of Christ Science and Technology Network December 21, 2017 Rev. Dr. Ruth E. Shaver 5 I am the Lord, and there is no other;   besides me there is no god.   I arm you, though you do not know me,   6 so that they may know, from the rising of the sun   and from the west, that there is no one besides me;   I am the Lord, and there is no other.   7 I form light and create darkness,   I make weal and create woe;   I the Lord do all these things. —Isaiah 45:5-7, NRSV This section of Isaiah is addressed to the “Savior” of the Israelite people, Cyrus the Great of Persia. We know of Cyrus from the so-called Cyrus Cylinder, an artifact held by the British Museum that proclaims the king to be a liberator and restorer of proper faith and practice to the people of Babylon and all those held captive by the Babylonians. The Cylinder makes no mention of the Israelites, Jews, Jerusalem, Judah, or Judea, 1 but the Biblical

Continuous Creation Devotional for the United Church of Christ Science and Technology Network November 20, 2017 Rev. Dr. Ruth E. Shaver Ages ago I was set up,    at the first, before the beginning of the earth…. when he assigned to the sea its limit,    so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight,    rejoicing before him always… —Proverbs 8:22, 29-30, NRSV In November of 2013, the Earth proved that the limits of the sea are ever changing. Nii-jima, an undersea volcano in the Japanese islands, poured forth magma that quickly broke the surface of the sea and became the world’s newest island. This escaped notice in the headlines; it’s not like the island was habitable then and it’s no more habitable four years later, though it has merged with a nearby island and continues to grow as the volcanic eruption shows no signs of abating

A Great Run Devotional for the United Church of Christ Science and Technology Network October 14, 2017 Rev. Dr. Ruth E. Shaver Before the mountains were brought forth,    or ever you had formed the earth and the world,    from everlasting to everlasting you are God. —Psalm 90:2, NRSV I blame my parents.   They sat me down in front of PBS in primetime and made me watch NOVA and Nature and Cosmos (with Carl Sagan) and then took me to church on Sundays.   It was inevitable that I’d grow up thinking God has an amazing imagination to have written the laws that led to human intellect and curiosity over “billions and billions” of years. Well, not inevitable , but certainly likely. It was definitely impossible that I’d be a Creationist. I knew by the age of 10 that human civilizations had been around in Mesopotamia by at least 5000 BCE ( now estimated at 6000 BCE ), which meant that my first reaction as a junior in high school to Bishop Ussher’s date of

I’ll just say this straight out: there is NOTHING unpatriotic about exercising one’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression by sitting, kneeling, or even turning one’s back on the flag during the playing of the National Anthem when one is making a point about the disparity between our idolatry of the symbols of our nations (the flag and the anthem, in particular) and our continuing unwillingness to grow into the ideals of our nation (liberty and justice for all who are created equal). This is not Jane Fonda going to the capital of the country with which we are at war. This is not Dennis Rodman popping up in Pyongyang as a publicity stunt or whatever that was to give a two-bit dictator more standing on the international stage. This is men whose lives have been defined far more by the color of their skin than by their abilities on and off the field of play calling our collective attention to just one of the many ways that we have fallen short of the glory

Out of Eden: An Evolutionary History More Twisted Than a Double Helix Devotional for the United Church of Christ Science and Technology Network September 21, 2017 Rev. Dr. Ruth E. Shaver Genesis 3:22-24, NRSV Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”— therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. Homo sapiens sapiens are the supposed pinnacle of evolution for the genus Homo. Given that we seem to be hurtling backward toward the good old days of mutually assured destruction, we could easily argue that placement, but for now, at least, we are the most intelligent and most creative species in existence on Earth. But

I’m behind in my blog posts because I spent six of the past ten days in wider church meetings (which might sound awful to most of you but which I genuinely and passionately enjoy—yes, I’m a church nerd!—mostly because of the amazing people with whom I get to spend that time, though the subject matters of the last two meetings has also been enjoyable). That means I haven’t yet written about something else near and dear to my heart: my acceptance as a Sinai and Synapses Fellow for 2017-2019. Sinai and Synapses is an organization founded by Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman for many of the same reasons I ended up doing my Doctor of Ministry degree in faith and science. As the “Why It’s Needed” page of the website says, current dialogue about science and religion is unproductive because there is no middle ground. Religious literalists and vehement atheists screech at us, “ creating a lot of heat, but they are producing very little light. ” In my dissertation, I positioned literalism (Creati

Last week, I almost wrote a vitriolic response to the Nashville Statement , a theological declaration about human sexuality composed by members of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). (TRIGGER WARNING for the statement; it is dehumanizing toward LGBTQI people and highly critical of any straight/cisgendered folk who think that gender equality, marriage equality, and LGBTQI rights are good ideas; also, please note that I do quote the statement below.) I opted not to do so because I had nothing new to add to the tomes of replies written by far more capable siblings in Christ than I, particularly Nadia Bolz-Weber and the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver who address the Nashville document point by point (they include the original with their response, but it’s pretty easy to skip the original as you read). This won’t be a direct response, either, but it is prompted in part by my reaction and that of most of my colleagues and friends who are Christians to the sta

Please read the title of this post in your best Baby Dinosaur voice . Several friends and acquaintances have recently posted various analyses of a statement by Jesus concerning signs of the end times: Mark 13:24-25—But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” Matthew 24:29—"Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken…” Luke 21:25-26—And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”* The analyses go something like this: The eclipse, followed by Harvey’s wr