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Why do they still let me teach Sunday school?
Things I said to Mom's Sunday school class while last-minute substituting as teacher today:
1. So Jesus got, like, really pissed, and he totally trashed the whole place, dude. It was radical.
2. Why can't God be a girl if He wants to be? He can do anything; who says She's never a girl? (this got a cheer from the girls in the class, p.s.)
3. A fast overview of every Judas-apologia fanfic ever written for the Easter story, from the Acts of Pilate to the Gospel of Pilate, with a long digression about how by Easter the disciples were spending most of their time bickering like siblings who had been trapped in a car for too long.
Things I almost said, but stopped myself at the last minute:
1. Jesus hates teabaggers! (I didn't actually say that but I laid the groundwork. And I want a bumpers sticker now that says "God Hates Teabaggers: Matthew 22:21") I felt unexpectedly justified when Pastor decided to preach his sermon about how the Democrats in Congress are like Christ Triumphant riding into Jerusalem (let us strew roses at their feet) and the Republicans are just like the Pharisees and Sadduccees. :P
2. The reason they didn't listen was because it was women who saw them, because nobody ever listens to women, but remember that Christ spoke to girls first, before he spoke to the men; he believes we're the ones worth talking to first. (I almost said this but we were running out of time and I figured "God's a chick" was enough Christian radical feminism to start them with.)
3. Aslan is a fraud and Narnia sucks. (Didn't actually mention Lewis, but talked about *why* Aslan is a fraud. Also, didn't say "Jesus is more like a Time Lord than a Highlander," or compare "He will knock four times" to "before the cock crows thrice." Be proud of me.)
Let that stand as your warning: as today was Palm Sunday, and it's my very favorite Christian holiday, I plan to talk about Christianity, and specifically Holy Week and Easter, a lot for the next week. It will be in rather the same sort of tone as the above. If you'd rather not be exposed, filter or unsubscribe me; I won't be offended. It will be back to business-as-random-usual come Monday after next.
1. So Jesus got, like, really pissed, and he totally trashed the whole place, dude. It was radical.
2. Why can't God be a girl if He wants to be? He can do anything; who says She's never a girl? (this got a cheer from the girls in the class, p.s.)
3. A fast overview of every Judas-apologia fanfic ever written for the Easter story, from the Acts of Pilate to the Gospel of Pilate, with a long digression about how by Easter the disciples were spending most of their time bickering like siblings who had been trapped in a car for too long.
Things I almost said, but stopped myself at the last minute:
1. Jesus hates teabaggers! (I didn't actually say that but I laid the groundwork. And I want a bumpers sticker now that says "God Hates Teabaggers: Matthew 22:21") I felt unexpectedly justified when Pastor decided to preach his sermon about how the Democrats in Congress are like Christ Triumphant riding into Jerusalem (let us strew roses at their feet) and the Republicans are just like the Pharisees and Sadduccees. :P
2. The reason they didn't listen was because it was women who saw them, because nobody ever listens to women, but remember that Christ spoke to girls first, before he spoke to the men; he believes we're the ones worth talking to first. (I almost said this but we were running out of time and I figured "God's a chick" was enough Christian radical feminism to start them with.)
3. Aslan is a fraud and Narnia sucks. (Didn't actually mention Lewis, but talked about *why* Aslan is a fraud. Also, didn't say "Jesus is more like a Time Lord than a Highlander," or compare "He will knock four times" to "before the cock crows thrice." Be proud of me.)
Let that stand as your warning: as today was Palm Sunday, and it's my very favorite Christian holiday, I plan to talk about Christianity, and specifically Holy Week and Easter, a lot for the next week. It will be in rather the same sort of tone as the above. If you'd rather not be exposed, filter or unsubscribe me; I won't be offended. It will be back to business-as-random-usual come Monday after next.
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Look! I even have a special icon for commenting to posts about religion!
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Though I don't have a special icon. =/
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...right, time to go scan my new Young Lovecraft comic. :D
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O.O
Re: O.O
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Actually, it's not. It is highly likely that I won't remember this conversation at all tomorrow.
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Actually, Pastor didn't come right out and preach explicitly about the health care bill - which I am glad of, because the point of "Leave the politics to the politicians and keep them out of the Temple" applies to liberals as well as to F*cktards - he was using the Congressional leadership as an example of how a triumphal entry (no matter how hard-earned) is just the overture to even more hate and persecution, and you can't rest on one triumph. I was gratified that he just smoothly, automatically and without comment cast the Democrats as the good guys and the Republicans as the bad guys. Plus he prefaced it with a recap of Homeless Resource Day yesterday, featuring several specific stories of people who have been completely left behind by our current system, just so the point was completely unmissable. Not preaching politics from the pulpit, just casually making it unmissable that one party is far more in line with Christ's message than the other. :D I liked.
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... your first paragraph is giving me severe cognitive dissonance. *bangs head against wall* Yay for Pastor, though! He does good sometimes.
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Here's some cognitive dissonance for you! Said church dinner was the Irish/St. Pat's dinner, and one of them went right from spitting bile and lies about how the Health Care bill is anti-american and socialist and any sort of government regulation will DESTROY THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY--- to singing merrily along with the 19th century radical-unionist workers' power folk song that was playing on the CD. And talking about how much he loved that song.
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We need this in fic. For serious.
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(The four knocks/three crows thing I didn't even notice until I was telling the story today. I think it requires further research.)
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Jesus is a Time Lord! That answers a lot of things...
As a liberal feminist Quaker Christian, I admire the heck out of your theology.
(oh, you probably don't remember me. I was the fangirl with lots of white hair you talked with for hours at Kevin and Sarah's party in December.)
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(It's the junior high class. We've been working on this for almost a year now, and we've had some awesome discussions about various ethical issues and what the Christian perspectives on them are. I think for our next project, though, we might try something that was written in closer dialog with Christian ideas, like maybe Lord of the Rings, just to make it easier for me to pull in more Biblical material.)
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We have one combined class with all ages from 3-14, so we have to do really flexible lessons, but that sounds like an *excellent* Sunday School. Someone should start a Union of Good Sunday School Teachers.
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We had an all-ages combined class until around two years ago, though we didn't let kids start until they were five. It was *brutal* trying to come up with lesson plans that could incorporate the needs of all those ages, especially when we didn't know week to week exactly who would be there. I kind of hated teaching that class, but I took my turn once a month like a good parent *g*. But as soon as we got enough kids attending regularly to split them up, I jumped ship for the junior high class immediately!
The first thing we did was read Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I only knew what happened in the first section of the series, but people told me that Nausicaa had to make a decision about genocide at the end, so that sounded promisingly meaty. The kids loved it and the discussions were fantastic, but we had a lot of problems with getting everyone to keep up on the reading, so we did an anime next, so that we could all watch the episodes together.
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Haruhi might actually be interesting, depending on what you want to talk about, though it's also deeply silly - I can't describe the Christian connection without spoilers for at least a few episodes, but it's basically "What if the-Great-I-Am-omnipotent-and-omniscient was born onto Earth as an ordinary Japanese High School girl?" It's very much a comedy, and it doesn't ever get explicitly Christian, but at least in terms of what fascinates *me* about the Christ story, I loved the way it addresses what it means to be fully human with human failings but also fully God, and what it means for the free will of the ordinary people around her, and the ethics of using that sort of power if you have it (and the ethics of not using it, too), and it's basically just an extended meditation on the relationship between God and Her Creation. But all done by way of a light-hearted high school comedy that also deals with things like bullying and relationships and making friends and families.
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Chevalier d'Eon does that as well, as does Angel Sanctuary. And really, it makes a certain amount of sense -- from an outsider perspective, high church Christianity is full of weird rituals, sometimes in languages no one speaks anymore, fancy/exotic pretty clothing and pretty buildings, secret society-like organizations, and a strange obsession with canibalism and blood sacrifice.
I've also seen a lot of manga not quite grasp the fact that being a nun entails what's assumed to be a permenant vow of celibacy and committment to the church (i.e. girls who are being nuns as a temporary thing until they get married).
Evangelion ... is eschatological and kabbalistic and the Christian elements make no sense to anyone, whether they have a Christian background or not
Is there any element of the overall plot of Evangelion that makes any sense to anyone?
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A lot of anime does the exoticized view of Christianity, and I'm not actually meaning to complain about it - none of it's any worse than what people who do claim to be Christian have done, and I actually find it fascinating to get a little bit of what it's like to look at Christianity when you're not swimming in it. But I don't know that I'd recommend them to a junior high Sunday School class. :D (Although, if the kids could handle it ... talking about other cultures' use of Christianity, and what that tells us both about Christianity, and about the way we use other cultures, could be really cool.)
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I find it sort of fascinating/cool, too, actually -- and there's also a sort of cosmic justice to it, considering how often Christians go around using other religions like exotic window dressing while knowing nothing about them.
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Although I'm curious re: your opinions on Aslan. Of course, the last time I read the Narnia books was when I was like... 12, and when I was 12, my opinions on a lot of things were not what my opinions are today...
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I am not a Narnia expert either - I never liked the books enough to read them closely (and in fact to this day I've only read half the series, and most of them only once,) but I recall having many, many problems with them, and reading later discussions has not changed my mind.
But as it's relevant to the Easter lesson: the first time I threw the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe against the wall was after Aslan died on the Stone Table, and then came back again, same as ever, everything fixed, no harm done. The whole *point* of Christ's sacrifice was that it *mattered*, that it was a *true* sacrifice, that he really did die and could never again have his human life, couldn't sit down again with his loved ones as equals, and he died in pain and misery and his wounds were not erased - he lived as a human and *died* as a human, and part of being a human is that it ends.
The miracle of the Resurrection is that dying as a human no longer means Death is victorious, that Christ, by choosing to die as a human but in his glory as God, blazed the way for all of us, exactly as human as he is, to follow him to the Kingdom of Heaven.
The miracle of the Resurrection isn't that there was a tricky bit of magic which made it like the sacrifice never happened. When Aslan declared that his death had been unmade and appeared completely unaltered, his death stopped being about the power of love and sacrifice and started being about the Pevensies' manpain.
And then I threw the book at the wall.
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With me, the last time I read Narnia was shortly before the first time I read Lord of the Rings. As soon as I realised how much richer symbolism is than allegory, I didn't ever feel the need to read Narnia again.
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I really like the god as she idea as well. One of the things that has kept me from church for a long time is always relating god solely to the masculine.
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There's actually a tradition that dates back to, well, came by way of the Jewish Kabalistic shekinah, but shows up in all sorts of gnostic, mystical, spiritual, heretical, magickal and metaphorical Christian traditions of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, the first emanation of God-the-creator, the Lone Power, the Holy Spirit, the Bride of Christ, the creative Word that started the universe, or any combination of the above and a few other things, but almost always defined in some way as the missing feminine in the Christian Godhood. I really much prefer that to the attempts to find the missing feminine in Marianism, so in my private theology, Christ is the Son of Man, the Holy Spirit is feminine - sort of the Midwife of Creation, and God-the-i-am is both-either-neither-all.
Anyway, at the very least I always point out that God could be a girl in the same spirit that I never color Christ's skin white on the coloring pages.
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For quite a large proportion of my life I have visualized GOD as appearing rather like, ah, Holly from Red Dwarf. :D
Hee! These days I try to visualize God as Whoopi Goldberg (specifically from that one Muppet Christmas movie).
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I felt unexpectedly justified when Pastor decided to preach his sermon about how the Democrats in Congress are like Christ Triumphant riding into Jerusalem (let us strew roses at their feet) and the Republicans are just like the Pharisees and Sadduccees. :P
Has there been any backlash over this? I mean, it's kind of true and awesome, but the last time a priest gave a sermon that was overtly political/partisan at my church, half the congregation complained to our regular priest (the sermon-giver was a visiting priest) and it was a huge scandal. People were incredibly offended that visiting guy had tried to use the pulpit to put forward a political opinion. (to be fair, it was a very polarized opinion about the Iraq war that was expressed in ways that were personally offensive and insulting to numerous parishoners. There were a couple people who walked out).
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As to what Pastor actually preached, see my response above to
that I remember staying a awake through- doing parallels about current events without ever quite preaching politics. Honestly, everybody at the church knows his opinions on this sort of thing, so everybody who can't put up with it left years ago - he's incredibly politically & socially active; the current controversy is not that his preaching is too political or too slanted, it's that he's too busy meeting with Congressmen and social justice organizations and the boards of various NGOs to actually do the pastoral and congregational work we pay him for.no subject
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