"otherness is the essential gift"

AS A REMINDER, the talk by Cheryl Anderson that I'm basing this on can be heard in its entirety with a very important question and answer session after it.

I love The Color Purple, the book, the movie, the musical.  In fact I saw the musical for probably the fifth time just in August and there is a line where Celie who's the poor Black Woman living in the South who's talking to Shug who's a nightclub singer and free spirit and she tells her that "If God ever listened to poor colored women, the world would be a different place, I can tell you." And I thought what does it mean when you thing God doesn't' listen to you?  

Now, this doesn't take away from "God made a way out of no way," or, you know, "God brought me through," that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about it systemically.  What about removing the racism, the sexism that made life difficult to live from the beginning?  That's what I'm talking about. Something that's more systemic. What if we could imagine these obstacles didn't exist and that part of what is our Christian responsibility is to help bring that about.  

So, I've gone through why I do this work, it's because of what I see happening with this mythical norm in a number of arenas.  But I want to talk now  about the strategies.  And I started the strategies looking at how Jesus and Paul interpreted the Bible.

I'll break here because this gets into a longer section that I want to deal with by itself.

The points that those held to be "others" other than affluent, straight white males is to have the experience of being other than the official authentic culture.  That's as true of the elite, professional-class, academically ordained to be legitimate culture as it was in previous eras.  It is certainly the case in those professional fields that remain largely the preserve of affluent, straight-or passing for straight, white men. In many if not most cases, those from outside that group have to adopt the thinking and, even more, attitudes of the "norm" of affluent, straight, white males or they will be anything from disadvantaged to excluded.  That is certainly true in the legal professions and in the high priesthood of that, what it is obvious has become the judging racket.  It's certainly the case in the Supreme Court majority in the United States who at any given time define what the Constitution means, overturning previous courts in even the longest of enduring rulings.  Just wait to see what they'll do to the struggle for equality in June if you want to see the dire consequences of that.

In The Color Purple, as I recall the book, the stratification cuts across racial and other lines exactly on the issue of gender.  Among many white gay men, it's certainly the case that there are those who want to maintain a hierarchy, racial or other aspects of identity held up as better than others.

Of course, someone like a Lindsay Graham has been known to be gay and has been allowed to be a part of the ruling class because he is a slobbering, slavish servant of the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite, especially those who are most powerful who are primarily those in the "norm" that Cheryl Anderson talks about.  

Christianity, if it had followed the teachings of Jesus and Paul and James, etc. could never have accommodated itself to that system because even Paul, the source of several of the worst lines in the New Testament, radically cuts apart that norm in his more important statements.  Jesus certainly didn't fit into any norm of its kind. He'd have certainly been the subject of American racism and bigotry due to his skin color and religion, his way of life and his statements are not supportive of such a thing.  His economics, the most radical of any economics, would have had him excluded from respectable intellectual circles.  

But I think it's better than for me to go on to add to what Cheryl Anderson said, this passage from the talk by Luke Timothy Johnson that I've been neglecting in this series.

The third conviction [about how we are to read Scripture]. We have only one vocation as humans and that is to be faithfully obedient to The Living God.  Our vocation in life is to be faithfully obedient     to The Living God.

This means that we discern how God is speaking to us in our world.  And we are called to discern the shape of the world that God speaks to us.  And we are called to faithfully respond. Now the premise of that understanding of faithful obedience is that we are responding to The Living God, meaning God's self disclosure to the world continues. That we cannot respond faithfully to God if we close our eyes to our experience or the experience of others.   Because it is in our experience and the experience of others. It is in our story and the stories of others that God discloses God's self. This is the way God speaks to us, through our world. Creation is ongoing, God creates the world new at every moment and every single thing that is existing and not non-existing speaks God's creative power. Therefore every moment of every day, every office hour, every visit, every meeting in the hall way bears the potential of revelation, a call from God to our creative response to what?

That's why otherness is the essential gift. Because if we never encounter the other, we fashion idols. We fashion God in our own image, our own projects, our own desires, it's when the other intersects us, interrupts us, that we know that God's confronting us.

That comes before that quote I did use earlier in which Johnson said that the Bible should be taken as authoritative but that it can't always be held to be normative in us deciding how to live our lives, not any more than the other human thinking that is encountered in our daily interactions with other people. In the same talk he said that the experience of The Living God "trumps Scripture" even as he has said that Scripture is "authoritative."  That certainly takes into account one of the most obvious things that is almost never admitted about Scripture, that it is a long series of People recording their experience, personal and communal, of The Living God.*

One of the problems in this is the fear that if we are all to rely on what we take to be our experience of God as supreme it seems to invite the dangerous nonsense of the TV hallelujah peddlers and their ilk, but of the even more obviously deadly dangerous cults such as led to the recent starvation murders in a cult in Uganda or the kinds of AK mass murders that we never wonder at the role the Bill of Rights as recreated under Republican-fascist courts in the secular realm.

Of course there isn't a lying, distorting pseudo-religious huckster on TV who doesn't claim, in line with that most Protestant of traditions of "sola scriptura," that they are presenting the literal "truth" of scripture, even as it especially overturns the words of the man they will then pretend they believe is the actual presence of The Living God on Earth, Jesus.  I'll interject here that in United States secularism Thomas Jefferson and/or James Madison or more vaguely "the founders" plays a far less convincing role as the same.

Paula White or the soon to fall leader of a show-biz nightclub variety show TV mininstrelsy scam would certainly not want their suckers to take their life's experience seriously enough to give it the level of self-questioning, critical discernment that would lead them closer to the kinds of experience that Jesus taught and embodied.  

There is a parallel danger in official Catholicism to the extent that the rather less definable "magisterium" can be held to have a place like that of Scripture within traditional forms of Protestantism.  The neo-fascist American "traditional Catholicism," financed by multi-millionaire and billionaire Mammonists and trading on a fake history of neo-medievalism encouraged by cheap fiction and show biz and papacies of JPII and Benedict XVI is part of a long and grimy effort to make the teaching authority something like that.  Which is certainly what Vatican II faced and critiqued and sought to overturn as it was present since the counter-reformation period and is always a danger in a centralized, hierarchical church as much as it is in the anarchic chaos of Pentecostalism and Evangelical Protestantism.

In the rise of LGBTQ+ expressions of Christianity I hope that those kinds of things can be avoided.  I think that it might be possible to do that because as long as we construct our community out of the diversity of that ever expanding acronym, there may be no dangerous construction of the kind of "norm" that Cheryl Anderson talks about. LGBTQ+ is all about including "the other" and with them their experiences of The Living God, the extent to which such entities as The Reformation Project or The Roman Catholic Womenpriests continue to practice "all are welcome" they enhance their likelihood of following the word of Scripture through the ever changing record of the testimony of The Living God.


If the famous construction of Paul, no Jew or Greek, no free or slave, no male or female, (etc.) had ever been taken as seriously as it should, there should never have been any question of a white, affluent, male norm in Christianity.  If the words of Jesus about doing unto others and loving each other as he did were taken seriously, there would have been no straight, white, affluent, . . . norm either.  The extent to which "traditional" Christianity is stuck in that norm helps measure the extent to which it has not achieved even basic adherence to the teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, etc.  Christianity has a way out of that through applying those egalitarian teachings.

Secularism has no such authoritative way out of it, it has crackpot "scientists" like Jordan Peterson and Richard Herrnstein and the Darwinists and economists telling us equality is "unnatural" with implications of dysgenisis and an impediment to "progress" instead.  And judges unsurprisingly finding the same in the Constitution written by slave-holders, land stealing genocidalists and financiers even dishonestly reconstructing the words added to it to overturn the inequality from the friggin' founders because they suckered everyone into accepting their Marbury self-given powers and that's what good lawyers were taught in law school. The secular rule of government by judiciary is held in place by the cowardice of lawyers, lower judges and politicians and the credulous faith of those trained to uphold that, knowing they'd risk their credibility in their professions and in wider popular culture.  Jefferson and Madison, no matter what they said, certainly didn't live as if they believed even their excuse for breaking with Britain that "all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights."  Of course, once their independence had been bought with the blood, mostly, of people of less affluence, they dropped that kind of talk in the Constitution.

There is no hope for those in the underclass in secularism, the overturning of the very brief Warren-Kennedy-Johnson era under the secular government of the United States should put to rest any such notion of it happening under the Constitution.  The very, very few who tried to live like that in that "founders" period were complete oddballs in religion like William Blake or a few of the Quakers or Shakers, etc.  And not even all of them really did it.  I think it helps if your experience is as "the other" and you don't have much of a stake in the "norm."  The earliest Christians either were others or they radically and heroically rejected the norms they could benefit from.

I'd rather take my chances with an honest attempt to discern The Living God than in Scripture idolatry, neo-baroque costume drama Catholicism or "originalist-textualist" legal casuistry or in any of the other secular ideologies I've looked at.