[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome back, Collective table, to season 10, the 50.5%. This is Claire and I am here with my co host, Jason. How's it going, Jason?
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Going good. Going good. Thank you, Claire. Excited to be here.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: This season we are focused on centering the voices and experiences and wisdom of women. We're calling it the 50.5% because women make up more than half of the global population, at least the last time we checked.
So if we've got that wrong, feel free to correct us in the comments. Despite this statistic, women are often sidelined or marginalized, dare we say disdained.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Yep. To borrow from Dr. Gaffney.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Yeah, to borrow from Dr. Gaffney, who we are continuing to chat about today. So if you haven't already already listened to episode one, part one of our conversation with Will Gaffney, go ahead and do that. Before you tune into our conversation today.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: And before we get into the second episode of our conversation with Dr. Gaffney, just a reminder for listeners that we do talk with Dr. Gaffney about some stories from the biblical text that could be triggering for people who are listening in. So if you have sensitive ears or are with any young ears in the room, this might be a good time to push pause and maybe come to this another time. We do get into, in this particular part of the conversation, some pretty explicit conversation about some of the texts of terror and how we handle that. And that's sort of where we left off with the last episode. We started to get into a little bit about how we handle some of those more difficult texts and how Dr. Gaffney's approach, exemplified by a womanist midrash, which is one of the things that she really introduces as a womanist theologian, really unlocks the Hebrew text in particular for us to see it through multiple lenses or a kind of fresh prism so that we can not deny the horror of some of those texts, but still recognize that it can be inspired text that is useful for us, especially as it reflects our own tendencies and our own problems in humanity. So we're going to get into that a little bit more with her today. And specifically, we asked her about how God is sometimes depicted in monstrous ways in the Hebrew texts and was super curious to hear what she might have to share about that. So we want to go ahead and share that with you guys. Now.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: I've heard you say the quote, the language you use about God tells me what you think about me. And from hearing what you are talking about today, the, the way you read the Bible, the way you understand Stories like David Bathsheba tells me what you think about me, and I would love to hear you speak more on that.
[00:03:26] Speaker C: As we understand that these texts are not literal, that there was no notion of literal writing in the worlds and cultures from which these authors emerged. The text cannot be literal if it's not in its original language because things change in translation because of the differences in contemporary languages. And so when you have those things as a base understanding, then you don't have an argument to say, well, women are cursed because Eve ate the apple. Dude, there's no apple in that story. But also, when God gets around to saying that there's something sinful in the world, in this new created world, it's not Eve, it is Cain murdering Abel. That is the first use of sin in the scriptures. It's not applied to the Eve story. In the Eve story, the ground is cursed, but she's not cursed. The multiplication of her, her pregnancies and her labors is not. You're going to be in labor a long time now, and before that you could just pop one out by sneezing. It's that she's going to have multiple labors. Because the world is harsh and because children died at birth and in their tiny years so often. It's a description of the world in which the people live and a story about how it got to be that way. A close reading of that story recognizes that if God created everything, God created that serpent. How is the serpent crafty? Sneaky? In Eden, before anything goes wrong, God planted a trickster in their Eden paradise. What is that? So a question I often have my students ask. Answer is, who is the God in this text? Is this a compassionate God? Is this a wrathful God? Is this a trick playing God? Is this a judge, a poet? Is God a poet? Is God a sculptor? Who is God? How is God different in the next book, in the next chapter, in the next story?
[00:06:01] Speaker A: I appreciate you bringing up this question. Who is the God that's depicted in this text? Or how is God depicted in this text? If I could, I'd love to read a quote from you. It's from your conclusion to the wisdom commentary on Nahum Habakkuk and Zephaniah. I love this quote. From the conclusion you say the recent proliferation of superhero movies with characters that sometimes do as much harm as good suggests that people are hungry for stories of superhuman avengers to set the world to rights. And strikingly, those heroes are often deeply flawed. Even anti heroes, immoral or amoral characters who perform heroic or even moral deeds, while leaving carnage in their wake. And then you just drop this sentence in Zephaniah, God is both monster and hero. I love that. I love how you tease that. You really do tease it in the conclusion. You don't really like, unpack it a lot. But I'm a fan of David Pinchansky, who has written about the monstrosity God. And I think one of the reasons why that's so helpful is because it gets at what you, I think, brought up when you said, I teach my students to ask the question, who's the God being depicted in this passage? And so thank you for that, number one. I'd love to hear you talk a bit about what you mean by God being the monster and the hero in Zephaniah or in other texts.
And I would like to connect that if you think this works. I'd like to connect that to this idea that the text is a discourse that is at odds with itself. All the time that the authors of scripture are in a discourse with each other, often a heated discourse about who God is and what God is.
[00:07:50] Speaker C: So God is monstrous. In texts where God is a world eater, a planet killer, we would say today when that level of punishment is brought down on an entire people because a leader made a bad decision or practiced bad religion, that the consequences are no longer like in the wilderness. But even then, that worst monstrosity, you violated these principles and the earth is going to swallow you up. Also your wife and your children. Doesn't matter how old they are, just killing them all. That's monstrous. When God tells Moses in numbers to just annihilate the Midianites, I don't want them anymore. I know your wife is Midianite. Then the text is very silent about what happens in Moses household. And God continues, well, you know, if you see a girl, well, first kill the men and boys, including the baby. Boys. Get the babies. Kill them if they're boys. And if you like one of those women, you just take her and then in a sort of bizarre set of details. Well, because it's not going to go over well with her. And this is now quoted material. Give her a month to mourn her mother and her father. After that, you can penetrate her. Bibles frequently say, go into her, but it's sexual penetration, but also at that time, cut down her nails. That's a very specific detail to facilitate rape. And shave her head. That's meant to humiliate her, humble her, dehumanize her in the culture. So God is giving specific instructions on murdering babies and kidnapping women for sexual servitude and keeping them in what I'm going to call a dungeon. That's monstrous. But then you have the God who is tender and compassionate and hero heroically delivers all the people of Jerusalem when the Assyrians come.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Again. You know, she is just so, you know, just so matter of factly visiting in just one brief comment so many of the. The most problematic texts in, in Hebrew scriptures. And so it's a lot to, like, take in. And like, I guess I'll just say that the bit that she mentioned that really hit me like a ton of bricks was the Reference from Deuteronomy 21 about cutting her nails being a preparation for rape. And again, like, maybe this goes back to just something we talked about in the last episode very briefly, that, like, it's right there to see it, that it takes a kind of, you know, diabolically creative imagination to ignore it. Right. But there it is, you know, that God is instructing the Israelites that when they take women from opposing tribes, that they go to war with, when they take them captive, when they take them captive, when they abduct women, that they're to prepare them by, you know, shaving their heads and cutting their nails. And that this is just really like a horrific depiction of sex slavery. And then the part that just I still am struggling to, I think, get past is her saying, very matter of factly, that for these men to cut these women's nails is preparation to rape them because then they're less dangerous. Right. Like, they won't be able to scratch them. And that is such a depressing and horrific thought, to just know, even if you, like, you just stumbled upon that, like, sort of information outside of a religious text, you know, like outside of this collection of myths and letters that we have been taught to believe is authoritative in our lives.
Even if I stumbled upon it in any other context, it would be deeply troubling. But then to like, for her to just be like, well, that's.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: That's what it's saying.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: That's what it's saying. Like, God is depicted as giving these instructions. It's hard even now. Like, I don't have a hermeneutic anymore that attributes that to who God actually could be. But it still hits me like a punch in the gut.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Something that I think is really powerful that she says. And it's so simple. She says it's a description of what's going on. So unfortunately, these ideas, these actions, it was how somebody was understanding God at Some point in time. And that's simply what we're reading here. And I think where we. We, as in Christianity, where we have gone wrong and where we will continue to go wrong is when we are narrowly reading the Bible in solely prescriptive ways, as when I was a kid, one of my Sunday school teachers had us write the acronym B I B L E. Basic instructions before leaving Earth.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Yes, of course.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: That was written in the front of my Bible. And that's not to say there's not a time and a place, place, certain genres of literature that we do find in the scriptures. If we look at it like a library, that could be prescriptive or instructions to take. But these stories are not that time. It's an opportunity for us to read these descriptions of how people were, what people were seeing, how people were understanding the world around them and saying, oh, my gosh, like, this is how I am experiencing the divine or not experiencing the divine.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Yeah, she said something too. In that part of the conversation that just made at the time when we were having the conversation, like, my brain basically just stopped listening because she said something that, like, made my head explode a little bit. And that was when she was talking about this really helpful question, I think, interpretive question, which is, who is the God in the text? She said, I teach my students to ask this question, who is the God depicted in this particular text? By which she means not the entire Bible. Right. But like, who's the God depicted in this myth or story or pericope that you're reading right now? And I thought that was such an important point. And then she goes on to illustrate the point by saying, is the God that's being depicted here a compassionate God, or is it a wrathful God or a vengeful God? And then she just drops so casually, is it a trickster? Tricksters perform a certain function in the mythos of a particular culture. One of the really important roles that they play is both negative and positive. Right. They demonstrate a kind of creativity that helps humanity to survive. On the one hand, that's sort of the positive side of the trickster. And then the negative side, of course, is the trickster comes along and just screws things up all the time. Because the dark side of that creativity is to just screw everything up. Like, sometimes it doesn't work out. And so the trickster is this figure in most mythological settings, whether that's indigenous Native American mythologies in North America or Greek mythology.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: I'm thinking of Loki here.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Loki in the. Yeah, Norse mythology, Loki is the you know, classic trickster in those myths that we're more aware of now because of Marvel.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Well, I've been watching Vikings and Vikings.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: I've been nerding out about that.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: You turned Janella and I onto Vikings. We've been watching that. That lately. Well, the reason my head exploded when she talked about reading the trickster in the Genesis story is because I think she points out something incredibly important, and that is that the trickster does appear in Jewish and Christian scripture. It's just that we have conditioned ourselves to flatten scripture and so we don't have eyes to see it. And so because we have been socially conditioned to believe that. Again, back to the binary of right and wrong, pure and contaminated, good and bad. The serpent figure in the Genesis story has to, of course, be the devil, has to be bad, but really it can just be read as a trickster figure which has a role to play in the good of the universe. And then this opens up the Bible to seeing God as a multiplicitous pluralistic figure too. Right? Like, to recognize that the singular Persona of Yahweh or Elohim, just to pick two Personas in Hebrew theology, really represents this multiplicity that we wrestle with when we wrestle with God. And so giving ourselves the permission to ask the question, who is the God in this text? Is a way of acknowledging that monotheism has richness and texture and nuance and divergence and diversity as well. Right? Like that there are multiple gods depicted in the Hebrew Bible, not just one. And it's our job to discern them. Right? To say, oh, there's this God depicted in Joshua, and I don't fancy that God very much, you know, for lots of obvious reasons. And then there's this God depicted in Isaiah. Something's about the God that's depicted in the very Isaiahs, right? Because Isaiah can be broken into multiple texts too. That there's some aspect of this God that I find really compelling and endearing and others that really trouble me, like the permission to see that God is depicted in the Bible in a multitude of ways, and then to have the responsibility to discern which of those ways is good and which of those ways is not, is incredibly liberating, I think.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: And as we spoke about in the last episode, upholds the text in such a sacred way and does it justice even more so than keeping it or not keeping it flat, but making it flat.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Right. Because we're not rejecting those texts that depict God as monstrous.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: It's a way of engaging with it in A deeper way.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: It adds depth to it.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: It adds color and nuance and also brings with it something I think we don't want, which is the responsibility to discern.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: I like that word, responsibility. She talks about the text being at odds with itself all the time. And I think that's exactly what you're getting at here when you're saying, like, we tend to. To flatten it. And I. I wonder why. We're finding ourselves in a place in Christianity, in biblical interpretation, where our tendency is to run from the places where the text is at odds from itself. Why are we trying to flatten it? And that that could be. I could answer that. I think it's out of fear. I think because the text has been used to control people for so long, I think it's easy to control people when there is a one right or wrong answer. And nothing is up for interpretation, nothing is up for or worth imagining. We're talking about sanctified imagination here. I think there's fear on both sides of that power spectrum, from the people who are wielding the power, and I think that that trickles down to the people who are, like, victims of the power. Of course, there's something at stake here, like survival, you know, in our context.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Eternal life, whatever that.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Whatever that means. When I say our context, I say, like, coming out of, like, evangelical, you know, fundamentalist religion. And so, like, of course you're not going to step out of line because something is at stake.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: I mean, when you say that fear is holding us back, I think that could be explored in so many ways. But, of course, the thing that comes to mind is if women took the power that is available to them to engage the text in this way, to advance their notion of what was good and right and true in the world, using their own testimony, their own lived experience as a platform to authorize it, then, number one, that's a lot of power to wield, right? Because even though you might argue that religion is on the decline in, say, the global north or what we used to call Western civilization, the reality is that, like, a religion and religious narratives and religious traditions still wield incredible power. And that is, like, you have to be willing to do that, number one. And number two, we have just seen what happens when a woman behind a pulpit uses the text to say something powerful to the most powerful man in the world. Now, a lot of people applauded Bishop Bud's words to President Trump, but a whole lot of people have condemned her for it. And a resolution has come to the floor of the House of U.S. house of Representatives, chastising her for doing that. I have no doubt that she has experienced death threats and condemnation. And who wants that? Like, who wants. Who wants to have to be in the world like that?
[00:21:15] Speaker B: I'm not a bishop by any means.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: You're the bishop of our family Ministries.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Bishop of our Family Ministries. My new job description or my new title. But as a woman who happens to find herself in the pulpit semi regularly, just yesterday. Just yesterday, just so happened, I find myself seeing things like this and thinking, like, what am I doing?
Like, what's the point?
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: I can sit here all day and say, like, how inspiring this woman is. And she is, she is. And how important her words are, how integral I think they are to the unfolding of whatever is going to happen in this administration. And just so needed. But at the same time, I would love to pick her brain because I don't want to put words in her mouth. But I wonder if she's also had that thought, like, what am I doing? Like, is this even worth it? Because I can't even get up there and calmly say something without being called words such as ungracious, nasty.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Well, and it also just occurs to me that most people, and maybe even most of the people listening to this podcast, their lives are just hopelessly complicated with other more urgent concerns than how do I interpret these ancient biblical texts.
Most people in the United States are. Are hustling to pay their rent or their mortgage, if they have one, if they could possibly afford one, and worried about holding on to their jobs and worried about paying their student loans, or worried about navigating the realities of systemic racism or homophobia, or the fact that they, because of those identities, might be losing their jobs. Now, with an incoming administration that I just saw today is putting out an executive order banning transgender people from military service. Right. Like, most people have incredibly stressful, anxious, difficult lives, even if they don't have the compounding oppressions of intersectional identities that Dr. Gaffney talked about in our last episode. Even if you don't have that, you're struggling to not just be crushed by neo colonial capitalism in the United States.
And so. And now here we are, ministers at a little progressive church, asking them to be willing to wrestle with the text. So should they?
[00:23:39] Speaker B: I mean, we talk about this a little bit with Dr. Gaffney, and so much of her wider work as a professor, I would argue, directly affects, you know, what is going on in the public sphere.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Because it's not a secret that the Christian nationalism That we're seeing is a direct effect of people using these religious texts and ideas to wield power over people and argue for oppressive policies such as transgender people should not be serving in our military. I think that this. This work is super important. It's important for people like Dr. Gaffney who study the Hebrew Bible to be uncovering these stories and interpreting them and sharing them from these perspectives. And that doesn't mean that if you're a person who, you know, attends church every once in a while and. And wants to do their best and, you know, hear what the work that God is doing in the world around compassion, justice, it doesn't mean that you have to be a Hebrew Bible expert, but I think it means that you should be open to hearing these stories from different perspectives, and maybe that will change the way that you read them and take them in, and maybe that will transform the way that you are engaging in the world, because they. They do influence us and affect us more than we know.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: I mean, I think we would all argue here that these texts that contain these sort of difficult and oppressive and problematic narratives, also within those same narratives, contain the seeds of liberation.
That's the version of the story and the version of the Gospel that we believe is faithful to the tradition. And I suppose that that's why we argue for that perspective, because that is liberating.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Why? Why it's worth still engaging with. Well, on A hopeful note, Dr. Gaffney does have some really fascinating things to share about women in Scripture specifically. So we are going to turn to that.
[00:25:52] Speaker C: We start by reading what's actually in the text and taking it seriously. So if you start your study of the Christian Testament with Romans 16, you will see that nearly half of the leaders that Paul is addressing, leaders in the church, arguably pastors, if the church is in their home, are women. Calls him his co worker and his co laborer, as he does with Timothy. Later, he mentions a woman named Junia, chief among the apostles. And then we talk about why old Bibles like the King James have Junius, when that's not even a name that you can find in any ancient Roman records, and that the feminine name was changed to a masculine form so that there would not be a female apostle. So if we start with the text tells us more than we think we know, and people have resisted the text to the point of changing it while still saying it's immutable and infallible, then we have a foundation on which to go forward into the world in which our churches are set up. So we can start there, but we can also, and this is really important. And churches don't do this as a rule. Look beyond the text. That includes the archaeological record. So can women be elders or leaders? Were they leaders in the synagogue? When a leader of a synagogue brings the little boy, the child, to Jesus, and that word for leader's synagogue is Arche Synagogus, a colleague who's now a friend to me, Bernadette Bruton wrote a whole book on women leaders in the synagogue. And I was curious, like, what's her evidence? What are you doing? Well, just like we have engraved things in our churches and plaques. Pastor's wife, gift of the Brown family. There are surviving plaques of women with the title Arche Synagoga, woman leader of the Synagogue. And Rebecca the Elder. So she just digs them all up, takes photos of them, and presents them to the public. So when we're talking about people say, oh, well, the world in which Jesus came from, well, actually, it was a little more gender diverse and women had a little more power. And these are at the same time as the. As the early church, which means that the church was working and organizing itself in a time where there was female leadership in its sister religious tradition, or maybe mother religious tradition, Rabbinic Judaism. And churchmen made a point of eradicating that. Just as there was a movement of women prophets, they eradicated them. But if we look at records from Roman Catholicism, early Catholicism, then we have women who have the authority of bishops and all kinds of things. There's a physical image, a carving of Theodosa, Episcopal. Right, Theodosia, the woman bishop. That carving was savage. The hair was cut short, just hacked off of the sculpture so that it would look more male. But now it looks like a cross dresser because the clothes are female. And I don't mean cross dresser derogatorily. And then the name was like, re carved. So the last letters that put a masculine ending on the name are not the same font as the rest of it. So that thing is a mess. And by all of those alterations, proves that there were women bishops. And at some point, someone decided that the memory of them should be erased. So when we look to resources outside of the church, we can talk about what's happening historically and then look at what the writers of Scripture are doing in that very same world.
[00:30:11] Speaker B: So Dr. Gaffney here, again, she's really wanting us to understand that we're reading the text literally. And when she says literally, she's not asking us to open it up and read it in our English NIV translation, and take that for what it is. What she means by literally is looking at it in its own context and understanding its meaning in not only in just its original language, what it meant to its audience, what it means within its genre, how the people in that culture who would have been hearing these stories, how these words would have fallen on them, what kind, what type of connotations and associations they would be making, which is so hard now because we are so far from that. And part of the work that she does is getting back into it, putting yourself back into that place as the reader. I just want to say that's what she means by.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: By literal.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: By literal.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, and one of the things I just really loved about that is that, again, what she's doing is she's broadening and deepening the text for us. When she says, you know, it's important to go beyond the text, right? And to look at the archeological record, to look at history, to look at culture, to look at the context of. Of those cultures, to recognize what's actually there. And in doing that, like, she unpacks just one example for us of how the archeological record gives testimony to the fact that even the earliest followers of Christ didn't feel constrained by the text, right? That they understood that the text contained those seeds of liberation, that what God seemed to be doing in the trajectory of these stories was liberating women to lead, to hold authority, to speak on God's behalf, even at times. And that, you know, that should free us up to do the same. Right? And that just strikes me as really powerful because so much of the argument from the other side of this, from a kind of domineering, patriarchal expression of Christianity, is to point to the tradition and say, well, but this is what tradition teaches us. But that is just one tradition.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: Yeah. What do you mean by tradition?
[00:32:32] Speaker A: Right. Which tradition? Which Christianity? Because just as there's not one text, there's not one Christianity, right? There are multiple Christianities throughout time across different cultures, and that no one version of Christianity gets to hold itself up as the definitive, true, privileged expression of the faith. Right? Like being the oldest doesn't win you that title, or being the one that originated geographically closest to Jerusalem doesn't win you that title. That the text is expressed in a multitude of ways throughout time and space. And in a sense, that also is the text, right? It's not just the written words. It is the culture. It is the way that the church has expressed itself in a multitude of ways and continues to express itself In a multitude of ways, the question becomes, again, the responsibility we bring to it, to discern it and to live it faithfully.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Well, and that. That's hard to do when you open your Bible, even really great translations, and you read about someone like Junia Junius, and it's unclear whether or not they're a woman. If anything, interpretation upon interpretation made it to be that this person is a man.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: And this is why we need scholarship and why we need archaeology and why we need anthropology and why we need history and why we need linguistic studies so that we can discover how a text, like the reference to Junia as an apostle is a reference to a woman, not to a man, and how that text was changed to a masculine form by interpreters who had a patriarchal agenda.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: Well, I think that happens today.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah. You recently found a headstone from a pastor at our church that reminded us of this.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, some people who are listening might not know this, but the Collective Table is a podcast of our church. The Oceanside Sanctuary has been since last year. And 2025 is our 150th anniversary as a church. And so all this year, one of the things I'm doing is sort of digging up our archives, our historical records, and we're celebrating our 150th year in a couple different ways. But one of my favorite characters from our history is the first woman to pastor at this church was during the Great Depression. Her name was Grace MacDonald. And Grace MacDonald is a bit of a mysterious figure in our history, because, number one, it was really unusual for a woman, even in a mainline Protestant denomination, to be pastoring in the early 1930s. Like, that's just remarkably unusual. And so I think in my naivete, I thought there'd just be tons of information about her because this would be, like, an incredible milestone. But what I've learned is that that's a bit of an embarrassing part of our history. At least it was for many decades, a kind of embarrassing part of our history. And so details and information about Grace MacDonald are really hard to come across. Like, she wasn't celebrated as a pastor here. And the story goes that her husband was a pastor, and he died in 1930. And this church, because it was during the Great Depression, in a small town in North San Diego county, couldn't afford to hire a new pastor at the time. And so she just stepped forward, like women in the history of the church do, and said, I'll do it for no pay. And she faithfully pastored this church for four years during the Great Depression, started a soup kitchen here, which really began, like, our identity as a church that cares for the poor. And so she was enormously influential here. But when I pull out the records of, like, newspaper clippings for our gatherings and services, they never refer to her as the pastor, even though she was. It's almost like it's a hidden thing about her. Right. And so I've just been trying to. I've been really working to find any information I can about her. And one of the things I found is a picture of her headstone. She's buried not far from here. She's buried right here in Oceanside. And there's a website called Find a Grave, which sounds morbid, but it's, like, an incredibly useful website for people doing genealogy research. And they. You can find pictures of people's headstones on them. And I found his headstone, her husband who died in 1930. His name is Chester McDonald. And it just says Chester McDonald on the headstone. And underneath it, you know, where there's, like, a description, it just says minister. And then that's how I found her headstone, because she's buried next to him, and her headstone says Grace McDonald, and underneath it, it says, she also ministered. And I was like, wow, what a loaded. Yeah, like, that phrase. Like, that phrase is so loaded, positively and negatively. Because on the one hand, thank God for whoever commissioned that headstone because they acknowledged that she did the work and they didn't have to. Right. I mean, they could have just said, you know, devoted wife or mother, whatever. Right? And so that's positive. Like, somebody had the. I don't know, maybe courage is the right word to, like, have her headstone engraved that way.
[00:37:49] Speaker B: On the other hand, the also.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the also. Also. She also ministered is also passive. It's a passive construction of her vocation. And, you know, that intersects with the story of Janelle and I in a lot of ways, too. So that also hit home to me as the husband of a woman who, for most of our life in ministry, was sort of relegated to a pastor's wife role, even though she's a way better pastor than I am.
[00:38:21] Speaker B: So not to be morbid here, but when you and Janelle die, we're gonna have Janelle Coker, minister, and mine will be Jason Coker. He also ministered.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Absolutely. I'd be good with that.
[00:38:36] Speaker B: But this story about Grace MacDonald, about Junia, these are not unique in the history of Christianity. And it makes me so curious about the things that are yet to be discovered, you know, in archaeological records. And again, that's why, why we need that. It makes me excited.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: So we've talked a lot about how the text and recognizing the plurality of the text reveals something about the authors, and the way we read it and interpret it reveals something about us. I wonder, given all of that, what you think the text still does reveal about God.
[00:39:23] Speaker C: For me, the most enduring and significant portrait of God in the text is the Immanuel concept that God is with us. In all of the terrors and travails of ancient Israel, God remained with them. And the other part of Ezekiel's theological reframing was that God left the Holy Land. God went into exile with God's people. So when Ezekiel says, I saw this, this chariot and the wheels and the eyes and the things, he's saying, this is the real deal on which the cherub chariot in the temple was based. You know, that was the sculpture. This is the thing. And it moves and it does all this stuff. And so he says, and I saw it by the river Khabar. I saw it in Babylon. God came to Babylon. And speaking to God's prophets, sending messages to God's people. So whatever horror we find ourselves in, God is with us. And the text communicates that over and over. Every time God, you know, threatens to just smash the earth and start over or even begins doing some ravaging, you know, God relents. There's promise and threat about, one of these days I'm going to come back and I'm really going to do it. But until that time, God remains with us.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: What a beautiful note to end on and just wrapping up and thinking about the plurality of God.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I really loved what she said there. And I think what will stick with me for a long time is her saying that her takeaway from these narratives is whatever horror we find ourselves in, God remains with us. And so I find so much beauty in that. But I'm also, like, at the same time, challenged by everything else I heard her say, which includes asking myself if that's true, right? Like, not just taking the text at face value, but being willing to take the next step and ask myself, is that true for me? Have I experienced God with me, the M N U l in the midst of my grief, in the midst of my. My own struggles? Does my lived experience also testify along with the text that that's true? And I wonder. I wonder what some of our listeners might say to that, you know, if whatever horrors they have found themselves walking through? Did do they have a sense that God, whatever you might mean by that, was still faithfully present?
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Well, Jason, this has been a lovely two part conversation about the many things that Dr. Will Gaffney brings to the world, and we'd like to thank Dr. Gaffney for her time with us.
Thanks to our listeners and we look forward to seeing you in our next episode.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: All right, thanks so much for hosting this conversation.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: Some questions to consider what stories and the biblical texts seem monstrous to you?
How might you learn to go beyond the text and your interpretation of being a faithful follower of Christ?
And finally, how have women's actual lived examples of leadership inspired and empowered you?
Thank you so much for listening. The Collective Table is a progressive and affirming Christian platform and a production of the Oceanside Sanctuary Church, a church community committed to inclusive, inspiring and impactful Christian spirituality. We are rooted in the love, peace and justice of Christ. Check our show notes to find out more about our website and where you can follow us on social media.
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