approaching God who approaches us

The Advent of the Christ was just a purple candle on a Sunday morning for the first 30 years of my life, and I’m still learning to pause and hold the tension of joy-with-penitence of this “little Lent” before rushing straight into tinsel and carols and holly-jolly cheer the day after Thanksgiving. What is joy with penitence? What does it mean to fast in preparation for a feast, or to sorrowfully reflect while at the same time growing in anticipation for the arrival of the King?

The calendar moves us toward Jesus, toward Christmas. Jesus moves toward us in the miracle of the Incarnation. Heaven and earth are set on a collision-course that will blow up the trajectory of history and should likewise alter the course of our lives. The King is coming, and we are ill-prepared, sin-filled, unworthy to welcome him—sorrow. The King is coming, and He is our loving Father and our salvation—joy.

Advent is like the cool of the day in Eden, that time of the evening breeze when God walked in the garden (Genesis 3:8). His approach would have been pure joy, but for the failures of His imagers. Adam and Eve hide like guilty children waiting to be caught by their parent, unsure what the reaction will be, but expecting it to be bad. Instead of joy, sorrow. Within three pages the whole-goodness of God’s presence for humans has been corrupted by sin, and the whole-joy of His approach has been corrupted by fear.

“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9b)

“I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” (Genesis 3:10)

I was afraid because I was naked. I was ashamed of myself. I was not worthy to receive you.

We’ve all been there. We reflect for two minutes on the scandal of the Incarnation and we are there: naked, ashamed, unworthy, afraid. How can we approach this God? The instinct is to hide, to lie, to cover ourselves up.

But this glimpse of Advent in Genesis is a glimpse of the joy in our own little Lent, for the King does not laugh at His wayward children; He does not lose His temper; He does not destroy them or abuse them or beat them down. He holds His boundary—and at the same time He covers their shame.

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

Genesis 3:21-23

We pause in Advent deeply aware of our spiritual nakedness and deeply grateful for God’s generous provision. We can approach Him, unhiding, because He approached us not as a mighty warrior-king but naked and humble Himself, a suffering Servant offering us robes of righteousness. We have a place now in His temple court because He became the fruit of the tree of life by hanging, cursed, on a tree of death.

Of Him we take and eat, and live forever.

can a woman be a priest?

You all know I’ve wrestled, and have been wrestling, hard over what it means to be a man vs. a woman in Christ’s church. I wrote out my rejection of typical evangelical complementarianism comprehensively in six parts a couple years ago, but that was a beginning, not an end. I needed to reject complementarian theology so I could make room for an exploration of right theology, rather than swing instantly to its polar opposite, which is a natural but flawed inclination.

Beginnings don’t translate very well to the internet, where any half-formed thought you hit “publish” on can be pasted over you like an everlasting scarlet letter, as if you are not in fact an ever-evolving human who is thinking and processing and wrestling with God.

Nonetheless, I claim this as another beginning—a start, not an end, at articulating my journey toward right theology of gender.

Since writing that six-part series, I have left one extremely complementarian, conservative evangelical, non-denominational church and entered into a traditional, hierarchically-structured, Anglo-Catholic leaning mainline Protestant church. Not exactly the feminist flag-waving egalitarian situation anyone expected (least of all me).

In the Anglican Church of North America, the ordination of women is an open question. It is debated among the College of Bishops. Some dioceses have decided that women should be ordained as priests; others (including mine) have decided they should not, although a woman discerning the priesthood could technically be ordained under the oversight of an affirming diocese outside her own. I don’t know which side has it “right,” but I am certain that this space of tension and debate is healthier than the prideful, fear-based shutdown of either extreme.

That’s why I remain.

When there is enough respect between the differences of opinion to hear one another’s best cases, to assume good faith, and to acknowledge there is merit in both sides, there tends to be more respect for everyone—including the women whose lives hang in the balance of the debate. For example, my priest is of the opinion that the diaconate and priesthood ought to be reserved for men, but he is also willing to learn from women. He is able to see the God-given wisdom in women. He is not afraid to discuss even the hottest of theological debates with women.

Perhaps this is what I wish complementarian pastors and Christians knew: Even if I think there are problems with the complementarian position, the biggest problem I’ve seen is a lack of respect for women (and their advocates) as thoughtful human beings who deserve to be heard—not shut down, not treated as dangerous or deceptive, not whispered about in elders’ meetings behind closed doors. If you can’t be respectful in debate, how can we trust you to respect us in any other setting?

A serious handling of the differences between men and women must be willing to see and consider the nuances of where women are welcomed in Scripture. Jesus welcomed women as apostles (John 20:16-17); Paul welcomed them as deaconesses (Romans 16:1); Philip welcomed them as prophetesses (Acts 21:9). If we are still asking questions like “Should women have any co-ed leadership positions in the church?” we are hardly having a serious debate, because clearly they should and did, and the current efforts to shut them out of preaching and teaching and leadership ministries are merely a reaction to a cultural moment, not a reflection of God’s heart or God’s Word.

But “Should a woman be a priest?” is a serious question that I’m still mulling over. There are no Jewish or Christian priestesses in the Bible, though there are women teachers, preachers, evangelists, missionaries, prophets, judges, rulers, and worship leaders. This demands us to ask further questions: “What makes a priest different from a teacher, preacher, evangelist, missionary, prophet, judge, ruler, or worship leader?” In most evangelical churches, not much: the pastor is the teacher, the preacher, the evangelist. If a woman is endorsed by God to do all those things, what stops her from being a pastor?

I think this is where being in an Anglican setting has helped me understand. The priest in an Anglican church isn’t just the person who leads the service and gives the sermon. Anyone could do that—in fact, women are welcome to lead prayer services and teach co-ed catechesis in my church. But in the communion service, the priest acts in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” to distribute Christ’s body and blood to the people in the Eucharist.

That’s a completely different set of responsibilities than anything else on our list.

If the Eucharist is all symbol and no sacrament—as it’s treated in non-mainline churches—then it makes very little sense to me why a woman couldn’t be a pastor. But if it is a sacrament, if there is mystery, it makes a lot of sense to me that she couldn’t be a priest.

A woman can’t act in persona Christi. Christ came as a human male, not a human female.

Christ came as the new and better Adam, not the new and better Eve—He came to correct where Adam failed, for the sake of Eve, not where Eve failed for sake of Adam. Adam’s failure was in tending to the garden as the guardian of the sacramental fruit. The priest, in persona Christi, tends the sacramental bread and wine for the Bride of Christ.

If we overgeneralize the maleness of Christ to give all men a spiritual calling or status that all women can’t have, we fall directly into the Genesis 3:16 power dynamic that Jesus lived and died to abolish. But if we erase the maleness of Christ altogether as a meaningful distinctive of why He came, we lose a vital pattern-key to exactly how He fits into the whole Biblical narrative, and what He continues to accomplish through His body and blood.

Having a priest hold up the bread and the cup each week and say, “Behold the Lamb of God. Behold Him who takes away the sin of the world. Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb,” has become a comforting reminder that God Incarnate came to right every wrong—all the way back to when Adam failed to tell Eve the whole story of the sacred trees and then stood by silent while she chose death. Sure, untold numbers of such priests and pastors have also failed miserably to protect the Bride as they ought (the ACNA’s own current archbishop being a prime example), but Jesus didn’t. Jesus loved her as His own body and laid down His life for her.

Does all this mean I think it’s wrong for a woman to be a priest? No idea. Maybe. Maybe not. I waffle between wondering how much sleep God really loses over the chromosomes of the person handing out the bread and remembering that He struck dead the two priests, Nadab and Abihu, who offered “strange fire” in Leviticus.

Either way, I trust that there is something that matters about being created male or female. Women have a distinct capability that no man can have in the bearing and nurturing of children. In the human family, only women can be mothers. Perhaps in the family of Christ, only men can be “fathers”—though sometimes the fatherhood of a priest looks more to me like mothering, as he is charged with all the motherly activities of nourishing, discipling, catechizing, nurturing, knowing, guiding, and loving the “children” who make up his parish. (And like a mother, he never gets a break.)

Or to say it another way, maybe women are made to be priests—of a different sort of church. We are the priests of the temples of our homes, a different kind of sacred space. As much as I sometimes wish otherwise, I am not replaceable in my home—my husband can help me and try his best to imitate me, but only I will ever be Mama. Only I will ever be the one who can nourish and disciple and catechize and nurture and know and guide and love like a mother.

Unfortunately, the churches that most need to wake up and have this discussion in a productive way are also the ones who have thrown the baby out with the Roman Catholic bathwater. Priests, Eucharists, sacraments, mystery—they’re all just parts of the pre-Reformation boogeyman. So I doubt this post gets much further than helping me think through my own ideas with more clarity. But that’s okay.

spring will come again

The garden is drifting to sleep.

Sheets of cold dew and coverlets of mist wrap around the still-green foliage. Patches of yellowing and mildew form like age spots on the leaves, reminders of a life-cycle coming to its end, and despite their weakening stems and the disappearing daylight the dahlias keep thrusting forth buds. It is a silent form of “rage against the dying of the light,” but a rage all the same—a refusal to go submissively to winter’s sleep.

First frost looms in the shadows like the Angel of Death. His cold touch will instantly and irrevocably turn the green of life to the black of mourning.

But even the Angel of Death can only kill the body. The soul—the nephesh, the life-conduit—is cradled safely in the hidden place, waiting for resurrection. The roots and seeds lay at peace in the earth, waiting for spring.

We might think of death-and-resurrection as a pattern started by Jesus, but it has been with us since God first divided light from darkness and set the times and seasons into motion. Day gives way to night and then dawns again. A full moon wanes until it disappears in shadow, and then waxes again. Growing-time becomes harvest-time becomes dormant-time before everything wakes up to grow anew.

The ceaseless liturgy of the created order mirrors the life, death, and life-again cycle—a cycle that first-fruits in Jesus, yes, but is sketched and hinted from Genesis 2, when the First Adam falls into a “deep sleep” to be awakened into a new Adam-and-Eve humanity, and is brought to fullness in Revelation 21 when the Last Eve—the Church, including all the saints and martyrs who have died from her inception—descends from heaven as the glorified Bride, the New Jerusalem.

In that day, death will be such a forgotten enemy from our long-ago past that we’ll no longer need reminders in the form of daily, monthly, or yearly “little deaths.” There will be no night there, no daily sleep of unconsciousness to remind us that our bodies will soon enough sleep with our fathers. We will have no need of sun or moon, for God’s light will shine perpetually, everlasting as our lives. The tree of life will yield its fruit every month; there is no winter, no season of dormancy, no Angel of Death to bring frost, only a better-than-Eden flourishing that is both endlessly productive and endlessly restful, somehow.

This is the hope I find in the garden drifting to sleep: not that I relish in small deaths, not that I won’t profoundly miss my flowers, but that for now it’s an irrefutable reminder that God is trustworthy and faithful. As I have no doubt that the sun will rise after tonight’s small death of night, or that the spring will come after this year’s small death of winter, or that the plants destroyed by frost will grow again next spring, I need have no doubt that my own mortal body is safe in the hands of the One who wove death-and-resurrection into every thread of Creation.

Paul wrote that “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26), but the destruction of death is one of the very first things written into the ordering of the universe. It has not yet come, but it is coming. From even before death was a threat to the Garden-dwellers its destiny was defeat.

There is a beautiful service on All Souls’ Day at my church in which we commend those who have died into the hands of God. We take down a list so we can commend each by name. I love this practice of opening our hearts to give our departed loved ones into the divine care of God, trusting that He—the first Gardener—knows how to tend them safely through the winter. Following the pattern of all Creation since before time began, spring will come again, and soon—when the last enemy is destroyed under Christ’s feet—we’ll get to worship Him together, in everlasting summer.

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So will it be with the resurrection of the dead: What is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.

1 Corinthians 15:42-43

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Alleluia!