Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

ORUCC receives Leadership Award from Public Health

ORUCC — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:30:31 +0000

Janel Heinrich (Public Health), Winton Boyd, Astra Iheukumere (Mayor's office), Joe Parisi (Dane County Executive)

Winton Boyd accepted a Public Health Leadership Award on behalf of congregation on Monday, May 14 at a ceremony at Warner Park. ORUCC was recognized for our “leadership in developing local efforts to address the root causes of homelessness and poverty” at a ceremony on Monday, May 14. In her introduction of (Winton), Public Health nurse Kim Neuschel stated, “ORUCC has given generously and thoughtfully of their time, resources and finances to support local efforts to address the holistic needs of Madison’s diverse population…Faith based communities traditionally lead the way in efforts to reach society’s most vulnerable citizens by providing for the most basic human needs. What makes ORUCC unique is that their efforts do not stop there. ORUCC exemplifies it’s mantra of “spiritually alive, joyfully in-clusive and committed to justice’ by seeking to address the root causes of homelessness, food insecuri-ty and poverty. Their ‘upstream’ approach directly aligns with the underpinnings of public health and is deserving of recognition by the health department.”

Ken’s Pennings – “Helping or Sharing?

ORUCC — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:13:08 +0000

Last December when I picked up my friend from the Toys-for-Tots distribution at Alliant Energy Center, she got into my car, and said, “Now you know what it’s like to be on my side.” I smiled and said, “I’m always on your side.” She smiled back, “No, you’re on the side of the service providers. I’m on the side of the service-recipients.” An interesting divide in people’s minds, isn’t it, – service-providers and service-recipients?

But are any of us truly on one side or the other? Which of us hasn’t been in great need, dependent on the nurture, care, and provision of others? Which of us hasn’t given bountifully out of the abundance of our own wealth, if not in material ways, than certainly in non-material ways?

I’ve really appreciated how our community partners in the Southwest Neighborhood Association affirm and demonstrate the equality of all people living in the neighborhood of Orchard Ridge Church. All people, economically-advantaged or economically-challenged, have a great deal to share with one another. All of our resources, whether material or non-material, are invaluable in building a healthy community.

On this topic, a friend recently shared with me, “For me, there is a huge spiritual risk in thinking the smug and superior thought that I am someone who ‘has’ and others ‘have not.’ Way-finding is asking me to see any goodness or riches I have as things I have been given, by grace, to share in a genuine spirit of love and not in any self-righteousness way.”

All of this makes a big difference in how we work against racism, poverty and crime in our neighborhoods. We move away from a “helping” or “handout” mentality in addressing real problems, and move toward a mutual sharing in the solving of problems.

In building healthy neighborhoods, I hope we can all remember that each of us can make a valuable contribution.

Wish List for The Road Home

ORUCC — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:45:48 +0000

ORUCC supports the The Road Home (TRH), a non-profit agency devoted to working with homeless families to end homelessness. TRH programs include the IHN temporary shelter of which ORUCC has been heavily involved since its inception in 1999.

Many families struggle to manage the cost of even the most basic of household items when they move to housing. Might you be able to help with any of the items listed on the “Wish List” below? We have a clothes basket near the church parking lot entry for these items. As you go about your regular shopping, or clear out unneeded items in your home, please consider bringing these items to our clothes basket! We know these can help those struggling families!

Diapers & wipes
Cleaning supplies
African American hair care products
Toilet Paper
Paper Towels
Laundry detergent
Bleach
Pots & pans
Gas / grocery cards
Feminine hygiene products

It’s a Woman’s World by Rev. Ken Pennings

ORUCC — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:57:30 +0000

I’m speaking this morning on equality and justice for women in a world that is still dominated by men.

It would be far better to have a woman address this topic. I really should invite the women in our congregation, “Tell us about your struggle for equality and justice in a male-dominated society. Tell us about the discrimination and sexism you experience.” And then I should sit down, and listen deeply to what you have to say.

Perhaps there will be another time for that, but I’ve decided that men have to use their privilege, power and in my case, pulpit, to join women in the struggle for building a more just and compassionate world.

News from the Vatican: Archbishop, J. Peter Sartain of Seattle has been appointed to deal with “serious doctrinal problems” that have appeared among American Catholic nuns.

This “visitation,” ordered by the Vatican means that, once again, an all-male hierarchy in the name of a God called “Father,” has directed that women be disciplined and forced to conform to the patriarchal ordained leadership of the church if they want to remain in religious orders.

The statement from the Vatican said that many American nuns have questioned the church’s teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, while others are promoting a “radical feminist agenda incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

One of these so-called “radical feminists” is Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, an internationally renowned theologian who teaches at Fordham University. Johnson’s recent book, Quest for the Living God, was sanctioned last year by the Committee on Doctrine of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

It’s a really great book, and I highly recommend it to you. Most of what follows I have gleaned from the chapter she entitled, “God Acting Womanish.”

Elizabeth Johnson writes, despite women’s identity as human persons and the rich range of their gifts, their worth is consistently subordinated and demeaned in the theories, symbols, rituals, and structures of both society and church, most of which they had no part in shaping. This bias is intensely exacerbated by prejudices of race and class, placing poor women of color on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

The United Nations compiled statistics that led to the millennial goals for all people, especially for women and girls: While women make up ½ of the world’s population, they work ¾ of the world’s working hours, receive one tenth of the world’s salary, own one one-hundredth of the planet’s land, and constitute two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults. Together with their dependent children, they comprise 75 % of the world’s starving people and 80 % of homeless refugees. To make a dark picture even bleaker, violence stalks women’s lives. Subject to domestic abuse and battering from husbands and boyfriends, they are also raped, prostituted, trafficked, and murdered by men to a degree that is not mutual….These statistics underscore the inequity women face in society because of their gender. In no country on earth are women and men yet equal.

The women’s movement in civil society in the 1960s and 1970s galvanized women to analyze the causes of their subordinate situation and to strategize for change. This spilled over into women’s religious lives and led to a spiritual uprising. All over the world, women of faith came to grips with their subordination in church and society and critiqued it in light of the gospel. Kept silent and invisible for centuries, they began to stand up straight like the woman in Luke’s gospel, bent over for 18 years, whom Jesus declared to be free. Like her, they found their voices, claimed their humanity and began to speak out against the sin of sexism in the midst of the assembly.

When we look to the Gospels at the egalitarian ministry of Jesus, and to the book of Acts at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on both women and men, and the irreplaceable participation of women in the founding and spread of the early church, how can we not grieve that women were then marginalized once the early communities became established? Barred from governing, women have for centuries had no voice in articulating the church’s doctrine, moral teaching, and law. Banned from preaching and administering the sacraments, their wisdom has not been permitted to interpret the word of the gospel nor their spirituality to lead the church assembled in prayer.

The sheer fact of the omission of women from the public sphere led to the assumption that men have a privileged place before God. In this milieu, theology developed grossly misogynist views about women’s very nature. One late New-Testament writer triggered an appalling tradition with his teaching: “Let women learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing” (I Tim 2:11-15).

Notable thinkers throughout the Christian tradition concurred. In the third century Tertullian considered woman as a second Eve; just as she “softened up with her cajoling words the man against whom the devil could not prevail by force,” so too all women are “the gateway of the devil”; they tempt men, and because of their sin, the Son of God had to die.

Augustine, while affirming that woman is equal to man in her spiritual capacity, taught that in view of her body and social role, “she is not the image of God,” but can be considered so only when taken together with man who is her head.

In the medieval period Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, defined the female as a “defective male,” misbegotten when the male performs with less than perfect vigor during intercourse.

In the 16^th century Martin Luther taught that a wife must live in obedience to her husband; while he goes off to the affairs of business and state, she is to stay at home “like a nail driven into the wall,” minding the house: “In this way is Eve punished.”

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

– Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”

On a number of occasions, when I’ve shared in church circles about my struggle as an openly gay man pursuing a call to pastoral ministry & ordination, women have shared with me their parallel struggles pursuing a call to pastoral ministry and ordination.

One female pastor shared that after she was finally called to a church, there was a certain gentleman in the congregation who would get up from his seat and leave the church building every time she started preaching: this, in protest of a woman preacher.

The theology now being articulated with a view toward women’s experience is called “feminist theology.” Departing from male-dominated ways of interpreting society and the church, feminist theologies embrace an alternative vision of community, one of equality and mutuality among sexes, races, classes, all peoples, and between human beings and the earth. Black women in the US have named their project “womanist” theology. Latin American women work under the banner “mujerista” theology. Asian women are doing theology from the vantage point of their own cultural contexts.

The liberating goal of these theologies is not reached simply by integrating a few women into a society and church where patriarchal and androcentric (or man-centered) structures and theory still prevail as the norm. This “add women and stir” recipe just results in further problems as women disregard their own gifts to try to fit into a male-defined world. Rather, the whole structure of church and society needs to be transformed to make space for a new community of mutual partnership.

For centuries, verbal depictions of God in liturgy, preaching, and teaching, along with visual representations in art, forged a strong link in the popular mind between divinity and maleness.

By envisioning the incomprehensible mystery of God in non-authoritarian ways, women began naming the Divine in female terms and metaphors. Naming toward Goddess with female metaphors releases divine mystery from its age-old patriarchal cage so that God can be truly God. If God is “she” as well as “he” – and in fact neither – a new possibility can be envisioned of a community that honors difference but allows women and men to share life in equal measure.

Fourteenth c. English mystic Julian of Norwich wrote: “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.”

Like a mother, God gives life to the world, nurtures this precious and vulnerable life, and desires the growth and flourishing of all. Mother God is involved in “economics,” the management of the household of the universe, to ensure the just distribution of goods to all. Goddess’s preferential option for justice for the poor is the expression of a mother’s strong instinct to care for the child most in need. As mothers rise up to defend their young, so too when people do violence to one another, neglect the poor, aggrandize themselves through unjust systems of exchange, or ruin the ecological well-being of the earth, the maternal love of God is active to defend, seek justice, and heal. Like the mother bear in the prophet Hosea, God the mother rears up to protect her cubs, even tearing the attackers’ hearts out from their chests (Hos. 13:8). The wrath of God has a place in this maternal metaphor. Here we have a fierce Mother-God.

Another radical feminist nun, Sr. Joan Chittister, writes, “Patriarchy —the domination, oppression, ownership, and control by the fathers – became the Divine order of the day (in the history of the Church) and with it the rape of the earth and the rape of the women, as well….The fact is that nothing will really change until we change the language, until we learn to think differently, until we learn to see women as an equal image of God, and to affirm the images of God as birthing mother, loving spirit, passionate compassion, heart of justice, and womb of the universe.” (Prayers to She Who Is, by William Cleary, pg. xi).

Here at ORUCC, some of us are quite comfortable using feminine images for God. I always knew that God wasn’t male or female, but I was so accustomed to how I spoke to and about God that using feminine language & imagery felt very awkward and ingenuous to me at first. But practice makes perfect!

It’s very important to me that I use the feminine as well as the masculine for God because church and society has so much more work to do for the equality of the sexes. We’re just scratching the surface of a much deeper problem by adjusting our language about God and using more inclusive language in our songs and prayers.

The real work is ahead of us…the work of listening deeply to women’s experiences of discrimination, oppression, and abuse; expressing outrage and resistance to the battering of women, domestic violence, incest and rape, restructuring and reshaping the institutions of church and society to ensure that women’s gifts, talents, experiences, leadership, and strength are recognized, their voices are heard, and their wisdom included in every decision that affects their lives.

May the God–whose compassion freed the woman in today’s reading to stand up straight–strengthen us as we continue the struggle for women’s equality and justice! Amen

Prayer of Response: (I invite you to respond “We will stand up straight” )

Thank you, Mother God, for empowering us to stand up straight as people of great value and worth in our own humanity and with our rich range of gifts.

To re-image the divine and to claim your feminine persona in theology, worship, church structure, art, language, and practices,