I was just verbally assaulted by some young adult/teenager who tried to con me. First, he spoke so quickly I could barely understand what he was saying. And what I did understand made me think twice. It would be random comments, like "a rat on acid. Just kidding." There was a lot of that. But he told me about how if he was one of the top two sellers in the state, he would get college scholarship and a trip to anywhere in the world. He wanted to go to Rome to see the Vatican, and be the first person in his family to go to college. But when he told me what he wanted a degree in, it was something I had never heard of. I've gone to three colleges/universities, and hold three degrees (working on my fourth). I've never heard of it. Whatever, that's okay, I guess. How very admirable of him to be trying to accomplish such a goal.
As he continues to talk about the points he gets, how much the magazines cost, ways to pay, he's slowing creeping closer to the door. Finally, I get up the nerve to say "No thank you, I'm not interested." He gives me this look like I just shot his dog, and says, "What did I do wrong?" I responded, "Well first of all, you're practically in my apartment!" He was standing on the doorstop/threshold/bump-on-the-floor-thingie, which meant his toes were in my apartment. And just so you know, I'm not by myself. My two-year-old daughter is running around eating her popcycle, and this stranger is trying to get in my house. So after I called him on that, he steps back. I also point out that he's speaking way too quickly for me to understand what he's saying, so he insists on giving me the whole schpiel again, slightly slower. I still don't understand half of what he's saying.
I'm on the verge of giving in, when I start to here inconsistencies in his story. The amount of points I would give him changes. His rank keeps changing: first he's 13th, then 17th, then if I don't buy from him he'll drop down to 50th. Finally, I realized that my inner sense was telling me to say goodbye. This was too uncomfortable. So I again told him that I was not interested. Then he turned hostile. Again he asked what he did wrong. I told him that I was not interested. It took several minutes to convince him that I wasn't going to buy from him. I shut and LOCKED the door. Then went to look up this company online. Guess what? Scam! All these complaints of people who didn't receive magazines, or their money back. And that some salespeople had been imprisoned for assault, rape, theft. *shudder* And he was almost in my apartment. My daughter was here! No thanks.
Don't buy from solicitors.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Mother's Day Sermon
Here's my sermon that I gave today. The theme was Bring Honor and Glory to God.
We are called this day to bring glory and honor to God!
We do that every Sunday, don’t we? We gather here on Sunday mornings to glorify God. But do we honor God? Do we honor ALL that God is?
God is the great I Am. Everything that we could be, God is already: all of our personality types, emotions, passions, interests, talents and gifts. Do we honor all of that?
Through our language, we limit God. Every time we use language that does not reflect the totality of God, we place limits on our understanding of God. Every Sunday, I hear God is Father, Lord, and a million “He’s.” Continually referring to God in male terms denies the other half of what God is. Denying part of God does not bring honor to God. So today, I would like to honor the part of God that we ignore so often: God the Mother.
First, we’ll start with God the Father, who we are all probably very familiar with. Christianity believes in a trinity: three-in-one. God the Father, who is the creator of everything. Jesus, the redeemer, who made it possible for our sins to be forgiven. The Holy Spirit, who sustains is in our faith, and moves in the world through our ministry.
I know the trinity can be tricky to understand, but think of it like this: to Katherine, I am Mama; I am also wife, daughter, grand-daughter, niece, sister, employee, student, minister, pianist; some people know me as Ashley Whitham, some as Ashley Sharpe, or just Ashie Rose. It depends on who I’m with, and what I’m doing. But it’s all me. It’s the same with God. Depending on what God is doing, God can be called different names. But it is all from the same God, the same source of love. So even though I am distinguishing between God the Father and God the Mother, they are one God, parts of a whole, different faces of the same.
Historically, 2/3s of the Trinity were male: God the Father and Jesus. The Holy Spirit has gone back and forth in gender, depending on the language of the writer. The Hebrew word is feminine, the greek non-gendered. There is also the personification of God’s Wisdom in the Old Testament, which is the female word Sophia.
I’m going to be sharing with you a series of quotes on the powerpoint to aid my message today. From Janice Allred:
“Picturing God as male leads to valuing masculine attributes, values, and experience over feminine ones and contributes to the oppression of women (Allred 42).”
The basic premise behind this is that if men are made in the image of God, where does that leave women? For centuries, female characteristics of God have been whittled down to nothing, just as women have been whittled down in societies around the world. God has become the epitome of what a man can be. Society looked to God to satisfy many needs: God is a jealous God, a vengeful God, a warrior God, a King of kings, a Lord over all, our Master.
But besides all the male names for God, we have the issue of pronouns and generalizations. If there are men and women, it’s simplified to men. If God has no gender, we can’t call God ‘it,’ so people decided to call God ‘he.’ According to the men who created all these traditions, ‘he’ included both genders. Women, do you ever like being referred to as ‘he?’ If someone addressed this congregation as men, would you feel included?
Male and female are determined by birth. But masculine and feminine are defined by society. Men were once the hunter/gatherers, and as such have evolved several beliefs about how men should behave. Men, can you give me a few examples of masculine traits?
Femininity has always been the opposite. Once, women worked just as hard as men, side-by-side, especially in agricultural societies. Then their roles were forced to change. Where men were seen as strong, women had to be weak. Men were noble, women must be pitiful. Men were majestic, women were thus modest. If men (and God) had all these traits, women had to be the opposite of them all. There were two realities: men and women.
Picture a piece of paper, with a circle drawn on it. Now there are two realities. Your pen can either be inside the circle, or outside the circle. The only problem is that there is a greater reality that we are not always aware of: you cannot have an inside of a circle without having an outside, and you cannot be outside the circle without there being a circle. It is impossible to live completely without masculine, or completely without feminine. Everyone is both.
“The principle of polarity tells us that men must possess feminine as well as masculine characteristics and women must possess masculine qualities along with feminine ones… If human beings need to possess both masculine and feminine characteristics, it should be clear that God, both male and female, is a complete and perfect being, possessing both feminine and masculine attributes in their perfection (Allred 28-29).”
The ancient symbol of the yin-yang represents this idea as well. Not only are the two opposites equally complimentary to each other, but they are also each found in the other. They cannot be separated, and you cannot have one without the other.
All men have feminine qualities, and all women have masculine qualities. Society has dictated against that our entire lives. I know that we are sometimes completely oblivious to this, but it’s there. Societal norms have shaped who you are, whether you like it or not.
“Real human beings, living in freedom, possess all human attributes, which they develop or neglect according to their own desires, gifts, and opportunities (Allred 29).”
This is not based on gender, or on what society has decided your strengths and weaknesses to be. If you were free to be what you want, would you have developed to be the same person? Are you the person God created you to be? We all want to say yes, but are you sure? Can we ever truly know? Our lives are a process, constantly building on our past choices, creating new options for our future. Any one change in our past would have sent us in a different direction later. It is through revelation by God and relationship with God that we can hope to achieve our true self.
For centuries, God has been painted as a man, and men were created in God’s image. This quote is from Joseph Smith.
“What kind of a being is God? I will tell you and hear O Earth! God who sites in yonder heavens is a man like yourselves… It is the first principle to know that we many converse with him and that he was once a man like us, and the Father was on an earth like us… If men do not comprehend the character of God they do not comprehend themselves (Joseph Smith).”
God was the perfect man, everything a man should ever hope or strive to be. It was only natural for the male church leaders to call God ‘he.’ After all, they were ‘he’s’ too.
I know that most people here would say that they believe in a non-gendered God, and if they ever referred to God in female terms, that would be forcing a gender on God. But you do that anyway, every time you use a male pronoun or title. ‘He’ does not cover both genders. Men does not include women.
So where does that leave us? Men were created in the image of God, and must find understanding of self and God through continued revelation and relationship. What about women?
“Today… women say, ‘If I do not comprehend the character of God the Mother, I cannot comprehend myself… What kind of a being is she?’ (Allred 42)”
Who is God the Mother? Do we know? Have we had any revelation of who She is, that maybe we attributed to another persona of God, or simply ignored before?
“God {meaning God the Father} must reveal himself or we have no knowledge of him. Must we then wait for a revelation of the Mother before we have any knowledge of her? We must be aware of the possibility of idolatry, of creating her in our own image, of making her into what we conceive the perfect woman should be, of using our images of her to control or manipulate others. On the other hand, we should also recognize the importance of our own seeking after God… And we should not assume that there has been no revelation of the Mother or that waiting for her to reveal herself need be entirely passive (Allred 43).”
Assuming that the Mother has not revealed herself, and we can’t do anything about it until She does is just lazy. We must be active in our search for revelation and relationship with God. We can’t sit around and wait, and yet we must wait for God. We do not want to merely project our own wants and desires onto God, making God the Mother in our image.
So let’s honor and glorify God the Mother. We may not know much about her, but we might know more than we think. What attributes of God would we consider to belong to the Mother? Go ahead and call them out.
Ideas:
Compassion (The Hebrew word for God’s compassion is the same word as a woman in labor)
Creativity
Forgiving
Nurturing
How can we honor this side of God? It may be that what we normally do to honor God the Father may not be the same way we want to honor God the Mother.
I read somewhere that if God the Father is who we worship, God the Mother is who brings us to worship. That’s how I honor God the Mother. I love worshipping as a community, and it’s the Mother’s presence who prepares us, brings us together, and facilitates our worship. I honor Her by letting myself be open to her presence. I also see Her as the source of my musical talents, and I honor Her when I play the piano.
How can you honor the Mother? You don’t have to share your ideas out loud, but I would like you to consider your works, your faith, your lives, and does that bring glory to ALL of God? What might you need to change so that you honor all that God is, and not limit God?
Can you see the hand of the Mother working in your lives? Honor God by recognizing that the feminine is always present, and equally important to the masculine, and God is both!
Janice Allred. God the Mother: And Other Theological Essays. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books: 1997.
We are called this day to bring glory and honor to God!
We do that every Sunday, don’t we? We gather here on Sunday mornings to glorify God. But do we honor God? Do we honor ALL that God is?
God is the great I Am. Everything that we could be, God is already: all of our personality types, emotions, passions, interests, talents and gifts. Do we honor all of that?
Through our language, we limit God. Every time we use language that does not reflect the totality of God, we place limits on our understanding of God. Every Sunday, I hear God is Father, Lord, and a million “He’s.” Continually referring to God in male terms denies the other half of what God is. Denying part of God does not bring honor to God. So today, I would like to honor the part of God that we ignore so often: God the Mother.
First, we’ll start with God the Father, who we are all probably very familiar with. Christianity believes in a trinity: three-in-one. God the Father, who is the creator of everything. Jesus, the redeemer, who made it possible for our sins to be forgiven. The Holy Spirit, who sustains is in our faith, and moves in the world through our ministry.
I know the trinity can be tricky to understand, but think of it like this: to Katherine, I am Mama; I am also wife, daughter, grand-daughter, niece, sister, employee, student, minister, pianist; some people know me as Ashley Whitham, some as Ashley Sharpe, or just Ashie Rose. It depends on who I’m with, and what I’m doing. But it’s all me. It’s the same with God. Depending on what God is doing, God can be called different names. But it is all from the same God, the same source of love. So even though I am distinguishing between God the Father and God the Mother, they are one God, parts of a whole, different faces of the same.
Historically, 2/3s of the Trinity were male: God the Father and Jesus. The Holy Spirit has gone back and forth in gender, depending on the language of the writer. The Hebrew word is feminine, the greek non-gendered. There is also the personification of God’s Wisdom in the Old Testament, which is the female word Sophia.
I’m going to be sharing with you a series of quotes on the powerpoint to aid my message today. From Janice Allred:
“Picturing God as male leads to valuing masculine attributes, values, and experience over feminine ones and contributes to the oppression of women (Allred 42).”
The basic premise behind this is that if men are made in the image of God, where does that leave women? For centuries, female characteristics of God have been whittled down to nothing, just as women have been whittled down in societies around the world. God has become the epitome of what a man can be. Society looked to God to satisfy many needs: God is a jealous God, a vengeful God, a warrior God, a King of kings, a Lord over all, our Master.
But besides all the male names for God, we have the issue of pronouns and generalizations. If there are men and women, it’s simplified to men. If God has no gender, we can’t call God ‘it,’ so people decided to call God ‘he.’ According to the men who created all these traditions, ‘he’ included both genders. Women, do you ever like being referred to as ‘he?’ If someone addressed this congregation as men, would you feel included?
Male and female are determined by birth. But masculine and feminine are defined by society. Men were once the hunter/gatherers, and as such have evolved several beliefs about how men should behave. Men, can you give me a few examples of masculine traits?
Femininity has always been the opposite. Once, women worked just as hard as men, side-by-side, especially in agricultural societies. Then their roles were forced to change. Where men were seen as strong, women had to be weak. Men were noble, women must be pitiful. Men were majestic, women were thus modest. If men (and God) had all these traits, women had to be the opposite of them all. There were two realities: men and women.
Picture a piece of paper, with a circle drawn on it. Now there are two realities. Your pen can either be inside the circle, or outside the circle. The only problem is that there is a greater reality that we are not always aware of: you cannot have an inside of a circle without having an outside, and you cannot be outside the circle without there being a circle. It is impossible to live completely without masculine, or completely without feminine. Everyone is both.
“The principle of polarity tells us that men must possess feminine as well as masculine characteristics and women must possess masculine qualities along with feminine ones… If human beings need to possess both masculine and feminine characteristics, it should be clear that God, both male and female, is a complete and perfect being, possessing both feminine and masculine attributes in their perfection (Allred 28-29).”
The ancient symbol of the yin-yang represents this idea as well. Not only are the two opposites equally complimentary to each other, but they are also each found in the other. They cannot be separated, and you cannot have one without the other.
All men have feminine qualities, and all women have masculine qualities. Society has dictated against that our entire lives. I know that we are sometimes completely oblivious to this, but it’s there. Societal norms have shaped who you are, whether you like it or not.
“Real human beings, living in freedom, possess all human attributes, which they develop or neglect according to their own desires, gifts, and opportunities (Allred 29).”
This is not based on gender, or on what society has decided your strengths and weaknesses to be. If you were free to be what you want, would you have developed to be the same person? Are you the person God created you to be? We all want to say yes, but are you sure? Can we ever truly know? Our lives are a process, constantly building on our past choices, creating new options for our future. Any one change in our past would have sent us in a different direction later. It is through revelation by God and relationship with God that we can hope to achieve our true self.
For centuries, God has been painted as a man, and men were created in God’s image. This quote is from Joseph Smith.
“What kind of a being is God? I will tell you and hear O Earth! God who sites in yonder heavens is a man like yourselves… It is the first principle to know that we many converse with him and that he was once a man like us, and the Father was on an earth like us… If men do not comprehend the character of God they do not comprehend themselves (Joseph Smith).”
God was the perfect man, everything a man should ever hope or strive to be. It was only natural for the male church leaders to call God ‘he.’ After all, they were ‘he’s’ too.
I know that most people here would say that they believe in a non-gendered God, and if they ever referred to God in female terms, that would be forcing a gender on God. But you do that anyway, every time you use a male pronoun or title. ‘He’ does not cover both genders. Men does not include women.
So where does that leave us? Men were created in the image of God, and must find understanding of self and God through continued revelation and relationship. What about women?
“Today… women say, ‘If I do not comprehend the character of God the Mother, I cannot comprehend myself… What kind of a being is she?’ (Allred 42)”
Who is God the Mother? Do we know? Have we had any revelation of who She is, that maybe we attributed to another persona of God, or simply ignored before?
“God {meaning God the Father} must reveal himself or we have no knowledge of him. Must we then wait for a revelation of the Mother before we have any knowledge of her? We must be aware of the possibility of idolatry, of creating her in our own image, of making her into what we conceive the perfect woman should be, of using our images of her to control or manipulate others. On the other hand, we should also recognize the importance of our own seeking after God… And we should not assume that there has been no revelation of the Mother or that waiting for her to reveal herself need be entirely passive (Allred 43).”
Assuming that the Mother has not revealed herself, and we can’t do anything about it until She does is just lazy. We must be active in our search for revelation and relationship with God. We can’t sit around and wait, and yet we must wait for God. We do not want to merely project our own wants and desires onto God, making God the Mother in our image.
So let’s honor and glorify God the Mother. We may not know much about her, but we might know more than we think. What attributes of God would we consider to belong to the Mother? Go ahead and call them out.
Ideas:
Compassion (The Hebrew word for God’s compassion is the same word as a woman in labor)
Creativity
Forgiving
Nurturing
How can we honor this side of God? It may be that what we normally do to honor God the Father may not be the same way we want to honor God the Mother.
I read somewhere that if God the Father is who we worship, God the Mother is who brings us to worship. That’s how I honor God the Mother. I love worshipping as a community, and it’s the Mother’s presence who prepares us, brings us together, and facilitates our worship. I honor Her by letting myself be open to her presence. I also see Her as the source of my musical talents, and I honor Her when I play the piano.
How can you honor the Mother? You don’t have to share your ideas out loud, but I would like you to consider your works, your faith, your lives, and does that bring glory to ALL of God? What might you need to change so that you honor all that God is, and not limit God?
Can you see the hand of the Mother working in your lives? Honor God by recognizing that the feminine is always present, and equally important to the masculine, and God is both!
Janice Allred. God the Mother: And Other Theological Essays. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books: 1997.
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