White Patriarchy – Peculiar Faith

Women’s Lib Comes to a Village in Samaria

A big shout out to lectionary “Year A” in the three-year cycle which gave us just yesterday the intrepid and resilient (though sadly nameless) “woman at the well” in John’s account of the Gospel (4:5-42). She herself was a fount of living water as we gathered for worship in this Lenten season, in these days when white patriarchy is running amok across the globe and an oily rain is falling on the people of Tehran—an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.

Rather than oil in the streets, and as if like Moses, we struck the rock in the wilderness in worship and out from ancient biblical texts streamed the kind of clear watery refreshment we hardly knew we needed so terribly much. How fortuitous and perhaps even divinely inspired that the lectionary landed on these biblical texts in Women’s History Month—a month that really should feature actual women (with names, damnit!) and not merely stereotypes.

It’s dismayingly difficult to keep women real given the long, the achingly long literary, religious, and political history of turning the stories of women into archetypes, symbols, and violent cliches. As we now know in some fresh and horrifying ways from Jeffrey Epstein’s island of misfit billionaires, women (and girls) are not merely tropes but objects to be traded, trafficked, bartered, enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed.

A Sunday lectionary hardly seems up to the task of unraveling and dismantling such an infernal misogyny, unless we pay attention, and unless we take ancient stories as contemporary beacons, and unless we insist that Scripture really can inspire and equip us—with the Holy Spirit’s charisms—to live as revolutionaries, just like Jesus.

So let’s be sure to notice when reading the story about that fierce woman at the well—and then notice again, and then still once more (because deeply ingrained patriarchal habits are insidiously hard to break)—that there’s absolutely nothing in this story about repentance and forgiveness; but there’s quite a lot in this Johannine story about cycles of patriarchal domination.

Let’s take a step back from that observation (which sounds like heresy in my Evangelically-shaped ears) and consider carefully the calcified cliches behind which women so often disappear. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, on the first Sunday in Lent, the lectionary assigned the classic story from Genesis about the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent.

Ah! But that’s not how most of us remember that story. Most of us have heard it referred to as the “temptation of Eve,” who then seduces Adam to make the same mistake she did.

That difference makes a significant difference: imagining only Eve present for the serpent’s temptation makes Eve a symbol of the original seductress who leads to the fall of man (both in the generic and particular sense)—and who does so again and again, from generation to generation, wearyingly repeated as stale caricature on a manly stage.

John’s story at a well in the desert has often been read in much the same way as that iconic story from Genesis. In fact, the literary figure of “Woman as Wicked Seductress” is so common—infusing the air we breathe and the water we drink—most of us don’t even have to know about it to read John’s story with that motif as our interpretive lens.

I grew up hearing this story as an encounter between Jesus and a sexually promiscuous woman—a woman who had led astray no fewer than six men—and how wonderful it is that God’s forgiveness can extend even to someone like her; but none of that is even hinted at in John’s telling.

The first-century context of the story offers alternative ways of reading that are much more plausible. Given the ancient mortality rate, this woman could have been widowed multiple times; cultural customs would have forced her to marry the brothers of her deceased husbands, one after another.

It’s even more likely that she was struggling because of religious marriage regulations in which only men could initiate divorce, and for any reason at all; the social and economic vulnerability of unmarried women might have forced this woman to remarry after multiple divorces just to survive—and perhaps that’s why she resorted to living with a man who was not her husband, a way just to put food on the table.

To repeat once more: Jesus says nothing at all to this woman about forgiveness, not even repentance; what startles and astonishes this woman is that Jesus apparently knew—he knew and he named—what she had been enduring and living through.

Reading this story apart from the usual patriarchal assumptions about sexual morality can itself be quite liberating, and a way to notice a remarkable first-century embrace of a woman as student and disciple, as compelling witness and evangelist, and some would say one of the earliest apostles! A whole village follows Jesus because of her ministry!

But there’s more: John goes still further in his portrayal of Jesus as a divine social revolutionary with a story that isn’t about just any (anonymous) woman; this woman is from a village in Samaria, a region denigrated and despised by the religious elite in Judea. (It takes hardly any imagination at all to bring to mind today’s “Judeans” and “Samaritans”.)

Recall the biblical story (1 Kings 16—2 Kings 9) about Ahab, a corrupt ruler of the northern Kingdom of Israel, who made a political alliance by marrying a Phoenician woman by the name of Jezebel. Together, they set up their own capital city away from Jerusalem and in Samaria, where they established a temple for idolatrous worship.

Even when those details from the biblical story are unfamiliar, very few would fail to recognize the name “Jezebel”—yet another emblematic figure of the dangerous seductions of women in the affairs of men.

John the Evangelist may have been enamored with a misty-eyed neo-platonic mysticism (and I confess to finding wonderful insights when I read him that way), but right now, today, it matters even more to see in this one Johannine woman the embodiment of both the vexations of gender and the hostile rivalries of ethnicity.

I mean, what if John is writing this story not as a way to illustrate God’s gracious forgiveness of a “sexual sinner” (dare I repeat this? that is not in the story at all). What if he is instead writing a story of God’s own determination to liberate women from their patriarchal classifications, and to heal the wounds of ethnic rivalry and hatred? Sure, preach forgiveness, but not with this story; this one is about freedom.

Oh, how much richer this story becomes when it’s not merely and crudely about how many sexual partners a first-century woman may have had (honestly, who cares?) but rather how often women become trapped in cycles of male domination and control, illustrated by this one woman—an illustration embodied by a woman of undesirable ethnic heritage.

John may be rooted in thick and even convoluted theological speculation, but he is also (I am convinced) committed to taking otherwise simple and ordinary encounters and rendering them with a brilliant divine presence and transformative insight.

Consider the lectionary’s rich texts last week, for the first Sunday in Lent: not only the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation but also John’s story about Nicodemus, a member of the judicial counsel of the Judeans, coming to visit Jesus at night. The symbol of darkness can remind us of seeds planted in the soil of Earth, just as the body of Jesus himself is eventually planted in a dark tomb, from which will sprout an Easter life.

Yesterday, by contrast, John’s Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman drawing water at high noon, in broad daylight. Something important is being brought into view, being revealed and illuminated for us to see.

As I read this familiar story once again this year, I kept returning to the frame John seems keen to create for it: authentic worship. If “proper worship” divided Judeans and Samaritans, then John insists in the bright light of day to show us living water flowing like a crystal stream of healing between the Judean Jesus and the Samaritan woman—water that not only restores life to a parched land but also provides a balm for the ethnic violence that has scarred the land.

That violence is rooted in the ethnic and patriarchal hostilities that have marred human history for millennia. True and life-giving worship, in other words, will always lead us into relationships of healing and reconciliation for the sake of Beloved Community.

The day is coming, Jesus says, when the true worshippers of God are not tied to any one location or belong to only one chosen race or exhibit a favored gender but shall instead all worship together in spirit and in truth—both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, as the lectionary collect for the day declared.

As these lectionary texts lead toward the Eucharistic Table, it’s worth remembering that John is the only Gospel writer to include a rather grisly detail in the story of the crucifixion: both water and blood flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus (19:34).

Now, it is certainly possible to read that moment as a forensic examiner: the Roman centurion’s spear likely pierced through the pericardial membrane around the heart of Jesus, releasing its watery fluid along with the blood.

Sure, but I don’t think John cares one little bit about that. I think John cares that human beings are physically born from their mothers in a mix of both blood and water, and here it flows from the Jesus who invites us all to be “born again.” The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich imagined exactly this: the wound in the side of Jesus as the womb from which we are reborn into New Life—Jesus, she said, is our blessed mother.

Even if John only gestured toward the socially transformative power of authentic worship, it’s high time we take that conviction with us to the Eucharist Table. There we remember the death of Jesus and proclaim the hope of Easter—the intertwining of memory and hope creates true and genuine community, as Josiah Royce once noted, and leads to the formation of Beloved Community, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later preached, and which John the evangelist insists leads to rebirth.

Rebirth as mere “blank slate”? No, but being born again into a world where the life of a woman at a well in the wilderness can reassure us that God’s living water shall not fail to heal us and free us from the racially gendered systems of domination that wound us all.

Harm Reduction: An Epiphany Pledge for 2026

I invite you to join me in making a pledge to reduce our harm and hurt, individually and collectively, in 2026. This is not an invitation to make a “new year’s resolution”; most of those fail before February. I find the binary “on/off” approach to behavior mostly unhelpful and even paralyzing. But even when we cannot remove all the hurt, we can reduce it, and we can also support others in similar efforts to create a growing network of those committed to reducing harm and cultivating healing.

In a world of so much hateful rhetoric, which fuels so many postures of aggression and hostility, and indeed entrenched violence, we must find ways not only to resist the harmful behaviors but also to disarm them, to apply healing balms to the myriad wounds, and likewise insist on creating spaces of abundant flourishing as a counter-witness to the culture of oppression and death that surrounds us. None of us can do this for the whole planet; but we can do it for our own households, for our neighborhoods, for our communities—we really can reduce the harm and hurt.

As a parish priest, I’m grateful for the liturgical texts that help to highlight our shared participation in a world of harm and the shared calling to contribute to a world of healing. The resources collected in Enriching Our Worship for The Episcopal Church include a confession of sin that not only acknowledges our own evil deeds but also the “evil done our behalf” (that list grows daily).

Similarly, this past September my parish here in Saugatuck used some of the texts developed by The Episcopal Church for the Season of Creation, including a confession of sin in which we noted our collective failure to claim our “kinship with all of God’s creatures,” and how we have “walked heavily on God’s earth, overused and wasted its resources,” and taken its abundance for granted. That text includes an expansive petition for forgiveness that includes the plea to “open our eyes to see God’s presence throughout the wonders of God’s creation, and to gladden our hearts” by encountering that divine reality—this alone would surely reduce harm and promote healing.

In that same collection of texts, we also gave thanks following Communion for the mysteries of “grain and grape, of earth and sky, and of body and blood,” divine gifts to inspire us to “renew the face of the earth,” praying that we might “join our efforts with God’s passion” to reflect God’s “healing glory in Creation.”

I’m also particularly mindful of the grating confluence on this day of The Epiphany, one of the great feasts of the church, which is also the anniversary of the U.S. capitol riot and violent attack on American democracy (today is the fifth anniversary of that horrible day). Not unlike celebrating the Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus on August 6, which is also the anniversary of the atomic detonation over Hiroshima, Japan, the mashup of religious observances and civic occasions seems nearly blasphemous. But I think that might very well be the point of observing a religious calendar in the first place: it matters for how we live with others.

We might take note, for example, of how Eastern Orthodox Christians weave a liturgical thread from the Nativity (Jesus in a manger) to the Epiphany (the magi presenting extravagant gifts to the toddler Jesus) and into the waters of the River Jordan for the Baptism of the adult Jesus. Taken together, that arc is celebrated overall as The Theophany, the manifestation of God. More pointedly, God shows up right where we are, in the cribs of starving children, and the bombed-out houses where toddlers once played, and rivers now poisoned with toxic forever chemicals.

God manifests everywhere in the ordinarily beautiful (the playful romps of my Australian shepherd dog, the outstretched hand of a four-year old reaching for Communion, the ice shelf along the shoreline of a great lake) and also the extraordinarily disturbing (nearly every headline in the daily news). Religious faith doesn’t just float above all the messy flotsam of human culture but burrows into it, emerges from it, and offers radiant forms of transformative energy—it helps us reduce harm and promote healing.

My own Epiphany plan for Harm Reduction in 2026 includes three broad pathways. The image of a “path” matters because the most important changes never happen overnight, and we all need time to adjust to new ways of being in the world. My life today—how I think, the way I see the world, where I put my priorities—is remarkably different from when, for example, I was ordained way back in 1988, and I could not have lived back then as I do now. The most important journeys take time.

To that end, I hereby pledge to reduce harm and promote healing by following more carefully and fully these three pathways:

1. Listen More Carefully
This path has always been my greatest teacher. It took quite a few years in my life (beyond college) to appreciate my cognitive abilities (I never thought I was particularly smart); it took even longer to understand that only experience can make one wise, and that includes, by definition, the commitment to listen, especially to perspectives different from my own.

Social patterns and cultural customs in the United States today have retrenched the longstanding tendency in this country to speak first and ask questions later, which has contributed to the deepest divisions and moments of fragmentation I have ever experienced. I have never cast as many suspicious glances toward strangers in my life as I have over the last ten years. I have never doubted the good intentions of public figures the way I do today. I recognize a deep need to trust others again by re-learning how to listen (and that includes reading, noticing, pausing, waiting, and tending, none of which makes for an easy path in a 2026 world).

2. Diminish Patriarchal Whiteness
I know how “woke” this particular path sounds, but I’m trying to follow the brown-skinned, itinerant preacher in a first-century occupied province of the Roman Empire who paid more dignified attention to women and girls than one might otherwise expect and who (according to later writers) insisted that we stay awake (Mt. 24:42, Mk. 13:33). In simpler terms: I’m trying to deepen my awareness of how much privilege attaches to my maleness and my whiteness—it’s a lot, more than I can grasp, and it wreaks havoc everywhere.

To be clear: this path does not assume that white people are bad and men are evil. It does assume that modern Western society has been in the grips of a system (cultural, political, and religious) that favors white men over all others, a grip that has lasted for many centuries and has become especially entrenched today. This presumption of white male dominance shows up in religious texts, liturgical prayers, public policies, economic analysis, medical research, and nearly all forms of entertainment.

Again, I cannot change all that but I can reduce at least some of the harm caused by all that: I can tend carefully to the gendered language of public worship, and whom I choose to feature in my sermons, and what kind of visual art appears on our liturgy leaflets. I can also encourage my clergy colleagues to do the same and I can learn from them—especially the women, and especially the ministers of color—how to do this better. I want to be on this path more fully, so help me God.

3. Eat Plants, Care for Animals
I have been on a vegetarian path in my diet for some years now, and have more recently embarked on a road toward a fully vegan lifestyle. Do note the words “diet” and “lifestyle.” What I eat is mostly vegetarian (only very occasionally some fish) but how I want to live is with a much more robust respect toward the full dignity of every living being, which is not only about what I eat. (A great place to start thinking about this and also to be inspired is right here.)

There are multiple reasons for my conviction about this commitment: eating more plants is much healthier for human bodies; reducing meat in our diets is one of the most significant actions we can take for ecological healing and renewal; by refusing to eat animals, I reduce pain and suffering in the world exponentially with every meal.

This path can reduce harm in my own body, but I am much more concerned to reduce dramatically the harm and hurt that is foisted upon 10 billion land animals who are killed in factory farms in the United States every year. I hate doing the math, but here it is: in this country alone, that’s slightly over 27 million animals every day, or 1.1 million every single hour of every single day. Let’s be painfully clear: this is not a quiet death for all these animals; it is a cruel system of daily fear, pain, and torture among living beings who are sentient and self-aware (in the case of pigs, they possess roughly the same cognitive and emotional capacity as a human three-year old). Regardless of how “alike” other animals might be to humans, the point is to lessen the pain and suffering of another creature of the same God, to reduce the harm we cause just by what we eat.

Those are ambitious pathways and cannot be traveled in a single year; but the point is not necessarily to “arrive” as much as it is to keep traveling.

“I have come that they may have life,” John’s Jesus said, “and have it in abundance” (Jn. 10:10). For many years now, that one verse has been my yardstick for assessing my pastoral decisions, liturgical design, preaching and teaching, and my convictions about interpersonal relationships. The abundant life God intends for all will appear—on this Feast of the Epiphany, it will manifest—not all at once but in waves and spurts and moments and collaborations along the good road we take together toward reducing the harm and hurt we cause.

What pathways might you take to reduce harm in the world? Where do you see a path toward healing right where you live? Will you join me in taking an Epiphany pledge? I would love to hear from you…

“The Baptism of Christ, II,” Daniel Bonnell

Living as Ikons of God

And it was good.
And it was good.
And it was very good.

There are still four more instances of that declaration of goodness in the first account of God’s creation of the world in Genesis, and many Christians heard all seven of them this past weekend when we celebrated Trinity Sunday.

What does it mean to call something “good”? What makes something “good” and how can we discern when it is? And why would it matter so much to repeat this refrain of goodness so often in the story of creation?

I’m guessing that human beings have not changed so terribly much over the last few thousand years. Just like today, humans in the ancient Mediterranean world likely thought something was “good” when it was good for them; something’s good when we can use it, or sell it, or trade it for something else; we become the standard for what’s considered “good.” I cannot help but think of how often I called my dear dog Judah a good boy simply because he obeyed me!

So perhaps it’s time to notice again (or for the first time) that all but one of the declarations of goodness in the first chapter of Genesis occur before humans even existed. Six out of seven times, God’s creation is declared good without any reference to human beings.

The whole creation itself is thoroughly good—whether it’s useful to us or not.

Well, that’s rather rude, isn’t it? Don’t we count for anything? Yes, we do, and much more so than most of us have dared to imagine—and sometimes more than we want to believe. To be described as “very good”—as humans were in that story—comes with some responsibilities.

John of Damascus, a monk and theologian of the seventh century, was embroiled in what came to be known as the “iconoclast controversy.” This was a vigorous debate about whether it is appropriate to have icons, or visual images, in churches.

John was an ardent supporter of icons and actually cited a familiar verse from Genesis to support his case: “And God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image…”

John would have been reading the Greek version of that passage, and in Greek that phrase—“in the image of God”—reads as the icon of God.

The human face as an icon of God! Shouldn’t this take our breath away? My face, and your face, and every single human face we see, all of them, icons of the God who made us!

And so, John of Damascus says, if you degrade and denigrate and reject visual images, you offend the artist—and in this case, the artist is God.

I think a lot these days about the visual arts, living and working as I do on what many call the “arts coast” of Michigan. We Christians actually have a lot to say and to offer, from our own Christian traditions, about the importance of visual images, the spiritual depth of art as it connects us to Creator God, the very source of creativity itself.

We might also note, rather urgently, that the stakes are rather high in this shared artistic endeavor with God. John of Damascus goes on to note something else about that familiar passage in Genesis. We are created not only in the image but also the likeness of God.

Those are not the same words; in fact, in Greek the word “likeness” is not a noun but a process, not a state of being but a state of becoming.

We are created in God’s image, yes, but we’re still on the way toward God’s likeness.

To be human is to be engaged in a profound process of assimilating to God, of resembling the One who made us, of being constantly formed and transformed into the divine creatures God intended to make from the very beginning.

The choices we make in this life shape the course of that journey; that’s why the stakes are so high, and that’s why visual artists can help us.

Visual artists can help us see at least a bit more clearly the imprint of God not only in our own faces, but also in the faces of those who are different from us, even different species, and in Earth herself. And by seeing more clearly the presence of God all around us and among us and in us and in each other, hopefully we will act and live differently.

As we launch into June, LGBTQ Pride Month, we need to see just exactly how high the stakes are for the varieties of gendered sexualities in the human race. Beyond the usual platitudes—“love is love” or “we embrace diversity”—we need to see much more clearly that those who do not conform to the standards of White Patriarchy are increasingly at risk of serious physical harm, especially with easily accessible firearms.

This risk pertains no matter where we happen to live or work or play in this country, from shopping malls and suburban streets, to national parks and urban office buildings—and this risk continues for black and brown people, just as it always has been present for women.

And still, it was good.

Everything depends on the goodness of God’s creation, and therefore on the goodness of God—a divine goodness in which we are invited to participate ever more fully.

That’s a key word—participation—for a celebration of the Trinitarian character of God. Rather than some abstract metaphysical doctrine, affirming God as Trinity is meant to draw us ever deeper into the never-ending mystery of God’s own life of self-giving, reciprocal love.

Returning to John of Damascus for a moment, he used a mostly untranslatable Greek word to describe this Trinitarian mystery of God—the word is perichoresis.

Some scholars have noted that there is at least a trace of our word “choreography” in that Greek term. John apparently was inviting us to think about the Trinitarian relationships of God like a cosmic dance—and if you’ve ever been swept away by the alluring rhythms of a tango or the gracefulness of a waltz, the energy often spills off the dancefloor and you can feel it pulsating across your skin, rumbling in your muscles, your heartrate rising.

And that, John of Damascus said, is how God creates. The creative energy and fertile relationality of God’s own life just spills over, as it were, and the whole Universe comes into existence—the whole cosmos itself as an unimaginable dance of evolving, changing, glorious life.

That mutual and eternal exchange of divine energy among the divine persons makes it impossible to tell the dancers from the dance and the dance itself is endless, deathless love—that’s the Holy Trinity, a doctrine that could actually change the world!

The very source of creativity itself is swirling all around us and in us and among us—our very faces the ikons of Creator God as we journey into God’s own likeness, from one degree of glory to another—world without end!

Now…let’s live as if this were true.