Splattering Brains at CBE

Fashion report: 

Today at the CBE conference I wore the t-shirt from EEWC-CFT's Norfolk gathering"Walking on water and making waves" (my all-time favorite theme) with a green malachite necklace and green 3/4 pants that I call pedal-pushers but my daughters call something else (which I can't remember).  

Bettina was dressed very nicely in a green-and-black-on-white dress, I think.  (Correct me!)  As Marg Herder would say, She showed up in style today.

Real meat report:

At 10 am I walked in late to a workshop about gender-based injustice in sub-Saharan Africa by Medad Birungi, a pastor and lecturer at Kyambogo University in Uganda (I chose that workshop partly because I had attended a man's workshop yesterday and thought that Medad was a woman.  Wrong.)  

The first words I heard were, "All girls are a curse on a family....If women don't submit, they are beaten.  The man is priest, prophet, and king... The woman is a beast of burden."  Kind of a tough way to start the day--close to tears by the end of the first workshop. 

 

At the end of the day I was getting Medad's autograph on Tombstones and Banana Trees and he said, "You should come to Uganda."  

"I'd like to," I said, "but I don't have the money to travel to Uganda."

"If it's God's will, it's God's bill," he answered.  I stared blankly.  

He explained with a long story about his six-year-old son who had a brain tumor and needed a $250,000 surgery; the family was flown to the US, and the son was given surgery for free in Tennessee.

Next--the plenary by a young whipper-snapper (J.R. Daniel Kirk) about patriarchy in ancient Greece and Rome with quotes from Aristotle (women are whiny, jealous, deceptive, fearful, etc) and Plato and Philo of Alexander, but the Gospel "creates a new society where the standards of the old world no longer apply."  

The crucifixion (killing, shaming) was to show people the folly of challenging Rome and its hierarchies, which are the exact opposite of God's kindom.  "It shall not be so among you" (Mark 10:43). Servanthood is the key to power and should overturn patriarchy.

After lunch, another plenary about the veil in the ancient Near East and today by Cynthia Long Westfall.  Just before it Lily Lee (Cambodian I think, middle-aged) came up to pray and first said, "We need to splatter the brains of gender hierarchy out of its dense skull!"  I was wide-eyed.  

Lee Grady's cheerful exegesis of Judges 4:21 (see yesterday's post) has kind of infected the whole conference (as Claire's "Very good, very good, yay!" did at EEWC-CFT's last conference).  

He had commented on the biblical theme of "women dealing fatal head blows" (Gen. 3:15, Judges 4:21, Judges 9:53-54, II Samuel 20:16-22, and also Esther, omitting Judith in the Apocrypha).  

Taking it a step further, he concluded yesterday, "My prayer is that we help women in this country get over the hump and discover the tent peg that is inside them."

Tonight after an awards banquet there was a kind of stand-up comedy talk by Daniel Fan: "Our tendency is not to take the sin of patriarchy seriously... If you can't do anything else, at least point and laugh."  

Then more Lily Lee (female infanticide, abuse in the family, trafficking).  

Then Domnic Misolo of Kenya (FGM, wife inheritance, dowry, and other ills combatted by the Ekklesia Foundation for Gender Education). 

Just when we were about to fall asleep, we were hit by a Fifty Shades of Grey description and battle cry presented by an officer of the Salvation Army, Lisa L. Thompson, and Kristyn Komarnicki (youngish biblical feminists).  

I personally have ignored FSG.  Hearing about it was one of the more stressful parts of this day, and I was not pleased to learn that "Christians should lead in opposing this" (BDSM--don't ask).  

However, since I know someone who met his third wife at an online S&M site and this wife just filed for divorce, for the second time, I guess I need to know about it.

Auld Lang Syne Report:

I had a nice chat with Aida Bensancon Spencer and Bill Spencer (Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary).  Also asked Arbutus Sider how Lucille Sider is doing.  She's living in Binghamton NY in a nice home rebuilt after it was flooded by the Susquehana a few years ago, still doing some counseling.  

All the pens have been passed out and most of the EEWC-CFT business cards.  Earlier I was beginning my introduction of EEWC by saying "It's a sister organization to CBE," but now I am saying, "It's actually a mother organization to CBE...."  

Marg Herder wrote about the two groups as complementary, but I've heard the word "complementarian" one too many times today.

Thanks to EEWC-CFT member Deb Vaughn for explaining that the statement-of-faith requirement for CBE's exhibit tables is probably meant to keep Wayne Grudem and the Complementarians away from CBE, not us.

Inclusive Language Report: 

Almost every prayer starts with "Father, we just...."  Lots of "Lords."  But my friend Bettina Pedersen reports that she heard God addressed as "Mother Father God" in the Vesper Service.

I went to the workshop on "Gender Language in Worship" by Jeff Miller, who teaches Bible at Milligan College, TN.  Mimi Haddad asked him to do this workshop--she's way beyond most of the CBE members.  

Jeff reported on the number of times the words "Father" and "Son" appear in Greek in the Gospel of John, Hebrews, James, and 1 & 2 Corinthians.  John refers to God as father about 120 times, Hebrews only twice, James three times, 1 Corinthians (Paul's second longest letter) only three times.  Jeff also discussed the frequency of other titles and metaphors for God and how various translations handle Greek pronouns. 

 

What he liked best was that Paul in quoting 2 Samuel 7:14a changes "he will be to me as a son" to "you will be to me as sons and daughters" (2 Corinthians 6:18 in the Greek).  Miller concluded that modern translation changes such as "brothers" to "brothers and sisters" should not be derided as merely "politically correct" but appreciated as "pertinently covenantal and positively Christian."  

After all this, my brain feels splattered.  

On the plane home tomorrow, sleepy or not, I will start Catherine Booth: Laying the Theological Foundations of a Radical Movement (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013) by John Read, who was at the workshop on language in worship today.