Raising an Ebenezer at the church of her(March 2005)
by Richard O. Johnson, associate editor
Copyright 2005 Americzn Lutheran Publicity Bureau. All rights reserved.
In
Forum Letter’s December issue, we included Pr. Marshall Hahn’s report on a pair of Episcopal clergy in Pennsylvania who achieved notoriety when it became known they were also priests of the ancient pagan religion of Druidry (“Christians 2—Druids 0”). Of course, as Mom used to say, when you point a finger at someone else, three are pointing back to you. Fittingly, we recently came upon the website of an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) congregation. Frankly, it makes Druidry look rather traditional.
A new form of churchThe congregation is Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco, a fine old historic place, the “mother church” of the Augustana Synod on the Pacific coast. Like many urban congregations, Ebenezer has seen better days. Baptized membership is reported in the low 60s, down from over 600 twenty years ago, making it the smallest ELCA congregation in the City by the Bay, with the exception of a predominantly Hispanic group in the Mission District. But, as their web page proudly states, “a new form of church is happening at Ebenezer,” and it gives a whole new meaning to the concept of “mother church.” Under the leadership of Pr. Stacy Boorn, it centers around “a lively, engaging, thoroughly inclusive and feminist service of worship.” This group is “a diverse community” (well, as diverse as an average attendance of 30 can be) “standing firmly within the Christian tradition in order to reconstruct the divine by reclaiming her feminine persona in thealogy [sic], liturgy, church structure, art, language, practices, leadership, and acts of justice.”
Even though the feminist stuff gets the lead on the web page, a closer reading suggests that the “feminist liturgy” is only offered on the first Sunday of the month. Of course “all other worship events are inclusive, diverse, and dynamic” — not that we had any doubts about that. And just in case you were wondering, the congregation is “Reconciling in Christ” with links to Lutherans Concerned, the Lutheran gay lobbying outfit.
Goddess beadsWhat, you ask, might it mean for a congregation to “stand firmly within the Christian tradition”?
One answer comes into view when you read about the brand new worship event beginning this month, the Goddess Rosary prayer service. Each Wednesday evening the sanctuary will be open for prayer and meditation. Not only will there be “candles to light and bells to ring,” but they will make available Goddess Rosary Beads and booklets with Christian Goddess prayers. Each quarter hour there will be a “community spoken Goddess Rosary.” It goes in part like this:
Hail Goddess full of grace.
Blessed are you and blessed are all the
fruits of your womb.
For you are the MOTHER of us all.
Hear us now and in all our needs.
Blessed be!Now we have never been especially attracted to the Rosary, not even to the various attempts to make it ecumenically acceptable to Protestants. But then we don’t have any congenital apprehension about it, either. If rosary beads help one pray, then we’re for it — with one caveat, of course, which is that prayers advertised as being “within the Christian tradition” ought to be somewhere in the neighborhood of the actual tradition being claimed.
But that does not seem to be the thrust of Ebenezer’s “new form of church.” Here God is the Eternal Feminine, the Divine Mother, ready to cater to our every whim. Here’s a lovely prayer by Miriam Therese Winter: “Our Mother who is within us, we celebrate your many names. Your wisdom come, your will be done unfolding from the depths within us . . .” Well, you get the idea. (Miriam Therese Winter, by the way, is the ex-nun feminist spiritual advisor who convinced Hillary Clinton to role-play Eleanor Roosevelt while she was First Lady. It was a stress reliever from Whitewater, Monicagate, her husband’s impeachment trial, and all that.)
The will of ourselves“Within us,” of course, is exactly the root of the problem with all of this. We human beings want a deity whose will unfolds from within ourselves. Makes it easier to follow that way, huh? Safely encapsulated within our own identity, this deity is very accommodating, affirming everything we think we are. We want a deity who is like us, a reflection of us. We don’t want Incarnation so much as our own divinization, on our own terms. We want a divine being with “many names.” We’ll pick the one that works best for us. We don’t want the stodgy old God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That God is, like, you know, way, way retro. Especially, we suppose, in California.
And so let’s find a different god, or goddess, or godthing. The web site contains a poem that seems to speak to that desire. Mother God begins “God to me / Is my dark-haired mother, / Stroking my forehead / As she lullabies me to sleep.” A colleague remarked after reading it, “This is great news! I can generally get anything I want from my mom!”
Divinely humorousThere is a highly precise and technical theological term for this human view of God. The word is “idolatry.” But in the ELCA, as in most American churches these days, we are not prepared to use it. Nor do we use “heresy,” because nobody believes in heresy anymore, and “flakiness” is regarded as impolite. So we prefer to speak about “contextualization” and “niches” and “theological exploration” and “spiritual journey,” and the like. Well, as God once said through the psalmist with surprised incredulity, “You thought that I was one just like yourself!” (Psalm 50:21).
For further information, and directions to Ebenezer, we urge you to visit their website, the aptly named <
www.herchurch.org>. When you do visit, remember, a sense of humor is crucial. We recommend keeping in mind another psalm: “He who sits in the heavens
laughs.” (Psalm 2:4)
Copyright 2005 ALPB. All rights reserved
