Episcopalian Women are not Pagans I heard about an article on Christianity Today with the headline Weblog: Episcopal Church Officially Promotes Idol Worship. What rubbish. The person who compiled this (it is a blog entry, and not an act of journalism) has started to push the idea that Episcopalians are not Christians. More rubbish. Episcopalians are Christian. Just because one of Church's national organizations publishes a sample liturgy on their web site does not mean that the Church promotes it as a valid liturgy. It isn't. Well, by valid I should point out that it can't be used in an official parish worship service.

The Episocal Church's Women's Ministry has removed the page, but the CT article offers this excerpt:

The plate of raisin cakes is raised and a woman says, "Mother God, our ancient sisters called you Queen of Heaven and baked these cakes in your honor in defiance of their brothers and husbands who would not see your feminine face. We offer you these cakes, made with our own hands; filled with the grain of life—scattered and gathered into one loaf, then broken and shared among many. We offer these cakes and enjoy them too. They are rich with the sweetness of fruit, fertile with the ripeness of grain, sweetened with the power of love. May we also be signs of your love and abundance." The plate is passed and each woman takes and eats a cake.

Now this does look like a Eucharist celebration. The breaking of bread in community is a memorial of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This liturgy does not mention Jesus (at least, the excerpt doesn't). The prayer to 'Mother God' is fine. There's nothing wrong with it. Worshiping God is a complicated thing, because God is ineffible, but worshipping God with female imagery is perfectly fine.

I don't know how visible the disclaimer is on the Women's Ministries site that points out that liturgy published on the site are not official liturgies for corporate worship, but it should probably be bigger, so people like Ted Olsen can see it. His blog entry didn't appear to show that he was familiar with how the Episcopal Church works, so his headline was probably meant to scare and try to fuel a few more fires in the American Christian Culture against the Episcopal Church.  ¶ 10:47 AM 0 comments

  Created in the Image of God

I was reading "The History of God" by Karen Armstrong, but it's slow reading because I react and think about every paragraph with my own thoughts. I have heard time and time again that only the male of our human race was created in God's image, and the female was created as a 'derivative' creation to help the male. This is the basis of the oppression of women and Christian sexism.

I decided to investigate the two creation stories from the book of Genesis and I was surprised to find out that the idea that the female is a 'secondary' creation aren't founded in the Bible.

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26,27 (NRSV)

The second creation story describes this differently:

...then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

Genesis 2:7 (NRSV)

In this version, woman is not created until verse 22.

This tells me that both men and women are made in the image of God. Since I try to avoid assigning gender-identifications to God, I interpret this to mean that both men and women are images of God. There is no Biblical basis for discrimination against women. Of course, there are probably several hundred references to the inferiority of women in the Bible, but going back to the spiritual beginning of the world, it is all unfounded.

  ¶ 1:51 PM 0 comments