Women and War, 2 Like a warm breeze on a perfect summer morning, a voice of grace and compassion rings across 3000+ years in this Sunday’s reading from the Old Testament (RSV, Year C, track 1). The voice doesn’t belong to a grown man, or to a woman full of years. It is the voice of a child—a girl who was kidnapped...
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Bible Women and War 1 Warfare has been a constant as long as human beings have roamed the earth. The sad truth is this: war happens. We do everything we can to avoid it, but combat occurs, both in distant parts of the world, and in our own towns (Orlando, Beirut, Minneapolis, Aleppo, New York, etc.). What might we learn from Bible women regarding warfare and conflict?...
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My goodness. Dreams in scripture are a big deal. They’re all over the place in the Old and New Testaments…twenty-one of them to be exact,* not including various visions…and only one is reported by a woman. The woman is, of course, Pontius Pilate’s wife. Remembered as a saint in the Greek Orthodox Church, she is also seen as a possible secret...
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No human being in the New Testament, besides Jesus, listens better than Mary of Bethany. As we go deeper into Lent and come closer to the cross, consider the unmatched gift she gave him: the deep and profound gift of listening. And it’s not just a gift for him—for through her endeavor, we learn how profoundly active and passionate real...
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My mother-in-law always grieved Leonard, her tall and handsome father. She was three when he died; he was twenty-eight. He was a millworker in the woolen mills of Lawrence: young and healthy one week and gone the next. Family history says that he went into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1918, thirty long miles away, and "didn’t come out." Best...
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Many women in the Bible suffer, caught in the midst of unimaginably harsh choices and pain. Think of the woman in Judges 19, whom we'll look at today. Most Christians do not know her story, and are surprised to find it in scripture. We’ve swept the pieces of it—and her—under the collective Judeo-Christian rug for 3000 years now. And she's not the...
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Let’s be real. Everyone knows the story of Abraham, but how about the comparable story of the widow of Zarephath? Both were about sacrifice and beloved sons. Abraham delivered his son Isaac to the funeral pyre—and would have killed the boy, had not God’s angel intervened. The widow of Zarephath also saw her son on death’s doorstop, although—unlike Abraham—such a condition...
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40,000 human skulls. They haunt me. Six weeks ago, I was in Europe, celebrating twenty-five years of marriage and visiting the towns along the Danube River. It was a wonderful trip—yet what I can’t get out of my mind is the sight of 40,000 neatly stacked human skulls, in the Sedlac Ossuary in Kutna Hora, a small town in the Czech...
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She had freckles on her face. She kept standing up to tug her short-shorts down; they pinched her, she said. She told me her name was “Josi,” without an “e.” And that she was eleven, in middle school, and that her school was “really safe — “that nothing ever happens there.” Her long legs would make her a good tree-climber. I hope she...
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Where do mothers find the strength to let their children go? One of the more dynamic women in scripture shows up this Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary: Hannah. Known for her great bargain with God, her story is full of emotion, pathos, and yearning. She also leaves us with a range of questions similar to ones faced by women in...
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