Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

November 9, 2011

What If We Viewed The Gospel Through The Lens Of Relationship?

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 9:49 pm

“Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.”

– Margaret J. Wheatley

We are relational beings, created in the image of the One who loves us and sought connnection — personal, intimate, familiar, and emotional connection — with us before we could ever even be aware of Divine love, much less accept and embrace it. That that makes masculinists and traditionalists squirm — all this “feminized sentimentality” about a God who desires “connection” hardly leaves room for a Victor intent on slaughtering the people who, coincidentally, they hate, too — is a tragic but true indictment of Western Christiandom.

Margaret J. Wheatley doesn’t have to be a disciple of Jesus to offer tremendous insight on who we are and what we need. If all truth is truly God’s truth, then she has a grasp on it that makes the conservative, patriarchal, brass-knuckled grasp of those who insist that primary importance be placed on “getting it right” pale — shiver, shudder, and shrink away — by comparison.

Why does the Church, the relational Body of the Lord Jesus who died to make a way for Love to come into our hearts, so disdain the idea of relationship and intimacy? I submit that it’s the pernicious effect of a masculinist, patriarchal, hierarchical and power-based wresting away of the Gospel from the living, loving example of its Author, the Creator and Lover Christ Jesus. And that can only flourish when the feminine and the female are disdained, separated from identification with the Yahweh whose image lives equally in both women and men.

The greatest expression of hatred of God begins with hatred of the feminine and perversion of the masculine, and the Church too often has provided succor to God’s enemies — those whose disdain for the feminine not only holds Eve to blame for Adam’s sin, but poisons God’s creation with an elevation of the masculine, a degradation of the feminine, and utter contempt for the God who identifies in both.

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