TELL IT, SISTER! OR, MULLAHS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE A WORLD TO GAIN, AND ONLY YOUR MINDS TO LOSE!

In a decision which can only be described as riding the great tsunami crest of history, the Southern Baptist Convention announced in June that the Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest (Southern) California, will be ‘disfellowshipped,’ or as we used to say in the old-time religion, excommunicated, or at least placed under papal interdict if Baptists had a pope.?‘Why?’ you may ask, since both rather conventionally conservative Fern Creek Church, ?with its solo pastor who is also music minister and Sunday School superintendent, the Rev. Linda Barnes Popham, and Rick Warren, superstar preacher and author and Lead Pastor of the cutting edge everything Saddleback Mega-Church are ‘doing well’ by any American standard, and also by the standards of the Gospel broadly construed.?The hint lies in Rev Barnes Popham's given name, ‘Linda,’ and also in the fact that Saddleback Church includes more than one female pastor on its very large staff.?Though not the earthshaking tragedy this might be in some other more ‘connexional’ church polities, exclusion still hurts (https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/religion/2023/06/14/southern-baptist-convention-news-women-pastors-saddleback-church-fern-creek-amendment-ban/70290969007/ | https://www.npr.org/2023/08/20/1194905115/a-church-that-was-expelled-because-of-its-female-pastor-still-has-the-support-of ).?

We need not go into the reasons for not ordaining women in the women-not-ordaining Christian churches, which still includes my own, though not because I told he Vatican to make it so—Rome really pays very little attention to me, except for Good Pope Francis telepathically through prayer.?Those ‘reasons’ are approximately the same across the interreligious board, basically citing statements in two- to four-thousand-year-old sacred texts that don’t provide for female leadership—except for the Blessed Virgin Mary.?Now there’s leadership if ever I saw it!??And she is a whole lot easier to talk to than anybody in the Triune Godhead, I can tell you from personal experience.?Anyway, it’s basically a matter of, “Listen up! ?We speak for God, and God does not want anybody but us running His show.?So ladies, shut up, put that veil on an keep it on, but come running when anything needs to be done and me and the rest of the boys have no idea what to do.”

For Catholics, Cardinals included, and some others, it may just be a problem of limited imagination.?Many just cannot feature it, a woman at the altar and/or in the pulpit.?It took this Catholic during his 30-year Lutheran detour, 22 years of which were under call in ordained ministry, about all of five minutes to get used to the idea, and, looking back on those years I will tell anybody that some of my most trusted, generous and downright courageous pastoral colleagues were women, including one bishop who should write the standard textbook for all denominations on how to be a good and faithful bishop.?Maybe it was the practicality of my Jesuit education that primed me for accepting women in ordered ministry, and in every other sector of human endeavor.?This reminds me of one Jesuit in particular who may have a big surprise in store for us couple of billion Roman Catholics one Sunday morning when we wake up to find that ‘Father’ is now to be addressed as ‘Mother,’ where appropriate.?I would not put it past him.?In a little noticed but monumental change Pope Francis has already revised canon law to permit qualified women not only to serve on but to head each and every ‘dicastery’ of the Roman Curia, meaning they can run the whole Church and probably are already doing so for all we know (https://www.usccb.org/news/2023/womens-way-pope-opens-path-more-women-vatican-church#:~:text=Pope%20Francis%20has%20also%2C%20for,and%20secretaries%20at%20plenary%20assemblies).

But back to those Southern Baptists and their Convention and back also to those seminary professors at places like Baylor Divinity School who, if they want their next promotion or to keep their jobs at all, had better come up with good reasons for dumping California-dreaming Rick Warren and poor Pastor Linda in Louisville.?Boys, what all o’ y’all need to do is to form a global brain trust across interreligious lines. If you do his, you will find a whole lot more resonance for keeping women in their place than in Christianity per se which includes all those subversive elements, such as Jesus hanging out with women he was not married to and talking a blue streak with them, healing their female problems—even though they weren’t Jews!—and saving the life of at least one working girl, and in the nick of time!?Plus, there's his Mother. And then there was the Apostle Paul with his many women helpers such as Lydia of Thyatira, the fine cloth importer (Acts 16), Damaris of Athens the philosopher (Acts 17) and Thekla (from the extra-Biblical ‘Acts of Paul and Thekla’), saints every one of them, though not in the Baptist calendar.?And then that dogone passage in Galatians about there being neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, and--Yessiree!--neither male nor female. You boys need help, but you have to know where to look, and the New Testament is the wrong place for that.

I have a friend and former teaching colleague who is also a cantor in the Reform Movement of Judaism.?She comes from a long line of cantors.?Cantor Sheila can take you to a place in Williamsburg-Brooklyn, NYC, where she lives and in this place you can get to know gentlemen from several branches of the Hassidic Movement, Sathmar, Lubavitcher or what have you. ?Cantor Sheila got to know some of them one hot summer afternoon when she was out riding her bicycle and wearing her short shorts and when she accidentally crashed her bike into the curb and ended up a bloody mess with multiple abrasions on the pavement, nothing broken, but everything hurting.?Immediately she said, her face was shaded from the hot son by a perfect circle of silent men formed around her?“Oh, did they come to help and protect you,” I asked. ?“No, they just stared at me, like I was a bug.”?“What??Why?!” “Because I was wearing shorts and my head was not covered by either a scarf or a wig.?And I said a couple of bad words in Yiddish.”?Those sound like promising contacts for your Interreligious Misogynist Brain Trust (IRMBT).

I see travel in your future though, far from Louisville or Waco or Brooklyn.?Next stop Tehran, Iran.??Yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which almost no Iranian ever wanted and of which almost every Iranian is now sick to death is definitely the place for you to go, but with a stopover, just a quick one, at Kabul, capital of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.??Here you can see in both living and dead color your dream of God in his heaven and all’s right in a totally male-dominated world.???Why, they have a special branch of the police forces in these two no-nonsense, no-woke-here countries.??In the Islamic Emirate there is the Morality Police Department of the Ministry for the Combatting of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, which has as its motto those immortal words of Oscar Wilde, “Hypocrisy is my only virtue!” and in the Islamic Republic also the Morality Police of the Ministries of Justice and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (not ever to be confused with the Ministry of Intelligence—Yes, they do have one).?Corresponding to their economies and respective cultural proximities to the Neolithic Period, Taliban-occupied Afghanistan and Mullah-controlled Iran have low-tech and high-tech approaches to the problem of women.?

The Islamic Emirate uses basically sticks and stones, and the occasional sword for female decapitation, or male as well as in the case of a young couple there recently executed because they had the unheard of temerity to fall in love.?The Islamic Republic uses its higher tech capabilities, electricity for example, and the billions of sanctioned dollars the Mullahs have learned how to free up from the west through hostage-taking.?Thus does the Islamic Republic refine its unending campaign to put the fear of God and the fear of the State (those being exactly the same) into the heart of every Iranian, whether still imprisoned in the physical and mental hell they have created in the land that gave the whole world culture and civilization, or in the Iranian diaspora.?Word has it that the men of the Ministry of Justice, Etc. are taking lessons from their new friends, the Russians, who learned so many ways to torture and kill people in Chechnya, especially women, and how to make them sterile. ?Of course, the Russians have another laboratory for inhumanity working round the clock in Ukraine, while the nations of the world occasionally make a comment in the UN General Assembly, but Russia still keeps its seat on the Security Council.?The Revolutionary Council of the Islamic Republic announced recently a new set of laws further repressing women and may be depended upon to be opening ‘detention centers’ for the masses of new arrest that will be required to enforce these laws.?There too, the Russians have great expertise to share.

What the Mullahs and other members of the IRMBT were not counting on is the fact that you can only push intelligent and moral people so far, and the Iranian people, led by Iranian women, have been pushed about as far as can be, and will be pushed no further.?The Afghan people, having been abandoned by their American protectors and having been physically degraded to the point of penury verging on starvation, might be approaching the point of exhaustion and collapse except for one fact.?‘Pashtun’ was not in the world-wide vocabular before that noble and fiery tribe led all Afghans (with American ‘logistical support’) to drive out the Soviet invaders.?But now we all know what it means, and we have a pretty good idea of what it means to get these folks on your case.??The mothers and fathers of Afghanistan, their daughters and their sons are inheritors of that fiery spirit.?The Emir & Company are living on borrowed time, just like the Mullahs of Iran.

And you know what??I’ll bet not a single member of Pastor Linda’s congregation in Louisville, Kentucky, is worried about anybody but their dear pastor who shows them the love of Jesus any way she can.??They are not losing any sleep over you, boys, or over your disapproval.

Let the people say ‘Amen!’

?Guy Christopher Carter, August 2023

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