Ep. 10: Under the Wings of the Spirit with Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns

Aug 26

Hosted by Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu

Featuring Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns

Does an evolving faith mean everyone has to think or worship like a white Westerner? or throw the faith of their grandmothers away? How do we read the Bible with the Spirit now? In this episode, Pentecostal theologian Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns explores reclaiming wonder and curiosity and humility about our relationship with the Bible as an icon and a portal. Using an oral tradition that includes storytellers, she broods over the text with us and invites us to remember the unnamed daughters and sons. Then Sarah dusts off all her Pentecostal language as she and Jeff have a conversation about gatekeepers, ancestors, Scripture, and living in the age of apocalypse while reclaiming practices once discarded.

P.S. One word of caution: some of the themes in this talk could be triggering for some listeners as we discuss themes of rape and violence. Please listen at your discretion.

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Show Notes

Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns

Website
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Seven Transforming Gifts of Menopause: An Unexpected Spiritual Journey by Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns
Pentecostal Formation: A Pedagogy Among the Oppressed by Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns

Transcript

JEFF: Hi friends, I’m Jeff Chu.

SARAH: And I’m Sarah Bessey

JEFF: Welcome back to the Evolving Faith Podcast.

SARAH: This is a podcast for the wanderers, the misfits, and the spiritual refugees to let you know you are not alone in the wilderness. We are all about hope and we're here to point each other to God. So no matter where you are on your journey, no matter what your story is, you are welcome! We're listening to God, to one another, and to the world.

JEFF: The story of God is bigger, wider, more inclusive and welcoming, filled with more love, than we could ever imagine. There's room here for everyone.

SARAH: There's room here for you.

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SARAH: All right, this is Episode 10 of the Evolving Faith Podcast! Welcome back, everyone. This week, we are welcoming Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns to the podcast. I have been secretly looking forward to this episode all season because it is so unique and it has sparked some really interesting conversations between Jeff and I but also I think has a lot of possibilities for you and for our entire community.

JEFF: Cheryl has a window on the world that is unlike any other I’ve experienced. I had never met nor heard of her before Evolving Faith 2018. And once we were in North Carolina, I remember standing in her presence, and she just kind of stared at me, and it was at once absolutely terrifying, because what in the world, and as I’ve said multiple times, she has a hotline to the Holy Spirit, and you don’t want to mess around with that. But it was also so beautiful, because Cheryl just exudes love and care. And you just know in your bones, without any other evidence to prove it, that she wants the very, very best for you.

SARAH: She does. She truly does. I think it’s a disconcerting thing to feel genuinely seen by someone. And Cheryl is someone that I have been so privileged to know and even dare to call a friend for a few years now. Which feels funny because she is truly like an elder to me, or like an Auntie in the faith. And for people like me, that can feel really rare. We’ve mentioned a couple of times on the show that my origin story is rooted in the Word of Faith/prosperity gospel movement, which has roots in the Pentecostal tradition, which Cheryl shares. And so we have a lot of overlap and crossover and shared tradition and shared language and shared history. And so she was someone that I invited to the table at Evolving Faith because to be honest, I still really love being charismatic. And I’ve gotten more Pentecostal the older I get. I don’t apologize for that. Because I still want to believe there is room at this table for the wonder, the mysticism, the enchantment of these experiences we’re having in the wilderness.

JEFF: I think many of us have been so in our own heads for so long that we really do need teachers who remind us that we’re called to be in awe and wonder when it comes to God and the things of God. Cheryl is a tremendous teacher in that way.

SARAH: You know, we talked a bit about this back in Episode 7 with Mike McHargue, about how an encounter with the Spirit can disrupt us and what charismatics have to offer or provide even in the wilderness, and Cheryl is really a good guide for that. She was someone I turned to while I was in deconstruction myself to find out if I could still have my weird Holy Spirit stuff even as I was reimagining how to read and understand the Bible, understand politics and the world, and engage in conversations and communities and companions that I had been taught to fear. My tradition has a real fear of academia and of higher learning - the conventional wisdom that we heard multiple times when my husband went to seminary for instance was, “Be careful! Those academics, tey’ll steal your fire!” - and our experience was the exact opposite of that. The more I learned about the breadth and depth and width of Christian tradition, of ecumenical learning, the more rooted I became in the wider story of God and the possibilities of faith, the more weird and mystical I became! It relit the fire that had already gone out in me, in my own tradition, if I’d just stayed in that one lane all the time. Cheryl has walked what can be that lonely path of being an academic, Pentecostal, ecumenical, eucharistic, and still filled with this sense of wonder and possibility - and she has for decades.

JEFF: If it’s lonely for her, she doesn’t really let on. I mean, I whine about my loneliness all the time. And she just moves through the world with such incredible grace. And I suspect it’s because she’s one of those people who really does feel God’s presence.

SARAH: I think so. I think so. When I’m in her presence, I genuinely feel like, Oh, this woman— okay, here we go. This woman has been in the secret place of the Most High. Hahahaha! That’s some serious Pentecostal language for you! You’d better brace yourself this episode, oh my goodness.

JEFF: Lord, have mercy. Is that Pentecostal language? That’s the best I can do.

SARAH: It totally counts. Well, we’ll count it. Plus, I do love how Cheryl surprises people. And we’ve talked about this before— They have underestimated her her entire career, because she’s a woman, she’s Southern, she’s Pentecostal, and she walks into these rooms and people underestimate her or think they know her and they know what she’s about for those reasons. And then she starts to preaching and people are like, Oh, look at this nice southern grandmother here to “share” with us and then, well, I’ll just say it this way: Jonathan Martin always calls her a “stone cold killer” when it comes to preaching. Because she gets your defenses down and then just, like, comes straight through with something that really does pierce the heart because she’s so smart and wise and deep and as you said, really loving. And powerful! I think part of the reason she’s such a prophetic voice is because she moves us from simple critique to envisioning and imagining the flourishing of creation.

JEFF: So let’s do the formal introduction, shall we? Over more than three decades of teaching and preaching, Cheryl Bridges Johns has spoken consistently and prophetically for the church’s renewal, the care of creation, the full empowerment of women, and re-engagement with Scripture. She is a professor of spiritual formation and renewal at Pentecostal Theological Seminary in East Tennessee and she’s the author of Pentecostal Formation: A Pedagogy among the Oppressed. Cheryl has been very active in ecumenical work, representing the Pentecostal movement in dialogues with the Roman Catholic Church as well as the Mennonite Church. That reflects her heart for people from different traditions and her posture of wide embrace, which makes her perfect for the Evolving Faith community.

SARAH: Cheryl is a wise elder with a burden for those deconstructing toxic aspects of their faith. She seeks to offer a way to be claimed again beyond the wilderness of criticism. Her latest book is Seven Transforming Gifts of Menopause: An Unexpected Spiritual Journey. Which is such a rare and necessary conversation. She has just created a beautiful guidebook for the spiritual life during menopause that is accessible and filled with honor but also a lot of wonder.

So I did want to mention just for continuity’s sake that Cheryl actually spoke right after Science Mike spoke and did his sermon about climate change and the end of the world so she opens with some of her experience in creation care work. And a word of caution as well: Cheryl does speak about a Bible story that is graphic and contains an account of sexual assault and violence. So please use your discretion if this is a sensitive topic for you and look after yourself. So, without any more rhapsodizing, let’s listen to Dr. Cheryl Bridges-Johns speaking at Evolving Faith 2018 in Montreat, North Carolina.

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CHERYL BRIDGES JOHNS: It’s really hard to follow Mike there. Cause I’m wanting to do my follow-up sermon on that. And just—they were talking earlier about being in meetings that evangelicals don’t want it to be known that they were there, and I’ve been in a lot of those meetings and things were said like, There will be no photos, and there will be no list of people who were here. Several years ago, I was called into a private meeting with evangelicals and scientists on the whole issue of climate. And it was down at one of those plantations in South Georgia where Dick Cheney would go and shoot things, and— But I remember gathering there with people like E.O. Wilson and scientists from the UN panel on global climate change and Rita Caldwell and others that— And I thought they're just, they're going to look, look at us, like we're going to be trying to put creation theories down their throat. So the first few moments were a little awkward there. You know, we weren't sitting there with our big Bibles and all, but we began to talk about one question and testify: Tell about your love for the creation. And we went on and on and on and on and on. And it was the most wondrous meeting. Partnerships came out of that meeting, people that you think would never work together. We're working together and evangelizing together, because we, I felt as a Pentecostal, I can say these things, this heavy mysterium tremendum—heaviness hanging over us like, this was very important. And I remember being out on a walk one evening, and one of the scientists from the UN, a very tall guy, he stopped me and he said, “I never, never knew this had anything to do with religion.” And he was crying. But he said, “Now I know. I know now.”

And it's some, I think, the world we live in is so either/or, isn't it? Science or religion. I did try to evangelize E.O. Wilson, I'll tell you about that story. But it was for me a moment of this shared love that we have together, with people who were so different than us, that can be such a wonderful thing. And I hope you heard that word that he was saying, because I came away from that meeting scared to death, when the scientists like Jim Hansen, James Hansen, got through with his slides, I just wanted to fall down and cry over this. And we, we are very close to, I believe, apocalypse. But I'm not going into that apocalypse.

Let me, let me talk about— the word that I really want to emphasize today is grief. Grieving. My the topic of my little talk here is grieving, brooding, transforming—the Spirit, the Bible, and the brokenness of the world.

I remember the moment very well when I concluded that I was not an evangelical. I was interviewing. I was trying to get out of Tennessee, and get cleaned up a bit, and go into an evangelical seminary, and there was this one that was quite interested in me. And so I go for this grueling, long, four days of interviews. They had a group of faculty there that were known as the Gang of Four. And they had some suspicions about me.

So the final interview with the whole faculty, they put me in an auditorium. And they were up like that, and, and I was in the middle on the floor, and they put me in a chair. I thought, Why don't you just tie my hands behind me and put a light on me? And, and, and they started to grill me. “Well, we know that you Pentecostals are subjective in your reading of Scripture. You read with experience. You, you don't have good hermeneutics. Can you, can you assure us that you will sign on the inerrancy word? And can you, can you just be...?” What I was hearing was: Can you not be yourself? Can you be just like us? And I knew people of my faith had had to do this in order to be accepted in the academy, and especially the evangelical academy, that you just had to throw your grandmother under the bus. And while they were talking at me, I thought of all the saints that I knew who had—get the PowerPoint up here on the first slide here—the people that I knew who had literally eaten the Word, had lived in the Word, had abided in it. They didn't know good hermeneutics, but they had the synergy. And they didn't understand historical critical methodology and all of that. But they knew that Jesus was in the Word and that the Spirit was abiding there. And they just imbibed it. And they would wear their Bibles out. So finally, I'd had enough. And I said, “If there's anyone here who has a low view of Scripture, it's not me. It's you. So your Bible doesn't have any arrows in it. Does that make it the Word of God? It’s a perfect text. Does that make it right? My people believe that the same Spirit that you say inspired the Bible is present when we read the Bible, that it was present throughout the history of the church in interpreting the Bible, and that it is present with us in groups and in individuals. And I just think you kind of have a low view of Scripture.” Needless to say, I did not go there.

Then I remember when I concluded that I really didn't fit in in liberal, progressive circles either. And the next slide there— because you have to throw some other people under the bus there as well. This is an image here of a widow in India, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. And she, in order to raise her five children, she pushed her cart around, and sold dried fish and shrimp. And there was always her Bible in, in this cart. And she would tell people, when they asked her, she said, “This is my boss. This is where my, my God lives. Jesus lives in this.” And, and she had a vision. And Jesus said to her, You got to leave these fish behind. And I want you to preach the gospel. So she took her Bible, this illiterate, she said, “I'm illiterate. Why would you call me?” But the Lord said,

I've called you to do this, people will read for you, you have it, your children are being educated, they will read to you. And so she has, she planted two churches, and established congregations before she passed away.

And I know that there are people who see like Bishop Shelby Spong’s wonderful comment about majority-world Christians—very superstitious kind of Christianity, just one step removed from animism. I'm not going to throw them under the bus.

I gave a paper at a conference, an academic conference at Princeton on majority-world Christianity and all that, and bless her heart, young woman, this student raised her hand, she said, “So, um, when these people mature, they will be just like us, won’t they?” I thought, Well, it might not work that way. So how do we evolve? What is evolving? Do we evolve to everybody looks like white Westerners— thinks that way we do? Is that evolving? Is that maturing? I don't think so. We're kind of a minority in the world. We're a small slice of the world. We’re pretty insignificant in worldwide Christianity. And it's doing quite well without us.

So what am I? I'm just sort of one of those in the margins. My great-grandmother got kicked out of her Methodist church for shouting too much in 1907. And she started her own church. So I grew up in that church. And every Sunday, I'd walk into church and there's her portrait over the vestibule. I had to walk under her every Sunday morning. And it was like, she would look at me and go, “It's hard out there. They're going to throw you out of the church, or you— you— there's a price to pay.” But I thought, Well, that's okay. You land pretty well sometimes when you get kicked out of places. So welcome to the margins. It's not that bad. It's actually, I think, where the Spirit likes to do her best work. And there's the most creative places in the wilderness. If you read the Bible, that's where the Spirit of God often likes to show up, is in that.

So what do I believe about the Bible? I believe that, that the modern text, be it an evangelical text or more liberal, progressive texts, I believe that it has been so disenchanted. So like Max Weber in 1918 lecturing at the University of Munich, he said, you just have to, if you're going to be a student of science, you have to just bear this burden of disenchantment. Now, some of you can't bear it, just quietly leave and go back into the arms of the old churches. We won't think less of you! Well, of course, we will! And then that same year, B.B. Warfield was lecturing at Columbia Theological Seminary. And he said, You know, we have to be scientific about the Bible—inerrant Bible. And that there's no magic. He said, When Jesus went back to glory, he took all the magic with him, all the signs with him, all the miracles with him. But why did he leave us this perfect scientific document—the Bible? That's a disenchanted text too.

So I think that what modernity did is flattened everything. We're the subject, it's the object. And as Walter Brueggemann says, it kind of left us with a feeble text. That is just no match to Enlightenment autonomy.

What do I believe about the Bible though? I believe these things about the Bible. And I believe that the Bible, its life, its— hermeneutics, or how to read it, to me as a secondary issue. The primary issue is, What is its nature? What is its status? What is its ontology? And I believe that its ontology, its purpose, is that it is a vessel that God uses, sets aside, sanctifies, fills with the Spirit, and uses it in the economy of salvation in reconciling the world and in bringing about the new creation. It is a human document. It's got all kinds of mess in it. It's got terrifying things in it. But yet God chooses to use this to bring about this new creation. It's, for me, reading the Bible, performance of the Bible, in preaching and teaching, opens up a liminal space, a thin space. I believe it's an icon. I believe it's a portal. I believe that when I am reading the Bible, or hearing the Bible read, or preaching and teaching, that there is some thin space that occurs, and the— and there's fusion of time and space. And there is this transparency, almost like reading the Gospel of Mark, where that the world that is in God comes very close. And you can almost get the curtain pulled back. So that for me, the Bible is a Spirit word. That it is not either Spirit or Word, but that it's joined as a Spirit Word. I believe it's trans-rational. It's not just irrational. And I believe in the transjective nature of the Bible, not just subjective versus objective, but transjective. I believe that the Spirit enlivens the Bible and the presence of that, so that brings me into, by the life of God, brings me into the life of God, that I enter into a world. I go through a portal. And that doesn't negate the need for good historical research and methodologies. And I in studying and reading it as literature and understanding how the stories function— I love to do that, I love to tease out chiastic structures, I love to look at layers of history in a text— And I like to see what now I'm calling it the echoes in the text, like the inclusioes, and I find that so fascinating. The Talmud says that whenever two people, when whenever people are reading the law, the Shekinah is present. And in this form of Jewish tradition, the Shekinah is the willed presence of God. It is God in feminine form. So if two sit together, and the words of the law are spoken between them, the Shekinah rests there. And I have been where the words of the— words of Scripture have been spoken, and the Shekinah has rested there. But moreover, there's some places that I don't think is very easy to go to. And there are very dark places in Scripture. There's what we called the texts of terror. And there's these other very dark places where I find that I don't want to go there alone. So even then, I don't go without the Spirit. Certainly, I don't want to go discern without the Spirit. And the Talmud also says that when the people are brought low, then Shekinah lies in dust, anguished by human suffering. So there's— the text I just want to close with is just to take you on a dangerous journey into a text that I have so much trouble with, and that's Judges 19.

It's been called the sacrificing of female bodies at the altar of male privilege. Or my title is: Where can the abused, the marginal, find a safe home? And this unnamed woman who is the concubine of this Levite, I believe he's an abuser— she left him for whatever reasons. And he goes to speak tenderly to her. After 30 years of pastoring, I know the tactic. They speak tenderly to you, you know, to get you back. He goes to get her back. She goes from this house of patriarchy to her father's house of patriarchy. He's wanting, and so she is not, even her father's house, it's not a safe house for her. So she and this Levite are headed back home. And they go into the village there of Gibeath. Hospitality is offered by an older man. Patriarchal hospitality is when you take another man under your roof. Then he becomes part of your tribe or your— he's one. You are obligated to care for him. He's one of you. Blood brothers. It's su casa. It is your house, his house. So then you have this mob. It's not about homosexuality, heterosexuality. This is about sexual assault, indiscriminate sexual assault. Who comes and you have this— uh— this man's house who says, you know, don't do anything to this man. Of course not. Here's my virgin daughter. And this is this man's concubine. And then this Levite, who had gone to speak tenderly to her, he seizes his concubine. The two hard words: yeah, he seizes her and he throws her, literally throws her, out to this mob where she is raped and abused all night. And she still seeks a safe house. She crawls back to the doorstep, knowing really full well it's not a safe place. The Levite opens the door the next morning, and there she lies in the dust. He kicks her and she doesn't respond. Even her dead body is not safe, because it is torn into pieces. I believe in reading this text, we are invited by the Shekinah to go into this house of patriarchy and to listen to the deals being made, to look at the women's faces in that room, frozen in horror. To go outside, into that abuse, to go into the dust with a dying unnamed woman. We’re invited with her to seek a safe house, knowing that there is none. And this grief we can call abandonment of— My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So I believe that here is where we call for the brooding of the Spirit, a prayer found in ancient Syriac Christianity: Holy Spirit, the Merciful Mother, spread your wings over our sinful times. So reading the Bible for me is that the Spirit's work in the text is the same as in creation, grieving over the brokenness, brooding over its chaos, and moving toward transformation and new creation.

So sometimes we, we go into the depths of grief, and we call for the Spirit to come to brood over the text, to brood over our brokenness. And there we wait. There we wait, as the Spirit does her gestating work. I can imagine the Spirit of God spreading her wings over the early Church as it begins to attempt to imagine and birth a new order. I can see the Spirit of God stretching her broken wings over our brokenness today. And I see the Spirit of God with the daughters of the purity culture, standing in houses they thought were safe. But hearing their fathers, in order to honor the code of male privilege, offer them their future, their children's future, into the hands of a sexual predator, a strongman who vows to preserve the old order of things.

Some of you are those unnamed daughters and unseen sons, lying low in the dust, trying to find a safe home, a home of love, a home of presence. But hear the words of Jesus: I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. Borne by the wings of the Spirit, Jesus comes and abides with us and makes a home with us. And we get a taste, a taste of that eternal home.

The Spirit carves out what I call deep space in us— creates home there. And we are not orphaned. We're not alone. So if you're tempted to move out of biblical-patriarch territory, to find other powers and other places for meaning, I ask that you choose to push deeper into the text. There you will find the Triune life. Here you will find the wings of the Spirit. Allow the Holy Spirit to grieve with you. And allow yourself to be given over to the grief of others—many who are unnamed, unseen. Find strength as the spirit broods over our broken world. And then move into the light that streams in from the future. This light is God dwelling among mortals. This is the God who will wipe every tear from our eyes. And this is the light that is the death of death.

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JEFF: If you have been listening to and loving The Evolving Faith Podcast, join us for Evolving Faith 2020, the live virtual conference on October 2 and 3, which is coming up soon!

SARAH: Many of us are right now engaging in good, hard, holy work right now to dismantle white supremacy, cultivate love, reimagine and build a faith that works not only for us but for the whole world, and find our way in the wilderness. We need to be reminded of what matters and who is alongside of us. We need connection and inspiration, good conversations and laughter, and, who are we kidding, probably (definitely) even some tears.

JEFF: We need some hope. We are gathering not in spite of these turbulent times, but because of them. Speakers this year include not only Sarah and me but Jen Hatmaker, Sherrilyn Ifill, Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Kate Bowler, Padraig O Tuama, Monica Coleman, Nichole Nordeman, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Barbara Brown Taylor, and so many others. You don’t want to miss a minute of this.

SARAH: And don’t forget either: Your registration gives you full access to all of the content until April 1, 2021. We’ve set a big, rowdy table in the middle of the wilderness, and together, we are having a feast. We saved a spot for you. Go to evolvingfaith.com and register today. You don’t want to miss this moment with this community, It’s pretty special. All right. Let’s get back to the show.

JEFF: Can I just say, as a word geek, that I adore how Cheryl uses words? And I don’t want anyone to mistake that as me making a comment about how she talks or her accent. No. It’s about her word choice. It’s about how she deploys these words that we understand but that we don’t typically use, so that it wakes us up. It compels us to listen a little more closely, because it’s at once familiar and not. Like “brooding.” I have not used the word “brooding” maybe ever. And it is an excellent word. Or “imbibed.” That is another word we don’t typically use, especially in the context of God or faith, but it’s perfect.

SARAH: I love that too. I love that too. That’s very much a Pentecostal thing that I have loved for years because they are students of words and also of the Word in a way that really enriches language and reenchants language at the same time.

There are so many aspects of her talk that I want to discuss because I think that they are very relevant to our community and they make room for conversations we’re having, you know, for instance, even in the Facebook group, in the afterparty. I remember being in the green room after she preached this and seeing so many of our speakers in tears by the time she ended that talk. There was just a tenderness and a love to her words, a care that was really evident in the room.

JEFF: I don’t think we’ve talked about this yet this season, but I think it’s relevant, given that we’re doing a podcast, which seems to be the new technologically enabled campfire around which so many stories are being told, and also given Cheryl’s anecdote honoring the church planter in India who could not read: Oral tradition matters. Preaching matters. Telling stories out loud matters. We receive information differently than when we’re reading a text.

SARAH: I do think that there’s an important word there for us. Because in a lot of ways it reminds me of what Sandra talked about back in episode 8, about the women in Swaziland, singing, “He walks with us,” as they cared for and mourned the men in their community who were dying of AIDS. There can be a real superiority to white, Western progressivism and evangelicalism that Cheryl names. Because she asks us, “What is evolving?” Are we so prideful that we think everyone will evolve to look in this particular way? Is that evolving? And so what does it look like to honor your elders, honor our grandmothers, as we do this work? And I think that’s a challenge for us and also a really exciting invitation.

JEFF: I think that is an important thing to keep in mind. Sometimes I see this language of being “further” along in deconstruction or reconstruction, as if it’s linear. And I don’t think it is. For me, honoring one’s elders is an incredibly important part of my tradition and my culture. We believe we are who we are in large part because of our ancestors. That’s not to say that we necessarily agree with everything they believed. But I don’t think honoring one’s elders means you have to subscribe to every tenet or every doctrine that they held to. One can say that they did their best to be faithful while recognizing that our own faith has evolved in a different way and into a different form—and one can say all that without saying that what we have now is superior. We have to resist that natural propensity to rank everything. I don’t think God works that way.

SARAH: It’s a real tension to hold. It’s a real tension to hold, I think. Because the initial temptation is to, I think, caricaturize maybe the people who first introduced us to Jesus or first gave us a container for God even. So I don’t think the only way to honor our grandmothers is to remain the same. We can honor while still embarking, while still questioning. You know, one thing she said that I loved was the line, “You land pretty well sometimes when you get kicked out of places.” And I really love that image of her grandmother being kicked out of the church and simply going and starting her own. Like, what a badass. We talk often about the pain and isolation of an evolving faith but there is also this creativity and permission of it too. That when you get kicked out of a place, you can land pretty well. You can land in the margins, where the Spirit does her best work. And I love the image of that and I think I’m going to hold onto that one.

JEFF: I love that image too. I love the sense of freedom and liberation. But can I just add a word of caution, though? I worry that there can also be this glorification of the margins—and I don’t want anyone to romanticize how much it can just suck to feel ostracized or to romanticize and gloss over, maybe, how real the toll can be of bearing the burden of discrimination. To be on the margins is not some badge of honor that one works toward.

SARAH: Right. That’s a really good point and good reminder. It’s not just a spiritual location. It’s a social location.

JEFF: Okay, speaking of social location: I’m glad you said that. I think it’s really important to return to the anecdote about the woman in India who can’t read yet has this beautiful possibility for making a difference open up. So how do we on the one hand say that we value learning and we honor study and on the other hold onto the truth that seminary education is not a prerequisite for knowing God or teaching others about God or testifying to God’s work? It’s something I think we really struggle with, at least in the West. I know that when I was in seminary, there was all kinds of ugly gatekeeping—like, anyone who didn’t have an M.Div. or even a Ph.D., couldn’t have an official teaching role. Praxis was always subordinate to theory. Lived experience didn’t seem to count for much, unless it was the lived experience of someone who sat in an endowed chair or the lived experience of someone who had already read X, Y, and Z books.

SARAH: I feel literally allergic to that. I think that’s part of the charismatic rebellion against that, maybe. Like, we were kicked out of churches and seminaries for it and so then we just turned our backs, like, oh we don’t need you anyway! We didn’t want to go to seminary or be ordained anyway! So we’ll start our own thing. And there is a beauty to that and a real danger too. Which I’ve experienced both sides of that—both the beauty and the real danger too. We have joked a few times about how my tradition is scared of academics but that’s not actually it, I think. I think part of that is rebellion, part of it is a worry about the Spirit being “tamed,” some of it is resentment. But it’s also a sense of critique and prophetic challenge about how the Spirit’s work not being limited or controlled or measured or just in one particular location. I could write whole books about my thoughts on this topic - and, I mean, just even in our production meeting, I think I maybe ranted for a good thirty minutes on this while you laughed hysterically. But I want to keep us back on track.

JEFF: I love a good Sarah Bessey rant. It’s just such a rare delight. And I feel like the Holy Spirit has smiled on me when I get to receive one.

SARAH: I think at one point you put your hands up and said, Oh here’s the eight wing!

JEFF: I wasn’t wrong.

SARAH: You were not wrong.

JEFF: But one of the gifts of a space like Evolving Faith is that we do get to learn from different traditions. Right, Sarah? You and I come from such different backgrounds and have ended up in different places. And I hope we get to honor those different traditions but also critique faithfully those traditions. I don’t think anyone has a monopoly on the precise truth nor does anyone have a monopoly on heresy. I’m pretty sure we’re all getting something wrong.

SARAH: Said my Enneagram 6 friend. And if you chalk that up to depravity, so help me…

JEFF: No comment.

SARAH: Okay, I want us to get into her words about the Bible. Because I think this might be helpful for some of us who have a very tense or complicated relationship with Scripture. She talks about the Bible not as a rule book or a manual but as an icon, as a portal, a thin place to meet with God. I really love that language and that shift and imagery—that idea of a portal. Again she includes not just reading the Bible there but preaching and hearing and oral tradition too. Which sets a wider table. She talks about a fusion of time and space. So reading the Bible in that posture, with the Holy Spirit, is the same work as the work of creation.

JEFF: It is a very different thing to sit down with the Bible and ask, “OK, what am I supposed to do now to live up to this?” or “What do these words literally mean?” than to say, “What is God doing through this?” and “What might these stories be stirring up inside me?” I think that latter posture is what Cheryl is inviting us into, and in some ways, I wonder whether it’s harder than the academic study, because there’s such a tremendous element of mystery and uncertainty about it.

SARAH: Well, going back to the word that you mentioned earlier— that word “brooding” is doing a lot of work here in that moment. Because it’s not simply ‘brooding” for the sake of better opinions and doctrine, it’s brooding for the sake of the broken and the weary and the grieving. There is a mothering energy to that sort of brooding to me. And Cheryl connects the story of scripture to us today. The shift she makes to one of the most upsetting stories in the Bible, one that deeply disturbs and troubles and upsets us and saying, “This isn’t just then, this is now, and this is us.” The daughters and sons of purity culture, standing at houses they thought were safe and only hearing their fathers honor the code of male privilege, sacrificing them at the altar of the old order of things or to hold onto power. When she named them, these unnamed daughters and sons in the room, there was real, visceral weeping in that room. Because she named that. I think she was actually brooding over their stories and covering their brokenness.

JEFF: We have largely lost that tradition of seeing God as a brooding, mothering hen. But the Gospel of Matthew quotes Jesus himself using that imagery. And St. Anselm has this strange and lovely prayer, in which he addresses Jesus this way: “And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother? Are you not the mother who, like a hen, gathers her chickens under her wings? Truly, Lord, you are a mother; for both they who are in labor and they who are brought forth are accepted by you.” That prayer came to mind when you were talking about those with these painful stories with the Church, because I really do believe that Jesus wants the brokenness to be covered by his wholeness and his goodness.

SARAH: The imagery and metaphor of God as mother has been such a lifeline for me these past few years. I know I wrote about it a bit in my last book. But I don’t know that I could ever get to the depths of how much it means to me, how much I have felt it saved my life.

Cheryl makes a nod towards something that I believe really deeply and have said multiple times these last few years: that we are in an apocalypse. And that is some serious Pentecostal energy for you!

JEFF: I just realized we forgot to send out the bingo gameboards for this episode. Surely someone has a Pentecostal bingo by now. Because you just said apocalypse.

SARAH: Apocalypse is like the center square. So in the truest sense of the word, apocalypse is an unveiling, a revealing. Things that have been hidden in darkness are coming to the light and it is earth-shattering. And this talk was two years ago. We were still in rather early days of the Me Too movement, the Church Too movement, Time’s Up, the revelations of sexual abuse and predation in churches. And that story has only continued to grow and devastate and be fully revealed. And this word that she brings then isn’t comprehensive but it’s particular: Allowing yourself to be brooded over, allowing yourself to be given over to the grief of others. Many of us who were in that room felt unnamed. And she named that in that moment. And then that invocation to move into the light, to God dwelling among mortals. That sort of promise, that sort of hopefulness, is really deeply ingrained in the Christian story - and still I find deeply compelling that every tear is wiped away, all things are redeemed, all things are restored and made right. Not in a dismissive pat on the head someday way but in a muscular, hopeful, embodied sort of way.

JEFF: But it can be unspeakably hard to live in the time when tears are still being caused, not wiped away. We have this vision of what could be and indeed the promise of what will be, which makes the ugliness of what is and the pain of what has been that much harder to bear sometimes.

SARAH: That is so true. Now that you say that, I think that might be why I turned back towards some of the practices and postures of my tradition even as I evolved theologically and am still in that journey here in the wilderness. I can’t say that I see these things the same way I once did, which was maybe more like magic spell-ish. But it’s because I need the embodiment of hope to survive in this. I need that thinness of time and space and the nearness of the Spirit to our grieving. I need that brooding of God in our broken places. I remember talking to Cheryl once kind of quietly about how I was still praying in tongues a lot simply because, maybe now more than ever, I’ve hit the limits of language for this sort of longing and pain and hopefulness that I can feel in these spaces. She nodded very seriously at my little confession and said, “Well, I've taken to anointing oil and prayer cloths again.” So I feel like I’m in good company, reclaiming and reimagining practices that are, maybe to outside eyes, a bit weird and yet rooted in tradition, in a way that was precious to some of our grandmothers— It can also be a form of healing too. It’s a way of saying, “I still want this” and I’m taking it with me even if I understand it differently and I practice it differently, I’m taking this thing that’s precious with me, even as I embark into this new place.

JEFF: Look, who am I to critique any that? I am the one who finds lessons about God in piles of worm shit.

SARAH: All right. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Evolving Faith podcast, friends. You can find all of the links mentioned, info about Dr. Cheryl Bridges Johns and her work, info about how to call in to share your own voices with us, and a full transcript in our show notes at evolvingfaith.com/podcast. You can find me at sarahbessey.com for all of my social media, my newsletter, and of course my books.

JEFF: Sign up for my newsletter at jeffchu.substack.com. And remember the Evolving Faith Podcast is produced by us, Sarah Bessey and Jeff Chu, along with Lucy Huang. Thanks to Audrey Assad and Wes WIllison for the music. And we will be back next week with an episode featuring our friend Nish Weiseth, who has a timely word about politics and neighborliness. Until next time, friends, remember that you are loved.

Sarah Bessey