Month: August 2013

New post on Christian Feminism Today: Mutual Submission in This Time in This Place

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I have a blog post up at Christian Feminism Today discussing the Household Codes and mutual submission in the New Testament and for today: Mutual Submission in This Time in This Place:

I think we do ourselves a disservice if we simply fall back to the New Testament Household Codes and say that’s the way it should be. That set of Household Codes won’t work in this time and place, but what Household Codes will? One where children see parents sharing power and not insisting on having their own way all the time? One where couples decide that a smaller house and fewer things is the way to go, because neither one wants to spend that much time at work and they’d rather spend more time together? A code that encourages workers to take their vacation time instead of being workaholics?

Yes, it’s much easier to just fall back to Ephesians 5 and say let’s do this! The Bible says it, so it’s good enough for me! But does that convey a contemporary Christian message of mutual submission? Or is it just a cop-out, so we don’t have to do the hard work of figuring out how to be Christians in this time and this place? I don’t have the answers, and honestly, I believe it’s a question that needs to be worked out in our faith communities.

This blog post is part of the One to Another syncroblog at Rachel Held Evans’ blog this week.

“Submit One To Another: Christ and the Household Codes,” which will focus on those frequently-cited passages of Scripture that instruct wives to submit to their husbands, slaves to obey their masters, children to obey their parents, and Christians to submit to one another (Ephesians 5:21-6:9, Colossians 3:12-4:6; 1 Peter 2:11-3:22).

Sermon: The Bent and Burdened Woman

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The Bent and Burdened Women
Luke 13:10-17

Luke is one of my favorite books and my favorite Gospel. So it was a given for me that this is what I was going to preach on. Luke is full of stories of underdogs. Luke tells the stories of the poor, sick, and women. I come from a poor, working class, blue collar family, and Luke is our Gospel. Probably one of the reasons I like it so much as well as Luke has a lot of stories about women. Luke focuses on the marginalized and poor, which includes widows, lepers, tax collectors and others society has outcast. The outcasts take center stage in Luke. Sinners and misfits—that’s who Luke’s Gospel is about and for. At this point in Luke Jesus has already encountered several outcasts: for starters the disciples are a motley crew consisting of fishermen, tax collectors, and zealots. Then there are the lepers, more tax collectors, paralytics, and sinful women. In Luke we have the stories where Samaritan is a good guy, and a rebellious son who is forgiven and restored. The religious leaders accused of Jesus being a friend to the worst kinds of sinners. And they were right. He was and still is.

Today we meet another one of those misfits: a woman whose back is so bent that she’s literally bent over. All she sees is the ground. She can’t straighten up and she can’t look up. She talks to people’s feet, and they answer her stooped and bent back. But today her life is going to change. And today Jesus is going to get into another controversy with a Jewish leader. Because this day is the Sabbath, and Jesus is going to choose to “work” today. Back in chapter 6 of Luke, Jesus had run-ins with the religious authorities over what could and couldn’t be done on the Sabbath.

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Five years ago on Shawna R. B. Atteberry: You mean I can be a feminist homemaker? Really?

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In order to start writing for the blog again, I decided to take a look at what I have done in years past. This one popped up for me right away as I still have a love/hate relationship with housework. I love a clean house; I hate cleaning. And as a feminist the idea that I should do the brunt of the work rubs me the wrong way, even if I do work from home, and it’s convenient. I decided since I have never resolved this sticky issue, to post this post again. Earlier this summer I was glad to see that I’m not the only Christian feminist woman who just doesn’t know how to resolve the tension between feminism, house work, and being a good Christian. Melanie Springer Mock, Kendra Irons, and Letha Scanzoni took up this very issue at Christian Feminism Today in The “Final Feminist Frontier”–Housework. (You’ll also want to check out Melanie and Kendra’s awesome blog: Ain’t I a Woman?)

(Originally posted 8/28/2008) I’ve never been a great housekeeper. Normally I’m barely a passable housekeeper. I watched my mom work all day then come home and clean and clean and clean. I decided that I was not going to do that. (I made it very clear to my husband before we married that I would not be doing all the housework.) Housework was not that important. It didn’t help that for the last two years I’ve struck out as a freelance writer and do a lot of work from home, where a lot of the time I feel like a glorified housewife. But lately my feelings have been changing, and I have been wanting a cleaner house and less piles. I’ve always been a pile person, and it used to not bother me. But now it’s getting cumbersome and tiresome. I think it’s because I’m getting older, and I just don’t have the energy to dig through piles to find one piece of paper or a book. Plus I really do like being able to see the top of my coffee table and not have to crawl over a pile of books to get into bed.

Of course this put me into a crisis mode. After all I’m a feminist. I’m a feminist who came out of the group of Christians who think the highest calling for a woman is to be a wife, mother, and yes, housewife. So for me to admit that keeping house wasn’t that bad (and might even better), was nothing short of an existential crisis. And before you start gloating, Mom, I’m still not going to clean like you do. I still think you cleaned far too much. There has to be a happy medium between piles and dust and spotless clean. Then an online friend, k8tthleate introduced to me a wonderful book: Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson. The book begins with these words:

I am a working woman with a secret life: I keep house. An off-and-on lawyer and professor in public, in private I launder and clean, cook from the hip, and devote serious time and energy to a domestic routine not so different from the one that defined my grandmothers as “housewives.”

I think what I like most about Mendelson is her emphasis on house-keeping. Oh yes, there is cleaning, but that is just one part of keeping a home and making it a place of welcome for the family, comfortable to live in, and a space we feel comfortable inviting friends into. I’ve discovered that’s what I want to do: I want to keep a home. I want to be able to invite people over without having to do a hurricane cleaning out before they come over (again not as easy to do now I’m no longer 20-something). I’m taking baby steps: putting stuff away, finding homes for things, and vacuuming and mopping on a more regular basis (once a month really isn’t enough). And we’ll see how it goes.

Are you doing things you didn’t think you’d do? Are there things you’re changing your mind about?

Updated 8/21/2013: I am still a lousy housekeeper with multiple piles, and my floors wished they were mopped once a month. And unlike what I wrote five years ago about liking the concept of “house-keeping,” I’m not too keen on the idea right now. I’m definitely more on the hate side of my love/hate relationship with housecleaning right now.

What about you? What are thoughts regarding the keeping and cleaning of your home? Where do you fall on that love/hate continuum?

God Places the Solitary in Families: Childfree doesn't mean childless

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I’ve written an article in response to Time Magazines cover story on women choosing not to have children for EEWC: Christian Feminism Today. In God Places the Solitary in Families: Childfree doesn’t mean childless, I discuss my own decision not to have children as well as how my definition of family differs from our current culture’s definition. Here’s something to wet your appetite:

This week’s TIME Magazine cover story reports on women who have made the same decision I have: to not have children. There were two huge reasons I was not impressed with the article. First they only covered one reason why women are not having children: for the freedom and the additional time and money that comes with being childfree. The article made this choice seem like an arbitrary decision, one made in order to be able to take more vacations and buy more stuff. The Time writer did not consider the complex life situations that lead a woman or a man to decide not to have children.

Please let me know what you think.