Thread by @stewartdantec

I am doing my gospel reading this morning. I read Jesus pointing to a birthing mother, as Black women do, as the example of how we should love, endure, and hope. I wonder: what would our Christianity look like if we, like Jesus, looked to women as our guiding metaphor?

If Jesus used inclusive metaphors as the place of faith, then we must use them as well. “Faith,” theologian Delores Williams wrote, “has taught me to see the miraculous in everyday life: the miracle of ordinary black women resisting and rising about evil forces in society.”

Christian faith should enlarge our world, not enclose it. It should move us to embrace ourselves and others as those created in the image of God, not destroy or devalue them. Like Jesus, it should make us more loving and whole, seeking ways to heal the places we call home.

I have been thinking: what would it mean for people of faith to not see life as an academic endeavor or battles to win, but worlds to be embraced and explored? What would it look like for us to take Jesus and Black women seriously by making life more embodied, healed, and whole?

I can’t stop thinking about this Audre Lorde quote and what it means for our faith: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”

Christian faith would be so much more healthy and healing if we saw our faith less about fighting and winning and more about loving and freeing.

One of the things I love about the story of Jesus is that he always made room for people to give up their lies, their terrible ways of learning, and he held out ways their faith can be about love and not fear.

As I read the story of Jesus, this is what he invites us to do: be open to rethink our faith and life stories, deconstruct toxic theologies and practices, unlearn unhealthy ways of being human and being neighbors, and embody the possibility of better for all of us.

Faith, in Jesus’ mind, should must make us more loving and more whole, not more harmful and more controlling.