On Sunday afternoon I boarded my plane in NYC to head "home" to Michigan to celebrate the graduation of my spouse Jim Kast-Keat. Besides the pride I feel for Jim I am also incredibly proud to have graduated from Western Theological Seminary. So today I dedicate my post as a blessing from this alumni to her alma mater. Alma mater in Latin means "nourishing mother" and the theological and pastoral nourishment I received from the professors and staff at Western was indeed nourishing and transformative.

My best friend and I made the commitment the first week of seminary that we were there for transformation. We were not there to appease people by the "correct" theological answers or to regurgitate for an exam only to forget what we retained the following year. No, I went to seminary seeking theological and personal transformation. When I walked across the stage in May 2011 I know I accomplished my goal.

Faculty and staff at Western Theological Seminary, I bless you. You pour out your lives.  Be it Tom Boogaart's Prophets class where I felt like I was going up to the mountain top and met God every class or Carol Bechtel's class where I learned to be anchored in the Psalms or Tim Brown who was the first person to tell me I need to preach or Leann Van Dyk who is an incredible Dean and one heck of a smart woman or David Stubbs who was so moved by the theological writings that he read them like poetry or Jim Brownson who is deeply committed to the Gospel of Jesus or the accomplishment I felt when I passed Robert VanVoorst's Greek class or the way I better understood the person I am in Jaco Hamman's class or the insightful questions Ron Rienstra asked me which helped me decide to be ordained in the RCA or Paul Smith's leadership on my intercultural immersion trip to Oman or the brilliance of Todd Billings or the way I am now realizing how much I love church history because of Chris Kaiser and Dennis Voskuil's teaching in my life. You all (and all the other staff and faculty) poured out your life for me and my colleagues and I couldn't be more grateful. You loved me, you challenged me, you pastored me, you empowered me, and I learned how to be the pastor I am today because of the time I spent at WTS.

I consider my role as alumni to be a bridgemaker. I am from the Midwest and currently have an East Coast vibe. I know the worlds of Michigan and New York. I love and appreciate them both. My theology has changed and opened up and so has my compassion for a variety of view points. I am adamant that some things need to progress forward but I also know we are all on a pilgrimage and change is a process. I keep in contact with current students who need a different perspective than West Michigan alone has to offer and offer some solidarity for students who bravely utilize their theological and pastoral imagination. (This summer I am so jazzed to welcome a current WTS to West End Collegiate Churches intern with us. I will do everything I can to support her in her ministerial journey and then send her back to WTS to finish up her training. I love being part of the East and Midwest unity.)

Choosing to go to seminary at Western Theological Seminary is one of the best decisions I have made and I bless Living God for the way I was formed. 

So Western Theological Seminary,
May God bless you and keep you,
May God's face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
May God lift up God's countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen.

N.Y. Adorned “Tradition” from Evan Owen Dennis on Vimeo.

Check out what my friends have started: That Reformed Blog.

Maybe you are interested in what the Reverend Tim TenClay might have to say about the Lord's Table and the conversations around inviting and fencing?

Or maybe you are interested in Pastor Jill Vande Zande's honest reflection on bullying in her life in her post Whether I Like It or Not?

Perhaps you are interested in what my friend, Pastor Wayne Bowerman, has to say about the focus of The Reformed Blog in his post What's In A Name?

The Twelve readers meet That Reformed Blog. I think we could be friends.

My Conversion

It was my first year of seminary and I was soaking up everything that was being taught in my Theology and Worship Class. I was new to the Reformed world so I didn’t know the right things to think or say. I was driven by questions (and still am). In class we were reading Daniel Migliore’s book Faith Seeking Understanding. It was in this book that I was surprised to find the topic of Feminist Theology. I didn’t get how God and feminism went together then. I found energy ignited in me. I went to the back of the book and kept reading the definition of Feminist Theology over and over, as if to realize it was real. Could it really be there was a thing as Feminist Theology?

Later that year I decided to write a paper on the traditional views of atonement in light of Feminist Theology. I discovered a gem of a book, Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics that lead me to a meeting with Western Theological Seminary's Dean of students who happened to have an essay represented in the book.

I believe in conversions. I believe we go through multiple conversions in our life. This was the beginning of my conversion to feminism. (Or perhaps more of an awakening to the feminist I had always been.) After talking with the Dean I wrote my paper (and got an A, in case you were wondering) that helped me realize that I enjoy talking about God through a feminist lens. But not just any feminist lens: a Reformed Feminist lens.

A Reformed and Feminist Theologian

My twitter bio proudly states that I am a Reformed and Feminist theologian. This can sometimes confuse people. Pop-culture Reformed theology is represented by people like Mark Driscoll and John Piper. While these might be names people connect with the word “Reformed” (or “neo-Refomred,” to be more exact), they are most likely not the names they would connect with the word “Feminist.” So when I say I’m Reformed and Feminist some are confused because Driscoll berates feminism. 

I have multiple encounters on twitter expressing how beautiful Reformed and Feminist Theology is. Just like Feminist Theology, Reformed Theology chose me. When you are chosen by theologies and you recognize the grace that they offer, you can’t help but respond by choosing it back.

There are different flavors of Feminist Theologies but if I were to create a Venn diagram of them their broad connection points would be that they are both soaked in grace. When I use more female related images for God or highlight the courageous stories of women in our Scripture it is grace for women and men. This equality for all of us is grace, a free gift of God that we already have, just waiting for us to realize it and live into it.

Feminist Theology offers the possibility to heal people’s images of God that have been male dominated which have squeezed out many opportunities for women to see themselves in our Biblical texts. This doesn’t heal just women but liberates men as well! It opens up new possibilities of grace when you begin to see your body, your spirituality, and your agency finally talked about theologically. And that’s the business I’m in: grace.

A Caution

It’s irresponsible for a feminist to say she speaks for all feminists. Just like it’s irresponsible for someone who is Reformed to say she speaks for all Reformed people. Feminism can sometimes be critiqued as being for white, educated, middle-class women. This is why we see the rise of Womanist and Mujerista Theologies privileging the stories of African American and Latina women. These are needed critiques that are all in conversation with each other.

When we talk about God we need to be mindful about how many times the God we talk about is male. If that’s what are we are implicitly saying, what are we explicitly communicating? I know for me, my well-meaning pastors growing up didn’t realize they were preaching about a God that I connected with less and less because I could not see how my body, my spirituality, my agency was represented in a particularly male dominated theology. Be mindful, cautious even, of the stories we are telling and what they say about men and women.

Going Deeper

What about you? Are you Reformed? Feminist? Both?

How do you see these circles of thought intersecting with one another?

We can go deeper together in the comments below but if you’re looking for a bit of extra reading on the topic, I recommend the following:

• Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics
• Feminist Theory and Christian Theology Cartographies of Grace by Serene Jones
• (Wo)manifesto an article by Carol Howard Merritt
• Mujerista: Definition by Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz

Or check out this great mini-documentary on Womanist Theology:

I often look to honor the words of women in my personal prayers and within my congregational prayers. Too often women's words are forgotten or dismissed. Women's Uncommon Prayers has been a helpful resource. There is a poem in the book that is joining me as we finish the Lenten journey. I've been sharing it with the different groups I lead and would like to share it here, too.

Lent: The Mind's Extremity

Into this late winter time
Lent erupts its Wednesday ash;
black dust darkens our sky.
Return. Return.
We follow the lightless fire
down to a place
beyond the mind's extremity.

Lent leads us down to buried time,
down the mountain
onto fenceless plain,
a dry savanna where all demons wait.
Lent's unwilled free-fall
plummets us through remorse
and clotted dreams,
into the scarred haunts of hurt,
blame, damage, loss.
We are released into ourselves, alone.

Lent returns us into depths 
deeper than the dead are deep
where we come into openness: two crows
on the bare branch of a single tree ---
black carrion birds,
guardians of a slate gray sky.

A cold lightning arcs down
into silence and dim light.
Moment by fearful moment
its sharp pulse flashes
in terror and prayer to the breath's end --
in dust we are returned
to the place where no secrete are hid.

Here the Spirit's slow alchemy
melts every easy expectation,
and a final expanse opens
its felt presence
to the edge of visibility.
We are returned to the rim
to look outward toward the cusp
of a new place.

---Ms. Rosamond Rosenmeier 

Can the actually existing churches speak meaningfully and persuasively to those who aren’t so sure about the supernatural or the magical or the metaphysical, which includes the fastest growing religious demographic in North America, the “nones,” those with no formal religious affiliation?

Can the church retain a viable role in a world where God is often viewed as a relic of the past, or as a grand Santa Claus in the sky, or perhaps even as a narcotic or neurosis that we’d do well to get rid of?

And if the churches are to be faithful to the revolutionary event that gave birth to Christianity, or if they are to recover their theological voice in a compelling and transformative way, is it possible to do so by listening to voices on the margins of the church, or outside of the church, including even those who might rightly pass for atheists? And perhaps more to the point, why are voices on the fringes of the church, or outside of the church, becoming more influential on church leaders and practitioners than the traditionally “orthodox” voices inside the churches?

With tracks related to ministry, liturgy, worship, preaching, community organizing, art and much more, all who are interested in the future of the church won’t want to miss it.

I've been connecting with a few presenters on Twitter. A new voice that I have discovered is Katherine Sarah Moody. Her work examines the relationship between continental philosophy, radical theology and lived religion, and in particular between emerging Christianity and the work of John D. Caputo, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley. She's great to follow on Twitter and highly suggest checking out her blog. 

Phil Snider is one of the leaders of this event and he is also another voice I have been connecting with on Twitter. I am currently reading his book Preaching After God: Derrida, Caputo, and the Language of Postmodern Homiletics. Have any of you read it? I've just started it, so I am not able to write my expansive thoughts but let me offer a quote from his book:

I contend that if we wish to employ persuasive and compelling theological rhetoric in our sermons, then we have to shift the ways we imagine (and talk) about God, especially in terms of God's transcendence, activity, and agency. If the task of postmodern theology is the overcoming of metaphysic, so too is the task of postmodern homiletics. 

It's my plea that we take postmodernism seriously and faithfully reflect on the intersection of ecclesiology and postmodern thinking and Reformed thinking. I am sometimes misunderstood by some sections of the church on this blog. Instead of offering judgment may I encourage us to engage postmodern thinking. Don't just offer a condemnation of postmodern thought without a rigorous engagement; that's exactly what I'm trying to do to in my personal studies, too. Why? Because the future (current reality) of the church is worth it!

I am particularly interested in the intersection of postmodern thinking and our Reformed tradition. I hope to focus in on this intersection in my personal studies. I am looking for writers and scholars who are focusing on this so if you know of anyone, please let me know who I should be reading in the comments section.Thank you!

Update (12:45 PM 3/6/13): This is an informative piece that Phil wrote for Patheos about Subverting the Norm. 

All sorts of people step into our house of worship on Tuesdays: people who have been chronically homeless for 12 years and know the rules of the street, people who are new to living on the street and I can see the anxiety of this new life in their eyes, people who use their body to sell sexual favors, people who wreak of alcohol, people who can’t stop testifying about what the Lord has done in their life and they know God is good (though they call the concrete their pillow), people who are mean, people who want to pick a fight, people who smell real bad, people who have a home but it’s dang expensive to live in NYC so they come to soup kitchens for their food, black people, white people, brown people, transgender, gay, straight, and some who think being gay is an abomination, volunteers who want nothing to do with religion, and volunteers who find their religious identity in serving, and then there is me – the minister.

For ninety minutes we all gather together breaking bread; it’s Eucharistic.

As we were nearing the close of our meal together one of my “street peeps” came up to me and asked if we had any more pudding cups. He said that he received an applesauce cup that day and, while he was thankful for that, the chocolate pudding cups are his favorite. I turned around and asked one of my volunteers to see what we could find. As she was sifting through the food I realize that under most circumstances I would find this request annoying or even a bit entitled. I would think, “you received food, now you want to be picky about what dessert cup you receive?” If I were to take that posture in this circumstance, which is all too easy for me, I would actually be hindering grace.

The people of my congregation on Tuesday night live a difficult life, overall.  Even as I write this I hear the winter winds rushing by my window and I think of my street peeps where wind is rushing in their face, not window. Maybe a pudding cup is not just a pudding cup but maybe it was a very symbol of God’s decadent grace; who am I to stand in the way of that?

Grace that tastes like chocolate pudding, I can get behind that!

Photo by Jim Kast-Keat
My first time preaching on The Transfiguration was at Hope Church in Holland, Michigan. I was a seminary student who was lovingly being nurtured into my vocation. I remember being captivated by the Exodus text, particularly when Moses face was shining. My imagination ran wild as I thought of all the ways one could visually represent this Divine encounter in a room decorated with a million tiny shiny things; I like things/people that shimmer.Fast-forward a few years later and now I'm enamored with the cloud imagery in the Gospel passages. The times I've flown through clouds in the sky, the times when it's cloudy over the Hudson River and I can't see the George Washington Bridge because of the fog, the times when things aren't easy and it's metaphorically cloudy. 

This idea of overshadowing I find both mysterious and a bit terrifying. In the book of Luke the first time we see the word overshadow (episkiasei) is when the angel visits Mary and says, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God." I remember this past Advent I didn't like the word overshadow then either. I remember teaching my adult education class and we curiously sat with this word [episkiasei] for a good 15 minutes. When things are cloudy we lose our control. When I lived in a driving culture in Michigan I hated driving in the cloudy fog because that meant I couldn't speed down the streets like a free bird, I had to slow down and be more alert. I didn't like it (though I'm pretty sure everyone around me was grateful that I eased up on the pedal!).

I've been meditating on Sufjan Stevens The Transfiguration in preparation for this Sunday. I've attached the words here and encourage you to read them while you listen. I think there are many times when things are cloudy and we have a difficult time seeing clearly. It's in that moment we begin to see with the intuition and we begin to listen with the spirit inside that is saying to us "Have no fear, we draw near, the son of God is here."

Our personal lives can get cloudy, our congregational lives can get cloudy, our denominational lives can get cloudy, our relationships can get cloudy; life can be cloudy and it can be a bit terrifying. Instead of panicking, instead of reacting maybe we can listen closely to the voice in the cloud and sink into our intuitive capacities that remind us to have no fear, Christ is near. I know I need that comforting reminder navigating life, maybe you do too.

Image from University of Cambridge

Recently I was in a Scriptural Reasoning (SR) group lead by Dr. Peter Ochs who developed SR some twenty years ago. SR is a practice in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims come together to study their sacred texts. It is a post-liberal and post-critical response to modern readings of the texts. It is a way we root ourselves within our scriptures and engage in interfaith relationships. Unlike some interfaith circles I have been a part of that seek to form around the lowest common denominator, SR welcomes commonality and (this is very important) the sharp tensions of differing theologies. The relationship is thus much more real and honest because we do not compromise our theologies yet develop and maintain a friendship.

Think of it this way: if you want to get to know your Jewish neighbor who lives next door to you, you might invite them over for wine or dinner and host them in your house. The space of your house and the space of your conversation becomes the host of your interfaith relationship. In SR the text itself is the host. The Bible, The Qur'an, and the Tenkah become the host of the interfaith relationship. As a Reformed theologian, text is very important to me. Sharing my text and receiving the text of my neighbor is holy ground.

The other night we studied the theme of beginnings. We looked at passages from all three texts that talk about the idea of in the beginning. From the Bible we studied John 1 (we looked at Genesis 1 from the Tenkah). I am still in awe of the way we delved into our sacred texts. It was Bible study for two hours and yet it was in relationship to two other texts. It was beautiful and challenging.

I am new to this thus I should probably begin to wrap up my explanation of SR. I may be wrong. I may be misunderstanding this very cool discipline. Look to Wikipedia if you want more info. Or google Peter Ochs. Or check out my friend's blog, here, as she reflects from our time doing SR.

But here's the deal. I'm still holding how beautiful this study was. I'm still deep in thought about the connection of creation and chaos. I'm not sure how to articulate all that I'm holding so I want to offer a poem by my friend, Matthew*, who expresses another perspective of beginnings. If you don't know Scriptural Reasoning, check it out. I think it may be (one of) the way(s) forward for interfaith relationships. If you haven't read Genesis 1 or John 1 lately, do so attentively. Don't rush it. 

VIII.

That which matters fell faceless

Into god-knows-what,

Spun out with blind

Fury into a hopeless whatever

Hit a null of inhospitable

Vacancy and shrieked

The tritonal trauma of chaos.

Wherelessness was the first God

To fall, wrists upon the threshold of

Moving, Breathing, and Having/Being. 

It was good -not that it was gone.

Let there be Light.

This was the only way

To know where the Becoming

Was going to be.

How else might importance

Cease stubbing sacred toes upon Nothing? 

Darkness turned suddenly with purpose and

Light blinked and blushed;

Acquaintance. And just like that

It was love at first sight.

*An emerging voice in Christian liturgical curation, Matthew Lyon discovered this art in Seattle, WA, where he served as Liturgist for Church of the Apostles, an urban Christian community engaged in the creative communication between faith, culture and ritual. He currently lives on a small island in lower New York. Follow him around on twitter: @LaserPony

The call to love is not for Pansies -- It’s the hardest job I do.Lady Justice held back by the Lady of Mercy by Glynn Acree, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama

Sometimes I want to tell people exactly what I feel without care for their feelings. Sometimes I want to be a truth-teller that is uncensored. Sometimes I want to speak bluntly about whatever opinion I have without care of choosing the exact wording that will be best received on the listener’s ears. Sometimes I’ve got a wicked temper and sometimes I say things in that moment that really don’t help humanity. Ok, who am I kidding, a lot of times I do this.

So what’s the big deal about this? You’re a feminist, Jes. You’re an activist. You understand your role as minister as one that helps ignite people to care about difficult topics through the lens of the Gospel. You speak up when others don’t. Acting up is good!  Well yes, acting up can be a good thing. Just ask Rev. Dr. King, Rosa Parks, Dorothy Day, or Clarence Jordan – all people who have acted up because they believed a better world was possible. The thing about acting up, speaking up, and living proud is that as a Christian all of this – all of life – has to be lived in the container of love. Love wins is not as easy as some think. Loving God and loving others is not for the faint hearted. If I'm honest (which I usually strive to be) then let me confess that loving God and loving others is difficult to do especially in light of people I perceive that don't care about justice & equality.

The task for any justice minded person is to marry our pursuit for equality with mercy. God is a God of justice, without a doubt yes! But God is a God of mercy and compassion, abounding in steadfast love. That is the flavor of my call – the marriage of mercy and justice.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel says it this way, “A religious person is a person who holds God and man in one thought, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.”

The greatest strength of a Christian is love. Love is the soil which truth is spoken from. Love is the container for activism. Love is the beat to my feminism. Love is the most difficult thing to consistently do/be. Loving God and loving others is the greatest commandment that Jesus requires of us.

There is only One who loves consistently, beautifully, and mercifully and that is not me.  God is love and moves and breathes in love. Through the Holy Spirit, love is the source I want to live from.

Loving others is not for pansies. Thank God we are freely connected to the one who is love and has shown us love. We are never blocked from the source of love in Jesus.