Sweetbitter: Women in the Bible 1 Thessalonians 5:21

(Re)introducing season 3 of Sweetbitter: Women & LGBTQIA+ History, part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network! This season Leesa, Ellie, and Alyse dive into the not at all controversial world of women and queer history of... the Bible, and Christianity. Submit your question for the next LTAMB Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Find more episode of Sweetbitter wherever you get your podcasts, or sweetbitterpodcast.com 1 Thessalonians 5:21 But test them all; hold on to what is good Welcome to season 3! Join us for a quick introduction to Christianity and the Bible. Thank you to our guests this week, Brian Murphy, Father Shannon Kearns, Rev. Jakob Hero-Shaw, Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, Rev. Florentino Cordova and Pastor Dawn Bennett. As always, you can find us on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/sweetbitterpod.bsky.social and Instagram at @sweetbitterpod. You can support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sweetbitter http://patreon.com/sweetbitter. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

• 0:43Speaker 01

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• 1:12Liv Albert?

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• 2:10Liv Albert?

  Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, except kind of not really. I am your host, Liv, and I am here with the first of what will be a few, but with other episodes mingled in, not to worry, a few drops of the shows that are now part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network. I have been bringing in some shows that I have known for a long time, the host of which I've known for a long time. We're starting up the Podcast Network with this kind of core, and we're looking to expand. But obviously, the more shows that I bring on to this new network of people sharing history, contextualized

• 2:53Liv Albert?

  and acknowledging the patriarchal developments, I don't know, people sharing history who give a shit. That's what I'm referring to us as when I'm not able to go into further detail. We need it more than ever. We need to be looking at the other aspects of history that are so often ignored or which we pretend never existed, the people in history that were not the status quo, that were not the men in power. And so, one of the first shows that I have brought on is the seasonal-based Sweet Bitter podcast. Now, Sweet Bitter,

• 3:34Liv Albert?

  you'll remember, they came out a few years back now with their first season on Sappho. It's where the name came from. In Ancient Greek, it's glukupikon. That was a terrible pronunciation, but it's true. And Sweet Bitter started, like I said, with this really amazing series examining Sappho from a few different angles. And then they did a second series, which was, I believe, specifically queer pirates, definitely pirates in the ancient world or throughout history. But as everything they do, there is a focus on women and queer people in that history. And now, Sweet Bitter has returned for season three.

• 4:18Liv Albert?

  The Bible. Now, stay with me here. I, I mean, I am partially some of Sweet Bitter as well, not particularly religious. This season on the Bible is partially coming from a Christian perspective and partially coming from an atheist perspective. And I think that's really important. But specifically, it is, again, looking at the history of women and queer people in the Bible. And so, obviously, I was more than thrilled to welcome Sweet Bitter into this new network of shows and even more excited to share episode one of their season

• 4:55Liv Albert?

  three on women and queer history in the Bible. It's gonna be interesting. Sit back and enjoy and find more episodes of Sweet Bitter wherever you're listening to this, or via links in the episode's description.

• 5:19Liv Albert?

  Welcome to Sweet Bitter. We're your hosts, Ellie Bridgina.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  And Lisa Charlotte.

• 5:23Liv Albert?

  This episode, we're very excited to introduce you to our third season, where we'll be discussing the queer histories in the Bible and Christianity.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Which I'm very excited about. We also have Ellie here. Ellie.

• 5:32Liv Albert?

  Double Ellie.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  We have double Ellie. No, we also have Elise here, who is our Bible expert, I guess, for this season.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  I'm the Bible expert amongst the three of us, but other than that, no expert.

• 5:46Liv Albert?

  That's okay.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Okay, so, let's talk about season three and why we chose it, because it's, uh, it's definitely a little out there compared to our other two seasons.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Is it, though? It's historical badass women and queer people, so that's all.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  That's true. That remains true of our podcast. We have Lilith as our fantastic artwork, which is very exciting. But I guess, I mean, I'll start, because I think I'm the first one who pitched this to both of you. I think I wanted to do it last season even, but for me, it was really, and this was like, you know, back in 2020. One that we started talking about this back in 2020. So I grew up atheist. I am not religious, just putting that out there to start. And I definitely just, I mean, I had grown up with some level of religious education and enough religious education to understand that what we're learning right now

• 6:42Speaker 02

  and what what society is doing right now is not religious. So like in terms of like what I learned about the Bible. And so for me, I wanted to have, I guess, like, um, women and queer people with the knowledge of the Bible and the stories of the Bible that are queer and women centered to kind of combat what's happening in the world.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's my take. So.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  And it's, it's sort of crazy because since you had brought that up, it just keeps getting worse and worse.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  I think coming from an atheist is such an interesting way to start this because like the Bible is like a, is a text also. It's like, also like a historical text that I think is why it's interesting that we're diving into it in a different way. And I know, Elise, you have a different experience than Lisa growing up. So what, what's your motivation for season three?

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I grew up in a non-denominational evangelical Christian church, but that was really fraught with a lot of struggle and challenge for me because I was queer and closeted and for lots of different reasons, that church just kind of, you know, wasn't a good fit for me, right? So I kind of sensed that it wasn't super cool to be gay. And also, I don't know, there was just, it felt very impersonal to go to a church with like thousands and thousands of people and Jumbotron screens and electric guitars, like kind of like selling this, I don't know, this really slick product. I'm at my heart like a poet, English nerd. I like old books and I like stories and symbols and, and cool characters. And I like questions more than answers, right?

• 8:16Speaker 03

  And so just the way I was taught the, the faith growing up was around dogma and certainty and like, right? And, and, and shame. And so I left, you know, I, I never kind of identified with Christianity. I never really believed in it. And then when I was coming out in grad school, I started, I was just curious what gay church was like. So I started going to gay church, which is Metropolitan Community Church, was founded in the seventies by queer people. And it's a Christian denomination by and for queer people. And I was just amazed. I had a really powerful experience taking communion from like a trans pastor and. Being in a Bible study with all these owls, which, do you guys know this acronym OWL? The Old Wise Lesbian?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  I, I do know the acronym, but I think just for our listeners, it's important.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Yes, it's a good clarif- it is a good clarification that you were not just having birds commune with you.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  I remember like reading the sermon.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  I found that I could speak to the soul of the owl.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, you guys should come.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Very wise.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Please check on me, please check on me if I join the owl. But these women sort of like, I, I read the, um, the Sermon on the Mount and how, you know, the, the faith is about caring for the poor and the marginalized and the oppressed and the downtrodden and, um, it's about welcoming the stranger and hospitality and, and care for your neighbor. And once I sort of actually read the text for myself and re-encountered it, I really wanted to like reclaim that for myself. And that was very, um, very healing. Just for the record, I'm still agnostic around like, I don't really believe in like an anthropomorphic monolithic God. Um, I'm much more like, I don't know, the universe, we're probably all cells and the universe is body. Like everything's under, you know, I'm, I'm much more here for the mysteries than the certainties. Um, I don't really believe in a heaven and a

• 9:55Speaker 03

  hell, but I do identify as Christian now. We take our kids to church every week. It's a great way for them to practice being bored and being around older people and.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  That is actually really true. My parents used to send me to church with my grandma and it was really good practice for that.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  For doing nothing. Yeah. I feel like, uh, in the Catholic church, I would stare at the ceiling and count.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  It's important.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  All kinds of like beautiful, beautiful architecture.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  That I would just be staring at it and like counting down the time till I could leave.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  My church was like all old people, but I loved this singing part. I started singing at church actually. So I could be grateful for, for that.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  I mean, singing with strangers about just the, the beauty and the mystery and the anxiety of, of, of being alive. I just love having a weekly practice of being with people who want to be better and who want the world to be better. My church is mostly queer people. Um, it's really beautiful, you know, Methodist church where, where we just like, you know, we try to fight oppression and racism and all the things that, you know, so, so we're very much part of like the Christian left. Yeah, that's where I'm coming from. What about you, Ellie?

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Nice. Well, it's interesting you talk about singing. I also find it funny, like some, I feel like I've seen this online where people are like, you know, like some people at those mega churches, like they just believe in God because they've never been to a good concert.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  And then they're like, this is the best concert I've ever seen. It, I must be connected to something, some higher power. Um, which I think both can be true. Um, but I started going to church in the Catholic church because I'm from Boston. And anyone who knows anything about Boston, um, there is a Catholic church on every corner. When I grew up, there were two churches that we could have walked to. Wow. Um, Saint William's and Saint Margaret's. When I meet someone from Boston, like specifically from Dorchester where I'm from, one of the first questions they'll ask is, oh, what parish? And that's like how they'll know within a like ten block radius where you live. That's wild. That is so wild.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  It is crazy. I mean, there was also so many other things like when I grew, as I was growing up, that happened within the Catholic church. I mean, obviously, Boston, we all know the like big Roman Catholic scandals surrounding the churches and in Boston. But even just like, you know, less and less people going to the churches, churches combining. There's a lot of like drama in Boston Catholicism. Um, but for me, I started going to church because I feel like it's just like a thing that you did because your family did it. And I started singing in church. I don't sing in church anymore, but even like going back four or five years,

• 12:40Speaker 04

  like I would still sing in church. And to me, it was a complicated experience. Because like I know that the Catholic church as a whole is against gay people. Hmm. And I am very, very gay. Um, and so. What? I know, it's so crazy. But like, growing up in Boston is interesting, like Boston Catholics are super Catholic and also super liberal. Interesting. So even though like the Roman Catholic Church as a whole is super anti-gay, I never felt like the people in my church were anti-gay. Mm-hmm. Until I grew up and I was actually singing in another church that wasn't my like home parish.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  And they did give like an entire sermon against gay people. And I was like, oh, wow. Like that hit, I was like, oh, I knew that this was sort of a thing nebulously. And then to have it like actually like. Be communicated in a church that I was in.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Like hit different. Like, like I didn't even think about it so much that I think I feel like I've told this story before, but like the first girlfriend I ever had. She was, I don't even know what kind of religion, which is gonna kill me. Presbyterian, I don't know. There was like, maybe you know this, Elise. There is a like southern kind of denomination where like they split into two because like one version of them recently was like just super like yay gay.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  And the other one was like.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Most of the Protestant denominations have have split. So the Methodist, the Presbyterians and the Baptists have all split and the Methodist very recently over whether you accept gay people or not, um, whether you, you know, will endorse gay marriages or allow queer pastors. And so there's often like, you know, there's the, there's the, there's the like gay friendly branch of the Presbyterians and there's the not gay friendly branch of the Presbyterians. And this is literally what they split over, which is insane.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Yes. So to her, I think it was Presbyterian. For her, she was a part of the pro-gay Presbyterian split.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  And we were having a conversation and she was like, how do you feel that like you can't get married in the church? And to me, being so ingrained in Catholicism, I was like, oh, why? Because you're not Catholic?

• 14:56Speaker 04

  Like, cause that's like, like, that was like the thing that

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  to me was more like, oh, well, you would have to convert. Like I've had like my uncle and aunt. Like she had to convert to Catholicism for them to get married in the church. Right? So I was like, that's what I thought of first. Not like,

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  oh, I'm gay. I can't get married in a Catholic church. Like it didn't even hit me.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  This would have been before steve six marriage was even legal, no? How long ago was his first girlfriend?

• 15:22Speaker 04

  No, it was like, it was like right af- like,

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  it was like right after. I was with her when Doma got overturned.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  That's wild.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  So like, we were talking about it after that. And like, to me, I was like, oh, well, it's legal now. Didn't think that's not legal in the Catholic Church. You know, that was, so to me, it was a very like, it's a complicated relationship with religion.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  I love that. I love that. Like, between the three of us, we've got the atheist, the person who's like, a cultural Catholic, but not a practicing Catholic.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  Yes. I would consider that very deeply.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  I'm like a practicing queer Christian, but I kind of rejected the culture.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  There's so many, yep.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  It's a good, it's a good mix of people. Yes.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  And then the timing of this has ended up pretty interesting. I mean, we've had, all had our own little journeys. And we have some like, kind of exciting news about like, joining this new network, which I will talk about in more detail in maybe like a bonus episode. But yeah, like, just the political moment that we're in right now. And we're recording this a little bit before you'll hear it. And who knows what could happen in the next like, month. But I think it was when we'd sort of been talking about it, talking about it. And then I think it was when, I don't know if you want to talk about this, Elise, but like, Elise and I messaged each other after that speech.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So at the, at the presidential inauguration, there, there was inauguration, inaugural prayer led by Reverend Mary Ann Budd, Buddy, I'm really sorry, I don't know how to pronounce your name, who's an Episcopal bishop. And, you know, this is just kind of a standard thing all presidents sit through after the inauguration. But she, at the sort of tail end of her prayer, said directly to Trump, like, looks down at him from her pulpit, and locked eyes with him, and said, I want to ask you to have mercy on the people who are scared right now. And she listed, you know, immigrants and queer people. And she just said, these are good people, these are our neighbors.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  So she used the, the language of Christianity, mercy, love your neighbor. And he lost it and, and trashed her on social media afterwards. And you can also watch the video of him, just like, him and J D Vance, just kind of rolling their eyes and, and getting angrier and angrier. But he, he trashed her on social media, media, demanded an apology, said she was biased, all these things. When really, oh, she wasn't talking policy, she was not talking, she was not being partisan, she was just being Christian, like, like classic Christian messaging. And so that just like, I don't know, brought to my attention how the Christian left is going to be an important part of how we resist from with, you know, from within sort of like the, the, the religious movements who are, who are pro the, you know, this kind of extremism, like

• 18:13Speaker 03

  the, the Christian left's going to play a role in the resistance, but also in just the, I don't know, like caring for, are caring for the people who are going to be hurt by these policies.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I think it's not just the Christian left. I think that people who are not, you don't have to be Christian.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Identify the Christianity. We're not making apologies for Christianity, like as a whole, and the things that it has been responsible for in the past.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Um, as, as I said, I don't believe like in anything. I don't have time for that. I just try to be like a good person to other people. But I do think that when these things are being used against us, it does help to have armed yourself with the knowledge of what's actually in the Bible. Um, and like, yeah, the far right is weaponizing Christianity against us, but that does not mean that Christian people are bad. Um, as a whole, it does not mean that the whole church is like, you know, or, or maybe the church, but not the people within it, let's say. Um, and so.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  It's nuanced. I mean, you know, throughout history, there have been so many really awful horrific atrocities and, and tragedies that the, the Christian church um, have, have been involved in or led or been part of. But also, you know, it's complicated enough that even for instance, you know, I was teaching about the HIV/AIDS crisis last week and we were talking about how the HIV/AIDS activists were sort of, you know, reacting against the Catholic Church's imposition against condoms, saying that's spreading the spread of, that's worsening the spread of HIV/AIDS, which is true. But also, at the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Catholic churches, or excuse me, Catholic hospitals were the only ones accepting HIV-positive AIDS patients, right? So that idea that like, we can have, you know, these values of mercy

• 19:56Speaker 03

  or of kindness and love alongside some really horrible things, it's just the nuanced, complicated gray truth of it all.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Before we spend a season unpacking how queer people and women feature in important ways in the Bible and how queer Christians interpret their religion, we want to acknowledge, as many of our expert guests do, that some Christians are to blame for a lot of really bad things in history and in the present day committed in the name of faith.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  A short and incomplete list, and I'm sure this will have grown since we recorded, sadly. The Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, conversion therapy, incest, child abuse, murder, genocide, Native American boarding schools, forced indoctrination, terrorism, the Holocaust, the anti-choice movement, hate crimes, book bans, and other forms of censorship, most recently, anti-queer hate crimes and bigoted laws like the Don't Say Gay Act in Florida, not to mention countless anti-trans

• 21:02Speaker 02

  actions being taken at present, which are all unfolding before us right now.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  And that doesn't even begin to get into the personal pain that many queer folks experience at the hands of the church when they are outcast, disrespected, erased, or personally attacked just for living their lives, just for existing.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Moving on from that, which is very

• 21:21Speaker 03

  I know, so fucking depressing.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  So depressing. So what we've always done in our past seasons is tell history from a queer woman's perspective, and that's all we're trying to do here. So whether or not you're religious, and again, as I said, I'm not. The Bible is an important historical document. It's a huge part of our lives. It's increasingly being used to, as a justification to walk back our rights. We're not coming at this from a place of like, we hate Christianity, we love Christianity. It's more like, we want to be educated about Christianity, a force that is being used very politically at this moment in time.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  One of our big goals is to sort of decolonize Christianity and queer Christianity, so that it doesn't just belong to any one political movement as a tool of oppression, but whether, but how it can be used as a tool of liberation. And that's true whether you're religious or not. So some of the voices you'll hear this season are talking about Jesus as a socialist, or Jesus as a queer hero, or Jesus as a feminist. And, you know, as things become increasingly violent towards queer people and women, it's just been really important for us to give folks the tools to reframe the conversation and, and also the historical context, and just ways of interpreting the text, and in ways that especially queer people and queer religious leaders are, yeah, like, taking

• 22:39Speaker 03

  these messages and putting them into practice in ways that are very liberatory. So you'll also hear this season about really interesting historical phenomena like transgender medieval monks. You'll hear from queer theologians, scholars who are practicing Christians. A lot of the voices you hear are people who are Christian identified, but that's because they're our experts on the history of Christianity, and they are queer. So we're definitely not trying to push the idea that if you're queer, you should be Christian, rather that, you know, these are our experts who are living, living queer lives while they have leadership roles in the church, and, or are scholars of the faith.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Some of the things you won't hear this season, we aren't focusing any episodes on stories of people's trauma. And why we're doing that is because, obviously, they're very important stories, but we do think those have been adequately covered elsewhere.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  We have enough stories of a trauma in the queer community. I know we're all tired and beaten down. And we're interested in how people are using liberation theology to preserve their dignity and take back what has always been ours. We're burned out on anger and trauma. Being angry is motivating, but it's also really, really tiring. And we wanted to find hopeful stories of people empowering themselves.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  So just before we go into a break, Elise, do you want to give us a quick, basic history of the Bible? What is Christianity? And also, for my benefit, what are the different types? Because I don't understand any of them. Yeah, just give us a quick little intro to.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah, and I'm definitely not an expert. So let me give that caveat to you. I'm not a historian. I'm not a religious studies scholar or theologian or anything like that. I work at a Jesuit Catholic university and I'm very proud of that. I love working at my Jesuit Catholic school. But the opinions I share this season will not reflect the views of the Catholic Church necessarily. And so I'm not speaking as a representative of anyone. But yeah, I mean, Christianity, right? One of the most popular monotheistic world religions of all time, across the world, obviously. The term Christianity comes from Christ, right? So Jesus Christ and the way that he lived his life, right? Is what followers of Christianity are really, you know, I guess by definition, trying to do. So we're looking at the stories that come from the Old Testament,

• 24:49Speaker 03

  which is the Hebrew Torah, along with some other important historical documents around Jewish laws and Jewish history, all the way up through the New Testament. And the New Testament starts with the four books, the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And those four Gospels tell the story of Jesus's life. He's a guy who was born in Nazareth and became a leader of a faith group of people that were sort of anti-Roman Empire, pro caring for each other, pro caring for the poor and the sick and the marginalized. And so Christians are following in the example of Christ. So as you already mentioned, you know, the history of Christianity is tied up with other Abrahamic religions, right? You have Judaism before you have Christianity.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  And then you have Islam after you have Christianity. So not many people really. But the Torah does mention, right, different Hebrew faith leaders and Jesus as well. Christianity splits into two main branches, Catholicism and Protestantism. Right around the Protestant Reformation, and that's when Martin Luther nails his ninety-five theses to the door and proclaims that, right, people should be able to have a more personal encounter with God, they shouldn't have to pay priests to, you know, be absolved of their sins, things like that. It's kind of one of the main ideas that Protestant Reformation was orbiting around. And then from Protestant and Catholicism breaking in half, you also have sub-denominations starting up within the Protestant tradition.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  So when we say denominations, we mean things like Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, all these little Protestant denominations that have their own ways of centralizing or decentralizing power, voting, their own different traditions, their own different hymns that they sing and things like that. So that is like the fastest breakdown ever.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  So it's like Catholicism is just, there's one type and then Protestantism is like everything else?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, but what the Catholics have that's really unique is they have orders. So in the Catholic Church, you have to be a man to be a priest, right? But they also have nuns and sisters and things like that. They're Catholic around hospitals and schools. But then the priests, the all-male priests, they can join different orders. And so like I work at a Jesuit school, and so you have to be a Catholic priest to be a Jesuit. It's like a little fraternity they have, like a little brotherhood. And they have their own kind of special flavors, right? So a Franciscan Catholic priest, they're kind of known for having like a lot of concern for the environment. And the Jesuits are really known for their like contributions to education. There's all these Jesuit colleges, like Boston College or Gonzaga or Georgetown, those are all Jesuit Catholic schools.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  So they kind of have their own flavors, but yeah, there aren't like denominations of Catholicism the way there is with Protestantism.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  That's so much information to digest, I think.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  I know. And I'm being so like pedantic by being so, so, so like the obvious, like thirty-five thousand foot view, but I just want to clarify in case these are all like completely new terms or new ideas. Like what is the Old Testament? Is it just older? Like, yes, it is. You'll you'll hear, but also it's basically like the the prequel before you get to Jesus, right? So like the Oh, okay, I see. So it's like Star Wars, episode one to three. Yeah, but the Old Testament is going to have Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve. It's going to have Noah and Noah's ark, all these like really old kind of mythologies around big human questions like, where did we come from? Where did evil come from? Why does bad weather happen? Right? All of those kind of old mythical stories.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  And then a lot of those clobber passages against homosexuality are in the Old Testament. We'll talk about those, but those are basically when the when the Jews were, you know, persecuted, they still are, you know, persecuted people, and they were trying to stay alive in the desert, moving around a lot, trying to stay alive, trying to not eat things that would make you sick. So there are all these rules in, for instance, like Leviticus around like, don't do this, do this, don't do that, do that. If you if you have this kind of pus coming out of this kind of wound, apply this kind of, and there's medical instruction in it, right? A lot of it's about cleanliness, clean, unclean, and part of that was just so that infections wouldn't spread. Part of it is because, you know, their their leaders wanted them to procreate and make a bigger race, right? Because they were under so much oppression. So that's where some of those like, it's just, it's just social codes. Like, how should

• 28:59Speaker 03

  I trim my beard? How, where do women sit when they have their periods? These are all like just cultural, traditional, like religious, but also like societal rules. Then in the New Testament, you have the Gospels, the story of Jesus's life, and then a bunch of letters that early Christians wrote to each other, trying to figure out what their church should be after Jesus had died. So much. Yeah. So much stuff. It's a big old book, a book full of books. And we're gonna dive in. You're gonna hear a lot more this season, but we will be back after a quick break.

• 29:40Liv Albert?

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• 32:24Speaker 04

  We want to share a story from the Reverend Jacob Hiro Shaw, Senior Pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church of Tampa. A quick content warning here that there will be a discussion of suicide.

• 32:35Speaker 07

  So I didn't grow up religious particularly. Periodically attended the Unitarian Universalist Church. My mom's family is Catholic. My dad's family is Methodist. And they didn't really, we didn't really have church, other than sometimes going to the UU church. And then in high school, I was in, this was like in the 90s, mid 90s. I was sort of struggling with my identity and my gender and sexuality. And I started kind of being curious about faith. Some of it was, I think, growing up in Florida where things are quite conservative. I think some of it was fear-based. Like, you know, I would hear people say like, oh, if you don't get saved, you're going to go to hell.

• 33:19Speaker 07

  And those kinds of things, which are now that I've done a lot of study, I'm like, oh, that's just completely inaccurate. But, you know, I was trying to figure it out. And I had this one friend who, she just really embodied the, I don't know what I love even 20-plus years later about Jesus. She just like embodied Christ's love. And she was just loving. She just like had this loving energy. And we became really good friends. And she talked to me a lot about Jesus. And she was from a really conservative church and very much wanted me to be saved. And, but she was also struggling herself with her sexual orientation.

• 34:04Speaker 07

  She was a lesbian. And, you know, she really tried to balance those things. And it didn't go well with her very conservative church. And she got very publicly shamed. And she was a, you know, she was a child. She was a teenager. So ultimately, she died by suicide.

• 34:26Speaker 07

  When she was nineteen, so right after high school. And for me, that was a big turning point. She had, she had just finished her freshman year of college and had just switched her religion, her, switched her major to religion and wanted to go to seminary, wanted to become a pastor. And those things had personally never occurred to me to do myself. And I, uh, it's not that I did it because she couldn't, but that was where the turning point was for me in that incredible loss. And yeah, she just, it's still, it happened in, in nineteen ninety-eight and it still is something that, that shapes my perspective.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  This season, you're going to meet clergy and people of the faith like Reverend Hiro Shah, people who resist the darker side of Christianity.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  We're going to unpack with these expert, guess why the Bible actually teaches the exact opposite of the hatred that motivates all of the horrific violence and injustices that have been committed in the name of Christianity.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  We're going to meet amazing queer and women Bible characters, as well as the people who take inspiration from them, people who seek to use Christianity to build a more just and peaceful world for themselves and others.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  The most amazing thing about the guests we'll talk to this season is that they aren't redefining Christianity at all. They're simply enacting the faith the way the scripture tells them to, bringing it back to its roots, to a man named Jesus who preached a radical, anti-imperialist message of peace, love, and justice for society's most marginalized and oppressed. His beliefs cost him his life.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Here's preacher, teacher, and activist Reverend Naomi Washington-Lee Part with more on this.

• 36:01Speaker 08

  So I think that institutions exist to preserve themselves, right? An institution wants to survive. That's, its reason for being is to be. And so anything that threatens that has to go. That's, that's the, for me, the biggest point of departure from Jesus's life and work. Jesus was like the most unconcerned person with self-preservation.

• 36:26Speaker 08

  Right? Like, he, he acted in a way that was completely reckless if you're trying to preserve your own life. Right? And that to me is what it means to follow Jesus. Right? Now, that doesn't mean I'm going outside and, and playing in traffic, or that, that's not what that means. But it means that I, I have signed on to a risky proposition. That if I follow Jesus, I might just lose my life. Both literally and figuratively. Right? This is something that is worth my life. I'm not interested in preserving the institution.

• 37:10Speaker 08

  And even preserving my own life if it means I have to sacrifice my integrity and my truth and my joy and my sense of self. Right? So that's one, uh, point of departure. The other is, I think that much of what passes as Christianity, uh, today is shame-based incarceration. Really, I, I'm gonna use that strong of a word. I think what we wanna do is keep people in cage, in cages. And we use shame to do that. So if we can make you ashamed of who you love. We can make you ashamed of what your body does and how your body looks.

• 37:53Speaker 08

  Um, if we can make you ashamed of your ambition and your, your desire, your professional desire. Right? Um, if we can make you ashamed of the decisions you've made in the past. Then we can keep you in this cage because you'll be so consumed with shame. That you don't realize, oh, my goodness. I'm locked in here, right? I need to get out. So I have decided that faith is not an instrument of shame and incarceration. That if my faith is not setting me free, more and more free every day.

• 38:33Speaker 09

  Then it's not worth having. I think it's terrible that in our quest to maybe be powerful or be wealthy, Christianity and Christians have coded the beautiful and liberating words of people inspired by a divine spirit and converted those words into something that keeps people ashamed of themselves.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  By actually looking back at those liberating and inspired words of the Bible, queer Christians are taking back the faith. Here's Reverend Florentino Cordova with more on that.

• 39:12Speaker 10

  It was a way, again, of power and control. How do we keep control of the people? How do we put rules and things in place? How do we formulate or say what Scripture is saying in order to control them and in order to keep them in line? And again, it adds up really because we were, as Catholics, we were never encouraged to have a Bible.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Just like Reverend Tino said, we want to actually look at the text of the Bible itself to find ourselves in its pages and to empower ourselves to reinterpret it.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  We want to take as our model for the season some advice we got from Pastor Dawn Bennett, pastor developer at The Table, an LGBTQIA+ centered faith collective in Nashville, Tennessee. Pastor Dawn advises all of her congregants to reframe, reform, and reclaim Scripture. Here's what she means.

• 40:03Speaker 09

  So the first thing I'll say right out the chute is that if somebody told you it's wrong to be queer, that was some guy's interpretation in 1946. I preach and teach on what we call the three Rs, reframing, reforming, and reclaiming. And the reframing piece is not to be taken lightly because we're not talking about proof texting. What we're talking about is taking the onus upon oneself to read more than one piece of a verse or one piece of a chapter, one verse of a chapter. We're talking about taking the time to invest in thyself. Luke, the great physician, said, "Heal thyself." How do we heal thyself?

• 40:47Speaker 09

  We go on exploration. So the mission statement of The Table is to create spaces for LGBTQ people to explore the things of faith and the things of self and the deeper issues of being and belonging. And so we go on those explorations in the pulpit, in the pew, at the table.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  But what exactly does she mean by reframe, reform, and reclaim? Are those three separate steps?

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Why, yes, they are, Lisa.

• 41:17Speaker 09

  So, the reframing is to take a piece of scripture that is maybe one line long, right? I'm trying to remember. Last night I was preaching on Romans 10, 9 and 10. And we were doing a preaching series on Tell Me More, and people were invited to send in their favorite and their least favorite scriptures. And Paul is always complicated because, you know, he's not everybody's favorite person. But the reality is Paul was a feminist, and that's all over, all the epistles that he wrote. Salvation is a conversation we'll get into another day, but the reason I lift that out is because that is one verse in all of Romans 10.

• 42:02Speaker 09

  And it's so easy to tell queer folks that you're not going to be saved because of what you're doing and the way that you're choosing to live your life. Even if you believe it, this is hinged upon what you're doing, right? And so the reframing is to say, okay, wait one minute. Let's zoom out and let's read, how about, how about we just read all of Romans 10 and find out what Paul was talking about in verse 9? You know? Romans 10 is like 45 chapters long or something. It's a whole lot more than one verse.

• 42:45Speaker 09

  So, or 45 verses long. It's a whole lot more than just verse 9. And so when you zoom out, you're able to get a bigger picture. And that's where the reforming comes in. The reforming comes in to say, reform, as in to form again. We are forming our understanding of scripture based upon more information, not one verse that supposedly defines everything about who we are. And we have the capacity to do that. And so the third is to reclaim.

• 43:24Speaker 09

  Reclamation is a word, yes, an action, yes. But reclaim can get lost in that word of reclamation, right? So let's, let's get it down to the base. We are going to take back our scripture, take back our belief, take back our salvation, take back our relationship, take back our pew, take back our Sunday, take back our very lives as people of faith. So when I, when, when, when I talk about re, reframing, what they find is amazing.

• 44:06Speaker 09

  What they find on their own is better than any gold nugget I could ever give them. But the gold nugget that I give them is to say here, read this for yourself, read this for yourself, because I'm so sorry that someone told you it was not for you. But if you will just take a chance one more time, that's the beauty of the table right there, is it's filled with people who have dared to believe that it just could be different this time.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  On our first episode of the season, we'll dive into the first step of reframing by analyzing the so-called clobber of passages about homosexuality and seeing what they actually say and don't say.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Until then, here's a taste of what's to come on Sweet Bitter.

• 44:55Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, the Bible is, it is written in a patriarchal system, a patriarchal society. That's the result of feudal and slave socioeconomic systems at that time. It was a time of conquer, it was a time of exile. So I read it more as patriarchal versus it being about homophobic and transphobic, you know?

• 45:22Speaker 11

  Not that they're separate, but I feel like there's a little bit of nuance there when we're looking at it as a patriarchal text. Our context is totally different than the one in which the text is written. So for us to use our terms, our terms, our understandings of queer and trans folks onto that context is difficult, if not impossible. And there's also like historical knowledge that ancient Hebrew cultures, like many pre-colonial cultures, were able to hold multiplicity of gender, multiplicity of roles, multiplicity of expression, you know?

• 46:00Speaker 12

  It's very likely that these are examples of queer relationships in the Bible that aren't maybe so explicit, but it certainly could be interpreted that way.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening to Sweet Bitter. Our next episode is already out, so go listen to it.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate and review us. It really helps, especially written reviews on Apple and Spotify.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com/sweetbitter.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Sweet Bitter is an independent production by me, Ellie Bridgina, Elise Noor and Lisa Charlotte. Our assistant producer is Thea Smith and our content producer is Linga Weiz Eko. Our audio engineer is Ana Lopez Reyes and our artwork is by Estella Illustrated. Thank you to our guests this week, Brian Murphy, Father Shadid Kearns, Reverend Jacob Hiro Shah, Reverend Naomi Washington-Lee Part, Reverend Florentino Cordova and Pastor Dom Bennett. You can read more about our guests and where to find them on our website.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  You can find us on Blue Sky and Instagram at SweetBitterPod or contact us on our website, sweetbitterpodcast.com. And that's all from us for now. We're happy to be back. See you next time. Bye.

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