Author Archives: Gordon C. Stewart

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About Gordon C. Stewart

I've always liked quiet. And, like most people, I've experienced the world's madness. "Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness" (Wipf and Stock Publishers, Jan. 2017) distills 47 years of experiencing stillness and madness as a campus minister and Presbyterian pastor (IL, WI, NY, OH, and MN), poverty criminal law firm executive director, and social commentator. Our cat Lady Barclay reminds me to calm down and be much more still than I would be without her.

Verse – The Exchange

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INTRO: This piece uses the Hebrew terms for man (atham) and woman (athama), descriptions that remind Hebrew readers that human beings are of the dust, of the earth.

The Exchange 

“Did God really say you will die if you
eat the fruit of the tree in the middle
of the garden, the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil?” asked the snake
of the woman beside the Elysian tree.

So she did eat and so did he – Atham
and Athama, the earthlings – wishing to
be like God, mocking death by dividing
evil from the good down below where
a snake exchanged a hiss for a kiss.

“Cursed are you among all animals,”
said God. “On your belly you shall go,
eating dust along your way. Atham
and Athama will bruise your head,
and you shall bruise their heel.”

Then the two-legged creatures knowing
good and evil, dividing the Garden between
sheep and goats, stumbled at a nip on
the heel and heard a hiss: “You, too,
are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Of the forbidden fruit of that one tree all
earthlings still do eat despite the voice
from the tree that tamed the snake,
exchanging a kiss for the hiss: “Forgive
them, for they know not what they do.”

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec. 28, 2015

Verse – Christmas: a Donkey’s Tale

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Hee Haw

Burro's ears

Burro’s ears

“Just put the burro here,” he said,
“She’ll calm the horses of the folks
inside the inn.”  And so they tied
me to the pole above the trough.

I was surprised he later led
a man and girl into the stall
and pointing to the straw, he said,
“Sleep here,  this simple space is all
that’s left tonight, and if the child
is born the cries won’t wake the guests.”

He grimaced, but she somehow smiled
and sank down to the ground.  Their rests
did not last long.  Her labor soon
began and then the baby, wrapped
and warm, was laid under the moon
light bright where we, the stock, were trapped
and fed.  I brayed when shepherds dumb
barged in and said a king had come…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Dec. 11, 2012

Verse – Christmas Re-Imagined

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INTRO: How strangely idyllic Jesus’s birth appears in Matthew. No mention of the absence of a midwife, stench, or unsanitary conditions. The animals were the only neighbors, including the goats and sheep of Matthew’s parable of the Last Judgment, and as I have re-imagined it, the serpent who would bruise humanity’s heel in Genesis 3:8-15.

All the midwives were busy that night
when goats and sheep butted and
bleated for a taste of the after-birth
while a hapless not-quiet-husband
knelt beside his not-yet-wife Mary,
confused by having to birth this
child of another he’d never met,
a lamb she said was meant to be
for reasons he could not feel or see.

No Star Wars star shone above
a forgotten place the three of them
shared with none but bulls and
cows, hens and roosters, a snake
slithering through the straw toward
the donkey’s heel, the goats on
his right, the sheep on his left,
before the angels said the baby’d
come to bruise the serpent’s head.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec. 27, 2015

Verse – December Rain and Reign

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Trinity Episcopal Church ExcelsiorSome Sundays, like last Sunday, I just don’t feel like going to church. The weather was depressing. I was feeling kind of down. But we went, Kay and I.

After going to church, I wrote this piece. A poet I am not. Steve’s the poet of Views from the Edge. But, hey, he’s a very forgiving guy. Hope you are, too.

Advent Rain – Christmas Reign

harvest-being-2014-051In drizzling rain under
sullen gray-chilled skies
we trudge to church as
through a Scottish moor –
neither fall nor winter,
a gloomy in between
when spring’s bright
hope seems dead as
days are dark and short –
on the way toward
a reign in Bethlehem.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec, 15, 2015

An NRA Christmas

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But Mary was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Conceal and carry!”

Luke 1: 26-28  NRAV [National Rifle Association Version]

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec. 22, 2015

“Do not be afraid”

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A sermonic reflection for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Dec. 21, 2014, Gordon C. Stewart.

Text: Luke 1:26-38

El_Greco_044-medium-3

The Annunciation {El Greco]

Mary has every reason to fear the appearance of Gabriel. Every demure depiction to the contrary, the Angel Gabriel’s “annunciation” to Mary is no private affair. It’s a public matter of the first order. According to tradition’s lore, Gabriel is the archangel commissioned to destroy the offspring of the rebellious angels and human women. (see below). Mary shrinks back.

“Do not be afraid,” says Gabriel.

Why should she not be afraid? This is not just any angel.

This is the Angel Gabriel, whose trumpet will summon the people, sweep away the occupation forces that substitute their rule for the Kingdom of love and delight. This is an angel of revolution. The Archangel of conflict who inspires both hope and fear.

”Do not be afraid!”

El Greco’s painting of the Annunciation illustrates the problem of textual interpretation. Gabriel’s appearance is not frightening. It’s feminine. Even to the point of appearing perhaps pregnant himself. The great masters did not paint an angel messenger as male, even when his name is Gabriel or Michael, the only two angels named in Holy Scripture.

Gabriel in Hebrew means “God is my Warrior”. Gabriel is a warrior angel, announcing to Mary that she too is to become a warrior, a mother whose birth-giving will lead to conflict with the Empire and the religious authorities who collaborate with it.

As described by New Testament scholar Carol Newsom, any annunciation by Gabriel inspires fear.

In the Book of Daniel, Gabriel is preeminently an angel of eschatological revelation. He is sent to Daniel to explain a vision of ‘the time appointed for the end’ (Dan. 8:15-26)…. Gabriel’s functions are more varied in I Enoch. In the Book of the Watchers (I Enoch 1- 36) he is listed as ‘the one of the holy angels who is in charge of paradise and the dragons and the cherubim (20:2). He is commissioned to destroy the offspring of the rebellious angels and human women (10:9-10)….

In the War Scrolls from Qumran (IQM) the names of 4 archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Sariel, and Raphael, are written on the shields of the 4 towers of the army. The positioning of the 4 archangels around the throne of God or other sacred space has a long subsequent history in both Jewish and Christian tradition…. [Carol Newsom, “Gabriel.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 2]

So why does Gabriel look the way he does in the art museums and literature of Christian interpretation? Why does Gabriel look so benign? And why does Mary look so calm, perhaps even demure, as in El Greco’s Annunciation?

The Jesus story has been neutered. The End Time has been re-interpreted by the Constantinian Church as a paradise beyond time, a state of afterlife, not this life. In no way political. In no way economic. In no way conflictual. Peaceful. Serene. Calm. Quiet. Passive. “Let it be to me according to your word.” Never disquieting. Never disrupting. Never revolutionary.

Gabriel has been transformed, neutered, rendered harmless by the Constantine religion whose adherents can no longer see the conflict between Christ, or his mother, Mary, and his father, Joseph, with the systems of unbridled greed and poverty under which they live. The Gabriel spoken of in most pulpits is not the Angel Gabriel that came to Mary.

We’ve re-created Gabriel in our own image. But though we may tame him in our hearts, our paintings and our sermons, we can erase neither the need to be afraid nor his invitation to fear not. Gabriel’s finger points at us, asking whether we will rally to the trumpet sound, the sound of his coming. We can repaint the young girl Mary as an icon of passive obedience and tranquility. But it will be a different Mary than the courageous one painted by the Gospel of Luke, the one who sings the Magnificat.

Luke and his Mary know that “Do not be afraid!” makes no sense unless there really is something to fear, and that we cannot overcome fear unless we hear Gabriel’s word of favor, “Hail, O favored one! The LORD is with you. Blessed are you among women…You shall conceive….”Do not be afraid…. For with God nothing will be impossible.”

“Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.’

“Then the angel departed from her” for parts unknown to make his visits down through the ages, making the impossible possible. Word has it he appeared last week in Washington, D.C. and Havana, Cuba to turn the impossible into the possible, a new Order being born from the old.

If you listen with faith, you might hear him. If you look, you will see him.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec. 22, 2015

Verse on the first Christmas

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“No Christians Were There”

No Christians were there at the birth
of Jesus. (For “…disciples were
first called Christians in Antioch”
years later.) But were those who were
there believers? the shepherds, the wise
astrologers, the non-father,
the Blessed mother? Did they see
with eyes of faith, or more like we
do: wonder, ponder, doubt and stare
at the small baby stabled there…?

That three were Jews, we know for sure.
The genealogies we read
in Matthew, Luke, go back as far
as Abraham. Eight days, we read,
then circumcision for the babe.
The Arab wise guys may be from
the land we call Iran. The sheep
herders may have been aliens
in the land illegally: cheap
pay for smelly foreigners.

The barn contained no royalty–
the stock had better pedigree…
and yet some say a King was born
to poor folks that the rich would scorn…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Dec. 21, 2013

Birthday Tribute to Steve

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Kate Shoemaker, MD, and her Uncle Steve Shoemaker share the same birthday – today, December 19. Kate sent this to Steve today. Kate, from St. Louis, MO, is spending the day with Steve and Nadja in Urbana, IL.

Happy Birthday poem from Kate Shoemaker to Uncle Steve.

Happy Birthday poem from Kate Shoemaker to Uncle Steve.

O Radix, A Third Advent Reflection and Sonnet

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We’re pleased to re-blog Malcolm Guite’s poem “O Radix“[Latin for Root], a movement from “the surface of the wide-world screen” to “the forgotten root…of every living thing.”

malcolmguite's avatarMalcolm Guite

https://lanciaesmith.com/image-for-the-day-advent/ https://lanciaesmith.com/image-for-the-day-advent/ The third Advent antiphon,inmy Advent Anthology fromCanterbury PressWaiting on the Word, O Radix, calls on Christ as the root, an image I find particularly compelling and helpful. The collect is referring to the image of he ‘tree of Jesse the family tree which leads to David, and ultimately to Christ as the ‘son of David, but for me the title radix, goes deeper, as a good root should. It goes deep down into the ground of our being, the good soil of creation. God in Christ, is I believe, the root of all goodness, wherever it is found and in whatsoever culture, or with whatever names it fruits and flowers, a sound tree cannot bear bad fruit said Christ, who also said, I am the vine, you are the branches. I have tried to express some of my feelings for Christ as root and vine more…

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Verse – Who is worshiped at Wheaton College?

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The Atlantic published “Professor Suspended for Saying Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God” yesterday.  Tenured political science Associate Professor Larycia Hawkins [Click HERE for Wheaton College’s faculty profile] was suspended by the Wheaton Administration for saying Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

Steve Shoemaker, Wheaton College, Class of 1965, and co-publisher of  Views from the Edge’s wrote this response this morning:

Who Is Worshiped at Wheaton College?

We worship the God of Abraham. (Jews)

We worship the G_D of Abraham (but consider his name so Holy, we do not say it or write it.) (Orthodox Jews)

We worship the God of Abraham. (Christians)

We worship Jesus, our Savior, and the Holy Spirit, our Comforter, along with God the Creator, a Trinity, who we believe was The God of Abraham.

We worship the God of Abraham. (Muslims)

We worship Allah, whose prophet was Mohammad, the same God as the Christians, whose prophets were John the Baptist, and Mary, and Joseph and Jesus; and the same God as the Jews, whose prophets were Moses and Aaron and Miriam, and Jonah, and David.

Steven Robert Shoemaker, BA, Psychology, Wheaton College, 1965.