Church Speaker; The Story of Israel in the Bible is about ‘Land Conquest, Homelessness,+ the Erasure of Indigenous People’
The Episcopal Church is dying, both figuratively and literally, and it’s because of woke and irrelevant sermonettes like these. In the message, Dr. Judy Stack, a member of the “open and affirming” St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in St Paul, MN, teaches the lost congregants on “Decolonial Stewardship of God’s Resources” where she claims that the story of Israel in the Bible is really about about land conquests, domination and the erasure of Indigenous people, which manifests in white people today as a colonizing attitude and character.
The land on which our church sits, the land on which we live and move and have our being, is stolen land from the indigenous peoples, and how do we continue to faithfully have our lives on land that was so viciously in most cases, taken from the people who lived here before us and who still live among us?
Because she is lost, she equates giving an indigenous person the gospel message as a form of ‘cultural colonization.’
The dominant picture of folks who were not in western industrialized countries is that they were savages, right? And that we were developed and they were either undeveloped or developing …this is one of the key things that then happens within, of course, our religious tradition, because religion becomes part of that. We bring the liberating, ‘real’ religion of God to people who have been heathen, pagan, barbarous, you know all these all these terms that were quite acceptable.
And this grows right out of our tradition. This is a really tough balancing act right because we do believe that God sets people free through the gospel of Jesus Christ, we do believe that there is something exciting and life-giving in what god did in Jesus and that people should hear it.
But how that gets co-opted into a whole cultural agenda to essentially civilize the savages is an exceptionally problematic part of our history and becomes the cultural colonization, even when there is not actual physical political colonization okay? And of course a lot of this takes place through use of force.
She continues by trying to explain the redemptive arc of scripture and the history of Israel invading lands given to them by God, noting that it’s all just made up.
To shift now particularly, we’re going to look at some scriptures that have been problematic and then some scriptures that we can maybe re-read. And I want to focus on the story of Israel, because it’s really a story about land conquest, domination and the erasure of indigenous peoples, right?
But with the story of the Exodus, you have an enslaved people being brought out from their slavery, that in terms of the story, like how this all actually transpired historically, not sure. It’s very sketchy..
Really, I think one of the things that we can think about as we read these stories is that these stories of Israel, is that a lot of it is about ongoing generational trauma around homelessness, loss of homeland, disconnection from homeland, and then the trauma response is colonizing.
She concludes:
(When Israel) is disconnected from the land in which they used to live…they have this trauma of being disconnected. And then once they’re set free what do they do? They go and enact this traumatic response (taking the land by killing the residents) and then continue to replay that.
And so one of the things that we need to think about is how all of us sitting here as white people are also disconnected from our homelands. Whether that’s England or Ireland or Germany… we live here as exiles and our colonizing response is probably in part a ‘trauma response’ to our own disconnection from land.. we are replicating the kinds of anger trauma responses in our colonizing that we see in the story of Israel.”
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Just when you thought the Episcopalians could not possibly get more theologically retarded…
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