In a culture where people are more prone to listen to music on their own with airpods on, it is rare to hear people sing aloud together or recite something together unless alcohol is involved or there is some sort of strange cultic practice involved. And yet, when we gather we sing and we read psalms together and to one another. Why? Joyful singing, praise, and thanksgiving is an outpouring of the Spirit. We encourage and strengthen one another in song, and confirm with one another what is true about God.

Paul chastises the more well-off in the church for being selfish and insensitive to those who were poor. Some were getting drunk and indulging, while there were members in the community in hunger. Paul reiterates that a vital identifier of Christ’s body is how it eats together as Christ commanded. Christ’s table is a table of unity. We are to wait for one another when we eat.

John 13:14

14 Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.

Jesus is tired and famished. So are the disciples. He asks the woman for a drink. Jesus is the Living Water given for this woman. He speaks to landscapes in her soul that are already shaped for worship. She is activated. How are you parched? Who are the thirsty around us? Who are the people not yet activated in our churches?

God rejects the reductive paths by which society allows these women to gain value (physical beauty and childbearing) and instead says that both women are loved, valuable and seen.

We take another look at women and the Apostle Paul.

We look at Deborah, as well as the 'Proverbs 31 woman', to break apart some common extra-Biblical perceptions of what it means to be 'feminine.'

Traditional and popular cultural interpretations of Eve make her out to be a subordinate ‘helper’ and afterthought to Adam, as well as the seductive temptress that caused humanity’s Fall. Can we take a 2nd look at the Scripture and discover an alternate narrative or fuller vision for God’s intent for Adam and Eve?

Ezekiel 36:26-27

New International Version

26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Genesis 1:26

Common English Bible

26 Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”