Jesus' Encounters: What John’s Gospel Teaches Us About Inclusion - Lent Bible Study with Bird Treacy
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We welcome back Bird Treacy for a rich discussion about children's role in church, the Gospel readings for the first week of Lent, and Jesus' relationship with Jewish traditions. Bird gives us a good word about the theological depth of children and how churches should fully include them in worship rather than treating them as distractions.
Our conversation transitions into exploring the Gospel of John, focusing on Jesus' personal encounters with Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, and the official. In an episode perfect for International Women’s Day – Bird highlights how these encounters reveal Jesus' unique ministry and his challenges to cultural expectations. We also discuss the significance of Jesus' Jewishness and how his deep knowledge of tradition enabled him to reinterpret it in ways that expanded access to God.
Bird Treacy is a Godly Play Trainer, Episcopal church lady, church programming consultant, and writer based in the greater Boston area. Prior to finding her way to professional work in the church, Bird earned a masters degree in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies with an emphasis on Disability Studies from Emory University, and she brings both an academic lens and a lived experience of disabled identity to her current work. When not wranging small humans or developing programming, you can usually find Bird cooking, writing, competing in jigsaw puzzle competitions, making lace, or doing some other craft project. She lives with her wife, a current veterinary student, and their five cats. Bird has a WEALTH of Resource, stay in touch with her -- Website, Substack, @abirdinchurch (Instagram)
Key moments in our conversation include:
00:24 Bringing Children to the Center
07:43 Jesus's Relationships in the Public Spaces
10:36 Women in the Gospel of John
13:43 The Jewishness of Jesus
Things we talk about on this episode:
00:00:00 Natalie Thomas
Hello and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's weekly Bible study. I'm Natalie Thomas.
00:00:04 James Thomas
And I'm James Thomas. We are deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
00:00:09 Natalie Thomas
And Bedtime Chapel grew out of a shared desire of ours to support families trying to center Jesus in a post Christian world.
00:00:16 James Thomas
We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short gospel reading. In this episode, we will be covering the readings for the first week of Lent.
00:00:24 Natalie Thomas
And we are here again today with Bird Treacy, who we know from our shared ministry in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and a swarm or web of relationships that have connected the two of us. And Bird, in our last episode, you had the chance to introduce yourself and a little bit about your family.
If you haven't listened to that one, folks, go back and hear that as opposed to having you repeat yourself. It would be great for you to introduce yourself to folks by way of the work you do as a godly play instructor and trainer, just to share a little bit about that experience and how it has shaped the way you understand the church as a whole.
00:01:05 Bird Treacy
Yeah. Thank you so much. So, yes, I, as I mentioned, last time we were together, I have been teaching in church settings for more than half of my life, since I was a teenager. And one of the things that spending so much time in the space of children's formation and coming alongside children in worship, what that has revealed to me is first of all, that the church, no matter how high of an anthropology people are bringing to sort of our understanding of Jesus, is fully human.
And the nature of humanity tends to have a really low view of children in terms of their theological capacity, which is sort of deeply backwards because children are innate theologians. And alongside of their deep capacity for theological thought, even if that is not yet accompanied by the language that helps us to recognize it, is this need for children to really belong to the community in a way in which they are seen and held and not viewed as distractions.
I just always think of Jesus, let the little children come to me. Bringing the children through the crowds to. To where they can see and be part of everything that is happening. And that we do a disservice to children in particular when we say, oh, yes, we have a space for children in our church, but it is in the back and they can't see anything that's happening.
Well, yeah, they're not going to pay attention and learn what is happening because you put them in a place where they are not prioritized as full members of this community. And so there's just this real sense of recentering Children in the same way that Jesus did, that my work has made my life about in a lot of ways.
And I say this, and I didn't mention this in our prior time together, but I am a children's formation professor, and all who does not yet have children. And so there are constantly children around me, but none of them are actually mine.
00:03:40 Natalie Thomas
Mine in a Western sense of the word. Maybe.
00:03:44 Bird Treacy
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:03:45 Natalie Thomas
Well, I have a follow.
00:03:46 Bird Treacy
Sometimes think they're mine.
00:03:48 Natalie Thomas
Yes. So, Bird, we recently made a change at the parish that we're going to in which children are now part of the entire liturgy. And this is by no means a unique experience to the church that we serve at, so wouldn't want to. To name it as such, but at times there are parents, caregivers of children who them themselves feel challenged by the distractions that kids are bringing into the church.
And what would you say to a leadership of a church, to James and me specifically, as deacons in that church, of how we can disrupt that heaviness or the guilt or the concern that people, parents or caregivers have about their own, to use your word, the ones that are mine, you know, making distractions in the church.
00:04:40 Bird Treacy
Oh, I will absolutely say, and I live this in a very particular sense. I am much older than my younger siblings. I'm 11 and 16 years older than my two younger sisters. And when I was in my teens, I would often go sit in a different pew than my family because I was so annoyed by how distracting my sisters were.
But I think you probably know this from experience, but you find your children more distracting and you find their behavior more stressful than basically anyone else. And that I can say very much from the experience of moving children into a more central location in my current parish as well. And it's always the parents who are like, my child was so loud.
I heard them doing all of these things. They were participants in the life of the church. Other people made noise, too. It's okay. They're allowed to do that. And also, if they are not present and embraced as they are now, then we're not laying the groundwork for their full inclusion later on. This starts from the beginning, but, yeah, you're definitely way more stressed as the parent of the little person making noise than anyone else is about the noise that is happening.
00:06:11 James Thomas
Yeah. And I just want to shout out, wherever he may be, the Reverend Frank Fernaro, who is a priest of this diocese, formerly dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, and he was serving as an interim at a parish where I was Attending. And I don't want to represent that. I remember this sermon exactly, but occasionally when you're being formed for ordination, they ask you to remember a sermon that really struck you or that you've thought about for years and years.
And he preached a sermon on this topic, and I'm not quoting him, but he went to the pulpit and said clearly and strongly that having the adults go to church and stashing the kids in the basement is just really disordered. And it's not a quote, and I'm not quoting him, but I am saying that I've always remembered that sermon.
And so, Father Frank, wherever you are, I thank you for pulling the scales away from my eyes on that. And that sermon really moved me. And I've thought about it for years, and I've. I've remembered, like, you know, sort of there's two lines coming into the church. The adults go into the nave and the kids go down into the basement.
And obviously that's. There's no scriptural warrant for that at all. There's a scriptural warrant for the opposite, as you've been saying. So that just that that sermon comes to mind. And I have a strong memory of having to be turned around on that topic myself because it was just. It became normative at some point in the history of our church to keep the kids out of it.
And. And it ought not have. So we have corrective work to do.
00:07:42 Bird Treacy
Yes.
00:07:43 James Thomas
All right. So into our readings are the beginning of our Lenten readings. Here in Epiphany, we were reading through Mark. And in Mark, Jesus is famously, there's the messianic secret. Jesus is secretive. He's always on the move. And now in Lent, we've begun reading through John, where Jesus ministry is characterized by these intense personal encounters.
And this week we're going to hear of three encounters, three such Jesus and Nicodemus, Jesus and the Samaritan woman, and Jesus and the official. What through line do you think John is trying to emphasize through these stories? And also what is striking to you about the unique circumstances in which each of these encounters occurs?
00:08:25 Bird Treacy
Yeah. So I think in coming to all of these different encounters in this much more sort of public operation of Jesus in these stories from the Gospel of John, we are again leaning into what we've spoken about in terms of the prologue and all of this language about around Jesus as the light.
The light cannot be hidden. And so he has to operate in this much more visible way in this Gospel. And it's not that he is uncautious about what he's doing. We see him very much moving with care, with the knowledge of threats from government bodies and the like. But he's also going to still go forth and act in the ways that he knows he has been called to.
And I think that our encounters with all of these particular stories, John is bringing us close to some of the essential elements of understanding Jesus's context and also rejection of his context through these encounters, that there are particular ways in which he would be expected to interface with Nicodemus, with the Samaritan woman, with the official, and that he does not necessarily do those things.
And John, through the lens of the distinction between John the Evangelist and John the Baptist, John the Evangelist allows us to take John the Baptist as this kind of anchor who already has that special messianic knowledge and can present Jesus and perceive his public work in a unique way.
00:10:36 Natalie Thomas
In those three specific encounters, we hear the name of Nicodemus, and then we hear the Samaritan woman and the official as unnamed. And we're curious from your point of view and understanding of the Scriptures, how you might make sense or engage with this idea of forgetting or silencing certain people, in particular women in the Bible.
00:11:01 Bird Treacy
So I mentioned in my original introduction that I arrived at children's formation and work in the church kind of sidelong. And that sidelong journey took me through a master's degree in Women's Studies. And so I am particularly fond of this question. And so when we encounter this really just namelessness of particular figures, I want to stop short of viewing it as erasure or silencing and rather really look to the ways specifically with women that despite their lack of naming, they are still fully seen by Jesus and serve to shape him.
And we really grappled with this recently. The. With the most newly revised edition of the Guide to Godly Play, or Volume 8, has a brand new story called Jesus and the Women. And it includes the stories of 12, technically 13, including the mother Mary women from the Gospels. And only half of them have names.
And yet all of those women who don't have names still in some way impact the course of Jesus's ministry. And so I think it can become an overemphasis on our particular modern notions of individuality to get too caught up in whether or not particular figures have names, because the impact of their stories remains.
And if, if what the Gospels really wanted to do was kind of set women in their culturally appropriate place and position Jesus in the context of his social norms, we wouldn't even hear those stories.
00:13:12 James Thomas
And famously Although we don't want to. Let's not get ahead of ourselves in the liturgical calendar. But the, the most important task ever entrusted to any Christian in a few weeks, we will learn, was entrusted to one or several women. And that's, you know, at the beginning. Christianity is first a woman's movement at its origins, sort of.
On a related question in this reading, as we, as we have these encounters, Jesus is tied to the diversity of the Judaism of his time. We read about Jesus at the temple, there's the reference to Moses in the desert. We hear that we're at the well of Jacob. In addition, he interacts with just a whole spectrum of sort of the people of that part of the world at that time.
Jews, Samaritans, Pharisees, royal officials. What can we say about the connection between Jesus and the Jewish tradition here? Early on in John, it's sort of famously known that we are grappling with the potential that the later narratives in John can inappropriately and incorrectly awaken a certain anti Semitism. But here we really early in John, there's no denying that we're deeply immersed in the Jewishness of Jesus.
So how does that enliven or richen the text for you?
00:14:40 Bird Treacy
Absolutely. So there's a kind of known saying among artists that when you're in a particular tradition, you have to know the rules in order to break them effectively. And I think there's a significant piece of that at play, certainly in situating Jesus in his relationship to his own Jewish culture and Jewish tradition, that he needs to show up in a way that makes it very clear that he has been raised in this culture and context, that he knows these stories and these scriptures, that he knows what the laws are, so that when he moves on to break and reinterpret them, he is doing so as a deeply knowledgeable insider.
Because that's a really different kind of breaking the rules than the outsider who is not part of the culture that they're contravening. And I think particularly in some of these passages with Nicodemus, and when we come to John in the wilderness, who is met with a question about purification, we have to really know what kind of practices this is happening in the context of.
So John's acts of baptism were considered scarce, scandalous, not because there wasn't a predefined ritual that he was sort of practicing within, but because in the name of the coming of Jesus and everything that was about to change, he was going beyond a framework of what was a traditional proselyte baptism, that you were converting to Judaism and needed to be purified in preparation for that, that we have to understand this, what will become an emerging concept of the Christian Jew after Jesus's death and that is emerging during his life.
And I think all of these interactions serve to help us understand that particular context.
00:17:10 Natalie Thomas
In my own personal devotions recently, I've been listening or reading some parts of the Old Testament that have to do with purification rituals or laws around purification. And what is striking to me is it allows me to understand how what you just said, the breaking of the rules, was done in such a specific way that it frustrated what it was frustrating.
Right. So it wasn't just this isn't important anymore. But actually these rights or these practices are so important and we need to open them more to people or we need to create a space that reduces the barriers for these rights and these traditions and these practices. And I don't think to what you said, I don't think you can really understand that lens on it if you aren't rooted in the context you know that, that Jesus was rooted in.
And so thank you very much for pulling that out and sharing how Jesus's Jewishness both informs his ministry and how our understanding of that Jewishness can understand, can inform our, our spirituality.
00:18:22 James Thomas
We want to thank Bird for joining us again today. And we're so happy that you will be back with us for a few more weeks. And if you want to, if you have enjoyed what you're hearing from Bird, as we certainly have, you can find her at www.abirdinchurch.com or wigglesandwonder.substack.com and her handle on Instagram is birdinchurch.
And Natalie will include all that in the show notes and you'll be able to find that information through us very easily, we promise. And speaking of Natalie, I want to thank you for being along on the ride here. We also want to thank the wider community of people praying with us that you great cloud of witnesses out there, wherever you may be, we're always tickled to see the, you know, we're always tickled to see that we have listeners.
We've seen recently, Bahrain, we've seen Japan, we've seen Russia, and of course, those of you closer to home. All the same, we love you all. We want to stay in touch with you. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram. Bedtime Chapel is our handle all the way around. You can email us bedtimechapel.com we want to hear from you what's working, what's working, not working. Find us on www.bedtimechapel.com you can always find the order of service there and the readings for the week. And until next time, we will be praying with.
