Baking Cakes for the Queen of Heaven
by: Nancy Vedder-Shults on October 7th, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Teaching the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum (and blogging about it) lit a fire under me. The title of the course refers to a story told in the book of Jeremiah. This week I finally recorded the song I wrote about this tale on YouTube. Now others can learn the tune and sing it in their “Cakes” classes.
If you don’t know the story, here’s a synopsis: Jeremiah rants and rails against the Queen of Heaven, telling the people that worshipping Her is a betrayal of YHWH. (This actually proves to be historically incorrect, since YHWH had a consort for most of the years until the Babylonian exile — even in the temple in Jerusalem. But Jeremiah doesn’t know his archaeology, since he’s living during these turbulent times.) He threatens the people that if they revere any God or Goddess other than YHWH, God will punish them. Here’s how Jeremiah expresses God’s anger at the people:
Do you not see what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven, and they pour out libations to other gods, in order to anger me! (Jeremiah 7: 17 -18)
The people continue their worship of the Queen of Heaven and sure enough, the Babylonians invade Israel and take many Jews into captivity. Jeremiah comes to gloat, telling the people that he told them so. But the people answer him:
As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of Yahweh — we shall not listen to you. But we shall without fail do everything as we said: we shall burn incense to the Queen of Heaven, and shall pour her libations as we used to do…in the cities of Judah, in the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty of food, and we were all well and saw no evil. But since we ceased burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and to pour her libations, we have wanted everything and have been consumed by sword and famine. (Jeremiah 44: 16 – 18)
I hope you enjoy my song.
Beautifully sung! I expect that if you judge of religion by results you need to be prepared to change it.
The Beit Arabyia home/Peace Center -which Israel has destroyed four times -is at the cornerstone of the village of the Anata and the Shufat refugee camps, in the very area where the prophet Jeremiah in the 6th century B.C. critiqued the violent conflicts in the Mid East:
“I hear violence and destruction in the city, sickness and wounds are all I see.” [Jeremiah 6:7]
During one of my visits there, Mohammad Alatar, film producer of “The Iron Wall” was also there and he said:
“I am a Muslim Palestinian American and when my son asked me who my hero was I took three days to think about it. I told him my hero is Jesus, because he took a stand and he died for it.
“What really needs to be done is for the churches to be like Jesus; to challenge the Israeli occupation and address the apartheid practices as moral issues.
“Even if every church divested and boycotted Israel it would not harm Israel.
“After the USA and Russia, Israel is the third largest arms exporter in the world.
“It is a moral issue that the churches must address.”
A fact most USA Christians are clueless about is that Jesus was NEVER a Christian!
The term ‘Christian’ was not even coined until the days of Paul, about 3 decades after Jesus/The Prince of Peace walked the earth and taught that it is the peacemakers who are the children of God, NOT those that bomb, occupy or torture others.
2,000 years ago The Cross had NO symbolic religious meaning and was not a piece of jewelry.
When JC said: “Pick up your cross and follow me” everyone THEN understood he was issuing a POLITICAL statement, for the main roads into Jerusalem were lined with crucified agitators, rebels, dissidents and any who disturbed the status quo of the Roman Empire and Military Occupying Forces.
Jesus, while never a Christian, was a social, justice, radical revolutionary Palestinian devout Jewish road warrior who rose up against the corrupt Temple authorities and challenged their job security by teaching the people they did NOT need to pay the priests for ritual baths or sacrificing livestock to be OK with God; for God LOVED them just as they were:
Sinners, poor, diseased, outcasts, widows, orphans, refugees and prisoners all living under the Roman Empire and Military Occupation.
What got JC crucified was disturbing the status quo of the Roman Empire and Occupying Forces by teaching the subversive concept that God preferred the humble sinner, the poor, diseased, outcasts, widows, orphans, refugees and prisoners all living under the Roman Empire and Military Occupation above the elite and arrogant.
The early followers and lovers of Jesus were called members of THE WAY-being THE WAY he taught one should be and that his sisters and brothers were those that DID the will of the Father:
“What does God require? He has told you o’man! Be just, be merciful, and walk humbly with your Lord.” -Micah 6:8
In 2003, I read an article in “Presence Magazine” written by a pastor of a church in Berkeley. I no longer remember what the article was about, but he inspired me to email him a few of my theological questions.
He replied something like this;
I once gave a sermon that began with the story of Rabbi Hillel, who lived 100 years before Jesus walked the earth.
Rabbi Hillel understood the Hebrew understanding of Hokema; Holy Wisdom; The Feminine Divinity, was the same as the Greek understanding of The Logos: The Word.
It was Saints John and Paul that understood The Logos: The Word was Jesus.
So with a little IMAGINATION you can IMAGINE that before Jesus walked the earth a man, he was already a she; The Word, Holy Wisdom, Hokema, the feminine divinity.
I gave that sermon to a mainline conservative congregation. It didn’t go over well…
It read like great news to me!
“Imagination is evidence of The Divine.”-William Blake
“Imagine All the People Sharing All the World.”-John Lennon
Eileen — Your description of Jesus reminds me of Marcus Borg’s book _Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time_. He’s a part of the Jesus Seminar, and his book makes clear that Jesus was a radical Jew for his time, and that Christian churches should take more of their cues from his actual life, rather than the rewrites over the years.
And Hokhmah or Holy Wisdom has been an inspiration to me at times, although most recently I was reading an article that cogently illustrated that Hokhmah and the Prostitute were two Old Testament female representations of the dutiful Jewish people and those who were wayward and still held onto the Gods and Goddesses who predated YHWH.