Sermon: Do the Easy Thing

 Grace Presbyterian Church

July 3, 2022, Pentecost 4C

2 Kings 5:1-19a; Luke 4:21-30

 

Do the Easy Thing

 

 

We were introduced to Elisha last week, as he doggedly held on to Elijah until the very last, taking up Elijah’s prophetic mantle as well as his clothing mantle in the process. As we come to him this week he has been in that role for a while now, and aside from that angry cursing at a group of young boys who taunted him over his baldness, his prophetic term has been rather calmer than his predecessor’s. He has his quirks, to be sure; when a trio of kings came to him for an oracle in 2 Kings 3, he refused to speak until a musician was provided to play – perhaps making Elisha the first beat-poet prophet. (That scripture reading tells us that once that musician began to play, "the power of the Lord came on him." Maybe some of us preachers today ought to give that a try.)

In today’s reading from 2 Kings, Elisha remains almost a background character, only appearing in person at its close but deeply involved in events nonetheless. While a powerful army commander and multiple kings are involved in the story - people who expect to be important - some of the biggest roles in the story are played by people who are anonymous to us, utterly insignificant in the social strata of the time; the servants of the general Naaman and his wife. 

Take the young servant girl who served Naaman’s wife, for instance. She had apparently been taken captive from her home in Israel, presumably during one of many skirmishes between Israel and Aram. One might guess that she was fully homesick for the land of her birth. In this servant role she would have been well aware both of Naaman’s military prowess and of the skin condition that threatened his stature, no matter how successful he was in the field. It would have been easy for her to say nothing. It would also have been easy for her to rejoice in Naaman’s potential downfall (quietly, to be sure; no point in chancing punishment); after all, he had defeated her homeland. How the mighty hath fallen and all that, you know.

Is it possible that this servant girl remembered her first calling? Such gloating, or even simple refusal to offer help in that time of suffering, simply was not reconcilable with what she knew of Israel’s God. Yahweh was a God who heals, and she remembered the prophet of that God in her homeland who healed others. With all of this in mind, she spoke up to her mistress, telling her about that prophet in the region of Samaria, which set in motion the events of today’s story. To her, that was the right thing and the easy thing to do.

Elisha himself also shows us what it is to remember whose we are. Like any good prophet, Elisha has had a testy relationship with the monarchy so far, apparently getting along better with Jehoshaphat, then the king of Judah, than with the ruler in his own land of Israel. Nonetheless, Elisha reached out to Israel’s king at a moment when that king was apparently forgetting whose he was. By his intervention, Elisha helps avert a potential disaster between Israel and Aram, and incidentally reminds that king that there is indeed a prophet of the one true God in the land (Israel's king Jehoram was an idol-worshiper like his father Ahab). Later in the story Elisha will also demonstrate whose he really is as well, refusing Naaman’s very generous offers of reward for his healing.

For Naaman, though, first he has to learn whose he is, which goes against everything he has been taught to believe. He was a man of power and accustomed to wielding authority over others even as he also served his king. The humiliating spectre of his disease threatened that. Being so desperate as to take the advice that a foreign servant girl gave to his wife was bad enough, but to get shuffled off from the king to some prophet out in the Samarian backwoods, only to be handled by some messenger boy was too much. I am the general of a great military power, he must have thought. Who are these people, these mere Israelites, these nobodies, to treat me this way? He might well have started thinking about how to bring these insolent people down once and for all. 

Fortunately, more of those anonymous servants are there to save the day, persuading Naaman that it only made sense do the extremely simple thing that the prophet asked of him. Finally he takes his Jordan River bath and is “over-healed”, his skin being made like that of a young boy.

It seems that a lot of people overlook an important point in this story: Naaman converts! He declares his profession of faith in verse 15 – “there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.” He’s still a little confused about some things, not realizing that that same God would be with him even in Aram and wanting to take along some Israelite dirt, but it’s a start. After Elisha rebuffs his attempts to pay, Naaman confesses his dilemma; his job required him to support his master, who still worshiped that foreign non-god, even physically in that act of idol-worship. He seeks pardon of Yahweh through Elisha, who sends him on his way in peace. Whatever else he may have had to learn, Naaman had picked up one important thing: he knew whose he was, he knew the Lord who held not only his healing but his very life in his hands, and that this Lord would still be whose he was, first and foremost.

But let's not overlook this central point in the story, and just how much Naaman's pride almost undid everything. Look again at Naaman's ranting after Elisha has first given him the instruction on how to be healed. First, this one: 

"I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy?

 

Naaman was expecting a big production number, something of a spectacle to be made over a Very Important Person like himself. It's not hard to imagine that Elisha's predecessor Elijah might have given exactly that kind of spectacle if he had deigned to intervene at all. But Elisha doesn't even leave the house; he sends these instructions via messenger - another servant, in other words. How in the world could a general who could crush Israel if he so chose be expected to take instruction from a mere servant?

Then there was this bit of ranting:

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters in Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?"

 

Here's where his Aramean nationalism is showing. Why do I have to dunk myself in this podunk river when there are great and mighty rivers back home I could immerse myself in? Who does this jerk think he is, anyway? Fortunately those servants (we have no idea if they were Aramean or were captured from some other foreign nation) talked some sense into Naaman, and he finally went to the river and obeyed the instructions he had been given.

It's worth noting that something like a kind of nationalism attaches to our gospel reading from Luke when Jesus recounts this event in his first visit to his hometown after starting his public ministry. All he has to do is mention this healing, along with Elijah's help to a widow in Sidon during a famine, and the crowd literally tries to throw him off a cliff. Elisha's intervention here might have gotten Israel out of another battle with Aram (roughly equivalent to Syria today), but it probably didn't win him a lot of fans in Israel.

Anyway, not only was Naaman healed by the time his seventh dip was done, but he was even over-healed; his flesh was cleaned "like the flesh of a young boy" which we can safely assume Naaman was not. It's enough to cut through all the pride and bluster and bring Naaman to a completely different understanding of ... well, of everything. He makes haste to return to the prophet and deliver that remarkable confession noted above. All of this comes about because a man who was looking for some great thing to do was finally talked into doing the easy thing he was given to do.

Do we fall into this trap sometimes? Does the church get obsessed with doing some big public spectacle of a thing to the detriment of carrying out the basic work God has given the church to do? 

One of the initiatives of the Presbyterian Church (USA), also taken up by the St. Augustine Presbytery of which we are a part, is the Matthew 25 Initiative, taking its inspiration from the well-known parable at the end of that chapter known as the "parable of the sheep and the goats." The three focus points developed from that scripture for this initiative are:

·      Building congregational vitality.

·      Dismantling structural racism.

·      Eradicating systemic poverty.

That sounds rather intimidating, to be sure; but go back to the source and look at those things Jesus talks about in Matthew 25:

"I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."

 

How much of that do we already do? Not all of it, but a good bit.

There will be times when the church, or maybe some of us as individuals, are called upon to do harder things. But the first thing is to do the basic, easy things that God has set before us, some of which we do almost by reflex here. 

Sometimes the hardest thing is to do the easy thing. Naaman almost ruined everything by being unwilling to go dunk himself in a river. Let us never get so caught up in anything that would distract us so that we fail to do the most basic things God has set before us.

For the obedience to do the easy thing, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #298, Lord, You Give the Great Commission; #312, Take Us As We Are, O God; #719, Come, Labor On

 

they launched a rocket tonight

they launched a rocket tonight

seventy-four miles north of here

 

we were promised a big show

by very enthusiastic resort staff

and so

a small but notable crowd

perhaps a dozen and a half

maybe two dozen

gathered on the overlook by the beach

which promised (we were told) an excellent view

 

the numbers gathered on the overlook

while the moon

stood stalwart sentinel

slam-dunking its reflected sunlight 

onto a lightly ruffled ocean

 

a plane fooled everybody for a moment

 

but sure enough

at 9:02 p.m.

a reddening glow blossomed low on the northern horizon

from which emerged a large red spot

larger than the stars anyway

not as large as the moon

standing stalwart sentinel

 

to the delight of all 

the newly launched large red spot 

turned south 

toward us

and eventually passed right in front of us

still climbing and growing smaller

its vaguely comet-tail-like trail changing colors 

and eventually fading away 

as the rocket climbed higher and faded into the sky

on its way to disgorge forty-something satellites

 

eventually

the smallish but notable crowd drifted away 

as the rocket could no longer be seen with unaided eye

 

and yet the moon 

still stood stalwart sentinel

slam-dunking its reflected sunlight

onto a lightly ruffled ocean

Sermon afterthoughts: The Deceptiveness of Light

What came into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

--John 1: 3-5 (NRSV) 

"Very well then, we must corrupt it. No doubt you often practice transforming into an angel of light as a parade ground exercise, now is the time to do it in the face of the Enemy."

-Screwtape to Wormwood, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

My sermon on John 1 today got hijacked along the way by the sentences above quoted from verses 3-5. Mostly this was because, as noted early in the sermon itself, I found myself wondering a lot about the particular ritual that closes so many Christmas Eve services involving the congregation holding up lighted candles in a darkened sanctuary. As written there, in cold hard computer-screen text, it doesn't look very impressive, does it? In practice, people tend to be transfixed. If other pastors are like me, they might worry that nothing else from the service will stay with anyone in the congregation once that's all over.

I couldn't let the sermon pass without noting how that light/dark dichotomy gets misused to treat, say, darkness of skin (or any other darkness) as tantamount to darkness of spirit or absence of light. There's a long history of that, behind justifying slavery and a whole lot of other civil rights abuses. What I didn't have time to get to, on the other hand, is the observation that the opposite can also be true; lightness of skin (or any other kind of lightness) as automatically good or perfect or right or holy. And goodness knows, that's just not true.

The quote lifted above from The Screwtape Letters riffs on Paul's admonition to the Corinthians about false teachers and deceivers. Goodness knows there's enough of that among us in the church, frankly pointing supposed followers of Christ towards all manner of falsehood and wrong theology and frankly evil-doing. We're only four days away from the anniversary of one of the most egregious and grotesque examples of such falseness in the 'Christian nationalism' that drove many participants in the attack on the Capitol.

'Christian nationalism' is particularly pernicious at the moment, but it is hardly the only false light luring people away from genuine faith, is it? The prosperity gospel has been eroding the church for decades. The strictures of "biblical manhood" and "biblical womanhood" have been breaking lives and hearts for at least as long if not longer. (Mandatory plug for Kristin Kobes du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne and Beth Allison Barr's The Making of Biblical Womanhood on those subjects.) The false lights, and the fake angels of light pushing people towards those false lights, are thick on the ground these days, and some of them are mistaken for real followers of Christ way too easily.

Light, indeed, can be deceiving, even without such false prophets and wrongdoers posing as angels of light. To bring in my favorite bit of Christmas-season public theology, A Charlie Brown Christmas, where do the brightest lights appear in that little parable? I think one might have to point to CB and Linus's journey to the Christmas tree lot, the one with all the big shiny aluminum Christmas trees. Remember the big spotlights that led the two to the spot? 

Or one might think of the brightly lit stage with all the kids dancing in lieu of rehearsing for the Christmas play:

This one stands out most in contrast to that same stage when Linus finally steps up with Luke 2 in answer to Charlie Brown's desperation:

John's seemingly simple dichotomy masks the much more demanding task of discernment that we face: which light is the true light? Seeking the "true light" as John calls it in verse 9 requires sorting out a lot of fake or artificial light. John doesn't really address that so much, outside of course of spending his entire gospel trying to portray that Light.

Maybe the difference is that the "true light" is the one that actually does shine in the darkness, that isn't unplugged or turned off so easily. The "true light" is the one that the darkness did not, could not, cannot extinguish.When other false lights have shorted out or burned away, the true light still shines. 

One of my former seminary professors, when the occasion arose, frequently (OK, almost always) pronounced a benediction that included something along the lines of this: "and may light, love's own crucified, risen, incarnate light guide each and everyone of us out of every darkness and all the way home." What does a "crucified, risen, incarnate Light" look like? Maybe more to the point: what does a "crucified, risen, incarnate Light" not look like? Perhaps in the end this is the thing that points us towards the true light and away from all the parade-ground devils practicing their transformation-tricks on gullible souls.

What I can't unsee tonight

Went down south from Richmond to enjoy dinner tonight after the day's activities. Making my way home traffic on Huguenot/River/Cary Street Road; the traffic unexpectedly comes to a near-standstill. 

Soon, it becomes clear; a law enforcement vehicle is sitting in the right lane ahead, lights flashing. I need to merge into the left lane. Fortunately it doesn't become a contentious thing, and I am able to get over, and eventually to creep ahead. 

Finally alongside the law enforcement car, I can see what has happened. A deer has apparently been struck by a vehicle. The deer is stretched out across that right lane. The officer is standing between his car and the deer, looking on helplessly.

This is a bad enough sight, but that's not the worst thing.  

The deer is not dead. 

He's trying to lift up his head and look around, maybe even trying to get himself up, to no avail, but trying anyway.

I'm pretty sure I swore every swear word in existence for the next ten minutes of the drive.

Nature really cannot survive us, can it?

Sermon afterthoughts: the "Get Out of Hell Free" card

 There's a lot of stuff to think about in Mark 10:35-45, and especially in that last verse. It's a verse that has been appropriated for the development of a theology of atonement, even substitutionary atonement, in a way that doesn't really work with the material Mark has given us here.

The sermon for this scripture explores this challenge to a degree. Much of that atonement talk hinges on how modern users ("modern" here applying to several centuries' worth of interpreters, not just us "modern" American types) apply a definition of "ransom" that doesn't really fit. The "ransom" in Mark's usage doesn't imply anybody getting paid for the release of those held captive, which doesn't fit with the notion that some price had to be "paid" for our release from sin, that price being Jesus's life in such theology. (Really, though, would not Jesus's resurrection somehow equate to a breach of contract in such a theology?) 

An awful lot (yes, there are two possible ways to interpret that, and both are valid) of theology has been spilt trying to fit this passage with other bits of scripture, such as some of the "suffering servant" verses from Isaiah, to flesh out this theology of a price to be paid. I'm not sure, though, that it's this bit of interpretation that causes the most damage. 

It's possible to be incredibly narrow in defining the word translated "life" in this verse. As noted in the sermon, the word in question (ψυχην, "psuxen") goes far, far beyond any definition of "life" that can be reduced to "not death." The word wants to embrace all the stuff of living, not just a biological definition of being alive. And this is the biggest problem for a lot of theologies out there.

Like John and James in this passage, it's easy to talk tough. When Jesus challenges their seating request, asking if they can really endure all the suffering he's about to endure, they have the cheek to respond "we are able." Were they counting on some kind of divine intervention to head off the very suffering and death Jesus had tried to teach them three times now? Were they just stupid? What is it? 

Like many of the January 6 insurrectionists, who are now sounding a lot less brave with prison time looming as a real possibility, one can't help but notice that these two brave-talking disciples have, later in this gospel, bolted and deserted Jesus by the time he is nailed to the cross. Eventually the book of Acts reminds us that James, willing or not, did eventually drink from this cup of suffering; he is noted as the first of the twelve to be martyred (of course Judas died first, but not a martyr's death). John apparently doesn't die such a death, but the tradition that he spent years in exile does suggest suffering did come his way. 

Even so, for an awful lot of human beings, giving up being alive is a far easier promise to make than giving one's life, particularly in the way Jesus gave his life, particularly in the way Jesus came to serve and not to be served. Being "manly" or "tough" or a "warrior" has become the default way of being "Christian" for an awful lot of men who claim that name. (Many, but not all, of such men are affiliated with church traditions that can be described with a five-syllable word starting with "e".) If you're willing to twist your brain enough I suppose that can be passed off as a kind of "service," but let's get blunt: there's nothing Christlike about it. 

Right there is a word - "Christlike" - that needs to be recovered and put to work a lot more than it typically is in the church of whatever stripe these days. In the current state of society, where the word "Christian" as adjective has been so stretched and distorted as to be nearly useless for anything meaningful, I still say it's worth breaking out "Christlike" in its place and seeing just how much of what we describe as "Christian" really measures up. 

Following a Savior who steadfastly refused to rack up power on earth loses its luster real fast for a great many people. Signing up for a fight sounds better. Even better is the promise of being "ransomed" - getting the great "get out of Hell free" card - without having to follow the example of Jesus, to give your whole life, your inner self, your soul, your everything. Talking as if your "salvation" is in the past tense is a lot easier and more fun than talking about your service, your following Jesus, as an ongoing everyday thing. 

Resist this. 

It might just be that the allure of the "get out of Hell free" card is the biggest problem with the misuse of verses such as this one. Anything that implies that the Christ-following life, or any part of it, is an over-and-done thing is a disaster for actual discipleship and Christ-following. And it's not just those e-word people that are the problem; all corners of Christianity, including the mainline, have severe problems grasping all this. 

The call is not to volunteer to die; the call is, like Jesus, to give your whole life, your inside and out life, all of you. And that goes on every day of your life. 

And that's really hard.

Ugh.

A sunrise

Morning is not my time. It is usually the time that sleep, which ordinarily spends the full night taunting and then eluding me, now attempts to ensnare me at that moment I need to quit purusing it. But when one is staying at a resort directly on the beach, one is obligated to get up early enough to go out to that beach and watch a sunrise. Today was that day.

The sky had already begun to lighten well before I arrived, and darkness itself had been well and truly vanquished long before I took up my post on the corner of the walkway overlook, not wanting to sacrifice my ankles to the demon beach sand. This day was simply and only for watching the sun rise. No pictures or video clips. No distractions. Only a drink to sip on, and eyes peeled to the east.

A few people were about; a smattering of morning walkers on the beach, including the ubiquitous older fellows with their metal detectors and at least one man toting a surfboard; one or two on other parts of the walkway overlook, cameras or phones at the ready; one couple in conversation with another woman, the only disruption of the beachside pseudo-silence.

Of course, it is no silence, not truly; nature has more than enough to say if one listens in such a setting. On this day it is the waves on the beach generating the most chatter. They have been stirred up by an extremely sizable hurricane in the Atlantic, one that has had the nickname "large Larry" attached to it since one of the earliest advisories on the storm in its hurricane shape began with the alliteration "Large Larry lumbering...". Large Larry has been kind enough to steer its major-storm winds well clear of land masses or populated areas to this point. Bermuda may yet be affected by the storm, and the extreme outer fringes of Newfoundland may get brushed by it much later. But for now, it is merely a large storm with high winds and enough force to generate substantial waves and swells as far as the eastern coasts of the US, including this outpost in Florida.

And those waves clamor for attention. Look at me, they say. Listen to me. I am far more interesting than that big gas ball in the sky. Look how large I am. Listen to how fierce I am. See how I am stripping away the sand from this beach. Pay attention to me. 

And of course, they are fascinating in themselves. They are large for this location. They are generating a great deal of noise. They are indeed stripping away sand from the beach. I am here just as high tide is wrapping up. The waves make it clear that it is not their choice to pull back. I'll be back, they say. I may be pulling back for now, but I will be back. I promise you that. 

They are most distracting in themselves. However, they cannot claim main-attraction status for this moment, for just when one is almost ready to forget the reason for being out on this beach before being fully awake, the tiniest of orange slivers has appeared on that horizon, slightly south of due east.

More observers have accumulated on the overlook and the beach itself by now, just in time for the main attraction from which they seem rather distracted. The sun is booking it this morning. That tiny orange sliver is already growing into a quarter-, third-, even half-sun. Before one can even calculate how long it will take, that sun has overtopped the horizon, perched like a child's favorite ball waiting to be kicked or tossed or picked up and lumbered around.

But wait; there is a challenge yet coming. The luminous orange disk is encountering a small cloud. Just as it had so quickly cleared the horizon it now slipped hastily behind the small cloud. It isn't a solid cloud; the sun can still glimmer through its thinner places, not with the vivid orange glow of its first appearing, but now brightly spreading its illumination from behind the cloud. 

The cloud is small, and the sun does not take long to surmount it as well. It is not the same sun as before; the orange luminescence is now transigured into the diffuse yet illuminating yellow that we know from our daytime hours. It is shining now, and ready to claim its rightful place of importance in a sky that has few other obstacles or challenges to offer. 

And it is done. A sunrise has been completed. The day is on.

Sermon afterthoughts: Childish

The week was spent preparing a sermon on Ephesians 4:1-16. Two verses in particular from the text just kept jumping out at me all week, to the point of almost preventing a sermon from happening. Check out verses 14-15, here as in the Common English Bible:

 As a result, we aren't supposed to be infants any longer who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes from teaching with deceitful scheming and the tricks people play to mislead others. Instead, by speaking the truth with love, let's grow in every way into Christ...

It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to find in your average batch of weekly headlines a slew of examples of folks who present themselves as "Christians," for whom the scare quotes seem especially necessary when viewed in the light of this passage (or, say, Philippians 4:8, or 1 Corinthians 13, or Galatians 5:22-23, or most anything about Jesus in any of the gospels). There isn't a whole lot of good witness in the behavior of such leaders as the pastor who threatened to throw out anyone wearing a mask in *his* church (emphasis on his). 

It is, in short, childish - a childishness made all the worse by its continued insistence on posturing as "masculine" or "manly" or some such business. It is whining posturing as leadership. It is those who "teach with deceitful scheming" preying upon infants who can be tossed and blown around by all the wind. And frankly, it is gross. 

I suppose the confluence of headlines and lectionary scripture have pushed this one forward in my mind, but it checks out nonetheless. The "Christianity" that preys upon our headlines and draws attention to itself (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, Jesus?) is a culturally shaped "Christianity" that has no spiritual maturity about it, that demands benefits and privileges for itself and its chosen few, with the rest of the world either ignored or actively vilified. 

I have in the past argued that the word "Christian" should be abolished as an adjective. Four years later, I'm more convinced of this than ever. What I'm seeing more and more is how much of this usage of the word seems to be deeply bogged down in a rampant spiritual childishness laced with heavy doses of fear, fear of "the other," fear of losing one's status and privilege and power, fear of anything that challenges our comfort and splendid isolation and imagined benevolence toward the lesser people around "us" (this one got totally ramped up by the pandemic).  

The aforementioned 1 Corinthians 13 contains, besides all the description and exaltation of love, this telling bit in verse 11: 

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a adult, I put an end to childish ways.

It's telling indeed, and yet how many have not put aside such childish ways? What might be some "childish" ways that need to be put aside? Things like selfishness ("if you have enough, then I can't have everything I want" is a pretty good summary), name-calling (have you had enough of the word "socialism" these days?), projection (accusing others of that of which you are guilty - every sibling has experienced that even if they don't realize it), avoiding responsibility ("it's not my fault if those people are [something they are actually not]"); it's a long list, and an awful lot of public-facing self-identified "Christians" indulge these and too many other traits of childishness with little pushback from, well, anybody. 

The title of the sermon that eventually resulted from the week's wrestling with these verses was "Grow Up." You'll see an amusing illustration with it (also reproduced it here - if anyone knows who created it I'd love to give them credit and maybe buy them dinner, even if it might be slightly unfair to a lot of adolescents I know). The illustration isn't limited to the church, to be sure, but boy howdy does it apply here. 

Of course, part of being able to avoid being tossed and blown around by the deceivers is being well-rooted enough to spot deception when you hear or see it. Being grounded in scripture would be a good start, but how many adults at your church have any tolerance for doing Sunday school? In addition, I'm going to list a few books at the end of this blog for getting acquainted with how the deceivers among the church get traction; two of them lay out in stark detail how powergrabbers replace genuine Christlike teaching with deeply unchristlike cultural norms prettied up with a thin veneer of churchy talk, while the third helps demonstrate how those norms-disguised-as-faith get spread around so profusely. The mainline church of which I am a part has a tall task ahead of undoing the damage done, but the task can't be avoided or brushed off no matter how much such churches seek to do justice and practice righteousness. The childish church is eventually going to have to be named and called out, no matter how unpleasant it will be, or else God's gonna have to tear it all up, roots and everything, and plant anew. 

Or maybe that's already happening.

Suggested reading:

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. 

Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.

Vaca, Daniel. Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America.