Today we have a text that makes those end time people happy, because they can start talking about what each little bit means, and symbols. and powers and aouthorities. The sunday text includes two passages — the one I quote and one from the Gospel, where a widow’s son is returned to life (When Jesus did this is Nain, the people seeing this knew that this was Elijah had done).

Instead I want to talk about women, and why the church is feminine, and what this means to men. I doing this, we will, as usual contrast: however the hint is given my C.S. Lewis when he said that compareed with God, we are all weak, powerless and dependant. If providing and caring is masculine, then God is very masculine. (This has been perverted throughout Church history — from the monks conflating courtly love and making Mary a virgin queen of heaven as well as the Christ bearer to the Jesus in my boyfriend songs which I cannot sing because they are not merely gay, they are wimpy)

For in these passages there are some fairly strong images of women at their best and worst, And the woman in travail, sent to the wilderness, could be the church. Or Mary: all the young boys were slaughtered by that tyrant Herod in the hope he would kill the baby Jesus. I will leave that to the scholars.

Revelation 12:1-12

¹ A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. ² She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. ³ Then another portent appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. ⁴ His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that he might devour her child as soon as it was born. ⁵ And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne; ⁶ and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, so that there she can be nourished for one thousand two hundred sixty days.

⁷ And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, ⁸ but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. ⁹ The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

¹⁰ Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. ¹¹ But they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death. ¹² Rejoice then, you heavens and those who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, for the devil has come down to you with great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”

1 Kings 17:8-16 (17-24)

⁸Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, ⁹“Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” ¹⁰So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” ¹¹As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” ¹²But she said, “As the LORD your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” ¹³Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son. ¹⁴For thus says the LORD the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.”¹⁵She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. ¹⁶The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD that he spoke by Elijah. ¹⁷After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. ¹⁸She then said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” ¹⁹But he said to her, “Give me your son.” He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. ²⁰He cried out to the LORD, “O LORD my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” ²¹Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the LORD, “O LORD my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” ²²The LORD listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. ²³Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, “See, your son is alive.” ²⁴So the woman said to Elijah, “Now I kno

Now, the angels, and men fought. The widow’s son worked to provide for his mother. Without this son, the widow was reliant on charitly and as Elijah noted, in the pagan towns, this was a recipe for starvation. Vox Day makes a point today which is can be taken as a gloss on this.

Now I’m going to teach you a hard, but very important lesson. You see, I don’t care you how feel. I really don’t. More importantly, neither does anyone else. Only about 200 people on a planet of 7 billion actually care about your feelings, and that’s if you’re lucky. The sooner you grasp this lesson, the better off you will be. And since almost no one gives a damn what you do, say, think, or feel, appealing to your feelings when you encounter differences of opinion is not only illogical, but useless.

What Vox says is true. The average man did not care about what was happening to the widow or to the woman giving birth. Most of the world does not care about the thousands who will die today. And we are not told about how many of those will be martyred for their faith in the long standing war of Islam against civilisation

And how we feel does not matter when the ravening hordes, be they progressive, religious, or the racialunderclass being let loose by their political overlords — descents. What matters is being able to protect, and being able to defent. The truth, our thoughts, our lives. A discourse that relies on feelings simply will not work.

And this is where the current church is wrong. We have stopped teaching the gospel. We have stopped saying what is true. We have stopped standing for what is right, even if the state then labels us, and we have instead become part of holy huddles, feeling for each other.

This feminizing of the church is wrong. We are supposed to be the worthy bride of Christ. And Christ dies for us. We are expected to die for him. We are expected to have courage, like him. Jesus was not a wimp, which is what many men in the church have become. Compared with God, who created this earth by the word, or by the command line, we are all weak, fearful, needy, dependant and poor.

So let’s get back to concentrating of being like Jesus, and not on how we feel or acceding to the current intellectual fashions, as if it has no more import as how the Parisian fashion houses are ruining tailoring this year. What we think matters. What we do matters. And for most of us, raising our children is the most important thing we do.