Sermon for the people of God at St. Mark Hope and Peace, preached 2018-08-26
Sermon text: Judges 11:29-40
Secondary text: Luke 23:26-31
[Note: my Hebrew is non-existent, so I apologize in advance for any errors. I rely on Interlinear Scripture Analyzer 3 for my textual work, and I am sure it is imperfect (and know that it doesn't account for textual variations.)]
This August, we've deviated from the assigned readings in the lectionary to visit some texts that are less familiar, to answer puzzling questions and to hear stories that we otherwise don't hear.
This text was suggested by Beccah -- but I chose it from several options, so I have no one to blame but myself.
The book of Judges is set chronologically between Joshua and 1 Samuel. Joshua tells us about the Hebrew people conquering the land of Canaan after their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness, and 1 Samuel will tell us about the last of the judges -- Samuel -- and the first of the kings -- Saul.
So Judges is set at a time when there was no king in Israel, and several times in the book -- although not in our story -- the narrator repeats that there was no king in Israel and "everyone did what was right in their own eyes" (Judges 17:6)
So if we're asking "why is this story in the Bible? Why did the writer of Judges choose to tell it?" one of the answers is, the book of Judges is pro-monarchist propaganda about how terrible life is without a king.
If you read Samuel -- or especially Kings -- you'll discover that's life's not too great with a king either, and in fact God strongly discourages the people from asking for a king -- reminding them that GOD is king, and they shouldn't need anyone else to tell them what to do.
If they have a king, God says through Samuel, he'll take all your stuff, your livestock and your produce and your slaves and your children. (1 Samuel 8:10-17)
A king will take your children.
....
So, Jephthah.
My love for maps is not like Pr. Donna's love for maps -- but then, whose is? -- so I can give only a basic sketch of the geography of this story.
It takes place East of the Jordan River -- what's called the transjordan -- which was the less populous side of the Jordan, and had an uneasy relationship with the rest of Israel. If you're like me and can picture two places on a map of the Holy Land -- Galilee is up north somewhere and Jerusalem is down south somewhere -- both those places are on the western side of the Jordan.
The region east of the Jordan and northish is called Gilead, and south of Gilead in the time our story is set is the kingdom of Ammon. (If you're way better than geography than I am, it might help to know that today, the region that was Gilead is now in Syria, and the region that was Ammon is now in the country of Jordan. More or less.)
So: our story takes place east of the Jordan. North is Gilead (which is part of Israel) and south is Ammon (which is not part of Israel).
And somewhere near Gilead, probably even further east, is Tob, which is where Jephthah spent his young adulthood.
Jephthah is the illegitimate son of a man named, confusingly, Gilead. Gilead also had legitimate sons, who drove Jephthah out of his father's land and into the land of Tob. We don't know where Tob was, or anything else about it, so I'm going to guess it was not anyplace particularly special. And Jephthah out in the middle of nowhere gathers bunch of worthless friends around him (11:3). The New Revised Standard Version [NRSV] translation is "outlaws," but the Hebrew means something like "worthless" -- literally "empty" [ריקים]. They're empty, like a dry well [c.f., Genesis 37:24] or a starving person [c.f. Isaiah 29:8]. Jephthah's friends are empty-headed and empty-hearted, which may begin to explain some things about Jephthah.
Eventually the kingdom of Ammon, which remember is the southern neighbor of Jephthah's Gileadite family, declares war on Israel, and Jephthah's relations remember that Jephthah is a strong military leader and come to Tob to beg him to come back and fight for them.
Jephthah is predictably miffed and reminds them that they're the ones who drove him away, so they sweeten the pot and promise him that he can be the head of Gilead if he leads them against Ammon.
To give credit where credit is due, Jephthah first tries diplomacy, which makes him unique among judges -- he tries, in many sentences, to convince Ammon that they have no business fighting Israel -- and the sons of Ammon ignore Jephthah's message.
And that's where our reading picks up.
The very first thing that happens to Jephthah in the passage in front of us is, he's touched by the Spirit of God.
And the very second thing that happens to Jephthah in the passage in front of us is, he's touched by a spirit of horrible shortsighted stupidity and makes a vow.
Commentators disagree about whether Jephthah was expecting to be greeted by a human or by an animal, but either way you've got to think he would have at least considered the possibility that he'll be greeted by a human.
And also, he's already been touched by the Spirit of God. He shouldn't have to make a bargain, because he's already got God's presence; God is already on his side. He concludes his long petition to Ammon by saying, "It is not I who have sinned against you, but you are the one who does me wrong by making war on me. Let the Lord, who is judge, decide today for the Israelites or for the Ammonites." (11:27)
So one, Jephthah knows his cause his just and two Jephthah believes God will judge in his favor and three the Spirit of the Lord has come upon him.
So again, there is no reason for him to make this empty-headed, empty-hearted vow.
Some of you know that rather than the NRSV, which is what we use here at church, I have the New American Bible for personal use, and you might remember -- if you've heard me read from it -- that the translators make the interesting choice to translate the Hebrew that's usually translated "burnt offering" as "holocaust."
That's linguistically correct -- "holocaust" is Greek for "burnt offering" -- but certainly a bold choice, since it will startle readers every time they come across it.
Sometimes that startlement is totally appropriate, of course, as in the text in front of us.
So the NAB translates verse 31, "whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites shall belong to the Lord. I shall offer him up as a holocaust."
I'm already screaming "NO!" at Jephthah when he makes that vow, and the use of the word holocaust deepens the horror of the moment.
God delivers the Ammonites into Jephthah's hands, and then God vanishes from the story.
Jephthah's daughter greets her father with timbrels and dancing -- or tambourines and choruses -- or flutes and the entire musical ensemble -- in any event, it's a musical celebration of victory. It's the same way that the prophet Miriam celebrated God's triumph at the Red Sea (Exodus 15:20), when she led dancing women and sang, "Sing to the Lord, who has triumphed gloriously. Horse and rider God has thrown into the sea!"
Like the prophet Miriam, Jephthah's daughter greets her people's victory over their foes with joyful music.
And here Jephthah makes his second empty-headed, empty-hearted choice.
Instead of saying nothing -- instead of saying nothing and being forsworn and letting his daughter live -- he tears his clothes and tells her she has done strong a terrible wrong because this situation is definitely her fault, and he's not the one who opened his mouth -- the Hebrew says "opened his mouth wide," [פציתי] or, in other words, he opened his big mouth, and he opens it again and tells his daughter what he's done...
and here things get interesting. Still tragic, but interesting.
Because while the headings in my Bible -- both NRSV and NAB -- call this story "Jephthah's vow," the way I think of this story -- and the story Beccah named when listing off difficult texts -- is Jephthah's DAUGHTER.
Jephthah's daughter, who is, like Miriam, a maker of music and a worshiper of God, who attributes to God her father's victory over the Ammonites and who tells him to honor his empty-headed, empty-hearted vow.
Where we stand in relation to this story depends on how much power we have -- and of course, we all have varying degrees of power depending on the situation.
In situations where we have the power to make life or death decisions for other people I hope we can all agree: it's wrong to sacrifice your children. For good measure, don't sacrifice other people's children either. Don't sacrifice children to the gods of fear and greed and political expediency. Don't sacrifice immigrant children to xenophobic ideology, don't sacrifice schoolchildren to the second amendment.
That's today's bold message from the pulpit: child sacrifice is still wrong.
Let's leave Jephthah there, empty-headed and empty-hearted, and follow his daughter and her beloved friends into the mountains to bewail her virginity.
First we should note what virginity means here -- or rather, what it symbolizes. Because literally it means virginity, it means that Jephthah's daughter has never had sex with a man -- but what that means for her. She's never had sex, and she's never going to. She's not married, and she's never going to be. She doesn't have children, and she never will. She is young, and she will never be old.
A question we might have of the text at this point is, why does Jephthah's daughter make the choice she makes? She obviously doesn't want to die, or she wouldn't be preparing for death with lamentation.
We might say, she doesn't have any choice, really. If we say she "chooses" to be sacrificed, we're really blaming the victim. In a system where a daughter is her father's property until he trades her to her husband, does she really have a choice? If we focus on her agency, are we really trying to take the blame off Jephthah ?
Obviously, that's not what I want to do.
So let's try to get inside her head.
She is suddenly in a perilous situation where, one way or another, her life is forfeit.
We can imagine some other options for her -- but none of them are good.
She could run away... but where would she go? She'd be a single, unprotected woman. Her father was a pariah in his own family, so she probably doesn't have relatives she can run to, and she certainly can't run to her father's empty-headed, empty-hearted friends. Her own friends are women, like her, and don't have the structural power to protect her.
She could beg and plead for her life, of course. But she doesn't. Maybe she knows that would be fruitless and wants to maintain her dignity. Maybe she's afraid that if her father breaks his vow, *his* life will be forfeit. Maybe she can't even imagine that possibility. Sometimes we don't see choices, and when you've lived your whole life in a system where you've got to obey it's hard to turn, on a moment's notice, and defy him.
In any event, she doesn't make that choice.
But she does make a choice.
She makes the choice to say, if I'm going to die I'm going to do it on my terms. She tells her father, yes, do this thing, since you opened your big mouth and made this vow.
And she says, let me go with my beloved friends and bewail my virginity.
Lament and solidarity are the tools of those without structural power.
At it's very most basic lament means saying "this SUCKS," which is also the heart of the prophetic message.
It SUCKS that the widows and orphans are oppressed. It SUCKS that our leaders are hypocritical. It SUCKS that some people starve while others gorge themselves. It SUCKS to be an unmarried, childless woman at the mercy of your father, and it sucks to be sacrificed because of your father's empty-headed, empty-hearted promise.
Sometimes all you can do is say IT SUCKS.
We noticed that Jephthah's daughter went to greet her father with tambourines and dancing, like the prophet Miriam.
And Jephthah's daughter is also a prophet in that she shows us, with her words and her body, the ways in which her world sucks.
And her beloved friends come with her, because solidarity is the tool of the powerless. Her friends don't have the resources or the structural power to save her life. But they do have their voices, their bodies, their tears, and they go with her to the mountains to mourn with her.
And memory is the tool of those without structural power.
The story ends by telling us that this became an annual ritual, that for four days each year the daughters of Jerusalem would go out to mourn Jephthah's daughter.
Lament. Solidarity. Memory.
The pain of the powerless is ignored by those with power.
So those without power and their beloved friends lament. They bewail. Weeping and wailing is loud. It is, like the music of the tambourine, wordless sound that makes itself known when there aren't words. Where the tambourines express ecstatic joy, wailing expresses ecstatic grief, grief that is painful, and painful to watch.
I could name any number of tragedies and map this pattern:
The public grieving of mothers who have lost sons to police brutality
The public grieving of parents who have lost children to gun violence
The public grieving of gay men who lost lovers to AIDS
The public grieving of the transgender community that has lost beloved friends to transphobia
The public grieving of the women of Jerusalem when they lose Jesus to capital punishment
and the public grieving that Jesus foresees will happen when the Temple is destroyed in 70 CE
Those who are hurt most profoundly gather with their beloved friends in homes, in churches, in public parks and at busy intersections.
(and the definition of "beloved friends" expands to include all those who grieve in solidarity with those who are hurt most profoundly, as Jesus expands our definition of "neighbor." We are called to treat as beloved friends everyone whose life has been devastated by tragedy.)
And then, forever after, there is remembering.
Annual vigils, memorial quilts. The Holocaust museum.
Good Friday.
As long as we live in a world where empty-hearted, empty-headed people make decisions that hurt the vulnerable -- children, immigrants, widows and orphans, homeless teenagers, addicts and recovering addicts, the elderly, those who are incarcerated and those who have been released from prison, people with disabilities and with chronic illness, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people, women --
people who, like Jephthah's daughter, have dangerous, violent families
and people who, like Jephthah, have unloving, ostracizing families --
as long as powerful people hurt vulnerable people, when no other options are available to us, we still gather in solidarity to make public lament. And we still remember, year after year.
And when we gather as beloved friends to lament and to remember, our lamenting and our remembering says: "LOOK AT THIS" and "SAY HER NAME" and "WE STAND WITH HER" and "THIS SUCKS."
We say "NEVER FORGET" and we say"NEVER AGAIN."
Amen.
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