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.
Showing posts with label theme: activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theme: activism. Show all posts
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Sunday, March 4, 2018
[sermon] Jesus' Seminar on Non-Violence
Sermon for the people of God at St. Mark Hope and Peace preached, 2018-03-04, Lent IIIB
Preaching text: John 2: 13-21
There is a lot going on in this passage. Much of it makes little sense to us, not being first century Jews, and not having direct access to the practices, sacrifices, and pieties of first century Jews.
Unlike us, Jesus was an observant Jew from a family of observant Jews,. We learn from Luke that Jesus’ family went to Jerusalem every year for the Passover [Luke 2:41], and Jesus appears to continue this tradition into his adulthood.
Jesus has come to the Temple before. But this time is different – this time Jesus notices what’s happening in the outer courts in a way that he hasn’t before.
He notices people selling animals to be sacrificed, sheep and cattle for wealthier people, doves for the poor.
He notices money changers, who are exchanging pilgrims’ money into the coinage necessary to pay the annual temple tax – which, bizarrely, is the Tyrian shekel.
It was important that the temple tax be paid with silver, and Tyre – a Northern city just outside of Jewish territory – had an independent mint that made coins that were 90-95% pure silver, the purest silver around.
Unfortunately, the Tyrian coins were engraved with an image of Melkart, the city-god of Tyre, which, since we’ve just had a refresher on the ten commandments, is obviously in violation of them – it’s a graven image, and it’s an image of a God other than the One God of Israel.
When we approach the world as peacemakers, we are called to observe the world attentively, looking for gaps in justice, places where the grace of God is needed. When Jesus comes to the Temple, he finds these places easily.
I should tell you there is some debate about what exactly upsets Jesus about this scene. I suspect that there are some details we have lost – there may have been dishonesty or corruption, since those are common where there is commerce. Perhaps people we being overcharged for sacrificial animals. Certainly the use of pagan currency to pay a tax for God’s house is offensive.
The text tells us that Jesus accuses the dove-sellers of “making my Father’s house a marketplace,” and the disciples see in Jesus a person consumed with zeal for God’s house.
They are quoting Psalm 69. It is zeal for your house that has consumed me, the Psalmist writes. The insults of those who insult YOU have fallen on ME. [Psalm 69:9]
The use of currency with a pagan God’s image is certainly an insult to God, and Jesus takes that insult personally. He is deeply angered at the misuse of God’s house, overcome by the distance of the marketplace-Temple of his day from the house of prayer for all peoples envisioned by Isaiah.
This is not what the house of God is supposed to look like.
Jesus’ zeal for God’s house is a vision of what the Temple should look like – a place where all can offer prayers and sacrifice, rich and poor alike, where no one makes a profit off other people’s piety, and a place where only God is God – not money, not the marketplace and not Melkart.
Jesus sees the house of God in a world where Israel is free from her Roman yoke, where no Roman coins of any kind are used in Jerusalem, where it’s possible to give one’s offering with pure silver, unadulterated by copper, unmarred by images of idols.
And struck by the contrast between that imagined world and the real world, consumed with zeal, Jesus searches around him and uses what he finds – fraying ropes binding sacrificial animals in place, dirty reeds that were animal bedding or straw that was their food – to create a “whip of cords.”
Jesus makes a whip and then uses the whip to make one of the most important tools of non-violent protest: a spectacle.
Jesus is an active agent – he makes a whip and drives out animals, he pours out coins and overturns tables.
It’s messy and chaotic, goes against custom and law and authority. It gets people upset and paints a picture of the upside down world promised in the Magnificat, where the poor are fed and the rich go hungry. [Luke 2:46-55] Jesus literally upsets the tables to symbolically upset the status quo and paint a vivid picture of God’s transformation of the world. The marketplace world and its marketplace values will have to go if there is to be room for God in God’s house.
So to recap, Jesus’ seminar in nonviolence has so far covered these steps:
First, look at the world with attention, and notice the specifics of what’s happening around you.
Second, compare that world with God’s vision of the world as it should be
Third, look around again and find the tools that are handy to
Fourth, Create a ruckus
That ruckus should be created with purpose, of course, designed to symbolize or signify the new order we imagine.
For us, the question might be, “What will this look like on the evening news?”
What are the optics?
What will people see?
A whip, the chaos of animals milling about, coins poured out.
Candlelight vigil, arms linked in solidarity. Rainbow flag, rainbow facepaint. People sitting in the road, blocking traffic.
Water cannons, pepper spray, dogs attacking protesters. A bloody execution.
Wait, what?
Part of the strategy of nonviolence is to turn violence on itself. Nonviolence anticipates retaliation and welcomes it. We know that authorities will escalate unreasonably, will demonstrate the irrationality and wickedness that are at the core of oppressive power structures.
In his letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. writes, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” And again, “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”
Direct action is a dramatization that creates a crisis – as, for instance, a rabbi driving out animals and overturning tables, disrupting business as usual so that folks are forced to confront the flaws in the sacrificial infrastructure and cannot help but notice the person at the center of this chaos.
Matthew (21:12-13), Mark (11:15-19), and Luke (19:45-48) tell us this protest in the Temple came at the end of Jesus’ life, that it was the immediate cause of the crucifixion.
Jesus will scold the soldiers who arrest him in the Garden, reminding them of how he preached openly in the Temple (Matthew 26:55//Mark 14 48-49//Luke 52-53). We could mention also this open demonstration, designed to attract attention. Nonviolence takes place in the light of day, in the middle of the city, in the place that has (unfortunately) become a marketplace, filled with people.
Attracting the attention of the authorities isn’t safe. But it’s not supposed to be safe.
Back in John’s story, “the Jews” – religious authorities, presumably – question Jesus about the whole temple/marketplace/tables/doves thing – asking, confusingly, for a “sign,” as if Jesus protest itself wasn’t a clear sign, like they want “The Temple Is Not Marketplace!” painted on posterboard for this to be a legitimate protest. Like they want him to produce written permission from the high priest to cause a disturbance, or, like the religious leaders whom Dr. King is writing to, they’re wondering why Jesus doesn’t try to negotiate first, why he’s resorted to “unwise and untimely” direction action.
And typically, Jesus doesn’t exactly answer their question, saying, “Destroy this temple, an in three days I will raise it up.”
Like everything in John’s Gospel, this saying has layers of meaning. There’s the literal temple, still standing in Jesus’ time but forever destroyed by the time John is writing. And there is, as the narrative tells us, the temple of Jesus’ body, and the promise that Jesus will be killed, and that in three days Jesus will be raised again.
Even in John’s Gospel, then, when several years separate this event from the crucifixion, the logic is the same. Jesus does this sign – this act of civil disobedience – and signals the incoming of God’s kingdom. Throughout his ministry, Jesus gives signs – in his healing, in his teaching, in his table fellowship and in his body – of the change that’s coming.
Jesus is here d̳a̳r̳i̳n̳g̳ the authorities to kill him. “I’d like to see you try.”
And eventually they do try, and they succeed, except:
Jesus’ violent death provides an opening for an even more spectacular sign, an even clearer image of the new world that God is ushering in.
In the new world, peace is triumphant over violence, the temple is torn down and built up, the rich starve and the hungry eat, marketplaces become houses of prayer, and greed and hatred don’t have the final word,
Jesus’ ruckus in the temple, tables turned and money poured out, animals running amok, is a spectacular image of the upside-down logic of God’s kingdom, the kingdom promised through the prophets, the Kingdom testified to by Jesus’ mother when she sang the Magnificat.
And we are called to do likewise. To take that magnificent, Magnificat image, of God scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts just as Jesus scatters coins on the Temple floor, and to look around at the world we live in, and compare them.
When we see places where they don’t line up, where the world we have doesn’t match the world God wants for us, we’re to use the tools and images available to us to create a picture of the world flipped on its head, the marketplace brought down and the Temple lifted up – a picture so compelling that it turns heads and turns hearts, just as God is turning the world upside down.
The hymn of the day – which for the record I did not pick out – is #723, Canticle of the Turning.
++
Works consulted:
Keys to Jerusalem: Collected Essays by Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, on Google Books
Alexis-Baker, Andy. "Violence, Nonviolence and the Temple Incident in John 2:13-15." Biblical Interpretation, vol. 20, no. 1-2, 2012, pp. 73-96. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/156851511X595549.
and of course:
Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Preaching text: John 2: 13-21
There is a lot going on in this passage. Much of it makes little sense to us, not being first century Jews, and not having direct access to the practices, sacrifices, and pieties of first century Jews.
Unlike us, Jesus was an observant Jew from a family of observant Jews,. We learn from Luke that Jesus’ family went to Jerusalem every year for the Passover [Luke 2:41], and Jesus appears to continue this tradition into his adulthood.
Jesus has come to the Temple before. But this time is different – this time Jesus notices what’s happening in the outer courts in a way that he hasn’t before.
He notices people selling animals to be sacrificed, sheep and cattle for wealthier people, doves for the poor.
He notices money changers, who are exchanging pilgrims’ money into the coinage necessary to pay the annual temple tax – which, bizarrely, is the Tyrian shekel.
It was important that the temple tax be paid with silver, and Tyre – a Northern city just outside of Jewish territory – had an independent mint that made coins that were 90-95% pure silver, the purest silver around.
Unfortunately, the Tyrian coins were engraved with an image of Melkart, the city-god of Tyre, which, since we’ve just had a refresher on the ten commandments, is obviously in violation of them – it’s a graven image, and it’s an image of a God other than the One God of Israel.
When we approach the world as peacemakers, we are called to observe the world attentively, looking for gaps in justice, places where the grace of God is needed. When Jesus comes to the Temple, he finds these places easily.
I should tell you there is some debate about what exactly upsets Jesus about this scene. I suspect that there are some details we have lost – there may have been dishonesty or corruption, since those are common where there is commerce. Perhaps people we being overcharged for sacrificial animals. Certainly the use of pagan currency to pay a tax for God’s house is offensive.
The text tells us that Jesus accuses the dove-sellers of “making my Father’s house a marketplace,” and the disciples see in Jesus a person consumed with zeal for God’s house.
They are quoting Psalm 69. It is zeal for your house that has consumed me, the Psalmist writes. The insults of those who insult YOU have fallen on ME. [Psalm 69:9]
The use of currency with a pagan God’s image is certainly an insult to God, and Jesus takes that insult personally. He is deeply angered at the misuse of God’s house, overcome by the distance of the marketplace-Temple of his day from the house of prayer for all peoples envisioned by Isaiah.
This is not what the house of God is supposed to look like.
Jesus’ zeal for God’s house is a vision of what the Temple should look like – a place where all can offer prayers and sacrifice, rich and poor alike, where no one makes a profit off other people’s piety, and a place where only God is God – not money, not the marketplace and not Melkart.
Jesus sees the house of God in a world where Israel is free from her Roman yoke, where no Roman coins of any kind are used in Jerusalem, where it’s possible to give one’s offering with pure silver, unadulterated by copper, unmarred by images of idols.
And struck by the contrast between that imagined world and the real world, consumed with zeal, Jesus searches around him and uses what he finds – fraying ropes binding sacrificial animals in place, dirty reeds that were animal bedding or straw that was their food – to create a “whip of cords.”
Jesus makes a whip and then uses the whip to make one of the most important tools of non-violent protest: a spectacle.
Jesus is an active agent – he makes a whip and drives out animals, he pours out coins and overturns tables.
It’s messy and chaotic, goes against custom and law and authority. It gets people upset and paints a picture of the upside down world promised in the Magnificat, where the poor are fed and the rich go hungry. [Luke 2:46-55] Jesus literally upsets the tables to symbolically upset the status quo and paint a vivid picture of God’s transformation of the world. The marketplace world and its marketplace values will have to go if there is to be room for God in God’s house.
So to recap, Jesus’ seminar in nonviolence has so far covered these steps:
First, look at the world with attention, and notice the specifics of what’s happening around you.
Second, compare that world with God’s vision of the world as it should be
Third, look around again and find the tools that are handy to
Fourth, Create a ruckus
That ruckus should be created with purpose, of course, designed to symbolize or signify the new order we imagine.
For us, the question might be, “What will this look like on the evening news?”
What are the optics?
What will people see?
A whip, the chaos of animals milling about, coins poured out.
Candlelight vigil, arms linked in solidarity. Rainbow flag, rainbow facepaint. People sitting in the road, blocking traffic.
Water cannons, pepper spray, dogs attacking protesters. A bloody execution.
Wait, what?
Part of the strategy of nonviolence is to turn violence on itself. Nonviolence anticipates retaliation and welcomes it. We know that authorities will escalate unreasonably, will demonstrate the irrationality and wickedness that are at the core of oppressive power structures.
In his letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. writes, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” And again, “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”
Direct action is a dramatization that creates a crisis – as, for instance, a rabbi driving out animals and overturning tables, disrupting business as usual so that folks are forced to confront the flaws in the sacrificial infrastructure and cannot help but notice the person at the center of this chaos.
Matthew (21:12-13), Mark (11:15-19), and Luke (19:45-48) tell us this protest in the Temple came at the end of Jesus’ life, that it was the immediate cause of the crucifixion.
Jesus will scold the soldiers who arrest him in the Garden, reminding them of how he preached openly in the Temple (Matthew 26:55//Mark 14 48-49//Luke 52-53). We could mention also this open demonstration, designed to attract attention. Nonviolence takes place in the light of day, in the middle of the city, in the place that has (unfortunately) become a marketplace, filled with people.
Attracting the attention of the authorities isn’t safe. But it’s not supposed to be safe.
Back in John’s story, “the Jews” – religious authorities, presumably – question Jesus about the whole temple/marketplace/tables/doves thing – asking, confusingly, for a “sign,” as if Jesus protest itself wasn’t a clear sign, like they want “The Temple Is Not Marketplace!” painted on posterboard for this to be a legitimate protest. Like they want him to produce written permission from the high priest to cause a disturbance, or, like the religious leaders whom Dr. King is writing to, they’re wondering why Jesus doesn’t try to negotiate first, why he’s resorted to “unwise and untimely” direction action.
And typically, Jesus doesn’t exactly answer their question, saying, “Destroy this temple, an in three days I will raise it up.”
Like everything in John’s Gospel, this saying has layers of meaning. There’s the literal temple, still standing in Jesus’ time but forever destroyed by the time John is writing. And there is, as the narrative tells us, the temple of Jesus’ body, and the promise that Jesus will be killed, and that in three days Jesus will be raised again.
Even in John’s Gospel, then, when several years separate this event from the crucifixion, the logic is the same. Jesus does this sign – this act of civil disobedience – and signals the incoming of God’s kingdom. Throughout his ministry, Jesus gives signs – in his healing, in his teaching, in his table fellowship and in his body – of the change that’s coming.
Jesus is here d̳a̳r̳i̳n̳g̳ the authorities to kill him. “I’d like to see you try.”
And eventually they do try, and they succeed, except:
Jesus’ violent death provides an opening for an even more spectacular sign, an even clearer image of the new world that God is ushering in.
In the new world, peace is triumphant over violence, the temple is torn down and built up, the rich starve and the hungry eat, marketplaces become houses of prayer, and greed and hatred don’t have the final word,
Jesus’ ruckus in the temple, tables turned and money poured out, animals running amok, is a spectacular image of the upside-down logic of God’s kingdom, the kingdom promised through the prophets, the Kingdom testified to by Jesus’ mother when she sang the Magnificat.
And we are called to do likewise. To take that magnificent, Magnificat image, of God scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts just as Jesus scatters coins on the Temple floor, and to look around at the world we live in, and compare them.
When we see places where they don’t line up, where the world we have doesn’t match the world God wants for us, we’re to use the tools and images available to us to create a picture of the world flipped on its head, the marketplace brought down and the Temple lifted up – a picture so compelling that it turns heads and turns hearts, just as God is turning the world upside down.
The hymn of the day – which for the record I did not pick out – is #723, Canticle of the Turning.
++
Works consulted:
Keys to Jerusalem: Collected Essays by Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, on Google Books
Alexis-Baker, Andy. "Violence, Nonviolence and the Temple Incident in John 2:13-15." Biblical Interpretation, vol. 20, no. 1-2, 2012, pp. 73-96. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/156851511X595549.
and of course:
Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
[sermon] on activism, shame, power, and pride
Sermon for the people of St. Mark Hope and Peace 2015-06-28
Primary Preaching Text: Mark 5:21-43
Secondary Text: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
I fully intended to talk about David today.
If you're my friend on Facebook you might have seen that weeks ago I posted excitedly about this text being appointed for this day, the eve of the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. The love of David and Jonathan, and particularly this text from Second Samuel is beloved in many lgbtq Christian and Jewish spaces because we can so easily claim David as one of our own -- especially for gay and bisexual men, this is a story that we can look to and say unabashedly, David is one of ours. Rev. Nancy Wilson, current moderator of the Metropolitan Community Church, says, exuberantly and with exclamation points, that David is the most clearly bisexual figure in the whole Bible.1
I was planning to preach about David until yesterday afternoon, when I finally noticed the woman who'd been tugging at my sleeve all week. My plans to talk about David, central to the institutions of both church and state, and what Rev. Wilson calls, a bit anachronistically, his "same-sex, lifelong relationship" with Jonathan, were disrupted and interrupted by a person on the very fringes of society, a person in desperate need who demanded -- and demands to be seen and heard and healed.
In this complicated moment in our nation, when joyous news from the Supreme Court and tragic news from Charleston compete for our emotions, the woman with a flow of blood speaks more fully to my identity as a queer person and our identity as a Reconciling in Christ church than does King David with all his power.
The woman with the flow of blood is the filling in a sandwich story about the healing of Jairus's daughter. Jairus is a person of power and influence, a leader in the synagogue. He summons Jesus to heal his sick daughter, and Jesus goes with him, and on their way, they're interrupted by a woman who has suffered in many ways for the way her body is made.
There are physical torments of her constant hemorrhaging, and the ungentle and unsuccessful cures she's endured from a stream of doctors, and then there is the cultural torment of being perpetually unclean. She is excluded from her society, rendered untouchable by the flow of blood she can't control.
She has nothing to lose. She's spent all her money on ineffective doctors and she had no social capital to begin with. Her physical condition has deteriorated, and she constantly endures rejection. Everything in her culture has taught her that bodies like hers, and her body in particular, are shameful.
So she reaches the point beyond shame, beyond propriety, beyond fear, where her need for healing is greater than any force that would constrain her.
Forty-six years ago, the patrons of Stonewall reached this point. The police raided a gay bar, as the police did. And that night, when tempers were hot, when activism was in the air -- Vietnam, civil rights, women's liberation -- that night drag queens and trans women, bulldykes and sex workers, homeless youth, most of them people of color, all of them people who had nothing to lose and so nothing to fear -- that night those patrons of Stonewall Inn refused to comply.
A few years earlier, transgender and transsexual patrons of Compton's Cafeteria reached that point, and they threw first coffee, and then dishes and furniture at police in protest of harassment and mistreatment.
The nineteen-eighties and nineties were full of those moments, and ACT UP, (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) picketed and protested to draw attention to the AIDS crisis, to demand access to medical intervention, to share accurate information about HIV transmission and safer sex. A people dying of AIDS screamed that "SILENCE=DEATH" and refused to be silent.
This past Wednesday, Jennicet Gutiérrez, an undocumented trans Latina activist, reached this point at the White House LGBT Pride Month Reception. She interrupted President Obama's speech to shout, "Release all GLBTQ immigrants from detention and stop all deportations!" She later wrote, "In the tradition of how Pride started, I interrupted his speech because it is time for our issues and struggles to be heard."2
Indeed.
In the tradition of Pride, and in a tradition older than Pride. In the tradition of Jesus, who announced in the Nazareth synagogue that he had been sent to proclaim release to the captives, and in the tradition of Isaiah, whom Jesus was quoting.
And in the tradition of a nameless woman with a hemorrhage, who had endured all that she could endure.
She didn't ask.
She took.
When we remember the activism of the previous century, we sometimes sugarcoat it. Last fall we saw many white lgbtq people deride the protests in Ferguson, crying, "Remember Stonewall! Peaceful protest is totally possible!"
Oh yes. Remember Stonewall, with thrown pennies, thrown bottles, thrown shoes. Remember the patrons who thought to set the bar on fire.
We don't need to condone violence to remember that it's part of our history.
The path that led to the Supreme Court decision this week that legalized same-sex marriage across the country was not always peaceful and it was not always nice. It did involve middle-class gay men and women asking nicely if they could please have their rights now, if it's not too much of a bother.
And it involved thrown shoes and burning police cars and groups called Lesbian Avengers and Queer Nation and Transexual Menace. It involved shouting and crying and name-calling.
There are couples who have waited patiently for decades to get married, and we rejoice with them this week.
And there are couples who got married decades ago who fudged applications for marriage licenses, people who changed their names to more gender neutral alternatives.3 Further back in time, there are people who didn't ask, but simply lived as members of their true genders, butches and trans men who married women and were their husbands.
There are Lutheran pastors who waited patiently for ELCA policy to change. And there are Lutheran pastors who were ordained extraordinarily years before the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.
There are people like Jairus, people with power and with a lot to lose, who got on their knees and begged.
And there are people like the woman with a flow of blood, people with no institutional power and nothing at all to lose, who reached out and claimed power, demanded healing.
Violence is still not God's will for God's people. God still doesn't want us to harm each other; God doesn't want us to take what's not ours. God has made that perfectly clear. We can and should feel conflicted about those parts of our history. Reaching out and touching a person in a crowd -- on purpose and without permission -- is a blatant violation of bodily autonomy, and that is also not okay.
But it's understandable.
Activism is not pretty, because it arises from the mess we've made of the world.
There is a point of desperation where everything falls away but the need for healing.
From the outside, it's a stillframe, a single moment in time of explosive rage, or uncontrollable weeping, or a woman reaching out her hand.
But inside, it's year upon year of oppression and pain.
It's the experience of an African-American woman, a single mother working two minimum wage jobs, whose body bears the aches of standing all day every day, of working through illness, of walking the long mile from work to the bus stop, the half mile from the bus stop to day care, from tensing whenever she sees a police officer. Whose face aches from smiling at customers and wishing them a nice day. Whose heart aches from the death of her husband to gang violence, the incarceration of her brother, and the endless, endless news stories about anti-black violence, and the stories her friends tell that don't make the news.
It's the experience of a transgender woman whose body aches with an undiagnosed condition because she can't access a health care provider who will treat her with dignity, whose muscles are tense from cringing whenever she walks alone after dark, who spends day after day warding off crude sexual advances but who can't find a partner who loves her for herself.
It's the experience of an African-American man, perhaps the most powerful man in the world, whose body aches from sleepless nights, whose head aches from recalcitrant congresspersons, and mostly, whose heart aches with the death of his siblings in the place that was their sanctuary. It's the experience of President Obama, whose wisdom and education and credentials and deep faith are invisible to those who, still, after eight years, see only the color of his skin.
It's the experience of the heroines and heroes of Stonewall, women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Johnson, who sold sex and took drugs and sometimes lived on the streets and felt themselves excluded from the movement they'd started, pushed to the side for the sake of the politics of respectability.
It's the experience of a woman whose body is despised by her society, who's been abused by the medical establishment, and who lives in poverty, alone and outcast.
Let me be clear, these experiences, all of them, are only part of the story of people's lives. There are moments too of transcendent joy, moments of beauty and love and laughter.
But in this time of grief, in Ferguson and Charleston and all the places in between-- this is a moment that's poured onto people already hurting from year after year of violence and fear.
This is a moment of pain, but also a moment of possibility, a moment of promise.
Those moments in scripture, those moments in history, this moment now --
The moment when survival is more important than manners, when the only words that will give voice to anguish are not polite words, when power that's been stolen from people and hoarded by institutions must be reclaimed --
that moment when with thrown rocks and raised voices and a hand lifted up to touch the fringes of power
that moment of desperate hope reaching up from anguish
it's that moment when God's power flows like lightening into the hands of God's people.
God can transform a bleeding woman's desperate faith into healing and restoration. God can transform angry arson and vandalism into the rainbow people who rejoiced on Friday. God transforms debt into jubilee, slavery into freedom, death into life.
The world fills us with shame -- for the shape of our bodies and the depth of our grief, for our passions and our pleasures, for the places we live and the clothes we wear, for the color of our skin and the fluency of our language, for who we love and for who we are.
Activism is the moment when people who have been made ashamed become shameless, because we have nothing left to lose and no other recourse left.
And grace is the moment when shame and shamelessness alike are transformed into pride.
Amen.
1Wilson, Nancy L. Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus, and the Bible. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. Print. 146.
2Guttiérez, Jennicet. "I Interrupted Obama Because We Need to Be Heard." Washington Blade. Brown, Naff, Pitts Omnimedia, Inc, 25 June 2015. Web. 28 June 2015.
3Eckholm, Erik. "The Same-Sex Couple Who Got a Marriage License in 1971." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 16 May 2015. Web. 28 June 2015.
Primary Preaching Text: Mark 5:21-43
Secondary Text: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
I fully intended to talk about David today.
If you're my friend on Facebook you might have seen that weeks ago I posted excitedly about this text being appointed for this day, the eve of the 46th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. The love of David and Jonathan, and particularly this text from Second Samuel is beloved in many lgbtq Christian and Jewish spaces because we can so easily claim David as one of our own -- especially for gay and bisexual men, this is a story that we can look to and say unabashedly, David is one of ours. Rev. Nancy Wilson, current moderator of the Metropolitan Community Church, says, exuberantly and with exclamation points, that David is the most clearly bisexual figure in the whole Bible.1
I was planning to preach about David until yesterday afternoon, when I finally noticed the woman who'd been tugging at my sleeve all week. My plans to talk about David, central to the institutions of both church and state, and what Rev. Wilson calls, a bit anachronistically, his "same-sex, lifelong relationship" with Jonathan, were disrupted and interrupted by a person on the very fringes of society, a person in desperate need who demanded -- and demands to be seen and heard and healed.
In this complicated moment in our nation, when joyous news from the Supreme Court and tragic news from Charleston compete for our emotions, the woman with a flow of blood speaks more fully to my identity as a queer person and our identity as a Reconciling in Christ church than does King David with all his power.
The woman with the flow of blood is the filling in a sandwich story about the healing of Jairus's daughter. Jairus is a person of power and influence, a leader in the synagogue. He summons Jesus to heal his sick daughter, and Jesus goes with him, and on their way, they're interrupted by a woman who has suffered in many ways for the way her body is made.
There are physical torments of her constant hemorrhaging, and the ungentle and unsuccessful cures she's endured from a stream of doctors, and then there is the cultural torment of being perpetually unclean. She is excluded from her society, rendered untouchable by the flow of blood she can't control.
She has nothing to lose. She's spent all her money on ineffective doctors and she had no social capital to begin with. Her physical condition has deteriorated, and she constantly endures rejection. Everything in her culture has taught her that bodies like hers, and her body in particular, are shameful.
So she reaches the point beyond shame, beyond propriety, beyond fear, where her need for healing is greater than any force that would constrain her.
Forty-six years ago, the patrons of Stonewall reached this point. The police raided a gay bar, as the police did. And that night, when tempers were hot, when activism was in the air -- Vietnam, civil rights, women's liberation -- that night drag queens and trans women, bulldykes and sex workers, homeless youth, most of them people of color, all of them people who had nothing to lose and so nothing to fear -- that night those patrons of Stonewall Inn refused to comply.
A few years earlier, transgender and transsexual patrons of Compton's Cafeteria reached that point, and they threw first coffee, and then dishes and furniture at police in protest of harassment and mistreatment.
The nineteen-eighties and nineties were full of those moments, and ACT UP, (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) picketed and protested to draw attention to the AIDS crisis, to demand access to medical intervention, to share accurate information about HIV transmission and safer sex. A people dying of AIDS screamed that "SILENCE=DEATH" and refused to be silent.
This past Wednesday, Jennicet Gutiérrez, an undocumented trans Latina activist, reached this point at the White House LGBT Pride Month Reception. She interrupted President Obama's speech to shout, "Release all GLBTQ immigrants from detention and stop all deportations!" She later wrote, "In the tradition of how Pride started, I interrupted his speech because it is time for our issues and struggles to be heard."2
Indeed.
In the tradition of Pride, and in a tradition older than Pride. In the tradition of Jesus, who announced in the Nazareth synagogue that he had been sent to proclaim release to the captives, and in the tradition of Isaiah, whom Jesus was quoting.
And in the tradition of a nameless woman with a hemorrhage, who had endured all that she could endure.
She didn't ask.
She took.
When we remember the activism of the previous century, we sometimes sugarcoat it. Last fall we saw many white lgbtq people deride the protests in Ferguson, crying, "Remember Stonewall! Peaceful protest is totally possible!"
Oh yes. Remember Stonewall, with thrown pennies, thrown bottles, thrown shoes. Remember the patrons who thought to set the bar on fire.
We don't need to condone violence to remember that it's part of our history.
The path that led to the Supreme Court decision this week that legalized same-sex marriage across the country was not always peaceful and it was not always nice. It did involve middle-class gay men and women asking nicely if they could please have their rights now, if it's not too much of a bother.
And it involved thrown shoes and burning police cars and groups called Lesbian Avengers and Queer Nation and Transexual Menace. It involved shouting and crying and name-calling.
There are couples who have waited patiently for decades to get married, and we rejoice with them this week.
And there are couples who got married decades ago who fudged applications for marriage licenses, people who changed their names to more gender neutral alternatives.3 Further back in time, there are people who didn't ask, but simply lived as members of their true genders, butches and trans men who married women and were their husbands.
There are Lutheran pastors who waited patiently for ELCA policy to change. And there are Lutheran pastors who were ordained extraordinarily years before the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.
There are people like Jairus, people with power and with a lot to lose, who got on their knees and begged.
And there are people like the woman with a flow of blood, people with no institutional power and nothing at all to lose, who reached out and claimed power, demanded healing.
Violence is still not God's will for God's people. God still doesn't want us to harm each other; God doesn't want us to take what's not ours. God has made that perfectly clear. We can and should feel conflicted about those parts of our history. Reaching out and touching a person in a crowd -- on purpose and without permission -- is a blatant violation of bodily autonomy, and that is also not okay.
But it's understandable.
Activism is not pretty, because it arises from the mess we've made of the world.
There is a point of desperation where everything falls away but the need for healing.
From the outside, it's a stillframe, a single moment in time of explosive rage, or uncontrollable weeping, or a woman reaching out her hand.
But inside, it's year upon year of oppression and pain.
It's the experience of an African-American woman, a single mother working two minimum wage jobs, whose body bears the aches of standing all day every day, of working through illness, of walking the long mile from work to the bus stop, the half mile from the bus stop to day care, from tensing whenever she sees a police officer. Whose face aches from smiling at customers and wishing them a nice day. Whose heart aches from the death of her husband to gang violence, the incarceration of her brother, and the endless, endless news stories about anti-black violence, and the stories her friends tell that don't make the news.
It's the experience of a transgender woman whose body aches with an undiagnosed condition because she can't access a health care provider who will treat her with dignity, whose muscles are tense from cringing whenever she walks alone after dark, who spends day after day warding off crude sexual advances but who can't find a partner who loves her for herself.
It's the experience of an African-American man, perhaps the most powerful man in the world, whose body aches from sleepless nights, whose head aches from recalcitrant congresspersons, and mostly, whose heart aches with the death of his siblings in the place that was their sanctuary. It's the experience of President Obama, whose wisdom and education and credentials and deep faith are invisible to those who, still, after eight years, see only the color of his skin.
It's the experience of the heroines and heroes of Stonewall, women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Johnson, who sold sex and took drugs and sometimes lived on the streets and felt themselves excluded from the movement they'd started, pushed to the side for the sake of the politics of respectability.
It's the experience of a woman whose body is despised by her society, who's been abused by the medical establishment, and who lives in poverty, alone and outcast.
Let me be clear, these experiences, all of them, are only part of the story of people's lives. There are moments too of transcendent joy, moments of beauty and love and laughter.
But in this time of grief, in Ferguson and Charleston and all the places in between-- this is a moment that's poured onto people already hurting from year after year of violence and fear.
This is a moment of pain, but also a moment of possibility, a moment of promise.
Those moments in scripture, those moments in history, this moment now --
The moment when survival is more important than manners, when the only words that will give voice to anguish are not polite words, when power that's been stolen from people and hoarded by institutions must be reclaimed --
that moment when with thrown rocks and raised voices and a hand lifted up to touch the fringes of power
that moment of desperate hope reaching up from anguish
it's that moment when God's power flows like lightening into the hands of God's people.
God can transform a bleeding woman's desperate faith into healing and restoration. God can transform angry arson and vandalism into the rainbow people who rejoiced on Friday. God transforms debt into jubilee, slavery into freedom, death into life.
The world fills us with shame -- for the shape of our bodies and the depth of our grief, for our passions and our pleasures, for the places we live and the clothes we wear, for the color of our skin and the fluency of our language, for who we love and for who we are.
Activism is the moment when people who have been made ashamed become shameless, because we have nothing left to lose and no other recourse left.
And grace is the moment when shame and shamelessness alike are transformed into pride.
Amen.
1Wilson, Nancy L. Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus, and the Bible. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. Print. 146.
2Guttiérez, Jennicet. "I Interrupted Obama Because We Need to Be Heard." Washington Blade. Brown, Naff, Pitts Omnimedia, Inc, 25 June 2015. Web. 28 June 2015.
3Eckholm, Erik. "The Same-Sex Couple Who Got a Marriage License in 1971." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 16 May 2015. Web. 28 June 2015.
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