Sermon on Easter 7
St. Augustine’s
Episcopal Church, Tempe, AZ
Being a campus minister means I pay
somewhat more attention to when higher education comes into the news, but it
was hard to miss that just over a week ago, six students at the University of
California at Santa Barbara were killed by a 22 year old man who went on a
shooting spree. The killers as Elliot Rodger, who left various video and
written manifestos saying that he was seeking to kill sorority women and others
at the university as revenge for the way he felt women had rejected him. I watched some of his videos in which he
justified his actions by saying that his plan was retribution for women not
giving themselves to him, even though he was a "supreme gentleman.” Additionally, almost a month ago, a student
my spouse Laura taught in Connecticut was stabbed by her 16 year old classmate
because she refused to go to prom with him.
These two events made national news in
large part by their gruesome nature. However, these events are part of larger
patterns of social forces, namely sexism, misogyny, and male entitlement. The
common thread in these two events is a sense of male entitlement--the notion
that men are owed something by women, such as time, availability, obedience, or
deference.
In the wake of these events, millions of
women have taken to twitter to tell their own stories of experiencing
belittlement, condescension, cat-calling, cow-calling, stalking, harassment,
abuse, threats, and violence at the hands of men. The project goes under the
name #yesallwomen, so-named
because immediately after these women have posted these stories of harm many
men responded that “not all men are like that.”
The collective response of these women has been “yes, not all men are
like that, but all women have experienced these acts in some form or another.” Millions of these stories can now be
found: stories of everyday cases of
sexism all the way to what are easily the most significant and damaging traumas
in the lives of these women.
In the spirit of this movement, I wrote a blog piece about
my own experiences of sexism against women—the sexism and violence friends have
experienced, the things I have witnessed, as well as patterns of sexism I have participated
in. Not long after I published my
writing, I witnessed it being shared, and women began to get in touch with me
to share their stories.
I’ll come back to this in a moment, but I’d also like to set
a stage with a tidbit of literary and theological history.
In the late 1870s Leo Tolstoy of War and Peace fame was disgusted with war in Russia—and
furthermore, disgusted with the Orthodox Church’s sanctioning of the war. After already achieving notoriety as an
accomplished novelist, he undertook to write a book entitled An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology.
Only the introduction exists, but of the project Tolstoy wrote “In the churches
they were praying for the success of our weapons and the teachers of the faith
looked upon this murder as the outcome of Faith…At one time I would have said
that all of it was a lie; but it is now impossible to do this… I have no doubt
there is truth in the doctrine, but there can be no doubt that it harbors a
lie; and I must find the truth and the lie so I can tell them apart.”[1]
I have been fascinated by this idea of how the truth can harbor
a lie. Part of this is the idea that
affirming Christianity does entail the need to disbelieve some things—either
things that we are told by the way the world operates, or by our traditional
and current Church teachings. This gets
to the heart of something known as faithful disbelief in Christianity. It is attested to in scripture in the words
of the First Epistle of John where it is written: “do not believe every
spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God (1 Jn 4:1).” Whatever truth there is in Christian doctrine
harbors a lie whenever the faithful disbeliefs the doctrines entail go
unrecognized. A teaching that maybe true
when heard in one context with one understanding can be false when heard in
another context with another understanding.
With this in mind, I believe we need to
apply this principle of faithful disbelief to some ways in which the church has
traditionally read our second lesson today:
the first letter attributed to Peter.
I think therein we discover a lie that the truth harbors.
And I want to make the claim that the
kernel of truth in the Christian story is that God wills suffering *only insofar* as doing Her will has
consequences in going against the ways of this world.
By simply looking at the letter,
there are some signs of considerable problems faced by the community who
received this letter. This is a letter
to a people under significant, sustained persecution. And it is no wonder. At the time it was written, to make the claim
that Jesus is Lord was not simply to believe that an emanation of God walked
the earth, it was to make a claim about who was in charge. In short, to believe in Christ as the Lord
meant to deny that Caesar was the Lord.
And, for an empire that could tolerate a remarkable amount of religious
diversity, the claim that someone other than Caesar was Lord was considered
sedition. The nascent Christian
community quickly found themselves on the wrong side of political power. Further, this community was not a powerful group
of people. The author is writing to
those downtrodden by society; he directly addresses ordinary men and women, and
slaves, with instruction on being a Christian in times of hardship. But notably, he never addresses anyone in
power within the empire. No
prefect. No judge. No governor.
In short, while the author writes to encourage his flock to endure all
injustice, not once does he—I’m going to say ‘he’ … historical likelihood—not
once does he assume he’s talking to someone who metes out justice within the
Empire. I think the omission is
significant, and if it does not represent the reality of community’s population,
it certainly represents the author’s conception of the community.
That being said, this first
letter attributed to Peter has some baggage.
It has been understood as contributing to the solidifying of women’s
second class status, and has been used to legitimate slavery. For instance, chapter
2:18 reads “slaves, accept the authority of your
masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also
those who are harsh.” Chapter 3:1 reads “Wives, in the same way, accept the
authority of your husbands, so that, even if some of them do not obey the word,
they may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct, when they see the purity and reverence
of your lives.”
Although, it is
worth noting that even with the inherent sexism in the letter, considering
women to be the “weaker vessel”, the admonition in the letter for husbands to “show consideration for your wives in your life together…since they too are also heirs of the
gracious gift of life” is in itself a movement in the direction of softening
the cultural mores that held women as inferior and more akin to property. More notably, men are supposed to show this
consideration “so that nothing may hinder your prayers (1 Pet 3:7).” That’s the fascinating part: something about the way the world treated
women could hinder the prayers of Christian men if they followed the world’s
example.
The early Christians understood
suffering, and the author of this letter is writing to keep Christians
alive. Christians were a group reviled
by those around them, and the author significantly contributed to how Christians
came to understand the pervasiveness of suffering, and how suffering could be a
vehicle of God’s work in the world. His
advice was to live peaceably, give the people no just cause to suspect
Christians, and honor the emperor and the Empire’s way of ordering social
life. The author seems to want to keep
the community alive with the appeal that respectability in the eyes of the
Roman Empire could possibly prevent bloodshed.
Scarcely could the author of
First Peter have imagined that the persecuted faith he knew would become the same
faith that christened the Roman Empire, and started to put the stamp of the holy
on all that the empire did.
In the switch from Christianity
as a persecuted sect to the official religion of the state, this text went from
being a call to survival by respectability to sanctifying a comfortable status
quo regarding the treatment of women and social class.
This matters. A lot.
The truth of God’s presence in the midst of suffering began
to harbor the lie that suffering is good and inevitable.
But the author still knows that suffering is often unjust
and he points out unjust suffering
all over the letter.
Crucially, nowhere in the letter is suffering a good thing
in itself.
Suffering can be a consequence of bad decisions and evil
acts.
Suffering can be result of the way our natural world
operates with sickness, decay, and disaster.
Suffering can be redeemed by God who heals, for the author that is undeniable.
Suffering can be vindicated by God who judges with
righteousness and above all mercy, that is the author’s hope.
Suffering, however, is not a good in of itself.
And the idea that suffering was good in of itself, or as a
vehicle for the sanctification of others, became a convenient way for the truth
to harbor a lie. The truth of God’s
presence in suffering legitimated the lie that the alleviation of suffering—and
the questioning of how society contributed to suffering—was not a priority for
the Church in relation to the political structures of the world.
This is how a letter that desired to keep women safe by
counseling obedience to non-believing husbands who might not react well to
having a Christian (meaning subversive) wife became the centuries’ old excuse
for women to stay in abusive relationships.
This is how a letter seeking to keep slaves alive by counseling them to
not anger their masters became the tool of preachers used to keep slaves docile
in the American South.
Unjust suffering was held up as the ideal and the natural
order of business in a world that had pretensions to call itself
Christendom. The tools that needed to
keep a small sect alive were perverted and used to legitimate unjust systems as
the lot in life of others, particularly the poor, women, and slaves, instead of
doing the hard work of taking the radical nature of the Gospel seriously.
Even with some gains, the work of radical appraisal of the
world through the lens of the Gospel is still difficult. Years
after the transatlantic slave trade has ended and there is a general consensus
that slavery is evil, there yet remains a lucrative slave and sex trafficking
trade in all parts of the world. Even
though women are no longer technically counted as property in our nation, they
are often thought of as possessions and prizes by men in ways both overt and
subtle.
And it is worth remembering that major opposition to the
ending of the slave trade and the equality of women are rooted in the very
religious texts we study, and through which we seek to understand God.
So, what do we do?
Take heart. As the
author says “rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings.” In humility, with eyes open to injustice that
goes under the title of normalcy, live a life in which the love of God shines
through in ways confusing to the rest of the world. Perplex others by refusing to believe
narratives of the inferiority of others, knowing all to be loved by God.
Be of courage. The author of 1 Peter realizes that
suffering is not an excuse for abandoning the core commitment to living a
Christian life, in imitation of Christ.
The existence of suffering does
not authorize us to trade the command
to “do unto others as you would want them to do unto you” for “do unto others
as they do to you.” Instead, the author
counsels us to persevere in patience as Christ did through adversity.
Another aspect of Christ’s suffering was the fact that his
very way of being in the world challenged the way the world works. Christ was crucified for a reason. He upset balances of power. He called the ways things worked into
question, always pointing to a Commonweal beyond what was readily
apparent. Those claims of allegiance to
a Kingdom glimpsed in slivers were considered seditious before they were
coopted by power; and those same glimpses of a kingdom of peace challenge our
comfort in a world in which millions of women experience forms of belittlement
and violence as part of their everyday life.
Let us take stock of lies and truths..
The lie is that such a world as ours is the best we can hope
for. A world in which the stories of
women’s pain is marginalized in addition to any number of ways in which
problems and people are dismissed in expediency. A world in which the dignity of many is
expendable for the comfort of a few. The
lie is that God sanctions suffering as indiscriminate tests of our mettle. The lie is that we are not responsible to a
mission of alleviating suffering by imitating Christ’s compassion, drive to
heal, and urgency in heralding a Kingdom that indicts the very existence of how
we arrange our societies.
The truth is that the kingdom of Heaven is our hope and our
guide. The truth is that we do not get
to take the shortcut of ascribing suffering to others as something they take on
for their benefit. The truth is that we
do not get to deign suffering as the lot of anyone’s life, especially if we are
looking to absolve ourselves of the responsibility for the creation of that
suffering. The truth is that God’s will
for the world will put us at cross-purposes with this world; and suffering and
reproach may result as we challenge business as usual. The truth is that we bear this mission in the
world, as we bear Christ and seek to serve all as the beloved of God.
How might we move further into living in the truth?
[1]
I owe these insights to Christopher
1 comment:
Insightful, powerful, challenging, calling to truth
Post a Comment