Robert Berra
All Saints, Mobile, Sermon
Proper
6, Year C
If I have not had the chance to greet you yet:
My name is Robert Berra and I bring greetings from the
Diocese of Arizona where I serve as the
Episcopal Campus Chaplain and teach sociology at Arizona State
University.
Jim was so gracious as to allow me to preach today—and
even though I’m on vacation I said yes.
I did not know at the time that I was also signing up for a week of
intense personal struggles with central truths of the Christian faith—but it is
what it is. I stand before you today
still struggling with justice and forgiveness and love and sin.
You see, even before I went to
seminary, my graduate work focused in large part on the relationship between
gender and religion. My graduate work
has since turned into my pastoral work. I
have witnessed the emergence of a long-necessary conversation about rape on
college campuses. On college campuses, 1-in-4 women and 1-in-16 men will
experience sexual assault. I work on a campus that was once referred to on The
Daily Show as “the Harvard of Date Rape.”
I have co-facilitated a course for other campus chaplains on campus rape
culture. I write on the topic
academically. One week this past
semester, four different pastoral conversations I had involved counseling
people who were dealing with the aftermath of rape—either because they knew the
victim or the perpetrator. The aftermath
of rape is rarely only held by the victim and perpetrator—it radiates out to
friends, families, and communities.
So as you can imagine, I have been following the case involving
Stanford student Brock Turner, who was found and chased down by two bicyclists while
he was attempting to rape an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. This past week, he was sentenced to 6 months
in jail after being found guilty on three felony counts. The victim’s statement has rightfully gone
viral on social media, as she demolishes his attempts to shift the moral locus
from his decision to rape her to a generalized complaint against college
drunkenness and promiscuity. He promises
that he will go on a speaking circuit and dedicate his life to addressing
drinking and hook-ups; but at every turn he refused to admit that the real
problem is that he thought he could rape an unconscious woman. Adding insult to injury, the father of the
rapist wrote a letter to the judge, in which he lamented that this entire messy
business of being on trial for rape had taken away his son’s appetite for steak
dinners, and that “20 minutes of action” should not cancel out the promise of
his son’s first 20 years of life.
“20 years of action.”
That is the closest the father of the rapist comes to mentioning his
son’s victim. But the judge seemed to
agree, and reduced the prosecution’s recommended 6 year sentence to six months,
saying that such a long “prison sentence would have a severe impact” on the
rapist. [Although, I do note he will be
a registered sex offender, and that will follow him around for the rest of his
life.]
I take some comfort that there has been quite a bit of
outrage, at least in my little corners of the world and internet. The ways in which rich white men are treated
with kid gloves for heinous crimes was unusually
transparent in this case. And it became
painfully clear that we live in a world in which a judge will give a rapist a
sentence that seems less like taking rape seriously and more like a consolation
prize to the rapist for the inconvenience of being found guilty. …Where the perceived promise of the rapist’s
future is valued more highly than the past and present suffering of the victim.
But even as I share the outrage, I’m aware that at least
one thing mingled with my outrage is recognition. I do see Brock Turner in younger versions of myself. Even though I was raised to consider rape a
great moral evil, I was also raised in a culture that treats a woman’s ‘no’ not as the final word, but the opening of a negotiation. As one judge in New Zealand said during his
summation of a rape trial 45 minutes before the rapist was acquitted by a jury,
“if every man stopped the first time a woman said ‘no’, the world would be a
much less exciting place to live.” We
learn in this culture not to respect the word “no”, but to try to get around
it. Twelve years ago, it took sitting
with friends who had been raped to realize that the way many men treat intimate
relationships cause profound damage.[1] I do not speak as though I’m above our rape
culture; I speak as one who is embedded within it. It took time to learn how to avoid shifting the moral locus of a rape from the
perpetrator—to keep from asking the questions that blame the person who got
raped—and instead focus on the fact that the perpetrator alone made a conscious
choice to overpower someone to use their body.
Maybe you have known for a long time about these
counter-cultural messages—how consent is an affirmative yes, not just the
absence of a partner saying “no.” Maybe
you’ve known that rape is nine times out
of ten not the attack of a stranger, but an acquaintance or a partner who
overrides a “no.” But I suspect many of
us men may recognize Brock Turner in us, and the recognition can silence us
even as we are disgusted with his refusal to own up to what he did. And so some men defend Turner, or the
lessened sentence; they counsel us to consider that the jury may have been
wrong; we are urged to forgive and be merciful to a rapist who refuses to name
his own crime for what it was.
So now that I’ve shared more about me than you may have
ever wanted to know, maybe you understand some of why, this week of all weeks, I
might struggle with scripture about forgiveness.
Our passage from the Gospel of Luke today takes places
right after Jesus notes that he is taking criticism from the religious leaders
around him because he is “a glutton and a drunkard who eats with tax collectors
and sinners.”[2] Luke then tells the story we heard today to
drive the point home. In the very home
of a Pharisee who probably invited Jesus over to size him up and test his
credentials, one of the pesky unclean sinners—a woman, no less— barges in and performs
this service for Jesus. It is just as
likely as not that the woman may have met Jesus earlier, experienced
forgiveness, and this is simply her service of gratitude. Instead of forgiving her because of the foot-washing she gives him, Jesus reiterates her
forgiveness in front of men who could not see the woman beyond her sin. Hence Jesus’s question to Simon the
Pharisee: “Do you see this woman? Can you look past the sin and see the love
and gratitude that forgiveness brings forth?”
A general lesson to be pulled from Luke is that we are to
be like the unnamed forgiving woman, grateful for the forgiveness that Jesus
offers—and rightly so; we are not supposed to be like the judgmental Pharisee. And so it is easy to see the passage as
offering us that choice: do we want to
be like the woman, loving so much more because we know the power of forgiveness
and offer forgiveness in our relationships; or are we like Simon who cannot see
beyond past sin and holds the past deeds of a person as the only measure of who
they truly are, or have become?
If we were to place ourselves in the Story as Simon, what
would we see and do if we saw Brock Turner’s victim in the woman at Jesus’s
feet. What if it was Brock turner there,
indstead?
Am I too much like Simon if I ask what it means to be
forgiving when, in this society, it seems to be an informal norm that men can
more easily escape the consequences of raping someone than a woman can escape
questions of what she may have done to bring the rape upon herself? Can we be too quick to forgive?
And here are the two big questions that have haunted me
all week: Is my anger that a rapist was
let off easier than I think is fair counter to the Gospel imperative to be
forgiving?
Am I failing at being loving?
Not necessarily.
Forgiveness is commanded to the church in terms of how we
handle our interpersonal relationships, but we also live in a world in which we
have to use our best judgment about how we will live together as a society. Unless we are willing to completely forgo any
sense of moral decision-making, we have to come to grips with the complexities
of love and justice.
There are those who would divide the concept of love and
justice, and set them as opposite shores of a deep, broad river. Such a division is harsh and, for a
Christian, it is ultimately artificial.
A sharp division between justice and love leads to a justice
better called retribution and revenge. Love
fares no better in the division: On this side of perfection, love without
justice cannot admit that the wounding we suffer at the hands of others bears
any significance at all, and so it has nothing of substance to offer to those
who suffer. For if God offers an
unqualified patience and affirmation to everything we do—even those things
which harm others—then the Gospel holds no good news for the many who suffer
for the sake of the comfort of a few.
The truth is more complex, and as the 20th
century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, justice is “an approximation of
brotherhood under conditions of sin.” Rather
than there being a sharp division
between love and justice, justice is the degree of love that is possible among
strangers and societies in a world marred by self-interest and a desire for
control—in other words, sin.
And it has to be said that outrage at injustice is itself
an expression of love. We follow a God who loves all with an equal loving regard, and we are
created to bear and respond to and mirror that divine image. Our very ability to discern and desire
fairness is that imperfect approximation of our sharing of God’s equal loving
regard for all. A perversion of love
that offers preemptive forgiveness to our wrongdoing with no redress or naming
of the wrong is the denial of love and worth to those who suffer. And, ironically, such a perversion of love
will always benefit those who practice evil and indulge selfish desire. The world already practices that sort of love,
in which white, male bodies possessing money are favored over others.
Christians are called to a more radical love—a more equal regard that responds
to divine image rather than earthly markers of favor.
Am I still Simon the Pharisee?
Maybe, but I do not think Simon was being just. He did not allow the possibility of
redemption or forgiveness, and so he lost sight of God’s equal loving regard—to
the point he could not see the woman past her history. There is a lesson there
worth heeding.
I suspect that everyone in this church knows some measure
of forgiveness and so we may also know the gratitude of the unnamed woman; and
yet we all could experience and give more forgiveness. That is easy to say and hard to do, but it is
the life we are called to live. At our
best, Christians point to forgiveness and redemption. Any number of people have histories that need
such good news—oppressors and oppressed, perpetrators and victims, activists
and the apathetic.
And if we choose to live in the world, we are called to
take on the work of love, which always includes forgiveness, and yet our love will
occasionally have to look more like justice. While I may decide to turn my own cheek when I
am attacked, there is no love or justice in holding out another person’s cheek
to be hit again. How often do we fail in
this when we refuse to believe a rape victim, or hold the perpetrator’s future
of more worth than healing the living hell the victim still experiences, or
believe a rapist will not act again when he cannot even name what he did wrong
in the first place? How do we hold our responsibility
to forgive in tension with our desire to acknowledge and mirror God’s equal
loving regard for all?
Ultimately I cannot answer these for you. I can tell you that I have commitments to
ending systems that see some lives as less worthy of consideration. I simply offer that this tension between
love, and justice, and forgiveness, and sin is a part of a conversation we do
not have permission to avoid, consider settled, or abdicate.
How might you engage this conversation and point the
world toward a more perfect justice and love?
May your discernment be fruitful.
Amen.
[1]
Other men called me an “emotional tampon” after noticing that I was spending
the time to listen to women without trying to score. Many of them are now military officers.
[2] Lk
7:34.
There are a number of things I read that are worth looking at, and so I provide citations or web addresses below.
The victim's statement: https://www.sccgov.org/sites/da/newsroom/newsreleases/Documents/B-Turner%20VIS.pdf
Reinhold Niebuhr, Love And Justice (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992).
