Wisdom Series 4, The Most Excellent of Songs, "The Unmediated Female Voice: Black and Beautiful."

 

B Wisdom 4 2021 (Song of Solomon)

The Most Excellent of Songs 1:1-7, 5:1-5; 8:6-7

September 26, 2021

           If you were like me, you grew up with strong elements of Purity Culture taught by the Evangelical, Fundamentalist, or sometimes by just traditional mainline churches.  It wasn’t exactly taught to me by my local church, but the religious culture around me told me that sex and my body were to be observed with all kinds of guilt and shame.  It was thick in little, old Metamora, Illinois.  That Purity Culture left me sufficiently broken around issues like sexuality.  I have a hard time accepting myself as a sexual being, seeing my body as a beautiful thing, knowing sensuality and sex as good and right and an incredible gift. 

           I grew up believing that all things involving sex were the ultimate sins. 

           Linda Kay Klein is an author who has spent much of her adult life trying to help individuals break free and recover from Purity Culture.  Here is how she defines it:

 

           In purity culture, gender expectations are based on a strict, stereotype-based binary. Men are expected to be strong, “masculine” leaders of the household, church, and (to a lesser extent) society. Women are expected to support them—to be pretty, “feminine,” sweet, supportive wives and mothers.

 

Sexual expectations vary by gender. Everyone is expected to maintain absolute sexlessness before marriage (that means no sexual thoughts, feelings, or actions). And upon marriage, they are expected to flip their sexuality on like a light switch. However, men are taught their minds are evil, whereas women are taught their bodies are evil. That is to say, men’s thoughts and actions are said to be either pure or impure, while women themselves are said to be either pure or impure. Sexual metaphors abound: A “pure” woman is compared to a brand new shiny car while an “impure” one is compared to a used car that everyone around town has already driven and that isn’t worth much anymore; a “pure” woman is compared to a delicious hamburger just set down on the table while an “impure” woman is compared to the last slobbery bite of that hamburger, etc.

 

Purity culture also teaches that women are responsible for the sexual thoughts, feelings and choices men make, and so must dress, walk and talk in just the right way so as not to “inspire” sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions in them. If they do “inspire” such thoughts, they are said to be a “stumbling block” – literally a thing over which men trip on their pathway to God. To avoid stumbling blocks, men are taught to train their minds using strategies such as “bouncing their eyes” when they see something that brings out a sexual thought or feeling—such as a woman’s cleavage in an advertisement or the knee of the woman sitting beside them at church.[1]

            

Klein goes on to say that this Purity Culture is deeply rooted in nationalistic and white supremacist assumptions.  As we see Purity Culture play out, we see how manipulative, controlling, and violent it can be—particularly over and against women’s bodies.  Never was this made so apparent than in Calvin University Professor, Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s ground-breaking book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.  I believe this book is required reading.

Over 20 years ago, I had just joined the group Witness for Peace New England, and one of my first meetings was with a group of young college women who had recently returned from Cuba.  The first thing they wanted to share with us was the experience they all had when they got off the plane and began traveling around Havana.  All of them recognized it.  All of them remarked how freeing it all was.  “No billboards,” they said.  “No advertisements,” they remarked, “showing pictures of women with these anorexically thin bodies hawking some product or TV show.”  In effect, telling them, that they should be so thin, that their bodies had a price tag; their bodies were commodified, up for sale, part of a system that put a dollar amount on everything.  They remarked how this absence of commercialization was like a weight lifted off their shoulders.

A couple of these young women—independent, strong, tough college women--were both smiling and crying as they told us how they had never realized how much that message is pounded into their own heads, day after day through a media that is ever-present.  In their home country, day after day they heard that their bodies were just another commercial product.  Until they lived outside of that system for even a day, they did not how realize how insistent and demanding that message was on their own psyches, and how much it had become a part of them.

How much does the human body cost?  In 4^th grade, I remember being told that my body, the sum total of its parts was worth less than a dollar.  Now I’ve heard anything between $4.50 and $160, depending on stock market fluctuations.  Really?  Truly?  In liberation, freedom, and balance, I believe the Living God does not even fathom us in those terms, cannot even imagine our bodies with a price tag.  We are the beloved Children of God!

           Sometimes we all need a different lens not only to see the world, but also to see ourselves living in the world.  The world becomes a mirror, or a prism, by which we see ourselves, so that when we are removed from our surroundings and put in a different place, we become aware of our freedom to be different, to maybe even see ourselves in the way God sees us.  We have so long interpreted ourselves by our surroundings that we cannot imagine another way. 

           The Song of Solomon, or the title the author really gives to us, the Most Excellent of Songs, is the only unmediated woman's voice we have in Scripture.2  

One of the more interesting translation issues the book presents is a small Hebrew conjunction that can be translated as "and" or "but."  It is used by the woman to say that she is "black and  beautiful" or "black but beautiful" in the first few verses of the book.  Regardless of the conjunction, someone, presumably the surrounding culture, is telling this woman that the color of her black skin does not go along with the word "beautiful."  And this woman is objecting.                     

                                  

         Now racism, as we know it, was not a part of the ancient world.[3]  But what this woman may be declaring is that she is of a different social class, becoming darker through long hours working under the sun.   Or, perhaps this woman is a different ethnicity than her beloved.[4] 

I am black and beautiful.  I am black but beautiful.  Yes.  Right.  True.  But if interpreting Scripture is to listen to one end of a phone conversation and ask what is going on at the other end, then we should ask why the only unmediated female voice in Scripture is objecting or protesting.  Who is denying her beauty, her ability to make her own choice, her willingness to declare romantic, sexual love without fear?  For the woman almost sounds argumentative, she is so insistent.[5]  Who is disagreeing with the powerful and passionate love throughout this book?

Either way, it is that strange and foreign woman who keeps showing up in Wisdom Literature who has the agency over her own body, her own choices, to initiate lovemaking with someone who is probably not like her.  Here she is arguing against her presumed protagonists.

           She says to the daughters of Jerusalem, “Do not cast an arrogant eye at me.  For I am black and beautiful.  Do not deny my love.”  While the daughters of Jerusalem, probably a colloquial reference to Jewish women who want her to wait, this is an empowered woman insisting on her right to initiate lovemaking—NOW!   And no, I’m not talking about her being friendly, or caring, or empathetic.  Yep, she wants to get down and get busy.  I’m talking about sex.

           How in the heck did the Most Excellent of Songs get in the Bible?  Doesn’t the Bible seem to get that people of faith don’t have sex?  They certainly don’t bring it up in their places of worship.  I mean . . . have you ever read this book before?  There is no mention of the God in the entire book!  Sacrilege!  The book is filled with sexual acts that have nothing to do with pro-creation and everything to do with pleasure!  For example, vivid detail around oral sex is given.  Blasphemy!  Almost every part of the human anatomy is described in vivid detail!  For shame! And what page number was that?

           The book is about intimate human experience, particularly a woman’s experience, that suggests a woman, without fear, has every right to use her body out of a way of knowing that is not otherworldly or lofty in contemplation, but through her senses—through fruits, flowers, and animals; through taste, touch, smell, or the sound of the other’s voice.[6]   This Most Excellent of Songs conveys the agency of this woman.  She enjoys her own body, all of her senses, without fear, and enjoys the body of her lover and all of the sensory things that come with that.  The book conveys the fullest sense of the Biblical way of knowing and a deep, sensual love.

           The strength of that love is undeniable.  At the end of the book, in chapter eight, verses six and seven, the woman says, “For love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.  Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.”  The phrase, “raging flame,” is produced by combining the word “flame” in Hebrew with a form of the Divine or God’s name.[7]

           Biblical scholar, Roland Murphy, suggests that the phrase “expresses a relationship between the flames of human and the flames of divine love.”[8]  Murphy indicates that this could be interpreted to mean that sensual, sexual human love is in some way a participation in divine love.[9]

           Today’s Responsive Affirmation, from Christian mystic St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul”, is based on the Most Excellent of Songs, and relates the deep, passionate, intimate love St. John of the Cross experienced with God.  Mutual, sexual, passionate, intimate love is a participation in divine love.  Wake the kids.  Phone the neighbors.  Would that we could share that good news!

           In reality though, we know this story, don’t we?  Women are forever being told by their families, culture, or tradition that they have no agency or power over their own choices, bodies, or romantic partners.  They are not to cross boundaries.  It is Montagues and Capulets, taught by the love of Romeo and Juliet.  It is the Jets and Sharks, taught by the love of Tony and Maria.  It is Angie Tucci and Flipper Purify, told by the story of Jungle Fever.  Why even Disney changed history to suggest that Pocahantas and John Smith crossed the great cultural divide through a romantic love that would not be denied.  In real life, such stories were chronicled in a 1992 movie which talked about the forbidden love within the lesbian community through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.[10]  Instead of forbidding power’s excess and violence, we use forbid and outlaw and preach over and against consensual, consenting adults.

           This Scriptural story is of a passionate, sexual, intimate knowing and divine love that crosses boundaries set by human culture or tradition or institution.  Sexual intimacy found in deep, romantic love has a deeper wisdom about connection that is considered forbidden by those who wish to deny the humanity or agency of someone they do not consider their equal.  Society seeks to keep the lovers apart but this love will not be denied.  Head knowledge tells us that this love is all wrong, but the senses, all of creation, bursts with the knowledge that this love must ripen into full bloom.

           Romeo and Juliet, Maria and Tony, Angie and Flipper, “Forbidden Love”—we have been told this story so many times we know this story by now, don’t we?  And yet, we seemingly have to tell the story over and over so that we remind ourselves in a world that seeks to put a price tag on women’s bodies, wants women to recoil in fear, not come out of their own homes, stay within their own group or tribe or ethnicity or race, and to not claim their own skin and bodies as locations of divine love and pleasure . . . we have to tell ourselves love is a raging flame that will not be denied.

           In our world, we exchange the agency and strength of a woman’s sexuality with objectification and commodification.  If we doubt the truth of that sinfulness, that the adaptation Margaret Atwood’s, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is so popular and seen as such a recollection of what has been, what is, and a warning of what may be reflects something deep in our culture.  Once again, the truth of that sinfulness was made painfully obvious when we recently re-visited Larry Nassar continually violating U.S. Olympic gymnasts and, even when the young women spoke out, nobody believed them.  Think about that.  We applaud their Olympic medals.  We don’t want to hear their voices.  The Most Excellent of Songs says there is a deeper wisdom.   The Most Excellent of Songs treasures the voice of a woman who is in charge of her own sexuality.

           What would it look like to walk around without fear—as a woman who is black and beautiful?  I end with a quote from the late author Toni Morrison, who imagines what it might be like to walk around the world as a black woman without fear.

 

And I want to inhabit, walk around, a site clear of racist detritus (erosion); a place where race both matters and is rendered impotent; a place "already made for me, both snug and wide open. With a doorway never needing to be closed, a view slanted for light and bright autumn leaves but not rain. Where moonlight can be counted on if the sky is clear and stars no matter what. And below, just yonder, a river called Treason to rely on." I want to imagine not the threat of freedom, or its tentative panting fragility, but the concrete thrill of borderlessness--a kind of out of doors safety where "a sleepless woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the yard and on down the road. No lamp and no fear. A hiss-crackle from the side of the road would never scare her because what ever it was that made that sound, it wasn't something creeping up on her. Nothing for miles around thought she was prey. She could stroll as slowly as she liked, thinking of food preparations, of family things, or lift her eyes to stars and think of war or nothing at all. Lampless and without fear she could make her way. And if a light shone from a window up a ways and the cry of a colicky baby caught her attention, she might step over to the house and call out softly to the woman inside trying to soothe the baby. The two of them might take turns massaging the infant stomach, rocking, or trying to get a little soda water down. When the baby quieted they could sit together for a spell, gossiping, chuckling low so as not to wake anybody else. The woman could decide to go back to her bed then, refreshed and ready to sleep, or she might stay her direction and walk further down the road--on out, beyond, because nothing around or beyond considered her prey.[11]

 

May all of us, from our children to our seniors, know our skin and bodies to be worthy, priceless, and beautiful and full of agency for God’s work in the world—that all of our senses would explode with a love that is as strong as death.  May we take full pleasure in that skin and in those bodies, by ourselves or with a trusted partner.  May we may be found crying and smiling with the full knowledge of how God sees us—sensually, sexually.  And may we live in that knowledge without fear, knowing that nothing around thinks that we have a price or that we are prey.  May we know a deeper wisdom.  Amen.

---

[1] Linda Kay Klein, “What is Purity Culture?” https://lindakayklein.com/what-is-purity-culture/.  I think this definition is so right on but does miss layers upon layers associated with racism.  Klein may even be referencing Hardee’s commercials where sex is being sold by an actress in platform, high heels eating a massive Thickburger.  How men and women are referenced can also be seen in archaic school dress codes that do not recognize major differences.  Young women are told not to wear things off shoulder, skirts too high, and yoga pants.  No such detail is provided for young men.  Young men are regularly found in tight apparel with shirts off with few objections.  The disparity is breathtaking.

[2] Renita Weems, Lecture at United Theological Seminary, Minneapolis, MN, March 3, 1992.  The book of Ruth has a narrator.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Anthony R. Ceresko, O.S.F.S., Introduction to Old Testament Wisdom:  A Spirituality for Liberation  (Maryknoll, New York:  Orbis Books, 1999), p. 167.

[5] Weems, Lecture.

[6] Weems, Lecture. 

[7] Ceresko, Introduction, p. 166.

[8] Ibid; Roland Murphy (cf. 1 John 4:7-8) Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6:154.

[9] Ibid.

[10] “Forbidden Love:  The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives”

[11] The House that Race Built. Editor Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Pantheon Books. 1997.  https://public.wsu.edu/~hughesc/morrison_home.htm.

Sermon: B Epiphany 4/Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., January 24, 2021, "Throw the demon out!"

 B Epiphany 4 (2)/MLK OL SJUCC 2021

Mark 1:21-25; Mark 5:1-20

January 17, 2021

           Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved, is set outside Cincinnati, Ohio, several years after the Civil War with the characters haunted by the enduring trauma of pre-Civil War slavery.  In this setting, fleeing and freed African-American men, women, and children looked to Baby Suggs as their spiritual leader—“uncalled, unrobed, and unanointed.”  Baby Suggs gathered the company of her people to worship in what they called the Clearing—described as a wide-open place cut deep in the woods.  Worship in the Clearing happened in this way: 

 

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently.  The company watched her from the trees.  They knew she was ready when she put her stick down.  Then she shouted, “Let the children come!” and they ran from the trees toward her.

 

“Let your mothers hear you laugh,” she told them, and the woods rang.  The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

 

Then “Let the grown men come,” she shouted.  They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.

 

“Let your wives and your children see you dance,” she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.

 

Finally she called the women to her.  “Cry,” she told them.  “For the living and the dead.  Just cry.”  And without covering their eyes, the women let loose. 

 

It started that way:  laughing children, dancing men, crying women, and then it got mixed up.  Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.  In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.[1]

 

Baby Suggs went on to tell them to love their flesh, for they do not; to love their eyes, for they’d rather pick them out; love their hands for they only use them to tie, bind, and chop them off; to love their mouths, their arms, their inside parts, and, finally, to love their hearts. 

           In a world which hated, despised, and spat upon brown and black skin, Baby Suggs exorcised the unclean spirit, the demon, which sought lodging and home in flesh, eyes, hands, mouths, arms, inside parts, and hearts.  That demon told them they were less than human, without agency, and less than the Children of God.  If the demon was to be exorcised from their community, it would begin with the worship and spiritual practice found in the Clearing with the loving of the inside and outside of that brown and black skin. 

           But the demon came.  A young woman named Sethe, nursing one child and pregnant with another child, milked like a cow by the young men of the family who owned her, decided when she escaped to Ohio that none of her children would ever again know slavery.  She escaped the plantation of “Sweet Home” in Kentucky when she was 9 months pregnant.  When Sethe knew the slave owner and the sheriff were on the way to find her family outside Cincinnati, Ohio, and return them all to slavery, Sethe took her children with her to the barn. 

           When they found her, Sethe had already killed her infant child, Beloved, and was getting ready to kill the remaining children.  From that day forward, the child, Beloved, haunted Sethe and all of her relationships.  Though Beloved made Sethe’s life a living hell, Sethe could not let go her lost child and all the trauma associated with it.  Whether it was a mother’s yearning for her lost child, the guilt Sethe felt for taking her life, the breaking of her spirit in grief and sadness, Sethe just could not let Beloved go.  Beloved offered Sethe an odd comfort. 

           I believe Beloved is one of the few modern stories that tells the radical story of the Gospel of Mark.  Much like Baby Suggs in Beloved, Jesus comes uncalled, unrobed, and unanointed to exorcize the demons from the Galileean countryside.  We read part of the Gospel lesson we had for Advent, the Scripture which begins Jesus’s public ministry.  The second Gospel lesson we viewed, is Mark, chapter 5, other than the crucifixion, the height of the gospel.  They are both reminders that Jesus is framed as an exorcist in the Gospel of Mark.

           These unclean spirits, these demons, have all the right head knowledge and even knows Jesus to be holy.  The demons protest, scream, yell, act as if they are the ones being persecuted.  The demons cry out in pain, begging Jesus to just leave it alone.  They create a scene by shouting out their spiritual knowledge.  Jesus is willing to endure their pain and is unmoved by their faith language to lead in courage.  The pain of transformation and becoming is necessary.  Using faith language does not make them anything less than evil spirits.

           While we tend to think of exorcisms as something that went out with modern science or only fit for Hollywood movies, studies of social science have concluded that demon possession is actually a world-wide phenomenon throughout most of history involving social tension, class conflict, and economic exploitation.[2]

           In what is now the African country of Zimbabwe, the Lunda-Luvale tribes sometimes had people who suffered from possession by spirits.  A special, 20^th Century version of this spirit possession, is called bindele.  This phenomenon among the Lunda-Luvale tribes is “caused by possession by other spirits [that] may be considered to reflect a tension between the society of the victim and that of the group represented by the spirit.”  Bindele means, literally, “European” or, metaphorically, “European colonialist.”  Sufferers from bindele are believed to be possessed by the spirit of a European.[3]

           In our main gospel story for today, Jesus encounters the Gerasene demoniac and asks the demon its name.  The demon replies, “Legion.”  Legion had only one meaning in first century Rome.  Legion referred to a division of Roman soldiers.[4] 

The meaning of this story becomes plan when understood within its historical context.  The ancient Jewish historian Josephus recounts that, in response to Jewish revolt, the Roman legions took the town of Gerasa in conquest in the late 60s, killed a thousand young men, held their families captive, plundered their property, and then set their homes on fire.[5]

Here is the man, symbolic of an occupied and oppressed Jewish people, cutting himself with stones, bound in fetters and chains, and living among the tombs.  How could the author of Mark portray any better what Roman imperialism and violence is doing to his people—the harm and violence and death present in that very place?  Before Jesus exorcises Legion from this person, the demon begs Jesus not to expel him from the country.  Jesus casts the demons into swine, an unclean animal, who then run off a cliff into the sea, the Jewish mythological place of primordial chaos. 

What a dangerous story to tell in first century Rome!  Who is this man that he might threaten to throw the Roman legion, the Roman military, out of the country and into the sea?  Is it any wonder that after the herd of pigs drowns themselves in the sea, the people of the village do not crown Jesus as Caesar and king, parade Jesus around town, or offer Jesus a free night’s stay at the Gerasa bed and breakfast?  Instead, the townsfolk ask Jesus to leave—presumably fearful of what will happen if the Romans catch wind of this.  The man, once occupied and oppressed by the demon, is now full of agency and wants to follow Jesus.  Jesus tells him to go tell his friends and neighbors that a liberated life is possible—is desired by God. 

Too often our demons have offered us an odd comfort.  They haunt us into believing that there is no possibility outside the status quo.  We fear what will happen when change and transformation come.  Indeed, community organizer and climate activist Anthony Rogers Wright said that what happened at the Capitol building on January 6^th was not a coup but an attempt to maintain the status quo through violence.[6] 

The pandemic has been a portal, a revealing, to show those who may not have believed in the naked cruelty and violence of racism, its demonic nature, so that we now stand at a moment brimming with possibility for transformation.  That is why we see so many people afraid.  The possibility for transformation is at hand.  If we are to be healthy leaders, we must be willing to endure the pain and fear shouted by the demon so that we might all be found in our right minds as leaders of good courage. 

All of this fear and demonic spewing has been fueled by a president who told us who he was even before he took office.  My good colleague, Rabbi Sharon Brous, related the primary story of her people this past week and talked about Pharaoh.  She said that Pharaoh’s narcissism, his hunger for power, his willingness to destroy the lives of people he considered “other” that the cruel and wicked Pharaoh’s “trajectory and character hewed so closely to that of our president that shortly after the inauguration several of [her] rabbinic colleagues were told that they were not to mention the word ‘pharaoh’ because that would appear to be an implicit critique of the new President of the United States.”[7]

But he could not light the fire unless there had been an historic kindling we are so close to unseating.  So many of us as white folk are afraid that our country is being taken away from us? when violence and death are being done through demonic policies, demonic police practice, and demonic processes.  As predicted, the Black snake leaks crude and Native people die, the industrial air of Cancer Alley along the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to New Orleans continues to kill African-American folk, abandoned U.S. plants along the border leak battery acid into the lone drinking and bathing stream for people who now have rashes and lesions in Tijuana, and help me to know . . .  does Flint have clean water? 

And white folk are afraid their country is being taken away from them?  What do we call that but demonic?   Racism is killing all of us.  It is the demon we house which gives us an odd comfort while it has us in fetters and chains, cutting ourselves, living in death out among the tombs. 

Racism . . . white supremacy . . . white privilege . . . these are the unclean spirits which have haunted our country from its inception.  They deny the humanity and divinity, the fertile soil and Divine breath, the agency, freedom, and liberation that God wills for all of us.  As people of faith, we must root it out of ourselves and engage those we know to bring about transformation.  Christ is still doing exorcisms.  And we must allow him to do his work on us, our community, and our nation.  The Epiphany season is about making things manifest.  And we must transform manifest destiny to manifest empathy. 

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the Body of Christ was thirty women who came to Sethe’s house to drive out the demon.  Some women didn’t come because of the heat.  Some women didn’t come because they wanted to avoid the confrontation.  Ella, who knew slavery better than anyone else, got them started—mumbling, praying, singing, and hollering.  In other words, Ella knew that she did not want that demon another damn day in Sethe’s house and in her community.  The sound of the women’s collective voices, mumbling, praying, singing, and hollering were like the Clearing and Baby Suggs come to Sethe and that sound “broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.”[8]  With these loving faces before her, Sethe is able to let go of the demon which is her child, destroyed by slavery and yet by her own hand, leave it behind to join this group of freed and liberated women and her community once again. 

Let the violence that happened in Washington, D.C., to maintain the status quo be the last stand of the demon of racism in our country so that all people might know themselves as Children of God and we might know ourselves, collectively, as the Body of Christ.  Peace and unity mean little in the face of the violence done by the demons of white privilege, white supremacy, and racism. 

As Rev. Dr. King preached,

 

If peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don't want peace. If peace means being complacently adjusted to a deadening status quo, I don't want peace. If peace means keeping my mouth shut in the midst of injustice and evil, I don't want it. Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the existence of justice for all people.[9]

 

In the first exorcism of Mark, Jesus tells the demon to shut up, stop playing the innocent or the victim, and to come out of him.  Jesus is willing to endure the demon’s pain and screaming to show courageous leadership.  Stop acting like you are the one persecuted.  In the second exorcism, Jesus casts the demon “Legion” into pigs who then run headlong into the chaos. 

           We would do well to do the same.  We must be like Ella who have been in such solidarity that we know the pain and death brought by racism.  And we say, as she did, “Racism?  Not another damn day!  Not another damn day in our house!”  This exorcism will take all of us, our collective will, as the Body of Christ to begin mumbling, praying, singing, and hollering so that we might be baptized and found in our right minds—to know ourselves as fully the Children of God and to continue to be the Body of Christ.   Certainly, we have an odd comfort from this demon.  Even more so, there are people that we love, people that we know, that we must now engage so that this demon is driven out.  Transformation is close.   It is God’s good wish that we begin.  Cast the demon out.  Amen. 

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[1] Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York:  The Penguin Group, 1987), pp. 87-88.

[2] John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus:  The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco:  HarperCollins, 1992), quoting Paul W. Hollenbach, “Jesus, Demoniacs, and Public Authorities:  A Socio-Historical Study,” JAAR 99:567-588.

[3] Ibid, p. 315, quoting Barrie Reynolds, Magic, Divination and Witchcraft Among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia.  Robins Series 3, Berkley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1963. 

[4] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man:  A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, New York:  Orbis Books, 1988), p. 191.

[5] Ibid, quoting Josephus, War, IV, ix, 1.

[6] UCC Climate Justice Zoom Meeting, January 13, 2021. 

[7] Rabbi Sharon Brous, “The inflection point,” IKAR Los Angeles, January 11, 2021.

[8] Morrison, Beloved, p. 261. 

[9]Excerpt fron King's "When Peace Becomes Obnoxious" speech delivered on 18 March 1956 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 7, 2019, "Relational, greatly loved, and inherently pleasing"

C Proper 9 14 Ord NH BFC

Gospel of Thomas 64, 70

July 7, 2019

Almost all of the New Testament is about identity.  And one of the iconic ways this is made evident is through baptism.  John the Baptist says that, “I have baptized you with water but another one comes who will baptize you with fire.”  Our identity is the head of wheat that feeds ourselves and the wider world.  But there is chaff—stories which still operate within us to tell us we are less than divine—and those need to be burned away . . . as fire is the great purifying instrument in the ancient world.

It is a countercultural act to love that which is within us, to know it as divine.  Black Elk said it best, “I had a dream and because I did not live my dream, my dream was making me sick.”[1]  We are called to live out the dream that is within us, to call it forward so that it may be made manifest . . .  as it sparkles and lights upon the earth.

Even more so, we are told from an early age that which is within us and these  bodies that define our boundaries are not normative and only have value when they can be turned into dollars, commodified, or receive approval from a dominating, ever-changing gaze. 

As our recent Bible study group knows, I believe Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, is one of the most important stories told in our time.  It is one of the true tellings we have of the Gospel of Mark and takes place just after the Civil War, outside the slave south, where freedom seekers seek to make new lives for themselves in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Morrison based the book on the real-life story of Margaret Garner who had escaped slavery just before the Civil War began.  In the story, Baby Suggs, an escaped slave herself, who took no official title, was unrobed and un anointed but let her great big heart beat in front of her people.  She was an unchurched preacher.  When summer came, Baby Suggs holy would invite her people to the Clearing where she would invite children to laugh, men to dance, and women to weep.  Pretty soon it all got mixed up and women began to laugh, men weeped, and children danced.  Morrison tells the story further:

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

"Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.

Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it.

This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.[2]

What Baby Suggs knew and wanted all of those freedom seekers to know was that the message the Domination System tried to tell them was a lie—that their flesh, and hands, and mouth and bodies were only meant to be worked, produce, bound, milked, and ignored.  This did not recognize the Divine found within them and on them and through them. 

            We have been given a false self that destroys all of us.  Even as a white, straight, cis-gendered man, I no longer want to bear the false power and load as normalized divine.  It is too much.  I am often broken and ragged and hurt and I need to be loved in that space.  I can’t keep up the illusion.  It is too much.  I am often not capable—and so I need the help of others.  I am often not strong or competent—and so I need the strength and wisdom of others.  I am often not loving—and so I need the divine called forward from all of you.  Because I have seen it in you, the ability, the wisdom and strength, the love, and it is truly glorious.  Truly glorious. 

White male supremacy is a false self that has me failing time after time.  Because it is false, it is so fragile that it is often defended with violence—defended with violence so that people do not dare speak the truth.  It is formed through domination and, defacing the children of God.  It is unsustainable chaff that God needs to be allowed to burn or it may burn down our planet.[3]  This saying from the Gospel of Thomas relates that if we do not bring forward the true divine identity, our true identity within us, it may very well destroy us. 

As Daniel José Camacho relates, “[O]ur true self is relational, is greatly loved, and is inherently pleasing.  The true self is peaceful and does not build itself through domination of others.  The false self is violent and formed through domination.  The false self eschews relationality and pretends to be utterly independent.  The false self is hatred, is internalized self-hatred, is a child of God vandalized.  The false self is always depleted, in need of great approval, greater success, greater results.”[4]

We are capable, powerful, wise, and strong but we don’t have to be all of it all of the time.  We are baptized, in all of our diversity, into a community of hope that begins to recognize the divinity within us and within people who are absolutely not like us.  They might look at you and see someone odd and strange and goofy . . . and yet, glorious divinity.  You might look at them and see someone so differently odd and strange and goofy . . . and yet, glorious divinity.  As Camacho writes, DNA testing, which has become so popular these days,  can be meaningful and tell us a little bit about our ancestry, but DNA testing cannot perform the memory of a baptism which affirms us as beloved and divine.  You . . . in your oddity, strangeness, and goofiness, you are gloriously divine.  No longer the lies that require our violence.  No longer the false stories that require our need to deface and harm another. 

I am a big fan of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa.  I read two of her incredible anthologies from women of color when I was in seminary and felt like each writer from those anthologies opened up my heart wider and wider to a world of pain and gifts and struggle and wisdom far beyond what I had ever known.  In her book, Borderlands, Anzaldúa writes about the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound that is not only at its physical location.  It is found within us, how we see each other and how we see ourselves.  She hopes that we move past false racial personalities to know our true identities.[5]

Race itself is a fiction—a recent one in human existence used to justify genocide and slavery.[6]  As a white male, I do significant damage when I pretend that I can erase years of history and harm by pretending I don’t see race.  It keeps me in power not to see it because race has been repeated so much that it functions in the background and drives our whole narrative.  Race makes what is going on at the border justifiable as domestic and foreign policy.  As a fiction, race needs that power over through violence and domination to continue the illusion.  And it responds in a sweeping way to try and harm any who would call out its lies.  For those of us who are well meaning, race causes us to pause just long enough so that children can be separated from their parents, locked in cages, and sexually assaulted without us storming the castle and saying, “This wrong!  It must stop!  It can be no more.”    God’s truth is that these are people, families, children, with a wisdom of struggle and survival, of strength and resolve, of beauty and wisdom, I may not even be able to comprehend.  If we do not allow that divinity to be recognized in them, will they ever be able to bring it forward in the future?  These are God’s children, God’s beloved—relational, greatly loved, and inherently pleasing.  Nobody is calling them into the clearing to laugh, or dance, or weep.  And so will they know to love their own skin?  Will they know?  Why am I not at the border now to tell them it is all a lie?  Why?

We are gloriously divine.  And we are to call forward that true self within us so that God’s truth, not the vicious lie being told at the border, so that God’s truth may go marching on.  Amen.

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[1] http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/thomas/gospelthomas70.html. 

[2] Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin Group, 1987), 88-89

[3] Daniel José Camacho, “Who am I?:  What DNA Doesn’t Tell Us About Identity” Sojourners, July 2019, p. 27.   

[4] Ibid.

[5]Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Consciencia de la Mestiza,“ Feminist Theory Reader:  Local and Global Perspectives ( New York:  Routledge, 2002), p. 186

[6]Audrey Smedley, “Origin of the Idea of Race,”  Race:  The Power of an Illusion, PBS, November 1997, https://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-02-09.htm.