Sermon in the Aftermath of Charlottesville 8-20-17

​​​​Katherine Hancock Ragsdale

Sermon 08/20/17

​​​​Is. 56:1.6-8

​​​​Mt. 15:21-28

We’ve had a rough week to 10 days. I’m a Virginian so the events in Charlottesville hit close to my heart: torch-bearing mobs yelling racist and anti-Semitic epithets, using Nazi chants and symbols. And then, I don’t know if the news in RI covered this, but just a few days later the Holocaust Memorial in Boston was vandalized for the second time this summer. Someone threw a rock and broke a tall glass panel with the numbers of those killed in the ovens inscribed on them. In over 20 years of its existence this memorial had not been vandalized and now – twice in six weeks.

I would bet that there are members of this community who can remember when young men and women from across this country volunteered to join others from around the world to fight, to die, to suffer things beyond our imagining – things so horrible that they’ve spared us even the stories, the memories – they faced all this to insure that Nazi-ism would not prevail upon this earth. To see those symbols, hear those words, feel that terror is not only repugnant and infuriating and evil, it’s also heartbreakingly disrespectful of the sacrifices of so many brave souls.

And it’s not just the rhetoric and symbols and rage which echo the nazis, it’s also the underlying sense of grievance, the world view, that ring too familiar. Remember Germany at the dawn of the rise of the nazis? The German Empire had been defeated in WWI, the economy was crumbling. And, instead of national and individual soul-searching to come to terms with the mistakes that had helped cripple the nation, instead of recognizing the inevitable tides and turns of history and planning for a future built on the best of the past, instead of that, they fashioned a movement of resentment and hate. A movement that blamed everything on the Other – the Jew, the Gypsy, the non-Aryan. And, even among the Aryans, on gay men and lesbians and people with disabilities. The loss of pride and power was blamed on the Other and straight, able-bodied, Aryan men intended to take it back.

Sound familiar? How can it be that in 2017, in the United States of America this can sound familiar?

What is happening, here, in the US, in 2017, is horrifying and infuriating. And we must resist. My hat is off to the Resist movement in its many manifestations. And it does manifest in many ways:

• This week’s enews featured a letter from the Episcopal bishops of the Diocese of VA which included a list of things individuals and churches can do to respond and resist.

• You probably heard that the entire President’s Council on the Arts and Humanities resigned. Have you seen the resignation letter? It’s 6 paragraphs long (counting the final “Thank you.” The first letters of each paragraph spell RESIST.

• There are other traditions of adding humor to resistance to sustain spirits for the long-haul. I’ve been told about a story that has been circulating about a town – in Bavaria, I think – in which a nazi leader, Rudolf Hess, was buried. For years, decades maybe, neo-Nazis have descended on the town on the anniversary of the leader’s birth to stage a march. The townspeople hate it and have done everything they can think of to stop it. They even finally dug up the body and moved it out of town but the marchers came back anyway. So, eventually someone decided that if the group couldn’t be deterred perhaps they could be defused – perhaps their power to offend could be sapped. They started decorating for the march – painted start and finish lines on the road; made funny signs; and, at the end of the route, showered the marchers with rainbow-colored confetti. They refused to take the bait and made a mockery of the whole thing.

• I’m reminded of a long-standing response to protesters at women’s health clinics – pledge a protester. Supporters from around the country pledge a dollar, or a dime, or a hundred per protester. So when they show up in all their shouting, pushing, hair pulling, pinching, threatening nastiness at least the patients and providers can smile with the realization that each protester means more money to support the clinic.

There are lots of ways to resist and many of them can be effective – can offer a cure to horrible problems. But I want to propose that resistance is not enough. Cures are great but, in addition to usually coming with unpleasant side-effects, they generally only come into play after disease has taken hold and done damage. So let’s talk prevention.

We need not only to repudiate the racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, xenophobic narratives of the alt-right; we need also to offer such a compelling vision of our own that the narratives of the alt-right are revealed as the pathetic, whining evil that they are. The stories that we tell shape us and they shape the culture. They become the air that we breathe, the ground in which our identities take root. We need to claim and declaim a vision so powerful that there is no air left for hate to breathe, no soil in which these cancers can grow.

We have such stories. As Americans we have such stories to tell.

Americans built a democracy that became a template for those around the world who yearned for freedom and justice and prosperity. This is not to say we’re perfect or blameless – we, like everyone, bear the mark of Cain. We’ve made terrible mistakes: the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, misogyny, the interment of Japanese Americans, exploitation and abuse of immigrant group after immigrant group. We’ve made mistakes and we still suffer the consequences of them, we continue to make more, and, no doubt, we always will but…

The Vision. The vision that inspired Patrick Henry and Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King – the vision calls us, again and again, to our better selves; it entices us to repair the damage and to live into the promise. Americans have a narrative to declare.

People of faith – Christians Jews, Muslims, people of many faiths all around the world have a vision and a story to share. We heard some of those stories in the readings appointed for today. Isaiah declared God’s promise that everyone is welcome in God’s presence: the foreigner, refugee, outcast, marginalized … all are welcome to the family of God. Then there was the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman. Jesus’s first response to her, a member of a despised people,and a woman at that, was to ignore her, then to insult her with a racist epithet. But he allowed his eyes to be opened, he repented, and he welcomed her. In early Christian history Peter and Paul fought passionately about whether non-Jews could ever become followers of Jesus, Christians. Eventually inclusion won – the doors were thrown ever wider.

The stories we tell shape us and the world we live in. We must tell these stories of God’s love and inclusion, of our connectedness to one another as members of one body. Here’s another such story.

I want to take you back to the beginning, to the creation stories in Genesis. I say stories. You know there are two? One says God created light and dark, all the earth and its creatures, and humans, “male and female God created them.” The other is the one we’re more familiar with, the one we all learned in Sunday school. In that, God creates all the world and then takes dust and spits in in, turns it to mud, which is fashioned into human shape, and God blows life into it and thus creates ….(congregation responds “man” or “Adam”). Yep, that’s what they told us, God created man and God saw that the man was lonely and so God created … (woman, Eve) right -- a “helper”, “helpmeet”, someone to hand him the nails, do his laundry, fix his dinner – the little woman. We all know this story, right?

Here’s the thing about this story: it’s a great example of translator bias. Translator bias makes sense: each of us can only see through our own eyes from the point at which we stand. Which is why the more voices the better – we don’t know what we don’t know. For example: that word “helper” or “helpmeet”? The Hebrew is “ezer”. Linguists figure out what a word in a dead language means much the way we learn our own language – by noting the context of its different uses. “Ezer” appears fewer than a dozen times in the Bible: once in this story, twice to refer to armies coming to Israel’s aid, and the rest of the times to refer to God coming to Israel’s aid –throwing quite a bit of shade on the “helpful little woman” interpretation. 

But here’s the other thing, the “helper” the “ezer” that God creates is not a woman created for the man at all. Because the text doesn’t actually say that God created “man.” Let me note here that my Hebrew has never been good enough for me to have figured all this out. This linguistic work was done by Phyllis Trible, one of the most respected scholars of Hebrew Scripture in the world.Trible has pointed out that the story actually says that God created ha’Adamah and that the literal translation of ha’Adamah is “creature of earth.” And interestingly, and very unusually for Hebrew, this word is not gendered. The text, in fact, refers to the creature of earth as “it” until God sees that it is lonely and separates out part of the earth creature and creates a second creature of earth. It is only at this point that “ish” and “ishah” , he and she, start to be used. In this story, too, God creates male and female simultaneously.

That’s what Phyllis Trible tells us about what the text actually says. Here’s what Katherine Ragsdale thinks it all means and why it’s important to our topic today. In this story God creates the creature of earth which contains within itself all of what it means to be human, all of what it means to be made in the image of God. So, of course it was lonely for there was no other with whom it could be in relationship. And even if God had created a second creature of earth there could still be no relationship because they would be identical, each manifesting the entirety of what it means to be human – made in the image of God. So God took that creature of earth, containing all of what it meant to be made in the image of God, and separated it out. God created creatures, each of which contained part of the image of God, each of which was human in a different way.  God created difference. Male and female provide powerful and clear representations of difference but, actually, in that moment God created all sorts of difference – age and race and gender and sexuality and ethnicity, lovers of science and lovers of art, of music and language and sport. God’s first, great gift to humanity was difference. Suddenly there were others, different from one another, who could play together, bat around ideas, surprise one another to laughter, fall in love. 

But here’s the thing. That means that each of us contains within ourselves part of what it is to be made in the image of God. And others embody other parts of God’s image. So to more fully know God we need to know one another. And the more different, the better. People who are Iikeus may be the most comfortable to be around but people who are different are the most valuable to be around – they show us aspect of God that we could never see and know on our own. We need each other, in all our difference, all our particularity, in order to know God more fully, in order to become more fully human ourselves. 

And we need to tell that story -- along with all the other stories of love and joy, inclusion and mutuality, grace and hope – not just as a response to and curative for the hate but proactively, preventatively, as a celebration of our humanity and vitality.

We are the children of God – made, in all our particularity and difference, made in Her own image.

We are the children of God – the redeemed, who will stumble and fall but who are promised that our failures are not the end of the story and that our wounds can become the nexus of our greatest strength.

We are the children of God – accompanied through this world by the Holy Spirit. Never abandoned, never alone, given one another for companions and as reflections of the very image of God.

We are the children of God – one body, reflecting God’s own self not in spite of our differences but through them.

We are the children of God – we cannot be shy, we cannot tarry, for we have work to do, promises to keep, promises to claim.

We are the children of God – we have stories to tell, stories of life and love and hope and joy.

We are the children of God – let us never forget.