Proverbs of Ashes

Rev. Katie Stein Sather, March 6, 2005

(from Proverbs of Ashes, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker)

International Women's Day is this week, Tuesday. I wish we didn't need to have this kind of day, where the accomplishments of women are celebrated in the context of a man's world, a world where women have less power than men. I wish it was assumed that the work and worth of women was equivalent to that of men. International Women's Day is a time to reflect on the progress women have made toward equality, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women who have played an extraordinary role in the history of women's rights.

I know that my nieces, now in their early 20s, are finding more opportunities than I had. One was just this week accepted into a PhD program—she's just now completing her Chemical Engineering degree, and doing very well, thank you. I'm not sure how common her experience is.

It's been a long battle, whether for the right to vote, or for equal opportunity to even attend school or university. Women know that economic equality here in Canada has not yet arrived. What's the figure? Women earn something like 75% of what men do.

There are so many issues of inequality for women, so many areas to address. What I want to focus on today is violence against women, and how they are counselled to respond. I want to especially focus on a theological response to suffering.

You have probably heard of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ even if you haven't seen it. One of the premises is that Jesus' suffering was intentional, and a model for us. His suffering is atonement for our sins.

Atonement, in the theological sense, means to make amends for our sins, to make up for. Gibson vividly illustrates the suffering that Jesus undergoes so that we may be saved. We are to be impressed with the degree of suffering.

Theologian Cynthia Crysdale in Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today offers a feminist view of suffering: "Women and those on the underside of history have been burdened by traditional doctrines of sin and redemption. Those without a voice or proper sense of self have been taught to see their humiliation as the virtue of humility. Those who have been asked to live for others have been instructed to see their subordination as noble sacrifice or, worse, as merited punishment for sin. For these reasons, Crysdale argues, feminists are justly leery of the doctrine of vicarious, suffering atonement. They are suspicious of the exaltation of suffering as the imitation of Christ."

Our reading today was from the book Proverbs of Ashes by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. The title is a quote from Job who dismissed his friends' rationale for all his suffering with the retort, "Your maxims are proverbs of ashes." Job no more believed that his suffering was good than you or I would. He railed against his friends.

I have more from their book.

It was about 20 years ago that Rebecca Parker, now President of our Unitarian Universalist Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California, and then a United Methodist minister, consoled a minister and friend who had just lead a funeral for a mother of four who was murdered by her husband. A few months later, Parker heard "a quiet knock on the church office door [that] interrupted [her] reading.... A short, brown-faced woman stood on the threshold, bundled against the chilly Seattle weather.

"Hello, pastor. I'm Lucia. I live down the block and walk by the church on my way to the bus.... I saw your name on the church sign. You are a woman priest. Maybe, because you are a woman, you can understand my problem and help me."

"Of course, come in," [Parker] said. [Lucia] sat down...[and] smiled, an expression both warm and sad.

"I haven't talked to anyone about this for a while," she began, the smile fading, and sadness deepening in her eyes. "But I'm worried for my kids now. The problem is my husband. He beats me sometimes. Mostly he is a good man. But sometimes he becomes very angry and he hits me.... One time he broke my arm and I had to go to the hospital. But I didn't tell them how my arm got broken."

[Parker] nodded. [Lucia] took a deep breath and went on. "I went to my priest twenty years ago. I've been trying to follow his advice. The priest said I should rejoice in my sufferings because they bring me closer to Jesus. He said, 'Jesus suffered because he loved us...if you love Jesus, accept the beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross.'" [Lucia said,] "I've tried, but I'm not sure anymore. My husband is turning on the kids now. Tell me, is what the priest told me true?"

...Just that Sunday [Parker] had preached a sermon on the willingness of love to suffer. [She] preached that Jesus' life revealed the nature of love and that love would save us...that love bears all things.... [love] keeps ties of connection to others even when they hurt you. [Love] places the needs of the other before concern for the self.

In the stillness of that moment, [Parker] could see in Lucia's eyes that she knew the answer to her question, just as [Parker] did.... After a long pause, [Parker] found her voice.

"It isn't true," [Parker] said to her. "God does not want you to accept being beaten by your husband. God wants you to have your life, not to give it up. (pp. 20-21)

The subtitle for the book is Violence, redemptive suffering, and the search for what saves us. What is our salvation if it is not the suffering of Jesus? The answer is what I read earlier, in the reading: it is love, but not the suffering that may come with love.

Rebecca Parker comes to this understanding from her own life story. She gradually comes to realize that she herself has been the victim of child molestation, at the hands of the dirty old man who lived nearby. She was a very young child when it happened. She survived the trauma of discovery through the steady witness of her therapist who neither denied that such terrible things could happen, nor claimed that there must be a reason for such a thing to happen.

Salvation for Parker and Brock is wholeness, a living completely, and loving fully. It is through the love of her therapist and her friends and family that Parker learns to re-integrate the separate selves that had allowed her to survive her original trauma. Their presence allowed her to know the Presence-that's with a capital P-in her life. It was through their love that she could then truly love herself.

Life is not about suffering, although suffering happens often enough. Love is not expressed through violence, and especially not through violence like crucifixion or spousal abuse. Love is in all the relationships we develop over our life time, and it shows in the grief we feel after someone has died, or when someone we love has become ill or otherwise suffered. This is not orthodox theology. It is a new theology, one I hope we can live, whether we ourselves have been a victim of any kind of violence. It is through our love that we provide salvation, and are saved ourselves.

I don't mean love in some kind of abstract distant sense. I mean in the thousand little kindnesses that you and I give and receive to our partner, our children, our families of origin, to our friends, and to perfect strangers. I mean love made manifest when you write a long letter to a shut-in, or offer someone a ride to church. It's the getting the glass of water for your child at bedtime, or the coffee at breakfast for your spouse. Love is made manifest every time we consider others as well as ourselves, when we move from "me" to "we."

I don't imagine many of you consciously believe in Mel Gibson's kind of atonement; I encourage you to live your lives as if you believed that the evidence of your love will make up, in some small ways, for the suffering of others. In this way we will live our theology, our new myth.

I'd like to close with a poem by Virginia Hamilton Adair.

("Genesis Strain" by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems)