This is the text of a sermon I preached in a class called Women's Ways of Preaching about a month ago. Its intended audience was the small group of women in my preaching section, which accounts for some of the strong language, perhaps inappropriate for use in the average congregation. I am posting it here because though it will likely never see the light of day, it needs to be heard, even and especially today.
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A reading from the Gospel according to Luke: http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=229151721
When she meets the group of drunk men on her way home from the club,
no one knows her name,
but everyone knows what she is.
She wears a tight shirt and a short skirt.
She is long legs, a pair of breasts, a waist.
Then the words come:
tramp, whore, slut.
Then the propositions:
come home with me, you know you want it.
And when she turns the other cheek out of fear for her own safety,
she walks away as fast as she can,
but the anger spirals behind her:
you’re nothing but a dirty whore, you deserve to be raped.
She is dismembered by the violence of these words and assumptions.
She is not a human,
she is not a woman,
and she does not even have a name.
This encounter is fictional, but it is true:
something like this has happened to each one of us at least once
when we decided to put on a short skirt or tight jeans
and a fitted shirt and some makeup
for an evening,
or even an afternoon or a morning—
or maybe our clothing was nowhere near revealing at all.
Maybe we have not all received such graphic jeers,
but we know what it is like to be reduced to breasts, legs, a vagina—
dismembered and dehumanized.
This is also the cultural setting in the gospel of Luke
where we find Jesus today,
reclining at a symposium with powerful men,
interrupted by “a woman of the city, who was a sinner.”
This is not an evening when Jesus is multiplying loaves and fishes,
sharing a meal with those who have virtually nothing.
Instead, we can imagine a wealth of elegant food,
fit for a group of people with considerable social standing,
gathered to discuss the finer, more esoteric points of theology
with the curiosity du jour:
Jesus, a bright, if eccentric, prophet.
As with any culture of wealth, education, and power,
the markings of this world are material:
good food, fine wine, nuanced conversation,
an exclusively male space,
and the reclining posture of the Romans,
the occupying force of political and cultural hegemony.
Even Jesus seems to be there to collaborate
rather than to subvert.
In the midst of all of this, a woman shows up to disrupt the proceedings—
and what is worse, she seems to have a history with Jesus,
who doesn’t bat an eye at her presence.
Her gender shatters the masculine sphere of the Pharisees’ symposium.
But it is not her gender that the Pharisees notice first:
rather, they see her like societies have often seen women
for the past two thousand years.
She is breasts, hips, vagina, and legs;
she is a sex organ and its accessories.
She is an object.
She is dismembered in the silent, motionless violence of their gaze.
“If this man were a prophet,”
says the Pharisee who invited Jesus, muttering under his breath,
“he would have known who and what kind of woman this is
who is touching him—that she is… a sinner.”
I don’t know about you,
but the delicacy and squeamishness of the word “sinner”
makes me cringe.
We know what he really means:
she’s a slut.
She makes her living by selling her body,
and to the culture around her,
she becomes no more than a collection of organs and orifices.
How did they know she was a sex worker?
Had some of the Pharisees been her clients?
Was it her clothes, her long sensual hair,
the jar of expensive perfumed oil she carried?
Perhaps you have seen the image below recently,
a photograph by college freshman Rosea Lake.
In it we see another woman who has been dismembered—
she is literally nothing more than a pair of legs.
Skirt lengths are inked onto her skin,
and none of the labels are flattering:
the longer lengths imply she has no sexuality of her own
and the shorter ones suggest an inappropriate hypersexuality,
all of which is her own fault.
The top four marks are the most chilling:
provocative, asking for it, slut, whore.
It is the label “asking for it” that makes my blood run cold
with the violence and relevance of its suggestion
that women ask for violence, for harassment, for rape, and for figurative dismemberment
because of what they wear, where they go, and what they do.
The unnamed, dismembered woman,
weeping quietly over Jesus’ feet,
is “asking for it,” because of who and what she is –
or perhaps only because she guilty of being female
in a masculine, sexualized society.
If we could hear her speak,
maybe her testimony would be similar to that of contemporary adult film star Stoya,
another “sinner” of the sexual variety,
who wrote about her own experiences with harassment and sexualized dismemberment.
After recounting her experiences with her harassers, Stoya writes:
"They say that they never do this, as though I've somehow driven them to inappropriate behavior and deserve it. They say they're just having fun…
Before you try to tell me that it's because I take my clothes off for a living, let me tell you that this started way before I was 18."
Tragically, so many of us experience dis-memberment today,
reduction to a set of physical parts.
While it affects women with particular violence,
men are not immune from harassment, assault, or rape.
Dis-memberment takes other forms as well.
Migrant workers are reduced to hands, arms, and backs,
barely a step above machine
as they work for miniscule wages
in physically dangerous conditions.
Racial and ethnic minorities suffer dismemberment because of their own bodies:
some find themselves reduced to cartoonishly slanted eyes
or are called “brown” or even “yellow” or “red” because of their skin color,
as though they are crayons.
The “Mammy” and “Sambo” archetypes linger in society’s consciousness,
insidiously reducing African Americans to their hair, lips, skin, or behavior.
As members of our culture, we still find ourselves complicit in dis-memberment:
as much as we recoil in horror at Rosea Lake’s photograph,
we see our own perceptions in it,
for we, too, are prone to judge women
who leave the house in short skirts
or who have lengthy histories of sexual conquests
before we can stop ourselves.
What, then, is the hope of re-memberment
for the anonymous sex worker at Jesus’s feet?
What is the hope of re-memberment for anyone,
female or male,
who has been reduced to a set of component parts?
For dismemberment appears to come hand-in-hand with silence:
aside from quiet weeping,
we never hear this woman’s voice.
As the Pharisees prepare to throw her out, however,
Jesus fills the void left by her absent voice,
returning agency to her by proxy.
“Simon,” he says, quietly, “I have something to say to you.”
Then, the hush: the electricity in the room
as Jesus weaves the story of the debtors and their generous creditor.
Tiny sparks fly from his words:
“Do you see this woman?”
And then, perhaps for the first time,
the men in the room see a human being,
a whole woman,
instead of a "sinner."
They see someone in need of kindness and mercy,
someone who has her own dignity and integrity,
someone who occupies a more privileged position
than the men reclining with this itinerant prophet.
Do you see this woman?
Yes. Yes, they see her. Yes, WE see her.
Her dangerous, scandalous sexuality
has become the tender, intimate sensuality
by which she washes and anoints Jesus with her very body,
with her tears and her hair and the scented oil she saves for her clients.
She has performed the ultimate act of hospitality
and done what the Pharisees never thought to do—
she has sought Christ in this strange preacher and recognized him,
and she overflows with gratitude
such that she will follow him to the ends of the earth –
this wonderful man who refuses to see her as a dismembered object,
who sees her as a human, a beloved child of God,
valuable and valued,
a person with her own voice and aspirations.
Condemned by her society for a multitude of sins,
she receives forgiveness from Jesus.
When she was nothing but her culture’s moral scapegoat,
Jesus gathered her hips and vagina and breasts
and joined them again to her feet, her spine, her mind,
her heart, her lungs, her voice,
her hopes, her dreams,
forging her anew.
So she follows him, serving him with her heart and mind and body,
all that she has:
weeping, anointing, worshiping.
She has become like a bowl repaired by kintsugi,
the Japanese art of mending broken ceramic with gold.
With the priceless gift of Jesus’s forgiveness
binding her together like a golden seam
for the first time in her life,
she shines.
Jesus forgives the woman at his feet,
still nameless,
but now whole and re-voiced.
He blesses her.
In just such a way,
Jesus offers us a new way
to re-member the dis-membered around us.
We, too, can offer forgiveness where society and culture condemn;
we, too, can take a second look
to recognize people as more than a collection of parts.
Christ calls us to follow him in the way of peace and justice,
a call that does not end
when we remove the robe after worship or the clerical collar at the end of the day,
when we lock the office door or close the textbook.
Christ calls us to re-member one another,
day after day,
even if our social matrix routinely tears us apart.
When we recognize a unified whole in the pieces of someone’s life,
Christ begins to forge the bright gold
that will bind the fragments together,
rendering us all precious, valuable, beloved.
This is where Christ dwells:
shining in our fractures,
blessing us as we wind our hair around his feet,
sharing the tender intimacy of forgiveness and inclusion
over and over again
in a space of wholeness,
safe at last.
A M E N
(The image, "Judgments," was created by Rosea Lake and is available here with her comments: http://roseaposey.tumblr.com/post/39795409283/judgments)
