Keep Your Courage: A Radical Christian Feminist Speaks

Part 1: Messages to the Empire

Introduction

The eleven chapters in Part 1 were selected because each wrestles with moral and theological problems of oppression and injustice and our sacred power to participate in the struggles for liberation. Chapter 1, ‘Messages to the Empire’, my commencement address in 2004 at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sets the tone and themes for Part 1. Subsequent chapters in this part are arranged chronologically to reflect the development of my interests and commitments as the decade progressed.

Chapters 2, 4 and 10 are brief ‘op ed’ (opinion editorials) written for local newspapers in the United States South (only one was actually published). Chapter 2, ‘Beyond Shameful Theology’, was published in The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, North Carolina) several days after the 11 September 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC. This piece was a response to the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s charge that the attacks were God’s response to ‘pagans, feminists, gays and lesbians’, and others trying ‘to secularize America’. Chapter 4, ‘The Passion of Mel Gibson’, discusses director – actor Mel Gibson’s powerful and, in my judgment, theologically mistaken and misleading 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ. In Chapter 10, ‘The Wisdom to Lead’, I discuss my enthusiastic support of Barack Obama’s Presidential bid in 2008 and my hope, at the time, that an Obama Presidency would open the door for Americans of different races to begin to come together across lines which historically have divided us. As I write this Introduction, almost two years later, my optimism in this piece seems unfounded, or, we can hope, premature, so great is the fear holding us in its grip.

Chapter 3 is a brief sermon, or homily: ‘Queer Christ’, which I preached at the Episcopal Divinity School in 2004. In it, the term ‘queer’ first appears in these pieces as a theologically descriptive term for the holy and serendipitous spirit which surprises us, bursting our expectations and keeping us honest. In my work, ‘queer’ never refers only to lesbians, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, nor simply to the phenomenon of gender-bending. To be ‘queer’ is to be allied with efforts toward sexual and gender justice and, perhaps, to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender oneself. But it is more than this. To be ‘queer’ is to burst out of boxes and cross boundaries constructed to diminish and mute us. In Chapter 3 I link the term ‘queer’ with both the free spirit of nineteenth-century English theologian Frederick Denison Maurice and my eighty-eight-year-old happily heterosexual mother, and I suggest that a ‘dynamic dimension of queerness -and Christ – is the holding together of qualities which only appear to be contradictions’, qualities like anger and hope. Like Christ, queerness has a paradoxical dimension: what is fully human can be also fully divine; what is deeply spiritual can be also sharply political; what is strongly ‘feminine’ can be also sweetly ‘masculine’.

In Chapters 5 and 6 I wrestle with questions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender justice, especially in the context of the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion. Chapter 5 is excerpted from a letter I wrote my friend, Tom Shaw, Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, in 2004, explaining my reasons for refusing to follow his directive that priests in Massachusetts not officiate at same-sex weddings. Chapter 6, ‘Make Us Prophets and Pastors’, is an ‘Open Letter to Gay and Lesbian Leaders in the Anglican Communion’. This essay was first published in 2005 in response to Anglican leaders’ decision not to ordain gay and lesbian people nor bless our relationships.

Chapter 7, ‘Some Violent Connections’, examines dynamics of violence and raises questions about connections between the economy, war, religion, fear, and women. This chapter is a reconstruction, on the basis of my notes, of a keynote address I gave in 2006 at a workshop on violence sponsored by various groups at the University of Indiana and the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis. This piece is a critique of global capitalism and explores its connections to the Iraq War, religious fundamentalisms at home and elsewhere, and the fear of women in which such religions are steeped.

Chapters 8 and 9 are addresses I gave at Martin Luther King celebrations in Brevard, a small town in the mountains of western North Carolina, where I live. The Human Relations Council of Brevard invited me to give the first of these speeches (Chapter 8: ‘Strong Faith’) at a Prayer Breakfast for religious leaders and justice advocates in 2006. Because the response to this presentation was positive, the Council asked me to address a larger, more general audience the following year on the theme ‘The Dream Continues’. I did so in January 2007, and my talk appears here as Chapter 9. Unlike my address the previous year, this presentation provoked outrage from some in the audience, who accused me of being hostile to the good white citizens of our town and of trying to link Dr King to ‘unrelated issues’, like gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender justice.

Following the op ed piece on Obama (Chapter 10, 2008), I conclude Part 1 with some reflections on ‘Feminism and Love’, a speech at the closing ceremony of Holy Ground, a feminist spiritual centre in Asheville, North Carolina, which was shutting its doors after fifteen years. I include this piece in this book, because it addresses the apparent waning of feminism as a strong, vibrant social force among religious women in the United States at this time.

1

Messages to the Empire

Every year the graduating class at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, invites a member of the faculty to preach at its Commencement Eucharist. I preached this sermon on 19 May 2004. The word ‘Empire’ refers here not, primarily, to the United States of America but rather to the structures of global capitalism and militarism which generate economic and social injustice in the United States and throughout the world.

Sister Angela (see also Chapter 31), a contemplative Anglican nun, mystical priest, and beloved friend of many of ours here at the Episcopal Divinity School told a story about a three-year-old Australian boy named Bobby whose parents overheard him one night leaning over the crib of his newly arrived sister: ‘Baby! Baby! Wake up and tell me about God, because I’ve begun to forget what God is like!’ This is the kind of story we cherish because it makes us happy, even perhaps ecstatic, to imagine such a God and such a child as little Bobby I love this story! I believe this story, and I wanted to share it with you, because it is a beautiful introduction – and counterpoint – to a Commencement service about loving such a God in the age of Empire.

Be clear that the God whom young Bobby is trying to remember is the same God about whom we have been hearing in today’s lessons, appointed by the Prayer Book as lessons for ‘Ministry’.¹ They are lessons which need to be heard as lessons about ministry in the Empire: a ministry of speaking truth to power, of speaking up in the context of a deafening silence. It is a ministry we share with our christic brother from Nazareth – a ministry of solidarity with those left standing outside the centres of power; a ministry today of helping save the people, like Bobby, his sister, and all creatures great and small from the devastation we will surely endure if our nation continues to pursue its policies of arrogant and reckless disregard, of waging war for the sake of profit and making profit for the sake of the rich.

If Mel Gibson’s slasher film The Passion of the Christ has any theological merit, it is in its portrayal of how Empires treat those who, like Jesus and his disciples, are experienced as troublemakers. Rome was Jesus’ imperial context and that of the early church. Ours today is the United States of America and a world being shaped by it. Our context as Christians is also the Church. So let’s try to hear this afternoon, in this double context of world and Church, what Bobby’s God is saying to the Church.

In the reading from Exodus, we hear God exhorting the people of Israel, through Moses their leader, to obey God’s voice and keep God’s commandments. And why should they do this? Because they, the people of Israel, are a chosen people. It is a tradition Christians share with Jews–to think of ourselves as chosen by God. It is a tradition fraught with danger, especially the danger of mistakenly lifting ourselves above others as a people set apart by God to be his only chosen, an exclusive people, a‘designer people’. It is a dreadful mistake shared too often by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to the exclusion of one another and of all other ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’ within and beyond the ‘chosen’ tradition.

But listen to what Psalm 15 has to say about being God’s chosen people: ‘O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly and do what is right. Those who speak truth from the heart.’ God isn’t saying that only Israelis may abide in the tent or that only Palestinians may dwell on the holy hill or that only Christians will inherit eternal life. God is not talking about who we are, dear friends, or what religion we may profess. God is interested in how we act, what we do, whether we love our neighbours as ourselves, whether we forgive our enemies as we wish to be forgiven. In our advanced capitalist global order, as graduate Brad Brockmann reminds us, God is choosing us to lift the burden – literally, the debt – from off the back of the poor, so that the poor can live and thrive with us, our sisters and brothers, in God’s world.

To live as people chosen by God is thus to extend our wings as far as we can and – with the Holy Spirit as the wind beneath our wings – to soar toward inclusivity, seeking out those who have been marginalized by us or others, those cast out by the dominant social order and, too often, by the deafening silence of the liberal church. Indeed, our critique of the world must always include a critique of the Church, because our religious organizations are shaped by the same social forces, fear and greed, which are distorting the shape of the world around us.

So one message we are called to bring to the Empire is that, whatever our identity, whatever our social location, we are never, ever, chosen by God to be an exclusive people.

As you graduates can attest, the EDS curriculum includes a required course called ‘Foundations’, hardly anyone’s favourite course, because it calls us all to a vocation of self-criticism, of studying critically our power relations as people of different races, cultures, classes, genders, sexualities, religious traditions, and other varieties of social location. Learning how to be self-critical, to notice how we are shaped by, and often benefit from, power relations, helps prepare us spiritually to speak truth to