“Demons & Drinks Of Water”

September 30, 2018: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.

This has been a week of Tsunamis – real and proverbial. We are rocked by the horrific news of hundreds of Indonesian people dead from the tsunami waves resulting from a 7.5 earthquake. And by we were emotionally swallowed up in the partisan rankering, the open misogyny of our nations leaders, and the deeply personal stories of abuse that rocked our nation. The week has enveloped us in an intense several days of anger, pain, despair, hope, sorrow, and courage.

The thing about the events coming out of Washington DC is that it not only is a time of disgrace for our nation; but, if we do nothing about it as a people of Jesus, it is our condemnation.

In the gospel today, the disciples are upset that someone is casting out demons in his name, but is not one of them. Jesus rebukes them, and tells them that if one but offers a cup of water in his name, they are His. Jesus warns his disciples about the stumbling blocks we place in front of children – God’s children – all of humanity, and what happens to us and them as a result. He also talks about salt – our salt – or at least the kind of saltiness we are to have as his followers.

What exactly does all that have to do with us today?

Well first, let us think about what exactly happened this week, and directly face the enormous consequences of this for us as followers of Jesus.

Abuse, sexual or otherwise, is a stumbling block placed before a child of God, sending them cascading off the paths of their lives into a thicket of despair. Oh sure, the wound may heal – eventually – but the scar tissue remains – anyone who has ever lost a spouse or a child can tell you that about pain. But as with any wound, the pain that sears through you when the scar tissue is ripped apart is immeasurable and profound – it is a recasting of the stumbling blocks tossed in front of a child of God. And in this past week, we have borne witness to that very pain, to the casting of stones before the vulnerable. And we also have witnessed salt thrown into that newly opened wound too – something salt was never meant to do.

This week, a woman, Dr. Christine Blaisey Ford, stood before the Senate Judiciary Committee to tell her story of abuse at the hands of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a man who is in the midst of a job interview to sit on our nation’s highest court – a place where justice and truth are sought by the citizens of our country. What we witnessed when she did so was raw, emotional, and difficult to hear…especially for those who have experienced sexual assault themselves. Yet I was outraged to hear some so readily dismiss the compelling testimony while decrying what has happened to this “good man.” Did something not happen to this “good woman?” Was not her testimony equally credible? This was the salt thrown into her wound, into our collective wound – the inability of some to listen, to even offer just a proverbial small cup of cool water to one who thirsted to be heard.

When we deny their truth – when we fail to listen to them when they speak about that moment when a block was placed upon the path of their lives by an abuser, we hang a millstone around our necks, and we are tossed into the sea, not by God, but by our complicity in tearing at that scar, ripping it open and leaving that Child of God suffering from our lack of compassion, and our inability to love as Christ commands us.

Yet Jesus is telling us that so long as someone is acting out of love, out of compassion, even in the smallest of ways in his name, they are one with Him. He speaks of us as salt, in this gospel, as being salted with fire, and he warns of us losing our saltiness.

The thing is though that salt, or sodium chloride, was an important compound even more so then, as it is now, but oddly enough…it cannot lose it’s “saltiness.” It doesn’t degrade over time. But, it can be mixed up with other substances, and it was not unheard of in that time for unsavory merchants (pun intended) to dilute the salt with other substances to increase profits, but in essence, making the salt useless. So, Jesus is warning us not to be diluted, but to keep focused on our purpose.

And what is that purpose? Ahhh, see that is what Jesus is getting at – and what we need to hear right now in this tumultuous time.

Over the past two years, the MeToo movement, and the past week in this testimony of Dr. Ford, has resulted in a very public outing of men in positions of power who have abused women and girls. While all of this is a welcome change to the long history of hiding the abuse of women in the shadows, it has also created an avalanche of strong emotions on the part of victims everywhere – reliving long ago trauma – remembering every moment of being tripped by the stumbling blocks thrown into their paths by their abusers, perhaps some of you are those very people.

And yet as a nation, we place yet another stone in front of them (all while placing a millstone around our own necks) when we dismiss their stories, when we fail to honor their pain, when we stand in the way of them speaking their truth, when we tear at the very fabric of their being with insults and threats.

We witnessed that this week. Now I want to be clear – this is NOT about whether you want Judge Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. Our national shame lies not in whether we desire a conservative or liberal justice, but in how we treat women differently than we treat men – how we abuse them, deny their truth, and turn our back on them.

It should not come as a surprise, for instance, that we readily accept the testimony of grown men describing their abuse by Roman Catholic clergy from decades past (as well we should), but we struggle with hearing a woman describe her story of abuse from a similarly distant past.

We can accept a man ranting and weeping as being a sign of strength, but we would (and have) considered the same from a woman to be a sign of weakness. Imagine, if you will, if a woman sitting in that same chair vying for a seat on the Supreme Court, shouting, crying, pouting, and belligerently answering questions she did not like.

But what has that to do with us? With the church? Everything.

Everything, because if we think that we don’t bear responsibility for this as a church, then we are blind to the millstone around our necks. The shame of our Church – by that I mean the entire Church universal – is the way in which our internal patriarchy informs and feeds our society’s sexism and misogyny. We have been the institution throughout the centuries that has consistently undergirded the patriarchy in our culture. If you are unsure about what I mean by this, then consider the way you feel when I use all female language for God – when I speak of God as Mother, or She. Think about that, because if it feels uncomfortable to you, or rankles some folks you know, then you are seeing exactly the kind of patriarchy this church has instilled in our hearts.

This millstone of sexism, of patriarchy, weighs heavily on us, and we must, through confession, atonement, and amendment of our ways, allow God to tear it off our necks, that we may kick away the stumbling blocks placed in front of the children of God all over the world by our words, our deeds, our inactions, and our silence. Gender inequality is as much an ecclesiastical, as it is a national disgrace, and each day that we don’t, as a body of Christ, stand up to it, is another day we weigh ourselves willingly down with a millstone and hurl our very souls into the sea.

We cannot allow our saltiness, our baptism into Christ, to lose its place as the essence of our being. We cannot allow our faith to be diluted to the point where we attend services, but do not live what we profess. And most of all, we must stop the dilution of our faith, our saltiness as followers of Jesus, by the damaging patriarchy of our history as a church.

We must do this, because there are demons of sexism and misogyny that continue to inflict harm upon children of God, and we must excise them from our church, from our schools, from our workplaces, and from our governmental institutions. Right now, there are people suffering from the emotional weight of remembering the abuse they suffered – they are our wives, our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, our friends, our neighbors. The news of today has ripped across the scars of their pain, and they are left exposed and vulnerable in sleepless nights of personal hell. There are families ripped apart by the news that someone they thought they knew has a past that is alarming, unsettling, and disturbing. And all of this is amidst an avalanche of public debate, scrutiny, accusations, and denials. They thirst for the cool water of compassion and love.

But all is not lost.

The darkness that weighs us down is not the last word, because Jesus is alive today in us, and he is the light that overcomes all darkness. Jesus is calling us all to stand up and remove our own millstones of bitterness, hatred, sexism, and misogyny. Then, and only then, will we be able to go into the world to smash the stones laid before our sisters, the ones we have put there either directly, or through our indifference or our ignorance. Only then will we be freed from our own sin to free others from theirs. Only then will we be the ones healing in his name, casting out the demons of our societal sins, and giving the restoring cup of Christ to the suffering in our midst.

The truth is, it all really boils down to our own identity, and who we claim to be.

Are we the body of Christ – a healing balm for the pain of the wounded, or are we the ones inflicting the wounds?

Are we the body of Christ – breaking the chains that bind us, or are we the ones chaining ourselves with millstones of bigotry and hate.

Are we the body of Christ – feeding the poor and forgotten, or do we give them stumbling stones of neglect and abuse to eat.

These are troubling times for us all, and we have significant choices to make that will change our lives, change the course of history, change the world… will it be toward the dream of God where all Her children are nourished and loved, or will it be the nightmare of human selfishness, where the very life of our souls is choked out of us for the millstones around our necks.

Let us go forth from this place and proclaim for all the world to hear that all people – girls as well as boys, women as well as men – are beloved and equal in God’s heart. And let us work as Jesus would – by seeing the women in our lives, by listening to their truth, by loving them into strength, by healing them with compassion. And most of all, let us begin first in our own house – in the church – ridding ourselves of the patriarchy that infects us and gives life to the gender inequality and abuse in the world around us.

Only then can we ever hope to be freed from the millstone that has bound us.

Only then can we be the people of Jesus we are meant to be, casting out the demons of sexism and misogyny that lay the stones meant to make others stumble, and offering the cool cups of water to those who thirst for healing, for compassion, for justice, for love.

Amen.

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