CLGS

Preached at the chapel service of Brite Divinity School
Fort Worth, Texas

October 19, 2010

If you have children, or if you know children or if you have ever been a child—as so many of you have—then you are probably familiar with the typical refrain children resort to on long trips in small cars: “Are we there yet?” Well, I like to think that, in many ways, I was a fairly unique child. I played the organ when my peers were playing baseball. At my request, my father built me a small church in my backyard with a stained glass window and steeple where most children had forts and playhouses. I also had a different—albeit no less annoying—refrain for those long trips and family vacations.

No matter where we were or what we were doing—it could be the middle of the Magic Kingdom or at a rest stop—my refrain was always the same: “What are we gonna do next?” You can imagine my parents became very annoyed with this, as they liked to actually enjoy the things we were presently doing for which they often paid good money.

Now, I think this just indicates that I was a budding visionary, always looking toward the future. But my parents had other ways of describing me.

I was reminded of this refrain from my childhood after reading this parable in Luke’s gospel. I thought about this widow’s persistent nagging – about her continual coming before this hateful judge who, admittedly, didn’t respect or care for this woman one bit. And
I began to see this parable as a story holding up to all of us a spiritual discipline that is highly undervalued.

You see, the world of this parable—though far removed by time and cultural distance—is, in many ways, not all that different from our own. It is a world populated by people who benefit from an unjust status quo and others who suffer the consequences of oppression, domination and constant vulnerability. Certainly, things are never quite that black-and-white with two distinct ends to the spectrum of power. But for the sake of clarity, I suppose, Jesus tells this story with characters that are set against one another in stark relief.

Dorothy Jean Weaver describes these two characters as “stereotypical symbols within the biblical world for those who have power and those who do not…If the judge is the symbol of power and authority,” she says, “the widow symbolizes powerlessness and vulnerability.”i We aren’t told, but we might imagine that this widow’s particular injustice is economic in nature, as women were notoriously vulnerable to economic hardship after the death of a husband and had no rights to an inheritance, which would have gone to brothers or sons.ii

Indeed, we are all-too-familiar with circumstances in which the authorities of justice become tools upholding an oppressive status quo. We have no trouble naming instances in which institutions set up for the protection and promotion of life become peddlers of death and destruction.

The judge, after all, was to be the arbiter of justice and represents the very societal structures put in place to insure that justice is served. But, ironically, it is the judge in this parable who is cast in the role of oppressor. And, as the widow’s character portrays, the innocent and vulnerable among us are most often the prime recipients of twisted pretenses of justice.

Sometimes circumstances when systems of justice go awry are met with outright revolution – armed bands taking to the hills to disrupt rampant miscarriages of justice. Other times, mass peaceful protests are organized in order to bring down of regimes whose day at the top of the food chain, feeding on the suffering, is over. But revolutions and mass protests are not what today’s lectionary text portrays.

Instead, this widow—in all of her vulnerability, suffering for God only knows how long at the hands of this spiteful judge—keeps coming in the same way she always has to the seat of justice, demanding that it live up to its name and grant her what she requires “simply in order to go on living.”iii

Rather than an act of revolution to overthrow the powerful judge and bring about a new regime, this is an act of subversion and resistance. Michel Foucault describes resistance as “playing the same game differently, or playing another game, another hand, with other trump cards.”iv This widow played the same game that kept her subjugated—going to the same judge who consistently denies her pleas for justice—but she is playing with another hand, with other trump cards, with nagging and resistance. And, most remarkably, it worked!

It seems that nearly every time I talk about resistance or mention the subversion of systems of domination, there always happens to be someone within earshot who channels the spirit of Audre Lorde and replies to me: “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”v By this, they mean that the tools used to uphold systems of oppression and injustice cannot be turned against those very systems to bring about a more just way. Playing by patriarchal rules, for instance, will never lead to a dismantling of patriarchy. For the most part, I agree.

But after having this quote posed to me as the final word in dismantling my conceptions of resistance and subversion, you can imagine how elated I was this summer to be in a room of twenty or so others listening to Yale theologian, Emilie Townes, speak about this very subject. Of course, she invoked the name of Audre Lorde. But just after she spoke the words I had heard so often, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” she paused, looked down for a moment, then said, “Sometimes [the Master has some] pretty damn good tools and we better know how to use them.”vi

This parable is about times when we recognize that the Master’s Tools aren’t working for us—or more precisely, are working against us—but revolution and a total overthrow of domination are still far off. It’s about times for practicing resistance.

When I think about resistance, I think about these stories Walter Wink tells:

"During the Vietnam War, one woman claimed seventy-nine dependents on her United States income tax, all Vietnamese orphans, so she owed no tax. They were not legal dependents, of course, so were disallowed. No, she insisted, these children have been orphaned by indiscriminate United States bombing; we are responsible for their lives. She forced the Internal Revenue Service to take her to court. That gave her a larger forum for making her case. She used the system against itself to unmask the moral indefensibility of what the system was doing. Of course she 'lost' the case, but she made her point.

"During World War II, when Nazi authorities in occupied Denmark promulgated an order that all Jews had to wear yellow armbands with the Star of David, the king made it a point to attend a celebration in the Copenhagen synagogue. He and most of the population of Copenhagen donned yellow armbands as well. His stand was affirmed by the Bishop…and other Lutheran clergy. The Nazis eventually had to rescind the order."vii

When I think of resistance, I remember slaves in the South, forced to adopt the Christian faith of their masters. I think about their existence enslaved by a system of domination that displayed neither respect for God or concern for human life. And I remember the spirituals they developed, full of Christian imagery. Language the masters were comfortable hearing. But little did the masters know that these words contained secret messages that would lead the slaves to escape and freedom. The end to slavery was still long in coming, but through subversive resistance, they did what it took to simply survive.

When I think of resistance, I see Steve Sprinkle (a Baptist minister) speaking at gay rights demonstrations in his clerical attire. Same game, same get up (save for the rainbow wrist band), same language, same texts, the same institutional church – but he plays the same game differently, with a different hand, telling the Christian story in a new light, with different trump cards.

But before we work ourselves into a frenzy of resistance, we must face the difficult fact that sometimes those oppressive, destructive realities that call for our most strenuous and creative acts of resistance are the very structures and practices that have often served us quite well.

In fact, I’ve been keeping something from you. It is, perhaps, something I should have told you up front, but it’s the hard part about preaching this text. In the case of this sermon, it is the text of scripture itself that has become the primary object of my resistance. It should be no great surprise, as we know that the Bible is often chief among the Master’s oppressive tools.

Lest we forget, the gospel writer intends to supply a meaning for this parable, framing it in such a way that we are led to believe the meaning is rather simple: it is a story about the need to be persistent in our prayers to God. Verse one even says, “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Luke 18:1, NRSV).

If the gospel writer has his way with our interpretative minds, we are to see this as a parable about prayer. We are to read it as an assurance that, if even this scoundrel of a judge will grant this poor widow justice, then surely God will grant justice and come to the aid of those who are enduring in their petitions (even if it is in the hereafter).

But must we take Luke at his word? Surely, we needn’t suppose that Luke’s pushy way of getting us to read this parable is the only way we might understand it.

I suppose I could have just selected verses two through five to read for today’s text. But rather than reading the parable without its frame, it is an important act of resistance to push against the interpretative frame provided by the gospel writer himself. Even within the biblical text, we must push against simple readings of “what the text says” when those readings foreclose on more complicated, uncomfortable and surprising readings. No one knows the necessity of this textual resistance better than women, persons of color, and queer people, for whom resisting “what the text says” is a way of life and a means of survival.

Feminist critics have long recognized “that the biblical texts and their interpretations have been written, for the most part, by men, for men, and about men, serving the interests of patriarchy.”viii (For example, Luke’s women are usually silent and often nameless.) This reading of resistance moves against Luke’s imposed allegory of the parable’s meaning and instead sees the widow as the one cast in the image of God (not the Judge), calling for disciples to emulate her tenacious and subversive spirit. Barbara Reid suggests, “When the widow is seen as the God-like figure, then the message of the parable is that when one doggedly resists injustice, faces it, names it, and denounces it, until right is achieved, then one is acting as God does.”ix

Therefore, if this parable is, in any way, about prayer as the author of Luke suggests, it serves as a challenge to our common ways of thinking about prayer. It calls us to resist the urge to fit this widow’s persistence into our cozy understandings of private petitions to God inside our closets.

If we are to practice resistance to the text’s patriarchal pull, we can’t simply disregard it or read only the portion that we are comfortable lifting from the surrounding text. Greater meaning is found in employing resistant hermeneutical practices that challenge the very text of scripture itself. If this is the path we choose, prayer—this parable suggests—is about action! Actions that Dorothy Weaver describes as “sturdy, audacious, perhaps even outrageous acts that go by the name of faith.”x

It is not lost on me that I am preaching this sermon in the context of a room full of seminarians preparing for lives of vocational ministry in the churches. If the Bible has served as one of the Master’s chief tools for oppression, the church has often been the toolbox itself.

It was my very last course in seminary—Capstone—in which the topic of the church’s future was raised in a paper presentation. Someone posed a question regarding the decline in the number of seminarians interested in ministry in local congregations. Somewhat flippantly, I said, “You know, most people go to seminary because they sense a call from God to help people and they’ve been in churches long enough to know that if they want to help people, the church isn’t the place to do it.” This comment was met with riotous laughter from the class and a quick (and appropriate) rejoinder from the Dean of the seminary, who was our professor, restoring the church’s image that I had besmudged.

It’s not that I don’t believe in the church. After all, I haven’t spent ten years and counting studying religion and theology because I liked the Greek and Hebrew. It’s just that the church, too, has been charged as an arbiter of justice and promoter of life and it, too, has often succumb to the forces of power that turn protectors of the vulnerable into persecutors of the innocent. So much so that many of my friends and colleagues—seminary trained ones—have given up on the church and forged other paths to follow their calling. I don’t blame them. But I just wonder if there is another way—perhaps one modeled by this widow.

Baptist preachers like to offer invitations, and I am no different. This invitation will not be accompanied by unending verses of “Just As I Am” and pressure to “walk the aisle,” but it is an invitation nonetheless. Take a look at your lives, your ministries, your spheres of influence, and ask yourself:

How can practices of resistance become a part of my ministry in the world? What systems demand for our continual coming, insisting that something change and refusing to be quiet until they do?

Are we inviting practices of resistance to domination and injustice that emulate this widow’s resistance? Or do we simply help others frame these circumstances in pious Christian language like Luke seems to have done to this widow’s audacious acts? The latter certainly makes for smoother sailing.

There are some games we cannot stop playing just yet—situations in which revolution is nearly impossible. But I invite you to keep this widow in mind and keep your eye out for ways of playing the same old game with a new twist on the rules—with different trump cards.

These things take time. It requires the most determined of postures to make even the slightest victories for justice in very old institutions. It takes persistence in telling different stories in order to see dominant discourse that keeps so many oppressed gradually change. Nagging is necessary and subversion is sometimes required in order to simply survive.

We have already made so many approximations toward justice. And we have to keep coming. We cannot relent in our nagging and resistance – to work our way into a more just future. So I ask you, in the words of my childhood refrain, “What are we gonna do next?”

Rev. Cody J. Sanders is a Ph.D. student in pastoral theology and pastoral counseling at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. He is an ordained Baptist minister (Alliance of Baptists).

Notes

i Dorothy Jean Weaver, “Luke 18:1-8,” Interpretation 56(3) (July 2002): 317.
ii R. Alan Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, vol. IX, ed. Leander E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 336.

iii Weaver, 318.

iv Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley, et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997), 295.

v Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 110.

vi Emilie Townes, “The Dancing Mind,” unpublished lecture, HRC Summer Institute, Nashville: Vanderbilt Divinity School, July 26, 2010.

vii Walter Wink, “Christian Nonviolence,” in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, ed. Paul Loeb (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 156-157.

viii Barbara E. Reid, "A Godly Widow Persistently Pursuing Justice: Luke 18:1-8," Biblical Research 45 (2000): 31.

ix Reid, 31.

x Weaver, 319.