girltheology

Sermon from the second week of Lent this year - still thinking a lot about it, so I thought I'd post it online:



"But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.
For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?
Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?
Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." (Mark 8: 33-38)

This text is troubling. For me, it is not a life-giving text. It is one of the texts I struggle with in the desert of my faith. It needs to be questioned, and Lent - a time of faith exploration, seems the right time to do it.

Since the focus of our Lenten study this year is water as a living covenant in our faith, I have thought this week about 'barrenness.' It is really the only metaphor in the scripture readings today that can be tired to the idea of water without some long and complex explanation. “Water is essential for life. We are born from water. Without it, we are parched; we thirst, we die. The land is dry and barren without water. Surely the land promised to us is fertile? Fullness of life comes from being faithful to the covenant relationship God calls us to. When we are faithful to that covenant relationship, the whole creation is healthy. Our thirst is quenched and new life is born around us and in us.”1

I want to share with you two stories I read in the New York Times this week, and hopefully it will be possible to consider this Lenten metaphor of barrenness – especially in light of the world in which we live. After reviewing the Hebrew Bible scriptures for today – and reading again that old story of Abram and Sarai's patience and faithfulness as they waited for the promise of a son – the promise to be “exceedingly numerous,” the following headline in the Magazine section (Sunday Mar. 12, 2006, NY TIMES) caught my attention: it posed the question “Wrongful Birth?” It is the story of a woman named Donna Branca – a woman whose family has now become a case study in the study of bio-ethics. Donna became pregnant for the first time at the age of 31. Despite several early indicators of a troubled pregnancy, her Doctors told her she was fine.
“On April 22, 1999, when Branca was 28 weeks pregnant — four weeks past the legal window for terminating a pregnancy in New York — she saw her regular doctor (for what would be the last time) and was reassured that her baby was fine. But three weeks later, while on vacation on the Jersey Shore, Branca began to bleed again. Her husband, Anthony, drove her to the emergency room at Southern Ocean County Hospital in Manahawkin, N.J. Anthony Branca, like his wife, is compact and mild-mannered. When the obstetrician arrived, the doctor got out a tape and measured Donna's belly, a standard procedure to gauge a fetus's size. Although such measurements are a routine part of prenatal medicine and require only a few seconds, Donna had never had her belly measured. The obstetrician on duty that day asked Donna if she had had any prenatal care at all. Then he told her, based on his calculations, her fetus appeared to be only 24 weeks old, not 31. An emergency sonogram confirmed that the fetus was indeed abnormally small, and an amniocentesis later performed at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y., revealed much worse news: Donna Branca's fetus had both a gene duplication and a gene deletion on his fourth chromosome. (It was not until after birth that it would became clear that her baby had Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, which commonly includes mental retardation, physical disfigurement, inability to speak, seizures and respiratory and digestive problems.) After two weeks of bed rest, during which doctors tried to delay labor, Donna delivered A.J. Branca on June 11, 1999, about six weeks before her due date. He was 15 inches long and weighed two and a half pounds, and he didn't cry when he came out. "One of the first things the attending doctor said to me," Donna told me, "was, 'It's not hereditary, so you should just have another child right away.'"

What happened next — the years in which the Brancas came to love A.J. deeply and also to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit claiming that Donna Branca's obstetrician's poor care deprived her of the right to abort him — sheds an uncomfortable light on contemporary expectations about childbearing and on how much control we believe we should have over the babies we give birth to. The technology of prenatal care has been shifting rapidly: sonograms became standard in the 80's; many new genetic tests became standard in the 90's. Our ethical responses to the information provided has been shifting as well. As in many other realms, from marriage and its definition to end-of-life issues, those ethics and standards are being hashed out in the courts, in one lawsuit after another. And what those cases are exposing is the relatively new belief that we should have a right to choose which babies come into the world. This belief is built upon two assumptions, both of which have emerged in the past 40 years. The first is the assumption that if we choose to take advantage of contemporary technology, major flaws in our fetus's health will be detected before birth. The second assumption, more controversial, is that we will be able to do something — namely, end the pregnancy — if those flaws suggest a parenting project we would rather not undertake." 2

While this story focuses on the issue of ethics regarding a particular pregnancy, it also touches on the issue of barrenness. Despite the fact that Donna Branca and her husband were able to conceive and she was able to deliver a child – a child that they grew to love and raise – he was not the healthy, happy baby boy whom they had hoped for. The whole ethical issue around whether or not parents should have the right to choose to complete or terminate pregnancies based on genetic testing is a controversial one. What happens when we are allowed to choose a child because it is genetically more successful than another? If we read further back in the book of Genesis – we will see that Abram and Sarai faced a different, but not dissimilar situation. Faced with the barrenness of his wife Sarai, whom he loved, Abram was unable to produce an heir, so he chose to bear a son – Ishmael – their servant girl Hagar his mother. 13 years later God made a covenant with Abram and Sarai, now calling them Abraham and Sarah – and promised to them their own son Isaac – a promise that was fulfilled.

But later – in Genesis 21 we read that Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” (Gen. 21: 8-10)
Although this troubled Abraham, for Ishmael was his son, he was instructed by God to follow Sarah's instruction and send Hagar and Ishmael away.

This story is pertinent for our times. We consider Abraham and Isaac to be fathers of our faith as Christians. We live in a world that for the first time in centuries there exists a religio-political war, which – although it is described as the war on terror – is designed in a way to demonize the “other religion.” In this case: Islam. Just like we consider Abraham and Isaac to be the fathers of our Christian faith – Muslims consider Abraham and Ishmael to be the fathers of the Islamic faith. The prophet Mohammed of Islam is a direct descendant of Ishmael.

We live in a world that is conflicted and hurting – crying out in pain: we watch as young men sign up to become suicide bombers. Westerners live in fear of a non-specific terrorist threat, and the radical Christian movement demonizes the radical Islamic Jihad – just as the jihad extremists demonize us as “infidels.” For centuries – since the advent of Islam there have been holy wars between Christians and Muslims. In defense of Islam – when the Muslims held control of southern Europe and the Mediterranean world – there was religious tolerance and freedom. The Holy Wars then, as now, were a struggle for economic dominance of a rich land. Despite the fact that for centuries the Arab world were fearless warriors whose expansion into northern African and southern Europe Christians and Jews were allowed to practice their faith and live in community with relatively little interference from the Muslims who ruled over them. The history of our legacy of intolerance began after the Crusades when the Christian world won back the territories of the Roman Empire, and Muslims faced religious persecution. Rather than the life-giving tolerance that was practiced by the Muslims, Christians promoted a barren land which demanded – by force – a world of intolerance and the manditory practice of Christianity. In first year seminary on my oral exam for Christian History my prof asked me if I could go back and change one thing in Christian history what would it be? I answered that I would have allowed for the practice of religious freedom in Christendom – who knows what Christian Islamic relationships would be like now had we not persecuted our Islamic sisters and brothers for their faith centuries ago?

This brings me to a quick summary of the second story which caught my attention in the NY Times this week: Dr. Wafa Sultan is a Syrian-born American psychologist living outside of Los Angeles. Until three weeks ago, she was widely unknown.

“Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die. In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries. Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling." She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people." She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them." In the debate [on Al Jazeera], she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?" she asked. "In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched."3

While it is refreshing to hear the words of this incredibly strong woman speaking out against the misappropriation of the Muslim's Holy Q'uran, we have our own journey to look at. If Islam is teaching terrorists to drink from the spring of religion until their thirst is quenched, what does it mean for us as Christians to be the covenant people of a faith whose barrenness caused the casting out of a baby because he was not of the right genetic stock?

Lent is a time of barrenness. It represents the forty days that Jesus went out in to the desert. It is our 'barren' time, so to speak. For Dr. Sultan – her life-giving waters have come from leaving the practice of her ancestral faith in order to question the barrenness of its teachings. While I am not supporting the choice to walk away from this faith into which we are born and baptized, in order for us to have integrity as a covenant people, this type of critical reflection is essential in our faith as well. What happens when we don't look at the shadow side of Christianity? We can celebrate the roots of our faith in God. We can celebrate our ancestry in Abraham and Isaac – but not without the careful discernment and questioning of stories like the ones we heard today. Indeed – if we were to question our scriptures uncritically as the “divine truth” which could not be questioned – our faith is as dangerous as the Jihad which the governments encourage us to fear. Mark 8:35 – part of that troubling text I read at the beginning of the sermon – disturbs me: For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. What is to separate our faith from the Muslim faith in this barren reading of a troubling text? Not much. But perhaps the hope of our covenant with God – the hope of our celebration of our ancestry and rightful births into this long line of Christian believers – is to follow in the footsteps of our sister Dr. Sultan. It is from the patient study of our barrenness that like Abraham and Sarah we are giving new life. I close with a Lenten prayer of reflection by Keri Wehlander:

You, O God,
sweet water of life
sparkle before me.

Parched though I am
I study you
from the shore of my desert.

Dancing, translucent river
fresh with grace
you open your arms wide.

I watch, filled with longing
but stilled by fear.
Uncertain. Unsure.

You, O God,
wait with tenderness
ready to wash my fear away
ready for me to swim in your love. 4

REFERENCES:
1.Severs, Sandra. Living Covenant: Water as Metaphor in Lenten Worship. p. 15

2. NY Times, Online edition, March 12, 2006

3. NY Times, Online edition, March 12, 2006

4.Poem by Keri Wehlander found in Severs, Sandra “Living Covenant...” p. 15.