by Chris Paige

Job 1:1, 2:1-10
preached at Tabernacle United Church on October 5, 2003

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. - Audre Lorde ("Master's Tools" in Sister Outsider, p. 112)

 

Last week Patricia shared a vision she and several other council members had during the council retreat. It was a vision about the future of Tabernacle. She had imagined walking into Tabernacle some decades into the future and finding an even more diverse congregation. And she imagined a sense of joy and celebration in the room.

It's World Communion Sunday today. I think World Communion has a lot in common with this vision for the future of Tabernacle. On World Communion Sunday, we explicitly, deliberately and ritually lift up our diversity as the Body of Christ. Through the sacrament of communion, we reflect on the mystical spiritual unity that we share, across all our differences. In World Communion, we testify that neither race, nor geography, nor economic capacity, nor language, nor culture, nor ideology, nor lifestyle, nor education shall separate us from one another in the love of God. Praise God for that testimony. Praise God.

But if you think about it, that's a crazy statement of faith. It's got to stand right up there with the bodily resurrection of Jesus as bizarre religious doctrine. Unless we are in denial, we have to know that World Communion is an illusion. Indeed, the evidence is all around us that we are separated by race. And by geography. And by economic disparity. It's obvious that we're segregated by language and culture and lifestyle and educational background. And even in this space during joys and concerns and the circle of prayer, we grieve on a regular basis over how deeply divided we are by ideology and war and politics.

Some say that believing in God or testifying to the bodily resurrection of Jesus is just some kind of nieve optimism and religious opiate that keeps us from facing reality. I wonder if we could say the same thing about World Communion. It really is a statement of faith.

In preparing for today's sermon, I looked at the lectionary passages for today. It seems that World Communion and the lectionary evolved out of two totally different historical moments. It's not like Advent or Lent when the lectionary passages line up deliberately with the Church Calendar. The texts aren't coordinated with World Communion Sunday at all.

But before I'd had a chance to find a different text, while I was still reading through this passage from Job, I started to notice a few things. The obvious theme in the entire book of Job relates to how we endure the trials and tribulations that enter our lives. How do we relate to God in the midst of such struggles? How does God relate to us? Who's to blame when things go wrong? Job's testimony of faith in God despite his trials has been an inspiration through the centuries - a testimony to perseverance and the importance of keeping perspective.

But I noticed something else about Job. He was a man of privilege. As a queer lesbian who experiences marginalization, I don't see myself in this text. But as a white, professional class, U.S. citizen, this story has something to say to me. Job was a righteous, well-intentioned, wealthy man, with family and respect in his community. And he went through some trials and tribulations. It's interesting to me, because in the Christian scripture, we so often see the suffering of the marginalized and the texts typically testify to God's love in that context. More often, we see the privileged being challenged, confronted, made uncomfortable.

But in this Hebrew text, Job appears to be the man on top - and we find him enduring hardship. I tried to reframe Job's tribulation with contemporary images. I think it basically amounts to Job having his Beamer repossessed. The agribusiness corporation where he was CEO had a hostile takeover. His kids were killed in a bus accident on their way to a football game. And Job woke up with lesions from his head to his toe. All that stress kind of put a strain on his relationship with his wife and friends. He got to feeling alienated. But the text tells us that Job was a righteous man and he perseveres through it all by blessing God regardless. And in the end, he gets his fortunes back -- doubled. He was comforted by his extended family, blessed with 10 more children, and died an old man, full of days at the age of 140.

But I'm wanting to pay attention to how Job's privilege operated here. This was a tragic episode in his life, but because of his access to a well-resourced safety net, it was not an episode that jeopardized his life. If you read through to the end, you find that Job's extended family helps him out by giving him money and gold rings. This is not your average down on your luck story.

It's hard to talk about privilege. Things like confidence and education and access are easy to take for granted - like having friends who can send you money and gold rings when you are down on your luck. It's not obvious for me to think about my friendships with other professional class folks as related to my privilege - but it is a resource and a part of a safety net that impacts my life - and my risk-taking. And it's a resource that not everyone has access to. When we take something like that for granted, it's easy to miss how it might impact other relationships. But the assumptions we bring to a conversation can become a major barrier to building and sustaining trust in a relationship.

I'm not even focusing on overt oppression and power dynamics here - about the military occupation of Iraq, the economic exploitation of Central America, or informal power dynamics within predominantly white liberal institutions. But rather the kind of unintentional alienation that can quickly break down an otherwise healthy relationship or conversation across lines of difference. Maybe we stumble onto an unexpected sore spot that coincides with our differences of experience. To me, it may be a simple slip or misunderstanding, but to the other person it may be just the umpteenth time they've had to explain about the same thing. If we don't share that experience, then it may be too hard to explain. And these omissions can become obstacles to the full connection we long for.

While I was thinking about Job another sacred text came to mind - this passage from Audre Lorde. For those of you who don't know that name, I want to give you a little more flavor -- just like I'm exploring the backstory for Job. Lorde wrote the following as part of an academic presentation in 1977: She said,"Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself - a Black woman warrior poet doing my work - come to ask you, are you doing yours?"

I never met her. She passed on in 1992 and I'd never even heard of her until a few years later. But she's been a huge influence in my life. Most of the people I consider elders in my life - particularly elders in my journey as a justice-loving Christian lesbian -- count her a major influence in their lives. The first time I heard her quoted as sacred canon during worship was in 1995 in Rochester, NY.

Lorde was an academic who spoke on various occasions to predominantly white feminist groups. She's been so influential because she spoke so directly and so eloquently -- not only about the nature of privilege and marginalization, but also about the nature of difference, guilt, courage, power, solidarity. She didn't seem to shy away from much - she talked about the power of the erotic, the uses of anger, the need for poetry.

So this text came to mind as I was pondering Job. She says, "Survival is not an academic skill." And I wonder how well we've learned that lesson… each of us here today. What I know of survival in terms of my own experience, comes mainly from wrestling with the ramifications -- the risks and consequences of being lesbian and queer. My struggles with being different from cultural norms have taught me something about surviving in the world - it has taught me about finding supportive community, about finding myself and holding onto myself, about confronting the hard realities that influence my survival. For instance, I don't just walk into any church and make my marital situation or sexual orientation known. And if I do, I pay close attention to what's happening around me - just in case.

But my identity as a white, professional class, U.S. citizen hasn't taught me about survival. I don't think privilege teaches us to survive. Rather, privilege teaches us to fear and avoid. My privilege taught me to silence myself for the sake of an uneasy "peace." My privilege taught me to be afraid of making contact with people who are too different from me. For fear of too much conflict - or being too uncomfortable. It's too scary. My privilege taught me to fear not only black anger or queer deviants or world revolution -- but it taught me to fear my own anger, my own emotion, my own identity. My privilege taught me to fear my deepest power - that place inside me that screams in outrage when I experience injustice - my own or that of another human being. It's the same place that dances with joy at authentic connection with my partner, friends, colleagues. That deep place is where God lives inside me. But such passionate connection doesn't always mesh well with getting along with other people of privilege. Yet I was nice little white girl. And I had the luxury of learning those lessons of fear. The luxury of being able to avoid conflict rather than learning how to struggle through it.

That fear and privilege didn't teach me how to find the courage to come out. That fear and privilege didn't teach me how to find authentic community. That fear and privilege didn't teach me how to tell the truth, even when it means risking the experience of someone else's anger -- or being wrong. That fear and privilege has never taught me anything about how to face my own complicity with overwhelming systems of privilege and domination - particularly as a white U.S. citizen.

Facing the magnitude of such complicity takes more than just voting the right way - though that I a good start. I'm talking here about finding my own voice, about standing up in the middle of conflict even when you're the only one and people think you're crazy. I'm talking about resisting oppression and despair, even when the odds are long at transformation. Resisting not just because you hope you can make an impact. But resisting because to do otherwise would be to sell your soul and loose yourself. I'm talking about building bridges with allies that are strong enough to weather a real storm - alliances that aren't necessarily easy or clean or pretty. My privilege hasn't taught me about such things.

But such patience and perseverance and prioritizing are skills of survival for people on the margins. As Audre Lorde put it, for those who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - and for others who have been forged in the crucible of difference. Brothers and sisters and otherwise siblings who stand outside the structures of acceptability.

To make this a little more concrete, I want to tell you a little bit about a project I was involved in for the first 8 months of this year. I was invited, through my work with The Other Side, to work with the Witness Our Welcome 2003 planning committee (WOW for short) on planning a plenary session to deal with racial diversity. WOW represented an ecumenical gathering of the "welcoming movement" -- the ecumenical movement of churches like ours that have publicly proclaimed their support of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered folks. WOW and the welcoming movement are predominantly white. And at the first such ecumenical event in 2000, there was some significant racial tension. That's a story of its own, for another time.

But this year, after talking with various relevant allies and colleagues, I began doing interviews, brainstorming ideas, and putting together a proposal for this plenary session. It was time-consuming because I was intent on building relationships with people outside the planning committee who might help to support a dialogue process that would extend beyond that one and a half hour plenary session at the conference.

Eventually the time came to present my proposal to the planning committee so we could finalize the details. But when I met with the committee, they freaked out. The planning committee members expressed all kinds of fear about how people would react and whether people (esp. white people) would be able to handle talking about their racial identity. My proposal had already been approved twice - once by an individual and another time by a subcommittee - so I was caught off guard by the intensity of this reaction. As I engaged the larger group, they didn't seem clear about their goals for why racial diversity was important topic for this event. Maybe they felt guilty about what had happened at the previous gathering. Or scared of being judged as racist. Or hopeful for their vision of including joyful diversity in the event. But at the end of the evening, I left in a quandry about how to proceed.

After the planning committee's weekend retreat was over I got a phone call. It seems that after I left the meeting, they had a variety of long, tense dialogue sessions working through baggage left over from their two years of committee work together. You see, they had never dealt with how race - or any other kind of difference - had impacted their relationships as a committee. They hadn't faced up to the way mistrust and alienation and fear had been building up over time. And this left them all quite vulnerable when I brought a proposal that was intended to help the larger event to dialogue. Somehow, I think my proposal broke through the fragile silence they'd been holding among themselves.

The bottomline of this process was that the committee realized that it was so busy working on tasks and talking in generic ways about "diversity" that they forgot to do the hard work of building relationships, and talking through their differences. By the time they did get to this deep work, they were tired, relationships were strained, and trust had already been broken.

They were able to pull out a successful plenary by presenting honestly on what they had failed to do in this process - to help others learn from their mistakes. But I wonder what kind of momentum might have been possible, if they'd done that dialogue work sooner.

I believe that it's important to wrestle intentionally with the roots and consequences of difference and how they impact our communal life together. We need to learn how to better talk about how the differences among us inform our relationships. Not just to sink into guilt or caretaking, but to work on understanding one another at each step of the way so that we can attend to differences that can potentially divide us in our lives together.

It's one thing to have diverse bread and music, but how are we dealing with racial differences in this congregation? How are we dealing with class? How are we dealing with theological diversity? And what about other hidden differences of experience? Are we aware of how relational trust develops in this community? Who is it that feels most empowered and secure within this congregation's structures? And who stays at the margins? Where are these conversations happening? Are they happening?

I want to invite you to think more deeply about diversity - beyond the beautiful weaving of diverse cultures, music, language, foods. The journey to joyful diversity is not a quick trip and it will have some bumps along the way. Conflict. Anger. Hurt feelings. We need to develop the ability and motivation to be able to be uncomfortable with each other sometimes -- and to move through that discomfort to deeper understanding. Because, I believe, it is only if we can begin this important work here, that we will be able to carry that wisdom to share with the rest of the world. As our mission statement says - to be a starting point of reconciliation and healing in the world.

So I want to invite you to this table - to Christ's table -- with an awareness of your own context, of who you are, where you come from, what you've been through.
Come with some awareness of your difference from others in this congregation - where they come from, what they've been through.

Come to this table aware of how we are different from others in the Body of Christ and the Church Universal. How are we different from folks at New Jerusalem in North Philly and in Los Anonas, El Salvador? How are we different from people in Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea? How are we different from people in Israel, Palestine, Africa?

The witness of this table, the witness of World Communion is that in Christ those differences need not separate us. But that they must inform us. And praise God, they will teach us. May it be so.

© 2003 Chris Paige