SOME PLACE TO CRY:  Or, What's the Point of Remembering?

Sermon for February 28, 2010

Scripture: Judges 11: 1-10, 29-40

Opening Prayer:

  “God of Our Weary Years, God of Our Silent Tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way, “ [1]

Thank you for your presence. Thank you that in music and in silence, in Scripture and in prayer, in giving and in receiving, in family and in the community, you are with us. Thank you for this opportunity to worship you once more, and to be bathed in the sufficiency of your grace towards us. In these next few moments together, give us wisdom from your Word, understanding from your Spirit and compassion from your heart, so that in our hour of trial, our courage will not fail. Help me, Oh Lord, to communicate your Word with clarity, compassion, and conviction, pouring out before these, your people, all that you have written upon my heart, and even more of your Spirit.

This we ask because we love you, who first loved us, in Jesus' name.

Amen.

The story of Jephthah's daughter might seem to you a poor choice of a text to preach on a lovely Sunday morning. Perhaps you are wondering what on earth drove me to select it. After all, the text highlights the sacrifice of a young woman whose name is not even recorded. My guess is that it's not a chapter you hear much in most of the churches in America .

Exegetes from Origen to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, apologists from Josephus to Pseudo Philo, and artists from George Frederick Handel to Shakespeare have wrestled with this chapter of the book of Judges, trying to make sense of it. They're not the only ones. The Eastern Stars, the women's auxiliary of the black Masons used to reenact the story of Jephthah's daughter regularly. My mother tells of the time she watched her grandmother, my great-grandmother, perform in the title role. Apparently, when they got to the execution scene, the drama and seeming realism was all too much for my mother, who was not quite six years old at the time. She says she stopped the show with her screams.  Screams? Well, yes. Rather appropriately, Phillis Trible calls this a text of terror. Why then, would I ,as a womanist theologian, be drawn to a story of loss and of death?

When I was growing up, in the schools and churches I attended, Black History month was always a time to celebrate black achievement. We highlighted black firsts, patents awarded, breakthroughs and discoveries made. Nowadays, we talk about presidents elected! Influenced by the Black Pride movement, the tone was always very upbeat. Later, as a college and graduate student reading slave narratives and contemporaneous reports, I was overwhelmed by the sadness of stories I didn't hear as a child.

By telling only the stories with happy endings, by lingering over the triumphs and glossing over the racism, economic oppression, deprivation, physical and sexual assault, and general lack of opportunity which has framed the black experience in this country, we did the whole history of African Americans a disservice. Just as we Christians tend to overemphasize spiritual victory at the expense of the rest of the testimony—only telling about how God answered the prayer, but not how we waited years for that answer—so sometimes black history has been portrayed as a kind of video that fast forwards from Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King to the Barack and Michelle Obama, with all the intervening images left a blur.

Perhaps we've been fearful to tell the whole story of black history. Perhaps we've been afraid to look under Plymouth Rock [2] and to examine the underside of the American dream. Perhaps we've feared telling the culpability of some of our ancestors in destroying the lives and potential of others of our ancestors. Perhaps we've even feared our own place in the story.

Like the sometimes sad story of black life in America , Judges 11 tells the sad story of a woman's life in Israel . I first felt drawn to the story of Jephthah's daughter as an MDiv. student, and the text continues to fascinate me. Jephthah was the son of a prostitute—although apparently, at this point in Judean history, prostitution was regarded as less of a sin. It was a shame, surely, and inconvenient, but not cause for Jephthah's brothers to disinherit him as they do, leaving him to grow up in exile in Tob.

Jephthah was a marginalized man, rejected by his family because he was the son of a “strange woman.” [3] Sent to live in Tob, “outside of Judah 's sphere of influence” [4] Jephthah grew up and was educated outside of the centralized worship of Yahweh.

Disinherited by virtue of his brothers' obscure and unmerciful reading of the Law, [5] Jephthah was locked out of the economic security and status that landholding afforded Israelite men. Eventually, he was surrounded by criminals who accompanied him on raids. [6]

Bat-Jephthah--let's give her a name, shall we? If we don't know her real name, perhaps this, which just means Jephthah's daughter, in Hebrew, will do. Bat-Jephthah was the unmarried daughter of a marginalized man; she was, in fact, doubly marginalized. Patriarchal society afforded her no power as a single woman: Israelite society afforded her father no power as a disinherited man. The sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter represents the loss of life on several levels: she dies an only child without offspring, thereby ending the familial line, and her youth and potential are all sacrificed without expression.

But where else was Jephthah's daughter to go? Ancient Israel provided no place for women outside of their fathers' or their husbands' homes. Even if she had chosen to flee, where could she have gone? Other social and economic options were nearly nonexistent for her.

Ancient opinion on Jephthah's vow is divided. The Epistle to the Hebrews lists him in its hall of faith found in Hebrews 11. Origen agrees, noting that it takes a “profound intelligence” to understand the role of “divine providence” in the story. [7] Huh? Divine providence? However, the Talmud agrees with Saint Augustine , who repudiates Jephthah and his vow. Apparently, the ancient Rabbis believed that, at the best, the vow was poorly constructed—too vague. “Whoever,” or “Whatever” comes out of the house first? What is that about? What if the first thing to emerge is unclean—like a pig—or otherwise unacceptable as a sacrifice? Dude! What if it's your daughter, man? The first century Jewish historian Josephus wrote that according to Jewish tradition, Jephthah was censured and punished, along with the high priest, Phinehas, who could have annulled Jephthah's vow [8] but refused to do so.

As far as I am concerned, Jephthah's guilt is plain: he has made a very foolish vow. Society's guilt is less obvious, but no less heinous: it allows him to sacrifice his daughter to this foolish vow.

I see in the tale of Jephthah's daughter, analogies to the state of the black woman in America . She is doubly marginalized: still, today, she is excluded from the centers of power by virtue of her gender and by virtue of her race. Still, her ability to progress in society is intricately tied to that of the black man--and, like Jephthah's daughter, she is strangely, even tragically obligated, even to the rash and foolish bargains black men strike to solidify their place in the world.

For Jephthah's daughter, the choice was between a rock and hard place, between the heat of the day and the dark of the night, between death and dishonor. For Bat-Jephthah, to accept her father's words meant certain death, but to reject her father's rash vow meant to declare a fool the man all of Israel had once before rejected, and then to run, with no place to hide. Bat-Jephthah held not only her own honor, but her father's, in her hands. For many black women today, the same choices define their conduct as they barter their silence for the prestige of the men they love. They accept choices that may ultimately mean death to them, if it will ‘save face' for the men that they love.

African American men are as marginalized, and historically have been as securely locked out of economic and political power as Jephthah was. Once able to barter their strength for a place in American heavy industry, they have found less success in the technological and service economy that has replaced it. According to Boston pastor Eugene Rivers, “The biggest culprit is an economy that has locked them out of the mainstream through a pattern of bias and a history of glass ceilings… America has less use for black men today than it did during slavery.” [9]

Less likely than black men to marry outside of their race, black women are therefore left prey, in a still patriarchal society, to every ill black men suffer, even the ills of those who, like Jephthah, have befriended outlaws or turned to criminal enterprises to sustain themselves after legitimate businesses found no place for them. According to Howard University sociologist Joyce Ladner, “the combined factors of joblessness, low skill levels, a lack of education, the social problems of substance abuse, alcoholism, [and] imprisonment [affecting black men] all lead to reducing the pool of individuals who would be able to earn a living and support a family.” The result is that a surprisingly high percentage of black women may never marry. [10] (I should note that in some sectors of the black community today, unemployment reaches as high as 50%, compared to 10% nationally.) Knowing that their fathers and brothers have been dishonored and shut out by society, knowing that their own cries will not be heard, except by their sisters, and knowing that they have nowhere to run, black women face the double dilemma of Bat-Jephthah. They must choose between that which will hurt the men they love, and that which will hurt them. Tied together by race, black men and women nonetheless find their relationships and families pulled apart by the consequences of racism. Then, black women are saddled with an additional burden—that of the consequences of sexism. So it is that even among a marginalized people, interlocking rings of oppressions divide them, just as cruelly as Jephthah and his daughter were parted.

So, faced with few options, all of which seem bad, some black women barter with death, turning mutely away as their sons or boyfriends pursue drug trades that offer them fleeting fame and economic stability, rather than to deliver them over to [often white] legal authorities who would shame and incarcerate them. They would offer themselves up before they would humiliate the men they love.

So, some black women, who represent the majority within the congregations of black churches, deny themselves or other women any pastoral or leadership role, or allow men to deny them the same, in part because they want to keep the men “out front.” [11] Because African American churches are among the few places where black men have provided unquestioned leadership, these women accept the death of silence in the very churches that they maintain by their participation, rather than to undermine the image of the black men who would preach or pastor. Then, like Jephthah's daughter, having chosen the death of silence, they make a crying space for themselves in the many women's auxiliaries, clubs, Bible studies, and prayer circles that they have created.

So, some black women barter with death; silently reasoning that black men's misconduct is born of black men's marginalization, they accept it as their fate. They are beaten, they are abused, they are disrespected, they are abandoned, they are left holding the baby, they are left standing alone.

Is Jephthah the only man who has ever tried to barter blood for blessing, or has he sons today? Isn't “Gangsta Rap” a modern vow of Jephthah? When black men destroy black women with their words, calling them names I can't repeat here, haven't they in fact traded the women's lives for the money or fame such ‘art' buys them? Does the men's experience of oppression in the marketplace excuse their own oppression of their mothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, and wives? It does not. The marginalization and insecurity of some black Jephthahs leaves some black daughters weeping on the mountains, while the society that keeps Jephthah marginalized has some of his daughters' blood on its hands.

So, black women who cannot find a voice or an advocate, find only a place for tears, and make flawed choices that represent their limited options. I do not justify these poor choices; I merely suggest that they fit within a flawed system not only of black people's creation. And in America , it should be understood that black men's tortured vows are often the product of the worldview of the Tob of their ghetto exile, or of the Israel of their rejection.

There are those who find God's silence in this text troubling--myself among them. However, I know that humanity is as much revealed by God's silences as by God's words. God's silence in Judges 11 uncovers and reveals the cold machinations of a heartless humanity; Israel shows little compassion for Jephthah and less for his daughter. Moreover, the Israelites knew better and should have done better. The silence from heaven revealed that humanity had learned nothing from all that God had spoken to that point.

And what of Israel ? Was there no one to speak out against the abominable blood-sacrifice about to take place in the midst of the congregation? Perhaps Jephthah, raised far from Jerusalem , in Tob, had an excuse for being ignorant of God's ways. What excuse had Israel ? What excuse has America ? None.

But, would Jephthah barter blood for blessing? Not with God: this is a deal with the devil. Romans 12 offers a more excellent model: you offer yourself to God as a living sacrifice. [12] To offer someone else is to misunderstand sacrifice, and to misunderstand God. Still, in the silence, we do not hear the people's protests against the injustices that characterize the life of Jephthah or of his daughter. We hear only the woman's tears.

Yet, it is in the tears that I find some comfort. (I am not condoning the daughter's silence, nor her passivity; I am simply appreciating that she took the time to cry.) In the midst of this hard, hard canyon of a text, that is so spare and comfortless, I find the small refuge of the women who gather together, to weep and to remember. They haven't ignored their pain; they have embraced it. The story of Jephthah's daughter can then speak to those of us who have not yet heard a reprieve from heaven as Isaac did, because it contains in it the hope that even those who forget our names will remember our tears.

I find that I identify with Jephthah's daughter. Somehow, it comforts me that despite the horror, Jephthah's daughter manages to find dignity and solace in her tears and in her companion's tears. In Bat-Jephthah's redemptive, pro-active choice to share her sadness with her sisters, she sets the pattern for a long line of women who would follow her example, seeking “to make a way out of no way.” This is the heritage, both bitter and beautiful, of those who, although nameless, nevertheless, survive in our memory.

I know from my experience that not everyone hears a reprieve from heaven; some die without ever receiving the promise, as Hebrews 11:39 reminds us. I am glad to know that at least sometimes remembrance is accorded to those to whom even life is denied. I feel a very visceral connection with a woman I could see crouched upon a bare rock weeping for what was not, for what would not, for what could not be. I feel empathy for a woman trapped between a hard rock and a harder choice, between fleeing time and approaching death. I feel as if I have come face-to-face with this childless, nameless, lifeless woman who is undefended, yet somehow still remembered.

I realize that I know Jephthah's daughter, that I have seen her, that I live in the midst of a nation of the daughters of Jephthah. More specifically, in the present, there are women sacrificed and sacrificing to reasons less compelling that Jephthah's very, very foolish vow. So it is that I find I can identify with Jephthah's daughter. And, I am thankful that although there was no place in all of Israel for her to live, there was some place for her to cry.

Black history month is, in the main, the celebration of the recollection of millions of nameless, faceless people who lived, as Isaiah put it, in the region “of the shadow of death.” [13] Indeed, Black History month is an invitation for all of us to gather, as the women of Israel did, to remember all the Bat-Jephthaths and the whole story of black history. For example, here's one nameless woman we can remember together. Her name was Ursula. She and her children were slaves owned by the University of Virginia . [14] Think about that: our University corporately owned a woman and her children. [15] When we tell the story of Black History, and even when we tell the history of the University of Virginia , we must recall all the Ursulas, even if we never learn their names.

The plot of the novel Beloved also revolves around the aftermath of the tragic murder of a child by her parent. A mother who has escaped slavery with her children subsequently kills them rather than allow them to be retaken into captivity. Presumably she was about to kill herself also, but was prevented by her own recapture. What some readers did not know was that in writing Beloved, author Toni Morrison based the story upon an actual historical event.

While the novel graphically details the sexual, physical and psychic damage slavery wrecked upon black folk, its main action takes place after Emancipation. It is then that its characters struggle under the weight of remembering the terror of slavery. Sethe, the mother, is haunted, quite literally, by the child whose life she took with her own hands. Unable either to bear or to banish those memories, Sethe is trapped. How, after all, is one to bear the unbearable? How is one to remember what is too painful to remember? How can one heart contain a history that bears such scars?

Toni Morrison proposes this answer: when memory is too much for any one heart to bear, it is best born in community. In Beloved , the women of the community gather with Sethe to sing and to pray and to be a presence until she is no longer haunted. So, Jephthah's daughter did a wise thing in gathering with the women of her community to mourn with them. So it is that when we gather to remember black history—all of black history, not just its joys, but also its sorrows—we do a powerful thing. We should not fear being overwhelmed by the deep sadness of the story of the black sojourn in America , or by the melancholy of the Spirituals, if we remember that this too can be borne, in community.

Here in Charlottesville , the city government has begun a dialogue on race. It is a sad commentary on the state of race relations in the churches of Charlottesville that this dialogue had to be called by the government while the churches were, mainly, silent. This sort of dialogue ought to be the work of the church. Reconciliation? It's our business! What is the Cross but the ultimate symbol of reconciliation—not only of creature to Creator, but also of human heart to human heart.

Further, I believe that until we confront the church's complicity in racism in this city, we will never be truly whole. There were churches in Charlottesville that opened as segregated classrooms when Virginia public schools closed rather than integrate. How does one confront such a painful, sordid past? Such pain is best borne in community—a community of repentance and forgiveness. We need some place to remember the whole story of our shared past, and we need some place to cry. Until we face that shared past, we will remain bound to it, imprisoned by it.

In our recollection, we can call up memory as powerful as the nameless, like Bat-Jephthah, like Ursula, or like Sethe's forsaken child. We can call those forgotten ones, Remembered , as God calls them. We can call those nameless ones, Beloved , as God does. We can allow those recollections to bind us in community of love and healing—bind us so tightly that no other foolish vows can be taken, no other undefended lives can be lost. We can allow memory to become such a powerful thing that it changes the future . We can allow memory to become such a powerful thing that it heals us as we recall our shared past together.

It is in that spirit—a spirit of remembrance, of hope, and of healing-- that I invite you to learn and to celebrate the story—the whole story—of the black experience in America , and to allow that memory to move you forward.

Let us pray:

Eternal God,

There is sadness all around us. Injustice. Oppression. Rejection. Every day, the incredible savagery of life is carried to us in the newspapers, on television, and as we hurry past it on the streets of our own neighborhoods. We see it in the cruelty we show one another, in the daily indignities we suffer. Help us not to build walls against the pain around us, but rather to let the sadness of life move us to remembrance, to tears, to community, to healing, and to action. And, as we touch others' lives, make us places of refuge for them, even as you are a place of refuge for us. You are the only sure refuge in times of trouble. Above the noise of the marketplace, in the silence of our hearts, let us hear your voice.

This we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.

[1] James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” in Songs of Zion (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981), 32.

[2] Here, of course, I am making reference to the famous statement attributed to Malcolm X, that African Americans didn't land on Plymouth Rock, but rather, that “Plymouth Rock landed” on them.

[3] I. Mendelsohn, “The Disinheritance of Jephthah in the Light of Paragraph 27 of the Lipit-Ishtar Code.” Israel Exploration Journal 4, Number 2 (1953):116-119.

[4] “Tob,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary , Volume VI., (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 583.

[5] Mendelsohn, 116-119.

[6] Judges 11:3

[7] A. T. Hanson, “Origen's Treatment of the Sacrifice of Jephthah's Daughter,” Studia Patristica, Volume XXI: Papers Presented to the Tenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 1987 (Second Century, Tertullian to Nicaea in the West, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Athanasius) . Ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone. (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Press, 1989), 298.

[8] Leviticus 27:2-7.

[9] Farai Chideya, Michelle Ingrassia, Vern E. Smith and Pat Wingert, “Endangered Family.” Newsweek, August 30, 1993, 24.

[10] Barbara Vobeja, “25% of Black Women May Never Marry,” The Washington Post, Monday, November 11, 1991, A12.

[11] Floyd Massey, Jr. and Samuel Berry McKinney , Church Administration in the Black Perspective (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1976), 43.

[12] Romans 12:1.

[13] Isaiah 9:2.

[14] This is according to Karen Hughes White, a descendent of Thomas Jefferson's slaves, as recounted in the episode “Brotherly Love: 1791-1831” of the video series“Africans in America : America 's Journey Through Slavery.” (“Africans in America : America 's Journey Through Slavery”: WGBH Educational Foundation, 1998.)

[15] For more information about the University of Virginia 's ownership and use of slaves, see Catherine S. Neale “Enslaved People and the Early Life of the University of Virginia ” (Unpublished Distinguished Masters' Thesis in History, the University of Virginia , 2005).

Dr. Valerie Cooper

February 28, 2010

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