“Women of Courage, Men of Peace”
Isaiah 2:1-5
Isaiah 2:1-5
December 2, 2007 First Sunday of Advent
Preached at Kingston Road United Church by the Rev. Richard C. Choe
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“Women will starve in silence until new stories are created which confer on them the power of naming themselves.” [i]
- Sarah Gilbert & Susan Gubar
Richard C. Choe©A mother drives to pick up her fourteen year old daughter who works at a local drugstore. She spots her kneeling on the floor in the toothpaste section, stocking the bottom shelf. She is about to walk to her daughter and greet her when she notices two middle-aged men walking toward her daughter. They look like anybody’s father. Her daughter does not see them coming. She is too focused on her task in getting the boxes of toothpaste lined up evenly. The men stop and one says to the other, while peering down at the girl, “Now that’s how I like to see a woman – on her knees.” The other man laughs.
The mother watches her daughter’s expression fall. Seeing her daughter kneel at the men’s feet while they are laughing at her subordinate posture pierces through the mother’s heart. She does not know what to do. But she realizes that if she were to abandon her daughter at that moment by simply walking away and keeping silent, her daughter may internalize the posture of being subservient for the rest of her life.
The mother walks toward to the men. “I have something to say to you, and I want you to hear it,” she says. They stop laughing and her daughter looks up. “This is my daughter,” the mother says, pointing at her daughter, her finger shaking with anger. “You may like to see her and other women on their knees, but we don’t belong there. We don’t belong there!”
Her daughter rises to her feet. She looks at her mother, and with confidence she stands by her mother and faces the men. “Women!” one of the men says and they walk away.
Mother and daughter look at each other and smile. There are moments in life when words cannot truly express the profound moment of truth.
Sue Monk Kidd recounted this moment of her awakening as a woman in her memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, articulating that the men in the drug store mirrored one of the attitudes existing in our culture, a culture long dominated by men – a culture of patriarchy that seeks male power over women, the other. Of staying up by keeping others down.[ii]
By confronting the misogyny of the two men and by standing together, Monk Kidd and her daughter began to name themselves as women of strength.
I wish I could say with confidence that I am far removed from the attitudes shown by the two men in the story I just shared. I realize that not only am I a product of the culture of my father’s generation but I have also have been a willing participant of the patriarchal culture that has been designed, developed, and rewarded machismo while belittling, demeaning and denigrating women.
My birth culture honoured me as the oldest male of the generation in my clan. I was the first born male of the first born male in a family within a culture where being male had clear advantages and rewards. No one had to really go out of their way to teach me that boys were better than girls. It was so ingrained in my birth culture. I grew up learning that being a male in Korean society was clearly a privilege. A family with a new baby boy would tie red peppers to a rope indicating pride and joy of the family. I remember seeing black briquettes tied to a rope on the gate of houses when a girl was born, indicating shame and misfortune in that family. The black briquettes symbolized something dirty and unclean. I find it ironic that these were the same briquettes that provided warmth and were used for cooking to sustain every household in traditional homes in South Korea.
It may be shocking for some to hear that I find Canadian culture – Western culture – the very culture I came to embrace from age 14 – is not much different from the culture of my birth. Although there are more egalitarian ways between the genders being practiced in public by changes in laws and peoples’ attitudes, the machismo, patriarchal culture is still very much ingrained and prevalent in North American society.
Misogyny – hatred of women – may have been outlawed and seen as uncouth in our society. But incidents like the massacre at l’École Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989 where 14 young women were murdered simply because they were women tell us that we have a long way to go in dismantling misogyny still so deeply embedded in our cultural foundation. Women in our society continue to be put down and murdered because of their gender.
How have women historically been received in church? "Not well" would be a simple answer.
Faith communities have been a major source and a proponent of patriarchal culture for centuries. Men rationalized, theorized and instituted patriarchy in such ways that in many instances men literally became God. Religion, culture, and politics have colluded and collaborated. Imagining, defining, seeing, and embracing the Sacred as feminine according to women’s realities have not been widely acknowledged or widely accepted as significant or authentic. Many are still uncomfortable or downright angry when they hear any reference of femininity to God. Calling God “Mother” is still considered blasphemous and sacrilegious to many.
“The Bible is no stranger to patriarchy. It was written mostly about if not entirely by men. It was edited by men. It describes a succession of societies over a period of roughly 1200 years whose public life was dominated by men. ... It talks almost only about men. In the Hebrew Bible as a whole, only 111 of the 1426 people who are given names are women. (That’s almost 8 %.) The proportion of women in the New Testament is about twice as great, but still leaves them a tiny minority.”[iii]
This is what author Margaret Starbird says about Christianity:
“Institutional Christianity, which has nurtured Western civilization for nearly two thousand years, may have been built over a gigantic flaw in doctrine – a theological ‘San Andreas Fault’: the denial of the feminine.”[iv]
Women continue to experience being the insignificant Second Sex in God’s Household. Although the United Church prides itself as one of the first denominations to ordain women, women’s place in the United Church has been relegated to the Second Sex in ministerial leadership for many years. The United Church once enacted a “Disjoining Rule – a policy where deaconesses – women clergy – until 1957 were required to give up their paid ministry in church once they married. The unfairness of this policy was finally acknowledged in a Service of Apology at the April 2006 meeting of the Executive of the General Council. At that special worship service an apology was extended to those affected by this history.[v] It took close to 50 years for the United Church “to apologize to those women and express the church’s sorrow for the loss of their leadership to the church.”[vi]
In a church where patriarchal culture is embedded in the bedrock of the foundation so that God can only be perceived and known as male, it is not just women who suffer. In our patriarchal society, men also suffer the consequences of dehumanizing their mothers, sisters, daughters, life partners, friends, colleagues and neighbours – those who are integral in shaping and forming who men are as human beings. When one part of society is dehumanized all parts of society is dehumanized.
Elizabeth Dodson Gray, a feminist culture critic, defines patriarchy as “a culture that is slanted so that men are valued a lot and women are valued less; in which men’s prestige is up and women’s prestige is down.”[vii]
Sue Monk Kidd says that, “It is important to emphasize that patriarchy is neither men nor the masculine principle; it is rather a system in which that principle has become disoriented.”[viii] She also states that “men’s resistance (of women in becoming liberated and becoming whole persons) often grows out of fear – fear that everything is going to change, that women’s gain is their loss, that women will ‘turn the tables on them.’ ... what’s needed in to invite men into (women’s) struggle, to make them part of (women’s) quest”[ix]
How do we reorient ourselves in order for us to dismantle the system that denigrates, distorts and damages us – both men and women – from being fully human?
I remember watching a one-woman performance called “Motherless World.” The woman in the play talked about what it meant to be a woman in a faith community through the ages. At one point she faced the audience and said – “If God is only a Father, then as children of God each one of us is a motherless child.” That I am a motherless child if God is only a father reverberated through me as a profound shock. The feminine aspect of God has been distorted and often absent in the household of God within Christian faith. Many of us – both men and women – grew up in faith as motherless children in church. I believe that men need to integrate the feminine image of God the way we take masculine image as an integral part our faith journey.
When Isaiah envisions God’s reign on earth, peace is the primary marker of the future Household of God. Isaiah envisions peace where people will engage in right relationship with one another and with God. How do we link such vision and hope for peace in and around us in our part of the global village? How can we experience God in our community in a way of peace?
Like many men, my journey toward liberation from bondage and collusion with patriarchy continues. Whether it is learning to become comfortable in a kitchen or unlearning the expectation that men are inherently superior to women, each step is a struggle. No one really wants to change when it means giving up privileges.
As a man in his late forties, I know the kind of man I do not want to be but I do not yet know the kind of man I could be. Many men of my generation feel that we are lost between the culture of our fathers and the emerging culture we are not sure of. Many of us are wrestling with the notion of being a man who are able to live in genuine partnership with women. We are aware that we cannot simply use our cultural upbringing as an excuse to not take responsibilities for our own words and action.
The Household of God originated from a Greek word oikoumene (οἰκουμένη) – the feminine present middle participle of the verb οἰκέω "inhabit" – meaning “inhabited world.” Christians redefined oikoumene as “the Household of God,” meaning Christian faith community – the church universal.
“Pyung-An(平安)”[x] is one way of expressing peace in Chinese. “An(安)” – the second character forming “peace (平安)” in Chinese is made up of two components – a roof standing over a woman (安). According to Chinese, peace is experienced when woman is present in the household. In other word, feminine presence is an integral part of peace in household. Peace within the Household of God will not be a reality without a presence of the feminine.
As we remember the 14 women who were murdered in Montreal on December 6, 1989 along with countless women who have died in violence since then, I would like us to commit to National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in every aspect of our life and faith. May we be bold in reclaiming the feminine images of God we have lost throughout much of our faith journey. May we be daring in expressing the many feminine aspects of God in and through our worship and ministry.
May our journey toward Bethlehem in this Season of Advent – season of waiting for the Christ Child who “at Christmas became like us so that we might become like him”[xi] – be a journey of discovering and embracing God who nurtures us the way a loving mother nurtures her children. And may we find the courage to make peace.
Amen.
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[i] Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (New York: HarperCollins.1996) vii.
[ii] Kidd, The Dance, 7-10.
[iii] Cullen Murphy, “Women and the Bible,” Atlantic Monthly 272, no. 2 (Aug. 1993): 41-42 cited in Sue Monk, Kidd, The Dance, 70.
[iv] Margaret Starbird, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail (Santa Fe, NM: Bear, 1993) xix. cited in Kidd, The Dance, 63.
[v] Moderator’s Report to the General Council, 39th General Council, 39th General Council Workbook, OMNI-59, http://www.united-church.ca/files/organization/gc39/workbook2_omnibus.pdf.
[vi] Vivian Harrower, Regret, Not Apology, from General Council, Women’s Concerns, Fall 2003, 40.
[vii] Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap (Wellesley, MA: Roundtable Press, 1982) 19 cited in Kidd, The Dance, 61.
[viii] Kidd, The Dance, 57.
[ix] Kidd, The Dance, 44.
[x] Korean pronunciation of Chinese word peace - 平安.
[xi] William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004) 7.
