That all might have life

International Women's Day
Judges 11.1-40; Matthew 15.21-28

Rev Dr Dorcas Gordon

Minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada and principal and professor of biblical interpretation at Knox College, Toronto. She represents her church on the theology committee of the Caribbean and North American area council.

When I was in the first grade at school, one book, used to teach us how to read, contained stories of a brother and sister named Dick and Jane. In a very basic vocabulary these stories told of Dick's adventures and the nurturing support of his sister. He climbed trees and ventured bravely into the world of his neighbourhood, while Jane stood by offering advice and helping him when he got into trouble. In these stories Dick actively created his world, while Jane served in a supportive role, accompanying him into a world that she did not make.

Not surprisingly, some years later educators discovered that in these books children were learning a lot more than how to read. They were learning how to live out their gender; they were learning how they should relate to each other as boys and girls, and how, as boys and girls, each should relate to the world around them. In the act of learning how to read, a whole generation of girls were having their world defined in a way that had the potential to restrict their full personhood.

That all might have life in its fullness

A recent article in a Canadian newspaper catches so well the dilemma of women: "We tell women every day that they have rights. They have the right to say no... We tell them they have the right to freedom of movement... We also tell women that they have the right to economic equality while we pay them only 70 cents for every male dollar. We tell women that they do not have to live their lives as victims of violence, that they have a right to a life free of abuse... But are we really ready and willing to do what is necessary to make this true?"¹ The article goes on to describe the increase in violence against women in Canadian society and to make the point that violence against women is not a mystery. The answers have been laid out. All that is needed is the will to make the necessary changes.

In Canada, December 6 is a national day of remembrance and action on violence against women. It is a day to grieve and to look for hope, for on this day in 1989 fourteen women were murdered in Montreal, university students who died hearing the shouts of their murderer, "Death to feminists!" These women were murdered because they believed what we told them, that they could be engineers. These women were killed because they were women who sought to enter what was traditionally a male-dominated area.

That all might have life in its fullness

A day to grieve and to look for hope! A day for lament! How deeply our response echoes across the ages.

An army officer named Jephthah was a skilled warrior, known for his bravery in battle. But he was also a man who was banished from his father's house by his stepbrothers and cut off from his share of the inheritance because of the circumstances of his birth. Shamed and bitter, he was determined to do anything to prove himself. Ambitious for power and prestige, he risked everything he had in order to get more. The storyteller informs us that he made a vow before God:

"If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord's, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering" (Judges 11.31).

Victorious he returns home, and his unsuspecting daughter, delighted at his return, rushes to welcome him with timbrels and dance. Realizing what he has done, Jephthah blames his daughter, "Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble to me..."(v.35). The storyteller does not pause to comment on his foolishness or to tell us how his daughter felt. Instead we read her dutiful response: "Do to me according to what has gone forth out of your mouth" (v.36).

And our tears begin to flow. But then there's more: "Grant me two months, so that I may go and wander on the mountains, and bewail my virginity, my companions and I" (v.37). We, the listeners, hold our breath, for in this action she accesses one of the ways in which women from the beginning of time have sought to make sense of the world around them: the profession of mourning women and with it the power of lament. In a culture that gave her no autonomy and in a story that gives her no name, she uses what is available to her: she uses tears and moans to give full expression to what is happening; she uses tears and moans to voice what is simply too dangerous to name aloud.

As the story comes to a close she is dead, sacrificed by her father. But to her women friends she has handed on a sacred tradition. Regularly, each year of their lives, they go to the mountains for four days to remember and to mourn (v.40), to lament because what happened to their friend could so easily happen to any one of them or to their daughters or their daughters' daughters. And so year in and year out they wept for "a name never known and a whole story that would never be told"² - a story that would forever remain the father's story, a father remembered centuries later as one of the heroes of the faith (Heb 11.32).

That all might have life in its fullness

One day in Tyre a woman broke into the circle of disciples, crying out to Jesus for healing for her daughter. To the disciples her cries were a nuisance, and even Jesus himself seeks to silence her. But she refuses to be pushed aside, and in the end she convinces Jesus to act as God's life-giving agent. She besets him on every side, challenging him to bring life into a situation of death, to use his power to transform the life of one marginalized by gender, ethnicity and superstition. In her action we recognize the activity of lament - naming the evil in her daughter's life and demanding transformation.

That all might have life in its fullness

Throughout the Bible we read story after story in which women's lives are circumscribed and marginalized, stories in which women's stories are simply part of the bigger story that has caught the imagination of the storyteller. And in their stories we hear them calling out to us, calling us to embrace their lament.

Lament calls us to continue their tradition of naming the evil in our lives and in the world in which we live, in the hope that life can be transformed, naming the evil in the hope that we might weave a new reality. Lament is the essence of wisdom, the insight to name what is happening in all its starkness, to name it and to respond with a deep, primordial cry of pain that settles for nothing short of transformation. It is also the ability to keep crying out, holding on, in the absence of any signs, to the hope that transformation will take place.

Today commemorates the place of our mothers and grandmothers within this long tradition of lament. In 1908 on the last Sunday in February, women in the United States initiated the first Women's Day.³ In 1910 at a conference of socialist women in Copenhagen, it became an international event, establishing a platform that called for, among other things, universal suffrage and maternity benefits.

Born in a time of great social turbulence and crisis, International Women's Day inherited a tradition of protest and political activism. While its history throughout the decades has been one of ups and downs, this day has continued to be a vehicle encouraging women throughout the world to name the evils in their lives and to work for the transformation of the world. In the tradition of Jephthah's daughter and her companions, it marks out that sacred time - that yearly time in the mountains - that time to remember, to name and to make a renewed commitment to work for change.

That all might have life in its fullness

This ageless cry now rings in our ears as we prepare for the 24th general council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, a cry to mark out Accra 2004 as sacred time, a time to remember, to name and to make a renewed commitment to work for transformation. The challenge is given to us to cry out against all the threats to fullness of life in our world and to continue the work of transformation.

It calls us to add our cry to the cries of children, women, and men throughout the world who suffer the oppression of a global economic order. It calls us to groan with creation as long as anyone suffers less than abundant living. Lamenting the evils in our world calls us to work for healing wherever divisions and disease exist; it calls us to commit to inclusiveness, to peace, to justice. Indeed, it calls us to nothing less than what Jesus proclaimed his coming to mean:

That all might have life in its fullness

Amen.

Notes