Preach Your Witness

“How shall we sing God’s song in a foreign land? How shall we sing God’s song on alien soil? As people of faith we wrestle with this question as we attempt to be faithful witnesses in the midst of the issues of our day, the issues that often make us feel and live as though we are in a strange land.

A land that is hostile and forbidding. A land that is deadly. A land in which the prejudices of a few can become the law of the land, a land in which the dignity of all persons has conditions put on it so that some of us need not apply for justice or mercy.

How is it in this strange land you and I are called to sing God’s song in the midst of the world’s evils and hatreds and prejudices and violence? Can we sing this song by becoming disillusioned and cynical? Can we sing this song by engaging in ritualistic dances? Can we sing this song by escaping into a simple place in time by seeking easy answers?

 You have to know where you want to be, you have to live your life standing on the promises, you must live in a radical hope that never excepts someone else’s definition of wholeness particularly if they are the only ones benefitting from it. She believed that you live your story and sing your song and remain steadfast in your faith and preach your witness and God will take care of the rest.”

Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes

 

Over the weekend, I read an article in The New York Times, From the Streets to the ‘World’s Best Mom,’ on the subject of sex trafficking. The woman whom the article was written about is in recovery from drug abuse and prostitution and she lives here in Nashville. The article begins with the woman that is being interviewed referencing that her mother, who was an addict, had taught her about oral sex when she was six years old. The woman being interviewed said she ran away from home at age fourteen and this was when she started working as a prostitute for a pimp. She said, “that she would be dead by now if it weren’t for a remarkable initiative by the Rev. Becca Stevens, the Episcopal priest at Vanderbilt University here, to help women escape trafficking and prostitution.” Rev. Stevens founded a residential rehabilitation program for women, Magdalene and Thistle Farms, that were or are suffering from drug abuse and have a history of prostitution. The article goes on to say, “Rev. Stevens herself had been abused as a girl — by a family friend in her church, beginning when she was 6 years old — and she shared with so many trafficked women the feelings of vulnerability, injustice and anger that go with having been molested.”  “Sex trafficking is one of the most severe human rights violations in America today. In some cases, it amounts to a modern form of slavery. One reason we as a society don’t try harder to uproot it is that it seems hopeless.”

In plenty good room, Marcia Y. Riggs explores sexual-gender ethics. She analyzes the stories of men and women as gender social groups within the church as a community or social institution.(10) Riggs states, “It is my contention, however, that when African American women and men are in complicity with sexual-gender injustice in the church, the church betrays its moral vision and corrupts both its internal moral life and its witness in the larger society.”(97)  Within the collection of writings, Riggs introduces the case of Anita Hill and Clearance Thomas. She explains how it is “a significant, public example of how African American sexual-gender relations can do the social reproductive work of sustaining white racist-patriarchal-capitalism while perpetrating sexual-gender oppressive ideas within the African American community is the case of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas.”(54) Riggs cited examples of words and phrases that Thomas used in his case against Hill that brought the focus back to race instead of the sexual harassment, that he was being accused of. “Here was the crux of the matter for African Americans: A black woman betrayed the race by publicly accusing a black man of sexual impropriety. In a white racist society, even if Thomas had done what Hill said, Hill should not have spoken of it in mixed racial company.” (59)

If Hill were to have remained silent about her experience with Thomas then her silence would have condoned the potential injustice that had been acted upon her. Where then, is a safe and appropriate place for African American women to tell their stories, use voices of integrity without feeling like they are contributing to white oppression? So, not only are African American women being socially oppressed by white people but then they are also oppressed with the pressure to be silent so as to protect their race from further scrutiny.  

Going back to plenty good room, Riggs concludes that, “although there are traditional or status-quo sexual-gender roles deriving from the sexual gender morality, these roles can be changed because (1) the roles are learned – historically specific and relative and (2) persons are moral beings (have the capacity to be intentional) who can challenge and resist traditional roles and expectations. Transforming the sexual-gender relations of African American women and men in the church will thus be accomplished through moral education that effects counter socialization.”(100)

A ministry that I would like to learn more about is that of women’s prison ministry. In the article, I referenced at the beginning of this reflection, from the New York Times, the woman that was interviewed, having graduated her recovery program is now dedicating some of her time to prison ministry. In the article, she talks about meeting a teenage prostitute in prison, who claims, that it was visits from this woman that gave her the hope and motivation to think about a life outside of prostitution.

 

Works Cited:

Rev. Dr. Emilie Townes, Songs of Zion, St Augustine’s Chapel, October 13, 2013.

Nicholas Kristof, “From the Streets to the ‘World’s Best Mom,’” New York Times, October 12, 2013.

Marcia Y. Riggs, plenty good room, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2003.