[1] Last summer my home church was shaken out of its
life-as-normal routine when one of its church council members was
arrested for sexually abusing both his daughter and his
niece. The following weeks were particularly fraught for the
pastor, as he tried to minister to both the abuser and the
victims. His difficulties were perhaps best exemplified on
the day of the preliminary hearing when both parties were in the
courtroom and he had to choose where and with whom he would
sit. But alongside pastoral protocol issues, my pastor also
had to contend with a deeper angst. The daughter had been his
family's babysitter for years. And on all those chauffering
trips between his house and hers, she had never once alluded to the
abuse. Granted the many factors that conspire to enforce the
silencing of childhood sexual abuse, my pastor still agonized over
what he might have done differently, or if there was something he
could have said, that might have ended the abuse sooner. As
it was, the abuser spent several months in jail and lost his job,
the wife divorced him and moved back to live with her family, and
the daughter's own marriage is now in trouble. They have all
moved away from town. And no one in the church asks after
them anymore.
[2] Lest you think my home church is an atypical congregation,
let me assure you that it is not. It matches almost perfectly
the "average" profile of an ELCA congregation: it's situated
in a small town in a semi-rural area; it was founded about 100
years ago by European immigrants; average Sunday attendance is
about 100; total membership is about 450; the vast majority of its
members are white; and most have at least a high school
diploma.[1] Presumably my
church is "average" in other ways, too, by which I mean the life
experiences of its members are in tune with the life experiences of
Americans more generally in this time and place. To
wit: 1) one in three to one in five girls are physically
sexually abused by the age of eighteen, with one in six girls
victims of abusive incestuous contact;[2] 2) one in eleven to
one in sixteen boys are physically sexually abused by the age of
eighteen;[3] and 3) battering-whether
emotional, psychological, or physical-has risen to epidemic
proportions (indeed, battering is the most common and least
reported crime in America today[4]); and
even though our society is doing better in recognizing and
responding to instances of women being abused, the possibility of
husbands or boyfriends being abused by their female significant
others is still scarcely acknowledged-even though some authorities
think the numbers of women who batter are actually close to the
numbers of men who batter.[5]
[3] Our panel was asked to address the question: "What sort
of claim does the Bible have today?" But, given what I've
said above, it seems to me that the more urgent question is not
what sort of claim does the Bible have on us today, but
rather, what sort of claim can or should the
Bible have on us today? Are there resources in the Bible that
can help in shaping a response to the agonizing questioning done by
my pastor a year ago? Are there elements in it that can
provoke us into sharing his questioning, so that we all begin to
more centrally ask ourselves: What might we do differently
that would more readily acknowledge the brokenness that is at the
center of so many of the lives of our parishioners?
[4] I believe the answer to these questions is "yes," though I
came to that conclusion only very indirectly, and mostly through
the help of a conversation with a former pastor. He told me
of several instances when church members had come forward and
shared with him deeply painful issues from their own
lives: one admitted to alcoholism, another talked about being
neglected by her husband, a third disclosed that she had been
sexually abused for ten years by her father while growing up,
another woman informed him that her husband was battering
her. Each time such sharing occurred, these persons always
prefaced their disclosures by saying, "You said something in the
sermon on Sunday that made me feel I could trust you with this
information, that you would understand." As it turned out,
his sermons on those Sundays were always thematically centered on
sanctification-not that this pastor ever actually used that
word! Rather, he spoke of pilgrimage: Christians should
think of themselves as on a journey in which the goal was a gradual
maturing into the glory of Christ. But in conveying this
lesson, this pastor also named many of the negative cultural forces
in our society-such as violence, obsessive materialism, and the
desire for power and control over others-that can hinder our
Christian growth. And it was the naming of these latter
forces that seemed to open the door to some persons sharing with
their pastor a dark truth about their personal, private lives.
[5] This pastor's experience has two elements I find suggestive:
1) sanctification as a key theological datum helping to elicit an
active response from hurting parishioners; and 2) the sermon's
importance in authorizing what his parishioners might, or might
not, do, say, or think. Building on these elements, let me
suggest the potential role the Bible could have in helping the
members of our churches speak the truth about some of the hidden
pain in their lives so that the gospel message of love,
truth, and freedom could be more powerfully unleashed. But it
depends on opening out our reading of the Bible-especially as it
happens in our churches-beyond both a Lutheran hermeneutic and the
revised common lectionary.
[6] Although I am not a professional theologian, my experience
as a layperson in the Lutheran church is that one of the key
features-if not the most key feature-of a Lutheran hermeneutic is
our focus on justification. We are fond of talking about what
God has done-not on what we humans have done or are doing
now. Although I readily affirm that the Lutheran stress on
God's free gift of grace is one of the paramount gifts that
Lutherans give to the Church catholic, can there not also be a
place in our churches for talk about sanctification, for talk, that
is, of Christian character formation, for the ongoing pilgrimage
journey we make towards living out that gift of grace? And
can that talk not also make a place for the full-truths of our
life-situations-even if those truths include painful personal
elements, as well as the toxic aspects of our culture that so often
further aid and abet the continuance of personal pain?
[7] Here I think we would also be immensely helped if we
expanded our reading of the Bible beyond the confines of the
Revised Common Lectionary. In particular, we need to draw on
many of the rich and complex-if also sometimes difficult and
challenging-narratives in the Old Testament. For instance, do
we, as members of the body of Christ but also very real human
beings, struggle with difficult, even painful or abusive,
relationships with our fathers? The stories of Abraham and
Isaac, Jephthah and his daughter, and David and his children
reflect some of these same difficulties. Are there instances
where one spouse ignores, even neglects, another? The story
of the relationship between David and Michal refers to the same
sort of pain. What about rape? Dinah's story, in
Genesis 34, is a scriptural witness of that sort of violent
abuse. What about sexual violence within a family? The
story of Tamar, raped by her half-brother Amnon, could easily be
the story of the very many sexually abused young women today.
[8] Neglect, abuse, sexual assault-these are realities that
ground the lives of many people today. How gratifying, and
perhaps reassuring, it would be for many to know that God's Word
sees and stands with the hard and painful pieces of their
lives. If we could back up and begin with an acknowledgement
of the brokenness that is a part of so many of us, how much more
meaningful and richer would be our reception of the good news of
the gospel.
[9] But in order for that to happen we need to stop putting our
reading of the Bible into a straightjacket. And, I would
contend, there is a danger that a Lutheran hermeneutic, operating
in conjunction with the lectionary, does that-at least if
we only read the lectionary parts of the Bible
and only by means of the prism of the Lutheran
hermeneutic. We need to encourage our pastors to at least
occasionally preach outside of the bounds of the lectionary.
We need to encourage them-and us-to take on the challenge of
preaching and teaching the "difficult" texts. We need to
break free of the lectionary/Lutheran hermeneutic straightjacket-or
at least loosen it up, as it were!-so that the gospel message of
truth, love, and freedom can be made more accessible to all of
us.
Talk given at the 2003 ELCA Convocation of Teaching Theologians
(August 17, 2003, Milwaukee, WI)
© 2003, Karla G. Bohmbach
© May 2004
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 4, Issue 5
[1] Comparable averages for the ELCA as
a whole were derived from "The Context for Mission and Ministry in
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America," a collation of a
number of recent surveys put out by the ELCA's Department for
Research and Evaluation. Among the statistics reported by
this document are the following: 1) the congregational setting in
which the largest number of baptized members lives is the small
town of less than 10,000 persons; 2) the first golden era of
membership growth in the ELCA (and its predecessor bodies) occurred
at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, with
growth at this time due mostly to immigration from Germany and
Scandinavia; 3) the majority of ELCA congregations (5,738) have
less than 350 baptized members; 4) non-whites make up only about
2.5 percent of the total ELCA membership; 5) 98 percent of ELCA
worship attenders were born in the United States and 98 percent say
English is their first language; 6) 41% of ELCA worship attenders
have been attending the same congregation for more than 20 years;
and 7) 47% of the worship attenders have a high school diploma or
less. See Kenneth W. Inskeep, "The
Context for Mission and Ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church
in America," 12 May 2003. Accessed 6 August 2003.
[2] Pamela Cooper-White, The Cry of
Tamar: Violence Against Women and the Church's Response
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 152. Another, but
similar, set of statistics can be found in The Boston Women's
Health Book Collective, The New Our Bodies, Ourselves (New
York: A Touchstone Book, 1992), p. 131. It reports that one
in three American women is sexually assaulted during her lifetime,
and one-fifth to one-half of American women were sexually abused as
children, most of them by an older male relative.
[3] Cooper-White, p. 152.
[4] The Boston Women's Health Book
Collective, p. 137.
[5] For the battering of men by women,
see Susan Brewster, To be an Anchor in the Storm (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1997). Brewster argues that the
frequency of men being battered by women approaches that of women
being battered by men, but, because of cultural forces, remains
much more hidden.