Deborah Sokolove Yakushiji
May 11, 2025
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Outside, it’s Mothers’ Day. In here, it is the 4th Sunday of Easter, so this is not a Mothers’ Day sermon. It is an invitation to listen for the Word of God.
When I am serving as liturgist, I often invite us to listen for the Word of God as it comes to us in scripture. Sometimes, someone asks me why we continue to read passages that refer to situations that no longer apply or that seem to contradict what we understand as God’s desire for peace, love, and justice for all. Why, they ask, do we say “The Word of God” at the end of the Gospel reading, when one or more of the readings for the day are offensive to our current sensibilities?
Indeed, why do we read scripture aloud every Sunday? What is different about hearing these stories during worship in the midst of the congregation than when we read them silently to ourselves during our quiet times or at some other part of the day? How can we hear the Word of God in passages that confuse or offend us? Why don’t we just skip that parts that are problematic?
I’d like to begin answering these questions somewhat obliquely, by taking a look at today’s readings. As you know, this year during Lent and Easter we have been using Wilda C. Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church (Year C) to guide our scripture readings instead of the more familiar Revised Common Lectionary. In general the Women’s Lectionary follows the traditional pattern of reading from Acts during the Easter season, but chooses somewhat less familiar passages each week. For the Epistle reading, instead of the traditional pattern in which during Years A and C we read from Revelation and from 1 John in Year B, Gafney has chosen passages from a variety of books in order to privilege stories that are rarely part of the regular round of readings. Similarly, since the Gospel passages for the Easter season typically come from the Gospel according to John in all years, Gafney helps us broaden our biblical vocabulary to include passages from both John and Matthew in Year A, and reading only from John in Year B, and from Luke in Year C.
Wilda Gafney is an Episcopal priest, a Womanist scholar, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Bright Divinity School, and an important voice in contemporary Muslim, Jewish and Christian interfaith conversations. To explain her approach, Gafney asks,
What does it look like to tell the Good News through the stories of women who are often on the margins of scripture and often set up to represent bad news? How would a lectionary centering women’s stories, chosen with womanist and feminist commitments in mind, frame the presentation of the scriptures for proclamation and teaching? How is the story of God told when stories of women’s brutalization and marginalization are moved from the margins of canon and lectionary and held at the center in tension with stories of biblical heroines and heroes? More simply, what would it look like if women built a lectionary focusing on women’s stories? These were my initial questions when I sat down to draft a proposal for a women’s lectionary, a lectionary designed by women—or an individual woman—for the whole church. I do not imagine that my questions and perceptions are the questions and perceptions of all other women. But I do believe that my questions and perceptions invite women, men, and nonbinary readers and hearers to engage the scriptures in new ways, and in that engagement, they might find themselves and their questions represented. [p. xxi]
When a scripture passage is problematic, Gafney often approaches it with what I learned in seminary to call a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” Hermenuetic is just a fancy way of saying “method of interpretation.” So, a hermeneutic of suspicion is one in which we approach a text (biblical or otherwise) not like everything in it is the holy, infallible Word of God, but rather as if there might be something intrinsically problematic with it.
As an example of this approach, she notes that the reading from Acts 12:6-17 juxtaposes Simon Peter’s joy and bewilderment at his miraculous release from prison chains, with the matter-of-fact acceptance of the enslavement of a young woman named Rhoda in the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark. Mary is a free woman of means, the head of a household and the apparent leader of a group of Jesus followers. Various translators refer to Rhoda as a maid, a servant, an attendant, or even just a young woman or a girl. However, given the time and place of the story, as well as other uses of the Greek term παιδίσκης/paidiskes elsewhere both within scripture and other sources, it is clear that Rhoda was an enslaved person who did as she was told by members of the household and their guests. As an indication of her low status, the writer of Acts tells us that other believers who were gathered in Mary’s house for prayer made fun of her, calling her “idiot” or “fool” and refusing to believe her when she said that Peter was at the door. As Gafney points out in her preaching notes, we, the readers, are expected to join in this misogynist “fun” even as we are invited to join in celebrating Peter’s freedom.
As if to underscore the irony of proclaiming freedom in Christ while not immediately condemning the practice of slave-holding among early Christians, Gafney selected the second reading from the short letter from Paul to his friend [Philemon 1:1-2, 7-16]. The primary subject of the letter is Onesimus, an enslaved person who has run away from Philemon and is currently living with Paul, who is himself under house arrest. Although Paul claims Onesimus as a son, due to his having been baptized by Paul, he also encourages him to return to the man who claims him as a slave. As I am sure you all know, passages like this were used by Christian proponents of slavery in the US and elsewhere to defend buying and selling human beings, even though this practice clearly violated the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. In these stories about the earliest Christians, as well as for some Christians today, freedom for some does not trickle down into freedom for all.
Finally, in contrast to the first two readings, Gafney’s choice of the Gospel passage from Luke 13:10-17 confronts us with Jesus’s radical rejection of hierarchy, misogyny, and discrimination against people with disabilities. When Jesus is attacked for doing healing work on the sabbath, his response is to question the rules that he is accused of violating. Wasn’t the sabbath supposed to be an opportunity for everyone to have the same privileges of rest, relaxation, and freedom? If even the animals were to be released to find food and water on the sabbath, why was it wrong, Jesus asked, to release the woman from her bondage to pain and suffering on that day? By healing her on a day when such activity was forbidden, Jesus was actively resisting rules that favored the powerful, inviting them, and us, into what we might now name as the diverse, equitable, and inclusive realm of the Holy.
By bringing these three passages into conversation with one another, Gafney has given us a model of how to listen for the Word of God in problematic passages of scripture. When we listen together, we may hear things in one another’s presence that we just slid over on our own. We may laugh or gasp together at words or ideas that seemed innocuous or overly familiar when reading alone. Rather than simply ignoring the parts of the biblical record that today seem immoral, unjust, or downright cruel, we can acknowledge the whole truth of our past and use that knowledge to move forward into a more just, merciful, and inclusive future.
I hope that you have noticed a certain similarity between my advocating for continuing to read both the parts of scripture that make us uncomfortable and the ones that comfort us, and the arguments that are currently being made in the political realm for removing any discussion of problems in our nation’s past from our schoolrooms, libraries, newspapers, and government websites. It seems to me that we should not whitewash our religious history any more than we should our national history. Rather, when a problematic scripture comes up in the lectionary, I hope that the preacher for the day tackles it head-on, helping all of us wrestle with the uglier parts of our past as well as celebrating the unfolding mystery of the Good News that keeps us coming back, Sunday after Sunday.
I hope, also, that you have noticed my deliberate use of some words and phrases with political overtones this morning. You may recall that in the days around the election last fall, I admonished people not to turn this lectern into a place for political advocacy and discussion. I asked for Sunday mornings to be a time when we could focus on other things, for our gatherings for worship to be a place of refuge from the ugliness of the hatred and anger that filled the news, to be a source of comfort where everyone might be welcome, whatever their political views.
Now, however, given the ominous acts of active persecution of people who the administration calls “criminals” without benefit of due process, the willful destruction of governmental agencies that provide safety nets for people in need both here and in many other countries as well providing important information and protection against any number of social and physical disasters, the defiance of court orders and constitutional mandates, I confess that I was wrong, and I ask your forgiveness.
A long time ago, Emily Gilbert used to urge us to give up our tax-exempt status so that we could not be economically pressured to be silent on important matters. At the time, I thought that Emily was worrying needlessly. Now, I think she had a point.
In this new world, some of us are more vulnerable than others, but I think that we need to acknowledge that all of us at Seekers are already in at least some amount of danger. When we put the words “justice” and “inclusiveness” on our front windows, post our sermons on the internet for the whole world to read, and stand outside the building on Friday afternoons with signs proclaiming that Black and Brown lives matter, we make ourselves targets for those who disagree and have the power to make our lives, not just the lives of so many other people, much more difficult.
Now, nowhere is safe or comfortable. Even when we want to focus on other things, there comes a point in pretty much every conversation when we turn to the governmental abuses of power, the official indecencies, the doubling-down on lies and misinformation, the refusal to observe even the small courtesies that make hard lives more bearable. It seems to me that it is our duty as followers of Jesus to do what we can to lift one another’s hearts, to make things better—more joyous, more beautiful, more peaceful, more wonderful—not only for those in greatest need, but for ourselves and for one another.
Last weekend at Silent Retreat, Sandra began by saying, “The Holy One you seek is in the people around you, and in the land, plants, and animals that surround you.” She invited us to find wonder and awe in the daily obligations that we have towards ourselves, one another, and the world outside our doors. Perhaps the most important of those obligations for us as Christians is to speak the whole truth—or at least as much of it as we ourselves can stand in any given moment—as we live out the good news of God’s love for all of God’s creatures.
When we read the difficult parts of scripture aloud together, it helps us to remember that the true, inspired Word of God is not the words found in those ancient writings, but Christ. When we listen for the Word of God in scripture, God can speak to us through the stories of our bumbling, ignorant, misogynistic, visionary, prophetic, faithful ancestors so that we can hear them, and ourselves, with love, forgiveness, and grace.
We at Seekers believe that the Word of God comes to each of us, and we share what we have heard so that we can all follow Jesus into the diverse, equitable, and inclusive realm of the Holy One, where everyone is welcome in every eternal now. Happy Mothers’ Day. Amen.
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