"Cultures in which female circumcision is common are strongly patriarchal and pronatalist. Women in these traditional cultures are believed to be weak and incapable of controlling their sexual urges. They are allowed little contact with men outside their families and are expected to hide their bodies from public view. Their social roles are circumscribed to child care and domestic functions....They are socialized by their mothers to believe that removal of external female genitalia is a religious obligation that promotes purity, cleanliness, and fertility....Their identities as desirable women depend on the submission of their physical bodies to the dictates of social norms. The custom embodies their inferior status."This comes from an essay, "Social Bodies: Tightening the Bonds of Beauty," by Deborah A. Sullivan, who is described as a professor of sociology at Arizona State University, so I assume the information is accurate enough. What caught my eye, of course, is the sentence in bold type. Precisely the opposite assumption of the one we make in the West, where there is even a question as to why women have orgasms (the subtext of the question being: why do women need to enjoy sex, since men have the stronger sexual urges anyway?) And, interestingly, just another way human beings establish identities (boundaries, more properly) for others, based on sexuality.
Homosexuals are another case in point. We cannot define homosexuality without puting sexual practice at the center of their identity. When we "define" male-female bonding (sexually, emotionally, socially, spiritually), we don't automatically define it in terms of sexual coupling. To the extent we do, we realize that is adolescent, and we soon move past it. We don't look at married couples and imagine their sexual practices alone. We take them as a couple, and consider the complexity of their lives. I never imagine another couple, whether old friends or mere acquaintances, in terms of what happens in their bedroom. But a gay or lesbian couple? It's the only topic on everyone's mind, even if it is the topic we dare not name. What do they do, how do they do it? This is the issue with the gay priests in the Episcopal church. Gene Robinson is apparently another step up the controversy ladder because he is not celibate. Which means, of course, we're all thinking of him in terms of what he does in the bedroom, not the bishopric.
Curiouser and curiouser...
In Paul's day (and Jesus'), people were divided by ethnos, a word which commonly carried a connotion of religious and moral inferiority among the Jews (as in Matthew 6). It's not coincidence the word is closely related to ethos: habits; laws; the customs of the fathers. People in first century Palestine, brought together under the Pax Romana, lived cheek by jowl with various and sundry cultures, a mix not uncommon in Europe and the Middle East today, but still so odd in America we call it "multiculturalism." It didn't serve to break down differences so much as to reinforce them, as a way of maintaining identity. Ethos and ethnos, then, come to define us. What habits and customs we approve determines who we accept as our "own." So when Paul said: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus," (Galatians 3:28), it was a radical statement indeed. Now our definition is to be in God: not in ethos, or ethnos, nor in sex or human law.
When the woman comes to anoint Jesus in Luke 7, it's easier now to see why she was considered a whore. Her sexual advances were on display for the entire roomful of men. To their understanding, she was doing exactly what women do: unable to control her sexual appetites, she was instead parading them. But Jesus chose to define her in God, and took what she offered as an act of devotion. It is not the act that is always the standard of definition: it is our arbitrary standards. It is where we choose to put the boundaries. And God is always pushing those boundaries around. From the Psalm this morning, for example:
50:7 "Hear, O my people, and I will speak, O Israel, I will testify against you. I am God, your God.
50:8 Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you; your burnt offerings are continually before me.
50:9 I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds.
50:10 For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.
50:11 I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine.
50:12 "If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine.
50:13 Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?
50:14 Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High.
50:15 Call on me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me."
Part of the re-writing of the requirements of the law conducted by the Exilic prophets. Consider, for example, the reading from Hosea, also for this morning:
5:15 I will return again to my place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face. In their distress they will beg my favor:
6:1 "Come, let us return to the Lord; for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind us up.
6:2 After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.
6:3 Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord; his appearing is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth."
6:4 What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early.
6:5 Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets, I have killed them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light.
6:6 For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
The Exile was the shattering of the boundaries for Israel. When Ezekiel saw the spirit of God leave the temple and mount a throne-chariot with four faces, able to go any direction at once and at will, it marked as dramatic a change in human history as the call of Abraham (according to Thomas Cahill, one of the "Hinges of History") or the Renaissance of Greco-Roman culture, or the Enlightenment itself. Until that vision, gods had always been tied to location. Even the God of Abraham called Israel to a land that was given to them. The logical assumption was that God was tied to that land. It was with Ezekiel's vision that God finally became the God of all Creation, in fact as well as in profession. Clearly this was a long time in coming, but we tend to retroject beliefs on earlier times, and this belief in God's transcendence took another few centuries and the final destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. to become an accepted doctrine. But Ezekiel's vision gave Israel reason to believe they could "sing the Lord's song in a foreign land."
Perhaps we need the boundaries to be shattered again.
No comments:
Post a Comment