Scriptures: Genesis 16:1-11, Ruth 1:15-19, Luke 10:38-42

 

The Exile of Selective Solidarity

Sermon for International Women’s Day, March 6, 2005

 

By Paula Moyer

 

            Sarah’s abuse of Hagar. Ruth’s pledge of loyalty. Martha’s resentment of Mary for “choosing the good part,” and Mary running with the wolves and ditching Martha in the kitchen. If we in the 21^st century look to women in the Bible for models of how to treat each other, we get, at best, a picture of confusion and ambivalence. Solidarity, and knowing how to express it and with whom to feel it, is the challenge.  Sometimes we meet that challenge partially, with a “solidarity light” or “selective solidarity,” given ironically, not to those in need, but to those we admire.

 

The confluence of International Women’s Day and Lent and gives women a wonderful and yet disturbing opportunity to look inward: How are we treating other women? For men, the corresponding question might be, how are we treating all women, across class, race, and age?

 

            Like many other women in my generation, I first heard the call to forge ahead and only later realized that my progress depended on my loyalty to my sisters. The call first came on a hot August day in Oklahoma City, nearly 30 years ago, and I will never forget it. I was just weeks away from moving to Minnesota to go to graduate school, and my 23-year-old self was getting more excited by the second. I was living with my Grandmother while temping for the summer in the archives of a nearby bank.

 

But on that Saturday afternoon, I was a woman with a mission. An ad in the newspaper had invited women to come to a local shopping center, Penn Square, and find out more about the women’s movement. The sidewalks were lined with several booths staffed by  smiling women, and men, offering literature, buttons, and other paraphernalia bearing feminist slogans. Feeling very brave, I bought a sporting button which depicted a sheriff’s badge and said, “Support your local feminists.” I also bought a notepad that asserted, “A woman’s place is in the house – and in the senate.” Although I had been sympathetic to feminism for a few years, this was my first glimpse of the new reality I desired for myself, but had so far only heard of in the news. Here women were claiming their space in “the big world” out there. This little gathering showed me I was not alone in my desires, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

 

            As I was preparing today’s sermon, I surprised myself by seeing a brilliant, tight connection between that August day in Oklahoma City and the lyrics to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The author, Julia Ward Howe, had been an abolitionist and a suffragist for several decades. She wrote the words in a firestorm of inspiration after having visited a Union soldiers’ campground early in the Civil War. Surely, after giving so much of her life to the ending of slavery, she must have indeed felt that she was witnessing “the glory of the coming of the Lord” to see so much of the nation’s resources committed to this cause. By the third stanza, she is about to leap out of her skin. This is where God sounds forth a trumpet for which retreat is not in the repertoire, and the narrator responds: “Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer! Oh, be jubilant, my feet!” Holy buckets! The word “enthusiasm” is inadequate to capture the passion of that swift soul and those jubilant feet.

 

            Obviously, those Union soldiers had much more at stake than the feminist rally, but I think I have a glimpse what Howe must have felt: Something I want to happen is really happening. Every Sunday here at University Baptist Church, when we pray for the realm of God to come and for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, I envision that realm as a place where gender-based privilege is gone and women participate fully in all areas of work, life, love, and worship.

 

Here at UBC, with all the ways we have committed ourselves to women’s equality, I do not and should not find it a challenge to declare this vision of the realm of God. Neither would I be challenged if I were to enumerate all the ways that I’ve been short-changed by living in a male supremacist society. Those stories are easy to tell. I always come out the battle-scarred hero. No, my challenge is to make sure my vision encompasses the full spectrum of womanhood. Am I willing and able to align myself with a God who tramples out vineyards of oppression? Is my soul sufficiently swift, and are my feet truly jubilant? Can I respond to this trumpet call, and make sure that it never sounds retreat?

 

I have to admit that in the last few years, I’ve been tempted to think we’ve won. In my profession as a traveling healthcare reporter, it’s easy to claim victory prematurely. I see as many women as men in the press rooms of healthcare conferences, and I never feel slighted. However, I haven’t tried to land an anchor position on TV, and the experts that come into the press rooms are predominantly men.

 

I’ve recently asked myself, though – how do I treat other women? In my personal life, and in my dealings with women in service positions, do I treat them the way I want to be treated? Am I like Ruth, who pledges “your people will be my people,” or am I like Sara, using Hagar and then pushing her around, or like Mary, who chooses the “good part” but shows no appreciation for Martha’s labors?

 

If they gave out report cards on treating other women right, I would have several areas checked “needs to improve.” If I have a conflict with another woman, it is easier talk to someone else about her first and after that, if ever, confront her. Only in recent years have I understood that by engaging in such acts, I have broken solidarity. I have weakened the bonds of sisterhood.

 

Similarly, some of us were late to understand marital fidelity as an issue of sisterly solidarity. In the sixties and seventies, the confluence of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution was pretty confusing. Some of us were slow to understand that our liberation depended on our fulfillment of our obligations – to women we didn’t know well or at all, to women we may not like, to women with cute spouses. Many of us have simultaneously claimed to be feminists and yet become sexually involved with people in committed relationships. Our rationalizations for hurting the affected spouse are usually pretty lame: “Well, I never met her, so I don’t owe her anything.” Or: “I didn’t start it; he [or she] came to me.” I used to accept, and therefore condone, those rationalizations with my silence, but now they seem to completely breach any sense of loyalty to women as a whole. I hope, the next time I hear a friend say these things, I will care enough to confront her, and also to share what I know: the right thing and the easy thing are often in conflict.

 

In the world of work, the way we treat women in support staff positions still reveals the shadow side of our movement. How do we treat our sisters who are taking care of our kids, stripping our sheets in hotels, and ringing up our purchases at Target? Or, when we use the word “sisterhood,” do those women even come to mind? We might see some disturbing answers in a conversation I held with the janitor in the women’s bathroom at a convention center. I nonchalantly asked how her day was going, and did I get an earful! “It’s OK,” she said, “but I can’t believe how sloppy some women are. They don’t even wrap their used pads, and then I have to clean out the bin.” Somehow we think professional women who give presentations at conventions aren’t like that.

 

Five years ago when the workers struck several Twin Cities business-class hotels, the maids delivered an interesting demand, which is now part of their contract. Now, if they come in to clean a hotel room and the job entails cleaning up vomit, they get bonus pay. Obviously, they had had it “up to here” to even make that demand. Sometimes we act as if elves descend from another planet, make it all go away, and then go back where they came from. If we want to say that we are building a sisterhood, we need to give it a broad foundation. We are only as strong as our unity.

 

In the church setting, we at UBC already stand in solidarity with women in ministry and want to see more of them without regard to their age, marital status, or sexual orientation.  And that’s as it should be. But what about the many women who have, for decades, performed the support services for our churches and denominational office? Is it enough to us if their wages are comparable to those of other church office workers, who are as a class notoriously underpaid? Do we know or care what their work conditions are? Do we presume to know what they think about women’s equality?

 

In the mid-1970s, a friend of mine was working as a secretary in a large local church. Like so many of us artsy types, it was her “day job.” At the time, I had a similar job with the Minneapolis Council of Churches. The church where she worked had called one of the first woman ministers in the Twin Cities. One week, the minister was delivering a lecture on feminist theology, and my friend approached her and said she would like to attend the lecture. The minister looked at her as if a piece of furniture had started talking. “Oh, you can come,” she said, rather flustered. “But it’s pretty intellectual.” Pretty intellectual – as if the content were beyond my friend’s abilities. Her hair was on fire for days afterward. Do I presume to know the limits of my sister’s interests because of her occupation?

Why do I distance myself from the maid, the convention center janitor, the clerical worker? If I am honest, I have to say that I fear the undertow. Before my groovy career as a healthcare reporter, I was a secretary at the University of Minnesota for 10 years. It wasn’t pretty. When I see that so much needs to happen to bring up the pay, work conditions, career ladders for working-class women, I see how fragile my hold on a professional life is – as if, poof! Tomorrow it could all be gone. The true challenge is to understand that when we selectively exercise solidarity, we limit the progress any of us can make. The poet Marge Piercy writes, “Strong is what we make each other. Until we are all strong together, a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.” When we exile ourselves from working-class women, we are a weak, fragile, and fearful circle.

 

That’s the problem: selective solidarity. As Christians who believe in women’s equality, our perspective and vision offers a solution. As we ponder a realm of God where we are all one in Christ, and as we move through Lent, may we find ways to let our light, our passion for justice, shine more brilliantly. May we mark this International Women’s Day as a time of renewed alliance and solidarity with all women, including those with whom we have conflicts, those we envy, and those of us in the “pink-collar ghetto.” The closing lines of a poem by Adrienne Rich have often served as a guidepost for me. In this poem, titled “Natural Resources,” Rich describes the efforts of the women in a coal miners’ strike, and uses the mine as a reference for the sacrifices those women made in their daily lives. She concludes as follows: “My heart is moved by all I cannot save // so much has been destroyed // I have to cast my lot with those who // age after age, perversely // with no extraordinary power // reconstitute the world.”

 

As Christians and supporters of all women’s equality, may we cast our lot across class lines. May we truly work to reconstitute the world and therefore bring the realm of God closer to earth. May we have swift souls and jubilant feet, and may our commitment to this vision obliterate any chance of retreat. Amen.