Proclaim Freedom

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. 

Decades ago, at our previous church, a new parish priest invited the congregation to join him in memorizing the passage above, Luke 4:18-19.

It was his way of announcing that our role, as Christains, was to follow Christ in enacting that anointing: proclaiming good news to the poor and freedom for prisoners, aiding in recovery of sight, actively, courageously, setting the oppressed free.

Freedom is mentioned twice there: freedom for prisoner. Freedom for the oppressed.

As we give thanks this Memorial Day weekend for those who have sacrificed to further the cause of freedom, I find myself wondering: what does it mean, now, today, to proclaim freedom for prisoners, to set the oppressed free?

During our travels to Greece, we spent a day in Corinth, one of the wealthiest commercial cities during the time of Christ.

We visited the the diolkos,  the paved passageway that allowed a five mile portage of ships across the Isthmian strait from the Aegean to Ionian Sea, and we stopped by the ruins at Kenchreai , the Corinthian port that served the trade routes heading west to Rome and other European ports.

Periodic earthquakes (most recently in 1858) prompted a population shift to an area several miles northeast of the original city, allowing more extensive archaeological investigation of ancient site than in cities like Thessaloniki, or even Athens, where new building has continually taken place on top of old.

Our group walked through the agora, often translated “marketplace” in the New Testament but, as our guide Costos Tsevas explained, more accurately “assembly” or “gathering place,” the center of political, philosophical, civil discourse. 

We gathered on the bema, the stone platform where citizens came to receive awards, face punishment, or take their allotted three minutes to present their point of view.

We saw the broken stone pillar, strangely worn and etched, reputed to be the post where prisoners, including the Apostle Paul, were beaten.

And we stared up at the Acrocorinth, the imposing castle high on the monolithic rock where the wealthy of the city lived in the shadow of the temple of Aphrodite. 

Ancient Corinth and Acrocorinth

Costos described the role of the pornai and heterais who plied their trade through the city streets, offering mystical union with the goddess through sexual encounter, and wearily carrying their profits up the steep road to the Acrocorinth.

The pornai were among the lowest tier of slaves, sent out by their owners to collect what they could of the currency flowing through the city. The heterai were more elite sex workers, in Corinth most often owned by the temple of Aprhrodite. Around 2 BC, an observer, Strabo, wrote: 

 “The temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it employed more than a thousand hetairas, whom both men and women had given to the goddess. Many people visited the town on account of them, and thus these hetairas contributed to the riches of the town: for the ship captains frivolously spent their money there, hence the saying: ‘The voyage to Corinth is not for every man’. 

Standing among the rocky ruins of Corinth, I could feel the weight of oppression: worship of a goddess who ensnared both men and women, physical enslavement enforced through force, sex used to further commerce, a sharp divide between wealthy owners and the miserable underclass, living only to serve the whim of the rich.

Paul, and those who joined him, proclaimed freedom: freedom from bondage to gods and goddesses who offered nothing and demanded constant sacrifice of wealth, wine, animals, captives, slaves, maybe even children (as when King Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia).

Freedom, as well, from a culture that used sex as currency and considered trade a value far higher than compassion or human dignity.

Freedom from participation in evil and the resulting condemnation.

Freedom from unrestrained self-indulgence.

Freedom for slaves?

Paul didn’t advocate immediate freeing of every slave, an impossibility in an economy where more than half the population was held in slavery and a large percent of non-slaves lived on the edge of starvation. He did, though, hold up a vision in which slave and free would be treated as equal, where generosity and kindness took priority over profit. In the short book of Philemon, he asked that the runaway slave Onesimus be treated as his own son, embraced as slave-owner Philemon’s brother, be given whatever privilege or hospitality Paul himself would receive. 

Costos led our group to an inscription set in stone near the ancient theater of Corinth:

"Erastus in return for his aedileship laid the pavement at his own expense.” 

The tradition was for wealthy citizens in prominent political positions to underwrite capital improvements during their time in office. This Erastus, as an “aedile,” would have been responsible for public buildings, festivals, and enforcement of public order, and the pavement would have been evidence of his time in office, his commitment to Corinth, as well as of his wealth.

Was he the same Erastus mentioned by Paul as a city treasurer (Romans 16:23), then coworker in the early church? (Actrs 19:22, 2 Timoty 4:20).  Costos quietly pointed out that if some of the church in Corinth were former temple prostitutes, now set free to pursue a new life, someone must have provided the funds to free them. Erastus, as a prominent citizen, would be a likely candidate to make that happen.

Certainly, the evidence trail on that possibility iscontested, yet it raises the question: in a society so deeply divided, with wealthy merchants living like kings, and others crowded into hovels, this good news Paul proclaimed would demand a radical shift on the part of the wealthy: to open their homes to the poor and enslaved, to sit beside those they had been trained to consider “andrapodon,” “one with the feet of a man,” as opposed to “tetrapodon” or "quadruped", the term used to designate animal livestock.

In his letters to the Corinthians, Paul made clear that a genuine understanding of the new "way" Jesus offered would require followers of Christ to become servants of each other, putting the needs of others first, choosing to do what would ensure the health and growth of the weakest, poorest member. Paul repeatedly asked the Corinthians to consider themselves slaves to each other: even to the least shonored. The one of no reputation.

As I track through the history of the church and of slavery, it seems to me that one gauge of the church’s health and witness is it’s willingness to embrace the cause of the slave and to stand against whatabolitionist William Wilberforce called “the mortal disease of all political communities”: the innate self-centeredness “that clouds our moral vision and blunts our moral sensitivity.”    

This week’s Time magazine (May 26, 2014) carries an article titled “Bring Back All Girls: What the 276 Girls Abducted from a Nigerian School Tell Us about Human Trafficking.”

What the article tells us: nearly 30 million people worldwide are exploited and treated like property.

4.5 million of those are subject to sexual exploitation.

A thriving market in prostitution and forced marriage enjoys enormous profits from the misery of uneducated, unprotected girls.

Human trafficking is now the second largest global criminal activity, second only to the drug trade.

I’ve written before about modern day slavery: Chocolate Dreams, Freedom is Indivisible, Seeking Justice. 

And yes, I buy fair trade chocolate, sign petitions, look for ways to support a more equitable economy.

But I’m haunted by a scene I watched in a rest stop outside New York City one evening. I was traveling home on I-95, the road that connects the northeastern cities, and saw a young teen girl and woman in the rest room. 

Something didn’t seem right: the girl’s clothes not quite what a girl traveling with her family would wear on a Saturday night, the woman watching a little too closely. As I headed out toward my parked car, they exited in the opposite direction, toward the lines and lines of trucks.

Sometimes we see but don’t see.

Know but choose not to know.

Double-guess ourselves.

Explain it away.

The Polaris Project, a national non-profit committed to ending human trafficking in the United States, offers a 24-7 hotline, for anonymous tips, calls for help, questions about how to spot traffickers.

Polaris Project Hotline Map

I’ve put the number on my cell phone: 1-888-373-7888.

The project publishes an interactive map showing trafficking hotspots.

That rest area?

In the heart of the biggest US hotspot.

It’s easy to grieve the slavery of Corinth, lament the evil of the cross-Atlantic slave trade.

Harder to acknowledge that more people are in slavery today that at any previous time in history. Some not far from my home, along the routes I travel.

Jesus said “proclaim freedom.”

I still wonder: How?

for more about the US hotline and anti-trafficking networks 

for international trafficking information 

This is the third in a series, Texts in Context, revisiting two weeks spent in Greece.
Earlier posts: 

Texts in Context: Yassas!

Mysteries

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.  

Freedom is Indivisible

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal...”

Reading through the Declaration of Sentiments, signed in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, by 68 women and 32 men, I find myself wondering why I never encountered that document in any history class, or heard it mentioned, even once, in connection to its obvious model, the Declaration of Independence.

Or why I never heard, until very recently, of the Justice Bell, funded a century ago by Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger here in Chester County as a way to call attention to the battle for women's suffrage. She commissioned a duplicate of the Liberty Bell, with an inscription of "Establish Justice", and arranged for a three month tour around Pennsylvania in the summer of 1915..

I find myself wondering how the men of Philadelphia, living in the shadow of Independence Hall, challenged by the sight of that Justice Bell, could vote, by overwhelming majority, against the 1915 Pennsylvania Referendum on Women’s Suffrage.

And I marvel at those who, looking back, find suffragettes amusing, or wish, even now, that women would “know their place”.

Last week I posted an article "what do teenage girls need.” The weeks before I wrote about time spent with women who have encouraged and challenged me, or spurred me on in important ways.

Girl in well - Water Mission International

But in the back of my mind is a knowledge of other women, other girls: girls who will never learn to read. Women who will never enjoy a weekend away with friends. Millions who live on less than a dollar a day, who walk miles in search of water, who spend their days in fear of violence, disease,

starvation. What do those girls need? Who encourages those women to be all they were made to be?

For a century and a half, the men who fought for their own right to vote, the men who enjoyed that right and the attendant rights of employment, property, assembly, self-direction, gave little thought to the women around them who had no opportunity to share in those rights.I object, even now, to their blindness. And to the blindness of any group that will fight or advocate for rights for themselves they refuse to grant to others.

But what of my own blindness?

Nelson Mandela, hero of the South African anti-apartheid movement, wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom: 

“Freedom is indivisible . . .  To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” 

Freedom is indivisible. As Mandela explained, 

“the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me.” 

But carry this a step further, as Martin Luther King did in his letter from Birmingham jail:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” 

Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, called violence against women, "perhaps the most shameful human rights violation. And it is perhaps the most pervasive. It knows no boundaries of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot claim to be making real progress towards equality, development, and peace.” 

According to Amnesty International:

Gender-based violence stems from the failure of governments and societies to recognize the human rights of women. It is rooted in a global culture of discrimination which denies women equal rights with men and which legitimizes the appropriation of women's bodies for individual gratification or political ends. Everyday, all over the world, women face gender-specific persecution including genital mutilation, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, and domestic violence. At least one out of every three women worldwide has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

Violence against women feeds off discrimination and serves to reinforce it. When women are abused in custody, raped by armed forces as "spoils of war," or terrorized by violence in the home, unequal power relations between men and women are both manifested and enforced.  

What a staggering statistic - according to many observers, a conservative estimate: At least one in three women worldwide has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused. 30 percent have experienced physical violence or sexual abuse by a partner. And more than 600 million women live in countries where domestic violence is not considered a crime.

The tragic pattern of violence against women is part of a larger story of dependence and poverty that deprives women of freedom and limits healthy choices:

Of all the primary-school age girls globally, 20 percent are not in school.

One in every six adults still cannot read or write; two thirds of those are women.

End Child Marriage

One in seven girls in the developing world is married before turning 15; in low and middle-income countries, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19.

Of the 1.5 billion people worldwide who live on less than 1 dollar a day, 70 percent are female.

Women are 80% of all refugees and displaced persons.

Women and children constitute 80% of trafficking victims globally. 98% of those trafficked for sexual purposes are female.

The list could go on: low wages, lack of representation in governing bodies, inequitable property rights and inheritance laws.

So much of what I take for granted is unavailable, even unimaginable, to millions of women around the world.

So what can I do about any of this?

Why even think about it?

Friends tell me I think too much. Which may be true.

But if freedom is indivisible, if it’s true that injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere, if I'm called to love my neighbor as myself, even the neighbor I can’t see, can’t hear – what then?

I know lots of people who choose to sponsor a child through an organization like World Vision  or Compassion. $35 or $38 dollars a month, and one child will receive school fees and supplies, clothes, minimal health care, supplemental food. So sponsor a girl and make a difference. Done! 

But some might say that model is cumbersome and expensive, designed more to massage the conscience of the donor than provide real change where change is needed. According to Sri Lankan Vinoth Ramachandra,  

“It has little to do with real costs on the ground. It’s also a very expensive process to manage, which means a large fraction of the money raised is swallowed up in the bureaucracy of the organization.” 

Some large international ministries are turning attention to education and training for women and girls. World Vison now invites gift donations for girls and women. Tearfund  and Oxfam don’t promote targeted donations, but are actively involved in empowering and educating women and working toward the welfare and rights of women and girls.

Class in India, Compassion Beyond Borders

I’m intrigued by the model of Compassion Beyond Borders, a small organization with very low overhead. The board raises its own administrative costs  and works with grass-roots organizations to educate girls in regions where few girls go to school, including parts of Guatemala, Mexico, Uganda, Kenya, and India.

So, yes, there are ways to directly impact and help educate and encourage women and girls.

But beyond that: is it possible to advocate for change in places where change is needed?

There are organizations at work in human trafficking: International Justice Mission works around the world to find and rescue women held against their will, and to strengthen legal supports for women’s rights.

But on a larger level?

Maybe a start is to look around.

To give thanks for the freedoms I enjoy, to give thanks for the women and men who believed women were created equal and were willing to advocate for women’s rights.

And to become more informed about those who are still living under the weight of oppressive inequality, and more informed about avenues to speak on their behalf.

The prophet Isaiah challenged God's people:

Learn to do right; seek justice.
    Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
    plead the case of the widow.
                (Isaiah 1:17)

I don’t know how to do any of that, but as Isaiah said, I can “learn to do right.” I welcome your insights, assistance, and friendship along the way.

An Alternative Narrative

In the liturgical year of our secular religion, last Sunday was a high feast day, maybe the highest.

The Superbowl was the largest mass media event of the year, and the biggest social media event ever, generating over 30 million public tweets. Thirty second ads cost  $3.8 million each, and over 108 million people tuned in to watch the game, the ads, and the halftime show.

A new movement, MissRepresentation’s #NotBuyingIt, called attention to the extent that Superbowl ads objectify women and use women’s bodies in ways that demean and dehumanize women. 

Anti trafficking groups called attention to the sex trafficking that attends the Superbowl, which has been called  "the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States." 

Other groups discussed additional forms of slavery represented by the Superbowl: in the cheaply produced commemorative jerseys, the food, the materials used to produce our large-screen tvs. 

The Superbowl was both celebration and enactment of our prevailing religion of consumption, competition, violence, power. Some of the victims were painfully visible: the women objectified and dehumanized in demeaning ads, the players courting concussion-induced dementia.

Not My Life: 2012 documentary

But many of the victims are invisible, so far from sight we imagine they aren’t there: child slaves harvesting chocolate for our sweet valentines, adults and children trapped in systems of exploitation, trafficked illegally to harvest our tomatoes, cotton, coffee, sugar cane, or working long hours, six or seven days a week, to produce cheap goods for companies that drive the prices ever lower. 

We enjoy our convenience and comfort, working hard to ignore the mounting evidence that our current systems are unjust, unhealthy, unsustainable, and contribute to an industry of human suffering that dwarfs the slave trade of earlier centuries. 

In thinking and praying about where we are and where we’re headed, I came across Walter Brueggemann’s "Nineteen Counterscript Theses", presented at the 2004 Emergent Conference and published in The Christian Century in 2004. 

Points one to six:

1. "Everybody has a script. People live their lives by a script that is sometimes explicit but often implicit.

2. "We are scripted by a process of nurture, formation and socialization that might go under the rubric of liturgy. Some of the liturgy is intentional work, much of it is incidental; but all of it, especially for the young and especially for the family, involves modeling the way the world "really is." The script is inhaled along with every utterance and every gesture, because the script-bestowing community is engaged in the social construction of a distinct reality.

3. "The dominant script of both selves and communities in our society, for both liberals and conservatives, is the script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life. §         I use the term therapeutic to refer to the assumption that there is a product or a treatment or a process to counteract every ache and pain and discomfort and trouble, so that life may be lived without inconvenience.

•  I use the term technological, following Jacques Ellul, to refer to the assumption that everything can be fixed and made right through human ingenuity; there is no issue so complex or so remote that it cannot he solved.
•  I say consumerist, because we live in a culture that believes that the whole world and all its resources are available to us without regard to the neighbor, that assumes more is better and that "if you want it, you need it." Thus there is now an advertisement that says: "It is not something you don’t need; it is just that you haven’t thought of it."
•  The militarism that pervades our society exists to protect and maintain the system and to deliver and guarantee all that is needed for therapeutic technological consumerism. This militarism occupies much of the church, much of the national budget and much of the research program of universities.
• It is difficult to imagine life in our society outside the reach of this script; it is everywhere reiterated and legitimated.

4.  "This script—enacted through advertising, propaganda and ideology, especially in the several liturgies of television—promises to make us safe and happy. . .

5.  "That script has failed. . . . We are not safe, and we are not happy. . .

6.  "Health depends, for society and for its members, on disengaging from and relinquishing the failed script.

The script Brueggemann describes is disturbingly visible in events like the Superbowl extravaganza. 

Sociology professor Michael Vos, exploring the theology of women, the body, consumption, violence, and control expressed in the Superbowl, asks:

"I wonder how we, as the people of God, might counternarrate the Super Bowl—this iconic event so disturbingly representative of what counts as sacred in our culture. In a way, our collective witness in the midst of this nation-defining event—the story we tell outside of church—is so much more important than the story we tell inside of church. For this outside story bears witness to our inside story. Will we imagine women in the way Doritos does? Will we pretend that we can simply mentally dismiss particular components of the Super Bowl "package" and in this way resist its hegemonic control? Or will we provide a compelling and alternative story about what it means to be image-bearers, in physical bodies, who live for a different sort of world." 

I just spent two days at a conference run by PASA, the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. Surprisingly, the theme of narrative and counternarrative surfaced repeatedly in the main sessions, seminars, even side conversations: are we all commodities, or something more? Is land a resource to be consumed, or a gift to be renewed, a regenerative treasure? Is value measured best by dollars, or by moments of beauty, rich relationship, generous community?

Even more, the conversation turned, again and again, to this: our systems are broken. It all needs to change. And until it all changes, nothing changes. 

The season of Lent is an essential time for disengaging from the pervasive narrative we live in, and for envisioning an alternative narrative. The Israelites, unable to picture any world but Egypt, spent forty years in the wilderness, disengaging from the past, preparing for the future. Jesus, preparing for his ministry, spent forty days in the wilderness; confronted there with the narrative of power, comfort, and consumption, he affirmed an alternative, where power resides in God’s hands alone, where comfort is found in obedience, not self-protection, where spiritual nourishment precedes physical.

I’ve been feeling the need, more than ever, to find in Lent an occasion of examination, of disengagement from that "therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarist narrative" Brueggemann describes. My time at the PASA conference encouraged me further to undertake what Brueggemann suggests is the role of the church: "the steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we testify will indeed make us safe and joyous."

My own church has been moving slowly through the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' own articulation of that alternative script. While the Superbowl ads, game, half time show, insist that we will be happiest if we win, if we consume, if we look a certain way, drive a certain car, fulfill every need the moment we imagine it, the Beatitudes and passages following offer a stark alternative.

I want that alternative. 

I see, more and more clearly, where our current script leads: unhealthy food, unhealthy relationships, unhealthy environment, unhealthy minds, exploitation of child labor, of women’s bodies, of water and land, hardening of conscience as we excuse our own complicity in an abusive, immoral system.

My goal for Lent is to look for ways to extricate myself from the exploitative aspects of our economy and culture, to find out more about fair trade, fair farming, restorative justice, socially responsible investment

And to affirm that alternative script proclaimed and demonstrated by Jesus himself, a life-giving story in which the last become first, the leaders are servants, and those with least, those most burdened, most willing to face the brokenness around them, find themselves comforted, nourished, blessed.

Please join me in this exploration.  Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

This is the first in a series that will continue through Lent (February 13 to March 31).