By Rev. Kathryn Ray "The king took the two sons of Aiah’s daughter Rizpah...and handed them over to the Gibeonites, who killed them and exposed their bodies on a hill before the Lord....From the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies, Rizpah did not let the birds touch them by day or the wild animals by night." -2 Samuel 21:8-10 Before coming to North Shore I worshipped and served at Ellis Avenue Church down in the Hyde Park/Kenwood area. At the time, this church was pastored by the Rev. Jonathan Friesen, who some of you may remember, preached at my installation service, and the Rev. Brenda Matthews, a local community leader, published poet, and prayer warrior. Pastor Brenda would shut down corners of the city where drug deals and violence were prevalent by hosting prayer vigils. She traveled around the country to share poetry and stories, and she moved hearts and minds with the oft-repeated call from one of her poems “Somebody better say something, somebody better do something, somebody better feel something, before it’s too late.” She taught me the value of rawness and vulnerability, and encouraged me to be less practiced and polished in my preaching, which I very much took to heart but still struggle to embody.
In church, she was Pastor Brenda. But in the larger community, she was Mama Brenda. Mama Brenda never gave birth or went through an adoption process, but she was mother to so many. And so I honor her this Mother’s Day and the mighty legacy she left when she passed away in my final year at Ellis Avenue. I also honor her today because she introduced me to another mother who has since become dear to my heart, a woman named Rizpah. I had read the books of 1 and 2 Samuel before, but somehow my eye had always slid over the story, until the Sunday that Pastor Brenda preached on this woman. And I have to give her props, because I still remember that sermon six years later. That is something I can say of very few sermons. Rizpah comes into the story of Israel after King David has assumed the throne and begun consolidating his power and wrapping up loose ends. A famine falls upon the land for three years. So David goes to God, and asks why. Through this entreaty, he learns that the devastation of the land came about because of an unrequited injustice. It is often the case, in the Hebrew Scriptures, that the land bears testimony to the injustice of the people. As in the words of the prophet Hosea, “Bloodshed follows bloodshed, therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish, together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.” So it is in the land of Israel in this story. It will not yield food, it will not yield its produce, because David’s predecessor, King Saul, had tried to wipe out the Gibeonites in violation of a treaty made by one of his predecessors, Joshua. So David goes to the Gibeonites and asks how “how do I make this right?” They respond, “Saul sought to wipe us off the face of the earth, he sought to make us disappear, so he should disappear. His legacy should be wiped off the face of the earth.” And legacy was so important. Think of God’s ultimate, bounteous promise to Abraham, to Sarah, to Moses, to David, is that you will have a name and many descendants. To erase those descendants is to erase their very existence, their memory in the land. But King David’s got a famine to end. He accedes, and hands over seven of Saul’s sons, seven being a number that represents completeness in the Bible. Notably, he spares Mephibosheth, the crippled son of Jonathan whom David had taken into his house as his own. Instead, he finds some other children of Saul to send to be executed. Sons that we have never met before, and would be nothing to us but yet more names. Except, we find out, they had a mother named Rizpah. She would not let them be simply names. Rizpah takes her sackcloth, the symbol of her mourning, and spreads it upon the stone in front of the scaffold where the bodies of her sons hanged. For weeks, she fought off the wild beasts and the carrion, so that they would not consume the bodies. Her grieving became an act of defiance. She refused to let her sons simply disappear without a trace, without a burial, without any kind of legacy. Though she had no political power, no voice the king had to heed, word of her action reaches him. He gathers up the bodies, together with the bodies of Saul and Jonathan, and he buries them all in the land of their ancestors. By doing this, he gives their descendants a place to honor them. Their memory can continue to live on. In Pastor Brenda’s words, Rizpah shamed the king into giving her sons the dignity in their burial that was robbed of them in their execution. So contrary to the wishes of the Gibeonites, Saul’s family is not wiped from the earth, forgotten forever. They were not forgotten because Rizpah refused to let them be forgotten. She demanded that they be remembered. She demanded that, even in death, they be treated as human beings. After weeks and weeks, King David heeds her demand. And then, and only then, does God heed the nation of Israel. Only then does the land begin to heal. Every second and fourth Thursday of the month, a group of older women from the Hispanic congregation gather for prayer, song, and Bible study. It’s called the Grupo de Apoyo, the support group. When the second Thursday falls before I preach, I will take the text I am preaching on to study with the group, to workshop it and get some ideas, get the juices flowing before I have to preach on the text. Last Thursday, we read this story of Rizpah, stumbled a bit over all the many names listed. But by the time we came to the end, and began our discussion, tears started flowing almost right away. Several of them recognized this woman. They know her. She is the mother of the young people disappeared by the Salvadoran army in the middle of the night, who goes to the prisons and the police offices, demanding answers. Rizpah is the woman who faced down armed soldiers holding her children at gunpoint to bring them home. She’s the group of people that would go gather up the bodies of those assassinated and discarded in the city dump to bring home to identify and to bury. It is from that Bible study that I received the name of this sermon. They called Rizpah a madre guerrera, a warrior mother. A warrior mother continues to tell the truth, even when no one seems to be listening. A warrior mother turns grief into a cry for justice, into the cry “Do not forget.” “Somebody better say something, somebody better do something, somebody better feel something, before it’s too late.” In this story, it is the warrior mother who brings healing to the nation. It does not heal after the sons of Saul are sacrificed. Blood for blood, it seems, did not remove the injustice that made creation sick. However, when the one in power heeds the madre guerrera, it is then the land again begins to bear fruit. So may it be with ours. This Mother’s Day, I pay tribute to the madres guerreras of all genders, from Chicago’s west side, to Newton, Connecticut, to those standing at the gates of El Chipote prison complex in Managua, looking for their children. I pray that we may join our voices to theirs, and I pray their calls, like Rizpah’s before them, be heeded, so that healing might come to our land.
1 Comment
Nancy Corran
9/6/2022 09:58:43 pm
Beautiful homily. Excellent exegesis thanks to the Grupo de Apoyo.
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