Unraveled by Suffering: Transforming Trauma
2 Samuel 21:1-14
September 26, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: Rizpah Keeps Watch; R Dunkarton, 1812 after J. M. W. Turner
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdPPvP_bMtg
George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by officer Derek Chauvin who knelt on his neck for over 9 minutes. We now know it was over 9 minutes, but originally it was reported as 8 minutes, 46 seconds. That was in May of 2020. For every night of the next month, some friends of mine turned on their porch light at 8:46 p.m. and stood there, keeping vigil for 8 minutes, 46 seconds. They sent out cards to every house and business in the area inviting them to stand in front of their homes with their porch lights on, as a way of illuminating a stance against racial justice. They began by standing, but as the month went one, sometimes they chose to kneel instead. Some of you know the people I’m talking about –Dan and Sharon Buttry, recently retired global servants for peace and justice. Dan said, “Holding vigil for 8 minutes and 46 seconds each night makes evident the crime rather than the accident in this killing of George Floyd. Try it. You will feel the very cells of your body crying out against the injustice.”
I remembered that this week as I read the story of Rizpah. I wondered about the intensity of the trauma and loss that she experienced. I thought about the intensity of her suffering, the degree to which she felt the very cells of her body crying out against the injustice.
Full disclosure – I also spent a lot of time with Dan and Sharon this week, reading their book Daughters of Rizpah. It is a great exploration of today’s story, one which they have used over the last 45 years in their trainings on conflict resolution and trauma transformation. I learned a lot from this book and I won’t begin to address all of it today. If you would like to read it, I’ll be happy to lend out my copy. I can also give you an order form and you may order your own signed copy directly from the Buttry’s.
This is not a familiar story for most of us. Let’s take some time to unpack it. It takes place when David is king, probably early in his reign. David is the second king of Israel. Saul reigned before him. Saul grew up in the area of the Gibeonites which was also the area assigned to the tribe of Benjamin, Saul’s tribe. Today, we might consider the Gibeonites as indigenous people, those who were living in the land at the time that the Hebrew people were liberated from Egypt and entered Canaan.
There was an ancient treaty with the Gibeonites which King Saul broke. Saul massacred the Gibeonites. That ethnic cleansing or attempted genocide happened some time before the events of our story. But now there is a famine. And King David has to do something. So he asks God about it.
God identifies the problem, the injustice suffered by the Gibeonites. David does not seem to ask God what to do about it, but instead he goes to the Gibeonites and asks what they want. They want vengeance. Saul is already dead, so they seek vengeance on his living descendants. David agrees.
Now, some might say that within his own time and place, David is trying to do the right thing, to establish a limited justice for the Gibeonites. And, yes, he probably is.
But it also seems politically expedient. You see, after King Saul died, there was a civil war in which David was only one of several contenders for the throne. It happens that in doing what the Gibeonites want, David will also eliminate others who might claim a right to the throne because they are also descendants of Saul. So, that adds another layer to the story.
David condemns seven of Saul’s male descendants to death.. He hands over the two of Saul’s sons and five of his grandsons. Merab is the mother of the five grandsons. She is silent in this story. We should not take that silence to mean that she doesn’t care or is unaffected.
Rizpah is the mother of Saul’s two sons. Rizpah is Saul’s concubine. A concubine is a slave treated like a wife, but without any of the privileges accorded to wives. Rizpah was Saul’s concubine, a marginalized person. Her only status might have been as the mother of royal sons. But now Saul is dead and the civil war has been won by David. “With the execution of her sons, Rizpah is pushed even further to the margins with all her future security and livelihood lost with her children. Rizpah is an ultimate marginalized person with no power by any of the measurements of society.” [1] And yet. . .
Rizpah goes to the site of the execution and keeps vigil over the bodies. She stays there, publicly grieving, proclaiming this trauma and injustice in her actions. What she is does is more than grief. It is also a form of civil disobedience. Part of the humiliation of this death was the desecration of the bodies. She keeps the birds and animals away, so her protection stands between the king and the full execution of his sentence.
She stays there from the spring harvest until the fall rains, probably five or six months. She stays, even though she is exhausted and the stench is awful, and she knows that people passing by are talking about her, her problems, her need for help, her need to move on already.
Rizpah stays there long enough that David hears about it. The king doesn’t respond as one whose orders have been obstructed. He doesn’t send soldiers to drag her away. But interestingly, he doesn’t go to her himself. Not at first. First he goes to the village of Jabesh-gilead. Some years earlier, Saul and Jonathan and his other warrior sons had been killed in battle and their bodies had been left exposed by their enemies. Their bones had been kept at Jabesh-Gilead and never properly buried. David goes there to gather those bones and then comes to Rizpah. He comes as the one who killed her sons. He also comes bringing the bones of the rest of the family who had died violently and been denied the honor of a proper burial. And then together, David and Rizpah bury all of the bones in the family tomb at home in Benjamin.
Rizpah might have been completely unraveled by her trauma. She might have been consumed with her grief and anger. But her courage, her persistence, her refusal to be just a victim, -- all help to shape a new story. It is not a story where everything is made right, but that rarely happens in real life, does it? It is a story where the cycle of violence comes to an end, where healing occurs, not just for her, but for many others and for the land. She is unraveled by her suffering, but she transforms her trauma into hope and action.
The story is multi-layered and complex. I have left out much more that could be said, but I want to turn now to two questions. The questions are where do we find ourselves in this story? And where is God in it? Where do we find ourselves? And God?
I said that this story is not familiar to most of us. It is not in the lectionary. A lot of white folks don’t even know that it is in the Bible. But this week, I became aware, again, of differences between the Bible stories that have historically resonated with white folks and with people of color. This one hinges on our experiences and also on translation. There is a verb that describes the execution of Saul’s descendants. The verb can be translated to fall, to hang, to impale, to dislocate. The exact means of this execution is not clear. But the verb can mean “to hang” and apparently, many black American Christians know this story. They understand that Rizpah’s boys were lynched.
You undoubtedly know the name of Emmett Till. I will spare us the recital of the torture that 14-year-old boy suffered at the hands of two white men before they killed him for the alleged crime of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. His mother demanded that his body be returned to her in Chicago. It was barely recognizable because of the violence inflicted on him. His mother’s name was Mamie Till Mobley. Everyone told her that she should have a closed casket funeral, but she refused. She said “I want the world to see what they did to my baby.”
And the world did. Thousands of people attended his funeral and viewed his body. Photos of it circulated, adding to the national and international outrage. Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence that the world should bear witness to the violence done to her child may have been the single-largest event that sparked the Civil Rights Movement. Mamie’s other name is Rizpah.
Austin Channing Brown is an author and speaker, a powerful leader in the move for racial justice. She says, “I cannot get the image of Rizpah out of my head. Rizpah lost a son to state sanctioned violence. She wouldn’t let the violence be forgotten. She wouldn’t let it be swept under the rug. She led a protest of one, fighting off beasts to bring what measure of dignity for the bodies and indictment for the rules that was in her power to do.[2]
Mamie Till Mobley’s other name is Rizpah. We know about so many other Rizpah’s – Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, Judy Shephard, mother of Matthew Shephard, mothers, fathers, friends and lovers in Newtown, Orlando, El Paso and Charleston, Haitian people under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
Where do we find ourselves in this story? If we know trauma close up, we may find ourselves offering public grief and lament, crying out for justice, refusing to be silenced until the truth is recognized. Or, if we bear witness to another person who is unraveling with grief and anger and pain, we may find ways to hear the truth, to understand the injury, to share in the suffering until our cells cry out against the injustice. We may find ourselves not in Rizpah, but alongside David.
Where is God in this story? God is overwhelmingly with those who suffer. God is the advocate for the Gibeonites, those whose treaty was broken, those who were massacred. God speaks for the Gibeonites even against God’s own covenant people.
And God is with Rizpah. Here’s how we know that. At the beginning of the story, God identifies the problem, the context which is creating the famine. The problem is the injustice suffered by the Gibeonites. And David tries to make that right. He has Saul’s descendants executed “before the Lord.” But God doesn’t accept the human sacrifice. God is silent. The famine goes on. The land is still defiled, even more so. [3]
The rains come, the famine breaks, only after David and Rizpah together bury Saul and his sons with dignity and honor. It was not after the lynching, not after the Gibeonites had their vengeance, but after attention was given to Rizpah. Then and only then God answers the prayer to bless the land. God responds to changed hearts resulting in changed behavior.
The Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman offers these words
“I pray that we learn from Rizpah. When we see injustice may we, like Rizpah, climb the mountain of God and defend those who cannot defend themselves. When we see someone unraveling in inexplicable grief, may this sight unravel us from the ways we are entangled with injustice.[4]
Beloved ones, let us pray that we can be unraveled for the good. Let us tell the truth. Let us confront the beasts. Let us put the powers to shame. With Rizpah, let us stand vigil and not go home until justice is done.[5] Amen.
[1] Sharon A. Buttry and Daniel L. Buttry, Daughters of Rizpah, (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2020), p. 27
[2] http://austinchanning.com/blog/untitled
[3] Buttrys, p. 49
[4] Lauren Wright Pittman, Unraveled sermon planning guide, http://sanctifiedart.org
[5] The ending is adapted from language in a sermon by the Rev. Cindy Weber “A Fierce Vigil: Keeping the Beasts at Bay” excerpted in Travelers on the Journey: Pastors Talk About Their Lives and Commitments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) p. 103