Scriptures: Psalms 38 and 112
One of my principles of preaching is not to talk too much about “other people”, especially in a negative way. I consider it inappropriate to spend a lot of words telling you what I think of, for instance, the attitude of Southern Baptists toward women.
Inappropriate because it’s a no-brainer; you would know at least in a general way, what I was going to say before I said it, and we can all agree that we are among the enlightened.
Inappropriate because if you have something to say to people, you should say it to their face, not behind their back.
Inappropriate because it has the feel of what Jesus was talking about when he talked about people’s tendency to see the speck in the eye of the neighbor and ignore the log in their own, the tendency in other words to be a lot clearer about others faults than about our own.
Inappropriate because when we gather together on a Sunday morning, we are not coming to discuss what word the Southern Baptists may need to hear this morning. I have no preaching word to bring to the Southern Baptists this morning. It’s my job as a preacher to try to speak a word not that they need to hear but that we need to hear, and I always start by asking myself not what you need to hear but what I may need to hear.
Those are all reasons why I should not be talking about what it may at first seem that I am talking about this morning. The Catholic Church has been on my mind a lot recently. Of course it would be hard not to have the Catholic Church on your mind, at least a little bit, these days, assuming you read the paper or listen to the news occasionally. The media have made sure that the Catholic Church is in everyone’s consciousness. It’s a made for media event, what with the scandal itself complete with bad behavior involving sex and money and cover-ups, discussions about what should have been done then, what should be done now, who should resign, what reforms may be needed and so on. There are clearly lots of ways people can tie into this if they want to. And I have tied into it, to the extent that I feel I need to say something.
I should make clear though that it really is not my desire this morning to weigh in on how the Catholic church should have handled things then or how they should be dealing with things now, what should be done to offending priests, what should be done to bishops who could have prevented much suffering but didn’t, what policies should have been or should be in place, whether this is a good time to talk about dropping the rule of celibacy or to talk about ordaining women, what the church needs to do to recover from the blows that have been dealt to it in recent months. I am not without opinions on all that, and I do feel the need to offer one opinion out loud. I believe we all need to protest when people make a connection between alleged clergy and homosexuality among the clergy. That connection has no place in the current discussion, and we ought to be saying that somehow, all of us. But apart from that I am not here to offer free advice to the Catholic Church, to offer commentary, criticism, or censure. To appoint myself judge, jury, or spiritual advisor to the Catholic Church just doesn’t seem very seemly. So why do I feel the need to mention this at all?
Somewhere around 1988 I think, I received a phone call asking me whether I would serve on something called the Church and Ministry Committee of the Chicago Metropolitan Association of the United Church of Christ. Church and Ministry committees are charged with deciding who is qualified to serve as a minister in the United Church of Christ and what churches are to have membership in the U.C.C. These committees are supposed to help people along as they prepare for the ministry, and they examine candidates for ministry and either approve them or don’t approve them as eligible for ordination. They screen people who want to join the UCC from other places, and they establish policies on professional standards and so forth. Being on the committee among other things meant meeting and working with some very interesting people at some very important points in their lives, and I had some thoughts about how to help people in preparing for ministry since I had supervised a number of interns—so I said “yes”. This was something I could do, and if you were going to be on a committee, this was a good one to be on. The work it did was necessary and worthwhile and often even rewarding.
I had hardly settled into my seat on this committee before we were presented with a situation that proved to be just the first of a steady stream of cases that were brought before us over the next ten years. It turns out it was our job (nobody quite explained this to me ahead of time) not just to usher people along as they moved into ministry; it was also our job to handle complaints of misconduct on the part of clergy and to decide whether a person’s conduct had made him or her unfit to continue in ministry. It was our job, when called upon, also to usher people out of the ministry.
The case I’m referring to involved a minister of a large church who had had sexual relations with multiple partners who had been members of the church over the course of many years. Through a complicated series of events what this person had been doing finally came to light. The women discovered each other, and with some outside encouragement eventually brought their complaints to this committee that I had just joined. Each of the women who did come forward, and there were an undetermined number who chose not to, said that they were there because they had just come to the point where they needed to say what happened, even though they didn’t really expect us to do anything—the minister being so prominent in the church and so popular in the congregation and so respected in the community and so forth.
And of course we all knew the women were more than justified to feel that way. Quite apart from the image this minister had, all of us on the committee, both clergy and lay people, knew stories of ministers being sexually overactive in their congregations and how to avoid scandal the minister would decide that the time had conveniently come for him to move on to another challenge, sometimes with the knowing cooperation of denominational placement officers, and how normally everyone would breathe a sigh of relief. Both the congregation and the minister could go on with their lives without any public ugliness. No matter about the hurt that lingered for the people involved or for the effects on the congregation that continued long after the person was gone. No matter about the hurt that might happen, was likely to happen, wherever that minister landed. It was no wonder the women were hesitant to come forward. They had no reason to think they would be heard, or that anything would come of what they had to say. They had every reason to think that people would tend to discount or disbelieve what they had to say. And they were right about that too. People in the church either refused to believe the minister would do such a thing or they blamed the women themselves for being the seducers. And when the committee in fact removed the minister from ministry in the UCC, other clergy felt he was either innocent or should have been treated more compassionately.
It was about this time though that things were beginning to change. Not just in Chicago but in many places throughout the country in the United Church of Christ and in at least some other denominations. Church and Ministry committees began to listen. They began to remove people from ministry. They created policies and procedures aimed at guaranteeing that people would be heard. And as that happened, as it was demonstrated that voices of the abused would be listened to and acted upon, more and more people came forward. Not in great droves, but enough so that every month when we came into the room for our meeting we held our breath waiting to hear whether there were any new charges being brought against people we might very well know and have worked with as colleagues.
I say all this to emphasize a point that should be easily made but that may get lost in all the attention being showered on the Catholic Church these days: that this is not a Catholic problem. The sexual abuse of children, of women, of people by clergy is in no way limited to what is currently getting the publicity. I feel very safe in saying that the extent of the problem is much greater within the Catholic Church than has yet been recognized, and the extent of the problem is much greater than just the Catholic Church.
I also refer to my Church and Ministry experiences in Chicago to say that I cannot read about the current crisis in the Catholic Church without having flashbacks, without seeing the faces of people I have heard telling stories of clergy abuse, and without having the emotions connected with those situations come back to me. One of the people who came forward that day was a woman I had had as a student in an undergraduate religion class I had taught. Many of those feelings that come back to me are feelings of anger. In the most extreme cases, the ministers involved had not just had a moment where they gave in to sexual desire, nor even a lot of moments where they lost control of themselves. This was rarely a matter of hormonal excess. It was a matter of an abuse of power, an abuse of people, a betraying of trust that typically went on over a long period of time, that was calculated and controlled and controlling. When I hear of priests who have abused people and of bishops who allowed the abuse to continue and spread, the anger comes back to me, and it’s an anger that is not so much tied to an article in the newspaper as to my own experiences.
It is now apparent that the church, the whole church, including the United Church of Christ, for way too long allowed clergy to abuse people and essentially did nothing, said nothing about it. In the years roughly around 1990 the UCC began to change the situation, and now there are policies in place which I can say are being followed to deal with charges of sexual abuse on the part of clergy. When that situation is finally brought to light, when that sin, not just of offending clergy but of the whole church, is confessed, the tendency is to want to rise up in righteous anger and say loudly in whatever way we can that this was wrong, that it should not have happened, that perpetrators will no longer be given new and unsuspecting areas in which to operate and indeed will no longer be allowed to engage in ministry. In no uncertain terms see that bad deeds of the past are punished, that bad deeds of the future are prevented, and that people are protected. No more hemming and hawing. Zero tolerance. Clear standards, strictly enforced. We’re hearing such calls these days, and I understand where they’re coming from.
Spiritually, the place where this kind of approach comes from I believe is the same place Psalm 112 is coming from. “Happy are those who fear the Lord…the righteous will never be moved; they will be remembered forever. They are not afraid of evil tidings. Their hearts are firm and secure in the Lord. Their hearts are steady. They will not be afraid, and in the end they will look in triumph on their foes.” The blessings of the righteous is what my Bible says this Psalm is about. It could also have the subtitle, a song for the upright. How important it is to seek justice, to root out wrong-doing. How good it is to see that good is done. How important that righteousness be upheld. I hope that at least part of all our souls is rooted in such a spiritual place.
But we need to be rooted elsewhere as well. That elsewhere is expressed in the other reading for this morning, from Psalm 38. “O Lord, I am utterly spent and crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart…all day long I go around in mourning…all my longing is known to you, my sighing is not hidden from you. My heart throbs, my strength fails. As for the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me. My friends stand aloof from my affliction, my neighbors stand far off…I confess my iniquity; I am sorry for my sin. Do not forsake me, O God.”
This is clearly a psalm not of righteousness, but of lament, not of one who means to be upright but of one who cannot help but be bowed down. And I am reminded that the stories that were told to me and the rest of a church and ministry committee almost fifteen years ago were stories that certainly contained their share of anger, stories that sometimes demanded punishment, that asked that wrong-doers be held accountable, that often demanded that something be done to prevent any further abuse, but that were most of all, in every case, stories of a great sadness. The stories those women told were in fact psalms of lament. And the good which came out of the telling was not so much in the righteous anger they aroused but in the resolve to listen for a change, to pay attention to those voices of lament which had too long gone unheard.
I say this, I make this point, because I think it makes a big difference in how we hear the reports of abuse in the Catholic Church and how we discern what word is being spoken to us through all the debate and commotion. The policies that were developed throughout the United Church of Christ some 10 to 12 years ago, were not fundamentally policies that were aimed at providing a way for perpetrators to be punished, though some people may very well have seen them that way. What they were much more, in my view, were policies that sought to provide a way for voices of anguish, voices of lament to be heard.
What we tried to say as a church, and I will dare to suggest that this should also apply to the Catholic church as well as any other denomination, what we tried to say as a church was that we were going to listen, we were going to take seriously the voices of lament of people who had been abused within the church by clergy. Part of taking those voices seriously of course was to invoke certain standards of righteousness, that is to make it clear that people would be held accountable for their actions and would not be able to proceed with life in the church as though nothing had happened. But the starting point was not the enforcement of a zero tolerance policy, whatever that might mean, but was instead the commitment to hear people out, to listen to the voices of lament.
What that meant though was that when that commitment was taken seriously we also found ourselves listening to the voices of lament that rose from within congregations, that rose from the families of accused clergy, that rose from some few of the clergy themselves who brought to us voices of sincere, not self-serving, but sincere lament.
This is the word I discern being spoken to me now through the headlines of the day involving the Catholic Church, through the memories that are evoked in me by those headlines, through the much more distant but strangely resonant words of the psalms. Listen—I hear the word—listen to the voices of lament. Certainly with regard to sexual abuse and clergy misconduct, wherever it occurs, listen to the voices of lament that come from victims and survivors and perhaps perpetrators too—we do need to listen to the voices of lament, and in that respect I have to say much of the current discussion within the church and without, somehow misses the point. The question is not what punishment is going to be handed out to how many accused priests, but who is going to listen to voices that need to be heard, now and in future.
But beyond this particular set of concerns centering on clergy abuse, the word is more broadly addressed to us, I believe. We are reminded, not just in these cases but in general, to listen to the voices of lament. They are all around us. And they are within us. And I am reminded these days—I would like to think I don’t need the reminder, but of course I do—I am reminded of my need, in the face of all the many kinds of voices of lament there are all around me and within, I am reminded of my need to pay attention. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 23, 2002