True story.
So, this preacher was
married. Well, he wasn’t really MARRIED,
she was his live-in girlfriend/ common law wife, but they were in love. Except she cheated on him ----- a lot. Then she got mad at him for being mad at her
for cheating on him --- a lot---- so she moved back to her daddy’s house. So, the preacher went to her daddy’s house,
and he was all, “Baby, please. Come
back, baby please, baby please,” and his girlfriend’s (ex-common law wife’s?)
dad was like, “Look, son. You can stay
here for a few days while ya’ll work this out.”
So the dad and the preacher spent 3 days getting drunk together. Three days turned into four. Four days turned into five. On the 6th day, the preacher was
like, “No more. No more. Man, we gotta go.” So, the very hung-over preacher and his ex-ex
girlfriend left to resume living together.
And that is Judges
chapter 19, verses 1-10.
The same social
drama, the same unrepentantly un-Biblical behaviors and relationship that we
think novel and particular to our post-modern Western culture were the norm in
Israel 1300 years before Jesus was born.
The guiding philosophy of that
kind of culture is summarized in the last verse of the book Judges: In
those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own
eyes.
No one recognized
objective ethical authority. Every one
believed they had a right to live and lust however they saw fit, and legally, they did. There was no statutory authority (no king)
prohibiting their behavior, but the absence of legal consequence didn’t
eliminate moral and spiritual consequences.
Providing
hospitality, including short term lodging, to travelers was a basic expectation
in ancient Israelite culture, but social norms were so corrupted and inverted
in the era of Judges that the Levite and his concubine couldn’t find lodging
for days, until an old Benjamite took them in.
A mark of a broken
culture is when basic human decency is the rare exception instead of the rule,
when being polite is so rare that we make memes to restore our faith in
humanity. 
How bad does a
society without a moral center become? It
gets Judges 19:22-30 bad. When the men
in town learned that they had visitors, some of them went to the old man’s
house and asked to see the preacher ---- so they could rape him. After negotiations, the men “settled” for
brutally gang-raping the preacher’s girlfriend. She died.
She died.
The next morning,
her boyfriend the Levite, the preacher, the man who’d loved her so much that
even though she’d cheated on him he still pleaded for restoration of their
relationship ---- he stepped over her broken body and said, “Get up and let us
be going” (verse 28).
He handed her over
to be brutalized in his place and then he stepped over her. Because he had somewhere else to be.
But, he didn’t
forget about her. No. He took her body home where he cut her up
into 12 pieces and mailed those pieces to each of the other tribes. It was the bloody 1300 B.C. equivalent of
recording a crime and posting it on Youtube.
Nobody could ignore the events in Gibeah because now
everybody had
visible evidence of what had
happened.
There was a national
investigation.
Then the children of Israel said, “Tell us,
how did this wicked deed happen? (Judges 20:3)
The nation demanded justice.
Then the tribes of Israel sent men through
all the tribe of Benjamin, saying, “What is this wickedness that has occurred
among you? 13 Now therefore, deliver up the men, the perverted
men who are in Gibeah, that we may put them to death and remove the evil from
Israel! (Judges 20:12, 13)
And the local courts
said, “We won’t prosecute.”
But the children of Benjamin would not listen
to the voice of their brethren, the children of Israel. (Judges 20: 13b)
Instead the
community around the guilty men banded together and launched a
counter-campaign.
Instead, the children of Benjamin gathered
together from their cities to Gibeah, to go to battle against the children of
Israel. (Judges 20: 14)
There was a
war. 65,000-plus soldiers died. Dozens of villages were burned. Uncounted thousands were displaced. Basically, it was attempted internal
genocide. But it wasn’t just the guilty
men and their enabling tribe who suffered.
God punished the entire nation.
Because the entire nation was guilty: guilty of hurting women or guilty
of failing to protect them.
God punished the
nation for failing to protect the woman.
For failing to protect women.
We don’t even know
the name of the Levite’s concubine because none of them remembered.
They stepped over
her.
Just like we do.
We do what we want,
when we want, with whom we want. We
worship our freedom and so we worship our power. We can so we do. And in a culture where power is an idol, the powerless are stepped on and stepped over.
In the story of the
Levite’s concubine, the nation didn’t repent of its rape-culture. The nation didn’t mourn a society so divorced
from its Biblical roots (i.e. the Mosaic law) that sexual brutality had become
entertainment. The people of God didn’t
consider why it took the visual of a woman’s chopped up body for them to
respond to what had been going on in Gibeah for years.
They stepped over
her.
Just like we do.
We post, like,
comment, and share the viral stories of crimes against women over there. But we avert our eyes to the bruised faces in
our congregations. We step over her.
She need us, she
needs me, to fight for her while she still has breath, while she still has her innocence,
while she still has a chance. No more
laughing at old men making vulgar jokes about little girls. No more telling sisters that God wants them
to reconcile with their abuser more than God wants their abuser to stop
abusing. No more having somewhere else
I have to be more than I need to be getting her help.
I know it's not culturally acceptable to get involved, but this culture is broken, so why should I accept its ideas of acceptability?
I know it's not culturally acceptable to get involved, but this culture is broken, so why should I accept its ideas of acceptability?
I know that everybody makes their own choices, but as a Christian I don't get to use personal freedom as a cover for being evil and enabling evil. As free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God. (1 Peter 2: 16)
It's time for the church to stop conforming to this broken, hyper-sexualized, lust-driven, rape-culture.
We serve the God-Who-Sees, so we have to open our eyes.
No more invisible women.
No more stepping
over our sisters.
---Anderson T. Graves II is a writer, community organizer and
consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.
Rev. Anderson T.
Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in
Fairfield, Alabama; executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth
Networking Organization (SAYNO); and director of rural leadership development
for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).
Subscribe to my
personal blog www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .
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