Dinah, Tamar and Potiphar’s Wife– A Me Too Sermon
The Rev. Peter De Franco
August 20, 2023
The Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist
Preachers usually take one of the three readings as the starting point for their sermon. Today, I shall break that pattern and preach on what I shall call the omitted readings from Genesis. We have been listening to the story of Jacob and his highly dysfunctional family. While the stories from the lectionary have focused on men, the lectionary omitted stories of three women: Dinah, Tamar and Potiphar’s wife. Our weekly bible study examined Genesis and that study raised my understanding of these “forgotten stories” and the need to talk about them.
All these stories look at issues related to sexuality. Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, was raped by a foreign man, who then falls in love with her and asks his father to arrange a wedding between them. Dinah’s brothers surreptitiously agree to the wedding on the condition that the foreign men be circumcised. As the men are recovering from their procedure, Dinah’s brothers attack and kill the men of the foreign tribe.
Tamar married Er, the eldest son of Judah, Jacob’s eldest son. Er dies and Judah is required to have another of his sons try to have children with her. This son also dies. Judah, imaging Tamar is cursed, refuses to give his next son to her and sends her back to her father’s home. Tamar comes up with a solution. Tamar plays the prostitute for Judah her father-in-law and conceives not one child but twins. Judah promises the prostitute a future payment and she takes Judah’s signet ring and staff as surety until she is paid. But Tamar, the trickster, plans to keep them as proof that Judah fathered her child. When Judah discovered Tamar was pregnant, he demands that she be burned to death. Tamar sends Judah his signet ring and staff. Judah recognizes the error of his way.
When Joseph is sold as a slave in Egypt, he works for Potiphar, one of the Pharoah’s high officers. Potiphar’s wife is struck by Joseph’s beauty and tries to seduce an ancient contender for People Magazine’s sexiest man. When the seduction fails, she accuses Joseph of trying to sexually assault her and Joseph is thrown into prison.
These three stories about rape, sexual marginalization and sexual harassment may make some of us uncomfortable. Perhaps the people who organized the Revised Common Lectionary anticipated that uneasiness and walked around their discomfort by omitting these stories. In their omission, they continued the culture in the church of avoiding conversations on difficult issues related to sexuality.
We are living in a Me Too Culture where the social norms of silence, shame and stigma are giving way to new patterns of speaking, confronting and changing these problematic behaviors. I would like to interrupt that old church patterns by speaking about those stories and hopefully by creating a culture in our church of making the church a safe space to talk about and so find healing from situations of sexual abuse or inappropriate behaviors.
God gives each of us the gift of sexual energy to help us connect with one special other, to find physical joy in and with that other person, to comfort us in our loneliness, and to give birth to children. But some people, and it is mostly men, use sexual harassment and rape as tools to dominate and abuse women. What are some of the things we can do to create a religious Me Too Movement?
The first thing involves breaking the silence about sexual misconduct, about rape, harassment, and abuse. 33% of women worldwide experience sexual violence that 54% of American women receive unwanted and inappropriate sexual advances and 95% of these behaviors go unpunished. Our culture does not listen to the voices of these women.
By creating a church culture which listens to women, we can open the doors to healing. By acknowledging the pervasive abuse, we can begin to reverse those patterns.
Jesus invites us to respond to sexual violence and intimidation with compassion and love. Healing begins when people can tell their stories, can be accepted as victims of predators and not as instigators of sexual misbehaviors, can turn back the sigma and find a listening ear, a loving heart, and compassionate mind. God works that healing through each of you. You are the ones who can listen with love and bring healing. You are the ones who can confront misbehavior when you see it. You are the ones who can stand for the powerless who are victimized by persons of power. Perhaps the stories omitted from the lectionary can inspire us not to omit these stories from our hearts. May we create a culture which listens to others, which brings healing through listening, which minimizes stigma and accepts the other. It sounds a lot like what Jesus would do.