Bishop's Sermon on Sexual Violence Broke Open My Lasting Silence

Commentary

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A United Methodist Insight Commentary

Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling had no way of knowing the trauma of my past when she began to preach April 25 on sexual violence.

She started by walking silently around the General Conference stage, embodying the church's silence that still haunts women, men and transgender people who are sexually assaulted.

I know that silence all too well. I kept silent about being violently sexually assaulted for more than 30 years before I sought counseling for attack-related reactive behaviors that were harming my life.

While this recognition bubbled up in me, Bishop Easterling continued that the church's silence obscures the fact that gender-based violence isn't about sex.

"It's about power," she said. "It is about domination. It is about a bastardization of God's word, God's very essence and God's intent for creation."

Bishop Easterling was breaking the silence, the silence that she said "gives safe harbor to those in our pews who are perpetrators of abuse.

"Our silence doesn't give those who are perpetuating violence the opportunity to understand the nature of their sin, and to repent," she said.

Too many survivors carry the guilt and stigma of shame, Bishop Easterling said.

I began to flinch and cringe. Silence also gives we who are abused a wall of protection against the questions that blame us for being victims, I thought.

Then Bishop Easterling listed some of the questions:

  • Why did you stay? Why didn't you just leave?
  • What were you wearing?
  • Why did you walk alone – or in my case, work alone at night in an empty newsroom?
  • Why didn't you fight back? Why didn't you scream?
  • Why didn't you say something?

I'll tell you why I didn't say something: when your abuser is the person who holds your job in his hands, the job that feeds your family, when he threatens to kill you if you talk, you don't say anything. Like the bishop said she was advised when she entered ordained ministry not to talk about her own history of domestic abuse in a prior marriage, I also knew that keeping silent shields you from appearing weak, keeps you from being vulnerable to more attacks.

While I struggled to take good notes, Bishop Easterling preached on.

"Society still blames those who have been abused, raped, violated," she said bluntly.

Goosebumps erupted up and down my arms. My eyes filled with tears, and I struggled to breathe.

I'll tell you why I didn't say something: when your abuser is the person who holds your job in his hands, the job that feeds your family, when he threatens to kill you if you talk, you don't say anything. ... keeping silent shields you from appearing weak, keeps you from being vulnerable to more attacks.

Then Bishop Easterling said words that shook my soul.

"You are a survivor," she said. "You're not to blame. You are an overcomer. You were made in the Imago Dei, the image of God, and you are of sacred worth and yes, if you are here, you are resilient!"

Forty years. Forty years since I was attacked, and all this time I've tried to see myself as a survivor. Until a church leader, a female church leader, a bishop, herself an overcomer, said those words, I'd never really believed it deep in my soul.

"Speak our names,” the bishop continued. "Minister to us. Speak words of hope and health, and healing and holistic sacredness into our lives."

Calling the United Methodist Church to address gender-based violence, she quoted theologian Miroslav Volf: there is something deeply hypocritical about praying about a problem you are unwilling to solve.

"God's power is never devoid of love; as bell hooks taught, love and abuse cannot co-exist," she continued.

"We are hypocrites if we don't acknowledge that the church is complicit in supporting a pedagogy of patriarchy that fuels a hermeneutic of hubris while too often refusing to dismantle systems of domination," the bishop said.

By this time, I could no longer write down the bishop's words. I had to let myself be borne along by the powerful cadence of her preaching. I tried to convey to my husband, who like me was watching the service on livestream, what was happening in my psyche, but I choked up.

Forty years, and still the silence bound me.

What if, I wonder now after watching a recording of Bishop Easterling's sermon to verify her words for this article, what if my United Methodist Church became the kind of faith community that she preached – one that proclaimed freedom to captives like me, stuck for decades in the silent trauma of being violated and dominated? What if my United Methodist Church asks the hard question, as Bishop Easterling put it, of why resilience is necessary because of domestic abuse, of rape as a weapon of war, of violence against transgender persons?

What if the church embraced the millions of people who carry the scars of gender-based violence on our souls?

Ironically, the day that Bishop Easterling preached, a New York appeals court overturned former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's rape convention because a judge permitted women to tell their stories of his sexual predations against them. As actress Ashley Judd, one of Weinstein's victims, said, the verdict was a "tragic day for survivors," a gut-punch.

Perhaps God's Holy Spirit was speaking through Bishop Easterling just in time for the Weinstein appeal. The world still silences abuse survivors like me. Will the church set us free?

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling's sermon was part of a worship service observing "Thursdays in Black," a campaign against gender-based violence by the World Council of Churches. A recording is available on YouTube.

United Methodist Insight Editor Cynthia B. Astle has covered The United Methodist Church at all levels since 1988. This is her 10th General Conference. Please email Insight to reproduce this content elsewhere.