WLSU: Your Voice, Your Place

“Yes but someone just touched me and was healed.” He looks around, and says, “Who was it?” A woman steps forward. This woman, it turns out, has been bleeding for 12 years and no doctor has been able to help her. It’s likely that what is described is an abnormal menstrual condition. It is unimaginably difficult, uncomfortable, and seemingly incurable. Based on the laws of her time, the nature of her bleeding renders her ceremonially unclean, and therefore unable to participate in the life of her community. The chronic nature of it means she has been isolated for many years now.

She is both a medical mystery and a social pariah. So her act of venturing out into a crowd is courageous, her grabbing at Jesus’ clothing may seem desperate, but it’s also a powerful affirmation of self. I deserve hope too, her act says, I am still a person, and I will not give up. Desperation and faith look a lot alike.

This woman thought that just maybe she could be healed. She was. She thought maybe she could do so and remain anonymous. She could not. Jesus had other ideas. His question requires her to step forward and use her voice, to be seen and heard. The woman comes forward - furtively, fearfully. Finally she speaks up, telling him she was the one who touched him and explaining why.

Jesus’ response is one of intimacy and compassion. He calls her daughter, which is to say he calls her family, calls her belonging, and tells her that her faith has made her well. Her faith, by the way, was about knowing it would work – it’s not at all clear she did – her faith was in the stubborn insistence that she is worth something, that she gets to hope too, that there is a place for her. Persistence and faith look a lot alike.

Why did Jesus call her out? He didn’t have to. She was healed, and it didn’t cost him anything. She didn’t owe him anything. And why did the woman acquiesce? The bleeding had already stopped before he pushed her to speak up. She could have gone on her way. He could have healed her and she could have gone away and no words could have been said about it.

I believe Jesus calls her to speak up because her body isn’t the only thing that needs to be healed. I believe he knows it is important for her to speak up, to have a voice, to claim her place. Her condition has marginalized her from her own community and silenced her for so long. For her to stand up and be noticed as family, as beloved, as counting, as mattering – this is its own healing. And I believe the woman knew that. I believe she knew it. “Here I am!”

This is not the only such story in the Gospels. We see a consistent theme in the accounts of Jesus’ miracles: The healing he enacts is not exclusively physical. When he heals the ten lepers, he sends them to the priest so they can initiate the rites that will help them re-enter society. Jesus finds a man beset by a legion of demons living in a cemetery. The man’s been dead to the world. When Jesus heals him, he wants to go with Jesus. But Jesus says no, your healing means you go back into life with others. Healing looks a lot like reconciliation. Healing looks a lot like humanization. The recipients of Jesus’ care are not only made physically whole: They are given a voice. Their place in their community is reestablished. They are enfranchised.

That word enfranchised might seem out of place in a spiritual conversation. It’s a word we find in the political realm. We sometimes forget that political matters have spiritual elements and spiritual matters affect our politics. Enfranchisement in our current context is mostly about voting, but the primary thrust of the word is that a person’s presence and dignity is acknowledged as part of the larger community. They are not shut out. They are not kept quiet. This is what Jeus is doing in his healing. When he calls the woman daughter, he is publicly incorporating her into the shared life of her people. She is enfranchised, and that is spiritual and political at the same time.

I cannot unequivocally tell you that Jesus likes democracy. It never comes up in his teaching. What I can tell you is that Jesus is serious about leveling the playing field, about every person’s life mattering. He is serious about giving voice and dignity to the people he meets. The values Jesus embodies are, I believe, consistent with what we value about democracy. Everyone has a voice. Everyone has a place in the conversation. Nobody left out.

I do not live in a democracy. I live in Ohio.

Ohio, a place I have come to love very much, is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. You’re welcome to do a Google image search of our districts if you are a fan of visual comedy. But for context I will tell you this: Ohio is 42% Republican and 40% Democrat, with 18% stating no affiliation. If people all voted on party lines and that 18% miraculously all voted Republican, you might feasibly expect our representation to be 60% Republican, 40% Democrat. In reality, 75% of our representatives are Republican. 75%. Our districts – which have been ruled unconstitutional but somehow still stand – are intentionally designed to engineer a one party supermajority.

This is not a democracy. Not all voices count. Some are intentionally minimized and silenced. I don’t care which party it benefits. Ohio has likely the most colorful history of gerrymandering of any state in the country. There were times in the distant past when Democrats were the ones doing the gerrymandering. It was wrong then too.

Do I think Jesus cares about this? Yes. I do. Jesus cares about the systematic disenfranchisement of his daughters and sons. Everything about his ministry suggests this is so.

In Ohio this year we have an amendment on the ballot – Issue 1 – that seeks to end this gerrymandering and create a bipartisan panel to redraw our districts. I can’t promise you it’s a perfect solution. What about democracy is perfect and uncomplicated?

Our beloved country has a history of noble ideals and principles about freedom, agency, and equality. We also have a history of screwing these ideals and principles up or just plain ignoring them for the sake of maintaining power. There’s nothing Christian about that.

Pay attention to people and laws that seek to decrease the number of people whose voices are heard and counted. Gerrymandering is just one of many ways those in power subvert the principles of democracy in order to preserve their power and privilege. I said/wrote in a recent podcast/blog post that American values and Christian values are not always the same. In the case of democracy, I believe they are. I believe Jesus’ work of giving voice to those who have been silenced, of reconnecting those who have been marginalized, of seeing those who have been rendered invisible, is about enfranchisement. Translated to our time, this empowerment looks like democracy.

If Christians in Ohio seek to live both into our Christian and our American values, we can seek the enfranchisement of all Ohioans. We can end gerrymandering.