Moving from words to witness in our relationship with God.
God's Gonna Trouble the Water:
A Faithful Response to Sexual Violence
Lydia Mulkey
November 14, 2017
 


This week I find myself traveling and talking to clergy and social service providers about providing a faithful response to sexual violence. Today, religious language and images swirled around as a room full of concerned folks spent a full day looking for resources within their faith tradition to help survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. At the end of the day, one of my closing questions to the group was “what did you hear today that troubled you?” Of course, there were many things that troubled folks. Some were troubled to realize the ways they had unknowingly created roadblocks for survivors in their congregations in the past. Some were troubled by the statistics. Some were troubled by the challenges ahead as they tried to faithfully respond. I imagine that you, too, are troubled by sexual violence right now. Survivors are coming forward at rates that may alarm you, in ways they have never been able to do. My heart leaps to think of all those who are experiencing the freedom of telling their stories and being believed, finally! And yet, my heart aches at the reality and the enormity of a problem that largely hid in cultural shadows for too long. Sexual violence is now a topic we are being forced to confront through social media campaigns like #metoo and through allegations against public figures like Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump. Hearing about yet another survivor, and another survivor, and another…we naturally become troubled. How can this be real? How can there be this much violence in the world? What is going on here?
 
After the participants had shared all that troubled them, I could sense the air that had been sucked out of the room. There was a lowering of spirits. For whatever reason, in that moment, the pool at Bethesda came into my mind. There’s a story in the gospel of John about people sitting by that pool waiting for an angel to come and trouble the waters. If they got in when the waters were troubled, they would be healed of their sickness. So I said to the participants, “I’m so grateful to hear that you are troubled by what you heard today, because when the waters get troubled, it is for the sake of someone’s healing.” Friends, an angel has troubled our cultural waters and invited us to get in and be a part of the healing. Troubling though it may be to hear story after story of sexual and gender based violence, we’ve got to get in the water and find our faithful response to those who are hurting. Will you wade in the water?
 
The first thing is to get informed. Click here for a good place for people of faith to begin: