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Serial Foot Washing Exhibitionism

Abstract: Achilles heel for draft social statement?

The ELCA press release arrived in our email at 10:43AM on August 4. At 10:48 while we were still digesting the tabloid-worthy headline ELCA Presiding Bishop Washes Feet of HIV-Positive Women, an indignant report from our Far-Flung Observer Network (FFON) arrived: "That's a news headline in 2008????"
And, indeed, we were so distracted by the headline that we almost missed Bishop Hanson's declaration that compassion is only half of the what Christians are called to do:
The other half of the call is to stand with people at the margins so that they will no longer be marginalized. I think too often Christians have found their comfort zone in acts of charity, compassion and love, rather than the struggle for justice and the full inclusion of marginalized people.

Minutes later another email comment on the press release arrived and noted that a foot-washing anecdote had also been featured in Bishop Hanson's sermon at the July installation of Sierra Pacific Synod Bishop Mark Holmerud.
A pattern was emerging, so we investigated further and found Repairing the Breach, Bishop Hanson's May 24, 2007 sermon, on the Southeast Michigan Synod web site. That sermon included the foot-washing story later told at Bishop Holmerud's installation. Bishop Hanson:
Two weeks ago I spoke at the commencement of Fort Peck Community College on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana. It is one of thirty-two tribal colleges in the United States. What could I say? I was told by someone that I was the first white person invited to speak at graduation. Every attempt at how to begin the speech seemed inadequate and empty. So I began by inviting two graduates to come forward, remove their shoes, and I washed their feet. I could think of no other act that might begin to convey my humility and repentance for the racism that has so permeated the response of we who are white to American Indians for centuries.
I spoke of Jesus, the teacher and rabbi, washing his disciples’ (students) feet and instructing them to love one another as he has loved them. I said that absent my repentance for the sin of racism, we could not even to begin to imagine what reconciliation and justice might mean for us today. Absent my public repentance for our collective sin of racism, I suspect my talk about the many contributions of American Indians would fall on deaf ears.

With Bishop Hanson, we are convinced of the need for public repentance, and there is no doubt that the ceremony of bathing another's feet can be a symbol of repentance. But bathing and repentance (even public repentance) are intimate, immediate acts: we repent in the moment; we wash feet in the moment. But when we tell the story outside the moment (in a press release or even a sermon), the symbol begins to lose its compass, and may not point where one had hoped.

(Vol. II, xli August 11, 2008 )

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