Unconventional Saints: Leslie Foster: Numbers 27:1-11
Ordinary Time
Then the daughters of Zelophehad came forward. Zelophehad was son of Hepher son of Gilead son of Machir son of Manasseh, of the clans of Manasseh, son of Joseph. The names of his daughters were Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. 2 They stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the leaders, and all the congregation, at the entrance of the tent of meeting, saying, 3 “Our father died in the wilderness; he was not among the congregation of those who gathered themselves together against the Lord in the congregation of Korah but died for his own sin, and he had no sons. 4 Why should the name of our father be taken away from his clan because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father’s brothers.”
5 Moses brought their
case before the Lord. 6 And
the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 7 “The
daughters of Zelophehad are right in what they are saying; you shall indeed let
them possess an inheritance among their father’s brothers and pass the
inheritance of their father on to them. 8 You shall
also speak to the Israelites, saying: If a man dies and has no son, then you
shall pass his inheritance on to his daughter. 9 If
he has no daughter, then you shall give his inheritance to his brothers. 10 If
he has no brothers, then you shall give his inheritance to his father’s
brothers. 11 And if his father has no brothers,
then you shall give his inheritance to the nearest kinsman of his clan, and he
shall possess it. It shall be for the Israelites a statute and ordinance, as
the Lord commanded Moses.” (NRSVue)
“What if,”
said a young gay black son of missionaries, in the way that children do before
we tell them not to; what if the world were different? What if we looked at God with new eyes? What if the boundaries we’re told about aren’t
the inflexible absolutes they seem to be?
What if we didn’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done
before?
Henry
Leslie Foster II was born in Singapore to American missionary parents and has
spent a good deal of his life circling the globe, growing up in Indonesia, the
Philippines, Thailand, and, oddly, even in Berrien Springs, Michigan before
studying in Germany, Tennessee, and California.[1] As we continue our series on Unconventional Saints
and reach this last weekend of Black History Month, we celebrate the creativity
and curiosity of this man who became a filmmaker driven by the question, “what
if?”
One
of Foster’s first gallery installation of films is called “Ritual Cycle,” a “series
of five experimental films that utilize ambient narrative to explore the
concept of divine identity, including the ideas of the feminine divine, the
genderqueer divine, and the divine as sibling”.[2] The rituals of the cycle anchor themselves in
the action of liturgy: lament, cleanse, hope, rest, feast.[3] What if God had many different faces, the
ritual films ask; what if sorrow and joy danced together; what if divinity wasn’t
some untouchable Other but right here with us; what if we could showcase how
black is beautiful and queer is marvelous and God is so much bigger than the
boxes in which we put the Holy? In an
interview about another film project, his thesis for his MFA from UCLA, Foster
said, “I'm really interested in how ritual and pleasure open doors to an
expansive radical Black imagination, pulling away from linear
Western/heteronormative time, allowing us to dream our way into better worlds.”[4]
The
story of the daughters of Zelophehad is not one that readily comes to mind from
Sunday school or familiar sermons; it’s not even in the Revised Common
Lectionary, the three-year cycle of Scriptural texts that many mainline Christian
churches use for preaching schedules. I had
forgotten it existed at all until I stumbled on it in a children’s story Bible
called The Book of Belonging. I
highly recommend the book in its entirety, but in it is the six-page chapter
about “Five Fearless Sisters.”[5] In The Book of Belonging’s telling,
the five daughters are fighting for the right to be part of the promise given
to their father, given to them before their culture decided they could not have
it. In demanding that they belong, that
they are just as much God’s as their father was, they are dreaming their way
into better worlds.
The
story starts here with the reading of today, but it actually continues across two
other spaces in Scripture. Here, Moses
and the Israelites who have escaped Egypt are coming to the end of their wilderness
wandering and are beginning to think of what it will look like to settle down
in the Promised Land. Owning land is
power, is place, is security, now as much as then even if we don’t use the same
language or the same inheritance patterns as the Israelites did. The five daughters of Zelophehad know good
and well that, under the rules of the wanderers, they will have no right to ownership
in the new land because of the death of their father and their lack of brothers;
because of their being women. This is
how it’s always been done, say the people who did something different a mere
generation before, and Mahlah, Noah, Tirzah, Milcah, and Hoglah all say but what
if.
They
go to Moses and state their case; they are as much a part of the people of God
as any man is, and their father was as faithful as other fathers, son or no. Why should they not get the land their father
would have gotten? Moses asks God, and
God most wonderfully says, “Yeah, I’m with them. Give the women their land.” The end of today’s passage is a delightful
blooming of what if, of new beginnings, of better worlds.
But
systems do not like change, even and sometimes especially if that change is to broaden
the table and the welcome. Professor
Kimberly D. Russaw summarizes, “After the Lord directs Moses to give the land
to the daughters, the elders of the Manasseh tribe worry that another tribe
will amass more land than them if the daughters marry outside their tribe.”[6] In Numbers 36, Moses again goes to God after
the elders come to him and returns with a compromise. The sisters “may marry anyone they please as
long as they marry within Zelophehad’s tribe.
No portion in Israel will pass from one tribe to another tribe.”[7]
Dreaming
of better worlds but knowing they’re still a work in progress; Foster would recognize
this two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back outcome. We recognize it. Foster’s 2019 film installation “Heavenly
Brown Body” is based around Mark Aguhar’s poem “Litanies to My Heavenly Brown
Body,” which itself riffs off of the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the sissies,” the poem begins, “blessed
are the boi dykes.” Like the sisters
waiting for their land and being told yes, but, Aguhar’s poem understands
that there are so many more steps that have yet to be taken to celebrate the
fullness of humanity, her words ending with blessing for those she “couldn’t
describe, will learn to describe and respect and love.”[8] Foster’s films recognize that what if is
still awfully speculative in many places where black, brown, and queer bodies
are policed without full recognition in, he says, “the hopes of not only making
visible but celebrating the people and bodies that heteronormative culture
fears, marginalizes, and hides from view.”[9]
The
sisters are not given voice in Numbers 36 but we do learn in verse 10 that they
act “according to God’s command” and marry some distant relatives from within
Manassah. Yet that isn’t enough, either;
after the death of Moses, the daughters again have to plead their case. In Joshua 17, they say to Joshua and the
priest Eleazar that the Lord gave them inheritance and the text implies they
don’t yet have it; Joshua, at last, gives it to them, and the grand story moves
on.[10]
“I’m
trying to praise the mutilated world and practice resurrection,” says Leslie
Foster about his films.[11] We, too, look at a mutilated world from this
resurrection faith, and we, too, may wonder what if. What if Black History Month was a step
forward each year in recognizing the wonder of Black people throughout history
and right now as well as creating a true change in the ongoing American socioeconomic
segregation and systemic racism? What if
transgender people were valued as simply people rather than threats to the
cisheteronormative government feverishly trying to erase us? What if God came in every single color and
gender in the way we talk about God, recognizing our history of the male lord
figure and giving equal space to the newer awarenesses of the marginalized
whose voices have been silenced for so long?
What if Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Tirzah, and Milcah did not have to bend
and beg and marry simply to belong with the people who walked beside them as
they wandered in the desert singing songs of God’s promises? What if we Christians spoke about justice on
Sunday and enacted on Monday, fought for it on Tuesday, lived into it on
Wednesday, confessed our lack of it on Thursday, loved and loved and loved in
the name of the indescribable God on Friday, Saturday, every day? What if we looked at the phrase “it’s always been
done this way” with healthy skepticism and curiosity? What if, asks Miriam Winter, we were to live
the Good News we proclaim as though it’s good news?[12]
Daneen
Aker’s book of Holy Troublemakers holds Leslie Foster as an example of “how
do we change culture,” noting that Foster’s life of moving around to very
different places made him “aware of how much we do and think comes from our
culture—and that if we only know one culture, we often don’t question it, even
when elements of our culture may harm others.
[Foster] says that ‘because people create culture, we can also change it…I
want my films to be part of changing culture for the good of us all.’”[13]
Whether
you’ve traveled the world or simply the length of State Street, how do you question
the culture around you? How do you go to
the elders, to the Church, to the mayor, to the councils, to God and say just
because it’s always been this way doesn’t mean it has to stay there? How are you listening to the people saying this
was promised to us, even if circumstances have changed a little? How are you willing to tilt your head and see
God at work a little differently than ever before, full of blessing and refusal
to leave even one beloved behind in the wandering space? We who claim a Christ Who said blessed are
the poor, the meek, the lowly; blessed are the ones whom the system does not
want to see, whom the rich cast out in disgust—we are given creative spirits by
a creative God and we cannot pretend that what is is what must be always.
May
our hearts be open to “what if,” to the holy and wholly unexpected; may our
souls be curious and our insistence run deep; may we look at injustice, even
and especially within ourselves, and hear that the daughters of Zelophehad are
right, that we are dreaming our way into better worlds, that God is inviting us
to ask, challenge, become. Amen.
[1]
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol3/iss1/18/
[5]
Mariko Clark and Rachel Eleanor, “Five Fearless Sisters,” in The Book of
Belonging: Bible Stories for Kind and
Contemplative Kids (New York: Convergent Books, 2024), 94–99.
[7]
Numbers 36:6b–7a, The Inclusive Bible
[8]
“Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body,” Mark Aguhar, TheDustyRebel
[10]
Joshua 17:3–4.
[11]
http://revry.tv/news/leslie-foster-experimental-film-and-installations
[12]
Item Details | Theological Commons,
recorded sermon, 11:51
[13]
“HT & US Lesson Plan: Leslie Foster,” Curriculum (pdf) based on Holy
Troublemakers and Unconventional Saints by Daneen Akers, p. 47.
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