Sermon: The Rt. Rev. Mary Douglas Glasspool

In the name of our loving God. Amen.

This past February, a very dear friend of mine gave me a coffee mug that sits on my desk as a kind of playful icon. The mug features a cartoon depicting a large group of men – in a gender-stereotypical way, you can tell that they are men because they all have beards – facing three women.  Again, in a gender – stereotypical way you can tell that they are women because the three are all wearing headscarves. The man at the front of the group of men is saying to the women: So, ladies, thanks for being the first to witness and report the resurrection. We’ll take it from here.

The biblical lessons proposed for commemorating The Ordinations of the Philadelphia Eleven in the Episcopal Church, are rich in meaning and story. The courageous resistance of the Hebrew midwives in Exodus.  The strong statement made by the Apostle Paul to the Galatians that unity in Christ transforms social divisions.  The startling question of the two men, to the women who have come to the tomb – Why do you seek the living among the dead? They all provide fertile ground from which we not only honor the Philadelphia Eleven, but also discern what it is God is up to now and how can we engage with that.

Let’s start with the midwives. What an incredible passage from Exodus! The king of Egypt, who is not named, decides to execute a policy of genocide among the captive and enslaved Hebrews. He summons two midwives who are named: Shiphrah- a name which means ‘to be beautiful’ and Puah- a name which means ‘young girl’. He commands them to kill all the boy babies they deliver – a policy which is not only cruel, but irrational if you want to increase the power of your slave labor. But, we read, the midwives feared God and so they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded.  They perceived that God was with them and also that God is on the side of life.  Even so, I give them all credit for the courage it took to stand up to the king of Egypt.  When the king discovered that his direct orders had been thwarted, he called the midwives to him and asked, why. The midwives very cleverly replied that the Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women: they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. Yeah, right. Talk about speaking truth to power!  Walter Brueggemann comments that without blaming the Hebrew mothers, the midwives attest to the surging power for life that is present in the Hebrew mothers, a power for life that is not known among women of the empire. [Walter Brueggemann, NIB Vol. 1, p.696]

Nowhere else are Shiphrah and Puah named in scripture, and yet we remember them by name as women of faith and courage. God fearers, defiant, clever and nurturing. They bear witness to the power of God whose will for life overrules the killing and whose power for life is undeterred by the death dispensed by the powerful. [Brueggemann, p. 697]

The section from Paul’s letter to the Galatians proposed for this commemoration contains the familiar and often quoted phrase There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male or female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3:28) Yet the verses that seem most relevant to this occasion are verses 23 and 24: Now, before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore, the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came so that we might be justified by faith”. (NRSV) Paul sees the law as disciplinarian- and the Greek word used is paidagōgos– a word from which is derived our English word pedagogue. The various translations of this word in English are many: guardian, custodian, disciplinarian, schoolmaster, tutor. The New Living Translation of verse 24 helps us better understand what Paul is saying. It reads: Let me put it this way, the law was our guardian until Christ came. It protected us until we could be made right with God through faith. Being made right with God through faith involved letting go of those binary distinctions that imprisoned women and men in particular functional roles; that made one group of people inferior and subservient to another group of people; that separated human beings based on religious and ethnic origins. The Christian perspective is that if we are all one in Christ Jesus, then we cannot let these distinctions become barriers to living this great gift of life in all its fullness.

The passage from Luke’s gospel is most usually proclaimed on Easter day. My guess is that most of you have heard a sermon preached on this passage. I hope it was a good one! Luke’s stories of the empty tomb and appearances of the resurrected Jesus are colorful, detailed, and infused with the work and increasing presence of the Holy Spirit. A group of women, none of whom are initially named, come to the tomb, to anoint Jesus’ body with spices that they had prepared – they are acting within their religious tradition. They find the tomb empty, and the heavy stone rolled away. And while they are trying to figure out what is going on, suddenly two men are standing beside them in dazzling clothes, which is meant to suggest to us that the men were actually angelic figures. The women are terrified, but the angelic messengers utter one of the most important questions of the Christian Faith: Why do you seek the living among the dead?  And then they say, Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee, that the son of man must be handed over to sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.

In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, a statement is made to women at the empty tomb that the risen Jesus is going ahead of them into Galilee. In the gospel of John, the poignant encounter of the risen Jesus with Mary Magdalene and the subsequent witnessing to the unbelieving disciples is related.  And then the risen Jesus appears once again to the disciples in Galilee. But in Luke’s gospel the action stays in Jerusalem. And after hearing the words of the two angelic figures, the women are instructed to remember the words of Jesus – how he told you…In one of my own ancient Easter sermons, I’ve said that the women faced death, they heard the word, and they remembered Jesus’ words.

The late Fred Craddock has written that this kind of Remembering is often the activating power of recognition. [Luke: Interpretation-A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990, p.283] It is what we might call a light bulb experience. We read scripture.  We read it again.  And the most familiar passages we might read, hundreds, even thousands of times. And some event in our lives, maybe a crisis, and we face the worst. And perhaps a messenger breaks through to us, to where we live and we remember the words of Jesus, or perhaps another important part of scripture and Click! the light bulb goes on. And in light of our new and sometimes even terrifying experience, some new revelation comes through the old familiar words. Remembering is often the activating power of recognition.

So here we are remembering an event that took place 50 years ago in Philadelphia. Eleven women who had been duly ordained deacons in the Episcopal Church, gathered at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.  The Reverends Merrill Bitner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeanette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Swanson and Nancy Wittig, knelt to be ordained before three retired bishops, Edward Welles, Robert Dewitt and Daniel Corrigan, with active Bishop Tony Ramos fully present and bearing witness. The Reverend Paul Washington, Rector of the Church of the Advocate, hosted the event. Barbara Harris was the crucifer and led the procession. Charles Willie, prominent black educator, and at that time Vice President of the Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies, preached the sermon.  And in a rare combination of gifts and skills that the church has not yet made the most of, security was provided by the local chapter of the Black Panthers and a precursor to the lesbian group, Dykes on Bikes.

This is the – it’s true. This is the Cliff Note version of the story, about which you can view a documentary at one o’clock today.  But I am moved to ask the question, why this particular event?  In the Diocese of New York, the Task Force charged with coordinating and publicizing more than a year’s-long series of screenings, panel discussions and other events, has happily enough, remembered stories leading up to July 29th, 1974. These are stories that include the recognition of Florence Li Tim Oi’s ordination to the priesthood in 1944 in Hong Kong, about which people in the United States in 1974 were not aware.  And stories of the events after July 29th, 1974, including the ordinations of the (so-called) Washington Four on September 7th, 1975, which certainly increased the pressure on the canonical chains to move.  And these are only within the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion. What about the denominations such as the Presbyterians and the Methodist Churches and others who had already granted women the authority to exercise ordained ministry in their respective churches? What was it about the events of July 29th, 1974, that caused that event to become the epicenter, as it were, that caused the tectonic plates to shift and forever change the landscape of women in religious authority?

I can think of at least four characteristics of those ordinations that were at once critical to the profound nature of the event and from which we can learn as the ripples continue to flow. The first is that It was a public event. People could (and did) know that it was going to happen beforehand, and they certainly knew about it afterwards. The power streaming from a public event comes in part because there are so many witnesses to the event. I see it as the living out of Matthew, chapter 10, verse 27, which has Jesus instructing his disciples, What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. The gospel proclaimed and lived is the most powerful tool at the disciple’s disposal against the powers of this world. The service was not held in secret. It was a public event.

Second, the event was held at exactly the right time, and by that I mean God’s time. In church circles, we use a Greek word to elevate the sense that it is God’s time and not necessarily our own chronological time. The word is Kairos and it suggests a sense of timing. Scripture uses the phrase in the fullness of time when we want to indicate God’s time. Most people would not have picked a hot summer Monday at the end of July as the best time for such an event.  But that’s the point.  The people involved had long been engaged in prayerful discernment; in wrestling with the principalities and powers of the institutional church structure; in trying to do this at regularly scheduled ordinations to the priesthood.  As in the diocese of New York on December 15th, 1973, when five women deacons were presented alongside five men deacons, and the women were refused ordination to the priesthood. The midwives could not have asked the Hebrew women giving birth to wait until they got there! The Holy Spirit kept moving and the 11 women and their many companions kept moving with the spirit.

Third, they did it together, as a group. It was not an isolated ordination. There were 11 of them, and I’m pretty sure they would’ve liked to have had 12 to resonate with the 12 Apostles. But I’ve always thought that the fact that there were 11 left something of an open space, like leaving room for Elijah at the table. It seemed to me an invitation to the rest of the church to join the women in this new adventure that would bring greater wholeness to the Church. Perhaps more importantly, if it had only been one or even two, The institutional powers that be could more easily have dismissed the case as heretical aberration, and simply moved on. But there was power in numbers, and the power unleashed on that day in July 1974 has continued to empower people to this day.

And fourth, the 11 women and their supporters acted within their tradition, could say ‘the tradition’.  Like the women coming to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body with spices, they were acting within their own tradition.  Let me be clear about what I mean here. They could have gone off the grid and written their own liturgical service. They could have held the service at a gymnasium or a school auditorium. They could have had other priests or lay peoples who supported them simply declare, Well, we see you as priests, so you’re priests. But the service was held at the Episcopal Church of the Advocate. There were four bishops present, three of whom did the laying on of hands, as is the custom. The women all signed the Oath of Conformity.  And the bishops led the service from the book of Common Prayer. Believe it or not, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. You know what? People can call these ordinations ‘irregular’ until the cows come home, but I say: They did it by the book!  They did not let the principalities and powers take their own tradition and practice away from them. They claimed the Episcopal Church at a time when the Church, institutionally speaking, was treating them as a problem it wished would go away.  What a blessing they give, they have given to us and how grateful I am that they did!

So now, sisters and brothers, siblings in the world, What do we do? I ask that question because while it’s wonderful that we are all here commemorating and celebrating, this is not the end of the story, and we have work to do!  There are still barriers in this world which unjustly separate people.  They need to come down. There is much brokenness in this world that needs healing, and there is so much despair in our world that needs to be countered with words and deeds of genuine hope.

My friends, from the Hebrew midwives, take courage in speaking truth to power and know that God is invested in that which gives life.  From Paul, know that in God’s world, the binary distinctions that imprison us will be coming down so that everyone can live life in its fullness.  From the women at the empty tomb, take courage in working within our own traditions, remembering Jesus’s words, and don’t simply let others take it from here.  And from the Philadelphia Eleven, learn that when we take action, whether it be to break down barriers, build bridges, confront injustice, heal brokenness, kindle love, stoke hope or flame the fire of our faith; do it publicly for everyone to see; stay in tune with the Kairos – God’s time; do it together, not in isolation; and don’t let anyone steal your own tradition! All of which is to say: Come, labor on!

In the name of our loving God. Amen.