But, By God, We're Here

Women in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, the musical

It seems in some ways that the ordination of women in The Episcopal Church is still relatively new. In other ways, it is difficult to remember a time when women weren’t ordained.

But I remember that time. Indeed I lived through the tumultuous years leading up to the ordination of eleven women in Philadelphia in 1974. I was ordained a priest in 1971 in my sixth month as the curate at St. Martin’s Church, Charlotte, North Carolina. St. Martins’ was the home parish of Carter Heyward, an exact contemporary of mine. Carter at that time was at student at Union Seminary in New York City and was in the forefront of women pushing the Church to ordain women to the priesthood. I myself had only recently come into the Church and like many converts, I espoused Episcopal traditions with gusto. One of those traditions happened to be an all-male priesthood. I don’t know that I was solidly against the ordination of women, but I certainly was no enthusiast for it.

One Sunday in early July, 1974, I preached a sermon on the gospel story of Jesus sending out his disciples two by two to places where he himself was going to come. I entitled it “Disciples That Go Ahead of the Master.” I preached this sermon never even thinking about or mentioning the hot-button issue of women’s ordination. Carter’s mother, Mary Ann, was in church that Sunday, as she usually was.  Ever the enthusiast for “the women,” as she put it, she immediately inferred that the sermon was precisely relevant to women’s ordination. She asked for a copy of it. News came out in several weeks that eleven women had been ordained to the priesthood in Philadelphia by three bishops. One of those women was Katrina Swanson, who co-authored the liturgy we are using today. Another was Carter Heyward. Mary Ann Heyward sent copies of my sermon to all eleven of those women. Within days, I think, each one of them wrote me a personal note thanking me for my support. And that is how I became an advocate for women’s ordination. 

The Philadelphia Eleven at their Ordination to the Priesthood
July 29, 1974

A year later, four more women were ordained in the Diocese of Washington in St. Stephen and the Incarnation Parish, known for its highly experimental liturgies, its unorthodox practices, its hit-the-streets-and-demonstrate-for-justice-and-peace mentality, and especially for its popular rector, The Rev. William Wendt. Father Wendt got into trouble with his bishop, The Right Reverend William Creighton, and was brought up on charges for which he was tried in a church court and ultimately reprimanded in the cathedral for his disobedience. 

I never imagined in 1975 that I would one day serve the parish of St. Stephen and the Incarnation. In 2015, I was in my twelfth year as Senior Priest there when we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the ordination of the Washington Four. The three living priests who had been irregularly ordained returned for a special liturgy and celebration. The wonderful occasion brought together a host of people who had been directly affected in one way or another by that event in 1975 that had been so painful. The year before, Carter Heyward had come to St. Stephen and the Incarnation to preach when we commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the Philadelphia ordination. It was all a part of a year of commemoration  and celebration that left me grateful that I had lived through the struggle, but profoundly aware that I myself had been privileged to avoid any suffering of my own, and that for only one reason: I was male.

It is interesting to me that the first lesson chosen for this liturgy is the story of Abraham’s agony over not having an heir.  It is a story about trust, the theme of the entire Abrahamic cycle.  Trust is integral to faith.  But there is a sub-text to the story.  It is implicitly about an outsider, Eliezer of Damascus, Abraham’s slave who he thinks will be his only heir.  Eliezer is only mentioned in the biblical text in this connection, although there are rabbinical stories about him.  So in the background of this highly important story about the establishment of a lineage that was ultimately to become Israel, God’s own people, who in turn were to be a light that shown for all nations, there hangs the question about who along the way is left out. 

Several years ago a friend of mine introduced me to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Howard Zinn was a professor at Columbia University. His history is history told from the underside, stories of the people who were the losers, like the Native Americans, like Africans forced into slavery, like common laborers of all races that rioted and frequently died for worker’s rights, like children who were working in factories under awful conditions prior to the passage of child labor laws. I was amazed on page after page to learn of things no one ever taught me in school. Nearly always the winners write the histories. They tell their own story about how they are powerful. They crow about what they’ve accomplished. Only recently have we begun to pay attention to the unsung heroes that have come from the ranks of minorities. And there are plenty of people who don’t like telling the stories of the so-called “losers” one bit.

But they are not they gospel and that is not how the gospel works. Like it or not, throughout the biblical story, God displays a preferential option for the poor and the powerless. It is not the rich and famous, but those who are the dispossessed, the marginalized, the forsaken who turn out to be the recipients of special divine care. That is what the Magnificat is about, Mary’s Song that we hear in the gospel today.  It reads like a manifesto for universal economic and social justice. Why? Because it is a manifesto for economic and social justice. Listen:

⁵¹ You, God, have stretched out your mighty arm
    and scattered the proud with all their plans.
⁵² You have brought down mighty kings from their thrones,
    and lifted up the lowly.
⁵³ You have filled the hungry with good things,
    and sent the rich away with empty hands.
⁵⁴ You have  kept the promise you made to our ancestors,
    and have come to the help of your servant Israel.

Mary herself, a woman, or, more likely a teenage girl, is the poster child for the powerless. She is female in a world dominated by men, young in a culture where age is revered and children discounted or ignored, a Jew without vote or office in a nation subjugated to a foreign imperial authority. 

"“Until you do right by me, I say, everything you even dream about will fail.” 

Last week I saw a production of the musical version of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.  The climax of that story takes place at an Easter dinner when the discounted, abused, downtrodden Celie declares her independence and finally flies in the face of Mister, her oppressive husband, as she announces that she is going to leave him. Celie curses Mister, an act of amazing courage. Enraged at being defied, Mister yells, “Who you think you is? You can’t curse nobody. Look at you. You’re black, you're poor, you're ugly, you're a woman, you're nothing at all!” But moments later when she is leaving, she shouts back at Mister, “I'm poor, black, I might even be ugly, but dear God, I'm here. I'm here.”

It is not an accident that this all transpires on Easter Day. Sitting around the table is the whole cast of characters, all of whom, to a person, are walking in darkness and the shadow of death. That is the case with all human beings at one time or another. But even the most bedraggled of them sees and hears Celie claiming her power and proclaiming her freedom, and some, notably the women, take fresh courage. One laughs declaring she is home again, back where she once belonged and was brave. Another follows Celie’s example and declares that she too is leaving, leaving her narrow immature dependency to become the singer she believes she can be. That’s Easter. That’s resurrection. That is the story of the power of God that we know as Christ breaking the bonds of death and hell and rising victorious from the grave. It happens again and again and again in lives like Katrina Welles Swanson’s and Carter Heyward’s. In lives like Bill Wendt’s. In lives like yours and mine. 

Three of the Philadelphia Eleven Celebrating Holy Eucharist in Riverside Church, New York
October 27, 1974
L-R:  Alison Cheek, Carter Heyward, Jeanette Picard

And it will happen again in this nation of ours. Evil will prosper but for so long, but the cause of Truth will triumph. It is built into the fabric of the universe. And that fabric may be ripped and torn and trampled upon by the forces of darkness and destruction and death, but that fabric will be mended by the only force that ultimately breathes, namely Life itself. Truth and life and love will continue moving, however unsteadily and haltingly, until the circle of life becomes wider and wider to include everyone. The only ones excluded are the ones who exclude themselves. The mighty are cast down from their thrones not by some punishing god from a distant throne but by self-will dedicated to the self’s destruction. The rich are sent away empty not by the Spirit but by their own choice to refuse the Bread of Life, which is Truth and Justice, Mercy and Love. We have seen darker times and lived through scarier moments, many of us. And we may be poor, we may be black—or white, we may be ugly—or beautiful, but by God, we’re here, we’re here.

A sermon preached on the commemoration of the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion on the texts Genesis 15:1-6 and Luke Luke 1:46-55.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018

Good Gracious

 Luke 20:27-38

            Some day, I think I’ll write a book called Famous Scenes Left Out of the Bible.  One of those scenes actually belongs in the twentieth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel in the middle of our story this morning.  The included scene would have the text read like this:  “There were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married the widow, and so in the same way all seven married her and died childless.  Finally, finally the woman died.  And Jesus looked at the Sadducees for a moment in total disbelief.  Then he snickered.  The snicker became a laugh, then a guffaw.  And Jesus, turning to his disciples saw that they were trying to hold in their laughter.  And the Sadducees grew very angry.  But Jesus, totally losing it, fell down upon the ground, rolling in the dirt, laughing uncontrollably.  “This,” he said, finally composing himself, “is the darnedest story anybody ever cooked up.”  But clearing his throat and wiping away tears from his dusty face, Jesus proceeded to teach the Sadducees a lesson.  They were chagrined to hear him say that Moses himself testified to the resurrection when he spoke of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.  So therefore, said Jesus, “God is not God of the dead but of the living.”

            Worse things have been done to the Bible.  In fact, one has to wonder why all three of the Synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—report this incident.  In all honesty, I imagine that they found it far less funny than I do.  I think it might be that they were all writing to audiences who, far enough removed from the Easter event, had some trouble with the notion of resurrection.  Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t think that the Early Church was necessarily plagued with exactly the same issues that bedevil the post-modern world.  But we know, for example, from another source, namely St. Paul, that there were significant numbers of people in the ancient Church who had a hard time with the notion of resurrection.  Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.”  A little later he goes on to say, “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised?  With what kind of body do they come?’”  So well before any of the first three gospels took shape, Paul was acknowledging that there were folks around who had trouble with the notion of resurrection, let alone the fact that on resurrection hangs the truth of the Christian faith.  If you have trouble believing in the resurrection, don’t feel so alone.

            Perhaps you are beginning to wonder if I am in as great a fog as any Sadducee.  Don’t I know that we are half a year away from Easter?  Am I not aware that St. Thomas’ Church has been building towards this day now for well over a month as the culmination of your stewardship season?  What has all this marrying that the poor woman did with so many feeble and worn out husbands—all with the added problem (from somebody, somewhere) of monumental infertility—what has all this to do with what we are here for on this special Sunday?

            This story is the quintessential example of a crowd of people, very sure of themselves and their point of view, who ask the wrong question. They miss the point entirely.  A generation ago, The Episcopal Church had a great Presiding Bishop by the name of John Elbridge Hines.  Bishop Hines used to begin his sermons with a prayer that included the phrase, “When we would make much of what cannot matter much to thee, recall us to the heart of our confession, Jesus Christ, Lord.”  In the light of that, most of us are Sadducees at least some of the time.  We make much of what cannot matter much to God.  We ask stupid questions, which, by the way, is not at all the same as expressing honest doubts.  We fritter away our time on things that are forgotten in a day or less.  The religious as well as the non-religious are not exempt from the danger of missing the point by making much of what cannot matter much to God or anyone else.

            So what is the point? 

            Everything in the gospel hinges on Resurrection.  Is the whole message one of love?  Then love and resurrection are inseparable.  Is the thrust of the New Testament about serving others to relieve suffering and to make a better world?  Then service and relieving suffering are inextricably tied to resurrection.  Is the theme of the gospel salvation, or transformation, or eternal life, or morality, or outreach, or justice, or right relationships, or honoring the Truth, or claiming one’s most profound Selfhood?  Yes and yes and yes to all of that.  And every one of those things, properly understood, is an expression of resurrection.  For God is God of the living, and if you are either alive or want to be, God is all about raising you from the dead.  That is what our baptism means.  It is our initiation into a community of resurrected persons sharing the life of the resurrected Jesus.  And it is more—our baptism is.  It is living out that life, practicing the precepts of Jesus, cultivating the Mind of Jesus, acquiring the habits of Jesus, doing the works of Jesus.  It is from beginning to end about being raised little by little, day by day, action by action from death to life.  You want to know what dead is?  It isn’t so much what you’ll be when you are a corpse.  It is lifeless, tasteless, meaningless, pointless stuff—relationships that are poisonous, attitudes that suck, inflated egos that try to mask insecurity with bravado, self-medication through one thing or another that never quite eases deep pain nor bleeds away old anger.  It is what the New Testament writers refer to as “the world” or “the flesh,”—not to be confused with the marvelous body you have.  Spirit and life and resurrection are all rolled up in the same ball, and that ball is the life of God, the power of God:  the power that raised Jesus from the dead and raises you from the dead.

            That is the point. 

            But we are left with a question, aren’t we? What must we do, what can we do, to live the resurrection life more fully? Or, if we haven’t yet begun to live it, how do we start?  It is a fair question, and it deserves an answer.

            Practice being grateful.  If you hang around the Christian community very long, you are bound to hear a bunch of one-syllable words, an important one of which is grace.  Essentially, grace refers to the giving action of God.  The one thing we can safely say about God is that God is always giving.  Every once in awhile, something hugely significant breaks into our awareness.  In 1999, on a sun-drenched autumn morning I started the drive from Santa Fe up towards Taos through what is properly called the Land of Enchantment.  I looked westward at mountains rising out of the desert, an overwhelming sight.  Full of joy, I exclaimed out loud with no one to hear me in the secrecy of my truck, “O God, thank you!  It is unimaginably beautiful.  Thank you for whatever you did to cause such beauty!”  I sighed and drove on.  In a second or two, I heard the words—not a human voice or a disembodied spirit, but words that formed so large in my mind that they might well have existed outside of me:  “Frank, I made it just for you.”  Tears sprang.  Alice Walker, my favorite theologian, says in The Color Purple that God is always flirting with us, trying to get our notice.  Her character Shug says that God is pissed every time we pass the color purple and don’t notice.  “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins.[1]  And that is just the start of it. God made it all just for you, as if you were the only being on the entire planet. God gives it all just for you.  Free of charge.  Millions upon millions of years, billions even, went into the making of you.  Flaming stars turned dark and died, flinging their dust across distances you cannot fathom, and their glory is right now in the stuff sitting here in the form of you.  Pinch yourself.  Feel what once shone as light, which you now feel as flesh. 

           

            Live with that awareness, breathe deeply that joy, and you cannot be depressed forever or down for long.  You’ll want a thousand tongues to sing your dear Redeemer’s praise.  And if you catch the spirit that made you, you will find yourself, sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, wanting to mirror that life that gave you your life and keeps on giving it to you no matter how you beat it up.  When you were conceived and later born, you embodied the DNA of your parents and took on their characteristics.  We are born again in baptism so that we can take on the characteristics of our Maker and Redeemer.  And before long, we find ourselves finding ourselves oddly when we start losing ourselves.  We begin practicing, awkwardly at first and then with increasing confidence, giving ourselves away.

            That is what God does, and when you do it, God is palpably alive in you.  Grace and gratitude are inseparable, two parts of a continuous cycle.  Charis, or grace, is at the heart of the Great Thanksgiving, which we call eucharist.  And that brings us up to this very moment.  We have gathered today to make eucharist.  A part of our eucharistia is making an act of thanksgiving the way we most frequently do, and that by giving a gracious gift.  Call it a pledge, call it commitment, or call it your estimate of giving.  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you make the connection between what you give through St. Thomas’ and your life in Christ.  Don’t pay the Church for goods and services.  Give to the Body of Christ because you are the Body of Christ and you want to be as giving as the Body of Christ in the manger, as giving as the Body of Christ when he fed five thousand, as giving as the Body of Christ on the cross.  And don’t stop with the card you fill out today.  Find some way to turn your thanksgiving into a gift every day.  Pay compliments.  Tip generously. Laugh hilariously. Love profligately, especially those who are hard to love and who therefore need it the most. 

            And should you ever come to the moment when you puzzle over who will be whose lover or wife or husband in the resurrection, may God recall you to the heart of your faith:  that you are alive in God and God is alive in you, for which grace you will never cease giving thanks.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

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[1] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in Chief Modern Poets of England and America, 4^th Edition (New York:  Macmillan, 1962), p. 60-I.