Sermon for Year C, Sixth Sunday of Easter
By The Rev. Torey Lightcap
May 5, 2013
St. Thomas Episcopal Church
“Woman-Led”
If I think back to the summer
of 1992,
I can still recall the distinct feeling
Of almost having my hand squeezed right off
the end of my wrist.
I was engaged to be married to
Jacquie at the time.
We were both still in college
in Oklahoma,
Going to school about 90 miles away from the town
where I grew up.
Thought maybe it’d be good to
show up back
At my old home church in my old hometown one
Sunday
With my fiancée on my arm.
Show ’em I wasn’t too good for them.
One sunny, windy Sunday
morning, up we went to worship, hand in hand.
It was nice seeing all those
folks again.
They seemed reliable and
dependable to my tired student eyes,
Which had fairly recently been opened to a
sense of how the world actually works.
The singing was reliable, too,
But most everything else had changed.
There was a new pastor,
And he had introduced this thing –
A time of intentional prayer, he called it
–
Where the men
would come forward
And kneel on the carpeted steps around the
altar
And pray for God to send righteous moral
leadership in the form of men
Who would turn around the direction of the
country
And put an end to notorious things. This
should have been a clue.
Then came the sermon.
I don’t remember anything else
the preacher said,
But I do remember him saying the following:
He said, “God will not bless a woman-led
church.”
And then, for good measure, he
said it fourteen or fifteen more times.
“God will not bless a woman-led
church.”
I had a gut feeling he was
wrong about that.
I also had a feeling I was
about to lose my hand,
Because the compression Jacquie was putting
on it –
Heaping up all her frustrations at the
preacher in the room –
The compression was so tight as she was
holding my hand
That I thought I might not make it out of
there with both hands intact.
She had to register her
displeasure with the content of the sermon somehow.
It was an iconic moment for me.
It would cause me to be
sensitive to how you, too,
Might not always be in agreeement with me,
and how you might respond,
And who you feel safe transferring the pain
of your disagreements to,
Although I have long maintained that if you
have a problem with me,
I sure hope you’ll feel free to come see me
privately about whatever it is.
But what was that squeezing on
my hand, really, that sunny Sunday morning?
I’ll tell you precisely.
It was the legitimate complaint
of a righteous woman to a corrupt biblical teaching,
And if I didn’t have complete proof before
that point that I should marry her,
It was all I would ever need from that moment
on.
She vetoed and invalidated a
blowhard sermon with a simple gesture.
She was right, too. Very right.
She knew good teaching from
bad, and she wanted to let me know,
And to blow off a little steam. Well: message
received.
And Lydia was right, too.
If ever you needed proof that
God does bless churches led by women,
Look no further than her story, in the Acts
of the Apostles.
Lydia, who we met in our first reading of the day.
“A dealer in purple cloth”
Who heard the message about Jesus Christ loud
and clear from Paul
In the shade down by a creek on the Sabbath
day.
There seems to be a fair amount
of agreement among biblical scholars
That someone who sold purple cloth in that
day and age
Would probably have been a person of means,
Or at the very least not been at the rock
bottom of society,
Despite the fact that women were not accorded the same respect as men.
A person of means was someone
with “a household” –
Someone with authority, with a house and servants
to manage –
Someone on whom many others depended for
their livelihood.
A highly capable person. A
self-sufficient person.
Like an awful lot of the women I know
Who’re keeping their households and their
businesses intact and sane,
All at the same time.
And Lydia was the first
European convert to the Jesus Movement –
A link on an ever-lengthening chain expanding
out of Jerusalem.
Acts is all about how the
Gospel of Christ moves out into the world,
And here we have important symbolic evidence of
that.
What is more, the message about
what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ
Has found a reliable home in which to lodge
and from which to spread:
A home that is both intelligent and
self-sustaining.
The New Testament mentions
plenty of women
Who helped the Jesus Movement along in its
infancy:
Lydia, yes, but also Dorcas, and Chloe, and
Phoebe, and Johanna, and Rhoda.
Uncounted women present at the
moment of the Pentecost when the Spirit went wild.
Also the unnamed daughters of
Phillip, and Eudia, and Syntyche.
Prisca, and Nympha, and Lois,
and Eunice.
They all passed along the news
of Jesus and sacrifically gave of themselves
And blessed the workings of the early church.
And God blessed them.
And God blessed their
enterprise.
And God blessed their churches.
And the Word spread like
wildfire.
Last week we heard Peter being
told that with respect to Gentiles and Jews,
He understood himself as being instructed to
no longer make any distinction.
That was a big move – one we
haven’t quite been able to surmount even to this day.
The evidence from the early
days of the Jesus Movement seems to say
That whoever
can help, and whoever wants to help,
And understands what it means to be a helper
and what it might cost,
Should be allowed to do so.
That whoever can lead, and wants
to lead,
And understands what it means to be a leader
and what it might cost,
Should be allowed to do so.
That yet again we don’t get to
make distinctions.
That power and authority should
be shared equitably and generously,
And that healthy respect will flow from that
sharing.
It sure is a mighty big leap in
logic
From this biblical understanding of the
church
To a preacher feeling well within his rights
To criticize the work of women in the
church.
It certainly overlooks an awful
lot of history
To suggest the women in your church aren’t
doing any good.
Not only that:
I also recall leaving that service with
Jacquie on that sunny Sunday morning
And walking a short distance down a hallway
to a reception space
Where we enjoyed hospitality prepared by
the ladies of the church
And stood around and visited with the
nursery workers who were also women.
We walked over carpet freshly
vacuumed by a female volunteer
And out into the world through glass doors
That had been shined up the day before by
that woman’s cousin, an unpaid woman.
Whoever would stand on the holy
work of women and eat their lovingly prepared food
And cast an eye over the faces of their children
Must be accounted a fool to shame them on the
same day as a whole class of people.
As for us, we don’t play that
game.
I don’t get to say that your
gift to God on this holy altar
Is less worthy than mine.
I don’t make such
pronouncements out loud,
And if I so much as think them I ought to
confess them.
God is God. You’re not. Neither
am I.
So we do as instructed; we make
no distinction.
Every gift given in God’s
service is a good gift.
Let those who can lead, and
those who want to, come forth and
take a part.
Because this much is true:
God alone judges the human heart.
Take this word from this altar
and spread it around.
And let those who have ears
truly hear this truth.
