C Easter 4
BFC 2019
Acts 9:36-43; 16:9-15 (OL)
May 12, 2019
Ah, tis the time of commencement
addresses all across the nation. Rev.
Dr. William Barber, leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, recently gave the
commencement address at his alma mater,
North Carolina Central University.. In
that address he observed that there are those who say our present economy is not
only good but great by those wonderful imperial indicators dictated to us from
the throne. At the same time, he said,
140 million people are poor. Four
hundred families in this country make an average of $97,000 an hour, while we
lock people up people who simply want $15 an hour in a union, and 60 million
people work for less than a living wage.
Two hundred and fifty thousand people a year die from poverty and 37
million people who go without health care.
Over and over again, Rev. Dr. Barber shared the urgent message of
Easter, to those about to receive their degrees, “You need to graduate today,
for there is great power in getting up, getting together, and getting
involved.”[1] Dorcas gets up, the widows, the community of
women untethered, get together, and, once again, they get involved.
Widows were that group of women who
were untethered because, in all purity, they were not people defined by loss of
spouse, but people who had made the conscious decision to “will one thing” in
community. They would not be deterred by
unnecessary attachments. They would not
be caught striving after the imperial indicators. And the same “community of women” can be
found in this day.
Too often the
history of Christianity is painted as singular and lacking any diversity. And though a huge part of our tradition is
definitively patriarchal, there is another part that is just not shared, lifted
up, or spoken and studied as often in a church that has been historically
patriarchal.. Some of you may remember Dan
Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Although
not literally true, The Da Vinci Code related
alternative histories many people knew intuitively to be true—stories about
women and their involvement in the historical church, stories that, if
remembered, how the world might be different.
As we do to Christianity, even more so with faiths
and traditions that are not our own. We
think of these faiths and traditions as singular—lacking any diversity. To understand people or peoples who are not
like us, we often put these faiths and traditions in boxes without much
complexity. For example, how many of us
know the Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi?
Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer
and judge who interprets Islamic law in harmony with democracy, teaches
equality before the law, and strongly believes in religious freedom and freedom
of speech.[2] Ebadi has said of her own Muslim faith, “My
problem is not with Islam, it’s with the culture of patriarchy. Practices such as stoning have no foundation
in the Koran.”[3]
Her courage came with a price. The government stole her Nobel Peace Prize
from a safe deposit box in 2009.[4]. To
quiet her criticism, the government also detained her sister[5]
and forced her husband to renounce her.[6]
Knowing that Shirin Ebadi works for women’s rights,
I think it no surprise that she is also a leading advocate for children’s and
refugee’s rights.[7] She states a universal truth when she says,
“We’ve realized that defending human rights starts with recognizing women’s
rights.”[8]
In a world still heavily dominated by male figures
and stories, we do well to remember our women’s stories. While declarations of war and stories of
conquest are written down as the official history of nations, women’s stories
are more often about mourning, healing, hospitality, planting, weaving, and
leading movements from the ground up.
In the United Church of Christ, that was the
Deaconness movement as men gave over the health care of German immigrants to a
community of women who turned it into a movement in St. Louis and up through
Illinois to Chicago where it became the largest non-profit health care system
in the nation. They knew the power of getting
up, getting together, and getting involved.
The men saw it as a side note.
The community of women knew it as a movement.
My hope and prayer, as a Christian, is that we not
only know our tradition but also know other traditions and faiths that have
long and diverse traditions, that we might lift up Shirin Ebadi’s work on
behalf of human rights, and see her as the leader of an important movement to
stem the tide of terrorism—in its colonialist and fundamentalist forms. My hope and prayer is that we will tell her
story to our daughters and sons, and will remember and lift up her story in our
nation.
In a male-dominated culture, we know that women must
have been important to the early Christian movement for their stories to
survive. Even though we have these
stories within our tradition, we rarely hear them, and often times forget to
pass them along. We read in the gospels
about women who do not desert or betray Christ, but remain to grieve, love
beyond death in their preparation of the body, and then are the first to
proclaim the resurrection. In the Acts
of the Apostles, the letters of Paul, and the gospels outside the ones we have
in the Bible, we would do well to remember women like Dorcas, Mary of Magdala,
Martha, Lydia, Priscilla, Eunice, Lois, Thecla[9],
and Julia.
In 1906, an interesting discovery was made in
the grotto of St. Paul at Ephesus. Archeologists found two sixth-century images
on the cave walls. One was of St. Paul and the other was of a woman, the mother
of St. Thecla. The Acts of Paul and Thecla was an apocryphal piece of sacred
writing from the second century. It was apparently widely disseminated at that
time.
The images of Paul and St.
Thecla’s mother found on that cave wall at Ephesus are very interesting. [B]oth images are same height, meaning that
they were of equal importance. Both have their right hands raised in the
teaching gesture, meaning that both were of equal authority. The image of Paul
is untouched. The image of Thecla’s mother, however, has been disfigured. The
eyes are scratched out and the upraised right hand has been erased. To the
original creators, Thecla’s mother and Paul were equally authoritative. To
those who later vandalized the images, only the male could be apostolic and
authoritative. Consequently, the female image has been blinded and silenced.[10]
How the world might be different if we
remembered women’s stories—the stories of mothers, daughters, sisters, and
friends, the community of women.
I have shared in many Bible studies how the whole
order of the Roman Catholic Church would be in peril if we remembered the story
of Julia. The apostle Paul refers to
Julia as not only an apostle in Romans 16:7 but as prominent among the
apostles. Julia’s name was later changed
to a man’s name by Biblical editors so that the doctrine of apostolic
succession would remain intact. That
doctrine states that priests and the pope are male only based on the fiction
that apostles were exclusively male. If
we remembered Julia’s story, the basis for keeping women out of the Roman
Catholic priesthood would be no more.
Paul calls Julia not only an apostle but prominent among the apostles.[11] How the world might be different if we
remembered women’s stories.
Perhaps then we would remember that women were
Christians priests in Arabia and Egypt as late as the 4th Century,
but were discounted by early Church Fathers like Epiphanius who saw the female
sex as “easily mistaken, fallible, and poor in intelligence.”[12] Epiphanius suggests that one of the most harmful
rituals these women priests perform is baking and breaking bread with one
another. Can you imagine? Christians breaking bread with one another? Where do these women get such a crazy
ritual? How the world might be different
if we remembered women’s stories.
Leila Ahmed, a Muslim feminist who wrote the book Women
and Gender in Islam, states that those cultures which did value a woman’s
humanity, as they came in contact with other cultures which did not, sacrificed
women’s stories to do cross-cultural dialog.
The more humane understandings about women were then lost in
cross-cultural exchanges. Women’s
stories were not remembered or lifted up, and, as a result, a more diabolical
and degrading view of women developed in both the West and the Middle East.
I pray our country uses diplomatic and peaceful
measures to relate with Iran, Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner, defender
of democracy, defender of women, children, and refugees, a woman who is seeking
peace within an historic faith tradition, will be remembered by all of us. How the world might change if we remember her
story.
How the world might change if we remember the story
of Shirin Ebadi, Dorcas, Mary of Magdala, Martha, Lydia, Priscilla, Eunice,
Lois, Thecla, and Julia.
Today we celebrate Mother’s Day, and I would have
you remember one more story. In our
country, Julia Ward Howe, the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic or
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, is credited with beginning Mother’s Day
in our own country. Horrified by the
violence she saw in the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, Howe sought to
begin a Mother’s Day of Peace. In 1870,
celebrating that Mother’s Day of Peace, she proclaimed:
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God –
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.[13]
In
a country living through the longest war of our history, the world needs
us. Arise, women of this day! Arise, people of this day! Remember those stories of mourning, healing,
hospitality, planting, weaving, and leading movements from the ground up. Arise!
Know the power of Easter. Live
out your faith. Get up, get together,
and get involved so that love takes on hate, mercy takes on meanness, justice
can take on injustice, truth can defeat lies.[14] Arise, lift up your stories, remember and
find your moral courage, on this Mother’s Day of Peace. Amen.
[1] Rev. Dr. William Barber,
“NCCU Commencement Address,” May 11, 2019.
https://abc11.com/society/nccu-holds-2019-commencement-ceremony-/5295767/
[4] “Iran Confiscates Shirin
Ebadi’s Nobel Pieace Price,” The
Telegraph, November 27, 2009, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6669252/Iran-confiscates-Shirin-Ebadis-Nobel-Peace-Prize.html
[5] “Iran detains Nobel
laureate’s sister,” CNN, December 29,
2009. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6669252/Iran-confiscates-Shirin-Ebadis-Nobel-Peace-Prize.html
[6] Shirin Ebadi, “Tricked
into cheating and sentenced to death,” New
York Times, March 3, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opinion/sunday/tricked-into-cheating-and-sentenced-to-death.html.
[9] The Acts of Paul and
Thecla. Thecla was thought to be Paul’s
traveling companion.
[10] Jack F. Price, “Women
Leading in Church?” http://ezinearticles.com/?Women-Leading-In-Church?&id=794858
[11] See, in particular, the
footnote for Romans 16:7 in the New American Standard Bible, a Bible
translated by Roman Catholic scholars.
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