Unlimited

Fireside Vespers, Week Three

Reading:

Deborah, a prophet-woman, wife of Lappidoth, she it was who judged Israel at that time. And she would sit under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the high country of Ephraim, and the Israelites would come up to her for judgment.

And she sent and called to Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh-Naphtali and said to him, “Has not the Lord God of Israel charged you: ‘Go, and draw around you on Mount Tabor and take with you ten thousand men from the Naphtalites and the Zebulunites. And I shall draw down to you, at the Kishon Wadi, Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, and his chariots and his force, and I shall give him into your hand.’?”

And Barak said to her, “If you go with me, I will go, and if you do not go with me, I will not go.” And she said, “I will certainly go with you, but it will not be your glory on the way that you are going, for in the hand of a woman the Lord will deliver Sisera.”

Homily:

My wife puts up with a lot. Myself, for starters, and of course our children. But she also takes a lot of flak as a female pastor that I as a male pastor simply do not have to deal with. And it isn’t fair that she has to handle that. But she does and does it well.

There are those who think that because she is a woman she should not and cannot be a cleric. There are those who would ignore her, talk down to her, or simply talk over her because they do not recognize her authority, her office, or her expertise. It is against Scripture, they claim, against the very Word of God, to have a woman speak out in a Church, let alone have a woman serve as pastor, priest, or bishop. It has always been men, and exclusively men, who serve at the Altar. No one spoke of ordaining women until the 1970s. Can two millennia of Church tradition and practice be wrong?

Both sides have their go-to texts, of course: those that seem to exclude women from the service of God against those that explicitly speak of women as deacons and apostles. One can fence with Scripture all the live long day, should one be so inclined and lean a bit toward masochism.

I cannot and indeed ought not speak for women clergy. They are quite capable of speaking for themselves, as their ministries clearly demonstrate. And a recent spate of scholarship argues strongly that such women are not alone. We have evidence—increasingly powerful evidence, in my judgment—that women served openly as deacons, priests, and bishops in the early Church and into the early Middle Ages.

It wasn’t until the eleventh century that the very meaning of ordination was transformed into an exclusively celibate male cult via sweeping churchwide reforms. That so many medieval bishops wrote so many letters condemning women serving at the Altar is a rather strong indication that women regularly served at the Altar. And the research into this is neither liberal nor fringe, mind you, but published by scholars of the Roman Catholic Church. I could recommend some books, if you would like.

We are always so certain of what it is God can and cannot do, the clear reading of Scripture, the unbroken witness of tradition—only to discover how blinkered and blinded we often are in our surety. The whole story of the Church, and indeed of Israel before it, is that of in-groups being shocked by those foreigners, sinners, and unworthies upon whom God chooses to pour forth His Spirit and His blessing.

When Jesus, having made something of a name for Himself in the Galilee, returns home to Nazareth to preach a sermon in the synagogue, it isn’t His bold proclamation that He is the Messiah come to declare the Lord’s Jubilee that upsets them. The Nazarenes love that; it’s the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams. A local boy made good! But then Jesus announces that God’s will and work are not limited to Israel, let alone to the remnant branch of David’s line. And that’s what shocks them. That’s what enrages them—to the point that they try to throw Him off a cliff.

Tell us that the Messiah has come to us, and we rejoice. Tell us that the Messiah has come to those outside the circle—to those who ought to stay in their proper place—and suddenly we turn from joyful crowd to foaming mob. It’s always been this way. Genesis champions the younger brother over the heir, Exodus the slave over the master. When the Law of Moses specifically excludes Moabites from the community of Israel, the Book of Ruth in response uplifts a woman of Moab as the ideal Israelite and great-grandmother to the king.

With the advent of the Church, questions of identity, of who can or cannot be a Christian, came to the fore. The great query wrestled by the Apostles was the inclusion, not of women, but of Gentiles. Could one become a Christian without first being a Jew? What about Ethiopians, Samaritans, Greeks, Romans? Surely not they, Lord. Yet everywhere we sought to draw the line, God emphatically stamped it out. And each time we’re shocked.

It continues to this day. The Vikings, once the scourge of Christendom, settled down to become the Nordic Lutherans of today. The Muslim refugees we feared might Islamicize Europe are instead filling up her empty churches. Our enemies are rarely the people outside the community of the Church, but those within, our brothers and sisters, our very selves.

Muslims aren’t stealing children away from Sunday worship; our own apathy and acedia have done that. Pagans didn’t cause the clergy sex scandals rocking the Catholic Church. We did that. We, as Christians, building our little walls, forming our little tribes, are our own worst enemies. That may well be why Christ chose us for His Body, to be His hands and feet in the world: because we’re the ones who are broken, fallen, sinful, small. We’re the least likely and the least liked. We’re sinners in the hands of a loving God. And if He can work through us, heck, He can work through anybody.

My point is simply this: no one owns God. No one can place limits on His power, His mercy, His action, His love. He is constantly surprising us, constantly toppling our temples, constantly making all things new. And that means that we have to die daily to our assumptions and our prejudices and the false idols we so love to fashion in our own hearts. Because Christ is doing the same thing today that He’s always done and always will: He is drowning us in our sins, raising us to new life, and calling every wayward sinner home in Him.

As soon as we think that God cannot work in any given way through a certain sort of person—that’s exactly when God will do just that. And woe be unto us when we stand in stubborn opposition to the will and the work of the Lord God Almighty.

In Jesus. Amen.

Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership
by Ally Kateusz

Crispina and Her Sisters: Women in Authority in Early Christianity
by Christine Schenk, C.S.J.

The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West
by Gary Macy, S.J.

Ivory Vikings
by Nancy Marie Brown

The Cruel Eleventh-Century Imposition of Western Clerical Celibacy
by Joe Holland