The very minute we think we ‘have’ God, God will surprise us. As we search in fire and earthquakes, God will be in the still small voice. As we listen in silent meditation, God will be shouting protests in the street. God is warning us that we had best not try to find our security in any well-defined concept or category of what is Godly – for the minute we believe we are into God, God is off again and calling us forth into some unknown place.
The Reverend Carter Heyward, Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation (1984).
This week we are celebrating 50 years of women’s ordination, marking the day on July 29, 1974, when eleven women were ordained to the priesthood at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. The Reverend Carter Heyward was one of those women, who became known as the Philadelphia Eleven. I was fourteen years old in 1974, active in the youth group in my local Episcopal Church, a bit of a church nerd, and I really wanted to serve as an acolyte. Unfortunately, at that time only boys were allowed to serve as acolytes. Girls were assigned to teach Sunday School. I guess people assumed that girls would naturally be good with children and boys would not, thereby limiting the possibilities for both. I don’t have any specific memories of the brouhaha that surrounded the Philadelphia Eleven that summer, but I do remember not being allowed to serve as an acolyte.
Since the earliest days of the church, the role of women has been contested. What may a woman be “allowed” to do? Can she hold authority? Can she teach? Can she even speak? Jesus seemed to think so, sending Mary Magdalene to proclaim his resurrection to the twelve, as an apostle to the apostles.
I think one of the reasons we want the Bible to give us definitive answers to our questions is because, as Heyward writes, we want to ‘have’ God. We want to get a handle on who and what God is and who and what is “Godly.” The problem is, even in the Bible, God is always surprising us, showing up in the most unexpected ways, in the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected people – like a young, unmarried girl in a backwater town called Nazareth, and in her son.
In the Forum last Sunday, we heard a biblical perspective on women’s leadership from Dr. Elizabeth Schrader Polczer. This Sunday, we will speak virtually with the Reverend Lucy Winkett, Rector of St. James’s Piccadilly in London, who was one of the first generation of women to be ordained in The Church of England.
For me, it has been an extraordinary journey from being an “acolyte denied” to presiding at the altar at St. Bart’s. I am filled with gratitude for the courageous leadership of the Philadelphia Eleven and all the other women who have paved the way before me. I am also incredibly proud to work alongside such exceptional male colleagues, my brothers in Christ, who lift up women’s voices and recognize the ordained women who guided and supported them along their own paths to ordination.
God will always surprise us and confound our expectations. What gifts are we losing, what opportunities are we missing when we fail to recognize God’s surprises, and when we deny any person, or group of people, from fulfilling their God-given call?
