Text: from Romans 16 Prophesying Daughters A Sermon by Jeff Carlson St. Pauls United Church of Christ, Chicago July 20, 2014 I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles. Greet also the church in their house. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was the first convert in Asia for Christ. Greet Mary, who has worked very hard among you. Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you. Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the Gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen. I began seminary over 20 years ago at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, the school of the church I grew up in. It was a large, evangelical seminary. Although my church had Swedish roots, there were students from all around the world, both men and women. But there was a key difference between the male and female students. The men, when they graduated, could be ordained into ministry; the women could not. It never occurred to me, growing up, to question that practice of having men in charge. It was the church culture I d always known, and it was the way that most churches, and indeed the whole world, worked. And after all, in the book of 1 Timothy Paul writes, I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She is to keep silent. So, women were free to go to seminary and learn, take the same classes as men, but after graduation they were only allowed to teach children or other women in the church. Not men. In most seminaries, you re required to take a course in the history of your denomination. For one assignment, I had to write a paper on some historical figure 1
or event in the life of the Evangelical Free Church. I chose a man named Fredrik Franson. He was a fiery, Swedish evangelist who, after coming to the States, was at Moody Bible Church for a time. That gives you a clue as to his conservative credentials. He was a zealous preacher who didn t waste any time in spreading the gospel, because he believed that the 2 nd Coming of Christ was at hand. There was no time to lose in spreading the word. He was sort of the Apostle Paul to the Swedes of the American Midwest. Many Swedish-American Evangelical congregations can trace their roots back to Fredrik Franson. In researching Franson, I used the library at North Park Seminary, since the Swedish Covenant Church had similar roots to my own; but the Evangelical Covenant Church seemed to take better care of their history, so they had more resources on Franson. I found something that was at first a shock and then a wonderful, eye-opening surprise that helped me grow out of the church I was in. I came across an essay in a back issue of the Covenant Quarterly that had been written by Franson in 1896. It was called Prophesying Daughters i. In it, Franson argued that women should be preachers. He goes through scripture and dismantles, one-by-one, all of the arguments for keeping women silent and then makes a positive case why women should preach. I couldn t believe that what I was reading had been written by one of the founders of my church. The title of the article, Prophesying Daughters, comes from the day of Pentecost. Peter stands up to preach about Jesus and says: In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. It was thrilling to read! I felt like I d discovered a massive cover up, a sort of Swedish-American Da Vinci Code, buried for a hundred years. I realized that in the rigid, patriarchal denomination that I knew, the Spirit of God had once blown freely, calling both men and women to stand up and preach. And they did! But those early, free, Pentecostal days came to an end when the men circled their wagons, forming their own minister s association, and slamming the door on women. The historian Gerda Lerner wrote: Women have lived in a world in which they apparently had no history and in which their share in the building of society and civilizations was constantly marginalized. Women have also for millennia been denied the power to shape the formation of the dominant institutions of society. ii One of those institutions is the church. 2
When we think about leadership in the early days of Christianity, we tend to think of the twelve male apostles, names like Peter and Paul. But if I asked you to come up with some names of women in the early church, how long would your list be? Let s see, Mary, Mary, Mary, Martha. What other names of early Christian women do most of us really know? Our impression of the early church can be that patriarchy ruled the day, like in that verse from 1 st Timothy about women being silent. But there s an alternative narrative hidden within scripture. There are whispers of prophesying daughters that you can hear speaking from the margins. I might be wrong, but I think it s a good bet that today s passage from Romans has rarely, if ever, been read aloud from the lectern at St. Pauls Church. There s no story there. It s just a list of obscure names, people long-forgotten that Paul greets at the end of his letter to the Christians in Rome. Paul wrote this letter in 58AD. He was staying in Greece and was about to depart for Jerusalem. He wanted to send the Romans some theology to chew on before he left. People have been chewing on Romans ever since. These leftover greetings at the end of Paul s letter - on the margins of all the theology of this work - might seem like a bore to read, but in them you can find buried treasure, because they give us some clues about what the early churches were like. Nobody knows when the message of Jesus first arrived in Rome or who preached it. Most of us are aware that early Christianity was spread through missionaries like Paul. The gospel of Jesus was also carried by prosperous Christians who traveled throughout the empire on business trips. Phoebe, the first name we hear in today s text, was likely one of them. She was clearly a woman of means, and Paul probably took advantage of one of her business trips to Rome to send along this letter. He calls her a benefactor to many and tells the Romans to help her out in any way they can. And there s another little detail that s easy to miss in a quick read: Paul calls Phoebe a deacon. What did deacons do in the early churches? They presided at table. Deacons celebrated communion. Phoebe broke the bread and lifted the cup. Phoebe arranged for the distribution of food to the poor. In the New Testament you also find deacons preaching and teaching publicly. Based on the personal reference Paul gives her, Phoebe was clearly a well-esteemed minister in her church in Greece, and she is the one who delivered Paul s letter to Rome. Romans, the book of the Bible that theologians have puzzled over for centuries, was first spoken aloud in church on the lips of a woman named Phoebe. There are other women named at the end of Romans. At least a third of the people Paul greets in these verses are women. 3
Priscilla is one. She s mentioned in other places in the New Testament. Her name always occurs with a man named Aquila, and her name usually occurs before his, meaning that she was the more prominent of the pair. Priscilla and Aquila were traveling evangelists. They started several churches around the Roman Empire and one of the congregations in Rome was meeting in their home. They were a teaching couple, a female and male team, who were clearly on equal footing in their ministry. Priscilla didn t only teach women and children. She taught men. iii And then there s Junia. Paul writes: Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives, who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was. (New Revised Standard Version) Now, look at how the Revised Standard Version of the Bible translated that verse: Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners; they are men of note among the apostles. Can you see what happened? Junia was given a sex change. Junia became Junias, a Roman man s name, because some Bible scribes and translators believed that an apostle could not possibly have been a woman. And yet her name Junia is found in the most authoritative ancient Greek texts and ancient commentators on scripture refer to her as a woman. Did you know that there was once a female apostle named Junia? Like Fredrik Franson s prophesying daughters, Junia was the victim of a cover-up. iv In this Year of Wonders of 52 Essential Bible Stories, we will hear more than one story about the apostles Peter and Paul. Don t you wish we had just one story about the life of the apostle Junia? Don t you wish we had just one story about this woman who suffered in prison right beside Paul, who knew Jesus before he did, and who was one of the most prominent among the apostles? All we have about Junia are a few details left in the margins. So what about all the patriarchy in the Bible? What about that verse that says that women should keep silent in the church? Patriarchy was the dominant worldview of Rome, and of the Greek empire before that, and the empire before that. It s still the dominant view of most of the world. Patriarchy was in the air you breathed, the water you drank. It was taken for granted as truth. Christians for centuries and people of other faiths have taken patriarchy to be God s revelation. But patriarchy is not God s revelation. Jesus is. Jesus proclaimed an alternative way of life called the kingdom of God. In his ministry he honored women, he touched women, taught them, ate with them, they followed him, and women supported. The first witness to the resurrection was a woman. 4
But the radically inclusive community that gathered around Jesus was offensive to good, traditional Roman values. I believe that the inclusive community of Jesus was just beyond the imagination of many early Christian men. They didn t want to make too many waves. They wanted to fit into polite Roman society. That Pentecostal wind, in which women broke the bread and lifted the cup, taught, preached and prophesied, was too radical; and so Roman patriarchy crept into the church of Jesus Christ and there it has remained. Patriarchy is sin. In Genesis, in the beginning, we read that male and female are both created in God s image. It s after the Fall, east of Eden, that patriarchy comes into the world. In some of his best writing, Paul said: Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. The old has gone the new has come and in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female. All of you are one in Christ Jesus. In Jesus, we are re-created, the curse of the Fall is undone, and patriarchy is obliterated. Now, we might be tempted to say: We have women ministers in the UCC! In our church we ordain Phoebe and Priscilla and Junia! But we should be careful, though, in thinking that we are so much more enlightened than our ancestors. When I was researching my thesis in the archives of St. Pauls last year, I got to know many names in the congregation from 100 years ago that I had never heard before. Nobody had intentionally covered them up. I didn t find a St. Pauls Da Vinci Code smoking gun. Tom Henry aired out most of our closets 20 years ago when he wrote his red history book. But there are many names that most of us don t know, names of women who helped to build this church. Women like Christine Rathsfeld, the first person to care for the Civil War orphans in what would become Uhlich Children s Home. Emilie John and Pauline Pister, the pastor s wives who led the old St. Pauls women s group called the Frauenverein, the driving force of much of the mission work of this congregation. Louise Keitel. Have you heard of Louise? She s the woman into whose mind the Holy Spirit breathed the dream of St. Pauls House. Alma Atzel. Have you heard her story? She was our St. Pauls medical missionary that we sent to China in 1916. Can you imagine what a mission trip to China would have been like in 1916? She must have been a brave woman. And when she came back to Chicago she was our St. Pauls parish nurse. Do we know their names? Do we remember their stories? How can we honor the role that women have played in shaping St. Pauls and our mission in Chicago and the world? 5
When you walk down the main hallway toward the chapel, you pass the portraits of the nine past senior pastors of St. Pauls. They were good men, for the most part. But every one is a man. That is the visible face of the history of St. Pauls that every girl on her way to Sunday School passes. That is the visible face of the history of St. Pauls that a visitor to our church sees when she walks down that hall. But we owe our life together, we owe our church, not just to men, but to women; women named Phoebe, Priscilla, Junia, and women named Christine, Alma, Pauline and Colleen. We need to remember their stories because they have given us many, many years of wonders. So, St. Pauls, I would like to suggest a modest proposal: A hall of portraits of women. i Covenant Quarterly, vol. 34 No. 4, Nov. 1976. ii Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 207. iii See Acts 18:24-26 for a brief story of Priscilla teaching theology to a man. iv You can find a brief history of the killing of Junia at Juniaproject.com. For more information on women in early Christianity, see the excellent book by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her. 6