INTRO 1. Today is our church s annual celebration of the spirit of women. a. It s not an official Lenten holiday, but a practice of a community b. richly blessed by women of faith, determination, creativity, and service. c. Much of our liturgy today came from poems d. written at the recent women s retreat, and ordered by Judy Chatfield. e. Judy also wrote our closing song. f. Our women s choir, Joyful Voices, sang the anthem. 2. We have honored Barbara MacKenzie and Barb Fryer a. for over 20 years of coordinating and hosting receptions after memorial services. b. 20 years of bringing women and men into a space of lovingkindness c. for grieving families be they known to our church or not. 3. Then this evening, Women s Fellowship is hosting a dinner a. with music by Alex Laszlo, Charlotte Van Ryswyk, Edris Boyll-Kuzia, and Katy Schneider. b. Eleanor Scott Meyers, who will preach next week, c. will give a talk called Art: Composing a Life in Landscape. 4. What makes this day of celebration even more special, in my mind, a. is how easily and often women s leadership and work b. are acknowledged and nurtured in our church community. c. Such a spirit of equality is not necessarily the norm in our religious tradition. d. For most of its history, Christianity has been hard on women. HARD ON WOMEN 5. Christianity IS hard on women: be it our Bible or how our Bible is used. 6. It begins in the beginning, with bad interpretations of the word adam in Genesis. a. Reading it as man rather than human, b. women become a by-product of the other sex rather than co-created partners. 7. Women are then blamed for humanity s lack of total joy and sustenance, a. when Adam refuses to take responsibility for his decision to eat God s apple.
b. Our faith then reads the pain of childbirth as a curse, a sign of how God despises women. 8. Later in Genesis, Lot, who lived in Sodom, was visited by two angels disguised as men. a. When his fellow townsmen arrived to assault those men, b. Lot thought nothing of offering his young, innocent daughters instead. c. Scripture does not find fault with Lot. 9. In Judges, a successful warrior name Jephthah a. promises to sacrifice the first person to meet him at his home s door. b. How could Jephthah not know that first person would be his daughter? c. His only family? She dies on the altar of his arrogance. 10. In another story, a concubine had the audacity a. to get angry at her master, known as the Levite, and leave his house. b. They reconciled, but on their way home, c. The Levite and his concubine had to spend the night in a dangerous town. d. Townsmen arrived to assault the Levite. 11. Just as in Sodom, their host offered the concubine a. as well as his own young, innocent daughters instead. b. The scripture does not hide the horror that befell the concubine. 12. The next morning, dead or nearly dead, her master tells her to get up. a. When she does not, the Levite cuts his concubine s dead or nearly dead body b. into a dozen pieces to send to the tribes of Israel as a message. c. Again, scripture does not find fault d. with either the offer of these women s bodies to a violent mob or the ensuing mutilation. e. No, the person who was most wronged was the Levite: f. a guest whose female property was disrespected. 13. The Gospels and Letters aren t much better. a. Some of the most important characters in Jesus ministry are women, but women without names: b. The Syrophonecian woman who chastises Jesus for refusing to heal her son just because he is foreign; c. Simon s mother-in-law, the first person healed by Jesus to serve his ministry; d. the woman with the curse of bleeding whose faith e. as she touched Jesus hem made her well; f. the poor widow whose gift of two coins to the temple g. exemplified to Jesus what real giving looks like. In these cases, while women have a positive role, h. being female remains code for unimportant, inappropriate, or least of the least. 14. And then there are the named women: the Marys.
a. Mary the mother of Jesus: b. rather than an unwed teenage mother, c. for surely goodness and mercy cannot be born in such circumstances, d. she is called a virgin, e. by misusing a passage from Isaiah. f. And Mary Magdalene: commonly understood to be a prostitute, g. scripture never names her as such. 15. In fact, both Marys proved to be more stalwart in their faith, a. more brave in their witness, than most of the men in Jesus company. b. Mary the Mother watches her son die. c. Mary the Magdalene is the first to see the empty tomb. 16. But just when it seems like our faith tradition a. is going to redeem the place of women, in comes Paul. b. Paul, despite saying that in Jesus there is no Jew no Greek, no male nor female, c. writes that women must remain silent in church, d. women cannot teach, and women cannot have authority over men. 17. All of these stories, a. stories made holy because of their presence in the Bible, b. have ordained the oppression of women often to extremes. 18. Christianity is hard on women: be it our Bible or how our Bible is used. WHY ARE WE HERE 19. So what are we doing here? Are women gluttons for punishment? a. Have we been so brainwashed by patriarchy b. that we are willingly submitting ourselves to abuse? c. How do we find ourselves in this tradition, d. a tradition which has often not encourage us to find ourselves at all? JERUSALEM 20. Today, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is warned to leave town. a. Herod, the local vassal of the Roman Empire, wants to have Jesus killed. b. Jesus, in his most delightfully caustic, says, c. Listen. Tell that fox I am busy healing his people d. and will continue to do so for two more days. Then I will get out of Jerusalem. e. Jesus then bemoans,
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 21. I, Jesus, broken of heart, want to protect you from yourself and outsiders, a. as a mother hen would her little chicks. 22. Anne Howard, at the Beatitude Society, a. an organization devoted to nurturing progressive Christian leadership, b. notes that images of God as mother are not so unusual: protective mother, the lioness, strong, sure, steady, or an eagle swooping, soaring, the picture of grace and splendor. 23. But Jesus talks of a hen: a fluffy creature that doesn t fly so well. a. One that is easy to domesticate and tasty to eat. b. Common: God as a common barnyard mother i. using her body to shield her chicks from the danger of the world ii. and their very own immaturity and ignorance. c. As happens throughout this Lent, d. God challenges our expectations of what the divine looks like to prepare us for Easter. e. Herod is the fox, and I am the hen. Humanity is the hunter, God is the mother. 24. This is how women can find themselves in our faith. a. Not because we are all mothers or have maternal instincts, b. but because we know what it feels like to be hunted. c. We know what it feels like to be vulnerable to predation. d. We know what it feels like to have a gentle God who fiercely defends us against attack. 25. Women may have been tortured and marginalized a. by the collectors of our faith stories, but women have not been rendered fools. 26. When Jephthah s daughter learns she is to be sacrificed, she does not blame God: My father, if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do me according to what has gone out of your mouth. a. Jepthah s daughter lays blame where it should: on her father. God did not ask for this. b. No, her father volunteered a human sacrifice in the wake c. of his bloodlust after battle. Her dad did this all of his own. 27. Christian women are like Jephthah s daughter. a. We know the ugliness and violence of our religious tradition is of the kingdoms of humanity, b. not the kin-dom of God.
28. Men do, too. Let me be clear, men know this truth, too. a. Men know what it feels like to hunted, vulnerable, and at the mercy of predators. 29. But for women, whose very Bible and faith tradition have been used a. against their souls and spirits and bodies for millennia, b. it is passages such as this that name how we keep our faith reality alive. c. People are cruel, not God. The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?, Psalm 27 sings, The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh my adversaries and foes they shall stumble and fall. 30. Daughters of Eve, a. sisters of the Levite s concubine and Jepthah s daughter, b. outsider women, unnamed servants, women with illnesses c. impoverished crones, Marys one and all: AMEN WE shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord sisters be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!