July 16, 2004
Woman’s work
Pentecost 7/11C
Gen 18.1-14; Lk 10.38-42
A friend of mine who is a priest was having a “What-do-you-want-to-do-when-you-grow-up?” conversation with her young son. She asked him whether he’d like to be a musician and song writer like his dad. “No,” he said. Then she asked whether he might want to be a priest like his mother. “No,” he said, indignantly, “that’s woman’s work.”
Of course. It’s always been, We’re only now coming to our senses about it. In a couple of weeks, we commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the ordination of women in this sorely maligned province of the Anglican Communion. Coincidentally, the propers this Sunday are about “woman’s work,” but they may be too subtle to penetrate some biases very widely.
On the face of it, they could be just about visiting — desert nomads to Sarah and Abraham, and Jesus to Mary and Martha. But they’re also full of other themes — caprice and laughter, hospitality and surprise, the work ethic and play, even dark humor about whether Medicare covers nursery expenses. On the other hand, there are still religious traditions that drag these texts out over and over to make their usual anachronistic pitch for the “place” of women.
But these are no casual nomadic passersby who drop in on Sarah and Abraham. They’re not making a survey. They already know who lives there and why. They’ve not hesitated to make the kind of plans for them that tie them down for the rest of their lives.
Furthermore, Jesus, with the terrible and ominous sense of urgency constantly hovering over him, would hardly be whiling away time at high tea over at Mary’s and Martha’s without a purpose. Just as Sarah held such a critical and essential place in anything Abraham might be doing for the Lord and could never do without her, so can we assume that Mary and Martha must must have held an equally critical and essential place in Jesus’ plans for his kingdom.
So let us take these stories a step further for a moment and consider them as being not about Abraham and not even about Jesus, but primarily about women — about Sarah, about Martha, and about Mary. These women were not simply “walk-ons” in the drama of salvation. They have names, purpose, capabilities, needs, children to birth and grief to bear, unique ministries to perform, houses to visit, water to share, wounds to heal, a male social hierarchy to tolerate and endure, and, of course, on occasion, bless the Lord, to manipulate and even laugh about.
These are not stories only about vocational values and leadership or the relative importance of running a home, and least of all are they about the priorities of what we rather presumptuously call “holy orders.” It took no canon law and no commissions on ministry to design and confirm the validity of the vocational discernment of these women.
Jesus and those desert visitors were building order into God’s strategic itinerary, raising up a faithful genealogy of caregivers, shepherds, bearers of the word. Of course, there’s much more here than simply gender issues, but these are stories of a radical breaking open of the established, taken-for-granted scheme of things. Each of the principals in these stories had something that the children of Abraham and ultimately the Jesus movement needed.
Of course, within a century or so after these times, the church in its increasingly pompous and male-dominated establishment of itself had pretty well sold out to the old secular gender hierarchies. It had successfully removed women from leadership, and swiftly put them where they “belonged.” Even twenty centuries later, the seventh bishop of Tennessee still could publicly refer to the imminent and inevitable ordination of women as “apostolic suicide.”
Incarnating the good news, it seems, does not mean standing still within the comfortable embrace of the inherited tradition, whatever some of our leaders might claim. It means rather making all things new, even things that have held back church and state and culture and, indeed, the family, things that have hitherto had an impressively, if regrettably large following for entirely too long
Many will remember Katherine Graham. She was a churchwoman and one of the most powerful figures in American journalism. A comment about her in her obituary seems altogether appropriate as we think about Sarah and Mary and Martha and all those who’ve stood and now stand in their succession:
A colleague wrote, “Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, she used her intelligence, her courage, and her wit to transform the landscape of American journalism.”
And so it has been and is that our women in orders through their intelligence, their courage, and their wit are transforming the landscape of the Episcopal Church in the USA.
My friend’s young son, when he quipped that the priesthood was not for him because it is “woman’s work,” more than likely did not know how close he was to the truth. In a very few years, I trust, I am sure he will find out.