July 19, 2007
Woman’s Work
Pentecost 8/11C
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.”
Coincidentally and by the way, the propers this Sunday are about “woman’s work,” but they may be too subtle to penetrate some biases very widely. Of course. It’s always been that way. We’re only now coming to our senses about it. It’s been only a few decades that we’ve finally had the gumption and good judgment to ordain women in this sorely maligned province of the Anglican Communion.
On the face of it, they could be just about visiting — desert nomads visit Sarah and Abraham, Jesus visits 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 might cover nursery expenses. On the other hand, there are still religious traditions that drag these texts out over and over to make their usual anachronistic and insecure 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 or taking a census. 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 that 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, and about all those others, unsung for whatever conscious or unconscious reason. 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. Lady Bird Johnson’s death and all the anecdotes surfacing about her being the power behind Lyndon come to mind.
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 discernment process and no commissions on ministry and no General Conventions to design and confirm the validity of the vocational insights of these women.
Jesus and Abraham’s 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 Jesus’s 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. Rather does it mean prayerfully and thoughtfully informed amazement at God’s 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 of The Washington Post. (Yes, another Katharine!) 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, (Katherine) 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 a truism that was and surely has had its day. In a very few years, I trust, I am confident he will find out.
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