International Women’s Day Sermon – Sunday, March 9 , A Sermon by Lea MacNeil

Yesterday, March 8^th, we celebrated the International Day of Women. This is a day in which the world is encouraged to remember the contribution that women have made to the advancement of humanity. It is also a day to celebrate the heroines of that cause. Those who are known to us, such as Lady Mary Montagu who, some 80 years before the birth of Edward Jenner, brought from Turkey to England, the knowledge and practice of small pox inoculation. And was, of course, ignored by the medical establishment of her day. Another is Emily Murphy, a Canadian women living around 1900. She was not only the first woman to be appointed a magistrate in the then British Empire but, and more importantly, she secured for Canadian women the right to be recognised as persons under the law. A more recent heroine is Malala Yousofzai – the Pakistani teenager whom the Taliban gunned down for claiming for herself, and all girls and women, a right Australian women take for granted – the right of an education.

These are the names of some of the heroines we celebrated yesterday. But we also celebrated those heroines whose names are known only to God. These are the countless millions of women who, throughout the ages, alone, or shoulder to shoulder with their menfolk, have worked and struggled to provide the best possible life for themselves, their families, and through these, for the human community itself.

As both a feminist and a Christian, I seek today to offer up my thanksgiving for the lives of these women, and for the blessings that their work and sacrifices have secured for me, and for many other women. I have chosen to do this by sharing with you some of the images of womanhood seen in the Bible. Of course, these images will be filtered through my own somewhat unorthodox, hopefully not too heretical, understanding of what these images have to say about women’s role, both in the Church and in modern 21^st Century society.

Choosing the Readings proved to be somewhat difficult. Unusual among ancient documents, the Bible is replete with stories concerning women. It also covers an immense period of time – thousands of years when the human society recorded in the Bible, and the role of women within that society, moved from that of nomadic herders, to a settled agricultural and urban society centred on the Temple in Jerusalem, to then explode westward and into the great founding cultures of Europe – the Greco-Roman civilisations.

Confronted with such an abundance of blessing, I chose for today’s Readings stories of women which, to my mind, have something more to share than what their more orthodox interpretations have to offer. Take for example the Reading from Proverbs. It is general known as The Reading of the Good Wife. Many male commentators believe this passage shows Woman in her most favourable light – as a paragon of wifely virtue, the exempla which we lesser females would do well to emulate.

Yet, whenever I hear this reading, I am left feeling decidedly uneasy. Not for myself or for other women, but for those men who see in the virtue of the Good Wife, the Real Deal. Gentlemen, if you are thinking this is so great, this is how women should behave, I regret to inform you, you have been truly blind-sided! This is how women for centuries out of mind have operated. In those times, and in those cultures that offered women little scope for social advancement and personal empowerment, this is how women have survived. And it is truly insidious!

Before I explain myself here, I want first to bring to your attention one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the one told by Dame Alison, the Wife of Bath. The tale itself is too long and complicated to relate to you here, but at its core is the question that men, for countless generations, have been asking: “What is it that women really want?” The answer, according to Chaucer’s proto-feminist, Dame Alison, is “Mastery.”

But Gentlemen, before you get too hot under your collars thinking that we women just want to take over the world and dominate everything, I will tell you that this is the simple answer. If you read the story very carefully, you will discover that what women really want is, yes, mastery – but it is mastery over themselves and their own lives. She wants to live a life where she is acknowledged to be a person – not property, a life in which she exercises both the authority, and the responsibility that comes with it, to make decisions for herself, and about those issues that profoundly impact upon her existence. In the making of those decisions, she wants to be answerable to nothing and no-one but herself, the law, and her God.

If she doesn’t have this power, she, like all other living creatures stripped of their personal empowerment, will sicken and die. Now, if I take away the obvious dangers of child-bearing which in earlier generations claimed the lives of many young women, I don’t see women in previous centuries or now, dropping dead in numbers significantly greater than their menfolk. So they must be gaining and exercising power – their “mastery” – somehow. And that “somehow” is spelled out in the passage of the Good Wife. Her power comes from manipulating the man, so she controls everything through him.

But what, I hear you thinking, is so wrong with that? What is wrong with the Good Wife running the household, the family business, the buying and selling of family property and assets, especially if her hubby is not complaining about it? To my mind, it is not so much the “what”, but the “how”. Throughout this whole passage, there is no indication that they work together as partners, consult each other on those matters which affect their mutual, and family, well-being. Rather, she just shoos him outside to go be with the boys while she, uninterrupted, runs the total show. He is what in the late 20^th century, became known as her “Beard”: the male figurehead, the visible front, behind which the real power, virtually unrecognised, goes about its business, but with no, or little, actual accountability. In the eyes of his society, he gets all the kudos when things go right, but if things go pear-shaped, who do you think will get the lion’s-share of the blame? After all, she is just another feckless woman, but who is the idiot that was stupid enough to marry her?

The Passage of the Good Wife goes a long way in explaining why, when women first started to be ordained as priests in the Anglican Church, they experienced such fierce opposition from certain church women. In the Anglican Communion before the 1970s, it might have been only the men who were permitted to parade around in their lavish vestments. It might have been only the men who proclaimed, and explained, the Word of God from the pulpit. And it might have been only the men who were authorised to celebrate the Eucharistic Mystery. But in every parish church, in every diocese, it was the women who actually controlled everything. She even had a name: The Female Pope assisted by her curia of Good Women. And it was many a priest who cried out in utter exasperation: “You can’t live with them, but you can’t live without them!”

Now, put a woman in amongst the ranks of the clergy, and the whole dynamic of the manipulation of power changes. Suddenly the Woman is no longer lurking in the shadows exercising covert power for good, or otherwise, from behind the scenes. She is now right out there exercising her authority in full view. And personally, that’s exactly where I want to see the power of both men and women being exercised: right out there in front where it is visible, transparent, but above all, accountable.

Somehow, in one of my student parishes, I got the reputation for being something of a feminist. So the Sunday when the passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, beginning, “Women be subject to your husbands,” was going to be read, the people who normally sat beside me in the choir stalls took their seats with visible trepidation. It seems, they were absolutely convinced that I was going to blow a gasket. “Actually, not,” says I to my concerned companions, “In fact, this particular passage has done much to completely renovate my opinion of St. Paul.” At this, my companions looked totally aghast, fearing, I suppose, I had been the victim of alien abduction or similar. I simply smiled and quietly said, “Listen very carefully to the reading.”

For those of you who mentally wandered out the door at the mention of Paul’s name, I will explain what it is you missed. St Paul was, of course, a Jew. But he was also a well-educated, well-travelled Roman citizen – a cosmopolitan man, familiar with many of the cultures which comprised the Roman Empire of his day. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and in many of his other letters to the churches in the Greco-Roman world, Paul’s references to women cannot be really appreciated without understanding the position of women in the ancient Greek world. In that world, women’s status moved slightly up or down depending on which city state is under discussion. But there is one general and constant truth: Independent of their men folk, ancient Greek women had little, or no, social or legal identity. They were what is referred to as “reflexive personalities.” In law, as in society, they were always seen in relation to a close male relative - as some man’s daughter, some man’s mother, some man’s wife. This was how a woman, if involved in a legal case, was always referred to in a court of law. Never was her personal name mentioned. And, if her name was mentioned: Well, we all know what sort of woman SHE was. And that was generally sufficient to scuttle her case.

The ideal for a woman was to remain sequestered in the home, first of her father, then her husband (marriage being her only real career choice). If she travelled outside of the home she was always accompanied by male relatives, or, if her husband was wealthy enough, a retinue of trusted family servants. Outside of the home, she wore a long loose cloak that not only shrouded her body but covered her head and lower part of her face as well. Shrouding the body against the sight of other men was the sign of a respectable woman: Respectable because she was the subject, or property, of just one man – her husband. And for a woman, this was extremely important. For a woman, who was not demonstrably the property of just one man, ran the risk of being seen as the common property of all men.

So, Paul’s injunction to the women of Ephesus to be subject to their husbands had the same value as him saying, “Women, remember to breathe.” For in the Ephesian society that Paul was addressing, a woman who was not subject to her husband, or in his lack, a father, brother, or other close male relative, had as much chance of having a viable existence as one who had, indeed, ceased to breathe – that is to say, Buckley’s!

No, Paul’s real point, and truly radical statement, concerning women, has nothing to do with their submission to male authority. In fact, it is quite the opposite. And so important was it, and so we wouldn’t miss his point, Paul repeats his radical concept three times, in verse 25, in verse 28, and again in verse 33. So, what is this truly radical statement that Paul repeats three times in a mere 8 verses: “Husbands, love your wives.”

Paul is very specific as to the type of love he expects men to express towards their spouses. He first echoes the Second of Christ’s Great Commandments, by contending that husbands should love their wives as they love themselves. He is to nurture her, and promote her interests, in the same manner that he nurtures his own self, and promotes his own interests. But Paul goes further, he then likens the love a man expresses towards his spouse as similar to the love Christ expressed toward the Church, by giving up of himself for her so she might become the very best that she is capable of becoming. Even today, let alone in the hyper masculine culture of Paul’s Greece, these statements are more than radical, they are mind-blowing!

Of course, this relationship is not to be just one way. The type of marital love that Paul is describing requires a mutual surrender, one to the other, of wills, of egos, of personal power. But because of the sexual power imbalance in favour of men that characterised both ancient Greece, and, in fact, most of European culture since then, this surrender has to be initiated by the man because the woman cannot surrender that which she does not have. Harkening back to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, it is not until the Knight hands over to his bride the right to decide for herself her own destiny, that she is able to give to him the beauty that is her true self. So, husbands love your wives.

In the Gospel reading we hear that Mary Magdalene is the first to discover the empty tomb and the first to encounter the Risen Christ. More importantly, she is also the first to be commissioned by the Risen Lord to spread the Good News, the Gospel, of Christ’s Resurrection. Thus, in point of fact, Mary Magdalene is the very first Christian apostle. The word “apostle” comes from combining the Greek preposition, apo, meaning “from,” with a rather uncommon Greek verb, stellen, “to send.” And in the Reading, we definitely hear that Jesus sent Mary from him to proclaim the news of his resurrection to his other disciples.

How many of you here, when hearing the name of Mary Magdalene, immediately thought, “Ah, Mary Magdalene, the first Apostle of Christ.” Now, I am not going to embarrass you by asking for a show of hands, but I am willing to bet that the vast majority of you, when hearing the name, Mary Magdalene, thought something like, “Oh, Mary Magdalene, the woman taken in adultery; Mary the Prostitute, whom Jesus redeemed.”

It is interesting that we have come to associate Mary Magdalene with sexual misconduct. And it becomes even more interesting when you consider that there is not a single shred of evidence in the Bible, or elsewhere, to connect the person of Mary Magdalene with the woman taken in adultery - the woman whom Jesus defended against the Pharisees. Yet, such a connection has existed in the minds of Church men since at least the 6^th century.

Who would perpetuate such a slander? And why? The question of “Who” is relatively easy to answer. It was the theologians and Ecclesiastical leaders of the Western Church, all of whom where most certainly men, who allowed this labelling of Mary as a whore to slip into Christian thinking.

However, the “why” of this conundrum is a little more complex. But I think it may have something to do with the concept of the Apostolic Succession. This is the concept in which the priestly leadership of the church is believed to be derived in an unbroken succession from Christ’s commissioning of the original apostles, and from these to the next generation of church leaders, and so on. This came to be symbolised by a bishop physically laying hands upon the next generation of priests, all of whom were potential bishops. At some point in time, the argument developed that because ALL the original apostles were men, those who received the mantle of this succession must also, like the apostles, be men. In this type of thinking, the Commissioning of Mary as the Proto-Apostle became, for the church leadership, more than just a little embarrassing. The obvious solution was to edit out Mary’s commissioning, and her apostolic authority, by this simple means of discrediting her as a person. The easiest way to do this, to Mary or to any other woman for that matter, was best explained by the British sociologist, Sheila Kissinger. “If you want to discredit a man,” said Dr. Kissinger, “discredit the sexual character of his mother. But if you want to discredit a woman, and everything she stands for, discredit HER sexual character.” So Mary is remembered, not as the first Apostle but as the fallen woman redeemed by the Son of Man and with that transformation, the priestly leadership of the One, Holy, and Apostolic Church became strictly a male preserve.

Did Jesus intend that the leadership of the movement he started to be strictly in the hands of men? He makes no actual definitive statement on the matter. We can only go by his actions: In the fact that he, unlike many Jewish men of his day, associated equally with women as he did men. In the obvious respect he showed towards them. In the way he seriously listened to what they had to say, to the point of actually learning from a woman, and changing his opinion as a result of that encounter. And then, finally, in the Commissioning of Mary of Magdala as his first apostle. From these actions, I can only deduce that Jesus had a much greater faith in the ability of women than many of the men who professed to follow him.

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