Let God Build Our Dream House
Friday, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the ordination of the first women priests in The Episcopal Church on July 29, 1974 in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Eleven, as the women are known, chose the Feast of St. Mary and St. Martha for their ordination to honor Mary’s and Martha’s vital roles in Jesus’ ministry. Churches all over the country have been commemorating this event, many by screening the new documentary The Philadelphia Eleven, featuring the women who challenged the very essence of patriarchy within Christendom and succeeded in building a movement that transformed an age-old institution, as the documentary’s producers dramatically summarize.
It’s a story that needs to be told and re-told, because it’s easy to forget at any point in our history how much we’ve grown and changed. Women represent 40% of the active priests in the Episcopal Church — and just thinking of our own context, I was surprised to learn that number wasn’t higher. Mother Anita, Mary Johnstone, Jennifer Pedrick, Liz Hegarty, Jackie Kirby, Anne Bolles-Beaven, Meaghan Kelly Brower, Stephanie Shoemaker, Virginia Buckles, Maggi Dawn, Susan Barnes, and Susan Lukens, and countless others.
And then there’s me. I’ve told you before that I told my mother when I was about seven that I wanted to be a Jesuit priest — a nonstarter then and now for obvious reasons. Priesthood in The Episcopal Church would have been equally unavailable at that time, although God had been on the move in the church for several years then to restore the historical ministry of our mothers in the faith: Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, Miriam, Rahab, Esther, Judith, Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, the Syro-Phoenician woman, the woman at the well, Lydia the seller of purple cloth, Prisca, Chloe, Claudia, and countless others, named and unnamed.
Different Vantage Point
I had a different vantage point on God’s movement in women’s ordination than what played out on the front pages of the national news alongside Watergate, civil rights marches, protests against the war in Vietnam, and landing on the moon. My great uncle, Robert L. DeWitt, was then Bishop of Pennsylvania. He was elected in 1962, when race riots were erupting in Chester, Pennsylvania. I remember my family talking about my uncle and the dean of Penn’s law school taking a midnight ride from Philadelphia to Harrisburg to plead with the governor to intervene.
Uncle Bob evolved into a socially liberal activist, known for outspoken advocacy in and out of the pulpit, campaigning for women’s rights and against social inequity, racism, and the Vietnam War. I was still a little young at this point to follow the news, so I heard these stories around the dinner table. I really can’t say honestly that my grandmother’s and my mother’s first comments were to commend Uncle Bob’s commitment to social justice. They were worried sick about his safety, as well as the safety of Aunt Bobbie and my cousins.
In 1974, Uncle Bob finally did something that just “took the cake,” as my grandmother said. Just retired as Bishop of Pennsylvania, he joined with two other bishops, Edward Welles of Missouri and Daniel Corrigan, a former national officer of The Episcopal Church, to break with nearly 2,000 years of tradition in ordaining 11 women to the priesthood. The fallout was immediate — credible threats of violence against the bishops and the women priests, an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops, charges filed against the three ordaining bishops, and attempts to keep the women from serving as priests. Ultimately the three bishops were censured by the House of Bishops, and the 1976 General Convention determined that the women’s ordinations were “valid but irregular.”
God’s Activity in the World
Why does this matter today, especially with so many women now in active ministry? What’s at stake in this contemporary gospel story is a bird’s eye view of God’s own activity in the world — among us, in our time. We can get stuck, and forget that our God is a living God, moving among us every day. Just as it seems like business as usual for me to be in this pulpit, and to celebrate the eucharist, we can forget to let God move freely among us, shaping and changing us for our time.
This is what happens to King David in this morning’s reading from Second Samuel. The Israelites have been carrying the LORD’s presence around from camp to camp in the ark of the covenant. When they stopped for the night, they placed the ark of the covenant in a tent or tabernacle known as the Tent of Meeting — the portable earthly dwelling of God. In today’s story, when the LORD has given David rest from his enemies, David settles in, and builds himself a house of cedar. He’s so comfortable in his new house that he decides to build the LORD a cedar house, but God’s having none of that. God is active and on the move among the people.
That’s what the detail of a cedar house is all about. It’s a particular reference that makes us stop and notice that David is trying to build the home of his own dreams for God. Through Nathan the Prophet, the LORD asks King David when, in all the time God has moved among the people of Israel, did the Lord ever ask for a house of cedar? The Lord will make you a house, Nathan says, or as author Kathleen Norris clarifies, it is not we who must build God a tabernacle, but God who chooses to dwell in and among us. It is in people, and not things, that God wishes to live. So how do we make sure that our spiritual home here at Emmanuel — where our very name means God with us — is a tabernacle or tent for God’s activity among us and not an early 20th Century Ralph Adams Cram version of David’s cedar house? How do we let God make us a house where God can move freely among us?
We share our home, building a vibrant and loving community. We welcome all people from all places in all seasons. We listen to each other, staying curious and always ready to learn something new or change our minds. We open our doors even wider to the whole community with the Community Bridge, starting in the next week or so because God has moved among us in to raise the funds to start construction now! We celebrate and share this glorious church building, remembering that it is a holy tabernacle for our living God in all times, not the comfortable cedar house of our times.
God is on the move among us. This is our gospel message today. When Jesus moves with the disciples in the boat to a deserted place by themselves, the people all follow him, begging Jesus to let them touch his cloak. That’s another super specific reference like David’s cedar house, meant to remind us, as preacher Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, of the hemorrhaging woman we met a couple of weeks ago. Crowds of people follow Jesus to be made well in today’s story because they’ve heard this woman preach the good news of what God has done for her. All she had to do is reach out her hand to connect to the living God moving among us, doing marvelous things. Amen