Sermon, August 4

Our Ephesians text today contains these words: “The gifts [Christ] gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…”

It’s a beautiful passage that describes something I get to see every day, with joy: the way God has gifted the members of this community in so many different ways, to be part of building up this body of Christ and equipping the saints – that’s you – for the work of ministry, of living out God’s love and justice in the world. 

This passage is also part of the rite of the ordination of a priest in the Episcopal Church. When I was ordained a priest in February of 2009, Bishop Michael Curry prayed these words before laying his hands on me and saying, “Give your Holy Spirit to Miranda; fill her with grace and power; and make her a priest in your church.” 

It worked!… 

This past Monday – July 29 – was the 50th anniversary of the ordination of a group of women known as the Philadelphia 11. 

Eleven women who were ordained as priests “irregularly” – outside the normal structures and processes of the Episcopal Church – two years before the Episcopal Church’s legislative gathering, General Convention, explicitly authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood in 1976.

Why was this action necessary?… It can be hard for folks attending an Episcopal church today to comprehend the institutional and cultural conservatism of the Episcopal Church sixty years ago. It wasn’t across the board or totally rigid; there were big steps towards ecological awareness and concern for civil rights and racial justice in the church in the 1960s and early ‘70s. 

But although there was no church law excluding women from ordination as deacons, priests, or bishops, there was a very strong custom against it. There had long been an order of “deaconesses,” separate and unequal from male deacons. In 1970, General Convention eliminated that distinction. But a resolution to open the path to ordination to the priesthood to women failed at the same convention – and then again in 1973. Support had grown, but wasn’t enough to overcome opposition.

Some women who felt called to priesthood, and their allies, began to plan other strategies to try to shake the church out of comfort and custom. One of the women said they felt like their vocation, their calling from God, was not to keep asking for permission to be a priest, but to be a priest. 

Ordination is what the church calls an episcopal act – meaning a bishop has to do it. You need a bishop to make a priest. A lot of bishops were sympathetic, but few were willing to rock the boat. 

Finally, three retired bishops stepped forward as willing to do the ordinations. (You only need one, but they wanted some extra juice!) In our church’s understanding of holy orders, once you’re consecrated a bishop, you’re a bishop for life unless you really mess up; but once retired, you have a little less at stake. 

In addition, one bishop who was not retired chose to participate in the service but not in the actual moment of ordination. I’ll say more about him in a moment. 

On July 29, 1974, the Feast of Saints Martha and Mary, a massive ordination service was held at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. Over 2000 people attended – imagine!!

There’s a part in the ordination service – like in the wedding liturgy – where the congregation is asked if they know of any reason why the service should not proceed. When that question was asked, several priests in attendance stepped up to read statements against women’s ordination. The bishops present responded that they were acting in response to God’s command, saying, “The time for our obedience is now.” And they continued with the ordinations. 

The Presiding Bishop at the time – John Allin – convened an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops, the body consisting of all the bishops of the Episcopal Church – at O’Hare Airport, for some reason? 

Initially the Bishops were going to declare the ordinations invalid – meaning, the ordination rite was void and those women aren’t really priests now. But the bishop of the Diocese of West Missouri, Arthur Vogel, a scholar and theologian, pointed out that that could be a problem in terms of church order. So instead, the House of Bishops declared the ordinations “irregular”… thereby ceding that these women might actually be priests now… but they also told the church at large not to recognize them as priests until General Convention met next in 1976 and decided how to proceed. 

(However, the Episcopal Divinity School, which thirty years later would become my seminary, hired two of the Philadelphia Eleven with full priestly duties in January of 1975!…) 

The 1976 General Convention finally approved the ordination of women to the priesthood, and opened a process for the full recognition of the ordinations of the “irregularly” ordained women. There’s so much more to this story… and there’s a new movie about it all that I would love to be able to show here sometime! This year, reading about it, my attention was caught by some of the men who were part of the story.

I noticed Bishop Tony Ramos – the bishop who chose to participate even though he wasn’t retired. In fact, he was quite young – only 36. He was from Puerto Rico, and had been appointed as the missionary bishop to the diocese of Costa Rica in 1968, at the age of 31. He resigned from that post a decade later to make room for a Costa Rican bishop to serve, then served the Diocese of New York as an assisting bishop for Hispanic ministries for many years.

Bishop Ramos died in 2019. His obituary calls him a “gift to the church and a prophetic voice… a life-long staunch supporter of women’s rights [who] fought for all marginalized communities.” As a result of his participation in the irregular ordinations in 1974, he felt “sidelined” and “exiled” by the church for much of the rest of his career – but he never wavered in his pride about having participated, seeing July 29, 1974, as a watershed moment for the church. Speaking about his participation at the time, he said, “The only way to do justice is to challenge injustice.” 

I noticed Dr. Charles Willie, who preached at the ordination service. Willie was African-American, born in Texas. He became the first tenured African-American professor at Syracuse University in 1974 – where he brought his college friend Martin Luther King Jr. to speak a couple of times. In 1974 he left Syracuse to accept a tenured position as a professor of education at Harvard. He was also appointed by both the Kennedy and Carter administrations to serve on commissions related to youth wellbeing and mental health. 

Willie was an active lay member of the Episcopal Church – so much so that he was elected the Vice-President of the House of Deputies in 1970. That’s the second-highest elected role a layperson can hold in the larger Episcopal Church, and he was the first African-American to hold that office. 

Because he had spoken out for women in ordained ministry, he was invited to be the preacher at the ordination service. In his sermon, he preached that it is a Christian duty to disobey unjust laws, recalling the civil rights movement: “It was an unjust law of the state that demeaned the personhood of blacks by requiring them to move to the back of the bus, and it is an unjust law of the church which demeans women by denying them the opportunity to be professional priests.” However, he said, the ordination must be celebrated “not as an event of arrogant disobedience but as a moment of tender loving defiance.”

When the House of Bishops declared the ordinations “irregular,” Willie resigned from his House of Deputies leadership role in protest – essentially saying that if the Church wouldn’t move towards justice here, then it didn’t get to claim the mantle of inclusiveness by having an African-American in a leadership role. 

I noticed Bishop Arthur Vogel, the theologian who persuaded the House of Bishops away from declaring the ordinations simply invalid. Vogel was born in Milwaukee, and studied at Nashotah House, the conservative Episcopal seminary outside Milwaukee. He served the Episcopal church in Delafield, and on the faculty at Nashotah House, from 1952 to 1971. He was elected bishop of the Diocese of West Missouri in 1971. In 1976 he offered the opening invocation for the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

I don’t know a lot about Vogel, but it seems likely that he held strongly Anglo-Catholic convictions – meaning that he was an Episcopalian who felt that the Episcopal Church’s liturgy and polity should be quite similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church, and not the warm fuzzy guitar-strumming Roman Catholicism of the 1960s, either. 

Maintaining Anglo-Catholicism within the Episcopal Church has long been Nashotah House’s heritage and focus. And Vogel was also very active in ecumenical dialogue between the Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches, reflecting his desire to see them come closer and perhaps even reconcile. You may be aware that the Roman Catholic church did not then, and does not now, ordain women to the priesthood. 

But it was Vogel who pushed the House of Bishops not to declare the Philadelphia ordinations invalid. He said, in essence: These women had met the church’s criteria for ordination; they were ordained by bishops in good standing, according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer; we don’t have any church laws saying women can’t be ordained. So there is no solid ground for declaring these ordinations invalid. 

Why? Maybe because he was a careful, thoughtful scholar who was concerned about sloppy logic and knee-jerk reactions. Maybe because the retired bishop of his diocese was one of the ordaining bishops; perhaps there were conversations there. Whatever the reason: A smart, well-regarded man, who was not a progressive firebrand, spoke up and helped the church handle this… less badly than it could have? 

Bishop Tony Ramos. Professor Charles Willie. Bishop Arthur Vogel. Each for their own reasons choosing to become part of this story. The story that meant that by the time I was born – in February of 1975 – it was already becoming possible for a woman to become an Episcopal priest. 

I didn’t figure out that that was my path, my calling, Christ’s gift to me, until a whole lot later. But when I did, my church placed no barriers in my way because of who and what I am. 

I am grateful for that, beyond words. I’m sure there are other things I could have done with my life – but I sure love doing this, and it sure feels like what I was made to do. 

And: I wonder. 

I wonder who needs our support, our solidarity, today. In the church; in the wider world. 

Like Bishop Vogel, might we feel called to speak up for something that’s not our cause or our issue, just because it’s the right thing to do?

Like Dr. Willie, might we build a bridge from our own experiences and struggles to empathize with another person or community?

Like Bishop Ramos, might we even be called to risk status, potential, the esteem of our peers, to do the thing that feels necessary for the health of our soul? 

Christ still calls the saints – that’s you! – to building up the body of Christ, and to the work of ministry in the world, advancing God’s agenda of justice, peace, and love of neighbor, near and far. Christ still gives us gifts for the work to which we are called, each and all. 

May we hear. May we respond. 

Let us pray. 

O God of Persistent Grace, you called the Philadelphia Eleven to the priesthood and granted them courage and boldness to respond, thereby opening the eyes of your church to the giftedness and equality of all: grant us so to hear, trust, and follow your Holy Spirit wherever she may lead, that the gifts of all your people may flourish throughout the earth, through Christ our Savior. Amen.

 

Some sources:

Obituary for Bishop Ramos: http://www.evergreeneditions.com/episcopal-new-york-spring-2019?i=581805&p=30&view=issueViewer&fbclid=IwY2xjawEXH3JleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHcfmm1zGZyhll3xaLqg82181J-tAZUKeTSKMDNTkHTDqd0F_1LDayBOekA_aem_xYaNZV6VN1pvUiuRze_Q9g

The original Episcopal News Service press release: 

https://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/ENS/ENSpress_release.pl?pr_number=74200&fbclid=IwY2xjawEVx7xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXXM6SUJdpd5NoQLIaqrVe5xkMO0m5xgFljGcK5mvss2zeL7lF_RfOUobw_aem_jSOw1L_ph-2JeB1tUWhEJw

Charles Willie:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V._Willie