by the Rev. Clara Sanders
Click here to watch the sermon recording on YouTube.
Good morning! My name is Clara Sanders; I currently serve as curate at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral and am deeply honored and blessed to be with you all today — actually my first time at Saint John the Evangelist!
My suggested assignment for today is somehow to fit the scripture lessons, racial reconciliation, the Philadelphia Eleven, and Disability Pride month into 12 minutes. It’s nice that the Gospel lesson is these five little Pocket Parables, so hopefully there’s gonna be a little something for everyone!
Of course, the glorious thing is that racial reconciliation, women’s rights, and disability justice are all deeply intertwined. The kingdom of heaven is collective liberation made manifest, One Way of love and justice with many paths.
Jesus talks about those many paths in the parables we read today, going from gardener to baker to treasure-seeker to trader to fisher, making sure that everyone in the crowd he’s teaching has a story they can latch onto to understand the good news he is proclaiming. But he’s also showing us that the kingdom of God is not just one expression. A world rooted in a God that is one-in-three necessitates diverse and interconnected ways of practicing God’s love and justice.
Today we are honoring the Philadelphia Eleven, who, along with three bishop partners and the people of The Church of the Advocate, a historically Black Episcopal Church there in Philly, organized their own ordination service on July 29, 1974. The vote for women’s ordination had failed at the church’s General Conventions in both 1970 and 1973, and it wasn’t until 1976, two years after this “rogue” ordination, that the representatives and bishops at General Convention finally affirmed the ordination of women as priests in The Episcopal Church.
What became clear in the documentary about these events – which I highly recommend you watch on TPT – is that this was such an intense shift – a shift that included death threats – because it entailed a real theological reorientation. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and now this question of women’s ordination both challenged the church’s idea of who bears the full image of God. And the answer to that question was not just theological, but also political, because it was also about who could have access to the power and authority of bearing God’s image.
“Jesus was a man,” opponents said over and over in the archival footage in the film, “Therefore Jesus’ representatives on earth have to be men.”
Never mind that whole “priesthood of all believers” thing that Paul talks about, or us all being one in Christ, or the fact that many of Jesus’ disciples – the ones following, supporting, and indeed representing him – were women.
Since the Jesus movement became a state religion under Emperor Constantine, the church has continually been tempted to interpret scripture and Jesus’ words and life through the lens of preserving worldly power instead of freedom in Christ. This has often meant that the kingdom of heaven – which I like to think of as the world God wants for us – ends up with only a single official definition, whatever corresponds with the experiences of people in power.
And yet the Word of God never lets us completely forget the truth. Throughout history, the church is constantly challenged by new and diverse ways that God’s will is being done.
Jesus tries all sorts of metaphors to try to get it through our heads that the kingdom of heaven is gloriously diverse in the way God is manifesting it in the world!
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed – nothing is too small for God.
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field that someone just finds – you don’t have to do anything to deserve God’s love.
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who finds a precious pearl and sells all they have to purchase it – we can release those attachments and material things that do not bring us closer to experiencing our own belovedness.
The kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown in the sea that catches fish of every kind. And yeah, it’s easy to hyperfocus on the whole gnashing of teeth part at the end of this story, but let’s hear that the kingdom of heaven catches fish of every kind. Nobody is outside of the dragnet of God’s love! And the sorting of the good from the bad doesn’t need to inspire mortal fear or our own lists of who’s in and who’s out, but rather a hope and a faith that the evil and sin that alienate us from God will pass away. After all, nothing can separate us from the love of God.
And that woman and the yeast… in the Gospel of Thomas, a text that isn’t included in the canon of the New Testament but which draws on some of the same sources as the synoptic gospels, Jesus doesn’t say that the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman mixes into flour. He says that the kingdom of heaven is like a woman that mixes the yeast –or, more accurately, sourdough starter — into flour to make leavened loaves.
And when I hear that variant, I can’t help but think about those Philadelphia Eleven, who knew that the time had come to mix that leaven into the dough of the institution and get it rising, even when those holding the power hadn’t yet okayed that recipe.
The kingdom of heaven is like a woman.
Like those who participated in direct actions during the Civil Rights Movement, the Eleven who chose civil disobedience received harsh criticism from people, both allied and opposing, who thought they should wait until it worked through the system. Those who disobeyed were accused of division, even though they were taking action to heal the division that already ran soul-deep in the church and in society.
They had realized that, as Audre Lorde said, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
Now, I’m actually a big fan of policies and procedures and mechanisms that help us to get things done and make changes in thoughtful and democratic ways. But just like holy scriptures, our institutions are products of their time and culture, with all the strengths and challenges that entails. Like Holy Scripture, our institutions have to be in dialogue with the world around us, and sometimes an interruption is needed to get the conversation started.
The Philadelphia Eleven were not just sticking it to the man. They decided that the time had come to actually live like the kingdom of heaven is already here.
They took the kingdom of heaven into their own hands and they kneaded in that leaven, trusting in a Savior who isn’t afraid of flipping some tables to bring the church back to itself.
I recently attended the fourth Interfaith Action for Palestine in Washington, DC. Previously, participants had pushed back against Christian Zionism by actively disrupting the annual conference for the super-PAC Christians United for Israel. This year, however, organizers intentionally did not plan an “arrestable” action, instead framing our prayer walk and lobbying witness as “prefigurative” — that is, modeling and living into the world we want to create, even if it isn’t here yet.
There are many examples of this kind of prefigurative work, especially from oppressed or silenced people who have been up against what feels like an immovable power. The Black Panther Party, who provided much of the security at The Church of the Advocate for the Philadelphia Eleven, developed a Free Breakfast for Children program in 1969 that soon spread across the country and provided a model for later federal programs, and the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Centers provided healthcare at no cost for several decades.
In their essay “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice,” Leah Lakshmi PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA highlights how people with disabilities have long been organizing among themselves to move beyond the model of professional attendant care and toward collective care for one another, actively practicing and modeling what we might call the kingdom of heaven, a pearl of great price, a care model of deepest value.
It was and still can be challenging for an institution like The Episcopal Church to move nimbly into that prefigurative space. Even when we can imagine the future we want, it’s hard to open ourselves up to the new systems and ideas and fermentation that imagination requires.
But we have those who have prepared the prefigurative way for us even in our own tradition: the Philadelphia Eleven and the Washington Four who were ordained the year after. The solidarity of The Church of the Advocate, who understood from long experience of oppression that all our freedom is connected. The painful but necessary friction with other churches in the Anglican Communion over The Episcopal Church’s full inclusion and affirmation of the spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities. And even now, people and churches not waiting for the system to catch up, but listening to those most affected on how to make their communities more accessible to people with visible and invisible disabilities.
Whenever I get frustrated with the beautiful and vastly imperfect work-in-progress we call the church, I remind myself that fortunately the kingdom of God is like many things. Jesus is always showing up in the most unexpected people and in the most unredeemable situations.
The kingdom of heaven shows up in the patient perseverance of systems change, AND in concrete challenges to worldly power that act as if the change has already come.
What does that look like for you and me in this moment? Well, the story of the Philadelphia Eleven provides us with some templates.
First, the independent ordination was deeply prayerful and seriously considered. This was not a “F around and find out” kind of thing; it was a product of devoted wrestling with our Heavenly Parent.
Second, this action was done in community and with consent of those participating. The vestry (governing body) of The Church of the Advocate agreed unanimously to host the service. Although several backed out beforehand because of pressure, the three bishops who did participate understood the risks to their careers. And even within a divided community, this act was a calling-in of the whole church to grow into who the Gospel asks us to be.
Third, the foundation of this action was not the preservation of power, but the ushering in of the kingdom of God, which, for Jesus, always comes from the perspective of the oppressed, the poor, the marginalized and the vulnerable. Actions like this have to come from below. Like Solomon, when we stop asking for long life or riches or power over another and listen to those who have boots on their necks, God will grant us the Holy Spirit of wisdom and discernment to know when it’s time to usher in the future by being the future.
As part of that prayerful discernment toward prefigurative action, we’re going to do a short song together. These words were set by Charon Hribar to the tune of the African-American spiritual I Wanna Die Easy and is part of the Poor People’s Campaign Songbook.
“I wanna be ready for change to come. I wanna be ready when it comes.” And part of being ready for change to come is being ready to be that change.
Amen.
