February 22, 2009

Glynn Cardy

Epiphany 7 (Transfiguration)     Mark 9:2-9

Like with a lot of biblical stories, it is the obvious things we overlook. Four blokes went up a mountain. One bloke, Jesus, allegedly met two old blokes up there, Elijah and Moses. There were a lot of special effects: light, cloud, and a voice from nowhere. The three other blokes Peter, James, and John, were a little spooked. Eventually the foursome came down from the mountain, leaving the old boys in the clouds.

There is much made of this story. Jesus was supposedly transfigured bright and white, with high connections. Some see it as proof of his divinity, or at least the early church’s belief in Jesus’ divinity. Some see it as an affirmation that Jesus would not die but be around for a final judgement, like Elijah. Some see it as the early church making the claim that Jesus was both a great prophet, like Elijah, and the teacher of a new law, like Moses. And then some, like me, see it all as wishful thinking made into a fanciful story.

It’s the obvious things we overlook. Go figure. It’s all about blokes. In particular it elevates to an inner elite three blokes: Peter, James, and John [the latter two being the sons of Zebedee]. But if one carefully reads the New Testament there are a number whom it could be claimed belonged to an inner elite: Mary Magdalene, Mary Jesus’ mother, Andrew, Mary and Martha of Bethany, the Beloved Disciple, James Jesus’ brother… Dom Crossan, the well-known New Testament scholar, posits that the multiple appearance accounts after Jesus’ death reflect the struggle in the early church about who were the rightful leaders of the new movement.

The way the early female leaders of Christianity were marginalized as the decades and centuries went by is well documented. Mary, Jesus’ mum, was made into a perpetual, submissive, oxymoronic virgin-mother. Only in recent years have scholars written about Mary the courageous, powerful, and influential church leader. Mary Magdalene was treated similarly. She was acclaimed as the first witness to the resurrection and called ‘the Apostle to the Apostles’. It is not surprising that men like Pope Gregory I saw her as a threat and, contrary to the biblical witness, discredited her with the stigma of prostitution.

Yet in spite of these strong women there is no denying that Christianity, indeed most major religions, are supportive neither of women in leadership nor of theologies that acknowledge the deity or deities to be gender inclusive. Last Sunday afternoon, for example, I attended a large Anglican service with a phalanx of five male bishops in attendance. With the exception of one woman it was an all-male front row. The liturgy had us worshipping and singing to a male God. As church-goers we can over time be de-sensitized to these observations, but the visitor or newcomer to Christianity often isn’t. It’s the obvious we overlook. It’s the obvious that needs transformation.

It’s easy to poke fun at and criticize fundamentalist religions. They do the blatant, in-your-face, blokes-know-best thing. God is a bloke and only blokes can speak for God. Women can’t. Women are told they can’t lead. Women are told they can’t teach, except small children. Women are told what their clothing should be like. Women are told they have to be under the authority, or is it the thumb? of a bloke. For women who are not part of these religions it reads like a sick joke. For women inside these religions it is a toxic brew that debilitates potential and stifles their spirit.

Yet mainstream, liberal-ish religions and churches like St Matthew’s can suffer from the same toxic substance, albeit in a diluted form. Look at the display boards at the back of the church and count the number of women vicars. Although this Church has had at least six women priests ministering here, and one being Priest-in-Charge, there have been no women vicars. Their absence reflects not so much who our parish were choosing but the pool of people who have been ordained and trained for such a job as this. Access to that pool for women has been extremely limited. Sexism is not just prejudice. It is the structures that develop over centuries when under the influence of that prejudice. When the toxicity of the individual prejudice diminishes the toxic structures can still remain.

And those structures remain to our detriment. When Anglican churches, like England and Australia, exclude women from being considered as bishops, they are effectively halving the potential talent pool for the job. It is sobering that the focus of the Church of England at present in addressing this issue is more concerned with an antiquated male minority who are resisting change than the message to the many millions of women in the UK in or outside of churches.

In our own country there was a long period of struggle prior to the ordination of women to the priesthood in 1977. A number of you were a part of that struggle, this church was part of that struggle, and we honour your determination and commitment.

Women who were ordained quickly found out how to survive or not in a 2,000 year old boys’ club. The job expectations, largely unwritten, were designed for a man with a supportive wife. And the more onerous the job the more this was apparent. Slowly, some of these expectations are changing. Issues of personal safety, flexibility of hours to care for dependents, conferences that are not in weekends or school holidays… are seeping into the consciousness of the church.

Since those early days of the late 1970s and into the 1980s the church, like the world at large, has gone slow on change. On the one hand school children are told ‘girls can do anything’ and the girls believe it and try. On the other hand the resistance of many men to women in leadership continues.

I noticed for example that at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on an abridged list of 170 business leaders only 5 were women.

Oxfam’s director pointed out the Forum’s definition of leadership is too narrow and should be broadened to say include female community leaders from Africa. Who set that definition? The men in charge. Who has the power to change that definition? Only the men in charge. The rules probably do not reflect blatant gender prejudice, but rather the entrenched assumptions of structures formed by men over many generations. And the world suffers. The more select the guest list the more limited is the range of ideas. And in a time of crisis that is not just stupid, but potentially fatal.

Conjointly with the movement to ordain women to the priesthood in the late 1970s there was a desire to revise liturgies that called women ‘men’ and used masculine pronouns for both genders. By the early 1980s this liturgical revision was well underway and was reflected in the New Zealand Prayer Book 1989. The same movement sought a similar revision in hymns. The transfiguration of the church was starting to happen.

But then it all got too hard. Everyone knew, or said they did, that God was neither male nor female, but for the sake of convenience was called ‘He’. Those who tried bucking this convenience got short shift. I have never seen in 24 years of ordained ministry a diocesan or national liturgy that used the word ‘She’ for God. It is as if there is something very powerful, largely subconscious, which resisted the feminization of God. It is as if God couldn’t be figured that way or we’d lose something essential. What we’ve lost by binding God up in a male sarcophagus is God’s freedom, and thus sovereignty.

The old hymns, like dearly beloved childhood memories, were also hard to let go of. Even if most didn’t believe the words, or knew what they meant, the old 16th century vocabulary and familiar tunes coalesced to resist change. Terrible theology, theology that denigrates women, continued to live on in public worship supported by nostalgia. A number of churches, inspired by the charismatic movement, introduced new songs, but by and large kept the terrible theology. Churches of the broad Anglican variety experimented with changing certain words in the old hymns. Some churches, like St Matthews, slowly introduced new hymns that had neutral language for people and for God. However the number of hymns using a female image or metaphor for God I could count on one hand.

Over the years of my ordained ministry I have had multiple conversations with teenage girls about God. These are usually girls who have been part of Sunday Schools and Youth Groups in liberal-progressive Anglican churches. Invariably when we talk about the gender of God they begin by defending the so-called ‘fact’ that God is male. This is despite the fact that the vicar, me, in more than two decades of preaching has never used a masculine metaphor or pronoun for God. This just goes to prove the power of sermons!

What are we going to bequeath to the girls of the future, our unborn daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters? Are we going to tell them that the Christian God is a male god - because that’s what we are telling them right now? Or are we going to say that God is both female and male as well as neither, and write and use liturgies and hymns that celebrate the feminine [because we’ve got plenty that celebrate the masculine]. That’s what we need to do right now. Our theology and worship needs reconfiguration.

On this day, which the Church traditionally has called the Feast of Transfiguration, let’s dream of a re-figuration of the Church. Let’s dream of a Church with structures that enable women to lead and influence how we worship, and enable women to be considered for any and every job. Let’s dream of a Church where feminine metaphors and pronouns are included in our liturgies and hymns, and where visitors know that God is not bounded by maleness. And let’s build a Church where our granddaughters and grandsons will know that here all dreams are possible in this house of mutuality, equality, and justice.