April 1, 2001
Fourth Sunday of Lent

Just Read Your Bible

Now I know it's not Christmas time any more, but how many of you remember all the details of the Christmas Story? Is it pretty fresh in your mind? Let's have a little quiz here ... How many Magi where there? Three Magi? OK. Do you remember what the shepherd said about the star? Anybody remember what the shepherd said when he saw the star? Shining in the East? OK. Anybody remember the names of the Magi? Balthazar, Melchior and Caspar. OK. Do we know anything about the way they looked? Races? Dark skin? All of them had dark skin? "Probably'. Well, when you go home today, turn to either the Gospel of Luke for the shepherds, or turn to the second chapter of Matthew for the Magi. You'll find that the Bible doesn't tell you how many Magi there were. The Gospel of Matthew is the only one that talks about the Magi. Not only do you not know how many Magi there were, but it says nothing about their names, and nothing about their appearance. All of that is information we have added along the way. In addition, if you read in the Gospel of Luke, the shepherds saw angels, but the shepherds didn't see a star. The star we get from the Gospel of Matthew. Angels from the Gospel of Luke. When we tell the Christmas Story, we take those two gospels and we put them together to get unified story. If you have done some Bible study, you know that when people sit down to write scripture, not only are they inspired by the Holy Spirit, but they are also have a particular sense of purpose. They have a reason for writing down what they write down. They relate to you the things that they think are important for you to know as they are telling their story.

This idea is where I got the title for the sermon today. Just Read the Bible. There are a lot of Christians who will say, if you want to live a faithful life, all you have to do is Just read the Bible. If you just read the Bible, then everything will become clear to you. I want to say to you as someone who has been "Just reading the Bible" for a few years now, that it's often not clear what a particular passage means. Sometimes you need a whole lot of information to help explain what was going on in Biblical times. What the intents were of the author. What some of the words might have meant back then that they no longer mean now. You have to do all of that before you even have a chance to understand what the scripture passage might mean. That doesn't mean that you should give up reading the Bible. But it means that you should not assume that it is a simple recipe book to give you the answers to any problem that you are facing in life. The Bible doesn't work that way. It is a faith story written by people who were inspired by God's Holy Spirit, trying to explain what it's like for humans and God to be in a relationship. It is an extremely important book for us in our faith. It is the only record about Jesus and his activities. It is not a simple book that you can just read and understand without spending some prayerful time in study.

In today's passage about Jesus gathered together with friends and a woman anointing his feet with perfume is a story that you will find in all four of the Gospels, with some variation. When people start to remember this story, they often do just as I pointed out in the Christmas Story. They take these different accounts and they put them together. So you will have people finding a sinful woman in one of the Gospels. Mary of Bethany described in this passage this morning, and Mary Magdalene described in one of the other passages. People have put those stories together so that those three characters have now become synonymous with one another. So Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene and the sinful woman become one character who is often described as a prostitute coming and wiping the feet of Jesus with her hair. The stories, in order to be understood in their context, need to be separated again. This morning we find Mary, the sister of Martha, the sister of Lazarus (whom Jesus raised form the dead). One commentator even suggested that Judas Iscariot, the disciple that betrays Jesus, might have been the elder brother of that family. I would encourage you to do a little bit more reading, because that was the first that I had heard of that connection. When the scripture says that Judas did not want Mary to use this rich perfume on Jesus feet it implies that he wanted to get his hands on the money. One of the ways that could happen is if they sold the perfume and put the money into the missionary money box. Judas was the treasurer, and he had access to the box. If Judas was the older brother in the family, he would have a different motivation. "Don't go wasting the family money perfuming his feet. We can use that money for something else." There are a variety of ways to interpret what is going on. It seems clear that while some of the other Gospels focus on forgiveness, that the focus here is much more on pointing to Mary and her understanding of the "big picture". Judas is saying, "Save this money, we have lots of other things to do." Jesus responds to him saying, "There are always going to be poor people. You are going to have to deal with that for a long time in the future." It is like saying, "Let's go to the movie now. We can wash the dishes when we come home, because they will still be there." So Jesus is saying sometimes you have to take an opportunity to do something, because the work to be done is always going to be there. Jesus is saying, "Mary recognizes that I might be dead in a week or two. I won't be with you anymore. When I go to Jerusalem, and I have to go to Jerusalem, when I go there, I'm not going to be well received. And I might be put to death." Mary, if you recall, is using a perfume called Myrrh. It is a perfume that was used in embalming, to prepare a body for burial. Most of the commentators will tell you that if you look at the story, it is Mary who understands what is going on. Mary understands that Jesus will probable be killed. It is Mary who is speaking with the prophetic voice in this passage. Not Judas, not the disciples who have been with Jesus all this time, But it is Mary who is saying, "This is what must be done. Now. Here at this point."

It took a long time for women to be recognized as prophets, or leaders or authorities in the Church. There were a few throughout history, but very few in positions of leadership within the Church itself. I was always proud to be able to share with folks that it was the Congregationalists who were the first to ordain a woman to ministry. That is true. But as I researched it, it's true with some twisting of the facts. Some of you remember the name, Antoinette Brown. Antoinette Brown was ordained into the Christian Ministry in 1853. She was ordained in a Congregational church as their pastor. But the story is a little bit more complicated than that. She was born in May of 1825, in Henrietta, NY. She attended Oberlin College, a well respected college in Ohio that was started by the Congregationalists. It was the first co-educational school to ever grant college degrees to women and the first school to accept people of all races. But the women were expected to clean rooms, to wash clothes, to serve food to the male students. While studying at Oberlin College, Antoinette Brown became close friends with Lucy Stone, a suffragist and an abolitionist. In 1847 Brown finished the literary course that was taken by most women. But she encountered serious objections from the faculty when she decided that she was going to continue at the school to study theology. They didn't think it was an appropriate field for a woman to study. But the school chartered a creed that no student could be excluded on the basis of sex. So Brown prevailed and she finished the theological course in 1850. The college faculty, even thought they couldn't exclude her from the class, could refuse to award her college degree. So she didn't receive it and she was also not given a license to preach. There must have been some pressure mounting along the way, because twenty-eight years later, the college finally bestowed the degree upon her.

Well, after hitting the road block, Antoinette Brown hit the lecture circuit for a while, speaking in favor of the abolition of slavery, temperance (the prohibition of alcohol), and preached whenever she had the opportunity. At that time, public speaking by women was considered a very bad thing. She was often shouted down by male preachers. Finally, in September of 1853, she was ordained as the minister of First Congregational Church in South Butler, New York. She was ordained in good Congregational Polity. She was ordained by a local church, to serve as their pastor. That same year she was an official delegate to the World's Temperance Convention in New York. But she was not allowed to speak there because she was a woman. In 1854, after just one year of ministry, Brown withdrew from her congregation due to theological differences. She had found difficulty supporting the idea of Original Sin and Predestination. So here was another complicating factor ... she became a Unitarian. The Unitarians will tell you that they are the ones who had the first woman ordained as a clergyperson. But I think we share the same Antoinette Brown together. She continued writing and doing important work, but no longer serving as an ordained pastor. When we stand to celebrate our diversity and our openness of mind, we point proudly to Antoinette Brown and say that she was the first woman ordained in the protestant church, and she was one of ours.

Since that time, women have become very active in the ministry, particularly in the United Church of Christ, but in many other denominations as well. In the early 1980's, there was a church in eastern Oregon that was looking for a pastor. They decided that they wanted the best candidate available. They were going to look at the profiles in a blind search. They took out everything that would indicate who the applicant was. Without clues to gender or age, the committee worked toward their decision. At that point, the top three candidates ended up being women. Even in the United Church of Christ, there is a difficulty in accepting women as clergy. There is often resistance to calling a female pastor, even though many women are great pastors.

I want you to take out your green piece of paper. Spend a few moments writing down words that would describe the positive qualities of a good minister. (Pause) OK, you can spend a little more time this afternoon when you don't have anything else to do to work on your lists. Now, take out the white piece of paper (The white sheets were completed earlier in the service. They consisted of two columns - one listing positive male characteristics the other listing positive female characteristics) and compare your green list to your white piece of paper and see where they correspond with each other. See how closely your green list of minister attributes matches with your list of male characteristics and your list of female characteristics. "They're the same?" What's the same? "The qualities." The same as which? OK, here we have an opinion that the green list is corresponding to both sides of the white list. Do you all find that it corresponds to both of your sides? "No." How many of you see that your minister list corresponds better with your male list? How many of you find that your minister list corresponds with your female list? (Two-thirds of the congregation raised their hands indicating a closer match to the female list) The point of all this is that many of the things that we value in a minister; to be compassionate, to be a good listener, to be welcoming, understanding, nurturing, outside of the church we would normally define as female characteristics. In the church we have insisted that the ministers should be male. Some people will point to scripture and say that women should be silent in church. But Paul said a lot of things and we don't listen to everything that he had to say. The Bible says a lot of things, and we don't listen to everything that we find the holiness codes in the Hebrew testament either. One of the passages I like to remind my children about says that if children disobey their parents, they should be put to death. If we were to enforce that once in a while, we would have a lot less delinquency, I'm sure. That's right, get rid of the riff-raff, and we'd be all set here.

So now you have an example of two different things. One is that we often turn to the scripture for a very simple response to problems, and it's not always that simple. The other thing is that we get ideas, either from the Bible or from the culture, about how things should be. Later on, down the road, we say, "How could we ever have said that?"

Even though we welcome women into the pulpits in the United Church of Christ, there are still some Christians who believe that women should not only NOT be ministers, they shouldn't even be elders in the church. They shouldn't be on the ruling board. The women should be the secretaries of the church. The nursery attendants of the church. The men should be in charge of the decisions. We were talking this morning in the adult Sunday school class about women having the vote. One of the women shared that on the way to the polls one day, she met a neighbor and she said, "Oh, you beat me to the polls." And the woman responded, "I don't think it's right for women to vote." Now we can hardly even imagine that, but there are people today who would like to keep women barefoot and pregnant and out of any decision making at all. We can stand here and say that we know that is an ignorant thing to say, and not a proper view of the world. But if we realized how many people used to believe that was true, it should give us pause once in a while when we think that we can stand today and say with assurance that everything we know is also true. There might be things that we think are true today and 50 years from now our grandkids are going to say, "How could our grand parents have been so ignorant?" We need to have a little humility. We can look through history and see how things have been justified in the past, justified by the culture or justified by our Christian faith. There are Christians who found Bible verses to tell you why it was OK to have slaves. Why it was OK for the man to be in charge and the woman have to listen to everything the guy said. We know that those things aren't right anymore.

It takes a lot for us to live faithfully. We need God's Spirit to guide us as we prayerfully consider scripture and make decisions about how to live our life. We are grateful for God's presence with us as we walk the path of discipleship.