HIS-tory and HER-itage

Sermon preached on March 3, 2019

Happy Women’s History Month! I’m so glad that I have the opportunity to preach during this month.  And to kick it off, I thought we could turn to that most Feminist Icon – the Apostle Paul.  That was a joke, don’t worry. 

Our scripture reading today does come from Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 16, verses 1 – 16.  Let us listen for the Word of God. 

I’m introducing our sister Phoebe to you, who is a servant of the church in Cenchreae.   Welcome her in the Lord in a way that is worthy of God’s people, and give her whatever she needs from you, because she herself has been a sponsor of many people, myself included.

Say hello to Prisca and Aquila, my coworkers in Christ Jesus, who risked their own necks for my life. I’m not the only one who thanks God for them, but all the churches of the Gentiles do the same.  Also say hello to the church that meets in their house. Say hello to Epaenetus, my dear friend, who was the first convert^[b] in Asia for Christ.  Say hello to Mary, who has worked very hard for you.  Say hello to Andronicus and Junia, my relatives and my fellow prisoners. They are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before me.  Say hello to Ampliatus, my dear friend in the Lord. Say hello to Urbanus, our coworker in Christ, and my dear friend Stachys.  Say hello to Apelles, who is tried and true in Christ. Say hello to the members of the household of Aristobulus.  Say hello to my relative Herodion. Say hello to the members of the household of Narcissus who are in the Lord.  Say hello to Tryphaena and Tryphosa, who are workers for the Lord. Say hello to my dear friend Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord.  Say hello to Rufus, who is an outstanding believer, along with his mother and mine.  Say hello to Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers and sisters who are with them.  Say hello to Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them. Say hello to each other with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ say hello to you.

You might be wondering why I picked probably the least familiar passage of Paul’s letter to the Romans for today, a passage that seems devoid of the beautiful theology in the rest of the letter. It’s a passage that’s not included in the Revised Common Lectionary, so it’s very possible that you would never hear it read aloud in church. But this is one of my favorite passages in Romans, and a very appropriate text for this month.

Spoiler alert, I’m not going to talk about Paul much in this sermon.  So if you’re looking forward to me taking him down a notch for his problematic views of women and queer folks, I’m sorry to disappoint.  If you’re hoping for me to take an apologetic view of Paul and show that he’s really not as anti-woman as everyone thinks he is, also not the sermon you’re looking for. Today, we’re going to celebrate the women who built the Church, not the man to whom historians gave the credit.

Because this is women’s history month, we’re going to approach the text with an eye to the women. This helps reconstruct our often-forgotten history and privileges our stories as vehicles to a larger truth.  It may not be immediately obvious, but the beginning of Romans 16 is perfect for this. It’s also a great argument for 1) why we should read the entirety of the Bible, even the “boring parts,” and 2) why we should Always. Read. The. Footnotes. 

"Junia" by Sara Beth Baca

At first glance, this passage looks like a standard greeting in which Paul names 28 people.  Unless you’re fluent in New Testament Greek, you wouldn’t know that about 1/3 of them are women.  Phoebe, Prisca, Mary, Junia, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, the mother of Rufus, Julia, and the sister of Nereus.  10 women.  Ten women who were so important to the Roman church that this the most celebrated evangelist, made sure to include them.

It gets really interesting when you look at all the descriptors Paul uses for these women, the importance of which you wouldn’t know unless you read the footnotes. Let’s go down the list: Phoebe is a diakonos, translated here as “servant,” of the church.  This is a term reserved for ministerial leaders or officers, and it is the word that Paul uses to describe himself at the beginning of this letter.  Phoebe was Paul’s equal.  Phoebe would have been the one to “deliver” the letter to the Roman Church – when that community first heard Paul’s words, they would have been coming out of a woman’s mouth.

Prisca is mentioned six times in the New Testament along with her husband, Aquila, as a significant leader, missionary, and teacher; Paul greets her as a co-worker with her husband, not his subordinate.  Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis all labor, kapiao, for the Lord, a verb that Paul uses in other letters to denote some leadership function.  Nereus’ sister and Julia are included in the list of names at the end without designation, but their inclusion in these greetings points to some participation in ministry.  Rufus’ mother is greeted as if she were Paul’s own for her hospitality.

My personal favorite is Junia, who was Paul’s “fellow prisoner,” and who Paul describes as “prominent among the Apostles.”  Apostolos, or “apostle” is a term Paul uses specifically for those people who had seen the resurrected Jesus. It’s a word that other New Testament authors reserve for those who followed Jesus in his earthly ministry. Being named an “Apostle” is a kind of a big deal.  The thought that a woman could be an Apostle was so scandalous to generations of Biblical scholars that they mistranslated – and misgendered -- “Junia” as “Junius.”  

When I first learned about all the women named here, I had a lot of questions: What was their experience in leadership? How did they deal with Paul at his most misogynistic? Why are several women greeted independently of any male relative – were they single? Or were they more important than their male kin?  What does it mean that Tryphaena and Tryphosa are greeted in the same way couples are greeted?  The sad fact is that these questions will always be answered the same way – with resounding silence.  We just don’t know because women’s stories were not deemed worthy of being recorded or preserved.  Because the Bible was canonized by a group of men in a patriarchal society, women’s stories were silenced, and our contributions went unrecognized for centuries. We don’t have an account of women’s travels and teachings, we don’t have their letters.

Romans 16, which at first glance is boring and skip-able, preserves the true history of the early church – that it was sewn, planted, and cultivated by women.  Not just in Rome, but across the world where all of these early Christian communities were forming.  We occupied every office, every leadership role.  Evidence for this is found not just in Paul’s letters, but in other parts of the New Testament and other fragments of Church history. Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, a feminist scholar who’s done a lot to reconstruct women’s history in Christianity, argues that when you look at all this evidence, it’s clear that the early church was an egalitarian community.  Leaders of the Jesus Movement were not defined by their gender, but by their discipleship and empowering by the Spirit.

We can thank Schussler-Fiorenza and other feminist scholars for excavating women’s leadership in the early church, but I don’t want to stop there.  I hope that the message of women being just as qualified as men to lead is not a prophetic one in the 21^st Century Mainline Protestant Church, especially this church.  I’m more interested in the other truths that can be mined through looking at this text through a feminist lens.

"Priscilla" by Sarah Beth Baca

This text also shows us that Paul was not a “lone ranger” for Christ; he wasn’t solely responsible for the spread of the Christian faith.  The multitude of people, women and men, greeted here show us that the Jesus Movement was a communal effort.  Paul counted on all these people to do the work of building the Church.  After 15 chapters of theological musings on God’s grace, this passage argues that the proper response to that grace is active participation in God’s plan for reconciliation – building a community that celebrates God’s grace, reflects God’s grace, and is a vehicle for God’s grace. That work ranges from evangelism, to governance, to opening one’s home, and to general “hard work.” Each of the women named in this passage responded to the Good News of Jesus Christ’s teachings, death, and resurrection in different ways, and every one of them was important to the movement.  Many women, doing all kinds of work, created communities of Christian practice that survived, that thrived, and that were passed down through generations of believers.

It should be no surprise to anyone that women were instrumental in building the early Church; that we were planting and cultivating communities where folks could hear the Good News, find companionship, worship God, and support each other to live a countercultural life.  We’ve been doing the “hard work” for, literally, thousands of years.  But the Patriarchy is insidious.  It not only erased women’s history of leadership, it also devalued the other work we were doing, that we were “allowed” to do. The day-to-day tasks of organizing, worshipping, teaching, and care that define Christian communities became “women’s work,” and was beneath male preachers and administrators.  The irony is that “women’s work,” was probably the most important work for spreading and strengthening the Jesus movement, not just in the first century C.E., but over the next 2,000 years.  Martin Luther, John Wesley, Richard Allen, and hundreds of other men get the credit for creating new denominations, for Christianity’s evolution, but the success of those new denominations depended on worshipping communities that kept the faith every week, that figured out how to put theology into actual practice.  That work doesn’t make it into the history books.

For 50% of you, I’m probably preaching to the choir. Women remember our foremothers and their work in the Church.  We remember the examples they set for us; the labor that they did as church secretaries, committee leaders, Sunday School teachers, prayer-circle coordinators, and coffee hour hostesses.  We know the work that it takes to keep the doors open and the congregation fed – spiritually and physically.  We know that for every Phoebe, Junia, and Prisca, there were dozens of, Marys, Tryphosas, Tryphaenas, Julias, and all those other “sisters” that Paul greets doing other, crucial work: project management, resource coordination, feeding, cleaning, pastoral care, praying, and all those other jobs that are necessary for a congregation to thrive.

And this is why it’s not enough to simply use this passage as an argument that women should be pastors, because women’s access to church leadership is only half the battle.  The work that we have been historically relegated to is still not seen as valuable.  To be recognized as leaders in the church, we women have to be ministers or theologians, and all the “women’s work” of our foremothers still goes uncelebrated, unnoticed, and increasingly unfulfilled.  Nobody gets paid for this work.  We still expect people with “time on their hands” to volunteer for this work.  And there’s still not gender parity in all church volunteer opportunities. We’ve won the right for women to do the “men’s work” of preaching and participating in higher levels of church governance, but we haven’t done a good job of celebrating the everyday work that it takes to steward this church that we’ve been gifted -- the “hard work” that the other women in this text, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, and Mary were doing.  Even today, their work is not as celebrated as being a martyr or a traveling evangelist. 

And so I wonder if we’re missing the larger message of Romans 16 – that the thriving of the church is a communal effort, the work of which is the privilege and duty of a Christian life. I’m afraid that we’re doing a lot to reconstruct our history, but in the process, neglecting our heritage.  Yes, it is important to lift up Phoebe, Prisca, and Junia, to defend everyone’s right to church leadership, regardless of gender or sexuality.  But we cannot limit our definitions of leadership and discipleship to preaching, evangelizing, or being the top donor in a church.  If we do, we continue the legacy of Patriarchal oppression and threaten the survival of the capital-C Church.  I want to move beyond reconstructing our history to celebrating our heritage. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the differences between “History” and “Heritage.” History is something we study; heritage is something we carry.  Even when few documents remain that tell of their existence, the women of the early Jesus Movement left behind an extraordinary legacy – they gave us the Church.  Celebrating women’s heritage goes beyond remembering that Junia was an apostle, that Prisca was a patron, that Phoebe was an evangelist.  And it goes beyond definitions of gender roles and gendered work.  It asks us, all of us, to affirm our foremothers and remember their stories by continuing their lives’ work.  It demands active participation in the project that they began, that generations of women nurtured and sustained even when their leadership was erased and their contributions taken for granted.  If we do not celebrate and affirm their faith by continuing their project, then all of their efforts and struggle will have been in vain.  Carrying our foremothers’ heritage needs all of our gifts and talents, and for all of that work to be celebrated.  Praying for sick members, organizing opportunities for Bible study and reflection, joining a committee, teaching, organizing the library, all those contributions and gifts are just as important as a divinity degree and should be just as valued.

"Phoebe" by Sarah Beth Bacca

The women in Romans 16 worked alongside their brothers to build God’s reconciled world, one worshipping community at a time.  The beauty of that early Church was not that there were women preachers as well as men, but that folks were not constrained to certain roles because of their gender or their sexuality and that all their work was valued.  In an egalitarian community, we are all able to answer the call of creating, sustaining, reforming, and transforming our communities with our own unique Spiritual gifts.  Celebrating women’s heritage in the church means building and nurturing that kind of community.  Only then will we have done justice to the memory of the women of Romans chapter 16, all the women after, and for all the women to come.