“Homage to the Philadelphia Eleven”

by the Rev. Rhonda J. Rubinson

delivered at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, NYC

Monday, July 29, 2024

Texts:  Exodus 1:15-21, Sirach 1:4-15, Galatians 3:23-29, Luke 24:1-11

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be found acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen.

We in the church don’t pay much attention to the two midwives whose story we just heard from Exodus, but we should.  One sign of why we should is that we learn these woman’s names – Shiphrah and Puah – and that is unusual for the Bible, where named women account for less than 15% of over a thousand named characters; obviously the rest are men, so these women were singled out as worthy of naming. The reason is that Shiphrah and Puah made possible salvation history as we know it: without their intervention, the baby Moses would have died upon birth if they had obeyed the pharaoh’s command to kill all newborn Hebrew boys; the pharaoh was terrified that one of those boys would grow up to lead a rebellion of Egypt’s very large Hebrew slave population that could ultimately cost him his throne. But, the Bible says, “the midwives feared God” – more than the king of Egypt, they feared God.  So, despite pressure and peril, not knowing whether they would survive their disobedience of the king or what the legacy of their actions would be, they saved those baby boys.  By so doing, Shiphrah and Puah gave a master class on how to choose faith over fear, how to stand up to authority, all while sapping the power from those who wield it like a weapon.  In other words, they teach us how to transform the world.

Fifty years ago on July 29, the Feast of Saints Mary and Martha (the day chosen for its significance), eleven women knelt and received the sacrament of ordination to the priesthood as three retired male bishops laid hands on them at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.  Although the Presbyterian and Methodist churches had ordained women since 1956, and even the Diocese of Hong Kong ordained the first woman in the Anglican Communion, Li Tim-Oi, in 1944, this was a first in the Episcopal Church.  Like the midwives before them, these women chose faith over fear. Their choices, too, were, filled with pressure and peril, and none knew whether they would survive even their ordination service because of violent threats against them, or if they did, the vicious blowback they knew would follow.

Together we call them “the Philadelphia Eleven” which emphasizes their power, courage, and prophetic witness as a bloc, a sisterhood, but each individual ordinand had travelled step by step on their own arduous journey, drawing strength from each other along the way.  Daily – and I’m sure, nightly – they had to choose again and again whether to succumb to blistering opposition, or to recommit to following the path that they knew would lead to a different kind of salvation: the salvation of the Episcopal Church, which likely couldn’t survive without the full participation of all of God’s people, including women. Like Shiphrah and Puah, their names deserve to be known.  They are:

Merrill Bittner

Alla Bozarth-Campbell

Alison Cheek

Emily Hewitt

Carter Heyward

Suzanne Hiatt

Marie Moorefield

Jeannette Picard

Betty Bone Schiess

Katrina Swanson

Nancy Wittig

Now I have a confession to make.  Growing up, I was unaware of the sacrificial heroism of the Philadelphia 11 and those who supported them. In 1974 I was not a member of any church; I was a Jewish teenager attending high school in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, worried about taking my SATs.  By the time I was ordained in 2000, my class consisted of six women and one man, so to me the ordination of women was very normal in the Episcopal Church; wow, have I gotten an education in this 50^th anniversary year – and that’s why we observe this anniversary, not only for remembrance, but for education. Of course, now I’m acutely aware that I am traveling through the comparatively smooth terrain of our current church landscape that the Eleven created. Yes, me and all my sister women priests must still fight back against the ever-present spasms of misogyny and strong currents of sexism that still exist today in our church and wider society.  But because of the Eleven, my own ordination is no longer looked upon as “irregular,” or even worse, as an act that could be theologically smeared as an “abomination that violates the natural order.”

The attacks on the validity of women’s ordination – and, by extension, on women generally – open a window on to the strategies that powerful institutions like the church have historically used to hold on to power. First, there is the time-honored tactic of stalling – be patient, we’re not ready yet, let’s have another committee do a study, then study the study, appoint a commission, etc. – but eventually that string runs out. When change seems imminent, fear takes over.  In the church’s case, the chronic fear has historically been that permitting people whose racial, ethnic, and gender identities fall outside of the norms of the “traditional” church hierarchy (that is, white, straight, male) to exercise ordained ministry would somehow destroy the church.  And those who raise the specter of this fatally wounded church always cast themselves as defenders of the faith, and protectors of the church. That’s when the church reverts to the same strategy that pharaoh used as he tried to hold on to power: manipulation through fear.

In the case of women’s ordination, the word “blowback” doesn’t begin to describe the fury that erupted after the women were ordained. Watch the documentary “The Philadelphia 11” or read Carter Heyward or Nancy O’Dell’s books for the horrifying details of the ways in which their opponents reacted: defrocking the male priests who allowed the women to celebrate the Eucharist, physically attacking them as they served the Eucharist, and worse. This went on until the General Convention of 1976 finally canonically recognized the ordination of women to all holy orders, and the anger only slowly began to abate.

How could any of this be justified, if we believe, as Paul writes in Galatians, that in Christ there truly is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female? This is the favorite biblical passage that supporters of women’s ordination pointed to because Paul pulls back to give us the big picture, which is that all the categories that we use to divide humanity in order to dominate a slice of it become utterly incoherent and fall silent when confronted with life and ministry in Christ, who is all in all.

But that didn’t – and hasn’t – stopped the inflammatory, fear-mongering language that has plagued church history; the language remains the same, it’s only the name of the targeted group that changes from time to time.  We have heard the same words deployed to denigrate Black people, women, women of color, gay and lesbian people, and now the fuller spectrum of LGBTQ+ people, but the Philadelphia Eleven knew that breaking the stained-glass ceiling for one group would inevitably help others, as others had before them.  The ordination of our first Black priest – Absalom Jones, also in Philadelphia (is there something about Philadelphia?) helped pave the way the Eleven to accomplish what they did, yet because that group of women were all white, they knew that more needed to be done.  It was. Pauli Murray, was ordained the first Black woman priest; she had attended the Philadelphia Eleven’s ordination.  But there is an even more direct line from them to Barbara Harris, who helped organize their ordination service and even served as a cross bearer – she would of course become the first woman Bishop of any color in all the Anglican Communion.  And she in turn helped pave the way for Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop, bringing to the forefront the struggle for LGBTQ+ acceptance at all levels of ministry that continues today.  But cooperation between rights movements is never a given.  Again and again, we hear from the Philadelphia Eleven of their shock, disappointment and deep pain when those who fought so hard against the Viet Nam war and for Civil Rights, either refused to support them or stayed silent, which itself is a form of complicity.

Progress is never easy; each step forward takes courage, persistence, and the determination never to be driven backwards – a danger in our reactionary political climate right now.  We are grateful for the progress our church has made, but today’s gospel shows us a bias against women that still must be overcome, and this one that many women priests, including me, have encountered ourselves.  In the story of the visit of the women to the empty tomb, Luke names three – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James – in the context of a larger group of women who accepted the veracity of their story of the explanation given to them by the angels.  But at the end of the reading, Luke tells us that the apostles did not believe the women, because their words “seemed to them an idle tale.”  In this reaction, the apostles were acting as men of their time and culture:  back then, women rarely were allowed to testify in court because they were considered “unreliable witnesses,” so these women weren’t credible even though they were fully disciples, simply because they were women.  The men had not yet learned, as our church is still struggling to learn, that Christ’s disciples are not called upon to absorb and perpetuate the worst of the world’s bigotry and darkness, but rather to show forth the light of Christ to transform – dare we say “transfigure”? –  the world by Christ’s light? – in order to build the kingdom of God on earth. The bishops who ordained the Philadelphia 11 understood this.  They wrote that their action was

Intended as an act of obedience to the Holy Spirit.  By the same token it is intended as an act or solidarity with those in whatever institution, in whatever part of the world, of whatever stratum of society, who in their search for freedom, for liberation, for dignity are moved by that same Spirit.

The Spirit is always on the move, remaking the face of the earth.  Saints like the Philadelphia Eleven show us how to respond to the voice of the Spirit so that salvation history continues to unfold until it includes every child of God, in all our infinite, glorious, diverse beings and ministries.  Indeed, our own political landscape is at this moment transforming before our eyes, in ways that we can trace back to the Philadelphia Eleven.  To paraphrase Paul in Second Corinthians, in Christ there is a continually new creation; everything old has passed away, behold everything has become new!  This was indeed the Philadelphia Eleven’s work, and it is our work for Christ in whom there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, now or ever.  Amen.