First Presbyterian Church of
100 North Hillcrest Boulevard
Telephone numbers: (310) 677-5133 Fax (310) 330-8342
Electronic mail: PRESBYTS@SBCGLOBAL.NET
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Rev. Suzanne M. Swartz
Numbers 27: 1-11
Celebrations Abound!
It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating
Halloween. I can still see the kids
dressed up in their costumes getting ready to go trick or treating. They were so excited! After Halloween we very quickly start
celebrating Thanksgiving, when we gather with our family and friends to thank
God for all our blessings. The smell of
the turkey and stuffing was still hanging in the air when suddenly Advent
arrived, and what seemed like a day later, the celebration of baby Jesus’ birth
at Christmas. The handbells and carols
were still ringing in our ears when up popped the mother of all
celebrations: New Year’s Eve. With the
taste of champagne and eggnog still on our lips, the next thing we knew we were
celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. Then right after that we began celebrating love on
Valentine’s Day. We’ve just finished
celebrating Black History Month and we’re about to celebrate Jesus’ triumphal
entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
Before we know it, we’ll be celebrating the glory of Easter! Everyone loves a good party and celebrations
do indeed abound year round!
Today our denomination is celebrating and honoring the
gifts of women. We have been doing this
annually since 1983, and I am honored that you have asked me to preach the Word
of the Lord here today. It is because
of the many influential people in my life – many of them women – that I was
called to seminary and I stand before you today. It’s so awesome that today, all over the country, congregations
are using the same liturgy and pulpits are filled with strong and faithful
women’s voices. I am thrilled to be a
part of it all and I hope you are too.
I want us to celebrate the
steps we’ve taken as a church by bringing those of you who may not be familiar
with the Presbyterian Church up to speed on where we stand as a denomination in
regard to ordination of women. It’s
important on special days like today that we step back and remember our history
or in this case our “her story.” When I
refer to “ordination,” it is critical that we remember that ordained ministry
refers to all three offices – elder, deacon, and Ministers of the Word &
Sacrament -- and that the process of call should be stressed for each of
them.
We Presbyterians started
celebrating women’s gifts when we began ordaining women as Deacons in 1906.
Our first woman elder, Miss
Sarah Dickson, was elected in 1930. We
threw a big party then too. Since then
women elders have brought their gifts of faith and intellect, thoughtfulness
and strength, listening and speaking, creativity and perseverance to every
council and committee of the church.
It wasn’t until 1956, though,
almost three decades later, that women won the right to be ordained as
Ministers of Word and Sacrament. You
can bet that the day that Margaret Ellen Towner was ordained as the first
female minister in the Presbyterian Church there was a celebration beyond
belief. Shortly after her ordination,
Towner came into contact with someone who was opposed to ordination of women on
the grounds that they will move in and take over men’s jobs. Towner replied, “There is way too much
work to be done to allow any jealousy.”
Can I hear an Amen to that?!
By 2005, we had a total of
4,571 female ministers throughout the denomination (that’s about 30% of the
pastors). When I am ordained hopefully
sometime in 2009, I will be approximately the 5,000th woman minister
in our denomination and I hope that my mother and my church family near and far
will join me in celebrating that momentous occasion.
But it’s not as if women
waited until 1906 or for these pivotal events to respond to God’s call. Jane Parker Huber writes, “Women have always
been active in the Presbyterian church from its earliest beginnings to right
now. The church work that our sisters
found to do or created for themselves tended to focus on mission causes: they
fed and clothed the needy, visited the sick and lonely, prayed, studied the
Bible, and shared their lives, enacting in their own ways the priesthood of all
believers as they ministered to each other.”
Huber’s right. And it reaches back into the earliest
history of our communities of faith from Thecla to Julian to Elizabeth Cady
Stanton. Which brings us to our Old
Testament passage from Numbers. This
story is about the welcoming into community of five women known as the
daughters of Zelophephad. It helps us
continue to learn lessons from the
heroines of faith of the Bible.
The Book of
Numbers is the fourth book in the Pentateuch – the first five books of the
Bible known as the Torah -- and in Hebrew it means “in the desert.” It is called Numbers because it contains a
record of the numbering of the people in the wilderness of Sinai, and of their
numbering afterwards on the plain of Moab.
The book is of special historical interest because it furnishes us with
details as to the route the Israelites took in the wilderness. The book is divided into three parts:
1.
Chapters
1 through 10:10 are about the numbering of the people at Sinai, and
preparations for resuming their march.
2.
From
Chapter 10, verse 11 through Chapter 21, verse 20, we have an account of the
journey from Sinai to Moab, the sending out of the spies and the report they
brought back, and the eight murmurings of the people and the hardships they
faced.
3.
The
remainder of the book -- from 21:21 through Chapter 36 -- talks about the
transactions in the plain of Moab before crossing the Jordan River.
Today’s story falls into
this third Section.
The
five daughters of Zelophehad were named Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and
Tirzah. They were equal in merit, and
that is why the order of their names varies in certain Bible versions. We do not know much about them except that
they were five women living in a man’s world – a world in which women didn’t
amount to much of anything. They could
not inherit land. They were only good
for one thing – having babies -- and it was hoped that those babies would be
male. The story sounds a lot to me like
a Biblical version of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, my favorite
novel. As you listen to the story of
these five Biblical women, I think you will agree that there is an uncanny
resemblance to Austen’s tale. Whether
or not Jane Austen used this Biblical story as a basis for Pride &
Prejudice, I don’t know. But she
certainly was Biblically literate and probably had at least heard of
Zelophehad’s daughters.
What
happened in the Bible story is that the five gutsy gals went before Moses and
argued the case of a woman’s right and obligation to inherit property in the
absence of a male heir in the family. Their father, Zelophehad, was a man of
the Tribe of Manasseh. He had no sons,
and thus no male heirs. He died during the 40 years when the Israelites were
wandering around in the wilderness.
So
his daughters petitioned Moses, Eleazar the priest, the chieftains, and the
whole assembly, for their right to inherit his property rights. Some scholars believe that the women drew
near to Moses before Eleazar and all the chieftains because they were afraid of
Moses’ anger at Zelophehad and thought that Moses would be more likely to
control his anger in a public forum.
Zelophehad’s
daughters argued that their father had not taken part in the rebellion. He was a good guy. They said that were they not to inherit, then their
father’s name would be lost to his clan. Zelophehad’s daughters were wise and
righteous. They studied and obeyed the
Torah. According to the Gemara which is
a rabbinic commentary, the ladies demonstrated their wisdom by raising their
case in a timely fashion, just as Moses was expounding the law of levirate
marriage, which is a type of marriage in which a woman marries one of her
husband’s brothers after her husband’s death, if there were no children, in order
to continue the line of the dead husband.
Moses,
being the modest man that he was, took the daughters’ case to God. God told Moses that the plea of Zelophehad’s
daughters was just, and that they should be granted their father’s hereditary
holding.
Later,
the family heads of the clan of Manasseh’s grandson Gilead appealed to Moses
and the chieftains, arguing that if Zelophehad’s daughters married men from
another Israelite tribe, then their share would be lost to the tribe of
Manasseh and be added to the portion of the tribe into which they married. So
Moses, at God’s bidding, instructed the Israelites that the plea of the tribal
leaders was just and that Zelophehad’s daughters could marry anyone they
wished, as long as it was among the men of the tribe of Manasseh. Zelophehad’s
daughters did as God had commanded Moses, and they each married sons of their
uncles. So you see, this Bible story
ends up happily ever after, as does Pride & Prejudice, in which both
Jane and Lizzy end up married and happy. Who knows what became of the other three sisters in Pride &
Prejudice. We’ll just have to
speculate on that one.
These young and orphaned
women in Numbers were outsiders seeking recognition within the
community. They weren’t really any different
from the many women of our denomination – like Katharine Sellars, Eleanore
Rhind, and Katharine McAfee Parker -- who sought recognition within the
Presbyterian Church. These three women
went to General Assembly in 1929 to speak out for paving a way for women to
more actively participate in the life of the church. They wanted to speak in worship, serve communion, perform
weddings, and baptize believers. Yet
they could not. These women weren’t
content to sit on the sidelines and watch men do all the work. Rather than perish in silence, they, like
Zelophehad’s daughters, followed the leading of the Holy Spirit to claim their
inheritance among the children of Israel.
In doing so they secured their place in the history of the Presbyterian
Church. And in response, the people
heeded God’s call for justice on behalf of these women, acknowledging their
prophetic voices. The result brought
wholeness and reconciliation to the community.
I believe that the way to
continue bringing wholeness and reconciliation to our community and world is by
listening to the prophetic voices of our women leaders of today – leaders like
Nancy Pelosi, Oprah Winfrey, Meg Whitman, Sherry Lansing, and Katie Couric,
just to name a few. In our
denomination, our current leader is a woman by the name of Joan Gray. I got to talk with her briefly during an
informal meet and greet session in Birmingham last June. She is a very down-to-earth, friendly and
well qualified woman who was the first woman ordained as a minister in the
Atlanta Presbytery in 1978.
Coincidentally that same year Sara Bernice Moseley was elected the first
woman moderator of a Presbyterian denomination. Gray follows Moseley and other strong women who filled the shoes
of the office of moderator: women like
Freda Gardner, Pat Brown, Thelma Adair, Dorothy Bernard, Lois Stair, and Susan
Andrews.
It is because of
women’s leadership that racism, sexual harassment, domestic violence against
women and reproductive rights for women have finally gotten some well-deserved
attention. That is also cause for major
celebration. It is also because
there are significant numbers of women in church leadership today that we now
use inclusive language in worship and in printed materials. Cynthia Campbell, President of McCormick
Theological Seminary, hit the nail on the head when she said “as long as the
way we talk about God is limited to male titles and masculine pronouns, women
as religious leaders will always seem just a bit off or not the
norm. We have already begun to
incorporate alternate language for God into our confessions. We declare in our Brief Statement of Faith…
‘like a Mother who will not forsake her nursing child….’”
That brings me to a brief
comment about our Gospel reading. There
are at least 3 sermons in our Luke passage today, so I am only going to focus
on a particular verse. In Luke 13,
verse 34, we hear Jesus’ lament over the Jerusalem that rejects him. The text says, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… how
often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her
chicks under her wings…” This picture of a hen gathering her brood under her wings
becomes a deeply moving portrait of God.
Not least in significance would be the characterization of God in a
feminine symbol. Perhaps today as we
celebrate the gifts of women we need to explore our understanding of God not
exclusively in terms of such masculine symbols as father and king, as important
as those are, but also as a compassionate mother hen with deep affection and
tenderness for her brood.
So I ask you, as common
daughters of Zelophehad, are we claiming our inheritance among the
assembly? As a Christian community, are
we heeding God’s call to open up the inheritance, gathering all together in
love as a hen gathers her chicks? Or
are we still interpreting what the Apostle Paul said about women keeping silent
in church as applying to us, today, in the 21st century? Keep in mind Paul was not making a universal
pronouncement for all time. He was
responding to a particular problem in a particular situation.
What are your
gifts? Have you ever thought about
that? Well whatever they are, we’d like
to celebrate them! Part of the reason I
am here as your seminary intern is to help you discover your spiritual gifts. I will be contacting you and arranging a
time to come visit you because I want to know where you see yourself being
useful to God and your church. I credit
the Rev. Sue Fisher with helping me discover my spiritual gifts. I participated in worship training workshop
with Sue about 10 years ago that changed the way I view worship. If you aren’t sure where your
gifts lie, ponder these questions:
Do you have a passion for
preparing, serving, and organizing meals for bereaved families and others in need? Or do you prefer providing child care or
volunteering in Christian education? Do
you have clerical gifts that would make you an asset to a church office? Or are you musically inclined – perhaps you
could join one of our choirs, play a musical instrument or perform a liturgical
dance. Maybe your gift is inspiring and
mentoring young people to consider ministry and service. Or perhaps your gift is assisting in worship
leadership. Sue Fisher will be back
here at Inglewood in two weeks to do another worship training and if you would
like to be a part of that, do let us know.
And for those of you men who
think ‘if the women want to run it, let them run it. “I don’t have to do anything”…. consider the words of
former moderator Marj Carpenter: “The
church needs the strong leadership of both genders working
together. We need to learn how to share
and respect each other so we can work together for the Glory of God.” Amen Marj!
Today we look to young women
of the church to stand before the people and claim their inheritance as women,
just as we look to our foremothers for examples of strength and courage to
sustain us on the path. And we look to
our Savior, Jesus Christ, who transforms feelings of desolation and isolation
to joy and comfort for all people. May
He continue to transform you today, tomorrow and always. Amen.