Bishop Mariann delivered this sermon on Friday, July 26, 2024 at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Good evening. I am Mariann Budde, and for eighteen years I served as rector of St. John’s in Minneapolis—a congregation filled with passionate, strong-willed people who prepared me well for my current vocation.
Heartfelt thanks to Bishop Craig Loya and Canon Blair Pogue for the kind invitation to join you for this service of remembrance and celebration. It’s wonderful to be among former colleagues and good friends, and to meet many of the current leaders of the Episcopal Church in Minnesota. While I left thirteen years ago, a part of me is still here and always will be. My husband Paul and I raised our sons as Minnesotans. We return several times a year to the place where I am known as Mariann and my title is Grandma.
Let me begin with an excerpt from Womanpriest, memoir of the Rev. Alla Renée Bozarth-Campbell, beloved in this diocese, whose fiftieth anniversary of ordination we celebrate tonight, and whose stole I am honored to wear:
She writes:
My story begins with Jesus in the Gospels and the liberating word he spoke to the women he met. His message, revealing to them possibilities for themselves that were not apparent in their cultures, carries the same freedom to me: be all you can be. Through my own encounter with the Gospels, I have heard Christ calling me to lay claim on the dignity that is mine as a human being created in the image of God, female.
My story begins with the examples of the heroic women in the Hebrew Scripture and their courageous witness to the integrity and holiness of womanhood…
I look to the ministry of Mary Magdalene to whom the risen Christ first appeared. In the truest sense, she was the “Apostle of Apostles,” because she was the first one sent by the risen Christ to proclaim the Good News of Christ’s resurrection to the others.
…My story begins with their stories, and with the hidden history of all the great women of our religious tradition from the beginning to the present. History has too often overlooked these women, relegating them to secondary roles in the unfolding drama of Christianity, when, if fact, they are central figures.1
***
For all who have heeded the call to follow Jesus, our stories begin with these stories too. For alongside the men of their time, women have always been there. Women have always been, in Alla’s words, “active participants and agents of the creation of our religious tradition,” the vessel through which we have come to know the Risen Christ.
The President of the House of Deputies at the 1976 General Convention was a prominent Black lay leader, Dr. Charles Lawrence. After the resolution in support of ordaining women to the priesthood and episcopate was finally approved by both bishops and deputies, a journalist asked him, “Dr. Lawrence, now that women’s ordination has passed, what about the ordination of homosexuals? Is that coming next?” He replied, “That was not a vote to ordain women. It was a vote to no longer ordain only certain categories of people.”2 Bishop Robert DeWitt, one of the three bishops who ordained the Philadelphia Eleven, said of that day, “The human family is the beneficiary.”
The human family is the beneficiary whenever we acknowledge the full humanity of any category of persons previously excluded on the basis of their being from bearing the image of God to another.
May I have a show of hands? How many women priests have been met at the back of church by someone in tears because she had never seen a woman preside at worship before? What is that about? An affirmation of their being as women. Now, thank God, it’s normative for girls and boys growing up in the Episcopal Church to see women priests—something unimaginable when some of us were children and girls could not be altar servers, and women couldn’t serve on vestries, represent their congregations at Diocean conventions, or be elected deputies for General Convention.
***
On the official website of the film The Philadelphia Eleven, producer and director Margo Gursey writes:
I am not an Episcopalian… to me this story is for everyone. It is how to break down barriers with grace, and be true to oneself in the process. And it is about standing up to institutions that do not allow all people to be who they are called to be.3
What a gift her film is to us. Producing it took longer than any other of Guernsey’s projects, and the biggest roadblock was a lack of funding. But then a small group of mostly Episcopal women organized to raise the money, contacting donors large and small. They knew that the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphia ordination was a big deal and they were determined that the film’s debut would be part of it. More on that in a moment.
When asked what inspired her to make the documentary, Guernsey said that it was reading Pauli Murray’s autobiography, Song in A Weary Throat. “Murray was at the ordination,” Guernsey said, “and the way she tells the story drew me in.”
Pauli Murray was more than simply there at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. A lifelong Episcopalian, Pauli Murray had dedicated her life to gender and racial equality as a lawyer during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era. When she was accepted into Howard University law school in 1941, Murray was stunned by the sexism she experienced there among her Black male peers. She called it “Jane Crow.” But as a devout Anglo-Catholic, Murray was initially opposed to the idea of women priests. It wasn’t until 1972, with her law practice and teaching careers behind her, that she found herself a student at General Theological Seminary preparing for the priesthood.
It was a call that surprised her, and yet, in retrospect, like most calls that come later in life, it felt as if her whole life had been preparing her for it. The General Convention had yet to pass a resolution affirming that women could be ordained as priests and deacons, but she entered seminary assuming (as did her bishop) that such a resolution would surely pass in the fall of 1973. That, as we know, did not happen, largely because of the way votes were counted in those days.
It was a stunning blow. Murray was among the many men and women who were grief-stricken, frustrated and angry. Some immediately started planning for the next Convention in 1976. Others were no longer willing to wait.
In December of 1973, five male deacons were ordained as priests at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Five women deacons with identical qualifications also presented themselves at the altar before Bishop Paul Moore. Moore was supportive of women’s ordination, but like all active bishops of that time, he would not “break collegiality” with other bishops or act without the affirmation of General Convention. “Go in peace, my sisters,” he told them sadly. Pauli Murray watched as the five women turned and exited the church. “No funeral procession could have been more sorrowful,” she writes. Murray raced down the side aisle to join the women outside the Cathedral, only to discover that more than half the congregation was already there in tearful support.4
After that the mood at General Seminary turned ugly. Most male seminarians were outraged that women deacons would disrupt an ordination service to “make a political statement.” The lines of division were hardening. Some bishops who supported the ordination of women announced moratoriums on all ordinations in their dioceses until women could be ordained alongside men. Others threatened to leave the church if women were to be ordained and take their dioceses with them.
“The proverbial dam broke in June 1974,” Alla writes, when two prominent male leaders publicly called upon bishops of the Church to use their authority to ordain women. (It’s stunning to realize in retrospect that there was nothing in canon law that explicitly said women couldn’t be priests.) Dr. Charles Willie, Harvard professor and Vice President of the House of Deputies, preached a sermon in which he said, “The church is in need of a bishop who believes that in Christ there is neither male or female, and with the courage and humility to disobey an unjust law.”5
A meeting was called on July 10. Three ordaining bishops were present, as were six women deacons. The Rev. Paul Washington offered the use of the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. From the onset of the meeting, “the attention was focused on the impasse created by the inaction of diocesan bishops who refused to ordain women to the priesthood even though no written law prohibited it. The approval of the General Convention, while supportive, was not necessary to change the interpretation of the law, which every diocesan bishop had the authority to do.” The twenty-one clergy and laypersons at that fateful meeting agreed: “Christian charity requires that the impasse be broken by action.”6
Into that cauldron of intense debate, deferred dreams, a stalled bureaucratic process, and doomsday predictions, eleven women agreed to be ordained without the official approval of their bishops. Their courage cannot be overstated. Of course they were ready and well-prepared. Their internal sense of call had been affirmed by others in the church. But the arguments against women’s ordination to the priesthood, as Pauli Murray reminds us, “carried the force of a two-thousand year tribal taboo that was deeply embedded in the psyche.” so much so that when she took the train from New York City to Philadelphia to attend the ordination, Murray was terrified. “My panic was so great that I might have left the train in Newark if I had not met two clergy-women of the United Church of Christ, whose obvious enthusiasm for the event calmed some of my fears.”7
She goes on:
In Philadelphia, we joined a throng of two thousand people from many parts of the country, who crowded into the Church of the Advocate. None of us knew what to expect, although there were rumors that dissidents might try to disrupt the proceedings. . . a few male priests fairly screamed their objections. Their hysterical outburst was received calmly, and when they had left the church the ceremony continued with customary beauty and solemnity. By the end of the service the joyous spirit that enveloped the congregation swept away all my doubts as to the rightness of the action taken that day. My most cherished memory is kneeling before the newly priested Jeannet Piccard to receive her blessing.8
It was, by all accounts, a glimpse of a new heaven and a new earth.
But the struggle was far from over. Every conceivable effort was made to discredit the women, invalidate their ordination, and censure the men who presided at it and the subsequent rectors who invited the women priests to preside at Eucharist. Resistance was so strong that many believe that had another ordination of four women not taken place in Washington, DC in 1975, momentum would not have shifted toward an affirmative vote at the General Convention the following year.
Bishop William Creighton of Washington, DC, a supporter of women’s ordination, nonetheless tried to stop the ordination of the Washington Four, and he censured the rector of St. Stephen’s and the Incarnation when Alison Cheek celebrated Eucharist there. But in the spring of 1976, Creighton shifted his position and publicly stated that no matter the vote at the Convention later that year, he would begin to ordain women.
Turns out, it was a matter of interpretation after all.
Back to the significance of this anniversary: There is something particularly poignant about the span of fifty years. Enough time has passed for us to see a given moment within a larger arc of history. The arguments against the ordination of women seem almost laughable now, and we would laugh were they not so strongly held and hurtful to so many.
Many who were at the center of the story fifty years ago are gone now, though many are still here, who were young in those years. With the passage of time, some are freer to tell their stories than they were as they were living them, or maybe we are more open to listening. Some were passionate with a vision of what could be, determined to find a way; others weren’t quite sure of what was happening, only that it was really big and life-changing and more than a little frightening. Still others resisted the change actively or passively, only to wake up years later to realize their views had changed. Before long, some of the most resistant forget how hard they fought against what they have now come to accept as normative. Hearing them talk, honestly, you’d think the change had been their idea all along.
But there is no room for judgment tonight. For in fifty years’ time who knows how we will be perceived on the arcs of change that we find ourselves on now?
So what are we to carry with us going forward? In closing, I offer these thoughts:
First: Things that once seemed impossible are impossible, until they’re not. Looking back, the change seems inevitable, but those who lived through it know better. It took every ounce of courage and strength to break through, and the cost was immeasurably high. Tonight we give thanks for those who paid the price for what we are blessed to take as a given. But I wonder, what seemingly impossible tasks are you and I called to work for now, at great sacrifice, on behalf of future generations?
Second: On the arc of any longed-for change, we don’t always know, nor can we choose, where we find ourselves within the more limited arc of our lives. But what we can choose is to occupy our space with as much intention, integrity and faithfulness as we have within us, to do our part with humility and grace. Not everyone is on center stage. The sacrifice of those who go first must be followed by the willingness of others to go second, and third, and fourth, until momentum shifts in favor of the new. This kind of change is the work of many generations, as the first women who petitioned to be seated at the General Convention in 1934 would tell us if they could.
Third: We’d be made of stone if we didn’t get discouraged or even lose heart along the way. So let me say a word about the inevitable disappointment we feel when the wheels of change grind to a halt, or even worse, after the hard-won moment when something big shifts and we glimpse for a moment the world as surely God intends. For even then, it turns out that we’re all still human; the church is still the church in all its stubborn imperfection and sin; as is the world in which we live. Some of the most poignant letters I’ve received in the last year were written by those who fought hard for women’s ordination because they longed for something greater that, in their estimation, had yet to come to pass.
Beyond one mountain, as the Haitians remind us, lies another mountain.
That’s when we realize that we’re not in charge of the universe, or the church, after all. And did I mention that we’re all still human?
Fourth and finally: As Alla’s words reminded us at the beginning of my sermon, our story doesn’t begin with us, and it doesn’t end with us, either. We are part of a living faith that spans generations of time. Our story begins and ends with Jesus, and the loving, life-giving, affirming God he came to embody, and whose Spirit lives within and among us still. In the brief span of time that is ours to live, we are the ones to persevere in faith, hope and love, walking humbly with our God on the path of justice.
Thankful for those whose courage we celebrate tonight, may we carry on, trusting in the God who created us all in divine image, and longs for us to be all that we can be—not for ourselves alone, but in love for those who will be here fifty years from now.
Amen.
1Alla Renée Bozarth-Campbell, Womanpriest: A Personal Odyssey (San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988) 83-4.
2Paula Lawrence-Wehmiller, The Love Loaf: An Ordination Story, June 30, 2019.
3Director Margo Gursey’s Statement
4Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, (New York: W. Norton & Company, 1987), 561-2.
5Bozarth-Campbell, 92.
6Ibid, 93.
7Murray, 562.
8Ibid, 563
