Women’s Sermons Hold Poignant Insights to Life
There is room for a subtitle to “The Book of Women’s Sermons,” an anthology edited by the Rev. E. Lee Hancock (Riverhead, 1999). It could read, “Do We Really Want to Talk About This in Church?”
Among the Protestant ministers, Roman Catholic theologians, Jewish psychologists and others represented here, one preacher goes as far as to ask that very question. And well she might. In the sermon “Living With Betrayal,” the Rev. Mary Foulke reflects on violence, including the time when as a teenager, her boyfriend held a gun to her head.
As in life, it seems that women in pulpits talk about nurturing, or the lack of it. Parenting, homelessness, God, mystery, grief, even religion itself are under scrutiny here. Not in a preachy way, or as an abstract topic to analyze. Rather, with the intimacy and the folding-in of personal experiences that make some private conversations so memorable.
These sermons are nothing like the sort that most men deliver. That doesn’t make them better. It only leaves a reader with a taste for more of the woman’s perspective on the concerns of daily life.
As often as I have listened to homilies on the gospel account by Matthew, about the Canaanite woman who asks Jesus to heal her demon-possessed child, I’ve never heard anything like “She’s in My Face.” This is the Rev. Mary Lynette Delbridge’s reflection on the unsettling story. At a dinner gathering, Jesus tells the distraught mother that he has come to save the lost sheep of Israel, his own Jewish people. He compares others to dogs hardly worthy of table scraps. The woman persists, “until her words shake Jesus into claiming the best part of himself,” Delbridge argues. He heals the child.
What does that have to do with now?
“I feel defeated by this woman who stays in my face with her example,” Delbridge admits, as she begins to answer that question. Soon we recognize this sermon is about advocacy. The Canaanite advocated her child’s rights just as the people who use the 125th Street subway station in Delbridge’s New York neighborhood advocate their rights, we discover. For years the station’s escalator didn’t work. Old people and mothers with babies could barely get up and down. Then they banded together, wrote letters, went on strike, called in a minister to pray over the broken staircase. The transit authority finally fixed the problem.
“It’s God-given love that makes you care enough to go and shake the very gates of heaven and hell for someone else,” Delbridge reminds us. The Canaanite woman is transformed into a patron saint of social activists.
The book is filled with such unexpected turns. Some contributors are well-known authors, Alice Walker and Kathleen Norris in particular. Most, though, are women clergy quietly working in regional churches. This book could make you want to tour the country a whole new way.
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* This Sunday: Don Waldie on “Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream”; James Longenbach on “The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place”; and Stephen Schwartz on “Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915.”