Livimg By The Spirit - 5
Chapter 5 of 11 of this study of the Fruits of the Spirit reads as follows:
5 - FAITHFULNESS
Does faith always mean believing in God?
Sports fans cheering on their favorite team vying for supremacy in their particular league often post signs saying "Keep the faith." They truly believe that their particular heroes will come out on top, regardless of how difficult the challenge may be.
My wife and I both like certain kinds of shoes made by specific manufacturers. They always seem to fit us best and give us the greatest comfort. We have faith in these particular manufacturers’ products. Brand loyalty has great commercial value in the marketplace. Manufacturers will pay premiums to advertise in certain publications to reach a desired set of customers. They will also pay to locate their products in prominent places in stores for the same reason.
Someone once said that faith is just a gamble that everything will turn out as we wish it would. So people pray for what they want in much the same way as others play bingo, buy lottery tickets or travel a considerable distance to gamble at a casino. It may be a mistaken belief, but it is common.
A young woman thought she was in love. She lived at some distance from the man to whom she was attracted and saw him infrequently. Almost daily she sent a prayer about her love to an e-mail list offering participants an opportunity to post prayer requests. Constantly she pleaded with God to turn the young man’s heart in her direction. Each time she saw him, she would issue a prayer-report to her list partners about what had happened. Since this was an open prayer list, hundred of people received this e-mail and learned how the relationship was developing. She seemed sincere in her prayers and repeatedly reassured herself that God would do as she asked.
Was this faith or just romantic gullibility? Was she really being faithful to the man whom she professed to love so fervently? Or was she the victim of a self-centered obsession with a tendency toward exhibitionism?
Faithfulness does have a prominent place in preparing for marriage and in living as a couple. Young men and women in love promise each other that there never will be anyone else to take their partner’s place. Traditional marriage ceremonies ask both partners to vow that they will remain permanently faithful "till death do us part."
When I first began to celebrate marriages, the traditional marriage vow it ended with the words, "And thereto I plight thee my troth." I had to explain what that meant. It was an old English way of saying, "I give you my pledge in good faith." It came into the language during the 13th century as a promise to be faithful forever.
The sad reality of modern times is that almost as many marriages end in divorce despite the fact that at the time couples made their vows they uttered the words in total honesty. As often as not, the basic issue in marriage breakdown is lack of faithfulness. The most widely publicized cases of infidelity in recent times occurred in the British royal family. The shortest marriage of the many I have conducted over a long ministry lasted just three weeks. I never learned exactly why the marriage broke down, but I suspected that the husband was more faithful to carousing with his drinking buddies than to staying at home with his wife.
Faith, fidelity and faithfulness appeared frequently in the Paul’s letters. Those three English words translate a single Greek word pistis. There is no English verb "to faith," but the Greek verb pisteuo is usually translated "I believe." A similar Latin verb credo has become a noun in common English parlance. Perhaps an even better way to translate pistis is "trust."
I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
"Give me a light that I may tread into the darkness beyond."
And he said to me, "Go forth, put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you, better than a light, safer than a known way."
This is trust; this is faith.
The Christian scriptures declare the special relationship which exists between Jesus and God in two words everyone recognizes: Father and Son. Despite the obvious masculinity of those words, it is impossible to read the New Testament in any translation without being confronted by them. The Christian church has yet to discover a better way of describing the unique revelation of God manifest in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
However we may express it in terms of doctrine or creeds, the heart of Jesus’ relationship with God was trust, faithfulness. The Letter to the Hebrews emphasized that he was "one who in every respect has been tested as we are." That expressed the tradition in the early church that Jesus was tempted, not just at the beginning of his ministry, but right to the end. In the Garden of Gethsemane just before his betrayal he prayed to be released from his commitment to be faithful unto death. Dying on the cross, he prayed for God to forgive those who crucified him. His cry of dereliction, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is a quotation from Psalm 22:1. When we look at that psalm, we see that it is a lament in the ancient Jewish tradition. It grapples with real and critical circumstances of life, yet at the same time exults in a deep sense of trust in what God is doing amidst the most disastrous conditions.
Who Can Be Trusted?
Like a building with solid foundations, reliability and trustworthiness form the basis on which most human relationships depend. A few years ago during an earthquake in Turkey, many apartment buildings fell to rubble and the inhabitants died. The buildings had been constructed with faulty materials by untrustworthy contractors interested only in the extra profits to be gained by shoddy workmanship and the use of inferior materials.
Politicians do not have a very good reputation these days. They are accused of making promises of all kinds in order to get elected. Once in office, they quickly find out how difficult it is to keep promises they made with gusto during the election campaign. So public trust in their leadership quickly diminishes. Most political leaders hire a staff of public relations people to see that only those things that are favorable to their political record are reported in the public media. In making its budget speech one year, the provincial government of Ontario set their vaunted tax reductions in a liturgy that repeated this refrain at the end of each paragraph: "Promises made; promises kept." It went on to the point of absurdity. In the months that followed, the opposition parties and the media put a great deal of effort into looking for the government’s failure to maintain those too obvious professions of faithfulness. They found plenty of discrepancies between what had been promised and what had actually accomplished. Undaunted by public criticism, the government maintained a steady flow of announcements and re-announcements of how well it was doing in keeping its promises. Each cabinet minister whose department came under scrutiny for some perceived failure of its mandate appeared before a hastily summoned press conference to argue that the matter was well in hand and plans were proceeding to make immediate improvements in the system. The hypocrisy only served to lower public confidence in the political process.
God’s Trustworthiness
Throughout the Bible we read of the trustworthiness - faithfulness - of God. Again and again the Psalmists praise God for God’s steadfast love. The absolute trustworthiness of God’s love is the one element on which faith depends. On the other hand, both Old and New Testaments also give us vivid details of how much of a struggle it is for the Israelites, people like ourselves, to be similarly faithful. Again and again God made covenants with Israel only to see those covenants broken by faithless behavior. The Israelites were no more faithless than the rest of humanity.
The authors of four gospels had no hesitation in pointing out that most people did not put their faith in Jesus. Many of those who did were rather fickle and undependable. In the crunch, even his closest disciples either betrayed him, denied knowing him, or forsook him and fled when he was arrested and put on trial. Significantly, it was the women among his followers who stayed to watch him die and were first at the tomb to anoint his body only to discover that he had risen.
The New Testament tells the story of the only person - Jesus of Nazareth - ever to have lived in perfect faithfulness.
Trying to Be Faithful in Our Time and Place
One of the most dynamic spiritual leaders of the 20th century was Martin Luther King. His struggle against the exclusion of black people from the mainstream of American life challenged the status quo as most political and religious leaders had refused to do. Dr. King fully recognized the dangers he encountered at every turn. The greatest moment of his career came when he led a civil rights march to Washington, D.C. in 1963. He delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech in the presence of 200,000 gathered in the shadow of the memorials to America’s greatest liberators, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He vividly expressed the hopes of the civil rights movement: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Throughout Dr. King’s struggle for civil rights for blacks as well as whites, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation remained one of his most implacable foes. Hoover had King’s hotel phone tapped to gather incriminating evidence against him. An amazingly extensive FBI file on Dr. King’s life and ministry sought to substantiate Mr. Hoover’s claim that he could not be trusted as a reliable American citizen and Christian minister because he had close associations with Communists. This only served to raise intense but unproven conspiracy theories about his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee in April 1968. Today, Dr. King’s fidelity to the civil rights cause and non-violent opposition to unjust laws is honored on the third Monday of January as a public holiday in many states.
Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, stands out as another 20th century hero who practiced lifelong faithfulness to a cause. As a young lawyer he joined the civil rights movement of the African National Congress (ANC). He quickly became the leader of protests against the white minority government's apartheid policy denying all civil rights to blacks. Jailed three different times for treason and sabotage, he was finally sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.
Nonetheless, Mandela inspired worldwide opposition to apartheid. The churches of South Africa and the World Council of Churches played a significant role in focusing attention on the brutality and injustice of apartheid. A global boycott of trade with South Africa helped persuade the segregationist government to adopt a new course. After keeping Mandela in the infamous Robbin Island prison for 27 years, the government of President F. W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and released Mandela in 1991. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 1993 with de Klerk for their work in bringing democracy and racial harmony to South Africa. In 1994 Mandela was elected president of South Africa in the first election that allowed all citizens to vote. After his retirement in 1999, Mandela has continued to be a voice for moderation and the building of harmony among African nations and across the world.
Desmond Tutu, spiritual leader of the Anglican Church in South Africa, also played a leading role in the struggle against apartheid. He followed the non-violent approach Mohandas K. Gandhi had used to bring social and political revolution to India. Because of his fidelity to the civil rights cause through non-violence, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1984, just before his election as Bishop of Johannesburg.
Two years later he was elected Archbishop of Capetown and titular head of the Anglican Church in South Africa. In 1995, President Mandela named him to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate crimes committed during the apartheid era. His personal faith and his fidelity to the way of Jesus Christ gave the commission the opportunity to hear some of the most tragic stories of cruel injustice and suffering without fomenting bloody revenge.In retirement, wherever Archbishop Tutu goes he brings a passion for justice and a remarkable attitude of forgiveness. He never fails to express his gratitude to God and to the people in the churches around the world who stood with him and his fellow South Africans in their long struggle for freedom, justice and reconciliation among people of different races.
In an article published The United Church Observer, Donna Sinclair wrote of a Canadian missionary, Essie Johnson, who began her work in Zambia during British colonial days when the country was known as Northern Rhodesia. Throughout her career Essie sought every opportunity to help women find their rightful place in African society. In the 1950s while touring rural areas of the country with a mobile school she would share the African food prepared by her co-worker. For fifteen years she served as principal of the Mindolo Women’s Training Centre. An All-Africa Conference of women immediately realized how great her influence had been. She had taught most of Africa’s women church leaders.
Always opposed to the separation of African and white Christians, she once persuaded a European church to permit her students to have a booth at their bazaar. At tea time, every booth except that of the African school girls had trays brought to them. Essie went to the kitchen to get a tray for her girls and was refused. So she went back to the booth and led the girls out to a table for guests where they had to be served.
A number of women scholars have pioneered new approaches to the place of women in the Bible and in the church. The names of Rosemary Reuther, Dorothea Solle, Elaine Pagels, Daphne Hampson and Luise Schottroff come to mind. Frequently they and many others have been denounced by male church leaders as a threat to ancient traditions and institutionalized interpretations of the Bible and Christian doctrine. Despite that, many of these women have been invited to teach in theological seminaries where priests and pastors prepare for their ministries. They have raised the consciousness of numerous church members about the urgency of readdressing hoary dogmas and exclusively male domination of the church. They have brought a keen sense of justice and equality to their work, emphasizing love rather than authority wherever faith is an issue.
The United Church of Canada has ordained women to the ministry of the word, sacraments and pastoral care since 1936. More recently, other Canadian churches have followed, if more hesitantly and after much searching for theological and pastoral understanding. Since 1980, four women have served terms as Moderator of The United Church of Canada. The first, Lois Wilson, until recently sat as a senator in the Canadian parliament. Before her election as Moderator in1992, Marion Best led the church in a search for a just solution to the conflict-ridden issue of homosexuals in the church and as members or pastors of congregations. She also served as one of the vice-presidents of the World Council of Churches.
The Anglican Church of Canada has elected two women as diocesan bishops. Elsewhere in the world, five other women have been elected as bishops. Janet Somerville, a former nun and teacher of theology in a Roman Catholic seminary, served a term as general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches. All of these women have shown outstanding faith and spiritual leadership in moving the church toward a different future.
Faithfulness can be extremely costly, to the point of death. During World War II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood firm against the atrocities of Nazism. He was imprisoned, condemned to death for treason and executed in April 1945. He left behind a rich collection of writings on how faithful discipleship is to be lived in the most dangerous circumstances.
Archbishop Oscar Romero demanded peace and justice for his war-torn country of El Salvador, in Central America. He persistently informed the world of the terrorist death-squads that tortured, slaughtered or caused to disappear thousands of innocent victims. Most were simple peasants with no wealth or power and those who defended them in the public media. Archbishop Romero’s words were a threat to the tyrannical government of the time. On March 24, 1980 he was assassinated while celebrating mass in the cathedral in San Salvador.
All of these modern heroes exhibited a lifelong faith and commitment to just causes and to their spiritual ideals. They present us with shining examples of what faithfulness means.
LIVING BY THE SPIRIT
5 - FAITHFULNESS
Does faith always mean believing in God?
Sports fans cheering on their favorite team vying for supremacy in their particular league often post signs saying "Keep the faith." They truly believe that their particular heroes will come out on top, regardless of how difficult the challenge may be.
My wife and I both like certain kinds of shoes made by specific manufacturers. They always seem to fit us best and give us the greatest comfort. We have faith in these particular manufacturers’ products. Brand loyalty has great commercial value in the marketplace. Manufacturers will pay premiums to advertise in certain publications to reach a desired set of customers. They will also pay to locate their products in prominent places in stores for the same reason.
Someone once said that faith is just a gamble that everything will turn out as we wish it would. So people pray for what they want in much the same way as others play bingo, buy lottery tickets or travel a considerable distance to gamble at a casino. It may be a mistaken belief, but it is common.
A young woman thought she was in love. She lived at some distance from the man to whom she was attracted and saw him infrequently. Almost daily she sent a prayer about her love to an e-mail list offering participants an opportunity to post prayer requests. Constantly she pleaded with God to turn the young man’s heart in her direction. Each time she saw him, she would issue a prayer-report to her list partners about what had happened. Since this was an open prayer list, hundred of people received this e-mail and learned how the relationship was developing. She seemed sincere in her prayers and repeatedly reassured herself that God would do as she asked.
Was this faith or just romantic gullibility? Was she really being faithful to the man whom she professed to love so fervently? Or was she the victim of a self-centered obsession with a tendency toward exhibitionism?
Faithfulness does have a prominent place in preparing for marriage and in living as a couple. Young men and women in love promise each other that there never will be anyone else to take their partner’s place. Traditional marriage ceremonies ask both partners to vow that they will remain permanently faithful "till death do us part."
When I first began to celebrate marriages, the traditional marriage vow it ended with the words, "And thereto I plight thee my troth." I had to explain what that meant. It was an old English way of saying, "I give you my pledge in good faith." It came into the language during the 13th century as a promise to be faithful forever.
The sad reality of modern times is that almost as many marriages end in divorce despite the fact that at the time couples made their vows they uttered the words in total honesty. As often as not, the basic issue in marriage breakdown is lack of faithfulness. The most widely publicized cases of infidelity in recent times occurred in the British royal family. The shortest marriage of the many I have conducted over a long ministry lasted just three weeks. I never learned exactly why the marriage broke down, but I suspected that the husband was more faithful to carousing with his drinking buddies than to staying at home with his wife.
Faithfulness Is Very Personal.
Faith, fidelity and faithfulness appeared frequently in the Paul’s letters. Those three English words translate a single Greek word pistis. There is no English verb "to faith," but the Greek verb pisteuo is usually translated "I believe." A similar Latin verb credo has become a noun in common English parlance. Perhaps an even better way to translate pistis is "trust."
As may be surmised from the examples above, faith exists in relationship, not as abstract knowledge. It should not surprise us that the Bible makes faith the fundamental relationship of human life. We may believe that God exists; but that is not faith. Rather, faith means having a personal, trusting relationship with God. We may believe in God or that God will help us when we are in trouble. Faith only becomes real when we trust God. To trust God means to place our lives now and forever, the future of all human history and that of the whole created universe "in the hands of God."
In the darkest days of World War II, King George VI of Britain included a poem by a missionary in India in his Christmas Message for 1940. It gave great encouragement to his people struggling amid the disastrous blitz.
I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
"Give me a light that I may tread into the darkness beyond."
And he said to me, "Go forth, put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you, better than a light, safer than a known way."
This is trust; this is faith.
Everywhere in the New Testament such a relationship of trust comes to us through Jesus Christ. We can trust God because of what God has done in coming among us in Jesus of Nazareth. The story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection reveal that God really does love us and will always love us no matter what we have done or what happens to us. God’s plan and purpose is to bring us into a mutual relationship of love, as friend with friend. That relationship includes all of humanity and all of creation from the most tender ecosystem on the planet Earth to the farthest reaches of outer space.
The Christian scriptures declare the special relationship which exists between Jesus and God in two words everyone recognizes: Father and Son. Despite the obvious masculinity of those words, it is impossible to read the New Testament in any translation without being confronted by them. The Christian church has yet to discover a better way of describing the unique revelation of God manifest in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The difficulty some people have with those words may lie not so much in the words themselves as in the perception of those for whom the words are problematic. Someone who has had a very poor relationship with his or her father is not likely to find much comfort in what is actually a metaphor. It describes a very intimate personal relationship. In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, he frequently addressed God as "Abba," roughly equivalent to our affectionate term, "Daddy."
However we may express it in terms of doctrine or creeds, the heart of Jesus’ relationship with God was trust, faithfulness. The Letter to the Hebrews emphasized that he was "one who in every respect has been tested as we are." That expressed the tradition in the early church that Jesus was tempted, not just at the beginning of his ministry, but right to the end. In the Garden of Gethsemane just before his betrayal he prayed to be released from his commitment to be faithful unto death. Dying on the cross, he prayed for God to forgive those who crucified him. His cry of dereliction, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is a quotation from Psalm 22:1. When we look at that psalm, we see that it is a lament in the ancient Jewish tradition. It grapples with real and critical circumstances of life, yet at the same time exults in a deep sense of trust in what God is doing amidst the most disastrous conditions.
Who Can Be Trusted?
Like a building with solid foundations, reliability and trustworthiness form the basis on which most human relationships depend. A few years ago during an earthquake in Turkey, many apartment buildings fell to rubble and the inhabitants died. The buildings had been constructed with faulty materials by untrustworthy contractors interested only in the extra profits to be gained by shoddy workmanship and the use of inferior materials.
Politicians do not have a very good reputation these days. They are accused of making promises of all kinds in order to get elected. Once in office, they quickly find out how difficult it is to keep promises they made with gusto during the election campaign. So public trust in their leadership quickly diminishes. Most political leaders hire a staff of public relations people to see that only those things that are favorable to their political record are reported in the public media. In making its budget speech one year, the provincial government of Ontario set their vaunted tax reductions in a liturgy that repeated this refrain at the end of each paragraph: "Promises made; promises kept." It went on to the point of absurdity. In the months that followed, the opposition parties and the media put a great deal of effort into looking for the government’s failure to maintain those too obvious professions of faithfulness. They found plenty of discrepancies between what had been promised and what had actually accomplished. Undaunted by public criticism, the government maintained a steady flow of announcements and re-announcements of how well it was doing in keeping its promises. Each cabinet minister whose department came under scrutiny for some perceived failure of its mandate appeared before a hastily summoned press conference to argue that the matter was well in hand and plans were proceeding to make immediate improvements in the system. The hypocrisy only served to lower public confidence in the political process.
God’s Trustworthiness
Throughout the Bible we read of the trustworthiness - faithfulness - of God. Again and again the Psalmists praise God for God’s steadfast love. The absolute trustworthiness of God’s love is the one element on which faith depends. On the other hand, both Old and New Testaments also give us vivid details of how much of a struggle it is for the Israelites, people like ourselves, to be similarly faithful. Again and again God made covenants with Israel only to see those covenants broken by faithless behavior. The Israelites were no more faithless than the rest of humanity.
The authors of four gospels had no hesitation in pointing out that most people did not put their faith in Jesus. Many of those who did were rather fickle and undependable. In the crunch, even his closest disciples either betrayed him, denied knowing him, or forsook him and fled when he was arrested and put on trial. Significantly, it was the women among his followers who stayed to watch him die and were first at the tomb to anoint his body only to discover that he had risen.
The New Testament tells the story of the only person - Jesus of Nazareth - ever to have lived in perfect faithfulness.
Trying to Be Faithful in Our Time and Place
One of the most dynamic spiritual leaders of the 20th century was Martin Luther King. His struggle against the exclusion of black people from the mainstream of American life challenged the status quo as most political and religious leaders had refused to do. Dr. King fully recognized the dangers he encountered at every turn. The greatest moment of his career came when he led a civil rights march to Washington, D.C. in 1963. He delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech in the presence of 200,000 gathered in the shadow of the memorials to America’s greatest liberators, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He vividly expressed the hopes of the civil rights movement: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Throughout Dr. King’s struggle for civil rights for blacks as well as whites, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation remained one of his most implacable foes. Hoover had King’s hotel phone tapped to gather incriminating evidence against him. An amazingly extensive FBI file on Dr. King’s life and ministry sought to substantiate Mr. Hoover’s claim that he could not be trusted as a reliable American citizen and Christian minister because he had close associations with Communists. This only served to raise intense but unproven conspiracy theories about his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee in April 1968. Today, Dr. King’s fidelity to the civil rights cause and non-violent opposition to unjust laws is honored on the third Monday of January as a public holiday in many states.
Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, stands out as another 20th century hero who practiced lifelong faithfulness to a cause. As a young lawyer he joined the civil rights movement of the African National Congress (ANC). He quickly became the leader of protests against the white minority government's apartheid policy denying all civil rights to blacks. Jailed three different times for treason and sabotage, he was finally sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964.
Nonetheless, Mandela inspired worldwide opposition to apartheid. The churches of South Africa and the World Council of Churches played a significant role in focusing attention on the brutality and injustice of apartheid. A global boycott of trade with South Africa helped persuade the segregationist government to adopt a new course. After keeping Mandela in the infamous Robbin Island prison for 27 years, the government of President F. W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and released Mandela in 1991. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 1993 with de Klerk for their work in bringing democracy and racial harmony to South Africa. In 1994 Mandela was elected president of South Africa in the first election that allowed all citizens to vote. After his retirement in 1999, Mandela has continued to be a voice for moderation and the building of harmony among African nations and across the world.
Desmond Tutu, spiritual leader of the Anglican Church in South Africa, also played a leading role in the struggle against apartheid. He followed the non-violent approach Mohandas K. Gandhi had used to bring social and political revolution to India. Because of his fidelity to the civil rights cause through non-violence, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1984, just before his election as Bishop of Johannesburg.
Two years later he was elected Archbishop of Capetown and titular head of the Anglican Church in South Africa. In 1995, President Mandela named him to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to investigate crimes committed during the apartheid era. His personal faith and his fidelity to the way of Jesus Christ gave the commission the opportunity to hear some of the most tragic stories of cruel injustice and suffering without fomenting bloody revenge.In retirement, wherever Archbishop Tutu goes he brings a passion for justice and a remarkable attitude of forgiveness. He never fails to express his gratitude to God and to the people in the churches around the world who stood with him and his fellow South Africans in their long struggle for freedom, justice and reconciliation among people of different races.
In an article published The United Church Observer, Donna Sinclair wrote of a Canadian missionary, Essie Johnson, who began her work in Zambia during British colonial days when the country was known as Northern Rhodesia. Throughout her career Essie sought every opportunity to help women find their rightful place in African society. In the 1950s while touring rural areas of the country with a mobile school she would share the African food prepared by her co-worker. For fifteen years she served as principal of the Mindolo Women’s Training Centre. An All-Africa Conference of women immediately realized how great her influence had been. She had taught most of Africa’s women church leaders.
Always opposed to the separation of African and white Christians, she once persuaded a European church to permit her students to have a booth at their bazaar. At tea time, every booth except that of the African school girls had trays brought to them. Essie went to the kitchen to get a tray for her girls and was refused. So she went back to the booth and led the girls out to a table for guests where they had to be served.
A number of women scholars have pioneered new approaches to the place of women in the Bible and in the church. The names of Rosemary Reuther, Dorothea Solle, Elaine Pagels, Daphne Hampson and Luise Schottroff come to mind. Frequently they and many others have been denounced by male church leaders as a threat to ancient traditions and institutionalized interpretations of the Bible and Christian doctrine. Despite that, many of these women have been invited to teach in theological seminaries where priests and pastors prepare for their ministries. They have raised the consciousness of numerous church members about the urgency of readdressing hoary dogmas and exclusively male domination of the church. They have brought a keen sense of justice and equality to their work, emphasizing love rather than authority wherever faith is an issue.
The United Church of Canada has ordained women to the ministry of the word, sacraments and pastoral care since 1936. More recently, other Canadian churches have followed, if more hesitantly and after much searching for theological and pastoral understanding. Since 1980, four women have served terms as Moderator of The United Church of Canada. The first, Lois Wilson, until recently sat as a senator in the Canadian parliament. Before her election as Moderator in1992, Marion Best led the church in a search for a just solution to the conflict-ridden issue of homosexuals in the church and as members or pastors of congregations. She also served as one of the vice-presidents of the World Council of Churches.
The Anglican Church of Canada has elected two women as diocesan bishops. Elsewhere in the world, five other women have been elected as bishops. Janet Somerville, a former nun and teacher of theology in a Roman Catholic seminary, served a term as general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches. All of these women have shown outstanding faith and spiritual leadership in moving the church toward a different future.
Faithfulness can be extremely costly, to the point of death. During World War II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood firm against the atrocities of Nazism. He was imprisoned, condemned to death for treason and executed in April 1945. He left behind a rich collection of writings on how faithful discipleship is to be lived in the most dangerous circumstances.
Archbishop Oscar Romero demanded peace and justice for his war-torn country of El Salvador, in Central America. He persistently informed the world of the terrorist death-squads that tortured, slaughtered or caused to disappear thousands of innocent victims. Most were simple peasants with no wealth or power and those who defended them in the public media. Archbishop Romero’s words were a threat to the tyrannical government of the time. On March 24, 1980 he was assassinated while celebrating mass in the cathedral in San Salvador.
All of these modern heroes exhibited a lifelong faith and commitment to just causes and to their spiritual ideals. They present us with shining examples of what faithfulness means.
posted by John at 11:28 AM
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