Sunday, July 22, The Feast of Mary Magdalene and the Announcement of the Rector's Departure

Kristin White

Beloved of God: some of you may not yet have seen the email that went out on Thursday night to the congregation from the wardens and me. In it, I shared that after six years as your rector, I have accepted a call from Bishop Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows to serve on her staff as the Canon to the Ordinary for Congregational Development and Leadership, in the Diocese of Indianapolis.

I will be glad to talk more with you about what that involves, but the most concrete thing for right now is that it means my time as your rector will be drawing to a close. I will be here with you for the rest of the summer, and into the first two weeks of September. On Friday, September 14, word is that we’re going to have a big party. September 16 will be my last Sunday at St. Augustine’s. The next day will mark our move to Indiana.

You are a remarkable church: strong and loving, practical and wise…because you are comprised of remarkable people: strong and loving, practical and wise…filled with joy and good humor, and knit together by the good work of the Holy Spirit. And you will continue, of course you will continue, to be exactly who you, after I have gone.

I want you to know that this is no small heartbreak for me, and for my family, to leave St. Augustine’s. You are the church that I love. And if I can presume to paraphrase e.e. cummings: I will carry you with me/I will carry you in my heart.

So let’s carry each other, these next weeks that we have, in celebration and thanksgiving for the journey we have shared. I am so grateful for this time as your priest.

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The Church has been working out its salvation with regard to women in the story of Mary Magdalene from the time she walked this earth, throughout centuries and millennia, until now.

Most commonly, Mary Magdalene is memorialized in writing and music and art as a prostitute, a cautionary tale, only redeemed because she is penitent. That’s how Mary Magdalene gets managed, too often, in the history of our culture and in the memory of our church. Her virtue in that narrative is that she is sorry, and Jesus is generous.

Mary Magdalene’s introduction in Luke’s gospel takes place just after an unnamed woman interrupts Jesus’ dinner with a Pharisee. That woman is a sinner, the text tells us, and for more than a thousand years, the church has interpreted this woman’s sin as sexual. (As an aside, I will tell you that the Greek word for “sinner” in that passage is the same Greek word in the same gospel that Peter uses when he cries out to Jesus in the fifth chapter: “Have mercy on me, for I am a sinner.”[1] However, I have yet to see any scholar ever interpret Peter’s sin, in his use of the same word, as a sexual one.) Anyway. Because this story of the sinful woman with the alabaster jar who comes and washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair and anoints him with oil from the alabaster jar – because that all happens just before Mary Magdalene is introduced in this gospel…and because Mary Magdalene happens to be a woman…Mary Magdalene is interpreted, first by Pope Gregory the Great in a sermon series in the sixth century and thereafter by many, many others, as being that same peculiarly sinful woman.

Mary Magdalene’s image has been reinvented, throughout the centuries, “from prostitute…to mystic, to celibate nun, to passive (helper), to feminist icon, to the matriarch of divinity’s secret dynasty.”[2] Anybody remember The DaVinci Code? The church and our culture have been working out our salvation as regards women for a good long while now.

“How the past is remembered, how…desire is domesticated, how men and women negotiate their separate impulses; how power inevitably seeks sanctification, how tradition becomes authoritative, how revolutions are co-opted; how fallibility is reckoned with, and how…devotion can be made to serve violent domination – all these cultural questions helped shape the story of the woman (from Magdala) who befriended Jesus of Nazareth.”[3]

What we know about her from scripture is this: Mary Magdalene is named – something that happens rarely for women in the Bible; and her words are recorded, as well, which is even more unusual. We know she comes from Magdala, a small fishing town on the Sea of Galilee in the same region as Nazareth. She carries stature, Mary Magdalene; because not only is she named, but she is named first wherever she is remembered among others in scripture – a sign of honor and respect for her.

We know that Jesus healed her when he cast out seven demons, and that she followed him after that, together with other women: Joanna and Susanna, and others whom Jesus had also healed of evil spirits and infirmities. We know that these women had sufficient resources and independence that made it possible for them to leave what they were doing to follow him. And more than that, we know that they had enough money, in their own control, that they could help fund his ministry…and they did.

We know that when the other disciples got scared and fled from Golgotha during Jesus’ crucifixion, Mary Magdalene stayed.

And finally, in today’s gospel passage, we know that three days after his death, Mary walked in the dark to his grave. And after the confusion and the running and the empty tomb, we know that – again – Mary Magdalene stayed. The stone had been rolled away. Jesus’ body was not where they had laid it.

“They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where…” she told the angels, as she wept, not knowing that those angels were angels. “If you have carried him away, just tell me where,” she begged the gardener, who, it turns out, was not the gardener after all. And then he said her name…and she knew. And he sent her to tell the others…and she did.

In that moment, we know something very important – maybe most important – about Mary Magdalene: she is the first evangelist. She is the first one to share the good news of Jesus’ resurrection.

She had experienced what it was to be possessed by demons, and she also possessed the strength that it took to be healed of them. She took the risk, one way or another, as the disciples had, to leave whatever her life was before that healing, in order to follow the one who had healed her. She had both the resources and the practical generosity to offer in paying what was needed for Jesus’ ministry. She stepped into a space of unimaginable pain at Jesus’ crucifixion, and then she stayed there with him through it all. And even in the confusion and further pain at that empty tomb, when the others left, she stayed. She stayed, and would bear witness to good news greater than anyone could ask or imagine.

What does it tell us, that our history has taken: a woman strong enough to withstand possession and be healed, a woman who risked danger and judgment by following a teacher who threatened the religious order, a woman who practiced generosity from her own means, who stood in the midst of pain and stayed there, a woman first to carry the good news that Christ was alive – what does it say, that our history has most often reduced her to that most common trope which would give the powers that be the powers they need to in order to control a powerful woman?

And where is the good news of her story?

Well, I believe it is first in the fact that we know it. We know her name and her words and her actions. And so we can also know that we are her heirs.

In 1980, the rector at the time – the Rev. Joe Mazza, father of our own Joy Witt – together with the wardens and the vestry of St. Augustine’s, petitioned Bishop James Montgomery to set aside his concerns about women’s ordination (four years after women’s ordination had become regularized by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church) and make Janice Gordon a priest. Men and women worked together to convince the bishop that women could serve as preachers and evangelists in the legacy of Mary Magdalene. Later that year, through no small effort of the leaders of this parish, the Rev. Janice Gordon would go on to be ordained at St. James Cathedral with three other women. She would serve here at St. Augustine’s, the first woman called to a clergy staff in the Diocese of Chicago.

That legacy continues, even now, as this parish sustains the ministry of our deacon, the Rev. Sue Nebel, and as you called me to be the first woman installed at St. A’s as rector.

And that is not all – because this church is filled with women who are the heirs of Mary Magdalene, and with men who know our names, and listen to our words. You are strong enough to bear what you should not have to, and you are willing to do what it takes to be made whole. You take risks, and are generous. You know what it is to stand steadfast in spaces of pain, and stay there. And like Mary Magdalene, God has entrusted you with good news that this world needs desperately for you to share.

So go, you bearers of the gifts handed down from generation to generation, all the way to us. Do not be reduced by a cautionary tale, because that version of redemption has always been too small to be true of God’s promise for us. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, as evangelists and allies, carrying the testimony of the God who knows us and names us, who loves us and calls us very good.

Blessed Feast of Mary Magdalene, dear people of this church I love. Go forth as witnesses to the good news that is her legacy, and ours.

[1] Luke 5:8

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/who-was-mary-magdalene-119565482/

[3] ibid

SUNDAY, JULY 1, 2018, THE SIXTH SUNDAY OF PENTECOST, PROPER 8B

Pastor Frank Senn, Evanston, IL

Text: Mark 5:21-43

We gathered at the lake shore this morning to greet Jesus just as the crowd did in today’s Gospel. Jesus had just returned from the other side of the lake -- the Gentile side -- and a crowd immediately gathered around him. Jesus spends a lot of time on the Sea of Galilee in Mark’s Gospel, traveling back and forth between the Jewish and the Gentile sides of the sea. He performs healings and exorcisms on the Jewish side and then goes across the lake and performs healings and exorcisms on the Gentile side. Without making any pronouncements the evangelist shows the inclusivity of the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God.

I wonder if the crowd had gathered around Jesus when he landed because news of the exorcism he had performed on the other side of the lake had reached people on the Jewish side ahead of Jesus. He had cast out demons from a man who had lived among the tombs and couldn’t be restrained even with chains. The demons, who named themselves “Legion,” recognized Jesus as the Son of the Most High God and asked him, “Where can we go?” Demons need bodies to inhabit. So Jesus directed them into the pigs -- unclean animals from the Jewish perspective -- which then ran off a cliff into the sea and drowned. There went the local economy. But Jesus had performed a huge cleansing of Gentile impurities with the destruction of the demons and the pigs. That’s something to bear in mind as we get into the situation in today’s Gospel.

As the crowd gathers around Jesus on the lakeshore, a man named Jairus, a ruler or elder of the local synagogue, prevails on Jesus to come quickly to his house because his daughter is dying. Jesus and Jairus and the whole crowd head toward Jairus’ house.

But a woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years, spending all her money on doctors who haven’t been able to cure her, saw her chance and took it. She wasn’t supposed to be there and if she got found out she was in trouble. Culture and custom said she wasn’t supposed to be there. Social courtesy said she wasn’t supposed to be there. Torah law said she wasn’t supposed to be there. But with the crowd pressing on Jesus, she reached out and touched the hem of his cloak. She was immediately healed; she felt it in her body.

She thought she could get away with it. But stop the procession! Jesus felt power go out of him. “Who touched me?” he demanded.

The woman had reason to be afraid. She was in flagrant disobedience of the law in Leviticus 15 that said: “If a woman has a flow of blood for several days outside her monthly period, or if her flow continues beyond her regular period, she remains unclean as long as the flow continues, and for seven days after it stops. Anyone who touches her is unclean until evening. Anyone who touches anything she has touched will be unclean until evening.”

Do you see the problem? The woman’s been bleeding for twelve years. She has been ritually unclean for twelve years. For twelve years anyone she touches has also been rendered ritually unclean until evening. If she touches someone, they are prohibited from having social contact with anyone for the rest of the day.

Give her credit that she recognized the seriousness of the damage she had caused and owned up to it. She has not only interrupted an emergency medical mission with a non-emergency situation. She has rendered Jesus unclean and unfit to touch anyone, at least for the rest of the day. And the person he was summoned to touch was the dying daughter of an elder of the synagogue who was charged with the responsibility to uphold the law.

What was Jesus to do? He did what he has been doing throughout the Gospel of Mark, like allowing his disciples to pick corn or healing people on the Sabbath Day. He ignored the law. He commended the woman for her faith and moved on to Jairus’ house.

One wonders what Jairus thought about all this, because he too was in a predicament. He should be upholding the tradition of the purity laws. If he allows Jesus to touch and heal his daughter, he too would have disregarded the law.

But stop the procession again! People come from Jairus’ house and say that it wasn’t necessary for Jesus to go any farther. The girl has died. Jesus didn’t get there soon enough. As lamentable as the girl’s death is, it solves the problem of ritual impurity that the woman with the hemorrhage had created.

But Jesus refuses to be stopped. He took his three leading disciples, Peter, James, and John, and with the girl’s parents went into the girl’s room, shutting everyone else out. He claims that the girl is not dead, only sleeping. He takes her by the hand and tells her to “get up.” “Immediately” (a favorite word in Mark’s Gospel) she got up and started walking around. “Give her something to eat,” said Jesus.

Now looking at this gospel reading as a whole, we see the symbolism piling up. It was a favorite literary ploy of Mark the Evangelist to interrupt one story with another story. The interrupting story served to heighten the effect of the main story. So we are invited to consider this reading as one story, not two, as we try to get at its significance.

Another thing typical of Mark’s Gospel is its secretiveness. The woman with the hemorrhage is hidden in the crowd. Only the three leading disciples are allowed to go with Jesus to Jairus’ house. Those in the girl’s room are enjoined to tell no one what had happened. The commentators call this the “messianic secret” in Mark. Events in Jesus’ life were only to be proclaimed after his resurrection because before that they could be misinterpreted -- and were!

To those who hear this gospel in faith (and it was undoubtedly read aloud in early Christian assemblies), the willingness of Jesus to accept in himself the woman’s uncleanness, and the hiddenness of Jesus in the room with the dead girl, are foreshadowings of the crucifixion -- Jesus’ bearing in his body the impurity of the world -- and his descent to the dead. And the healing of the woman and the walking around of the dead girl are foreshadowings of the new life of the resurrection. The meal to be given to the girl is a foreshadowing of the Eucharist of the church. If you want to push it, the twelve years the woman had suffered bleeding and the girl’s twelve years of age suggest the twelve tribes of Israel -- the fullness of the people of God.

As with all the stories in the Bible, and especially in the Gospels, this is all about us -- the Christian community that gathers every Lord’s Day to hear the Gospel stories and to commemorate and celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ in the Eucharist. And Jesus is here present, hidden under forms of bread and wine, to be touched by those who seek him and to touch those who receive him.

I know in this parish “everybody everybody everybody” is welcome to the meal, the Eucharistic feast of bread and wine. But Jesus forces no one. When the bread is broken at this table you can reach out your hand and touch him. Perhaps you do so because your issues have not been addressed by other gurus or healers, like the woman who was failed by the doctors. So with some measure of faith you reach out to touch Jesus in the bread. Then, like the woman who touched Jesus’ cloak, you can slip back into the crowd, strengthened to get through the week but without staying to find out what Jesus might be asking of you and what he might be offering you. And if you do that -- if you slip back into the crowd -- you won’t be punished or exposed. But Jesus will still be asking, “Who touched me?”, and longing to give you all he wants you to have, longing to give you the gift of himself.

But if you will stay present in the crowd around Jesus, then he will offer himself to you and make you whole as he comes into your life -- into your very body and blood with his body and blood -- to draw you body and soul into his risen life, immersing you in his death and resurrection in the waters of rebirth, and raising you up to new and eternal life. Amen.