The Scandal of the Unnamed Apostle
(Rutgers, March 7, 1999; 3rd Sunday in Lent, Year A; Gifts of Women Sunday)
Exodus 17:1–7 (OT, pp. 70–71); John 4:5–30, 39 (NT, pp. 97–98)
There is scandal, or disgrace, in this story of
the encounter between Jesus and an unnamed Samaritan woman.
But it's not the scandal the male disciples imagined when
they saw Jesus breaking the strong cultural taboo against
a man's speaking with an unrelated woman in public.
No, for us the disgrace is that Jesus's disciples were so dismissive of
this woman that they omitted her name when recounting her story.
They omitted the name of this woman whose conversation with
Jesus is the longest exchange of words recorded in the gospels;
they omitted the name of this person who was the 1st to proclaim
the good news of Jesus outside the Jewish community;
they omitted the name of this woman who persuaded most of
her townspeople to go hear Jesus so that they would
discover for themselves what she had discovered—
that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ.
Indeed we men of the church have proven quite good over the
centuries at not just omitting the names of such women apostles
but at even neglecting to tell their stories;
and it has taken until the end of the 20th Century
for the church to be motivated to assemble and publish
a number of their names and stories
and to seek to redress this scandal and disgrace.
Last Sunday, Dr. James Massey told you briefly of the important role
played in his life by the Reverend Dr. Clinton Herbert Loehlin,
father of Margaret Loehlin Shafer, my wife.
Today, on Gifts of Women Sunday, I want to tell you the story
not of my father-in-law but of my mother-in-law,
the story of Eunice Cleland Loehlin, a missionary to India,
who in life labored largely as an unnamed apostle
and who in death has only rarely had her story told.
2 years ago Margaret received a phone call from a Mrs. Veenu Singh,
a young Hindu woman doing research in the United States
for her Ph.D. dissertation in History at an Indian university.
Her dissertation topic was:
"The Influence of American Women
on the Liberation of Women in North India."
Mrs. Singh had come to realize from her preliminary study of the
topic that the American women of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s
who had provided the role model for independent Indian
women like herself and her mother—
the role model of an educated, caring, career woman—
Mrs. Singh had come to realize
that all of the relevant American women had been
missionaries—not government workers or
business women, but missionaries!
Mrs. Singh had also discovered that there were very few documents
in India attesting to the work of these missionary women,
so she was now searching through
American seminary libraries and denominational archives,
and getting oral histories both
from those women missionaries who were still alive and
from the family and children of those who were dead.
Mrs. Singh was finding the libraries + archives to be of limited help,
but she was gathering much useful data through the oral histories.
So would Margaret please be willing to provide her
with an oral history of her mother?
Margaret was more than willing, and she eagerly did so.
Recently, and quite unexpectedly,
I got a taste of just what Mrs. Singh was up against
in her attempt to get information from denominational archives.
I was sorting the books in the Rutgers Church Library
when I came across the Year Book of Prayer for Missions
in the Presbyterian Church for the years 1938 and 1955.
(And, oh yes, by the way, this series is still being published.
Year books for 1999 are available to you in the narthex!)
Anyway, I turned eagerly in these old books to the pages for India,
where Margaret's parents would be listed + their work described.
And on page 152 of the Year Book for 1938, I found this listing:
"Rev. Clinton H. Loehlin (1923), member, [the] India Council
[for North India, Punjab, and Western India Missions].
Mrs. Loehlin (1924), station and district work."
Well, I was shocked;
for although Eunice's work was listed,
her baptismal name—Eunice—was not.
She was listed simply as Mrs. Loehlin, that is as
an unnamed wife, rather than as an honored apostle.
As for the Year Book from 17 years later, in 1955, it was even worse!
There, on page 120, I read:
"The Rev. Clinton H. Loehlin (1923), executive secretary of the
Punjab Mission, and Mrs. Loehlin (1924) are living in Amritsar,
district of Jullundur. Mr. Loehlin is also head of a committee
to translate the Old Testament into Gurmukhi-Punjabi."
Not only was Eunice's baptismal name still being omitted in 1955
but in that Year Book the male editor also omitted her work.
It was as if she were some inconsequential appendage to
my father-in-law's ministry, which was not at all the case,
as everyone who knew them attests.
Like the story of the Samaritan woman,
the story of Eunice's life confronts us
with men's omissions about a woman apostle.
So let me, in a way similar to the Gospel of John, tell Eunice's story,
and let me, in so doing, depart from the example of John
by granting to Eunice the dignity of her name.
In the early 1920s, representatives of the Student
Volunteer Movement visited many American college campuses.
And they came to Ohio's Muskingum College in order to
urge young men and women to go abroad as missionaries.
Eunice was bright, vivacious, witty, adventuresome,
a committed Christian with a strong identity and character,
and she was also, as they said in those days, "unattached."
Becoming a missionary was definitely one way in which
a young Christian woman of the 1920s could acceptably
fulfill herself by making her own way in the world
and pursuing her own career.
So in 1923, Eunice boarded a ship filled with young missionaries
bound for ports in Asia.
And there she met Clinton, a young man also bound for India.
Once in India, the two were assigned to the same language school.
Their love bloomed, and then, in 1924, when they had completed
their language training and were ready for field assignment,
they married and became what they would remain to be
for the rest of their 45 years in India—a missionary team.
Both Eunice and Clinton were certified church workers;
both Eunice and Clinton were salaried;
both Eunice and Clinton were full-time employees
of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
And for the next 35 years, Eunice and Clinton worked together
in the villages of the part of India called the Punjab,
where 98% of the Christians came from the groups
we call "untouchables," but who now call themselves Dalits.
So almost all North Indian Christians were desperately poor
and illiterate. They were almost all farm workers and their families.
The task undertaken by Eunice and Clinton was not so much the
conversion of new Christians as it was the making solid of an
existing Christian community, providing it with the resources
of teaching and organizational skills it needed if one day
its leadership was to become entirely indigenous, as is
in fact the case today—last week's guest preacher,
Dr. James Massey, being a wonderful example.
The social patterns between men and women in rural India were
not all that different from those in Galilee and Samaria in Jesus's day.
Unrelated men and women did not talk with each other
or associate with each other in public.
Thus when Eunice and Clinton came to a village, they divided up.
Clinton worked among the men, and Eunice, among the women.
When the Loehlin children were home from boarding school,
Margaret and her two sisters would accompany Eunice,
and Margaret's two brothers would accompany Clinton.
When the Loehlin family arrived in a village, Eunice + her daughters
would gather the Christian women and children of the village
into the open courtyard outside one of the larger homes.
There Eunice would spend the day counseling the women
about family matters and their problems in life
and talking with them about God's love for them.
Eunice would also work with the women,
teaching them how to read, and
she would encourage them to send their children to school.
She would also administer first aid and apply ointments
and urge the women to take those who were too
sick to be helped by her to the mission hospital.
And she would, of course, share Bible stories
and offer religious instruction.
Eunice had a passion for women's literacy
and for helping women to develop a happier, more satisfying life
through better health, better family relations, better education
and through a deeper knowledge of God.
She lived and loved as best she could to help
Jesus Christ become a living, loving force in the life of
each woman and child with whom she came in contact.
After spending this "women's time" in the courtyard, Eunice would
join with Clinton to offer training to the village pastor and his wife,
who, like Eunice and Clinton, also served as a ministry team.
When Eunice and Clinton were not "on the road" in the villages
but were "at home," Eunice would continue her work
of advancing literacy and improving the lives of women.
She established book depots where books could be bought;
she encouraged and cultivated young authors and illustrators
and sent off their work to a mission press;
and she set up and conducted adult education correspondence
courses, mostly about Bible content. At any one time
she would be corresponding with perhaps 100 people.
Eunice also offered unending hospitality to all the church officials–
both Western and Indian–who were passing through town.
Well, that was the general pattern of Eunice's ministry for the
first 35 years. During Eunice's last nine years in the Punjab,
she and Clinton worked at Baring Union Christian College.
There Eunice's principal work was cataloging books in the library.
She loved this.
She saw it as a culmination of her life's work on literacy,
making books accessible to the students of the college,
many of them coming from the villages where
she had been working so hard on increasing literacy—
making books accessible to women, as well as to men.
She also counseled with the women students, always urging
them when they got married, as almost all of them did,
not to just disappear into the home but to continue to use
their educations to become leaders in the community
and to make their mark on the world.
When Eunice and Clinton retired in 1968 after 45 years in India,
they settled in Marysville, California,
which I thought of as a basically God-forsaken place.
Why there?
They had no family there, and no friends to start with.
But it was a city with a huge Punjabi immigrant population.
There Eunice became a volunteer at a local elementary school,
working with the Punjabi mothers who didn't speak English,
serving as their interpreter when they registered their children
or had a problem at school, or needed tutoring for a child.
And she organized them into an auxiliary PTA chapter,
where business was conducted in the Punjabi language.
Eunice remained committed to improving the lives of women
right up to the time of her death in 1983 from pancreatic cancer.
When I talked with Margaret about her mother's life,
Margaret urged me to say that the biggest contribution made
by this gritty, witty, vivacious, generous, ingenious woman
was not her work—however fine that was and it was fine.
But her biggest contribution was her being.
Margaret urged me to say that, like many other women,
Eunice's ministry was one of presence, and not just of product.
The role model Eunice offered to the women
of North India was the quality of her being.
In the front of the family Bible
that was given to Margaret by her mother
is written a saying about the importance of the witness
that a disciple of Christ offers through her or his life and being.
The inscription reads: "I am the Bible others read."
She was a truly gifted woman,
a Bible that many others did read well.
Her name was Eunice!
Let us pray:
O God, we lift our hearts to You in praise and gratitude
for all the women who have used wisely and well the gifts You have given;
for all the women throughout history who have helped to change
for the better church and society; for our own mothers and grandmothers,
sisters and daughters, whose lives have helped to shape our own;
for all the women whose way of being has been a Bible for us to read.
In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.
Return to Sermon Archive