Martha, Mary, and Seneca Falls
(Rutgers, July 19, 1998; 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C.
Baptism of Jacqueline and Jennifer Alien) ,
Galatians 3:23-29 (NT, p. 200; from 12th Ord.); Luke 10:38-42 (NT, pp.
73-74)
Hillary Rodham Clinton and a number of other prominent American
women have spent the past several days on a pilgrimage to the town
of Seneca Falls (population 7,000) in upstate New York, where can
now be found the Women's Rights National Historic Park.
Today, July 19th, marks the 150th Anniversary of the
Declaration of Sentiments, a manifesto issued
by the first American women's rights convention,
which met, it must be noted, in a Protestant church,
a Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, in Seneca Falls.
The convention was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Lucretia Coffin Mott, and was attended by 300
women and 40 men, the most famous of the men being
the Black abolitionist + publisher Frederick Douglass.
The status of women in almost all American Protestant denomination~
during the 1830s + 40s, and, sadly, right up to the late 20th century,
is clearly revealed in a Pastoral Letter that was written in 1837
to the individual Congregational churches of Massachusetts
by their General Association, or General Assembly.
That letter reads in part:
"The power of woman is her dependence, flowing from the
consciousness of that weakness which God has given her
for her protection ..."
Some eleven years later, on July 19, 1848,
the convention at Seneca Falls thundered forth its reply.
"Resolved, That woman has too long rested satisfied
in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs
and a perverted application of the Scriptures
have marked out for her,
and that it is time [woman] should move in the enlarged
sphere which her great Creator has assigned her.”
Today, Protestant critics of the 150-year-old women's rights movement,
including the mainstream of the Southern Baptist denomination
and certain far-right groups within our own denomination,
are still fond of saying that the agenda of women's full equality
with men has been set for the church by the secular world
rather than having been set from within the church
by a religious source or authority.
Such an assertion is, of course, historically wrong.
In America, the movement for women's full equality arose
over 150 years ago from within the Protestant churches
and on the basis of the Bible.
A number of Protestant women and men of the 1830s and 1840s
believed that the goal of women’s equality
had been set for the church by the lives and thought of
a pair of Christian authorities without equal:
none other than Jesus himself and the apostle Paul.
And in support of their position these women and men cited,
among other Bible passages, the 2 lessons we've read this morning.
In our Second Lesson we met the sisters Martha and Mary.
These two women were major figures among Jesus's followers,
as can be seen not only here in the 10th chapter of Luke
but also in the other account told of them
in the Gospel of John, chapters 11 and 12.
In Luke and John we see Jesus acting in a manner not typical
of teachers in his time. W e see him welcoming and celebrating
the discipleship of these quite - independent women.
And then our morning’s First Lesson was written by the apostle Paul.
Now, Paul's views on women’s proper roles in the early church
are, to say the least, complicated to discern and describe.
But what can be stated with absolute certainty is that
Galatians 3 has played a larger part in inspiring
a vision of women's full equality within the church
than any other single passage in the Bible.
In this passage, Paul quotes words used during services of baptism,
services like the one we’ve celebrated today.
Those words from the baptismal liturgy of his day read: (quote)
“As many of you as were baptized into Christ
have clothed yourselves with Christ.
There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female;
for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."
Through baptism into Christ, all these differences-
ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, gender-all these differences
that we've used to build up and maintain barriers
among ourselves are eliminated, broken down, dissolved.
In baptism, we are united as full equals
by our common overriding identity as followers of Christ.
So far as I know, the first American Christian authors to cite the
inclusiveness of Jesus's own ministry + the words of Galatians 3 as
biblical bases for women's equal rights within church and society
were two women whom I call the "Martha and Mary" of 19th-
century America-the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina.
Sarah and Angelina Grimke came from a family of
wealthy South Carolina slaveholders.
In the 1830s, they stunned their family by becoming Quakers,
moving north, joining the abolitionists,
becoming advocates of women IS rights,
and giving public lectures + writing books on these topics.
It was, indeed, the empassioned public speeches of these two sisters
that prompted the all-male clergy of Massachusetts
to issue the aforementioned Pastoral Letter of 1837,
in which, as I said, women
were reminded of their God-given weakness and were told
to return to their proper role of dependency, to a life
lived in the domestic sphere alone, and not in public.
Many male clergy took to their pulpits
and described the Grimke sisters as "unnatural II and "unwomanly,”
as "disobedient Eves" and "Jezebel women"-
stubborn, headstrong, and definitely sinful.
Sarah took the step of replying directly to the Pastoral Letter of 1837
by writing her own series of letters + publishing them under the title
"Letters on the Equality of the Sexes + the Condition of Women."
In these letters, Sarah announced that
she would base her arguments for women's equality on Scripture,
and that she would seek to correct the perverted interpretation
of Holy Writ that was widespread among the churches.
She argued that the Bible, when correctly interpreted,
discloses God's intention that women should be equal to men.
And she contended that although untold
generations of male interpreters of the Bible have been sexists,
nonetheless the God revealed in Jesus is not a sexist.
The themes sounded by Sarah and Angelina Grimke in the 1830s
were picked up and advanced in the 1840s by another Martha and
Mary team-Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Coffin Mott.
They organized the Seneca Falls Convention of July 19, 1848,
and wrote most of the Declaration of Sentiments, which decried the
patriarchal interpretation of Scripture spoken of by Sarah Grimke
and which listed a series of wrongs against women committed by
churches, including churches’ exclusion of women
from the ministry,
from the teaching of theology, and
from virtually all public participation in church governance.
These resolutions condemning the misinterpretation of Scripture
and the exclusion of women from ministry
were passed unanimously by the conventioneers on July 19, 1848.
The only resolution proposed at Seneca Falls that proved divisive
was one, crafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself,
that endorsed women’s right to vote in political contests.
But even that most controversial of all resolutions passed
after Frederick Douglass had risen to speak in favor of it.
The right to vote was not extended to all American women until 1920,
72 long years after the Seneca Falls convention.
Yet, shamefully, it took even longer than that for
women’s rightful role in the governance and ministry of churches
to be approved within most Protestant denominations.
And the change called for in 1848 that has been perhaps the slowest
of all to gain acceptance is a reinterpretation of Scripture that
seeks to overcome the inherited patriarchal biases
of centuries past.
Many tragedies have resulted from the snail's pace at which
churches have changed since 1848.
Among those tragedies has been the rejection of the
institutional Christian church by untold numbers of women,
including, in 1884, Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself.
Still, it is a cause for great joy today, on the occasion
of the baptism of these two sisters, Jacqueline and Jennifer, that
the struggle of the past 150 years has resulted in significant gains.
All offices + ministries of the Presbyterian Church are open to them,
and they will hear proclaimed from this pulpit + from many others
the good news of the wildly inclusive love of God that embraces
women and men as equal partners in Christ's service.
We rejoice that at the end of the 20th century
we have arrived nearer the goal set for us by
that baptismal formula of the 1st century
which was passed on to us by Paul:
"As many of you as were baptized into Christ
have clothed yourselves with Christ.
There is no longer male and female;
for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."
Let us pray.
0 God, we thank you for the life and witness of countless Marthas
and Marys throughout history. But today we thank you most
especially for the life and witness of Sarah and Angelina Grimke and
of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Coffin Mott. We rejoice that
they and their spiritual descendents have helped to create a more
wholesome and empowering community of faith into which to receive
Jacqueline and Jennifer. Amen.
Return to Sermon Archive