This Saturday, Jan. 20, a group of Cook County folk—women and men– will take part in a Women’s March, along with people all over the country. Last year’s Women’s March brought out millions.
I hope the world will never be the same.
The unprecedented bigotry, misogyny, and cruelty we’ve seen for the last couple years have provoked this groundswell of people saying, “No.” Declaring: “No. We will no longer be silent when women are treated as sexual objects; when the poor are neglected, when immigrants are ill-used, when the planet is not cared for. No.”
We march to say “no.” And we march to say “yes.” Yes to justice, mercy, and goodness.
As a pastor, I’m proud to be part of this movement. And from what I know of scripture, I’m guessing Jesus is cheering from the bleachers.
Okay, you wouldn’t know it from the way the church has portrayed Jesus (particularly in terms of its priorities and hierarchy), but Jesus was radical. In an era of equal opportunity misogyny across all cultures and religions, Jesus shocked people with his treatment of women. He called them to be members of the new movement, taught them, stood up for them. They responded, and thus were the ones who had the nerve to stay with him until the very end (each of the gospels recounts a group of women at the cross.). In a time when a woman’s testimony was not accepted in a court of law, a woman was the first witness to the resurrection. A fifth century Church Father complained that she, “was a wholly unsuitable first witness.” (It’s unclear who he was grumbling to…)
In the earliest Christian movement, women functioned as teachers, apostles, and presided at home services. It takes cultural blindness (or special bigotry lenses) to read scripture and ignore the lists of Paul’s greetings to the women he worked alongside (Romans 16) or women teachers (Acts).
When Jesus was alive, and in the earliest church when the Spirit had free rein, women’s leadership was valued as much as men’s. But then, institutionalism, fear, and hierarchy took over, and women were shoved to the cultural norms of the society around them—told to shut up. Or treated as sex objects – as Mary Magdalene was reduced to, by men “confusing Marys” and thereby undercutting the central role of women in the church. Or as we see in many churches to this day, the Church Fathers allowed Greek philosophy to trump Judeo-Christian metaphysics, so women became associated with all that is earthy and emotional vs. the male spiritual and rational: women were cut from leadership, pushed away from the altar, and even priests were forced to steer clear from them by not marrying.
But I believe the Spirit is at work here and now. The sheer outrageousness of “leadership” in Washington – their disregard for the weak, the vulnerable, the immigrant — has led to activism, to people saying, “No.” No, let us never go back to a time when we assume “boys will be boys,” and the testimony of women like Anita Hill is disregarded.
Let’s help our country remember the clear mandate throughout the Old Testament that God’s people care for the “alien in the land,” doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God. No, let’s work for a time when the poor are not shafted by the rich, remembering Jesus said nothing about sex, but waxed eloquent (for verses and verses) railing against greed and mistreatment of the poor.
Things have begun to change, and for this, we can be grateful. But we must not take transformation for granted. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
Now is the time! All are welcome to The Women’s March, January 20, 1 p.m. Harbor Park.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.
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