Acts 5:27-41
April 7, 2013
I
can feel in my bones the commitment of the disciples – the fervor, the
excitement, the intense and unwavering belief in what was right – that Jesus
was the one who embodied God’s will for human kind, and they were going to
carry on in his name…no matter what.
There
they stood in front of the people who killed Jesus, the people ready to kill
again those who carried on in his name.
And at least the way it reads to me, they did not waver – in fact, the
last verse tells us, “They rejoiced that they were considered worthy to suffer
dishonor for the sake of Jesus’ name.”
All because they were committed, as Peter says, to obey God rather than
any human authority. They were
faithful…incredibly faithful. Willing to
stake their lives for the sake of the gospel.
They were also what I would call zealots.
I’m
ambivalent about zealots. In fact, my
default is suspicion. Zealots –
religious and non – have wrecked some serious havoc on our world. I don’t need to give you a list. But I also think there have been some
important zealots, without who’s zeal, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
I
put the disciples into this latter category.
Why? Because I’m a big fan of
what Jesus began, and without a healthy dose of zeal, I don’t know that it
would have continued. These disciples
were trying to do some radical things, and the forces that sought to silence,
in fact to kill, them were considerable.
What
the disciples were doing? What they were
staking their lives on?
To
begin with, they were recovering a strand of their scriptures – their tradition
– that had been silenced by the powerful.
It was the strand they thought Jesus lived with his whole life. They believed they were living in accordance
with God’s word, but as interpreted through the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus. This strand of Hebrew scripture pointed
to the poor, the orphan the widow. It
called for inclusion of the outcast, the sinner, the leper, the despised as
beloved members of the community. The
disciples found mandates in the scriptures, as seen in Jesus’ life, for sharing
resources in common, having women as leaders and disciples in the ministry. They welcomed Jew and Gentile alike – seeing
no difference in the eyes of God. They
freed people from the letter of the law, and invited them to live in its
spirit.
And
they decided they were right. Others
were wrong, they were right, and they were willing to stake their lives on
it. Impressive. Zealous.
And I’m grateful, because I’m a beneficiary of their unwavering
commitment, and because they serve as models for us today. But how did they know? Everyone around them claimed to be acting
under God’s authority…claimed that they knew how to interpret the scriptures
according to God’s laws. How did the
disciples know they were right? How do we know?
Figuring out what is God’s will and what is merely human authority is
not, in my experience at least, the easiest thing in the world to do.
Who
is the arbiter of God’s will?
Louisa
Woosley was born in Grayson County, Kentucky in 1862. And she was, in my analysis, a zealot. She had confidence in what she was doing; enough
confidence that she was willing to risk everything for it. She overcame fears, risked loss of everyone
she loved, risked rejection and ridicule.
And
what she did was not all that different from what the disciples did: reinterpreted scriptures through her
understanding of God as known in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Fortunately,
unlike the disciples, the councils
she went in front of weren’t going to kill her or flog her. They were Presbytery councils, and whatever
other sins our denomination may have committed over the years, presbyteries flogging
and killing those with whom we disagree have not been among them. Nevertheless,
in the late 1800’s no women were standing before Presbyteries asking to be
ordained as ministers…no women except Louisa Woosley.
Woosley
was driven by an internal sense of call from early on. And this was a powerful, forceful, persistent
call that she knew was the Holy Spirit…was God.
When she was twelve or thirteen, she, as she said, “was impressed to
labor in the vineyard of the Lord, seeing the harvest was truly plenteous and the laborers few.” In other words, she was called to share what
she knew of Christ with others, and for her the way to do that was through
preaching and being a minister. But at
the time, women didn’t preach, and they certainly weren’t ministers.
Even
though she thought that this “call” was from God, it did not fill her with
immediate delight. She spent a great
deal of time denying and resisting the call.
As she said, “Not having so much as ever heard of a lady preacher, and
knowing that there would be opposition, I tried to persuade myself that it was
not right for women to preach…thus I passed my girlhood days.” She married, at age 17, and had children – she
went the traditional route for women at that time, making it impossible, she
believed, for her to be a minister.
But
God was persistent. Her life, she
thought, protected her from her calling.
But she made the mistake of reading the bible. Woosley decided to read the bible. Really read it. Cover to cover. And as she did, she marked all the places
where a woman was mentioned. After doing
so, and much to her dismay, she was, quote, “convinced of the fact that God…had
not overlooked women, but that he had a great work for them to do.” And
so, the sense of call increased, but so did her resistance.
This
combination of call and resistance caused her great distress. But what was she supposed to do? The obstacles were too great. She made lists in her head of all the reasons
she shouldn’t: She can’t leave her
children. Her husband wouldn’t accept
it, people would not hear her, or even ask her to preach, she was not educated
enough, she might lose the respect of her father. And so she told no one of her call for many
years.
Finally
her serendipitous opportunity came – the one she would not be able to
ignore. In 1887, when she was 25 years
old, she was asked by the session at her church – obviously filled with Easter
people in their own right – to conduct one of the daily worship services
because the pastor could not be there.
And, she writes, “for the first time in life I …opened my mouth for
God.”
Opposition
was immediate. Her father did turn his
back on her. Friends were now foes. And, as she said, “all earthly help failed
me.” But in the midst of this, she heard
God’s voice: “Peace. Be still.
Fear not, I am with thee.” In
that same year, 1887, she was received as a candidate for ordination, in 1888
she was licensed to preach the gospel, and in November 1889, she was ordained
by the Nolin Presbytery – full of Easter people in their own right – to the full work of the gospel ministry. She continued to preach, traveling and
gathering crowds. Her friends came
around, her father came back, and she was finally freed from the distress of
not following God’s authority.
Woosley’
understanding of what the scriptures said was the root of her zeal. She wrote a
book called, “Shall Women Preach?” and it has the delightful subtitle, “The
question answered.” She wrote this book
a couple of years after her ordination.
In it, she presented the arguments commonly used against women’s
ordination, and then used what she knew and understood of the scripture to tear
these arguments apart.
She
argued against literalism. She argued
against the natural superiority of men.
She argued that men should consider the need to be home with children as
much as women. But mostly she argued
that without women as equals in the church, the church was not whole, and so
God’s will was being thwarted – a terrible thing. In her reading of Genesis, she saw that woman
came from man’s rib, and that this meant men were incomplete without women and
vice versa. Though for Woosley, that had
little to do with marriage and everything to do with going about God’s work in
this world. Wholeness is fractured until
men and women come together for all sorts of ministry and activities, including
leading the church.
“God
gave this happy pair the world as an inheritance,” she writes. “Not a word is said of man’s sphere and
woman’s sphere, neither of his authority and her subjection.”
And
so, she continues, “side by side shall they stand, sharing in the
responsibilities of life, and bearing together the heat and burden of the
day. Let neither usurp the authority
over the other, as both are raised from a dead level in sin, to a living
perpendicular to Christ.”
It’s
incredible – it makes me want to hear her preach – and I stand here because of
her strength of faith, ability to discern God’s word in her time, and her
willingness to follow God above human authorities. She was a disciple of the most eloquent
kind. And she was a zealot. We have no difficultly now looking back and
seeing that Louisa Woosley’s actions were of God. That she spoke truth, and saw clearly the way
the church polity violated God’s creation.
It seems so obvious.
But
how did she know for sure she was right??
Everyone around her thought they
were following God’s will. How did her
session know? How did the presbytery
know? What would we have thought? Would we
have aligned with the masses, claiming that this was just capitulation to the
culture of the time? Or, would we have
heard God in her words, and seen that the church could not be whole if women
were not equal with men?
Gamaliel
seemed to know how to tell who was right.
He was part of the council the day they brought the apostles to stand
before them. He wasn’t as sure as the
others that they were wrong. Maybe, just
maybe, he thought, this is of God…and if we kill them, it’s possible God will
be less than pleased. So he made a
suggestion: Let them go and see what
happens. If it is of God, then God will
bless it and make it continue. If it’s
not, they will disperse, disappear, and disband. Amazingly, he suggested, and the others
agreed, that they, themselves, might be wrong and they should wait to see if
God was leading this group or not. True,
their wisdom did not persist; later they were not quite so humble. But it was, in my mind a Presbytery
moment. Let’s see if this just might be
of God.
Woosley
certainly knew where things were headed.
Her movement would not die, of this she was sure. “The tide is already
upon us,” she writes, “and he that cannot read the signs of the times must be
asleep to the surroundings. The women
are fast coming to the front, and are engaging in active public work. Already a large majority of Sunday-school
teachers and officers are women. But she
has not yet attained to all that is her rightful possession and privilege. Though many obstacles are thrown in her way,
it only remains for time to show that these will disappear as mists before the
rising sun. God will wipe them away as
so many cobwebs. It is certain that no
amount of prejudice, and narrow-heartedness and opposition, can very long keep
back the in-coming flood. Women will not
always be held back by these things. The
world is moving; time is flying, and souls are dying: and the church must move,
or the blood of many will be on her skirts.”
So true. The cobwebs were wiped
away. And in retrospect, this zealot was
of God – at least I sure hope she was.
There
are still cobwebs. The world still, from
time to time, needs zealots who listen to God above entrenched, human
authority. This requires conviction,
which is hard in a world that has few absolute rights and absolute wrongs. And maybe history is the only arbiter. But we need to make our best guess. We have to do all the work: read the bible – and it probably wouldn’t
hurt to read it cover to cover – listen to one another, pray, study, reflect;
but then we have to make our best guess and be willing to stake our lives on
it.
Zealots
are dangerous – which can be good or bad.
So we have to be careful, that’s for sure. We have to be humble as well as courageous. But as I look at Jesus’ life, as I reflect on
his incredible faithfulness and courage in the face of death, something occurs
to me about his life. To paraphrase
Gandhi, he was willing to die for what he believed. But he wasn’t willing to kill others for
it.
The
disciples lived out their faith with great zeal, but without swords. Woosley used words, not ultimatums. She put out her truth and then let people
decide. The presbytery said yes, not
long after, the denomination insisted her name be removed from the rolls, and
not long after that, they reinstated her.
And she led her last revival at age 75 – a fully ordained Presbyterian
minister. She was in for the long haul,
and somehow she trusted that God was clearing out the cobwebs – history was
moving forward and she just needed to stay faithful to her call.
We
stand on the shoulders of the disciples, on the shoulders of people like Louisa
Woosley, people who prove over and over to the councils that true disciples
will not disband, disperse or disappear.
We
are today’s disciples. What is our best
guess? What is God up to in the world
right now? Can we risk everything to
join the divine work in this world? Amen.
