Celebration Eucharist for 30 years of Women Priests
Exodus 15:20-22; John 14:23-27
18th May 2024
Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour
It’s thirty years since Bishop Timothy Bavin ordained twenty women to the priesthood in this cathedral. And some of you are here today. Of course women priests have become so normal now that we can easily forget what an enormous moment the 1994 ordinations represent.
I was reminded of this last year when I accompanied our Cathedral Choir on a trip to Antwerp. Some of our girl choristers singing today were there. In the Catholic Cathedral the priest warmly invited Canon Jo and I to robe as priests and accompany him as he celebrated mass. At the end he said to the congregation that he hoped the day would soon come when Catholics would not have to rely on visiting Anglicans to experience the presence of women priests. It was the warmest of gestures, reinforced by the smiles and greetings of the congregation as we processed with him to the altar.
‘Come Holy Spirit’ we say on this Eve of Pentecost. ‘Come Holy Spirit, renew the hearts of your people and kindle in us the fire of your love’.
In our Gospel, Jesus describes the Spirit in three ways; as our Advocate, as our Teacher and as our Reminder. As our Advocate, the Spirit pleads for us; as our Teacher, the Spirit interprets the Gospel of Jesus to us and, as our Reminder, the Spirit prompts us to find new gifts in the great things God has done.
The Spirit as our Advocate has groaned within history from the beginning. Think of Miriam leading the praises of God’s people as they crossed the Red Sea into freedom; think of Mary the mother of Jesus receiving the angel’s promise of a Saviour, think of Mary Magdalen announcing to the disciples: ‘I have seen the Lord’.
Think of the Holy Spirit, our Advocate in the years that led up to 1994. The feminist movement represented a change in consciousness which started at the end of the 19th century and is still spreading and reverberating today. I remember as a teenager the shock, the horror, the thrill of seeing a woman preach for the first time. It was Elsie Chamberlain, a Congregationalist minister.
In the 1930s Maude Royden, inspired by the Suffragettes, began campaigning for womens’ ordination. Florence Li Tim Oi, was ordained priest in 1944, to serve communities in North Eastern China. She was the first woman to be ordained in the Anglican Communion. Then there were the campaigners. I think of Dr Una Kroll who went on and on about women’s ordination at the Church’s General Synod. And Monica Furlong, who campaigned relentlessly as a writer and a lay figurehead for women priests. And I think too of my friend, and former colleague, the Roman Catholic religious, Sister Lavinia Byrne who wrote in favour of women’s priesthood and was rebuked for her pains by no less a figure than Cardinal Ratzinger. Many those who supported the cause suffered psychologically and emotionally from what was a long and painful struggle.
The Spirit as our Advocate still pleads for those who are told they are not truly called, those whose ministries are frustrated by self-serving theories of male headship, those who are rebuked for their intelligence and capability by conscious and unconscious misogyny and for all who one way or another paid the price for the gift the Church has been given.
‘Come, Holy Spirit, come with comfort, life and fire of love’.
Then, second the Spirit is our Teacher, teaching the Church to interpret Jesus. Surely it is through the Spirit that there is so much contemporary scholarship on women in scripture with writers like Frances Young, Sarah Coakley and Paula Gooder encouraging women to recognise that they are not the first to have a place in the pastoral, evangelical and sacramental ministry of the Church. The seeds are in Gospel when you know where to look, when you know how to look. We are called to teach the mind of Christ as the Spirit gives us the capacity and utterance.
‘Teach us to know the Father, Son, and thee of both to be but one’.
Then, third, the Spirit is our Reminder, the one who shapes the memory of the Church, bringing to life what is forgotten or has never been noticed, unveiling hidden truths, opening locked-in hearts.
John Henry Newman, perhaps the greatest Anglican theologian (when he was an Anglican) in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine argued that authentic change to the tradition of the Church is not a matter of a random evolution of ideas but something much more profound. It is the unfolding in time of an order which is implicit in the Gospel, but cannot be received all at once. The Spirit then reminds us of tradition in order to draw out what is new, hidden within what is old. Christian tradition is dynamic, not static.
It is one of the weaknesses of the Western Church that we often think of the Spirit being opposed to tradition as though the Spirit is always inventing new things. And this leads us into destructive polarisations, between, to give an example, inherited church (bad) and emerging Church (good). But the point Newman makes us that the Spirit is tradition, and tradition is the Spirit revived and renewed. We must go to the deep past to discover the true future.
‘Thou the anointing Spirit art, who dost thy sevenfold gifts impart’.
When the critical vote to ordain women to the priesthood went through in 1992 I was rung up by my then boss, Jane Drabble, the editor of the TV series Everyman. She was not a believer but she wanted me to know how delighted she was, because, she said the priesthood of women in the Church of England had implications for all women.
I have been thinking about her response all those years ago and reflecting on how the gift we received in 1994 has been given to all and for all.
So in my prayer today are for those who are denied an education in Afghanistan, those who are sexually mutilated in infancy, those enslaved and trafficked for men’s profit. And too, those far too many young girls who dread puberty and try to harm their bodies in various ways, of the victims of pornographic fantasy, of those still in danger from out of control predators on our streets and public spaces.
When we stand at the altar we bring to Christ all who have been robbed of their dignity, punished for their gender by a still sinful world; and we plead with the Lord for freedom and flourishing of all God’s children. Miriam still bangs her tambourine. Mary still sings Magnificat.
The critical vote in 1992 was very hard for some. It was hard for our then bishop Timothy Bavin who voted against it and hard for those who were waiting and hoping to be ordained, But eventually Bishop Timothy decided he must go with the will of the Church and humbly, generously allowed himself to be led to the point when he was able to ordain those first twenty women here.
We should all be glad and grateful that he did. Because when a woman stands at the altar she is clothed in the mystery of Christ. And when I think of what that means I always been encouraged by the icon of the Virgin of the Sign, in which the Church itself is represented as a praying woman. We have a version of this icon in the Lady Chapel and on your service sheet. There she is with her arms raised in prayer, leading the praises of God’s people and making intercession for us all.
And on her heart is the living icon, Jesus Christ, who has opened wide his arms for us. As she embraces him, so he embraces us.
This is what our priesthood means, for the treasure within, the pearl of great price is not something we possess or own, but the endless gift of God, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, that beauty ever ancient and ever new, Jesus Christ himself, to the glory of God the Father.