A wise person once said, “Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are beautiful.” It’s a joke that comes to mind when I think back to most of the Anglican Synods I have ever attended. They are “boys’ clubs” with locker room talk that includes boasts about who has the largest pulpit and who spoke the loudest in the debates.

I attended a special sitting of the Synod in Sydney, the most conservative Anglican Diocese in the world. The purpose of the meeting was to debate whether women’s ordination should even be discussed at the next Synod. My Dad was to state the affirmative case and the man who went on to become Archbishop was to take the negative. They would publicly debate the issues, and then hand over to comments from the floor. My interest at hearing my Dad was tempered by my horror that in the 1990s we were arguing a point that should have been resolved a century earlier.

As a student ordinand my place in the synod was standing amidst a large crowd at the edges of the synod. The hall was packed to the rafters. The meeting was set up in good Anglican fashion, with a clear domination hierarchy. The Archbishop and Bishops were seated in the center with copes and miters in place. The members of the Synod, the inner group, a predominantly male club, were in the next tier. Finally there was the outer peanut gallery where I lurked.

Voices were heard on both sides of the debate for several hot and heated hours. The voice that rang loudest and clearest was one that came from outside even the outer gallery. In the midst of these carefully measured debates an emotionally charged plea came from outside the group. This was the voice of a person who had no rights in this club. She stood out a mile away as being an outsider. I can assure of you that because this woman entered the outside edge of the hall and stood right next to me. She entered and just stood there for a moment. This gave me time to size her up as someone who looked like an outsider. She was certainly not a member of this club, not even the outer gallery. Yet beyond her obvious physical traits was something far more significant. There were tears in her eyes. And through those tears she cried from her heart, “Just give us a go!”

Those powerful words hung in the air like dead calm after a thunder storm. The debate was momentarily stopped as people glanced in our direction. Apart from staring at the son of the main speaker who had been trying to keep a low profile, the Synod sized up this crack pot of a woman. There was a sigh of disapproval and, as one, the club shrugged their collective shoulders and continued the debate. After all she wasn't a member and had no place to speak. On top of that she seemed to have lost control of her emotions. This was a voice and a cry that fell on deaf ears. In fairness there were people taking part in this debate as an act of solidarity with people like this woman. Yet the overall air of the hall was one of a club whose standards were never going to be lowered to include a woman such as this.

I vowed that night to remain only and ever at the edge of the institution, alongside those people who would never come any closer than the edge, those people that Jesus showed special interest in. Liberation Theology had become my experience within the church.

The sound of her voice, ten years on, still echoes in my spirit, and challenges all of my prejudices. To this day the church in Sydney continues to ignore her voice.

Gender, in my estimation, is among the five major concerns for the worldwide church. Alongside racism that sparks so many religious wars, class inequality that is part of the cause of poverty, sexuality that leads to so much fear, and ecology that is so fragile, gender has to be high on the agenda for churches charged to be liberators. This is not just about ordaining women into churches. There is little point in ordaining women into male structures, then wonder why so few women want to pursue the option. The church must delve deep into its Bible, its male God, its language, its policies and structures in order for the necessary revolution to occur. If it is wise, it will not isolate any one of the five key concerns from the others.

It seems to me that part of the limitation of Liberation Theology was its grand narrative that argued that capitalism was the single cause of poverty. I didn’t hear the male Liberation Theologians of the 1980s and 1990s addressing the reality that even in wealthier nations women are 40% more likely than men to be living in poverty. I didn’t hear them questioning why elderly women in countries such as America are 60% more likely than elderly men to be living in poverty. I didn’t hear them wondering at the number of households headed by females living in conditions of poverty where a new generation of children are being raised into a cycle of poverty.

Not enough was heard from Liberation Theology about the fact that, even allowing for the good fruits it has borne, globalization has widened the gap between rich and poor in third world countries. Educated women with even some English have an unequal advantage to get ahead in a world where English is the power language.

Not enough mention was made of the fact that in the 1990s only eight countries in the world had met the agreed goal for achieving greater gender balance in terms of political representation. The objective was for women to hold at least 30% of parliamentary seats. Not one of those eight countries was in Latin American.

My overall assessment of Liberation Theology is that it did the church a great favor. It forced the church back to its historical roots; the Jesus revolution. It forced us to see our priority for those residing at the edge of churches, either there out of fear or forced there because of their questioning natures. It is also my assessment that Liberation Theology did not see poverty in a wide enough framework. My hope in this sermon is to look again at the issue of gender as one of our five greatest concerns.

Our religious heritage is Hebrew culture where gender inequality predated economic markets. Therefore we have to wonder about any system that simply blames capitalism for all the evils of the world. There is an ideology that runs deeper than, even if it includes an economic reality. It is here that Feminism has attempted to journey.

There is a story from the 1890s that reminds us not to separate gender issues from the other major global concerns. Black educator Anna Julia Cooper noticed as she stopped at dilapidated train stations that there were often two dingy sheds on the platform. One had a sign that read “For Ladies” swinging over the door and the other a sign that read “For Colored People”. Anna says she never knew which door to open.

Our challenge as liberators in the tradition of Jesus is to know which door to open, which issues to address and how they connect. This has been the concern of the various strands of feminism. Many of you will know that there have been three broad waves of feminism. I want to explore with you how those three waves connect to Luke’s story of Mary and Martha.

Most interpretations of Luke 10 see Martha acting more like a woman, while Mary acted more like a man.  Martha seemed to be practical, nurturing and thoughtful, while Mary was conceptual, heavenly and distracted by knowledge.

First wave feminism would say that Mary had every right to sit with Jesus. This was the movement that pushed for voting and education rights for women. It would say that women, like men, could be public and active. This was a movement that challenged the barriers placed between women and all the public spheres of life on the basis of gender.

Second wave feminism would question the power of gendered roles in the story. It would ask the question, “Is Mary’s public role of being educated more important than Martha’s private role of making sure there was food on the table?” It would question the assertion of Jesus that listening to him is better than being active and caring. It would insist that what it called the ‘feminine’ roles be honored equally.

Third wave feminism would deconstruct the story by getting beneath the details to the social context of the day. It would begin to connect the poverty of women in the first century with their ethnicity and religious origins. This movement asserts that gender differences are best understood as a multiplicity of intersecting dimensions, for example the five major concerns I mentioned earlier.

This would take us close to an integral approach to feminism where both women and men are free to integrate aspects of both Mary and Martha within them. It would recognize that we may be ascribed a sex at birth, but our gender is something that cultures socially construct. The construction of gender changes in different cultures and at different times. We are all a blend of masculine and feminine qualities as any given society defines those terms.

It would take us closer to an integral model of both transcending and including previous stages as we develop. Maybe Mary and Martha were two metaphors in Luke’s mind for the stages he was exploring; the yin and yang of his life, the active and receptive in his experience. It’s one possible explanation for the story. There is certainly no judgment on either Mary or Martha in my mind, nor is there a right or wrong way to be woman or  man.

Ecofeminism is the most integrated of all the strands of feminism, and is a neat fit for progressive Christianity. Ecofeminism states that the same ideology that plunders nature also plunders women. This takes me back to my seminary days when I was taught that built into creation is an order that is divinely ordained. The order runs from God to man to woman to animals to plants. It’s part of the justification in Sydney for not ordaining women. They speak of a slippery slope. If women are ordained, then what will come next? Will we be ordaining dogs, or maybe even homosexuals?

Thinking back to my seminary days always makes me thing of the joke that asks the question, “Why did God create Eve?” Well, when God finished the creation of Adam, She stepped back, scratched her head, and said, “I can do better than that.”

In my mind that joke is just as ludicrous as the notion that God built a domination hierarchy into nature.

Ecofeminism takes us to the heart of an ideology that sees all events, all processes, all relationships, and all social issues as being connected. One affects all others, and each is created by all the others. Its not so much about an order as it is about the layers of meaning and cause and effect. It leads us to see that people are poor for many complex reasons. It leads us to see that gender is a multi-layered reality.

So, what can we do as people with a great concern for gender issues?

We can use our Hebrew and Christian Bibles sensitively. We can acknowledge that God has been seen as male for long enough. We can acknowledge that the Bible was written by men and primarily for men; therefore it has a gender bias built into it. This gender bias needs to be critiqued. We can acknowledge the role of a misapplied  Bible even today in the degrading of women, in curbing women’s rights and locking women into narrowly defined ways of being ‘feminine’. .

There was a man who studied with me in seminary who felt so strongly about women not teaching men, that in our church history class taught by a woman, he sat in the front row with his hands covering his ears. He did this every day for the whole year she taught us. He did this because of his earnest desire to follow the teaching of the Bible. It was so offensive, and yet he is now running some Anglican church in Sydney and no doubt in that church there are no women teaching in groups where men are present. After all he would say that a gendered hierarchy is built into nature by God ‘Himself’.

Women are silenced, beaten and killed because of an ideology that seems to be present in the misapplied Bible we inherit. Now it is time for us to address the abuse.

Here in the final weeks of Lent before we begin recounting the journey of Jesus to his death we become mindful of the reality of suffering, but never glorifying suffering.   Suffering is inevitable, and can lead to positives in the many layers of meaning we uncover in it. However we neither glorify victims of suffering, nor do we condemn anyone to being a victim of suffering. In more traditional views of Jesus death, where he suffered because of the sins of the world according to God’s plan, Jesus was the victim. It’s not much of a stretch from there to saying that women should carry their cross without complaining. More progressive views see Jesus death as a sad commentary on the power politics of his day. In this view, rather than looking for the victims, we look for those who will take up the same liberation cause as Jesus. We look to empower those on the edge as Jesus empowered those who were marginalized in his world.

Inspired by Jesus we will dream of being a church that doesn’t lock people into disempowering models of gender, race or class. We will speak of God as the source of all life enriching human experience and the ground of all human qualities. We will see the world not as Christian and not Christian, men and women, but as human beings existing in a multiplicity of interconnected relationships.

I want to conclude with the image of a pendulum. This huge silver ball with a needle point, hanging by wire from a fixed point on the ceiling high above has been used to explore the rotation of the earth, to keep time and to measure the shape of the earth. The pendulum swings perpetually, given momentum by the instability of the solid floor beneath it. The mechanism seems harmless and gives a sense of a comforting permanence. It needs only occasional energy nudges to keep its momentum.

Human life proceeds with a similar energy and momentum, consisting of what appear to be opposites existing in tension with each other. The balance is always found in the dynamic push and pull of these apparent opposites. What better metaphor could there be for a progressive church? How does this metaphor relate to gender?

The pendulum has been swinging towards an extreme in one direction for thousands of years. A male God, a male Bible and a male church structure has meant that two thirds of the members of the institution and 50% of the globe’s population have been in a hugely unequal position. If we are aiming at equality, the only way to redress the imbalance is to allow the pendulum to swing freely in the other direction. This will mean making special efforts to celebrate women in church, to set policies whereby women are equally represented. It will mean watching our language closely, choosing texts carefully. Isn’t this beginning to sound like Liberation Theology again? Those who have been kept at the edge of the church must now have their voices heard. We will stand in solidarity with women in and out of church.

This will take us on a journey to the centre of nature, to a concern for environment, to advocacy for poor women and women who have more than one battle for equality to fight because of their ethnicity.

Mary Daly has been a radical feminist and critic of the institutional church for many years. She ran courses at Boston College until 1999 which were for women only. In 1999 she was retired after a legal injunction to have a man admitted to her class was successful. Daly said this, “It takes a few people who are willing to live on the fringes of society to pull the median in the right direction.” Will we stand in that fire together here at Christ Community Church? Will we dare? If we won’t, which church will?

Daly’s comment takes us back to the visitor at the fringe of the Anglican Synod in Sydney. The woman whose words are still ringing loudly in my ears helped to begin my journey. Her voice continues to be silenced by churches at their own peril. Her words are now ringing in our ears as well. “Just give us a go!” The responsibility has been laid squarely on us as people who have inherited Jesus’ revolution: to empower those with the least power to be all that they can be, to free those imprisoned by cultural norms to flourish as human beings, to nurture a love that crosses boundaries of gender as we seek together a universal sprit of both care and justice.