50 Years of Women’s ordination for Lutherans in the US: Beyond darts in clergy shirts

50 years ago, the predecessor bodies of my denomination voted to ordain women. I was a kid at the time and not very churchy, so I had no idea that this was a big freaking deal when I entered seminary, five years later. I wasn’t trying to be a trailblazer. I simply knew the God who first whispered in my ear, then nudged me along, and finally hit me upside the head with a two-by-four, gave me no other choice. God wasn’t going to give me a moment’s peace until I entered seminary. 

This was a deeply spiritual, and private, call for me. I never had anyone ask me, “Have you ever thought of becoming a pastor?” It never occurred to them. That changed for me when I went to seminary. Classmates and faculty members affirmed my gifts for ministry; I never would have become a pastor without their nurturing presence in my life. I’m grateful, particularly to our seminary president, whose encouragement profoundly validated my call to ministry. 

The first day of seminary chapel, when I heard a woman read from the Bible in worship, I realized I had never heard a woman do that before. In my entire life. Then I started to notice all the other things I had never seen a woman do before, including lighting the candles on the altar! Needless to say, I had never experienced an ordained Lutheran pastor who happened to be female. 

There were a few other women studying to become pastors at my seminary. With only male role models, we were all figuring out what it meant to be a pastor and female. Was the answer for us to speak like men, relate to other people like men, and even dress like men? (When I began seminary, they didn’t make clergy shirts for women. I cried when I was finally able to wear one with the darts sewn in!) For years, I wrestled with what it looked like for me to be a pastor and eventually realized that the whole point was not that I could do it like a man. The point was that I could do it like a woman! But what did that look like?

When I was ordained, I became the first woman pastor in my district (what we used to call synods). As disoriented as I was in my new role, I also felt the weight of being an example for others. For those who were thrilled to see an ordained woman, I didn’t want to disappoint them, and for those who were convinced ordaining women was a huge mistake, I didn’t want to give them a reason to say, “I told you so.” I was hyper-conscious of how I would impact those who came after me. 

I can tell you the usual war stories about people who wouldn’t take communion from me or shake my hand. Once a woman threw me out of the hospital room when I came to visit her husband, who was dying. And there were those who insisted I was going to hell for doing what I was doing. But I was far more aware of those who supported me. Whenever a group of people heard me preach for the first time, I noticed women weeping in the pews. All their lives, they had heard the gospel preached with a male voice. Hearing it from a woman was a transformative experience for them. A number of older women confided to me that, if the Church had ordained women when they were younger, they would have become pastors. I knew that I represented something much bigger than myself. 

The greatest struggle I’ve had as a pastor, who happens to be a woman, is within myself. I am an outspoken person. I am passionate about what matters to me. I can take up a lot of space. That’s who I am. And I learned early on that, while these might be qualities that are admired in male pastors, not so much in me. I’ve struggled to find my own voice when others have told me that I need to defer, soften, and stifle. Unfortunately, I’ve internalized that and sometimes allowed it to shape the way I present myself to the world. As I’ve come to terms with my own inner sexism, I’ve been increasingly determined to stop apologizing for not meeting the expectations of others. 

That’s the part of the struggle that continues for me. I have been blessed with some great calls to serve congregations who respect my gifts for ministry. But there are still those “If I were a man…” moments for me. If I were a man, would that person have spoken to me like that? If I were a man, would I be so worried about how others perceive me? If I were a man… It’s the kind of question a woman asks when she longs for the time when she no longer has a need to ask it. 

In 2020, being a woman pastor isn’t unusual in my denomination. When I gather around a table with colleagues for a meeting, at least half of us are women. I rarely think about those days when I would have been the only woman at the table. I’m thankful we’ve moved on. I celebrate the fact that the gifts we bring to ministry really have very little to do with gender and more to do with the way the Spirit is always pulling us toward wholeness by including a diversity of life experiences within the Body of Christ. Ordaining women was just one moment along the way toward fully becoming the people God is calling us to be.   

Ordination - March 11, 1979

Getting Real with God

When I was a kid, we liked to hurl insults at one another. There were some classic lines, like, “Is that your head or is your neck blowing bubbles?” Or, “Do that trick again, open your mouth and make your face disappear!”One of my favorites was always, “Halloween’s over; you can take off your mask!” Well, that actually is what Ash Wednesday is all about for us as Christians. Mardi Gras is over, you can take off your mask.

Mardi Gras, which literally means Fat Tuesday in French, is one last day of revelry before the solemn season of Lent begins. One of the traditions of Mardi Gras is wearing masks. It’s not just a fun thing to do, but it actually has some significance. For this day, Ash Wednesday, the day when Lent begins, is the day when we remove our masks.

Back in ancient Greece, when they had plays, the actors wore very large masks to portray their characters. That way, even in an enormous Greek amphitheatre, people could see the facial expressions of the actors. The theatrical mask was called a persona. It’s a word that has been adopted in modern psychology to refer to the self that we present to the world around us. Our persona is our psychological clothing. Carl Jung said that “the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.”  It’s a mask that we can hide behind.

We all wear these masks. In many ways they’re useful. They can define the role we fill in the world around us and help us feel comfortable with one another. I spend a lot of time wearing the mask of a pastor. That’s the persona I present in order to perform a function. It wouldn’t be helpful for me to wear the mask of a computer geek or a politician or a basketball player when the people in my congregation need me to play the part of the pastor.

Sometimes we also wear masks to protect ourselves from being too vulnerable to others. That’s not such a bad thing either. We all learn what we need to do to protect ourselves in life, and that includes knowing the appropriate masks we need to wear in different settings.

But our masks become a problem for us when we use them to hide who we really are from others so that no one ever really gets to know us. Our masks become an even bigger problem for us when we use them to hide the truth about who we really are from ourselves. And, our masks become the biggest problem of all when we use them in an attempt to hide who we really are before God.

The truth is, despite our best efforts to hide behind the masks we wear, God knows who we really are. The point of Lent is to return to the relationship we have with God. The first step on our Lenten journey involves removing our masks so that we can be honest about who we are. Tonight Christians all over the world will go home and look in the mirror to see a reminder that we are mortal, that our time on this earth is limited and that our life belongs to God. Our masks will be gone and on our foreheads we’ll see an ashen cross.   

The life of faith is not about the masks we wear that make us look like good, moral people. The life of faith is about the relationship we have with God, and that relationship doesn’t stand a chance unless it’s honest.

So many of us miss this. We tend to focus on Lent as a time to clean up our act and we’ll engage in pious activities like fasting and good old fashioned groveling in confession for our sins. Those aren’t bad things to do, but they don’t necessarily lead us to a more authentic relationship with God. In fact, they can actually become yet another mask that we use to hide behind. For as long as we approach Lent with our agendas, we’re presenting a false self to God. We’re filling a role that we have created to God and we’re not the authentic people God has created us to be. We’ve become the religious person praying on the street corner when God longs to meet the person we are in the privacy of our room with the door shut, in secret.

So, how do we do that? How do we remove the masks we hide behind so we can have an authentic relationship with God? We won’t get there by directing how our relationship with God will go. We can’t make it happen by talking to God or searching for God. We can only meet God by getting our persona out of the way. It happens in moments when we’re open, undefended and immediately present.

God isn’t a commodity we can control. We can’t tell God what to do or invite God to be a part of our life. Because God is already present. Richard Rohr has said: “God’s Spirit is dwelling within you. You cannot search for what you already have. You cannot talk God into ‘coming’ into you by longer and more urgent prayers. All you can do is become quieter, smaller, and less filled with your own self and its flurry of ideas and feelings. Then God will be obvious in the very now of things.”

The practice of Centering Prayer is a way of finding silence and solitude where you can move away from the busyness of your life and focus on what really matters. Again, Father Rohr says, “authentic religion is more about subtraction than addition, more letting go of the false self than any attempt at engineering a true self. You can’t create what you already have.”

It can be scary to stand before God, stripped of all pretenses. But it’s the only way to a genuine relationship with him. God doesn’t want our religiosity, God wants our authenticity. As Psalm 51 reminds us, “God takes no delight in burnt offerings. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart God will not despise.” 

So, are you ready to get serious about your relationship with God? Are you ready to stop controlling that relationship by insisting on your own spiritual agenda? Are you ready to remove the mask of the false self you wear to keep your distance from God so you can open yourself up to an honest relationship with the one who knows you better than you know yourself? It’s time to stop pretending. It’s time to get real.

Going Off Script

Over this past week, I’ve been paying attention to the scripts that people follow. And I keep hearing the same script repeatedly. In fact, if you follow the history of civilization, it’s pretty much the same script, over and over. It’s about choosing sides. My side is better than your side and I’m going to prove my superiority by exerting power over you.

Within just one week, I saw it at the Superbowl, in the impeachment proceedings, during the Iowa caucuses, and the State of the Union Address. There’s us and there’s them. It’s our job, not only to protect us from them, but to push them down as far as we can on our way to the top.

It’s difficult, when everyone around us is following that script, not to get drawn into it. As I witnessed the president’s State of the Union Address, I felt myself clearly in an us against them state of mind. And it wasn’t a good place for me. I was all caught up in it, consumed with thoughts I’m not proud of. So, I decided to try something new.

I made up my mind that I was going to detach from all that I was seeing and observe it as if I were seated in an audience, a few hundred years from now, watching it all happen as a stage performance. Nothing that’s happening on that stage has anything to do with me. I’m just a part of the audience.

The characters and the plot are reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, like MacBeth or Julius Caesar. The plot is a classic tale of the battle for power, and it’s us against them.

This week we watched a pivotal, dramatic scene. A man who holds the most powerful position in the world enters a great hall to give a speech. It’s the hall where his enemies have been doing everything they can to remove him from power. And here he is, in this same place, with those who seek to bring him down, delivering a speech to assert his authority before the very people who are challenging it. Some are cheering and some jeering. This includes his adversary who has led the charge against him. She sits calmly, center stage, listening to his speech, as she is duty-bound to do. And then, when the speech is over, she rises to her feet and rips his words in half.  End of scene. Curtain. You have to admit that it makes for gripping theater. The kind of material that Shakespeare would have turned into one of his greatest plays.

If you can detach yourself from the scene and watch it as pure drama, you’ll notice that the plot is classic. Classic because it’s the same script people have been following from the beginning of recorded history – aligning themselves with their own people and doing everything they can to defeat their adversaries. It’s been the same us-against-them story in different forms, over and over again.

When you’re all wrapped up in the details as they unfold, it may be hard to see it. But when you’re observing from the audience, it’s obvious. Everyone is following their script and you know where it’s headed. Someone's gonna win and someone’s gonna lose. 

Now, imagine you’re watching a play like this unfold and suddenly, out of nowhere, a new character enters. And this character starts going completely off-script. He’s refusing to hate those who should be his enemies. He never asserts power over those he could easily defeat. When people come at him in anger, he refuses to respond in anger. When he’s hated, he refuses to hate back. When people harm him, he doesn’t retaliate, but he shows mercy. He expresses love and empathy for everyone on the stage.

It’s so disruptive that the other actors in the play have to pull him aside. "Listen, Mister, you’re not following the script. You’re messing everything up. If you can’t cooperate, we’re going to have to ask you to leave."

Well, he continues off-script-- loving his enemies, empowering the weak, welcoming outcasts-- until the actors can’t stand it anymore, and they physically eject him from the stage.

Now that he’s gone, they can return to the script. They can go back to demonizing one another, and attacking one another, defending their turf and obliterating their enemies.

Jesus went off script. And it did, indeed, get him killed.

His followers recognized the truth he spoke and lived. And they followed in the way he taught them, by going off script, just as he did.

If you’re looking for a way to live off script like Jesus did, read his Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew. He teaches about radical stuff, like praying for our enemies. Turning the other cheek. Refusing to retaliate against those who would do us harm, but returning love for hatred instead. 

There’s no future in following the script the world teaches us. If we continue to follow it, it will destroy us.

When’s the last time you’ve gone off script? How can you surprise people around you with your decency, your honesty, your love, your insistence on befriending those the world insists are your enemies? Together, as followers of Jesus, how can we disrupt the world around us by going off script?