Preached on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin (transferred), August 18, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Isaiah 61:10-11
Psalm 34:1-9
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 1:46-55
Our coffee-hour cake this morning featured an image of our Mary Shrine.
The amateur athlete Kathrine Switzer registered for and then ran the 1967 Boston Marathon. Her coach said he would help her run the race if she could complete the full distance in their training runs. But he warned her that, in his words, “No dame ever ran the Boston Marathon!” Switzer didn’t hide her female identity at the starting line, even wearing lipstick and refusing to remove it when one of her teammates warned her that she’d be ejected from the race.
What happened next is told in a 2017 article on the CNN website: “A few miles in, [Switzer] saw a man with a felt hat and overcoat in the middle of the road shaking his finger at her as she passed. Then, she heard the sound of leather shoes, a distinctly different noise from the patter of rubber soles, and knew something was wrong.
“[Switzer wrote in her memoir,] ‘Instinctively I jerked my head around quickly and looked square into the most vicious face I’d ever seen. A big man, a huge man, with bared teeth was set to pounce, and before I could react he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!”
“The man was race director Jock Semple. Press photographers captured Semple’s contorted face as he grabbed at Switzer’s numbers while her boyfriend pulled Semple off her.
“[Switzer] ran from the scene bewildered. She ambled on for a few miles before her anger transformed into energy and she took off for the finish line. Dropping out was not an option…
“[Switzer writes,] ‘…I knew if I [dropped out,] no one would believe women could run distances and deserved to be in the Boston Marathon; they would just think that I was a clown, and that women were barging into events where they had no ability. I was serious about my running and I could not let fear stop me.’
“She finished the race in four hours and 20 minutes, but would later be disqualified and expelled from the Amateur Athletic Union.
“Support soon eclipsed the fallout and she became a celebrity.”
The CNN article concludes with Switzer reflecting on gender equality in sports, saying, ‘We’ve come a light year but we still have a long way to go.’”
Kathrine Switzer made history, but to do so, she needed to summon and sustain a conscious disregard for the rules. And here in the Episcopal Church, we don’t just support athletes who advocate for equality in public sporting events, we also are known for other types of rule-breakers who teach us things that some of the rule-followers among us are not yet ready to learn.
Do you want to make the Church better? Do you want God’s people to do a better job proclaiming the Good News of justice, peace, reconciliation, and resurrection? If so, you may need to break a rule or two.
Every year, here at St. Paul’s, we break one particular little rule, a rule that is found in the fine print of our Book of Common Prayer. Compared to Kathrine Switzer, and compared to a few other people I will speak about in a moment, this rule-break here at St. Paul’s is definitely a small potato. It’s really a tiny rule, the one we’re breaking. But it’s significant that we are breaking it, and it is significant why we are breaking it.
Here’s the rule we’re breaking at St. Paul’s. I’ll read it at some length, just to give you a feel for how the Church sometimes sounds when we are inventing rules. You’ll find all of this on page 16 in the Prayer Book:
All Sundays of the year are feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to the dated days listed above [for example, December the 25th], only the following feasts, appointed on fixed days, take precedence of a Sunday:
The Holy Name [January 1]
The Presentation [February 2]
The Transfiguration [August 6]
The feast of the Dedication of a Church, and the feast of its patron or title [for us, that would be St. Paul], may be observed on, or be transferred to, a Sunday, except in the seasons of Advent, Lent, and Easter.
All other Feasts of our Lord, and all other Major Feasts appointed on fixed days in the Calendar, when they occur on a Sunday, are normally transferred to the first convenient open day within the week… With the express permission of the bishop, and for urgent and sufficient reason, some other special occasion may be observed on a Sunday.
If you still can’t work out what the rule is, much less how we at St. Paul’s broke the rule, you should congratulate yourself for being a socially well-adjusted person. We’re in the weeds here. This is the rule we’re breaking: We are not named “St. Mary’s Episcopal Church,” so it is irregular for us to transfer the August 15 Feast of St. Mary the Virgin to this Sunday. Transferring St. Mary disrespects the Sunday that got bumped, which was the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, which is one of the fifty-two Sunday feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But we break the rule twice, most years! In late September, no matter whether September 29th falls on a Sunday, we transfer the September 29 Feast of St. Michael and All Angels to the last Sunday of September. This also is … irregular! And we don’t even ask the bishop’s permission!
Now, normally I wouldn’t bring any of this up in polite, mixed company. I don’t like having the weird fine-print eccentricities of the church on display in the front of the house. We’re hearing a lot about “weird” people in our national politics these days, and I don’t want us to look weird to newcomers, or to people whose eyes would understandably glaze over if I pulled out page 16 and all of its mind-numbing calendar rules. All of this seems to fail the “Who cares?” test.
But I like that we break this rule a couple of times every year, again for two reasons. First, we are breaking the rule. St. Paul’s is a rule-following kind of parish, so when we break a rule, it is news of a difference. This bit of inside baseball seems trivial, but it might be worth your attention nonetheless, because we rarely do anything around here without a good reason, especially when doing the thing means flying in the face of the tidy, complicated, sometimes beautiful rules and rubrics of our communion.
The second thing I like about this rule-break is that we are doing it for an excellent cause: to raise up a rule-breaking woman, St. Mary the Virgin; and then, in September, a host of rule-breaking gender-fluid Angels. Think of Gabriel barging into Mary’s hut, uninvited, and telling her that her entire rule-breaking pregnancy is not a life-threatening scandal, but God’s will for a renewed earth! Mary was in big trouble; Joseph could have followed the rules and “put her away,” essentially dooming her to a nameless, landless existence as a shameful outcast. But the Angels, God’s messengers, bravely equipped Mary — and Joseph — to break a few rules.
This brings me to other rule-breakers in our Church, who broke far bigger rules than a calendar instruction. Late last month the Church celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the irregular, rule-breaking ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first women priests in the Episcopal Church. Their ordination inspired the ordination of four more women the next fall, and the change in our church canons at the following General Convention that affirmed the legal, regular ordination of women to the priesthood. Fourteen years after the Philadelphia Eleven were ordained, the first Black woman bishop of the Episcopal Church was ordained.
This fall I’m working on hosting a screening of the documentary, The Philadelphia Eleven, if only to give you all the experience of watching the Right Reverend Barbara Harris don the bishop’s miter for the first time. Was the Church ready for this? No. Was it the right and good thing to do? Yes.
Then, in the 2000s, the Episcopal Church was confronted with yet another rule-breaker, this time the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, an openly gay and partnered priest who was elected bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire. We were most definitely not ready for that, and years of painful schism followed. We didn’t yet agree that it was within the rules to elect and consecrate Gene, our sibling in Christ. But it was time.
You could say that the rule-breaking part of all these stories is the least important part. The rules are … well, they’re outdated, right? That’s why we break them! Persons of all genders should be welcome in amateur athletic events (and professional ones too, for that matter). Persons of all genders and orientations, leaders in God’s sight, should serve God’s Church. So maybe we look at that persnickety page 16 of our Prayer Book and we just say, “Big deal.”
But the rules do serve one good purpose: they mark the baseline that God transcends, right in front of our eyes. The old rules bring into sharp relief the need God’s people have for continuing reform, for ongoing renewal. In Mary’s song of triumph, she lists all the ways the world changes when God’s people get into what John Lewis famously calls “good trouble.” We break the rule before the world is ready. That’s how we move forward.
I will give one of the rule-breakers the last word. She tells us why all of this rule-breaking is so important. The Reverend Carter Heyward, one of the Philadelphia Eleven, spoke at the funeral of one of her sister priests, the Reverend Alison Cheek. Mother Carter said this:
“I’ll remind you that Sophia is an ancient image of God, specifically the wisdom of God. It’s who she was, our Alison, ongoing source of Sophia wisdom. Alison would want me to insist that the Philadelphia Ordination was the wake-up call to get moving and to do what Jesus of Nazareth did — stand with the marginalized, and embody courage in the face of cruelty, and lies, and bullying, and violence.”