Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 18: 1–14a; Psalm 15 (sung); Colossians 1: 15–28; Luke 10:38–42
Church of Scotland, Geneva, Auditoire de Calvin, July 20 2025
The Church of Scotland has always ordained women as elders and ministers. Margaret Knox, the young second wife of the more famous John Knox, was one of the first women ordained as elders, following the Scottish Reformation in 1560. True or false?
No, it’s not true. I’m telling you a pack of lies. But I’m telling you lies for a reason.
We are so used nowadays to women playing an important part in our congregation and the wider church as elders or ministers or in many other roles. Easily we forget that it is only within the lifetime of many of us that the Kirk agreed that women could be ordained as elders or as ministers.
*
It was 1963. I was 14. Mary Lusk stood at the bar of the general assembly of the Church of Scotland asking the church to test her call to the ministry of word and sacrament.[1]
Attempts had been made earlier in the last century to open the door to ordaining women. They all failed. But these were the Sixties. The times they were a-changin’. Perhaps, Mary Lusk and others thought, all it would take to unlock the door now was one persuasive case brought before the assembly.
She was already a deaconess in the church and licensed to preach. She had already been an assistant in the parish of Inveresk, lectured in St Colm’s College, and served as an assistant chaplain in the University of Edinburgh. She felt that this last appointment was one where the full ministry of word and sacrament should be exercised; and she felt personally called to that ministry.
To the assembly she said: “The fact that I should be required to show special cause to be ordained seems to me a curious situation; for my plea is that as a person I may share in the whole ministry of the Church, and may therefore be eligible to be ordained to any particular ministry within the Church.”[2]
Her 15-minute plea moved the assembly, and it might well have granted her crave there and then. But the Church of Scotland is a little like an ocean liner or an oil tanker, slow to change its direction and adjust its course.
The assembly kicked her petition into the long grass. It referred the question to the Panel on Doctrine – a group of theologians, naturally (then) all male, one of whose tasks was to cast an eagle eye on the doctrinal implications of any proposed change. And here she ran into trouble.
*
Tom Torrance was one of the most intelligent theologians of the 20th century, but he was also prone to get a bee in his bonnet. This time he got a bumble bee.
He argued, and persuaded the Panel on Doctrine to agree, that “the basic unit of humanity is not the individual human being, male or female, but man-and-woman as one… [I]t is not man without women nor is it woman without man that is made in the image of God, but man-and-woman. This relationship… is the basis of the doctrine of Christian marriage and also of the doctrine of the ministry of men and women in the Church.”[3]
On this basis, he took the eccentric view that in the ministry of the whole Church, men were to exercise a “presbyteral” function and women a “diaconal” function: in plain English, men might preach, baptize, and preside at the Lord’s Supper, while women might serve. In an incautious moment, he allowed himself to say that their proper service was to be “unassuming, unpretentious, and unofficial”.[4] Perhaps they might cook dinner while their husband was finishing his sermon or working on his latest book.
Mary Lusk had no time for this theological gobbledygook. Addressing the assembly again the following year, she said, “This bears no relation whatsoever to what I find in the New Testament. There we find that we are all being conformed to the image of God in Christ in so far as we die and rise again in Him… [There] I find women being accepted fully as individuals whom Christ has redeemed and who may therefore conform to His image.”[5]
But the effect of the red herring Tom Torrance drew across the trail of the petition was to throw the assembly into some confusion. Only in 1966 did it agree that women could be ordained as elders, and only in 1968 that women could be ordained as ministers.
*
That was then, and this is now. Torrance and other leading diehards very quickly abandoned their objections; and today we can see how deeply the Church of Scotland is enriched by the presence among us, on equal terms, of women elders and ministers alongside their male counterparts.
*
It is in the light of such stories as that of Mary Lusk – or Mary Levison, as in the course of those years she became – that we should understand the short reading from Luke’s Gospel that we heard this morning: the story of Martha and Mary.
Too often – and even if we are not ourselves male – we hear this story through male ears, or we read it through male eyes.
As Tom Wright says, “It has been customary to play the two sisters off, passive spirituality versus aggressive fussiness. Mary wins, but at a cost: as feminists point out, this model keeps both in the neat boxes devised by a male world, the one sedate and devout, the other making the tea and sandwiches.”[6]
We need to read the story differently, for this way of reading does justice neither to Martha nor to Mary.
*
Take Martha first. If we’ve been paying attention – or even if we haven’t – we may have noticed throughout this service a dialectical dance of hospitality and generosity. We come to God: God comes to us and changes us. We welcome Christ: Christ welcomes us and transforms us.
Three men show up at a tent under the oaks at Mamre, near Hebron. They are, we learn in the course of the story, divine messengers. They are, we learn, the Lord God in disguise. They get a meal. Against all odds, Sarah gets a son.
Abraham, Sarah, and a servant boy hasten to make the strangers welcome. Sarah bakes bread. Abraham selects a calf, and the servant boy prepares it. Together with the bread and meat, they offer the strangers curds and milk. It’s hospitality in the Middle East.[7]
This is what Martha is doing also, even if she’s feeling harassed and overworked. She’s welcoming her friend Jesus of Nazareth.
And this is what we also do, Sunday by Sunday, as we welcome friends and strangers to worship, share bread and wine in communion, and afterwards offer refreshments and sometimes even lunch.
We too are generous and hospitable. But how much more generous is God! And how much more hospitable is the risen Christ!
*
Turn now to Mary. It’s a male view, and indeed a male fantasy, to think that Mary is seated at the feet of Jesus “to gaze languidly with drooping eyelids”. Mary is not a groupie, she’s a student.
Here again, I’m borrowing from Tom Wright.[8]
Before he became the apostle we know as Paul, from his Greek or Latin name, Saul of Tarsus sat at the feet of Gamaliel. He was a pupil of Gamaliel. He was learning about his Jewish faith. Later on, the pupil became a teacher of both Jews and Gentiles – and then some!
In our story, Mary crosses a boundary. She intrudes into a male world of study and discipleship. Says Jesus, she has the right to be there. More than that: it is better for her to be there, rather than helping in the kitchen, even if, as may be, he’s a little worried about his supper.
*
Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things… but Mary has chosen the better part.”
What he says to Martha, he says to all of us.
Our four evangelists write about Jesus in his earthly life: what he did, what he said, who he was. But we should never forget that all our Gospels are written after Easter: after Jesus was crucified, died and buried, and after he was raised from the dead. They are written about a man who lived 2,000 years ago but who is, nonetheless, our contemporary, here in the midst of us when we gather in his name.
In our congregation, we have many things to do, and – as we wrote in the July newsletter – those of us who are worried and distracted by them could do with a little help from those who are able and available to provide it.
But the “better part” we can all share in together.
Sunday by Sunday – and, if we are carried away by enthusiasm, on other days of the week as well – we can sit at the feet of the risen Christ as pupils, as students, and listen and learn, as he talks to us about God, the world, and ourselves – and opens our eyes and our ears and our hearts.
[1] For what follows, see Mary Levison, Wrestling with the Church (London: Arthur James, 1992)
[2] Wrestling, 60f
[3] Wrestling, 76
[4] Ibid.
[5] Wrestling, 83f
[6] NT Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings. Year C (London: SPCK, 2000), 88
[7] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1992). “The Laughter of Sarah”, 157ff
[8] loc. cit.