Too Good to Be True

Beloved in Christ,

This July will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the ordination of the first women as priests in the Episcopal Church. Of the eleven women who were ordained in 1974, two years before it was officially authorized by the General Convention, two were from Minnesota: Jeannette Picard and Alla Bozarth-Campbell. Many, many other Minnesota Episcopalians, lay and ordained, worked, prayed, and fought to make it happen. That's a history in which I take enormous pride. 

Fifty years later, it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that there was a time when it seemed almost unimaginable. The journey toward women's ordination required courage, resilience, savvy political organizing, and steadfast commitment in the face of opposition and challenge. But as much as any of that, it took great faith. Faith, as the scriptures remind us, is the "assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). Our common life has now been shaped for the better by several generations of women in priestly orders because those early prophets could see what others could not, and they believed in the power of God to bring it into being, despite the odds and the evidence. 

From the beginning of Genesis, all the way to this very moment, God is always in the business of reshaping God's people, expanding our horizons, bringing new people and new voices into the center, bringing into being that which we cannot see and can only hope for. We are built on the foundation of so many apostles, prophets, patriarchs, matriarchs, and unknown heroes who have had the courage and imagination to see what so many could not.

As we celebrate this critically important milestone in our history this year, what unimaginable, unseeable, crazy-sounding vision of justice, of vitality, of beloved community is God calling us to be prophets of in our own day? How can we, in this season when we celebrate the God who always does what is too good to be true, and too crazy to believe, live with the expectation that God will once again bring into being the unimaginable, for the sake of God's love being more fully done, on earth as it is in heaven?

Grace and Peace,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya