"Gloriously & Perfectly Made" | Shana McCauley | October 6, 2024

This week I went to a board meeting. I went to Kansas to be a part of a group where– this is a group that specifically focuses on resourcing large parishes.

There are not a ton of large parishes in the Episcopal church, and so once a year, this group brings together folks. And many of you have been to these conferences.

So we had a presentation from somebody from the Church Center about statistics. Every year, every Episcopal Church– including the one that has $1, a budget of $1– fills out a parochial report, which is data from this congregation.

So we take attendance... I just want you all to know that. [laughter] All right, all right, you're with me.

So one of the things that we do is we count how many people approximately or specifically are here on a Sunday, and then we include information about our budget and about outreach and the very many things that we do.

And all of this information is aggregated, and then there are actually statisticians paid by the church who look at the information.

And so we had a woman come, and she talked to us about the parishes that are in the network, and the parishes that are similar to the parishes in the network that are not in the network– so, people we might invite to be along with us– and some of the trends alongside that information.

And so as we were discussing, I said, you know, in the Diocese of Oregon the Reverend Canon Chris Craun is facilitating– she, sorry, Chris Craun is the number two in the diocese, she's The Bishop's assistant, and she's facilitating a conversation around capacity.

And I really love this framing of the conversation. So if your congregation is small and doing ministry and has a limited budget, which we all do, and there's a fire and your Parish Hall burns down, your insurance is probably going to pay for most of the rebuilding. So most of the money for that is going to come back, but it will also require people to do the rebuilding to do the dreaming to imagine what that building will be used for next in the coming years. It will take people with the expertise and skill to know who to call to build this thing. right?

So the question is capacity. Do we have the capacity to rebuild or to build if something happens?

And then the next person to speak was a man I'll call Bob. And Bob said: You know, the really important thing in this conversation is capacity. Do we have the knowledge and skill if something happens to rebuild?

And I said, that's what I just said.

And then Mike, another person, says, like Bob said, the question is is their capacity.

I was fuming. I couldn't– I mean, this happens to other people... and it happens, um gentlemen, a little bit more to women. [laughter]

I couldn't believe it, and I sat there fuming, and I sent my husband an angry text message, can you believe this??

But this happens, right? And neither one of us is paid to be there, neither one of us is– this we don't lose anything by Bob getting credit for my comment.

But the thing is, is that after this, in the next months and years, when people think about who the right leaders are for this particular situation, the person they will remember for this is Bob, and not me, and not Chris Craun, and not the Diocese of Oregon, right?

So that guy from a different part of the country will get the credit for this, and he will be the one that they call on because he's the one with this great idea.

It matters. It affects the trajectory of my career honestly, right? So this one little incident, who cares? Bob is surely preaching at his church today. He may not even remember that he did this, he may remember this as his idea.

But nonetheless, it matters, right? And this is not surprisingly part of the outgrowth of some of the misogyny in the church, right.

I know, I know we don't have any of that.

So we've been ordaining women for 50 years in the Episcopal church. We celebrated this anniversary over the summer. Ordaining women to the priesthood for 50 years.

And we celebrated this anniversary over the summer. And what an amazing thing to reflect on 50 years of ministry, and I know that I follow women, amazing women in this place who really were– man, what what a path that I get to walk because of the women who walked it before me. And we still have work to do so.

This story, this story. There are two stories in Genesis of the creation, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. They're interesting to read side by side, to look at what this group of people wanted you to know about God and what this group of people wanted you to know about God. If you're that kind of nerd, pull out your Bible and read those two things.

But most times we mush together Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.

So in my Sunday School classroom– I started out as a– in a much more conservative denomination, and in my Sunday School, we mashed together the seven days of creation, right. In the morning that there was light and there was dark and God saw that it was good.

And then Genesis 1's creation story for humankind is that God creates man, and male and female in the reflection of God. That they're both created at the same time.

My Sunday school creation story skipped that. So seven days of creation, and then Adam was created, and all of the animals were created in subservience to humankind, right, into subservience to man, and then at the end, God looks and says oh he's going to be lonely, let's make him a woman to serve him.

So nobody– and then of course, you know, my Sunday School goes straight into Eve eating the apple and how women have pulled down the entire human race and now we have to struggle and toil because Adam– I mean, because Eve ate that stupid apple, right.

So they never had to tell me that it's women's fault because the story did it for them, right.

So if you stop and look at the actual story, there's a lot that we've added on top of it that isn't there.

So in the story, God creates human. Human.

So God creates human, and then God– I wonder how long that took, right, how how long that took, what shape that took, how many legs we had at some points, right.

But at some point, God settled on the two-leg two-arms, right, and then God made animals to be with humans right, and so there was fur and there were feathers and there were scales.

And I wonder about the delight that God and Adam– and human– God and human– must have had at this beautiful creation as it was being born.

And then after all of it is made, God looks at the human and says, gosh it seems like this human needs another human. And so in Genesis 2, it says that a deep sleep fell upon the human, and a rib was taken out and created– and from that rib was a woman was created.

So the "rib," that word that we use for "rib" is only translated as "rib" in this one place. So this word is used 40 times in the Hebrew Scriptures, and everywhere else in the Hebrew Scriptures it is either "side" or "side room."

So the likelier translation of this is that the human was split into two and made into two humans, two equal humans, the beginning, the end, and all of creation between them. A gift to each other.

God was delighted. God created human and animals and creation and another human, and God was done.

It is a beautiful story. It's the story of love, of a God who was curious and wondered and breathed life into something that wasn't.

This is a story that was kept for you and for me because our ancestors wanted us to remember that we are God's perfect creation.

Now you and I, we know that we didn't all descend from two people– there is a story part of this and a science part of this right.

It doesn't actually matter. That's not the story here.

We're not being told about these two people from whom you have to figure out, oh my gosh, incest and all that, right.

That's not the story. That's where we get stuck, that's the story that we sort of get hung up on, but really this is a story of creation.

Adam and Eve, the two first beings, they are all of us, because all of us were created in this perfect, spectacular way.

And God intended for us to have red hair and dark hair and for us to be all the genders that we live.

God meant for all of this to happen.

And God delights in all of this.

And for some reason we assign a celestial gender reveal party to Genesis 2 [laughter], and we get so hung up on how, look you guys, read it carefully: women are less than men, right?

And what we know is that this holds all of us back.

It holds all of us back.

If we can recognize that we together are God's creation, gloriously and perfectly made, this is a better story.

And it's the story that God intends for us.

Y'all, God made us. Just like this.

And God meant for each of us to bring what we bring– especially, especially how we bring it.

God meant for that to be.

God did not mean for me to be someone else, nor did God mean for you to be a person that you're not.

You and I we are created by a God who loves us, who delights in us. A God for whom we bring joy.

May we bring delight and joy and love to one another. Amen. [Applause]