Jan.16, 2022 Isaiah 62:1-7; 10-12
You have identified four women leaders to serve God as elders elected to our session. Thankfully, those same four women leaders have felt called by God to serve at this time—they said yes! Today we will ordain Ernestine Alston to the office of ruling elder, and install her, Jamie Wilkins, Johnnie Summers, and Stella Ngang. It is a special joy for me to see three of them returning to service—even though they know what to expect. They know the kind of commitment they are making, they know the satisfaction and pride at working with their fellow elders to reach wise and careful decisions affecting the life of our church family. And we have one woman who has been a member here for about half a century agreeing to serve God in this new way! You see, you can learn and do new things even when you are in the third age of life, as our Cuban family describes the life stage of being a wise, experienced senior citizen.
It is fitting that we welcome in these four women to leadership positions in our church family on the Sunday that I begin using the Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church by Wilda Gafney. Gafney is an Episcopal priest, a Hebrew scholar and one who delves into the scriptures from a woman’s perspective. She has created a new lectionary which tells the stories of scripture with a focus on the stories of women, named or unnamed, or present but obscured in the translation. Following a tradition from medieval times, there are multiple lectionaries available today, each one assigning multiple texts to each Sunday of the year so that listeners are exposed to a broad swath of the Biblical story and not just to the preacher’s favorite texts. So common is lectionary use that more than half of the 2 billion plus Christians in the world get their exposure to scripture in worship through a lectionary and the preacher’s selection of the passages assigned for that day. Most Presbyterian preachers use the Revised Common Lectionary, which was established in 1992. It is a three-year cycle, covering one of the synoptic Gospels each year, and sprinkling the gospel of John in throughout each year. Four texts are assigned for each Sunday, an Old Testament, a Psalm, a Gospel, and a New Testament reading. During my tenure here, I have also used the 4-year cycle of the newer Narrative Lectionary, which covers one gospel each year, following the story straight through the gospel instead of jumping around, with Old Testament stories included in the summer. There is also an African American Lectionary and a Roman Catholic Lectionary. Put together by the Consultation on Common Texts with representatives from 20 Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations in the US and Canada, the lectionary cannot include every story in the Bible, and that group of consultants, mostly men, had to make choices about what to include.
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Hunting Ridge Presbyterian Church 