A Few Good Women

I’m acutely aware that most of the Bible is filled with the perspective of men, the leadership of men, and the stories of men. As I move through Acts, the mention of women is few and far between. They are there in brief snippets but they’re easy to skip over.

This Sunday we are honouring in worship two women of the congregation who died during Covid. I never met either one, but what I do know of them is that they served for decades in and out of the kitchen and took mission seriously. They were close friends and friends to others. They created things, cooked, raised families and stayed faithful to the church and to Jesus. They are the kind of women exemplified in Acts and the rest of the New Testament. They claimed their place in what was, and can still be, a male-dominated religion.

I hope to do them justice, and to do the women of scripture justice. Tabitha’s story from Acts 9, who was also known as Dorcas, is my main scripture, but I want to make mention of many others - Mary Magdalene the first evangelist, Mary and Martha, Jesus’ mother, Priscilla, Lois, Eunice. And I’m fascinated by how purple cloth is a recurring theme to do with some of these women and the ‘noble’ wife referenced in Proverbs 31.

Purple cloth was first associated with King David and found by archaeologists dating to his time. Purple has always been associated with royalty and priests. Dying cloth purple was a lengthy process back then, using liquid from glands of mollusks. The complex knowledge needed to do this as well as the time required made it an indicator of high social status.

Whether or not women in scripture fall under the category of dealers of purple cloth, and whether or not they achieved wealth and high status, we know that they were valued in God’s eyes. Jesus stopped not just to give them the time of day but to value their service and gifts and perspective. They were revived when left for dead, they were relied on to build the new church and they were honoured for what they contributed to their community by their God.

I’m hopeful that by Sunday I will have a quilt to display at the front of the church that has patches of purple, because I can’t help but think of those patches as being like the many, many women over the last century and more whose hands have sewn, cooked, washed dishes, held babies and crying children, steadied someone faltering, and shared gifts of music and craft and building bridges. I can’t imagine our churches without the backbone of their service and compassion. I don’t know where we would be if it weren’t for those hands that kept feeding and nurturing steadily throughout the decades.

I pray that all women in the church would know that they are royalty because of their God and the love that flows from the Divine onto and through them. I pray that they would flourish and know that their value is immense. I pray that the next chapter of the church will be filled with the stories and resilience of women as much as those of men.