Now, in Christ, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Greek, a slave or free, male or female. You are all the same in Christ Jesus. You belong to Christ, so you are Abraham’s descendants. You get all of God’s blessings because of the promise that God made to Abraham.

Galatians 3:28-29

I have already featured several photographs of the Rosa Parks bus, both in my original Ford Museum Post and then the focus on transportation a couple of days back. The Parks story highlights a critical moment in the struggle for civil rights and I am thankful we are still engaged with the narrative.

The bus, however, is just one part of a long and complex story that is not only still in progress but also under active threat of losing ground across the board.

So Rebekah and I were particularly interested in Ford’s “Liberty and Justice for All” exhibit – especially as its history is very much our own experience. In fact, it is the above photograph of Rebekah, deeply immersed in the “Women’s Suffrage” display, that fuels this post.

The Ministry Bus:

It was only forty-one years ago that Rebekah graduated from Columbia with her master of divinity M.Div degree. And, when I looked at this photograph – taking the seat Rosa Parks occupied so bravely – I thought about all the barriers erected to try and stop Rebekah taking a seat on the bus headed toward ministry.

From years of nay-saying when she was a child, to being told to “sit back down, God doesn’t call women” when she came to the front of a church for prayer, to being instructed not to interview because we were expecting our first child, to being urged not to accept the call to Pensacola because it was an “important” position reserved for “one of the men…”

Our experience at the three churches we served was, of course, always positive, always encouraging, always affirming, and always “successful” in ways we could never have imagined had we not absolutely believed in the generous Love of God, the arms-wide-open Good News of Jesus, and the liberating power of the Holy Spirit.

Yet so many forces, social and institutional, were (and continue to be) at work trying to thwart the progress of America toward fulling embracing the foundational principle of Liberty and Justice for All.

And these forces seem to have been given new vigor over the past decade and so much good work is under threat or already beginning to come undone.

This concerns me.

I thought this map (below), representing the progress of ratification for the 19th amendment guaranteeing the right of women to vote, especially interesting and in a way prescient.

Here’s the thing: The message of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus and the invitation for all of us to be reconciled with God, is all about the fact that the distinctions (the separations, the preferences, the exclusions, the hierarchies) imposed by humans are obliterated by God’s all-inclusive love!

Because in Christ, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Greek, a slave or free, male or female. You are all the same… You belong to Christ… You get all of God’s blessings…

ALL of the blessings and the opportunities and the love, because of Jesus – DEREK