'We are all Ministers'

January 24, 2022
Matthew Potts
Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church.

The Reverend Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at HDS, and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, delivered the following remarks at Morning Prayers in Harvard's Memorial Church on January 24, 2022.

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It is good to have you back here in the sanctuary after we've been away from it for a bit, not just because of the break in term, but also because of the latest surge of the pandemic. But it's good to have you at the beginning of the Spring term, on this beautiful winter day. And I'm going to resume my habit of speaking to you about saints from my tradition.

Today is the Feast Day of Florence Li Tim Oi, who was the first woman ordained a priest in my churches, in the Anglican Communion, the first woman ordained a priest. But the circumstances of her ordination are complicated.

Li TimOi was born in 1907 in Hong Kong. In 1931, she was present at the Cathedral for the ordination of a woman to the diaconate as a deacon. This was allowed at the time. And she was inspired by that to go study theology in Mainline China. She returned to Hong Kong in 1938, where she worked in Santo António with refugees of the Sino Japanese war. She was ordained to deacon in Hong Kong and then sent by her Bishop, a man named Richard Hall, to Macau to do work in Macau. This is the late '30s, early 1940s. Japan occupied Hong Kong. And there were no priests in Macau. And the Bishop could not get a to Macau. And so, he gave Florence permission to administer the sacraments, to celebrate communion.

In my tradition, that's not a thing that deacons can do. It's also not a thing that women at the time could do. Hall wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and said, "I don't believe in women priests, but if I could get to her, I would ordain her, because I'm determined that no prejudices should prevent congregations committed to my care from having the sacrament s of the Church."

In 1944, they were able to meet. They met at a small town, kind of secretly, and he ordained her. And she continued her work as a priest. And then the war ended, and there was a furor over this ordination. Lots of folks, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, railed at the irregularity of it. That was the language that they used. And she renounced her license to practice. She never renounced her ordination, but she renounced her license to practice.

In 1958, after the Revolution, churches in China closed. She was forced to undergo political reeducation. She was abused. She had to cut up all her vestments. She would retreat in the mountains to pray in secret. Eventually, she moved to Canada. In the '70s, women became ordained in various churches in the Anglican Communion, and she started working as a priest at the end of her life, in Toronto.

Florence Li's story is obviously a complicated story, a story complicated by gender and racism and colonialism and violence. It's one that implicates me personally in lots of ways, not just because I am a priest in a very hierarchical church that only lets priests do certain things, not just because I'm a man in that church, also because I'm a Japanese person. And she was the victim of really complicated movements of colonialism in East Asia.

But what I find interesting about her story is that the man who ordained her, Richard Hall, did so even though he opposed the ordination of women, because he said necessity demanded it. The people needed a minister and she was their minister. The truth is, there is no ministry without necessity. There is no ministry without need. There's a famous Christian writer named Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian, who has this famous line about vocation in which he says, "Vocation is where your greatest gift meets the world's greatest need." That's a lovely way to put it.

When I talked to my Bishop about becoming a priest, he said, "You might want to be a priest, but we need to figure out if the church needs a priest like you." He gave the example of a desert island. He said, "If you went to you were on a desert island and you really loved to cook, and you felt like it was your life's location to cook, but you're trained as a surgeon, and there are three other cooks on the island, we might need you to be a doctor, whatever you feel on the inside."

One of the characteristics of our Protestant tradition, my denomination's Protestant tradition, this church's Protestant tradition, is this basic presupposition that we are all priests, in fact, that there is a priesthood of all believers, that we are all ministers. And if ministry is based in need, then what that means is that this is another way of saying that the world needs you.

I think these are words with which to begin this Spring term at Harvard, when the needs of the world clamor all around us and crowd around us, shouting their demands, to remind ourselves that we are ministers, which again is another way of saying, the world needs you. Whether you are young or old, rich or poor, strong or weak, smart or not so smart, holy or not so holy, full of faith or not really sure about any of this, the world needs you.

The Lord be with you.