There appears to be a movement of the Spirit these days drawing faith communities who utilize a lectionary to consider more intentionally the stories of women in Scripture. In 2022, our congregation for the first time made use of Will Gafney’s Women’s Lectionary. We found it to be a transformative experience, an opportunity to see God’s work in the world through an alternate focus and, because Gafney consistently used “she/her” pronouns for God in her translation of the Psalms, literally an invitation to reconceptualize God through our worship practices.
Debbie Blue’s Magnificat arises out of a similar liturgical context. It is a book of sermons on texts in the Bible that include women. House of Mercy, the church where Blue serves as pastor, took one year to forgo the Revised Common Lectionary and instead created a lectionary that featured stories of women (2).
As Blue starkly points out, “every text that comes up in the Revised Common Lectionary involves a man (as an author or character or voice).” But in order for every text that comes up in a lectionary to involve a woman, you have to create your own lectionary. And then, if you’d like to read a collection of sermons by a woman on lectionary texts that all involve women, you need a publishing house like JUANUNO1 to collect and publish such a volume.
Blue is by all accounts a fantastic preacher, and for those of us who have not had the privilege of hearing her preach in person, this book is a fantastic opportunity to hear her “voice” in print.
Each sermon begins with a reprint of the Scripture lesson on which the sermon is based. Blue then offers the sermon. Blue’s sermons are, I guess you might say, essayistic. There’s quite a lot of research and preparation on display, frequently comparing contemporary events or readings of Scripture to ancient commentaries. Blue also illustrates through her sermons a certain hermeneutical approach readers will find winsome. For example, she states in an early sermon, “the Bible isn’t a particularly optimistic book, really. It is more like glimpses of profound hope and love in the midst of of heartbreaking stories about people who aren’t especially good” (12).
Although some of the texts on which the sermons are based are widely familiar, some aren’t. For example, one sermon is on “the daughters of Zelophad.” Blue’s opening words about this text are worth quoting in full:
“It’s not every day that you’re going along reading the Bible and suddenly there are five sisters confronting all the male leaders plus God. It’s not often you find a story in the Bible where women challenge God’s law (some of which had been set in stone at Mount Sinai) and Moses checks with God, and God says, the sisters are right. Sorry. My bad. Change the law. Scratch that whole patriarchal thing we wrote at Mount Sinai about inheritance, give these women some land!
Seems like we should have a party. At least we should know these women’s names: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, Zelophad’s daughters” (61).
As a preacher reading these sermons, I received a lot. I was inspired to bring more of the church fathers or other ancient sources to bear on a contemporary reading of Scripture, but do so lightly, winsomely. I also found the sermons to be strongly exegetical, almost like conversational commentaries.
Perhaps my surprise was the extent to which Blue does not preach as “proclamation” or “address.” Which is to say, her sermons are seldom hortatory. She is rarely trying to get the hearer to do something, and also rarely trying to do something to the hearers directly by what is said (like, for example, receive a word of forgiveness or promise). I likely notice this especially as a Lutheran preacher trained in that tradition, so this is less a critique and more an observation of varying homiletical styles.
If you pick this book up and are trying to decide whether to buy or read it, I highly recommend paging to the end. Read Blue’s sermon, “Patriarchy In Drag: The Whore of Babylon.” It’s worth the price of admission, as they say, and also shares a bit more detail on how Blue’s congregation designed their year of a women’s lectionary.
In the sermon, she makes an observation that is, I believe, unfortunately true. “The reader must loathe the whore [of Babylon] because she is the source of all that is filthy, detestable, and obscene… do you think this rhetoric might have had an effect on the world—an effect other than keeping us from succumbing to capitalism, and believing in wealth and power? I think it’s possible that the sexist rhetoric in John’s apocalypse has had more effect than the critique of empire. I’ve come to this conclusion after looking around and seeing how things played out” (193).
Blue throughout the sermons takes a generous approach to her hermeneutics, but she is also free enough, at times, to make a point like this last one, that perhaps the author of Revelation contributed more significantly “to a misogynist reality that keeps perpetuating injustice against women in every imaginable way, than he succeeded in warning people away from the desire for wealth and power” (197). That’s a preacher right there.
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Thanks to Hernan Dàlbes at JUANUNO1 Publishing House for bringing the sermons of Debbie Blue to print. His publishing house translating works to bring progressive books to print and especially provide resources in the area where he serves, the United Evangelical Lutheran Church (IELU Argentina-Uruguay
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