For Barbara Schlachter, 2/22/2016 Bishop Alan Scarfe
Please repeat after me: “We Are Easter People” and “Alleluia is our Song.” So, who are we? And what is our song? Amen. Please be seated.
Among the many remembrances that have poured in to honor Barbara, this proclamation we have just shared from one of her sermons had had a profound impact on one person – even thirty years later.
I dared to begin writing this sermon immediately on hearing of Barbara’s death. I did not have any readings, or the reminiscences of the family and friends for that matter, and when the readings were passed on I admit to a little disappointment. I was sure she would have had us twisting in the wind with a few soul challenging lessons. – a Gospel with the women around Jesus up front and center stage, the first witnesses of the resurrection and clearly the original Apostles of the Church; or Jesus wondering if when He returns will He find faith on earth; or something juicy from Micah or Isaiah 58.
Then I thought a little more and began to understand. We normally let Romans 8 and John 14 fix our gaze on our eternal destiny. They bring hope to us in the face of death. “Not even life nor death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus,” or “ Be not afraid – in my Father’s House there are many mansion, I go to prepare a place for you”.
Did Barbara need such assurance? Or did she believe we needed such assurance? Is that the woman who decided to spend the last ounce of energy in her body to surround herself with the liveliest Irish music in town and be there to experience it live and alive? Of course not. So turn the lessons around to focus in on us as living servants of God and you get a very different picture.
These are not lessons about her death but about her life. They are the why of her very being, the impetus and motivation for her passions and goals. Because she was so convinced that Nothing could separate her from the love of God in Christ Jesus and that for her Jesus was the way the truth and the life, she was free to become the extraordinary woman we celebrate today.
“We are – Easter People. And Alleluia is our Song.” This is a declaration of the living, and it is why she could wait until social security kicked in and then go and get arrested before the White House!
Mel told me last night of how he had been in the pew during their days at White Plains, listening to the preacher, and beginning to get quite moved by what was being said. He was inspired, he realized, and then said to himself “that’s my wife up there!” He asked me: “do you know what it is like to be inspired by your wife?” I said, “Of course.”
Mel and Barbara met as undergraduate seniors at an Urbanization Conference in Chicago. Ohio and Nebraska came together over a bottle of vodka and we all know what happened after that. They began a conversation that went on for more than 48 years. Of course, Barbara dictated the direction – getting Mel a summer job as a bell hop at a resort near her home in Ohio so that they could spend the next summer together. Within a year they were married, in 1968. Mel moved to New York where Barbara was already a theological student at Union Theological Seminary. To everything there is a time including two forces for justice and peace becoming one during one of the most turbulent years in contemporary American history. Barbara’s action of going to Seminary was in itself an act of faith, as was her joining the Episcopal Church – a church in which ordination of women seemed far from the horizon. No one reckoned on the energy and focus of Barbara.
“I am not afraid to die,” she told me earlier last week. “Just not ready to say goodbye.” One trip home later and one exuberant evening with the Gaelic Storm and somehow she must have found that additional strength to do the hardest act any of us have to do – just as she had found the strength throughout her life for so many things and for so many of us. My personal message of thanks to her was for her never giving up on encouraging my ability to stand firm on those things that matter for the finest possible outcomes for the human race, and for the fragile earth – our common home.
Barbara was formidable – well beyond her physical frame. To everything there is a time, and her time was to be on history’s front line in the great fight for women to become priests. Being among those five deacons in New York who were refused progress to the priesthood, and who turned up on the day that their male counterparts were being ordained priest, to claim that they too were ready and felt the call of God and thus they presented themselves to the Bishop who could only say how his hands were tied. She strategized by getting Bishops’ wives to put pressure on their husbands to rethink their position with regard to women priests. Yes there is such a thing as ecclesiastical pillow talk, and we can only wonder what their threats were. Barbara worked during the 1976 General Convention for the formal regularization of her eleven sisters in Christ who had pushed the envelope further by being ordained without official sanction in Philadelphia in 1974; and alongside the achievement of the 1976 General Conventions’ approval of women priests, she became one of those first to be officially ordained on January 20th, 1977 as soon as the canons came into effect. Yes, to everything there is a time, and Barbara made sure she was in the center of that time as a time to plant and a time to tear down, a time to push and a time to affirm, a time to let God’s will be done, not only for The Episcopal Church but within the Church Catholic.
Pioneers have to be strong, and they have to have a tough edge to them. Barbara as a priest would never stop promoting the status and dignity of women, and understanding that to be the uplifting of the dignity of the whole human race. When forming a women’s group at the parish level at Christ Church Cedar Rapids, it had of course to be entitled “Women of Excellence.” There was no hint of elitism in this title, but a pure and unadulterated declaration of aspiration – offered to all and in all humility by a grace filled life that knew nothing could ever separate from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
A married priest couple is still a difficult combination for Bishops. Think however how rare it was in the late 1970s and 1980s. Bishops were in fact too scared to hire them fearing that the stress of two priests in one house would break up the marriage. In their own turn Barbara and Mel became gatherers in support of similar couples as more women became ordained. Their professional life was hardly settled. I must say that I tried chronologically to follow the pair of them during those days in New York – now one was working for the church, and now the other. One was a teacher as the other one served and then the other counseled or became a chaplain. I even tried to map it out on one of Lauren’s graph papers but it didn’t work. See me afterwards if you are interested further! It really didn’t settle down until they became co-rectors in New York and Ohio.
As an early pioneer Barbara became a token woman on Executive Council and she served on the Church Deployment Board. She chaired NECCA, the shop steward of the Episcopal Clergy. She never stopped working for the advancement of women clergy. She served on the Committee for the Status of Women and in 2006 celebrating the thirty years of ordained women she took on the task of developing a timeline which would go around the church where we Bishops would be meeting to elect the new Presiding Bishop and which would include among the finalists the first woman Bishop.
Let Barbara’s own words describe her emotion at the announcement that in fact our new Presiding Bishop would be a woman.
“When George Werner, President of the House of deputies, alluded to John Coburn’s way of handling the controversial vote thirty years before. I still didn’t get it. Okay, let’s have silent prayer and then be quiet out of respect. But when he said “The next presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church is the Rt Rev Kath…” I made a sound that sounded like a strangled breath, and around me there was a sucking sound as the Holy Spirit filled our lungs and our minds with this news. And then I sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed. I realized I had underestimated God and Her plans for the Church, and I realized that Katharine was a new type of woman leader. Pat Merchant made an eloquent statement in the House of Deputies and I realized that neither she nor I nor the other women who had been part of things so long ago could have been elected to such a position. We bore the pain and the scars in our bones. We had a cellular memory of discrimination and suffering that made us like Moses. We had been the ones to lead the victory through the Red Sea and to lead this new people in the wilderness, but we could not take them to the Promised Land. We were on the mountain watching Joshua lead them on the rest of the way. This brilliant and competent woman, who had been ordained less than half the time we had, carried no such memories, she would be able to do the work of the next phase.”
She mentions how Mark Andrus rushed over to place Katharine’s name on the timeline – I have to say that I was right behind him.
Barbara felt a great honor to be asked to preach at the ordination of the first women priests in Swaziland. One of the messages arriving for today comes from the first female Bishop of the Anglican Church in Africa, Ellinah Wamukoya and those priests – Orma and Nancy – to whom Barbara preached that day. As she preached she was connecting the movement of the Spirit in apostolic fashion from one side of the globe to the other. For let there be no mistake, she was an apostle, and as such a Bishop’s priest – keeping us on the straight and narrow which of course often meant urging us to support those who were not straight and ever leading us to broaden our minds and hearts and in understanding the wide demands of God’s mission. She saw potential within our limitations, and prayed for our better selves to hurry up and develop.
In Swaziland, as we came out of a ramshackle hut which was an orphans’ schoolroom in Mpaka Valley, she whispered to me – “Well, I think Christ Church, Cedar Rapids has found its new calling.” In 2011 I dedicated a new sanctuary there along with a couple of new school buildings under the name of Christ Church – I think the only Christ Church in the Diocese of Swaziland. Cedar Rapids has been the center of our companion diocese relationship with Swaziland ever since, helped of course by people like Melody, Paula, and Cheryl, but there was a time to whisper, and out of Barbara’s whisper new things were born.
Before her illness arose, she was busy promoting our other companionship with Brechin, bringing its center among the Episcopalians of Iowa City and Coralville. This year we will see young people from each diocese gather in pilgrimage in Dundee as we seek to build relationships and leadership into the future generations.
That such a generation will have a planet on which to do all that brings me back to her final yearning – to groan with Mother Earth for the children of God to be revealed – children of God who care for our common home; children of God who are learning to walk gently on this earth and who notice with what and whom they are connected; children of God for whom it matters with what quality and attention we live and with what quality and attention we treat others.
Who of us are ready to be converted in our retirement years to a wholly new cause? Barbara let the Spirit do just that. To everything there is a time – except a time to rest, though to be fair she was unapologetic in saying that she was going to enjoy spending time seeing her grandchildren and being that one and only Grannie, along with her new call as one of the 100 grannies for a livable future. Her rest was to enjoy loving and celebrating those dear to her.
Finally I go back to where I began. No one takes a dying person on a jail break out of hospital to celebrate a 70th birthday – but Barbara’s family did for Mel’s 70th. Nor do they follow it up with a night on the town at the Gaelic Storm concert – but the Schlachters do. And you got the idea that chief ring leader was Barbara herself. That says everything you need to know about the love and strength of Barbara’s family.
There however was one thing that was still separating her from the love of God as she came home that final time – a chocolate milk shake! And so with that goal achieved nothing else was standing in her way to be able to say goodbye; and leave us without any doubt whatsoever that we have lives to live – lives buoyed by the love of God in Christ Jesus, lives centered on Jesus as our way, truth and life, and lives which are invited to recognize our time for everything under heaven, our historical moment, our time to advance the revolution of the One Holy Trinity, as Barbara has in her time. Thanks be to God.
