A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Nina D. Grey

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

March 7, 2010

“Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideal, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for the noble duty and made the world beautiful for you.”

These are the words that Olympia Brown spoke in 1920 to the Racine, Wisconsin Church that she served from 1878 to 1887; these are the words she spoke in the year of women’s enfranchisement, six years before she died; and with these words the Rev. Olympia Brown paid homage to the Universalist faith that held her, the faith that sustained her, the faith that drew her into lifelong activism.

She was born in 1835, the first child of a pioneer family, and raised in Michigan, first in a little log cabin. Even as a little child she pushed boundaries and took risks. When barely older than a baby, her mother told her, she would head for a room where their supplies were kept, a place she wasn’t permitted to go, all the while chanting, “I mean to be good, I mean to be good, I mean to be good.” By this, she reports, her mother knew she was planning on a “forbidden visit to the sugar box.”

In her autobiography, begun when she was 76, she reports this incident and other stories of crossing expectation boundaries. Crossing boundaries of gender expectation became her life-long path.

She and her siblings were educated, because their parents were liberal and for the time, unusual. They believed that all their children should get the best education possible. So they educated Olympia at home, then at a public school. She was part of a literary society in the school, but discovered that only the boys were allowed to recite and debate.  The oldest, she had a lot of responsibility, but she was a cut-up too. She would not be kept in her place. She didn’t want that for herself and she didn’t want it for any girl or woman. Her parents sent her to Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, a supposedly cutting edge place for its time, but there her teachers said, “We never examine young ladies in algebra or Latin.” There she found out all the things young ladies were not allowed to do. She transferred to Antioch College, where the renowned educator Horace Mann was conducting “the great experiment” of coeducation.

Horace Mann brought in illustrious and brilliant speakers to enlarge the thinking of his students, but they were all men. Olympia Brown’s parents had taught her well and steadfastly encouraged her. Thus, she was convinced of women’s capacities and accomplishments. She gathered the women students together and they hatched a plan. They would bring Antoinette Brown to speak at the school.

They organized it. They paid for the journey. And Antoinette Brown came to Antioch. Antoinette Brown was the first American woman ever to be ordained, in 1853, but her ordination at a Congregationalist church was local, and not recognized by denominational authorities. The power of her speech stirred Olympia and enflamed what was already growing in her: a Call to Ministry.

Olympia’s family had not been churchgoers. What little affiliation they had was with Universalism. But she learned Universalism through her mother’s milk, and from both her parents’ encouragement. By their words and actions, they taught her the essence of Universalism: that a loving God included everyone, that all were saved, that every person is a child of God and therefore absolutely equal with every other person. And when she was finally challenged to read the bible, Olympia confirmed her view of a God of universal love.

She saw this in the stories of Jesus’ radical inclusion of the sinner, the outcast, simply everyone. She read it in the assurances he gave that no one is ever separated from the love of God. This faith became her passion and its truth became ever more solidly her truth.

Faiths that taught of hellfire and damnation made no sense to her. Surely the universal love of God for all humanity was a truth all would be grateful to hear, and so, caught up with her sense of call, Olympia applied to seminaries.

Meadville told her they would like to have her for a student but it would be too great an experiment. Oberlin said she could come but not “take part in public exercises.”

Mr. Fisher, the president of St. Lawrence University, the Universalist Divinity School in Canton, New York said she would be admitted, but he “didn’t think women should be called to ministry.” However, he left it up to Olympia and her God as to whether women were called.

Feeling uplifted by the latter statement, she made the trek to Canton, where she found out she wasn’t actually expected at all. Mr. Fisher thought he had discouraged her! But Olympia Brown didn’t discourage easily.

She graduated from St. Lawrence in 1863 and persuaded the Universalist powers-that-be to ordain her, despite their resistance. Daughter of pioneers, she, too, was a pioneer. A church in Weymouth, Massachusetts called her first to the pulpit; then she served in Connecticut, and finally in Racine, Wisconsin. Her faith called her to push boundaries for the sake of justice for all people. And never merely pietistic, she linked her faith to the challenges of the real world.
It was obvious to her. If we are all God’s children, all partake of the infinite love, all contain a spark of the divine, then we all need a voice in what concerns us. Not just all men but all women are equal. And equality demands justice.

She married and her spouse supported her ministry in every way. Her mother lived with them and took care of their children and the house while she was away.

And Olympia Brown was away a lot! Faith, she was sure, belongs in the public square. She took ministerial leaves of absence time and again, traversing the prairie, on roads that weren’t quite roads, but rather mud paths, in all kinds of weather, resourcefully finding men who would take her by coach or whatever vehicle available to the next town, getting lost and arriving late but at last, and finding people there who had waited long hours to hear her proclaim the equality of women and women’s right to vote.

For decades she organized and organized, first part-time, fitting it into her parish ministry, and then more full-time when she left the parish to devote herself to the work of suffrage.  Like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper*, she spoke to crowds wherever she went.

Olympia was a constant advocate at public meetings, conventions, and at congressional hearings. She spent long hours in strategy sessions. She shared platforms with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass and countless others committed to the cause of the women’s right to vote. She learned to speak from her passion and without scripts, and along the way she endured condemnation and threats and hardships that went way beyond inconvenience. She was undeterred, even when the suffragist movement encountered long slumps in energy and resources, as it did in the 1890s and very early years of the new century.

When I first went to seminary in 1976, I heard of women like Rev. Denise Tracy who in the early 1970s awakened the consciousness of their teachers to language that excluded women; and who by their activism convinced those same teachers to adopt inclusive language and insist on it in their classes. I was the first woman minister in Keene, New Hampshire, the first woman senior minister in Germantown in Philadelphia and the second woman senior minister here. In 1983 I was one of three women in my UU minister’s study group. There were 27 men. I felt like a pioneer. But learning about Olympia Brown made me realize that I am beholden to her, and other women minister pioneers, that small band which served our Unitarian and Universalist faiths in the late 1800s and early 1900s before the more recent entrance of many women into ministry. My women colleagues and I are standing on their shoulders.

Olympia Brown opened doors. She and others, who pushed the boundaries of expectations, opened doors to a breadth of women’s possibilities and more egalitarian ways of human relating.

Opening doors was her work. When, in 1920, she cast a federal ballot, she wondered about what we would do with the vote, now that we have it. Freedom is not an empty thing. It must have substance. If we are free to vote, what will we vote for? What is our work?

We know that the struggle for women’s rights is not yet finished. We have the vote, but so few women serve in congress. Reactionary forces gnaw at the freedom of reproductive choice we won in 1973, and the Stupak amendment** deepens the struggle. We need to engage that struggle as it is playing out in health care. Health care injustice is pernicious and goes against the Universalist strand of our UU faith! If we all have the divine spark of worth and dignity within us, we are all entitled to good, affordable health care. Everybody in, nobody out.

So many kinds of justice-making is our work: climate justice, criminal justice, racial justice, and the list continues. I know! No one can do it all. When I am feeling overwhelmed by the multitude of challenges we face, I rest gladly in the words of Edward Everett Hale. Remember?  “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.” I will do what I can do because our faith mandates it. We support the worth and dignity of all by the power relationships we create and uphold.

Were Olympia Brown standing before us, she might tell us what she told her old congregation at Racine in 1920. “Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideal, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for the noble duty and made the world beautiful for you”. So may we stand by our faith, seeking always its guidance for the living of our days. Amen.

*Today’s story for all ages was about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, black female suffragist, abolitionist, advocate for temperance speaker, essayist, poet and novelist.  Harper was born free in Baltimore, MD in 1911. While living in Philadelphia, she joined the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia.

**Amendments to the House of Representatives version of Health Insurance Reform.