Freedom to Put Others First
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue preached this sermon St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Tifton, Georgia on January 28, 2018
Freedom to Put Others First
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
What does a Christ-like life look like? Really? When does someone’s life look like Jesus?
You are probably better at this than I am, but I can let myself off easy when it comes to trying to be like Jesus, because, I figure, he was God the Son. I assume I might fall short of being like Jesus. I get around this by my ongoing fascination with saints. These are regular people like you and me who rose above all expectation to more closely resemble Jesus than the typical Christian.
In 2006, I represented the Diocese of Georgia at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church when we were asked to vote on Florence Li Tim-Oi for the calendar of saints. I was opposed to naming her a saint. She had been the first woman ordained a priest in the Anglican Communion. “So what?” I thought. Who cares who happened to be first? That doesn’t make someone a saint! We could mark the occasion, remembering the ordination of women, without making the first person a saint.
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Then I read her story and was humbled. When she was born on May 5, 1907 in the fishing village of Aberdeen on Hong Kong island, boy babies were highly prized. At that time, in that culture, a bowl of ash could be at hand to smother unwanted new-born girls. Her parents were Christians so delighted with their baby girl they wanted everyone who met her to know it. They named her Li Tim-Oi, meaning ‘Much Beloved Daughter’.
At her baptism, she chose the name Florence for the famous nurse, Florence Nightingale. While a student, she attended a liturgy at the cathedral in which an English woman became a deaconess. The Chinese preacher asked if there was a Chinese girl also willing to sacrifice herself for the Chinese church. She knelt and prayed: “God, would you like to send me?” She felt then a call that never left her.
While a student at Union Theological College in Canton, she led a student team rescuing the casualties of Japanese carpet bombing, nearly becoming a casualty of the Second Sino-Japanese war in the process. Then in 1941, she was ordained a deacon by the Bishop of Hong. Before long her Bishop sent her Macau, a Portuguese Colony crowded with refugees from the Second World War. The photograph from the excellent website It Takes One Woman shows Li Tim-Oi, her mother, Bishop Mok, her father, Archdeacon Lee Kow Yan after her ordination as Deacon by Bishop R.0. Hall at St John’s Cathedral HK. Ascension Day 22 May 1941.
In 1943, Li Tim-Oi prepared 72 for baptism. Her Bishop would write amazed, “No other man pastor has yet had that experience in the Anglican Church in South China.”
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