All Saints Sunday, Year A, Sun Nov 6, 2011

Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

In the Episcopal Church we remember, or commemorate, certain special people on assigned days during the church year. Some of these people are the traditional saints of the universal Church, such as Saint Francis, and some are specific to the Episcopal Church or Anglican Communion. There are many new names that have been added to our calendar in recent years, and some of these are people most of us have never heard of.

I thought it might be good and worthy to start a new tradition at All Saints, and to feature one of these new people on All Saints Sunday, and even from time to time during the year. Many of them have fascinating stories: some had very special talents for ministry, and others were more or less ordinary people who found themselves in a unique situation for ministry and service to the Church.

This year I’d like to tell you the story of a very special “saint” of the Anglican Communion. The Holy Spirit blows where God wills, and this is amply demonstrated by the very unlikely story of the first woman to be ordained to the priesthood in the Anglican Communion. The Rev. Florence Li Tim-Oi was born in Hong Kong in 1907. In spite of the tradition in China to show preference to sons, her father named her “Much Beloved Daughter”. Tim-Oi was drawn to the church while she was a student, and she took the baptismal name of Florence, in honor of Florence Nightingale.

In 1931 she attended a service for the deaconal ordination of an English woman at the cathedral in Hong Kong. In his homily, the bishop asked if there might be a Chinese woman who also felt called to give herself to service in the church? Tim-Oi says that she immediately knelt down and prayed to God for guidance, and this was the beginning of her discernment of vocation. When she announced her decision to study theology to her family, one of her sisters said, “Are you going to be a Bible woman?!” Still, her family supported her desire to study for service in the church.

WW II started while she was at theological school. She led a group of students in assisting bombing victims, and she narrowly escaped becoming a casualty herself. After graduation, she began her ministry at a parish in Kowloon and then another in Macao. Because of the Japanese occupation, the priests in Hong Kong were unable to travel to Macao to celebrate the Eucharist, so Tim-Oi began to function as their priest, with the full knowledge of the bishop of Hong Kong, Ronald Hall. Tim-Oi didn’t know that Bishop Hall had already been in conversation with other clergy about the ordination of women, and that they had reached the conclusion that some bishop would need to be the first to do it. He became aware of Li Tim-Oi’s ministry, and decided that she should be ordained to the priesthood, since she was in effect already serving as a priest.

On January 25, 1944, Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained to the priesthood in the Anglican Church. Bishop Hall said later that this ordination was only confirming what the Holy Spirit had already ordained. She served her parish for several years, and there is a wonderful photo of her, a lovely young woman in an alb and stole, surrounded by her vestry, who were half women and half men. By the end of the World War II, her ordination to the priesthood had come to the attention of the See of Canterbury, and Bishop Hall was challenged either to resign as a bishop or for Tim-Oi to renounce her Orders. As a result, she did resign her license as a priest, to protect Bishop Hall, but she never renounced her Holy Orders. She continued to serve a congregation near Vietnam, where she started a large maternity home and a school, which is still operating today.

When the Communists came to power in China in 1949, all the clergy were sent for re-education. The pressure to give up her faith became so great that at one point Tim-Oi considered suicide. Then, she says, the Holy Spirit spoke to her and said, “What are you thinking? You are a priest!” Many years later she was asked how she kept her faith during this time, and her answer was: “I just went up the mountain to pray. Nobody knew.” She was assigned to a farm, where her responsibility was feeding chickens. Later she was sent to work in a factory, and in 1974 she was allowed to retire. In 1979, the churches in China reopened, and Tim-Oi resumed her ministry. In 1981 she immigrated to Canada, where, to her great joy, she was licensed as a priest. She served at the Cathedral in Toronto until her death on February 26, 1992.

This is just the outline of her story. Her story comes to life in a film called “Return to Hepu” which chronicles a visit she made to China after she had settled in Canada. In one scene in the film, we see her visiting a leper colony where she had served so many years before. In this scene, she is recognized by a number of the patients who are all gathered to greet and honor her. We see her as a friend greeting old friends; we see her as an honored guest; we also see her as a priest who is nurturing and gathering her flock. In another scene, we see her singing a hymn with a small group of people who had been members of her parish. One man begins to cry quietly as he remembers the time when the churches were closed and they were not permitted to practice their faith.

The ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi to the sacred priesthood is of the greatest importance because her ordination helps to give us the image of full and complete humanity that is a true reflection of the image of Christ. As a result, we may come a bit closer to understanding the full and complete and universal offering of the salvation of God. Her ordination was of great importance but also, in another sense, it was of humble importance. She was the first woman priest, and she was also just a faithful servant of God, constant in her faith, giving service to her people and to God. Tim-Oi spoke of herself in humble words: “I am just an earthen vessel with God’s treasure inside me”. She may have seen herself as a humble, earthen vessel, but it seems she was exactly the right person, at the right time to be a model of Christ’s priesthood, in China, and for all times and for all people.

The Rev. Li Tim-Oi is just one of many “saints” of the Church, and one of the multitudes of the children of God. In the book “Holy Women Holy Men”, which lists all the saints and commemorations of the Episcopal Church, the introduction reads as follows: “The Church is ‘the communion of Saints’, that is, a people made holy through their mutual participation in the mystery of Christ. The communion exists through history, continues in the present, and endures beyond the grave and gate of death into heaven, for God is not a God of the dead but of the living, and those still on their earthly pilgrimage continue to have fellowship with those whose work is done.” (HWHM, 742)

As we here at All Saints Episcopal Church are striving in our own little corner of God’s vineyard, we are also journeying in companionship with a continuous multitude of others who have gone before and will come after. They too had and will have their struggles and triumphs, in their own time. We are all saints, and we are all blessed with gifts of the spirit and gifts for service, given to us that we may share and offer of our selves to one another, and for the building up of God’s kingdom here on earth.