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+We Can Be Heroes or Women of Faith in the Post-Biblical era
+===========================================================
+
+We all have spent last couple of weeks following this series
+of awesome sermons about remarkable people of faith. I first
+thought that my task is the hardest one, to find one exceptional
+woman among millions of those who followed Jesus Christ in the
+post-Biblical times, but when listening to those sermons, it
+feels like I am not alone. Each one of us had a different task to
+pick one person from large set of candidates. However, I still
+believe that my task might be the most difficult one. Not only
+I am one of two preachers with the longest time period to pick
+from, but also the position of women was quite different during
+the ages than the one of men.
+
+Let’s try to start from this start. I am persuaded that one of the
+strongest motivators in our lives is our resistance to pain. We
+all have some kind of pain in our life, and our effort to get rid
+of that pain may be one of the strongest decisive factors for
+us. When the pain reaches sufficient threshold we are willing to
+do almost anything to get rid of it, without regards whether what
+we are doing is right, Christian, or even legal in many times. We
+know how many alcoholics, drug abusers, and even adulterers
+claimed that they what they were doing fully knowing it is wrong,
+but the pain they were trying to drown out was so strong, they
+give in. As Richard Rohr, a famous Franciscan spiritual leader,
+once said, “if we don’t transform [our pain], we will transmit
+it.”
+
+There are many different types of pain we can encounter in our
+lives, but I would like today only about one of them. Feeling of
+powerlessness. That feeling when we are facing ours or even more
+somebody else pain, and we cannot do anything about it, can lead
+many to serious depression, which we could try to oppose by going
+into some completely irrational and ungodly places.
+
+    | Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat
+    | something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that
+    | you know nothing about.” So the disciples began to say to
+    | one another, “No one brought him anything to eat, did
+    | they?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of
+    | the one who sent me and to complete his work. …”
+    |
+    | (John 4:31-34)
+
+There is only one antidote against this feeling of hopelessness,
+because of course it is always about the lack of hope in the
+end, and that is to do something. Think for example about the
+current war in Ukraine. For anybody who spent at least a little
+bit of time following the current news in the past two years, the
+impression is so strong, that it can completely crush our
+life. If we know somebody who has some significant links to
+the war, and we have some people like this in this church, the
+feeling is even stronger.
+
+For somebody the pressure is so high, they gave up their life
+and went to volunteer to Ukrainian army. I know about many Czech
+volunteers who are participating in some kind of charitable
+organizations which are helping people affected by the war in
+various ways. And of course, there are also many funds collecting
+many for supporting good work to those who suffer. Anybody has an
+opportunity to do something, and for your sanity, if this touches
+you, I would strongly suggest to do it.
+
+For centuries, for millennia, women never had even an opportunity
+to behave to do much, and they had to develop their own strategy
+how to deal with the pain of the world as they see it (and many
+men, often the most successful ones, learned that lesson as
+well).
+
+----
+
+Which finally leads to one obscure woman I would like to talk
+about. Her name was Hannah More and she was living in the end of
+the eighteenth and the beginning of nineteenth century in England
+(specifically in Clapham). Move your mind to those times, think
+about novels by Jane Austen, and that for most women there was no
+chance how to achieve independently almost anything. Hannah More
+has one advantage above her sisters. She was engaged as was
+expected, but her betrothed was postponing the wedding for so
+long time (in the end more than five years) that in the end he
+decided to break the engagement and he got married to somebody
+else. I am not sure whether it was a legal requirement or just
+him being a decent man, given that after five years of waiting
+Miss More was almost ineligible to get another husband, he
+promised to her and paid an annual rent for the rest of her life,
+which allowed her to life a decent independent life. She never
+married, but used her life for changing her life.
+
+She became one of the founding members of what is now called
+The Clapham Sect, group of faithful Christians, members of the
+Church of England, who were guided by their faith to change the
+society according to their faith. Some of her opinions and goals
+are now hard to accept, times changed a lot, but she certainly
+achieved a lot. Her biggest personal achievement was founding
+of the first systematic school system for girls, she produced
+hundreds of pamphlets for education of literate poor, and one of
+her less direct achievements that she organized a group of people
+supporting William Wilberforce and persuaded him to pick up the
+cause of the abolition of slavery.
+
+When looking at her life there are couple of differences which I
+think can illustrate what I think is the main lesson we can learn
+for our life of everyday heroes.
+
+Get power v. love and help
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+This is the basic difference in the life situations of man and
+woman in history. Well, actually, it is not only about women,
+because of course most of men in the past and mostly everybody
+today are not in the situation where they could leave everything
+and start changing the world.
+
+Still the primary of our society, even when we are not
+considering violent solutions, is to achieve some amount of
+power, and then use it for changing the world. One of two
+video-clips I hoped to run during this sermon, but then I decided
+to cut them because they were too long, was from the first part
+of the Lord of the Rings, where Boromir asks to take the evil
+ring of the Dark Lord Sauron to defend his country against the
+same evil. I am not saying that all politics is always evil, we
+need more Christians and other people of good will in politics to
+get out of the marasm we currently find ourselves, but it worries
+me how much we rely on this one way how to change things, and how
+complicated and dangerous it is.
+
+I am thinking about a Christian non-profit organization which
+used to work among young girls who were pregnant. They were
+organizing adoptions and care for pregnant girls trying to
+persuade them not to go with abortion. They used to have
+thos posters “Are you in a bad situation? We will help!”
+everywhere. Even though they were expressly Christian and
+opposing the mainstream attitude towards pregnancy and sexuality,
+they were quite respected and I believe they actually helped many
+girls in difficult situation.
+
+I don’t know what happened, perhaps they considered their
+previous work too small, or something, but they changed their
+complete strategy, turned towards politics, and the results
+are in my opinion complete disaster. Head of the organization
+made couple of some rather unfortunate statements, some of them
+sound quite homophobic, they started publish position papers,
+which were including some unverifiable statements and some really
+bad statistics and bad science. Once respectable organization is
+now a joke, and many people I asked about them told me that it is
+just another proove that “those Christians” are only after power
+and money. Jews have term “Chillul hashem” (desecrating the name
+of the God), which I am afraid applies here.
+
+Take over v. Link, encourage
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Masculine tendency is to conquer, take over, defeat enemies.
+Another video I wanted to show was from a good Christian film
+“Amazing Grace” from 2006 about William Wilberforce, and how
+exactly Hannah More helped liberating slaves of the British
+Empire. Instead of fighting to get herself to the front, she
+linked together people who might be interested, and introduced
+them to William Wilberforce, who as MP then struggled with the
+future direction of his life after his conversion to Jesus. Given
+her previous experience with publishing books for the wide
+population, she helped to publish the autobiography by freed
+black slave, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
+Equiano” (1789), which was the first testimony about the horrible
+life of slaves on the British plantations in Caribbean and which
+helped to turn the public opinion about the slavery in Britain.
+Till this day she is known for her other endeavours and her role
+in the abolition of slavery is usually mostly ignored.
+
+Is it more important to help or to be famous?
+
+
+Radical change and destruction v. Improving / do what’s possible
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+I didn’t want to get much into details about Miss More’s efforts,
+because some of them are now rather controversial. For example,
+education of girls was in her time so controversial idea, that
+for some time she was teaching just reading, not writing. We are
+in time of the French Revolution, and under the influence of
+Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, she
+decided to oppose the influence of the revolutionary propaganda
+by publishing hundreds of short stories for poor literate
+Englishmen (and Englishwomen, if she already managed to teach
+them reading) how they should be content with their life. Most of
+these books are now mostly ridiculous, but they illustrate her
+deep distrust to anything radical and revolutionary, even though
+many considered her to be revolutionary.
+
+It relates to me with another tendency which I could see on many
+people who actually changed for better, and that is relentless
+focus on their goal and willing to let go everything else. One of
+the reasons why Martin Luther in changing the world was exactly
+this keeping focus on changing the Church and letting everything
+else to go. Many people then and later were angry with him for
+not opposing and perhaps even encouraging bloody suppression
+of the German Peasants’ War by the German nobility. Looking
+from the other side, it was the only possible way how to keep
+establishment supporting changes in the Church, and that was the
+one thing he felt to be called to.
+
+-----
+
+To summarize, what are the lessons we can bring from observing
+life of our today’s heroine, Miss Hannah Moore?
+
+1. One thing I don’t know about Miss Moore is her prayer life,
+   but of course, when talking about looking at the needs in the
+   current society, a prayer is the first thing which should be
+   on our minds. If our food is to do the will of the one who
+   sent us, we should better be certain that he actually send us
+   to resolve the issue we see, and that it is not only our
+   attempt to glorify ourselves or to sooth our conscience.
+
+2. Do you want to help or do you want to change the world? The
+   latter quite often end in some kind of disaster.
+
+3. Is your central focus you helping or are you willing remain
+   unknown and link together and encourage other people who may
+   in the end be famous for something you started?
+
+4. Are you focused on your thing and you are willing to let other
+   things go if they jeopardise your thing?
+
+5. Are you persuaded that “small work” (“práce drobná”, the
+   phrase of the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Garrigue
+   Masaryk) is more fruitful and blessed than revolution and
+   destruction?