The sermon preached by Revd Sr Una Kroll at the Eucharist celebrating the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women to th epriesthood of the Church in Wales.

‘This is the reason that, I Paul, am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles’ (Eph 3:1).
(Or, as some translations have it, I Paul am a prisoner in Christ Jesus)

We know that Paul was a trouble maker in the early Christian Church, someone with a vision that would not go away, not even for the sake of peace and quiet in the early community of Christians; Jews and pagans under Roman rule. Paul was struggling, as he said `to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Eph 3:8-10)

And it was a struggle. Paul's efforts to enable Gentiles to become full members of the early church were every bit as controversial as the present day dilemmas that have sent our Anglican communion, and other churches, into a torment of conflict. At first he was not trusted, having formerly been an enemy of the early disciples. When he spoke up for the Gentiles he provoked arguments. Bitter words were exchanged. Decisions were over-ruled. No one could see an easy way forward. In the end it happened: the Gentiles were in.

Paul was at the beginning of a journey that we are still on. His story is an important one for those of us who are celebrating the tenth year of our ordinations to the historic ministry of the Anglican Church today. God's plan for God's Church, God's Body - is a mystery that has been gradual in its unfolding in regard to humankind, and it is still unfolding in God's way, in God's time, and in places of God's choosing. A glance back at Paul's story shows that sometimes God reveals the mystery of his plan to people outside the Christian community, that God moves in mysterious ways, through human institutions outside the Church. Dr Sheila Cassidy, writing in this month's Tablet, tells of her imprisonment in Santiago at Christmas in 1975. She speaks of her, ‘so young and so brave co-prisoners’. She says, ‘They taught me that true religion is about honesty and compassion and sharing: it was my first and only experience of a truly Christian community (except of course that most of them did not count themselves Christian)’.

Exaggeration? No: not from where I stand. I can still remember the day in 1978 when, as a battered woman, asking for bread from the Church, I, and other women alongside me, received only a stone, yet in the same week God's presence was made evident to me through a group of non-Christian lesbian and gay people. (NB an insight which came to me during the sermon itself. . . .a stone slakes thirst in the desert, AND IT WAS A GIFT.) God's wisdom sometimes comes to us through secular outcasts as well as Christian ones. For, at the time of which I am speaking, women and gays were outcasts together—and that is a fact we should not forget in our celebrations today, for we, you and I who have been partly accepted by some people in our own Anglican communion cannot rest until ‘the wisdom of God in its rich variety’ has made known ‘the fullness of the mystery of God's plan for all human beings’.

Today, you and I are celebrating one small step on a long and on-going journey as God unravels wisdom in it's rich variety over centuries of history. We are celebrating a very hidden mystery in God's plan that has been gradually revealed over centuries and centuries of history—the partnership of women and men in God, and in God's world.

Now that partnership demands that we Christians, men and women, are prisoners of Love, prisoners in Christ and for Christ, that, our hearts are, ‘encouraged and united in love so that we may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God's mystery, that is Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Col: 2:2-3). Today we are celebrating an epiphany of LOVE itself. We are seeing on our TV screens, in news reels, at public events like baptisms, weddings and funerals ordinary sinful women and men working alongside each other, contributing their ordinary gifts, making mistakes, bringing forth old and new treasures in heaven, ambassadors of Christ.

We are prisoners of truth, prisoners of faith and hope and love, prisoners for Christ, prisoners in Christ. That is the epiphany, the showing forth of Christ, that we are called to. Does that mean that those who do not believe that God is revealing Himself to the world through the partnership of women and men, gay and straight people, celibate and married people, are not prisoners of Christ Jesus:  No it does not, so long as they are revealing God's LOVE in its fullness. Where LOVE is, God is. That's the test - not the arguments.

We all, supporters and opponents like, have a calling to dwell in Christ—to be prisoners of Love itself. Our love, our imprisonment in Christ, means that for a time we may also have to be imprisoned by restrictive practices by which we are prevented from episcopacy through fear of what will happen if, horror of horrors, women should ever put on the mantle of episcopal authority. But we must remember that that kind of imprisonment is nothing, nothing at all, to those who are imprisoned in Christ Jesus, in Love itself. Christ cannot by His nature do anything other than love his enemies enough to suffer for them and die for them, and that for today's Church is the revealing of his mystery.

Stay then, prisoners in Christ Jesus, prisoners for Love, ‘continue to live your lives in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught’, refuse to answer hate by acceptance of that hate. Declare yourpain, as Christ did, declare your thirst, as Christ did, and continue to die into resurrection life so that one day, in God's time, everyone may see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that as this epistle declares in the next few verses, you may ‘know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you (and all God's people) may one day may be filled with all the fullness of God’(Eph3: 19).

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.