That the courage of women who speak up, say no, and claim their dignity will never be rewarded. This whole sordid story, this routine dehumanization of women, is as old as time. And as old as the Bible. Time and time again in the stories we hold as sacred, women are dismissed, demeaned, denigrated.

Welcoming children means welcoming powerlessness, dependency, need. None of which is very appealing to most of us. Childhood can be a far more terrifying thing than many of us give it credit for.

We can be as good as gold, and still we suffer. Goodness is no protection from pain. This is something that should be screamingly obvious to those of us who call ourselves Christian. Jesus was as good as it gets, and he suffered pain of all different kinds: physical certainly, but also spiritual and emotional.

I know that huge numbers of people now strongly associate organized religion with immorality and depravity and abuse. And it makes me ashamed and embarrassed.

Jesus was not nice—much of what he had to say, much of what he did, was offensive to his disciples, and to us. Gentle, nice people do not end up on a cross. In the last few weeks worth of readings Jesus seemed to be saying that he himself was God’s own manna, come down from above to give life to the world. That doesn’t really offend us, but to his first hearers, it was offensive.

How can this man give us his flesh to eat? It’s a good question. An authentic question. And it’s a familiar question, too.

More often than not, it seems as if God doesn’t really provide; it seems as if God allows for way more than we can really handle; It seems like all these ideas of a comforting, benevolent, reasonable God must be holdovers from a simpler, easier time… “once upon a time,” we might even say.

On this very day, millions of people will be physically hungry, and in the face of such deprivation, thinking about the reality of spiritual hunger can seem like the very definition of privilege. But many human hungers spring from deep emotional needs and thwarted desires. For all the strength and beauty of being human, we are also “but flesh” as the psalmist says: vulnerable in our physical and emotional states. We are creatures who exist, as poet Mary Oliver says, (in and through) “the soft animal of our bodies.”

Last week we celebrated the Feast of Mary Magdalene. And I talked about how striking it is that almost no women get to tell their own story in the Bible. And not only do they not get to tell their own story, but their perspective is just never represented. They are truly powerless—at the mercy of the men around them within the story and in the telling of the story. This morning we just heard a doozy, a story of the use and abuse of power, and of another silenced woman.

Despite the fact that Mary was the first apostle, the one to whom Jesus first appeared after being raised from the dead, she has not until now had an official feast day. The reason is that she stands in a long line of women who have been ignored, demeaned, abused, or worse by the Bible, the church and the world. And that ignoring, demeaning, abusing, and worse continues.