From the Pews to the Polls | QUILTS of COMMUNITY

Scripture Readings: Genesis 29:15-28

Matthew 14:13-21

Portion of Redwork Quilt, The Ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church (Fort Scott, Kansas, 1888). 

I first learned of this redwork quilt from the book Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting.

The story goes like this:

In 1888, a group of women from the Methodist Episcopal Church of the small town of Fort Scott, Kansas, gathered with a purpose: to raise money for the most vulnerable in their community. 

They set out to do this with a community quilt. 

The women invited local businesses to sponsor a quilt square for three dollars. The women would then stitch the names of businesses and other donors in bright red thread onto white cotton blocks. When the quilt was completed, the women hosted a party where the quilt would be revealed, and where attendees could buy a meal to support the cause. 

Inevitably, not all the squares found sponsors. The women might have decided to fill in the blanks with some decorative florals or abstract shapes. Something pretty and noncontroversial.

But these women were not just industrious, they were also opinionated, and a little cheeky. 

And so the women used this extra space to express their radical political belief—that the law should treat women as men’s equals. 

"Equality Before the Law" Patch of the Redwork Quilt

There is one block that carried the boldest of their political messages. The block is devoted to “Old Mother Eve”—a reference to the first woman in the story of Genesis. Boldly stitched in the center are the words, “Equality Before the Law.” Surrounding these words are the names of women who inspired them. Names like slavery abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the leaders of the suffrage movement and a fellow abolitionist, Ruth from the Hebrew Bible, and Dorcus, a disciple of Jesus who spent her time sewing clothes for those in need. 

I thought back to the story of this redwork quilt as I prepared for this week’s sermon.

Our readings for today illustrate powerfully two of the ways that our society has dehumanized and neglected women and their stories. 

In today's reading from Genesis, we meet the two sisters Leah and Rachel who clearly not treated at the equals of their male counterparts. The women are treated as property, bargained over between a father and a suitor. 

This story does reveal the great distance between the world of Genesis and our own. Marriage at the time was understood primarily as an alliance between men, involving the exchange of women. Laban and Jacob negotiate the bride-price—seven years of labor—without consulting either daughter. 

Then Laban tricks Jacob into marrying both daughters.

Some interpreters suggest that the girls' father, Laban, was trying to secure the futures of both his daughters. In a patriarchal and tribal society, perhaps this seemed like the best way to ensure their survival. Jacob, after all, loves Rachel and is willing to do almost anything to marry her.

But this initial deception sets Leah and Rachel on a painful path. Forced to share the same husband, their sisterhood is torn apart by rivalry as they compete for Jacob's affection and status within the family.

And we might marvel at how God doesn’t seem to help things!

The text tells us that God sees Leah's suffering because she is unloved and grants her children, but not Rachel. While this affirms God's concern for the marginalized, it does not heal the deeper wound. Both women are trapped in a dehumanizing situation. 

Rachel is so distressed by her infertility that she uses her privileged position within the household to compel her servant Bilhah to become her surrogate. Rachel has little power compared to her father and husband, but Bilhah has even less. 

In this story, it is Bilhah who is left completely voiceless.

This story has been cast as a great love story. We like to remember Jacob's willingness to work fourteen years for Rachel as proof of enduring love. But if we read beyond Jacob's devotion, we notice two women whose lives are negotiated by others as property, whose voices are absent, and whose relationship is fractured by an unjust system. 

We might ask many questions about this text, about the goodness of stories that reflect relationships we find offensive today.

But what we must understand is that the Bible has never been a collection of feel-good stories.

Our scriptures is complex and contextual. 

And our scriptures are remarkably honest about human brokenness.

As I said at the beginning of this series, we can imagine the Bible as similar to a handmade quilt—stitched together are many stories, from different places, and from across generations. 

Each piece is distinct, carrying its own colors, textures, and history. Some of those patterns belong to another time, expose the wounds of the societies that produced them. Some reveal the extraordinary faith of our spiritual ancestors, like Ruth and Dorcus, who inspired the women of Fort Scott Methodist Episcopal Church. 

Yet stitched together, these stories reveal something larger. Through them, we catch glimpses of God's patient handiwork: inspiring, challenging, and guiding humanity ever deeper into the story of God's love for the world.

That is precisely why I am grateful the Bible does not hide human brokenness. It tells the truth about us. But too often we have mistaken the Bible's honesty for God's approval. We, have treated descriptions of inequality as though they were divine commands. 

For centuries, so-called "plain readings" of Scripture were used to defend the subordination of women, the enslavement of Black people, the dispossession of Indigenous communities, and the exclusion of countless others from the full dignity God intends for them. The same interpretive habits were invoked to deny women the right to vote, own property, open a bank account, seek a divorce, or exercise authority in the church. Even today, Scripture is often enlisted to oppose the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people to make their own medical decisions.

The problem today is not that the Bible tells stories of unequal societies. The problem is that the inequality in the Bible is read as the world God desires.

Even now, despite our world looking very different from that of Rachel and Leah, many are using the Bible to tear, rather than mend, the fabric of our common life. 

Our second reading for today reminds us of one of the most subtle ways women and children have been neglected throughout history.

Matthew tells us, "Those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children." 

How do you react to that line? 

Does it seem alright? 

Does it annoy you? Or perhaps make you laugh? 

Does it make you angry, to see anyone who is not an adult man be considered irrelevant to the headcount?

Some sociologists estimate that in a gathering like this there may have been 5-6 women and children for every adult man. If so, this wasn't simply the feeding of the five thousand. It may have been the feeding of thirty-five thousand people. 

And who would have been included in this group? 

People who are poor and people begging on the streets. People who are disabled and sick. People working as prostitute and tax collectors.

All hungry for hope, for healing, and for bread. 

And they are all followed Jesus to this deserted place to have that hunger satisfied.

The text says Jesus was in that deserted place to get away from the crowds. For he had just head the news of the execution of John the Baptist. His cousin. His fellow prophet. His partner in proclaiming God's coming reign. 

Jesus withdraws because he needs to grieve. It’s an important detail to not overlook—that this miracle begins with Jesus' own heartbreak. It begins with a profoundly human Jesus carrying the weight of grief.

And yet, when he sees the crowds, Matthew tells us that Jesus "had compassion for them." Unfortunately, compassion—or even worse, pity, as it is translated frequently—can sound weak or patronizing in English, as though Jesus simply felt sorry for them.

But the Greek word is much more visceral. It describes something that happens in your gut.

It is that wrenching in your stomach when you encounter profound suffering. A feeling of being made sick.

In it’s ancient context, it can also refer to the contractions of giving birth.

Jesus is feeling the pains of the suffering of this world—he is feeling the birth pangs of a new hope. A new hope that will profoundly change the world.  

Jesus' compassion does not resolve itself with passive sentiment, but turns him to act.

Faced with hungry people, he feeds them. Faced with scarcity, he creates abundance. Just as the women of Fort Scott took little more than red thread, scraps of fabric, and their own labor to care for their neighbors, Jesus takes five loaves, two fish, and a community willing to share—and everyone has enough.

This is what God's compassion looks like. It does not merely acknowledge suffering. It mends it. It gathers what little people have, blesses it, shares it, and in the sharing discovers that there is enough for everyone. It is another patch in Scripture's quilt, revealing the same God who continually stitches broken communities back together.

Quilts like the one made by the women of Fort Scott were a common fundraiser at the time. It was a practical way that women found they could put their skills, resources, and creativity to work for the good of their community. And it reflects a small but powerful example of the long tradition of mutual aid—where communities meet one another's needs from the bottom up rather than waiting for solutions from the top down.

What makes the Fort Scott Redwork Quilt unique is that the women used it for more than fundraising. They did raise $112 for their neighbors' needs, equivalent to about $4,000 today, (and even received an offer of $20 to purchase the quilt! Which is about $700 today!), but what makes the quilt unique is the way they also used it to advocate for a different kind of community. Through red stitches, the women of Fort celebrated the women who had shown them equality's promise and bore witness to a future in which equality formed the foundation for all people to flourish.

The community of Fort Scott seems to have received the quilt’s political message well enough. One newspaper writer remarked, “the quilt is an odd one… a number of squares were not paid for, the space being devoted to the public benefit.”

However, another news article offered a more encouraging review. “Be not mistaken. It is not a crazy quilt, but is a perfectly sane one.”

While these quilters may not have lived to see full equality, the winds of change were already blowing. 

Twenty years earlier, in 1967, Kansas had held the nation’s first referendum on women's suffrage. It did not pass, but it inspired other western states to hold similar referendums.

This is how Wyoming became the first territory or state to recognize universal suffrage in 1869.

Then in 1887, the year before the quilt’s creation, Kansas recognized women’s right to vote in local elections. In 1912, the women of Kansas would finally have their right to vote in national elections, a full eight years before the passing of the 19th Amendment.

Of course, this triumph was not total, however, as the fight to uphold the voting rights of most black women and all Indigenous women would continue long after. Although fun fact, in Wyoming, Black women were allowed to vote from the beginning! It is believed the first Black women to cast her ballot and have it count was in Wyoming in the first election after universal suffrage past.

Today, after this service, you are invited to join us at the public library to vote in the primary. I know that many of you are already aware that this is an incredibly consequential midterm election, and that this primary is especially consequential in Wyoming.

And so I encourage you to join us. If not today, before the primary deadline on August 18th. 

I also want to encourage you to take some time today to think about all the people throughout history who have made it possible for you to vote. To have a voice in our collective governance. Voting is not the solution to all our political and social problems, but is one small but important act that we can take in creating the Beloved Community right here in Cheyenne.

So let us vote our values, and take it from the pews to the polls! 

Sermon preached by Rev. Delaney Piper on 8.2.26.