Li Tim Oi: Grace and Courage
Gracious God, we thank you for calling Florence Li Tim-Oi, much beloved daughter, to be the first woman to exercise the office of a priest in our Communion: By the grace of your Spirit inspire us to follow her example, serving your people with patience and happiness all our days, and witnessing in every circumstance to our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the same Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
In the Episcopal Church’s calendar, January 24 is the feast day of Li Tim-Oi, the first woman to be ordained a priest in any of the churches claiming the “apostolic succession” of an historical episcopacy. Though part of our “Lesser Feasts and Fasts,” it is a day we should celebrate big-time, not only for the great blessing of having sister priests, bishops, and primates serving among us, but also because her ordination was a moment of real grace, when the Church despite itself did the right thing and followed the Gospel.
Li Tim-Oi’s ordination was a bit like that great turning point in early Christian history recounted in Acts 8-15 when the Church, again despite itself, reached out and brought in the gentiles as equal partners to what previously been a Jews-only affair: Philip privately preaches to the Ethiopian Eunuch and baptizes him (Acts 8:26ff). Then, after Saul’s conversion, Peter openly baptizes gentile Cornelius, against Peter’s native sense of religious duty to God. It took a dream vision and huge amounts of “coincidence” to bring Peter to do the deed (Acts 10). Saul, now Paul, preaches widely and succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. And so the Church must meet and figure out in Council how to manage the new reality, Gentiles as Christians (Acts 15). The story recounts a brilliant chapter in the Church’s life, one mirrored in Li Tim-Oi’s ordination.
I know a little bit about Li Tim-Oi because I was ordained in the same place
she was made a deacon by Church of England Bishop Ronald O. Hall—St. John’s
Cathedral in Hong Kong. St. John’s still has Bishop Hall’s Chair in the
chancel. The Anglican College where I taught there, Minghua Theological
Seminary, is named after him. (His Chinese name is “He
Minghua.” “Minghua” was Hall’s Chinese given name.) Many of
the older St. John’s congregants remember Mother Li’s ministry. I have
often preached and celebrated at Morrison Chapel Macau, where Li Tim-Oi served
for several years. In October 2011, I had the great pleasure of meeting and
talking to Bishop Hall’s son Christopher in Hong Kong, there on vacation from
the U.K.
Li
Tim-Oi, her mother, Bishop Mok, her father, Archdeacon Lee Kow Yan after her
ordination
as Deacon by Bishop R O Hall at St
John's Cathedral HK. Ascension Day 22 May 1941
When Li was born in Hong Kong on 5 May 1907, her father named her Tim-Oi (in Cantonese; in Standard Chinese it is pronounced Tian- Ai):
添嬡
This
means “add or give birth to a beloved daughter” because he valued his daughter
even if others in his patriarchal culture preferred sons. She was
converted to Christianity as a student at an Anglican school, choosing as her
Christian name “Florence” after Florence Nightingale, the famous 19th century
English nurse known for her unselfish service.
In 1931 at the ordination of a deaconess at St. John’s, Florence heard a call
to regular orders for herself. Completing 4 years of seminary in
Guangzhou, and was ordained deacon on Ascension Day 1941, and given charge of
an Anglican congregation in the Portuguese colony of Macau (about a four-hour
boat ride from Hong Kong, now an hour by jet foil or 45 minutes by car through
the Hong Kong-Zhuhai–Macau bridge and tunnel system). Macau then thronged
with refugees from war-torn China, as its neutrality was respected even after
Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in 1942. As deacon, Li Tim Oi regularly led morning prayer for Sunday worship. At this time in the Church of England, Eucharist was celebrated once a month, and, increasingly, weekly in a second Sunday morning service.
Since there was no way for Anglican priests to get to Macau to serve the community there, Bishop Hall took the emergency measure of authorizing Li Tim-Oi to celebrate “deacon’s masses” using pre-consecrated Eucharistic elements in 1942-45. But this proved unsustainable when travel restrictions imposed by the Japanese occupation forces made pre-consecrated elements unavailable in Macau. In January1945, Bishop Hall asked Li to meet him in a non-occupied area of South China, where he resolved the priest shortage by ordaining her “a priest in the Church of God.”
Known in the conservative press as "the red bishop" for his progressive positions
on social justice, Bishop Ronald Owen Hall served in Hong Kong for 30 years,
unable to return to the U.K. to serve as bishop there because he had ordained a woman to the priesthood.
Hall had previously been in correspondence and conversation with his fellow Bishops back in England, who had all uniformly told him that by ordaining a woman—regardless of the circumstances and the need—he would make himself a pariah in the Church of England and would never be able to serve as a Bishop in the U.K. One of the reasons for Hall’s long tenure as Bishop in Hong Kong (30 years) was that he could not return to the U.K. except to retire. This caused his family great hardship, since they were generally living in the U.K.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, otherwise a social and theological progressive for that day and age, privately expressed his divided mind on the matter: "If we could find any shadow of theological ground for the non-ordination of women I should be immensely comforted, but such arguments as I have heard on that line seem quite desperately futile." Nonetheless, he publicly condemned the ordination: “I cannot think that in any circumstances whatever an individual Bishop has the right to take such a step which is most certainly contrary to all the laws and precedents of the Church . . . I do profoundly deplore the action that you took and have to regard it as ultra vires [beyond your legal authority]. ”
Bishop Hall knew, however, that it was God, not Ronald O. Hall, who made Tim-Oi a Priest. Later in his life, he joked that at the time of the ordination, he was tempted to give Tim-Oi a new Christian name, Cornelia, seeing her ordination as significant an increase in the scope of God’s grace as the baptism of Cornelius the gentile. Consistently throughout his life, Hall said that he did not regret ordaining Tim-Oi, and indeed claimed it as one of his finest hours and greatest acts.
After the war, the controversy over Tim-Oi’s ordination forced her, in the interest of preserving peace in the Church, to give up her diocesan priest's license. She declined, however, to renounce Holy Orders, since she agreed that it was God, not Bishop Hall, who had made her a Priest. Living in Guangdong Province after the communist takeover and during the Cultural Revolution, she was persecuted bitterly, but later said that knowledge that she was a priest had sustained her during the hardest assaults of the Red Guards.
As the example of her life worked on the Church and times changed, Tim-Oi was able to practice her priesthood again. She was recognized as a priest again in 1971 for the Diocese of Hong Kong. When she retired to Canada in 1981, she was appointed a non-stipendiary priest in a Toronto parish, where she spent the remainder of her life.
At the provincial synod of the Chinese Anglican Church in Shanghai in 1947, Bishop Hall had tried but failed to get retroactive approval in canon law for Li Tim-Oi's ordination. One of those attending was Gilbert Baker, who later as Hall’s successor as Bishop of Hong Kong would ordain Anglicanism's first two women priests legally with the blessing of the Anglican Consultative Council, in 1971. The ordination of women as deacons, priests, and, increasingly, bishops, has now become, thanks be to God, the general norm throughout most of the Communion.
Thank God for prophetic voices in our age. Thank God for moments of grace when the Church, despite itself, better embodies hospitality, love, welcome, and mercy in its life and practice. As we consider the divisive issues currently facing the Communion, where names like “Jeffrey Johns” and “Gene Robinson” appear instead of “Cornelius,” or “Li Tim-Oi,” let us remember the centrality of grace in God’s economy. And let us too be courageous, like St. Peter and Bishop Ronald O. Hall.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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