The reason we Anglicans join Roman Catholics and Lutherans in remembering Lucy, though, has more to do with sex and power. Lucy, born beautiful and wealthy, spurned the advances of a pagan suitor, who in possessive rage then named her as a practicing Christian to the local Roman authorities. When Lucy refused to worship the Roman emperor as a god, she was condemned by the governor of Syracuse to be "defiled" in a local brothel.  One of the legends about Lucy is that a team of straining oxen was unable to drag her from the court to her punishment. Lorenzo Lotto's painting of this moment is all about the integrity of an isolated woman in a frenzied, libidinous culture.

Lucy's witness, I think, aligns her with John the Baptist. John was actually put to death (Mark 6:14-29) for his public critique of Herod's sexual acting-out (discarding a first wife wantonly and taking possession of his brother's wife, Herodias). The Herod we see in Mark's gospel is dangerously powerful, impulsive and besotted, with judgment rooted somewhere south of his neck. The Baptist's own neck ultimately goes to the block as a consequence.

The admittedly gruesome stories of Lucy and John are important, I think, because they point us into a particular Christian sexual ethic as we continue just now to absorb the torrent of news stories detailing the sexual predation of famous and powerful men. I often feel that we, in mainline "progressive" Christian churches, have retreated from confronting some of the more destructive and oppressive conventions of our culture for fear of seeming prudish, intolerant, behind-the-times or sanctimoniously judgmental. While we certainly have centuries of such witness to answer for, how do we activate our own faith and the template of Christ's love just now in the process of confronting and ending a culture of pandemic sexual abuse, in which both women and men are daily victimized, manipulated and humiliated?

The final words of our baptismal covenant offer perhaps the most important perspective, calling us to complicity in the safeguarding the dignity of every human person. Christian ethicist Margaret Farley makes this more specific: "to treat another human person as a mere means is to violate her insofar as she is autonomous; it is to attempt to absorb her completely into my agenda, rather than respecting the one that is her own." In a class I once took with Margaret, she was fond of saying "we can't scoop up others into our own agendas." Sexual or otherwise.  This is what Christ was talking about when he gave us the new commandment.

Lucy and John's dreadful reckonings come, in the end, because they refuse to be scooped up into sordid dynamics of power and degradation. May their witness guide our prayers and actions as we try to make God's kingdom of safety and human dignity a bit more palpable in our own daily lives and work.

See you in church,