Where My Girls At?

Adapted from a sermon preached May 14, 2023 at First Presbyterian Church-Memphis.

It’s Mother’s Day, so I am going talk about women!

Last year, my friend, Rev. Teresa Kim Pecinovsky, released her first children’s book. Mother God offers breathtakingly beautiful illustrations by Khoa Le, and also offers a scripturally-sound depiction of God, highlighting divine attributes that are traditionally understood as “feminine.” God is a mother in labor, nursing, and teaching her children to walk. God is a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wing, and a momma bear guarding and protecting her cubs. God is a baker, a seamstress, and a wise grandmother who tells stories of old. And God is the one who rocks us to sleep at night, singing soft lullabies. The book closes with the line, “God is your loving mother, you are made in her image too, God calls you “Beloved,” she is making all things new.”

It's become one of those few children’s books that I cannot make it through reading aloud without getting a little choked up. It’s beautiful. The experience of reading this book for the first time to my three girls last year was very special, but then it took an unexpected turn. My oldest, Ingrid, who turns 6 this week, spoke up and said, “So God isn’t a boy, and girls can be just as strong?”

My heart sank. My then 4 year-old daughter, who lives in a household of five women and one man, who is the daughter and granddaughter of female pastors. The daughter who has attended chapel every week for the past four years at her all-girls Episcopalian school with a female Episcopal Priest as chaplain. The same daughter who has spent the majority of her life at a church led by women pastors. This same daughter was under the assumption that God had to be a man. It is humbling to see the pervasiveness of this patriarchal perspective in even the youngest followers of Jesus.

As I closed the door to her bedroom and walked down to my own, many of my own memories came rushing back to me. When I was six, a little boy in my Baptist Sunday school announced that boys were better than girls because God is a boy, because Jesus calls him father. Or at 10 learning that the reason that we didn’t go to the American Baptist Church down the street and drove an hour away to attend one on the north side of Chicago was because, even in a tradition that affirms and practices the ordination of women, the pastor at the church by my house did not approve of my mother’s standing as clergy. Or the several emails and letters I have received over the last 13 years when speaking out as a pastor that attack, not my position on an issue, not my Biblical interpretation, but my gender. “You are no pastor,” one man wrote to me, “You are an imposter and heretical fraud, and you should repent now before it’s too late.”

So here I stand, as one of several ordained women who have stood here helping to lead this church in downtown Memphis….

“Women can’t be pastors.” I am certain you have heard this one before. And there are a few places in the Bible that folks who assert this position will point to support the continuation of patriarchal leadership in the church. Some will point to Genesis, and say that because man was made first and because woman was made from a part of man, that this means that man is superior. This logic never made any sense to me - the original being superior to the newer model. If that were the case, people would still be walking around with the 2007 iPhone instead of the iPhone 14. Maybe this logic of original being superior to the sequel works with Godfather movies. But even then, it’s a matter of debate.

There are really two pieces of scripture that folks will point to most when saying that men should be ordained and woman should not – and both of these are attributed to the Apostle Paul. The first is 1 Corinthians 14, which says that woman should be silent in church. Now this is of course confusing because just a couple of chapters earlier, in our text for today, Paul is instructing women on how to properly pray and prophesy in church with symbols of authority on their heads? So that’s weird, right?  

The other frequently quoted text is in 1 Timothy, which similarly tells women that they are to be silent and have no authority over a man. But it also tells women that they are to dress modestly, not braid their hair, and never wear gold or pearls or expensive clothes. Somehow the same ones who say I am out of place as a woman also say that those instructions about women’s appearance (literally one sentence earlier) are a product of historical context and not hard and fast, divinely-given rules like the line about women in leadership. It’s puzzling.  

So often these conversations and debates about the role of women in leadership in the church center on the teachings of Paul. And Paul, well, as the old Facebook relationship status used to say – “It’s complicated.” As arguably the most influential architect of the early Christian tradition, or at least the one who had the most written material attributed to him find its way into our Bible (14 of the 27 books of the New Testament), Paul is a massive figure in Christianity. And yet, we don’t always know what to quite what to do with all of the Pauline texts. We have questions. Questions like, How much authority do we give to someone who was not a Disciple and never actually knew Jesus during his lifetime? Also, we have questions about who wrote what and when. Biblical scholars divide the up the books of the Bible attributed to Paul in three ways: The books they think were actually written by Paul, those that were written by a close follower or followers of Paul, and the Pastoral Epistles, which they are pretty sure were not written by Paul but were later compositions by the “Pauline School.” So do we prioritize the authority of scripture based on these categories?

Another Pauline question... Paul’s writings are characterized as rather “apocalyptic” by many scholars, meaning, as my New Testament Professor Dr Amy-Jill Levine would say, “Paul thought Jesus was coming back next Tuesday.” In other words, Paul expected the return of Christ was immanent and operated out of an urgency of spreading the Gospel, but without taking up many of the major social issues that Jesus had tackled, probably because he believed that when Jesus comes back (next Tuesday), he would set all of those matters straight. So now that we are here in the church over 2,000 years later, how does that affect how we interpret the writings of Paul?

Well, as one who has stared at, yelled at, embraced, studied, discarded, reclaimed and cried over some of the words attributed to Paul, I actually think that Paul deserves a little redemption in the area of gender politics. Because Paul had a more equitable understanding of the role of men and women in the leadership of the church than he is typically assumed to have had. For starters, let’s remember historical context. In the time of Jesus’ ministry, and the formation of the early church, women were usually regarded as subordinate and inferior in virtually every area of life. They were to remain at home, be good wives and mothers, and to take no part in public discourse or education.

We know that Jesus was counter-cultural in this regard. Jesus had a substantial feminist streak. Through his teaching and actions, he affirmed the worth and value of women as persons to be included along with men within God’s love and service. He rejected some of the ways that sexism and chauvinism played out in his day, and called men out who were treating women poorly. He taught women. He had women followers. And in all four Gospels, it is women who discover the empty tomb, and the risen Jesus appears first to women in two of the Gospels, leading them to be the first proclaimers of the Good News of the resurrection. This is the legacy that Paul picks up following the death of Jesus and his own conversion story on that infamous Road to Damascus.

(As a note right here: We often confuse our specific church traditions about ordination with the biblical concept of ministry. It’s helpful to name that the New Testament says virtually nothing about ordination. This was an invention of the Christian Church over time. What we do see evidence of in the New Testament is evidence of people working together to build up the tradition and one another, and God giving people “gifts” to aid in that building. But ministry in the early church had no rank or title.)

If you are to survey all of the parts of the New Testament that are attributed to Paul, you will see many women as central and essential to the launch of the early church. And yet, how rarely we hear their names in our tradition - Lydia, Chloe, Nympha, Apphia, Mary, Persis, Tryphena, Tryphosa, Priscilla, Euodia, Syntyche, Phoebe, and Junia. Among these women were evangelists, and preachers, and teachers, and leaders of house churches. There were women present in the room when the tongues of fire appeared as the Holy Spirit was poured out at the event we term “Pentecost.” There were women arrested for being early followers of Jesus. There were women who traveled on behalf of the early church. And scripture tells us that Phoebe was the leader of the church in Cenchrea.

We have clear evidence from Paul that women did participate in the gospel ministry along with men. Paul’s terminology made no distinctions in roles or functions between men and women in ministry.

And then we have our text today, from 1 Corinthians Chapter 11. In this text, Paul asserts the mutuality between men and women – clarifying that head coverings were not to be a sign of women’s non-participation, but rather a mark of authority when praying and prophesying. And I love this line: “For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God.” This is a clear assertion of the mutuality, interdependence and equal footing of the genders in relation to God.

So how did we get here? To a place were millions of fellow Christians see me standing here, talking to you in this manner as heretical? How did we get to the place where all those biblical examples I offered get pushed aside by a couple of lines of scripture, read out of context, and about which we have some questions? Where are the women when we talk about the early church?

There are powers and forces in our world that were present at the time of Christ and are present now that are very adept at maintaining their grip and position of advantage. Paul knew this. In some translations he infamously calls them the “principalities and powers.” In his letter to the church in Ephesus, he referred to them when he said, “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Over time, our Bible has been used to justify land-grabbing, war, genocide, slavery, segregation, racism, lethal capitalism, and environmental plunder, and yes, sexism and patriarchy.

When my daughter, who is exposed to a lot of exceptional, female religious leaders and a lot of gender-inclusive language for God still needs to be reminded that God is not a man exclusively , and that women are also strong, physically, mentally and spiritually, I am reminded of just how invisible yet pervasive the messages are about what women can and cannot do.

We live in a weird moment in time when it comes to gender as a construct – a time where gender matters less than ever in some regards, as the understanding of gender expression has evolved to an incredibly broad spectrum. I have beloved members of my circles who identify as nonbinary and/or genderqueer and lead me to question if the construct of gender is becoming antiquated?

And yet, my experiences as a woman remind me that gender still matters. There are many corners of the world where the experiences of women are not so far removed from those in the time of Paul. Places where women are not free to work or to learn. Even here in the United States, women still make less than men for the same work, are expected to perpetuate the human species without the assistance of guaranteed healthcare or paid leave, and over the last year, courthouses and state houses across this nation have made determinations that have taken away significant portions of my bodily autonomy and medical privacy. So, for me, being a woman and a mother are very significant identities I hold as I make my way through this world.

Much of human history has positioned women as lesser. Many in our Christian tradition would suggest that, even as our corner of the world has moved forward in gender equality, the church must still hold to the first-century mindset about women. But let’s reclaim Paul’s position. Yes, Paul. The same guy who is quoted against me as pastor. Because the bulk of the writing attributed to him, which is the bulk of the writing in the New Testament, shows a Paul who valued women, who affirmed women, who trusted women with helping to shape the early church and begin the Christian movement that brought us to where we are today.

Don’t allow anyone to convince you that a couple of lines, pulled out of their context, negate the overall corpus of what Paul said about women and did alongside women. Women were there. At the center of the early church. My mother and I have role models that date back, not a hundred and fifty years, but who were there at the beginning. Sitting at Jesus’ feet. Standing at the foot of the cross. And spreading the Gospel message alongside men from the very beginning. 

Women were there. And women are here. And thank goodness for that!

Happy Mother’s Day. Amen.