Sitting around the dinner table playing dominoes, everyone starts to sing this song which has wound its way back into the national consciousness. Though my wife and I were certainly alive in the 70s, the Kid ™ says what a great song this is… will I wake up soon?
More memorable for me was this one… Pablo Cruise (on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert no less!) You see Kids, before MTV we had to stay up until the middle of the night to see music on television (cf: Midnight Special).
Rawk On!
Let’s use our discernment skills and examine a passage, shall we? Perhaps a good one would be 1 Timothy 2:8-15:
I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or disputing.
I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.
Read the passage and break it down into its basic commands. As you tick off each one, make a note of whether or not this command should be practiced today.
1) Males should pray with their hands lifted up.
2) Males should pray without anger or disputing.
3) Women should dress modestly.
4) Women should not have elaborate hairstyles or wear gold or pearls or expensive clothing.
5) Women should have good deeds.
6) Women should be silent and quiet.
7) Women should not teach or have authority.
So, what were your answers? Unless you answered in the affirmative to every single one and live out that commitment you have put some framework of discernment in place with regard to the biblical commands. Can you identify the source of your decision matrix. For example, Paul commands that men should pray with their hands lifted up. I looked about during worship this Sunday morning and noted some hands clasped and most heads bowed but none of the men had their hands raised during moments of prayer. The Apostle also commands that women are to dress modestly but I suspect that what passes for modestly in Southern California or Florida might not be the same as the requirements in North Dakota or Alabama. Is it proper to make cultural adjustments to a biblical understanding or must the first century dress of women be the bar against which all current and future dress is measured? The point here is that there can be reasonable disagreement on the application of these commands and yet, the restrictions on women have become fossilized and made their way as the hard and fast tradition of the Church. Why flexibility on some and not on others? Is our discernment colored by other factors that we are unwilling to give name to?
It’s important to answer these questions for ourselves because many in church are simultaneously willing to ignore the first command of the passage and maintain the last as a hard and fast rule. This, in spite of the fullness of the Bible’s story in which women were active in ministries and leadership throughout the story. Is it appropriate to allow the WKSPs to control the greater body of WDWDs? Genesis 3:16 has become indurate and tradition bound up in its words, proscribing women forever to inferior status. Reading this in context however can lead us to see it as the result of the transition from Oneness to Otherness and the struggles that obtain from this relational status.
How do we respond then to Christ’s restoration of Oneness:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (2 Co 5:17)
There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Ga 3:27-28)
Do we see the power here that Christ brings? At the very least, the new creation might be seen as a restoration of Oneness between men and women but, even more powerfully, it unleashes the Spirit within to undo the the Fall in our world. Thoughts?
As we read into the middle section of this psalm (vv 12 – 21) we find a poetic device at work to emphasize the only source of hope for the psalmist, salvation by the Lord. Notice how the dangers bracket the redeemer:
Bulls, Lions, Dogs
Hope in the Redeemer
Dogs, Lions, Bulls
Nearly all of us can identify with the despair of the psalmist as our troubles surround us on all sides, threatening to engulf us. The vicious nature of one’s enemies is on full display; the lions roar their deafening cry while tearing at the flesh, the horns of the bulls glisten red in the light as they snort and bring their enormous bulk closer and closer and, all the while, the snarling dogs snap and dodge, circling around their prey. Their teeth pierce the hands and feet of the besieged as he grows weaker and weaker.
I can count all my bones; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing. (vv 17-18)
There is always hope, even if it is not restored in this life. We are children of the Lord and despite our current danger, we will rest in the safety of his hand knowing that our circumstances serve the greater purpose of God.
But you, O Lord, be not far off; O my Strength, come quickly to help me.
Deliver my life from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs.
Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen. (vv 19 – 21)
Once again I return in the darkness of the early morning in tow behind the dogs and reach down to pick up the newspaper on the driveway. When I lift the blue plastic bag and feel the lack of heft, I immediately begin to scan the ground for the rest of the paper. Nothing around so I slide the plastic back to reveal…what a pitiful end the Rocky Mountain News has come to. A daily newspaper in a major American city is reduced to 32 pages, front to back. What are they going to do when the Broncos find a coach and they can’t devote ten pages each day to that story?
The saga of the News is being played out across the country as once important journals fade away in an environment of the Interwebs and 24/7 cable channels on the television. By the time I get to the newspaper, I’ve already been brought up to speed on the computer and may have listened to a little radio as well. What are they going to offer me any more?
The newspaper/journalism used to be different. I could turn page after page and find depth to a story. Now, I’m bombarded by opinion pieces that pretend to be news stories. When the Rocky Mountain News was put up for sale, the staff went into full salvation mode appearing on local talk radio. What astonished me (or didn’t, I suppose, which made it worse) was their utter state of denial of these men and women as to the decrepit state of journalism. They loudly proclaimed their lack of bias and the fairness of their reporting when just the opposite is on display in each morning’s dwindling pages. The ‘journalists’ patted one another on the back for their stories and series and denied every attempt to point out their lack of objectivity. Some went so far as to attempt to blame a lack of sophistication in the readers for the state of news reporting.
Isn’t the first step in AA admitting you have a problem?
I’ll be saddened the day the RMN shuts down because the alternative, the Denver Post, is much, much worse. Do Wuzzles come in book form?
The depths of moral bankruptcy seem to know no bottom, do they? We are inundated with opinion pieces masquerading as news in which a victim is portrayed as the aggressor in the Israeli-Gazan conflict. The newsreaders display their lack of principles as they attempt to portray some measure of moral equivalence between the culture of death which rules in Gaza and the democratic, peace-seeking culture of Israel. Will we soon see sympathetic portraits of the Somali pirates?
Sarah Palin was savaged mercilessly during her ninety days in the public spotlight. Her rise through public service was belittled and searched for scandal. The Palin family was trashed and portrayed as ‘Deliverance’ extras, pregnant in their mukluks with questions about lineage paraded across the front page. All this because she proudly stands up for her conservative principles. While all this was happening, the media at large happily avoided any difficult questions of the principles or beliefs of the next president that they so gleefully carried into office. Obfuscations dismissed, questionable relationships ignored, morality murdered.
Perhaps the most disturbing trend that has been developing for some time but is now reaching its zenith is the ascendance of the ‘celebrity pastor.’ These men (and women) have become consumed with self-aggrandizement and promotion. It is especially apparent in the blogosphere where their posts are couched in introductions in which they are “humbled” to have preached at four distant churches on one Sunday as they remind us of how great they have become. Shouldn’t people who have been redeemed and gifted through no aspect of their own character seek out a true humility? True achievement is recognized by others, not ourselves.
Is there anything left in the till for a bailout here?
In my previous post, we looked at what ministerial efforts women were involved in within the story of the Old Testament and today we turn our focus to the New Testament. Can you think of the names of any of the women involved in ministries in the gospels or epistles? How about Mary? Even the mention of Mary among protestants is likely to cause some measure of agitation but have we fully considered her ministry?
Mary was an enormously influential woman, called by God to be the mother of the Messiah. Not only does she bring Jesus into the world but she demonstrates in her Magnificat (Lk 1:46-56) a depth of spiritual maturity that certainly contributes to the development of her sons Jesus and James. Her parental role is largely hidden in the gospels but the men who developed under her tutelage reflect a deeply committed mother who placed God first in their lives.
Junia is another woman who stands out. We encounter her very briefly in Romans 16:7 where she is mentioned by Paul as one who is outstanding among the apostles. Though we are noting her gender it is more important to recognize her in the same way that the Apostle does. She is noted for the outstanding nature of her intelligence, giftedness, and her calling. Often, in our modern church, we are willing to allow the WKSPs to overwhelm what we can discern as a clear calling from God. Where does this doctrine come from?
In Acts we encounter a pair of of bible teachers named Priscilla and Aquila, husband and wife, as Paul meets them sojourning in Corinth after being driven from Rome (Acts 18:2). They are mentioned numerous times but are noted as theology and scripture teachers of Apollos (18:26.) What is of note (aside from her calling to and mastery of the role of teacher) is her positional prominence in nearly every mention of the couple’s names. While it was not unheard of to mention a woman’s name first in the context of a couple, it was done in cases where there was a special recognition of the woman as is the case here.
Finally, let us not overlook Phoebe the Deacon we encounter in Romans 16:1. She is not belittled by the modern title deaconess as something less than practicing a fully recognized ministry within the church. She is active in ministry such that Paul recognizes the need to mention her in conjunction with her important contributions to the church. She is not mentioned as having been silent.
The New Testament (from which the WKSP passages derive) shows us women that were influential, that were the source for stories about Jesus, they were church planters, teachers, benefactors and interpreters of Paul’s letters. We have to ask then, why the WKSPs? How does the insistence on the silence of women fit into the theme of Oneness restored by Christ? We’ll broach this in the next post.
John Burke’s first book No Perfect People Allowed solidified a lot of my ideas about ministry and in his new book, Soul Revolution he’s just as good. I came accross this paragraph on my first read,
Imagine you found a Rembrandt painting covered in mud. You wouldn’t focus on themud or treat it like mud. Your primary concern wouldn’t be the mud at all, even though it would need to be removed. You’d be ecstatic to have discovered something so valuable. If you tried to clean it up without the expertise, you might damage it. So you’d take the painting to an expert, who could show you how to restore it to its original condition. When people begin treating one another as God’s masterpiece waiting to be revealed, God’s grace grows in their lives and cleanses them.
The more I think about this, the more I love this.
A recent purge of overstuffed desk drawers yielded these rawk and rollll memories. Maybe this year will be the year I scan all of my old negatives and bring them back to the light of day and start a spreadsheet of the shows I’ve been to so I could tell you where they came from. La Tortuga came from mission experience in Oxacca … my how things have changed.
Happy new year to one and all. I must be getting old. Instead of ringing in the new year at the Cow Palace as in years past, shortly after midnight I fell asleep to the booming of our neighbor’s fireworks.
First good sign of the new year: a message from a cousin that I had lost touch with.
Continuing this series on the issue of women in ministry, we recall that our aim is to read the entire Bible in developing our theological beliefs. We do this in order to prevent one or two passages to be taken improperly out of the context of the whole story as thought they define the permanent and complete voice of God on a subject. What often occurs in the discussion regarding a woman’s role in the church is that two Pauline passages are recited as the whole of the biblical record on women:
As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. (1 Co 14:33-35)
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. (1 Ti 2:11-12)
We will refer to these as the Women Keep Silent Passages (WKSPs)
Somehow, the cultural notion of female inferiority has become fossilized in the Church and doctrine and practice built up around it. Because of this, two passages have taken on an importance that is out of perspective with the rest of the Bible. If we carefully read the Bible in its entirety, we find a history of women’s involvement in the life of God’s people that is far broader than the the WKSPs allow. Reading the Bible as a story should lead us to ask a different question from the legalistic, what is allowed. Instead, we should look at what women actually did, leading us to a different question, What Did Women Do (WDWD)? When we ask this question as we scan the pages of our bibles, we find that women led, prophesied, taught, they were apostles, and they were spiritual mentors. They were (Blue Parakeet) exceptions to the inferiority culture. To allow the WKSPs to overwhelm the preponderance of WDWD passages is an unbiblical approach to analyzing the issue.
When reading Paul, we must remember that he is in conversation with his scriptures, the Old Testament. He is certainly aware of the importance of Miriam as one third of Israel’s early leadership trio. Moses was the Lawgiver, Aaron the priest, and Miriam the prophetess (cf: Micah 6:4). Paul also knew and revered the importance of Deborah the Judge. Here was woman called by God to lead Israel back to righteousness. She could speak for Him as a prophet, render decisions in a court of law, exercise spiritual leadership, and be a military commander. It is important to note that she was the leader of ALL of Israel, including the men. Paul would also know well the story of Josiah finding the Torah and repenting of how wicked the people of Israel had become. Who does he seek out to speak with God? Huldah the prophetess (not the only one by any stretch.) Paul knows that women have been used by God long before he began to pen his letters to Timothy and the church at Corinth. Does he now presume to overrule the choices God has made? We will look into the New Testament women in the next post.
UPDATE: Here is an interesting thread touching on the overall issue. Many of the facets of a theological discussion (tradition, single passage vs the ‘whole story’) are present among this intelligent group.
LOVE | ACCEPT | FORGIVE 