Wednesday - "The Faithful Work of Smashing the Patriarchy"

 6-2-21

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

At the seminary I attended in Minneapolis, at the end of every semester was something called “Reading Week.” While it was a week of no classes… it was right before all of our final papers were due – a time to catch up on all our reading and writing. Ever since then, every so often I take a “Reading Week” for continuing education, to catch up on some of the books that I have become quite a tall stack.

This is one of the books I recently picked up after hearing about it on NPR – “The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.” Now, granted, may seem like an unnecessary book to read for an ELCA pastor… after all, the ELCA and her predecessor bodies have been ordaining women for more than 50 years! Emmanuel has a few women pastors, and we even have a woman bishop – Bishop Leila Ortiz! AND we have a woman Presiding Bishop – Elizabeth Eaton! We are SOOOO Enlightened!!

Perhaps… but we are also swimming in a sea of other Christians who perhaps aren’t so…. “enlightened” let us say. There are plenty of LUTHERAN denomination that do not ordain women. 18% of the Lutheran denominations that make up the Lutheran World Federation DO NOT ordain women. Additionally, many women pastors IN the ELCA even now find themselves the first woman pastor ever called to the church they serve and face less respect and are paid less than their male counterparts would be.  

It also happens that some of the loudest Christian voices out there tend to subscribe to a very narrow view of women’s roles in and outside of the church and baptize these ideas in the name of Christ. Using the Bible, and more specifically the writings of Paul, certain branches of Christianity don’t allow women to: preach, teach mixed gender Sunday school classes, and live fully into their identities as beloved children of God.

Dr. Beth Allison Barr, the author of the book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood, knows this all too well, and tells her stories of being a Ph.D. in Medieval Christian history, and yet, needing special dispensation from her pastor to teach Sundays school when no men where available. Her book reminds us that the patriarchy existed well BEFORE Christianity… she writes: “Patriarchy may be part of Christian history, but that doesn’t make it Christian.”

Lots of the letters of Paul ARE used to make the Christian Patriarch into some kind of Gospel – that part I was well aware of. But in reading Dr. Barr’s book last week, I was also astonished that Paul didn’t always mean what we think he meant. All those “wives should submit to their husbands” clobber passages might actually be counter cultural. It turns out, ancient pre-Christian Roman society was SUPER patriarchal – no huge surprise there – but early Christianity was seriously shaking things up. For Paul to directly address wives at all in these “household rules” as he did was radical and unheard of.

Paul also wrote for Christians to not be conformed to the world. Do Christians really want to look MORE like the world, meaning MORE like patriarchy? It’s just as rough out there in the “secular world” for women as it is inside Christianity, between sexual harassment, the pay gap, lack of affordable childcare, and lots of old men in the government telling women what to do with their reproductive systems.

It was not PAUL who told my mortgage lender to send mail to our house in MY HUSBAND’S NAME, rather than mine, even though I was the primary point of contact through the whole process. Paul did not stipulate that upon marriage my name MUST BECOME “Mrs. Husband’s First and Last Name.” It confuses Christians AND non-Christians alike that I still go by my last name of origin.

You see, the same man who wrote “wives submit to your husbands” also wrote the passage from Galatians 3… words that I image would also be just as likely to come from the lips of Jesus. After, all it was not Paul who died and was raised for us, it was Jesus. And Jesus talked to women, healed women, were sponsored and supported by women, were friends with women, and called women to share the good news of his resurrection with all.

In the era that Dr. Barr knows best- the medieval period in Europe, plenty of women preached and taught. Instead of moving forward, Christianity as a whole has gone backward. And when one of us is not free, none of use are free.

A long time ago, Jesus set women free… why has it taken us so long to do the same? In baptism we have been set us free… why are we holding hostage the potential of any who has been called to do the work of God’s kingdom?

Dr. Barr ends her book as she ends each of her classes in Medieval History – Go, be free! She writes: “Once again, I propose that we stop making Christianity look like the world around us, and starting fighting to make it looked like the world God inspired Paul to show us was possible” – I would add, a world where there IS no longer Jew, Greek….slave, free… male, female… rich, poor… citizen, immigrant…. Housed, homeless… outsider, insider… for all of us are one in Christ Jesus. One, Free, Empowered, and beloved. So, go, be free! Thanks be to God. Amen.