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VOW
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Lesson Eight:
The Post-circle Meeting Imagine that your circle meeting is over. It was not only inspiring and informative, but a delightful and diverse collection of women from your church. The teacher presented a lesson on a most controversial Pauline text: “Let the women keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but let them subject themselves, just as the Law also says. And if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church. Was it from you that the word of God first went forth: Or has it come to you only?” ( I Corinthians 14:34-36)
“Who in their right mind would pick a passage like that for a Presbyterian Women’s Bible Study?!!!” In her less than graceful way, she’s actually done you all a huge favor. She broke the ice that held through the 30 minute Bible Study, and now you can share with candor. Another circle member says, “Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve always been embarrassed by that passage. I think Paul was a male chauvinist pig whose teachings perpetuate the oppression of women in the Church and the society.” Someone who nods in agreement says, “I’m no Bible thumper so I can’t give you chapter and verse but I think what Paul said about women is different than what Jesus said.” Still another member of the parking lot circle says, “Now don’t be so hard on Paul. He couldn’t help it. He was a product of his time and culture. We thinking Christians just have to sift through his writings to find the truth and the relevancy. I think a lot of what he said is worth reading.” There’s a woman standing next to you. She joined the church a year ago, having moved her letter from some Baptist church. You can’t remember her last name. Edith something. Her cheeks are flush and her eyes are piercing each of you with the glare of righteous indignation. She puts her hands on her hips and says, “Well, I think....” And it dawns on you in mid-sentence that these are the first words you’ve ever heard her speak! “Well, I think what Paul said about women speaking in church applies to women in the parking lot too. So button your lips!” With that, she marches to her station wagon, leaving the rest of you in stunned silence. One thing is absolutely certain: Paul never prohibited female laughter in church, so go right ahead. Remember, we’re just imagining a scene; plausible, I might add, in every Presbyterian parking lot in America. If you haven’t noticed yet, you haven’t said anything. Everyone has deposited their two cents on Paul, and now, all eyes are on you. You may get away with silence in the church but not in the parking lot. It’s time to speak. What will you say? I’m going to pray for you while you prepare your answer. And this is what I’ll pray: *That you will be the kind of Presbyterian who approaches any and every Biblical text as the Word of God, and God’s Word to you.The All Too Familiar Problems in the Corinthian Church While you are standing there in the parking lot preparing your answer, let me tell you a story about a particular congregation. They were one messed up bunch of ancient people! But God loved them dearly and Paul wanted to help them, because both God and Paul could see through the rampant problems to a better and more faithful church. To become that church, Paul had to confront the problems. The basic problem with the church at Corinth is that they were nearly invisible. The church had set up shop but you could hardly distinguish between the people of the church and the culture surrounding them. Within the life of the church there were people whose morals were invisible. Sexual immorality was as common place in the church as it was in the society. Some of them were even debating the virtues of incest. Don’t believe me? Go read it for yourself. There was no sense of foundation or grounding. They had even corrupted the Lord’s Supper into a gross “love feast.” And when they weren’t wallowing in the gastronomic orgy of a love feast, they were fighting like cats and dogs. The battle du jour was between the tongue speaking charismatics and the “ungifted” lesser Christians. It was a real mess. Line them all up and you couldn’t tell the Corinthian Christian from the plain old ordinary Corinthian. In fact, when it came to worship, the church looked more Corinthian than Christian. Across the bay from Corinth sat a pagan temple on a hill, The Temple of Apollo, home of the Oracle of Delphi. Women, not men, played the key role in this pagan religion. Practiced from 1400 B.C. to 381 A.D., the ancient oracle was akin to the modern day psychic hotline. Today, the gullible pay by the minute through a 1-900 number. 2000 years ago, the men of Corinth would travel across the bay, offer up an animal sacrifice, and enter the chamber of The Pythia, the highest position in the pagan religion, only occupied by a woman. The Corinthian man would ask a question submitted on a lead tablet. “How many sons will I have?” Or maybe, “Will my crops be abundant or dismal this growing season?” The Pythia read the tablet, ate a laurel leaf, and then perched herself upon a tripod in her chamber, whence she would then go into a bizarre euphoric trance. Mostly, her utterances would sound like babbling nonsense, according to ancient historians. Another priestess would translate the nonsense mostly into gratifying news. “She said you’ll have a whole herd of sons!” Or, “The Oracle declares you will have a bumper crop!” Ancient historians reported that the babbling hallucinations of the high priestess were actually induced by vapors rising from the ground within the Pythia’s chamber. For many years this was dismissed until a recent geological survey discovered ethylene gas rising from volcanic fissures in the rocks of the Temple ruins. Ethylene, a sweet smelling gas, produces an hallucinogenic effect. (Reported by John Roach for National Geographic News. August 14, 2001) Unlike the oracle, what Paul said wasn’t just hot air. It was truth. Truth for yesterday and truth for today. And this is what he truly said: Women “keep silent.” Or more true to the Greek, “keep the peace.” And then he said, “For they are not permitted to speak.” But his choice of words was precise. The Greek word loosely translated as “speak” is more carefully translated as “to utter incoherent sounds.” Paul was inspired by God to write these words because some of the married women in the church at Corinth were disrupting services and confusing people by babbling away in tongues in a fashion very similar to that of the oracle. Don’t you see it? Paul is not an oppressor of women but a liberator of people. His words aren’t about women. They’re about the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the people of the Church rising above the amoral practices of the world around them. Paul’s instructions call for the people of the Church to work hard at distinguishing themselves from the people of the world. Paul is telling the church, and particularly the women of the church, not to “shut up” but to stick out like a sore thumb. If the pagan priestesses babble in pagan worship, then you charismatic women are going to have to be very careful about expressing your gift in church. Don’t confuse people. Make it virtually impossible, Paul is saying, for anyone to confuse your faith and practice with the faith and practice of an unchristian and unholy culture. “What about Paul’s teaching about women covering their heads?” someone asks. There were a thousand priestesses in the Temple of Aphrodite at the Acrocorinth, as well familiar to all Corinthians. These women practiced cultic prostitution in their pagan religious rites. Their hair was kept short, nearly shaven. For the same reason, Paul instructed women to keep their heads modestly covered or to cover their heads with long hair. (See I Corinthians 11:1-16) Don’t confuse people. Distinguish yourselves from pagans who are leading people astray. Again, Paul was no oppressor of women, but a liberator of people, and he knew full well that God wanted to use the Church to liberate or redeem a sinful world. Lord knows we make it hard on Him when our lives (our words, our choices, our behavior, our relationships) are barely distinguishable from the lives of the unchristian men and women around us. Paul may be writing about hair in the 11th chapter, but the truth God was communicating through him has nothing to do with hairdos and everything to do with the conspicuous faith. Paul’s message is as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago. This is what I hear Paul saying to P.C.U.S.A. Christians in the year 2004: “You are to be in the world but not of the world. Stop confusing the very people we need to be reaching with transforming love of Jesus. You confuse them when you tell them that what they believe isn’t really all that important as long as they try to be good. You confuse them when you ignore, or at worst bless, behaviors that contradict God’s clear instruction. You confuse them about the validity of the Christian faith when the divorce rates of some of your more conservative and evangelical members are higher than the general population. You confuse them when your General Assembly is the last institution left in the American culture that wants to validate partial birth abortion. You confuse them when you spend more time on internal squabbles than on reaching the unchurched. You confuse them when you say “we’re about mission” and then you make draconian cuts to the missions budget. You confuse them when a Christ seeking visitor sees you watching the clock instead of listening to the sermon. You confuse them when your ministers preach one ethic and then live out an entirely contradictory one. You confuse them when you say “Jesus is my Lord,” and then spend the overwhelming majority of your time seeking after material possessions. You confuse them when an inventory of your life looks no different than that of a polite agnostic. Your faith is nearly invisible. And you’re confusing the world to death, literally.” Paul had some tough words to Corinthian Christians too. But to the very same crowd of Christians, Paul gave the most beautiful words he was ever inspired to write. If we will endeavor, by God’s grace, to diligently follow them, the world will see you and me and say, “Beyond a shadow of a doubt, there goes a Christian.” “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love never fails...” (I Corinthians 13:1-8a) You Cannot Keep Silent - You Must Speak Well, so much for the story of the Corinthian Church learning what it means to be the Church in an unholy culture. And you’re still standing in the parking lot and the rest of the ladies are waiting for your response. You cannot keep silent. You must speak out. You must speak clearly, intelligibly, as informed by your diligent study of the Word of God. You must speak a peaceable and edifying word, even in the parking lot. What will you say? Make Paul proud. Closing prayer: Holy God,
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