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| At the moment of Jesus' death, "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." (Matthew 27:51) Image source. |
In some churches, women aren't allowed to volunteer as ushers, or to serve communion, or to read Scripture to the congregation. Because, the bible says women should not speak in church, and a woman must not have authority over a man.
There are also churches that believe men and women are fully equal, and women can have all the same leadership positions that men can. They interpret those bible verses as only applicable to the first-century churches they were written to, and not absolute rules for all time.
Suppose you don't know which side of this debate to believe. It certainly seems sexist and wrong to put restrictions on women, but at the same time, it's right there in the bible, so maybe God really does want us to do it?
Maybe it would be wise to err on the side of caution, and not allow women to do things. It's difficult- it's difficult to obey God in this way- everyone will call you a sexist, and also if you exclude all the women volunteers, maybe you don't even have enough men volunteers to run your church service. One could argue that obedience to God is in fact supposed to be difficult like this. It's so hard, it's a sacrifice, look how we are sacrificing so much for God. Much more righteous than taking the easy way out and just letting women have all the same roles that men can have, right?
The problem with this framework is, it has God above us, and we are down here trying to please him, trying to follow the rules correctly, for him. God has high standards, and we have to work really hard, exclude people just in case God wants them excluded, the narrower the better, no sacrifice is too great if we are doing it for God.
But God is not up there, waiting for us to present our carefully-screened representatives to perform worship in our best attempt to follow Their rules. God is here. God is in us. All humans bear the image of God. If your church excludes women from volunteer/leadership roles, you are excluding God.
If you restrict women, you're not "erring on the side of caution." You're cutting off part of the body of Christ. You're cutting off God.
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Gay Christians face a similar debate. The traditional interpretation of the bible says only hetero relationships are allowed, and sex is only for one-man-one-woman marriage. On the other side, you have gay Christians making the argument that those bible verses were written for the people in the ancient Near East, and they don't apply to us now.
But if you're not sure who to believe, what do you do? Maybe don't ever date a same-sex partner, just in case it's a sin. Maybe a church should not do same-sex weddings, or have queer people in leadership. High standards, for God.
But again, you're cutting off God. God is in queer people, queer joy, the way that we thrive when we're able to accept ourselves for who we are. Don't ask people to repress themselves for God- you're repressing God. All the diversity and beauty of the image of God, living in so many different people with so many different experiences and perspectives, and we're trying to cut it down, fit it in a box, make it fit the straight and narrow "rules."
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Another example is that time in college that we brought a friend to church, and he said he was a Christian, but we "knew" he wasn't a "real" Christian. I wrote about this in my post The Worst Bible Story:
On another occasion, a friend of mine, let’s call him Hector, brought another friend, let’s call him Carl, to church. Carl claimed to be a Christian, but he hadn’t been attending church or anything, and Hector and I knew that he didn’t have a real “relationship with God”, you know, because evangelical Christians are all about judging who is and who isn’t a “real Christian.”
So Carl came to church. And that week, we had communion, and Hector stopped him and explained, you know, honestly, you’re not a real Christian, so you shouldn’t take communion. And Carl was really hurt by it (can you imagine), but I admired Hector for taking a stand like that. Defending the wafers and grape juice from those who don’t have the “correct” view on Jesus.
I would never have done what Hector did, because I was not confident enough in my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 and I had never seen anyone stopped from taking communion before. ...
I would never have done that, but I really admired Hector for the way he stepped out in faith and took a stand for God, even though other people didn't accept it.
Excluding Christians from communion because we think they're not "really" Christians. Because we believed God was above us, judging whether we stayed in the lines or not, and God was offended by anyone who came forward and ate a little wafer but didn't meet the standards of how to believe in Jesus the "correct" way.
We thought that if someone felt hurt by being blocked from taking communion, well, that was a small price to pay to keep up the highest standards of respect for God. Making sure that only people who were definitely the right kind of Christian were allowed to participate.
We were actually excluding God.
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Matthew 1 contains [one version of] Jesus' genealogy. It traces his ancestry from father to son, through Abraham, down through David and the kings of ancient Judah, down to Joseph, the husband of Mary. I've often heard Christians point out how interesting it is that this genealogy mentions some women. I mean, it's a typical patriarchal genealogy in that it's all about "so-and-so was the father of so-and-so," but at a few points in the list of fathers and sons, it also mentions who someone's mother was.
Specifically, the women included in the Matthew 1 genealogy are: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.
Tamar, whose first husband Er was wicked, so the Lord put him to death. Then she was required to marry his brother, Onan, who was also wicked and the Lord put him to death. Then she was supposed to marry the remaining brother, but her father-in-law Judah didn't let her, so she disguised herself as a prostitute to get Judah to have sex with her, and she became pregnant that way.
Rahab, a prostitute and foreigner, a resident of Jericho, whose city was attacked and the people killed by Joshua and his army.
Ruth, a widow and foreigner from Moab, which was one of Israel's enemies.
Bathsheba, who was raped by King David. She became pregnant, so David murdered her husband Uriah, and married her.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was a virgin but probably had people judging her for being unmarried and pregnant.
This is not exactly the dream team that you would assemble if you wanted good, respectable, uncomplicated role models. So why did Matthew go out of his way to point out that these women were part of Jesus' family line?
One way I've heard this explained is, this is great because it shows that even if we're not perfect, we can still be part of God's work. God can still use us to do amazing things, despite our flaws.
I want to spin it a little bit differently, though: God lives in the women that society rejects. The widows, the immigrants, the sex workers, the women in bad marriages, the rape victims. To exclude them, to say Jesus needs a perfect pure genealogy... you're excluding God.
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Christian missionaries go to different parts of the world, encounter diverse and interesting cultures, where God is already there and alive, and tell the people to stop doing all that and follow the missionaries' religion instead.
God was already there, before any Christians came. The people have the image of God, and they have their own culture and religion, which is important and meaningful to them. The missionaries tell them to cut it off, to repress it, that it's *bad* because it's worshipping the wrong gods- you're cutting off God.
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Deuteronomy 23:1 says, "No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord."
Hundreds of years later, an Ethiopian eunuch met Philip, one of the early Christians. Philip told him about Jesus, and he believed, and said, "Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" Is this legit? Can he be baptized? Can he be welcomed and included?
Philip didn't think it was an issue at all. Philip baptized him.
Throughout the bible, there are some passages about excluding people who have some kind of imperfection and therefore don't meet the standards and can't enter God's presence. And then there are other passages about God's radical inclusiveness, about marginalized people who were accepted and approved of by God. Slaves, people from the wrong nations, people from the wrong religions.
I don't think this is a simple Old Testament/ New Testament split- it's common for Christians to claim that the Old Testament was about rules and the New Testament is about God's love- but the verse that says women can't speak in church is from the New Testament. And the Old Testament has stories about welcoming immigrants, which stand in contrast to its laws about killing everyone in every city you conquer.
The bible has all of these threads running through it; we use our own beliefs about the nature of God to decide which bible passages to emphasize and which to disagree with.
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1 Corinthians 12 says that we are the body of Christ.
Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.
This passage is about diversity. About how we need diversity, or else we are actually excluding parts of Christ.
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The Christians who want to exclude people... well, God is in them too. We can't cut them off either.
In practice, that means thinking about how to get people who disagree to coexist in a church. You can't just say we all accept each other even if we disagree, because these issues are about one group's basic rights on one side, vs another group's bigoted opinions on the other side.
So you need to make sure you set up a system where people who want to exclude and restrict others are not given the power to do that. And okay that sounds complicated- but really, you have to do that anyway. All the groups of people I've mentioned in this post, as examples of people who bear the image of God and shouldn't be excluded- well, they are all imperfect people who have conflicts sometimes. We all are.
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Is God above us, waiting to see if we are good enough to meet Their standards, requiring us to restrict and ban people who aren't good enough to participate in worshipping Them? More restrictions, higher standards, the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you."
No, God is with us, in us, and when we exclude people, we are excluding God.
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