Nevertheless, I Preached

What if a woman feels called to be a pastor? It was an honest question. My heart burned and my chest tightened as I looked around at the other group leaders that had been gathered in my sister's living room. My sister and her husband, who were leading the group, had invited us all together to agree on some shared beliefs. And I had been a leader for about two years, ever since I moved back home to Maine after graduating from college. But my questions pressed down on me. I no longer believed some of what I had been taught as a child about women in leadership, about our LGBTQ plus siblings.

And for a long time, I had tiptoed around those questions. I knew that questions were seen as a lack of faith or a deliberate refusal to follow God's will. And then the conversation turned to who could teach the youth group. The other women agreed that they would not give a lesson when boys were present.

In their words, women could not teach boys how to be men. Their husbands could teach. Meanwhile, as an unmarried woman, I understood that I could no longer preach or teach, despite serving in collegiate ministry for four years.

And I couldn't let this one idea go. Wasn't God big enough to speak through women, too? So I asked the question that landed in the room like a ton of bricks.

One of the other youth group leaders looked me in the eye, and she said the words that would stick in my head for a long time afterward. If a woman feels called to preach, she is just being prideful. Shortly after that moment, I formally stepped down from leadership.

The gap between what I had been taught to believe and what I was beginning to question had grown too wide for me to belong. My evangelical upbringing no longer felt like home. But that leader, she was not trying to be cruel.

She was simply repeating what she had been taught and what she earnestly believed. And not too long ago, I would have agreed with her. The Bible says it, I believe it, and that's that, was my constant refrain.

And many of us probably know what verses this leader had in mind. In 1 Corinthians chapter 14, verses 34 and 35, Paul writes, Women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is something they want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home.

But it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. Now, before we begin unpacking these verses, I want to make a bit of a confession here. I am a Paul defender.

You may be wondering, how is that even possible? Yeah. For nearly 2,000 years, Paul's words here have been used to keep women in their place.

And it's not just women. Paul's words have been used to defend slavery, condemn queer folks, push people to the margins. But my perspective about Paul changed when I attended seminary and I took multiple classes for my favorite seminary professor and also current president of Wesley Theological Seminary, Dr. Carla Works.

As a Pauline scholar, she has spent decades of her life studying Paul's words within the scope of scripture and its historical context. And as a woman, she has had to wrestle with Paul's words. She taught me something incredibly important.

It can be tempting to throw these verses away to claim that they are culturally irrelevant and backward. But if we refuse to deal with these passages like these, if we can't wrestle with them honestly, with both our heads and our hearts fully engaged, then we are ceding these texts to those who would use them to continue perpetuating harm. We must name and reclaim these verses for the sake of liberation.

And this is what we've been doing this entire sermon series. We've covered a ton of hard topics. And each time we've emerged on the other side with greater clarity about what Paul is saying to us in this moment.

So as I began to study Paul, I realized that his words in 1 Corinthians 14 must be read carefully with attention both to Paul's context and his theology. And I want to emphasize that Paul was in some ways more radical than we give him credit for. Although he was working within his culture.

He was working out his theology within the limits of his society. And so wrestling with this complexity is part of why I've learned to appreciate Paul. And to see what I mean, we can back up a few chapters.

You can turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 11, verses 2 through 16. The words will also be on the screen. And you can go to table.center to see the text, take notes, and receive other resources for reflection later in the week.

I also want to give a fair warning that these verses may make you like Paul even less. So just stick with me here. I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions just as I have handed them on to you.

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man. And the man is the head of every woman. And God is the head of Christ.

Any man who prays or prophesies with something on his head shames his head. But any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled shames her head. It is one and the same thing as having her head shaved.

For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair. But if it is shameful for a woman to have her hair cut off or to be shaved, she should wear a veil. For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God.

But woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. And neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man.

For this reason, a woman ought to have authority over her head because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man, or man independent of woman. But just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman.

But all things come from God. Judge for yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled?

Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is dishonoring to him? But if a woman has long hair, it is her glory. For her hair is given to her for a covering.

But if anyone is disposed to be contentious, we have no such custom, and nor do the churches of God.

So your first response to these verses might be rage. That's totally valid, by the way. Your second response, though, might be confusion.

What on earth is Paul talking about here? The good thing is, if you're confused, you're in good company. Because scholars have been scratching their heads over this one for centuries.

Where to begin? We are basically reading Paul's mail here. He wrote this letter to the early Corinthian church.

And Corinth was a major port city, just outside of Athens, obsessed with status and influence. Everybody wanted to climb the social ladder. It's like when you start a conversation with someone new in DC, and the immediate question is, what do you do?

Your answer determines how that other person views you. And the early church contained people from all walks of life. Rich and poor, slave and free, Jew and Gentile.

And this caused a ton of problems within the community as they jockeyed for status and position. And Paul's main goal was to end division and cultivate unity. And when we wrestle with confusing texts like this, we have to remember one thing.

It is okay to be confused, but we shouldn't pretend to understand more than we actually do. This is what biblical scholar Richard B. Hays calls hermeneutical honesty, or this ability to grapple with the distance between these faraway words in our present context. It's about how we engage authentically with what this ancient text might have to say to us today.

So, to us, this text is almost hopelessly convoluted. The chief issue appears to be about head coverings. But this is wrapped up in a tangle-of-word salad about veils, angels, some questionable theology, and some gender essentialism.

For biblical scholars, the jury is out on whether Paul is talking about literal head coverings here, like veils, or merely the status of a woman's hair, whether she's wearing it bound up or loose. In the translation I read, they do use the word veil, but that does not occur in the original Greek. It could mean veil, but it could also just mean a woman having her hair down.

And either way, whether veiled or unbound, this could have been shameful. In Corinth, the church was surrounded by the worship of other gods. The temple of Aphrodite sat high above the city on the Acropolis, and the temple of Apollo towered over all the other buildings in, like, the center of town.

You couldn't escape idol worship. And for some religious cults in the city, the priestesses often wore their hair loose and wild as they prophesied. So perhaps what Paul is doing here is encouraging the women not to associate with them, even in their appearance.

And this mattered for the men. Paul frames it as a hypothetical, but he does mention that men should leave their heads uncovered. This could possibly be because some temple priests did cover their heads during worship, and so Paul is encouraging them to separate themselves, like sort of the religious cults of the time.

The closest modern analogy to something like this would be how men are encouraged to take off their caps during the national anthem or during church services as a way of respect. Now, notice all the perhaps here. We truly don't know why head coverings mattered so much to the early church.

And it's okay not to know. It's actually a little bit fun to go down a rabbit hole and explore all the different, like, what-ifs and whys without getting wrapped up in one solid answer. And you can have a little bit of fun with it.

Like, look at verse 10, where Paul makes some pretty bizarre turns. For this reason, a woman ought to have authority over her head because of the angels. What do angels have to do with this?

Scholars give a big fat shrug to this question. They don't know. There are some, like, a few competing theories.

Some scholars believe that this passage connects to Genesis 6, where the sons of God, often understood to be angels, are lusting after these mortal women. So a woman's loose or uncovered hair might tempt the angels, so the covering would protect her. And then others view this as angels as part of the congregation.

They were watching over the worship to keep it in order. And for Paul, a woman having her head covered would signify to the angels that worship was being done properly, and that men are fit for God's presence. Either way, though, I think this is why it's important to wrestle with what we don't know.

There was part of this context that is lost to us. Probably when Paul wrote these words to the Corinthian church, they knew exactly what he meant. It didn't have to be written down.

They were, like, nodding along and be like, yeah, the angels, I get it. And it's frustrating to us now, but I think it helps us get more comfortable with ambiguity and mystery. Often, reading the Bible is not as simple as understanding the plain meaning of the text.

But I imagine some of you are screaming at me right now because there was a giant elephant in the room. Paul lays out some pretty clear language about men and women here. And what are we supposed to do about that?

Doesn't verse 3 prove that Paul is a raging misogynist and he can't be trusted? I am not going to stand here and lie to you and say that there are no issues with Paul's language. Paul is clearly outlining this sort of chain of command.

Woman answers to man, man answers to Christ, Christ answers to God. And he goes further to say that men are made in the image of God, but women are the reflection or the glory of man. At face value, these verses seem to say that women are inferior.

And this language is not neutral. As most of us are aware, this language has been used to oppress and subjugate countless women over the years. And it's causing real harm even in this moment.

But in all of this mumbo-jumbo, this word salad, there is one thing that Paul doesn't argue about. In verse 5, Paul says, Any woman who prays or prophesies. For Paul, it is a given that both men and women are to pray and prophesy in the assembly.

They are to speak to God through prayer and for God through prophecy in the assembly. The only question in this passage is how they ought to conduct themselves while doing so. And if we go back to the verse about the angels, Paul says, A woman ought to have authority over her head.

Some scholars read this as a woman's own authority to pray and prophesy in the assembly. For authority doesn't come from the men around her. It's hers given to her by God.

And this is where my take about Paul being more radical than we give him credit for, even today we argue about whether women should become pastors. This past June, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to advance a constitutional amendment to ban women from serving as pastors or performing pastoral functions such as preaching. And nearly 75% voted in favor.

As someone who grew up in a conservative Baptist household, I didn't witness a woman preach until I started attending the table. For the church at large, this question is not settled. In Galatians chapter 3, verse 28, Paul writes, There is no longer Jew nor Greek.

There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male and female. For all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Paul was figuring out how to live out this radical theology in this culture where boundaries and statuses between people were sacrosanct. He didn't have it all figured out. And even today, we're figuring out what it means to live into this verse.

But what is clear when we sort of zoom out and put Paul within the context of his entire ministry is that Paul took it as a given that women would be praying and prophesying in the church. And he relied on women of faith, not as subordinates, not as helpmeets, but as partners in ministry. In Corinth, Paul met Prisca and her husband Aquila, who became leaders of their own house church in Ephesus.

And Prisca's name is often listed first, which has been a convention to indicate importance. And then one of my absolute favorite biblical figures, Phoebe, was a female deacon. And she delivered arguably the most important letter Paul ever wrote, the letter to the Romans.

And as its messenger, she would have been responsible for reading the letter in front of the congregation and serving as its first interpreter. Even in 1 Corinthians 11, we see glimmers of this radical theology. Notice verse 11.

Nevertheless, in the Lord. Nevertheless, in the Lord. This is where Paul flips the script on verse 3.

When Jesus Christ came, he broke down the walls of division between people and united them as part of one body. His life, his death, his resurrection fundamentally changed the way people had been taught to interact with one another. It revealed the truth that has been constant, which is that man and woman cannot exist independently from one another.

All men come from women through childbirth. And ultimately, everyone and everything that has ever existed comes from God. In the Lord, we are equal.

We are one. And that means that each and every single one of us is called by Jesus and belongs to him.

But where does that leave us with 1 Corinthians 14? I want to put forth just one suggestion. In the early Corinthian church, Paul's main concern was the issue of order in worship.

In chapter 14, verse 26, Paul celebrates the fact that everyone has a hymn, a lesson, a prophecy, a revelation to share in front of the assembly. But the problem was that people were speaking over each other, not making room for each other, confusing one another with prophecies that weren't given the time and the space to be weighed. And women were likely participating in this chaos.

During this time period, most people would have been familiar with the oracle at Delphi, who prophesied in response to questions asked by visitors to the temple. And these questions could be often incredibly personal. It would be like if someone yelled out, like, am I going to get married one day?

Or am I going to get my dream job? Like that sort of thing. The questions that don't really have a place in the corporate gathering of worship.

Or maybe they were trying to learn, but they were asking questions that were interrupting the flow of worship. And so in response, Paul didn't say, like, don't learn these things. He would just say, ask them at home, which is a more appropriate place to sort of learn.

So to be able to participate in the assembly. And then Paul ends the chapter by encouraging both brothers and sisters to strive to prophesy. So whatever Paul meant, he can't have meant permanent silence for all women at all times, everywhere.

Paul relied on women in his ministry, both as patrons and active co-workers of the gospel. He takes it for granted that women are praying and prophesying. And it's only later that these voices are stifled.

In Joel chapter 2, verse 28, Joel promises that the Holy Spirit will be poured out on all people, and both sons and daughters will prophesy. And as the church, it's up to us to hold on to this truth and seek its fulfillment. There are always going to be voices that try to drown out the spirit poured out on all people.

But we are called to point toward liberation and set people free in the name of Christ. Sometimes, this looks like setting ourselves free from the no's that we have been given to proclaim the gospel right where we are.

And we walk in the footsteps of people who knew all too well what that looked like. Nearly 250 years ago, a black woman named Jarena Lee was born free in New Jersey. Under the shadow of slavery, she worked as a live-in servant with a white family from the age of seven.

And after a tumultuous childhood and adolescence, she converted to Christianity around the age of 20. And a few years later, she began to hear the voice of God telling her, Go, preach the gospel. These words echoed the call of long-ago biblical figures like Moses and Jeremiah.

And like them, Jarena was terrified. She answered God, No one will believe me. But God repeated, Preach the gospel.

I will put words in your mouth. Still, she doubted. She went to a quiet place to pray.

And God revealed to her a pulpit with a Bible in a dream. But when she went to her pastor, Reverend Richard Allen, he told her that there was no room for a woman to preach. As a Methodist minister, he pointed out the Book of Discipline knew nothing about women in pastoral leadership.

For many years, Jarena obeyed the no, even if it meant setting aside her call. But deep down inside her, the call still burned like a tiny ember. In her autobiography, she writes, For as unseemly as it may appear nowadays for a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God.

And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper for a woman to preach, seeing as the Savior died for the woman as well as the man? And if the man may preach because the Savior died for him, why not the woman, seeing as he died for her also? Is he not a whole Savior instead of a half one, as those who would hold it wrong for a woman to preach would seem to make it appear?

It took years for her to accept her call. On one Sunday morning, eight years after she first pressed her pastor to allow her to preach, the call flared within her again. She sat in the church service as another pastor, Reverend Richard Williams, stood up to preach.

But he lost the spirit. He went silent. Jarena stood up, and she began to proclaim the word of the Lord with great power and strength.

And when she sat down, she was terrified that she would be expelled from the assembly. But afterward, Reverend Richard Allen, the same man who had told her no before, now the bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, stood up, and confessed that he had made a mistake. He now believed that she was as much called to the work of preaching as any of the others present.

Jarena Lee went on to become the first black woman authorized to preach in the AME church. In a single year, she traveled more than 2,300 miles and preached 178 sermons.

Jarena's story matters. And so do the stories of all the women, queer folks, and people of color who have stood up and proclaimed their voice matters, even when people have tried to silence them. These stories are still being written as we speak.

This week, we elected a record number of women to elected office. And a record number of other marginalized people who had not had access before. Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first black woman ever elected governor of any state.

New Mexico elected Deb Haaland, the first Native American woman governor in our nation's history. Michigan elected Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim U.S. Senator in our nation's history. And in deep ruby red Alabama, voters in the conservative district elected Allison Montgomery, the state's first transgender legislator.

All across the country, we have seen how people who were once told no are finding their voices and their power. And I am but one piece of this larger story. Eight years ago, when I asked the youth group leaders what would happen if a woman felt called to preach, it was a hypothetical.

I never dreamed in a million years that I would be standing in front of you today, let alone as an associate pastor. But God planted that seed because I would end up looking back at that moment as a turning point. Where I slowly, gradually reclaimed my own voice and began the journey of proclaiming God's word.

Being in this role has stripped me of pride, pretensions, anything at all that could make me believe that this is from my own effort. The only reason I'm standing in front of you today is because the Savior called me. And so I invite you to consider your own story.

What is Jesus calling you to? Where have you felt like you have been silenced, left out, excluded? And how can you reclaim your voice and your faith?

What is that ember burning inside of you, despite the doubt and the fear? I want to bring us back to Paul. I have needed to wrestle with his words.

I am not a Paul defender because he's never done anything wrong or frustrating in his whole life. To put it mildly, I am a Paul defender because he demonstrates what it looks like to figure out how to live out your theology in your own space and time. He reminds me that it's okay and it's even encouraged to wrestle with scripture.

When the text is ambiguous, contradictory, downright confusing, I invite you to engage authentically and view it through the eyes of his audience. Dive into the text to figure out how to live as a follower of Christ in a fragile and broken world, just as we are. Paul didn't have all the answers, even though he sounded certain sometimes, or all the time, and neither do we.

The words of Paul can be used to silence or to set people free. We already know here that women are called to preach and to lead, that everyone has a place at the table. Holding this view doesn't require us to abandon difficult passages that appear to say otherwise.

We can wrestle with the complexity of scripture and come out on the other side with our faith stronger. So, I encourage you to identify your own nevertheless. I was told that a woman who wanted to preach was being prideful.

Nevertheless, I preached. Some of you were told that queer folks could not possibly bear the image of God. Nevertheless, you held onto your love of Jesus, even when everyone around you told you that you shouldn't.

Some of you were told that your race, your gender, your class, your personality, disqualify you from being able to proclaim the gospel. What have you heard that has kept you from saying yes to God? Maybe it was a "you don't belong here," or "you have too many doubts," or "not now," or "we'll see."

But today, I hope you hear this. Nevertheless, in the Lord, the Spirit has been poured out on all people. As Paul himself wrote, "The God who called you is faithful."

And the same God is setting you free from anything that has hindered your yes to Christ.