Ecclesia Princeton
Ecclesia Princeton
||para||DOX- Genesis 1, 2vv18-25- Part Two: Women and Biblical Fullness
Could traditional gender roles in American Christianity be more cultural constructs than biblical mandates? Join us as we explore this provocative question and uncover new understandings about gender and scripture that challenge the status quo. This episode promises to illuminate how societal shifts and evolving economic power dynamics shape church practices and beliefs, questioning the deeply rooted hierarchies often mistaken for divine order. Through thoughtful analysis, we venture into the realm of biblical texts, finding insights in Genesis 1 and 2 that speak to equality and partnership between genders, rather than a ladder of authority.
Dive into the rich tapestry of God's image, transcending human concepts of gender. We'll explore the profound implications of God's portrayal using both masculine and feminine imagery, suggesting a divine reality that surpasses our limited human categories. The narrative doesn't stop there—Jesus' life offers a radical reimagining of gender expectations, with his teachings rooted in love and mutual respect. Together, we navigate the tensions between cultural norms and scriptural truths, offering a fresh lens on the roles of men and women in the gospel narrative.
As the episode unfolds, we delve into themes of healing and honor within gender roles, encouraging communities of faith to embody the teachings of Jesus. By highlighting narratives of empowerment and respect, we challenge listeners to rethink what it means to live a life of faith in a world often lost in the fog of gender and identity debates. Embrace the call to become a community of honor and love, reflecting the divine message of equality and partnership found in scripture. This is a journey to reclaim the beauty and power of gender roles deeply rooted in the gospel of Christ.
Hey Ekklesia, pastor Ian Graham, this past Sunday we focused in our teaching series called Paradox, on the way that we often have a zero-sum approach to gender, and what I wanted to do is normally, when we gather on a Sunday morning, if you are in our general sphere, when you come, if you come to the 9 or the 1030, the teachings are similar. Now, there's varying degrees of improvisation and different ways that the Spirit moves in a service or, honestly, between each service. I'll ask a few people if something was helpful or unclear or murky, and if those things are brought to light in that short amount of time, I'll usually transition from them because I don't want to do unhelpful things twice. But this past Sunday, what we tried to do was address the topic of gender from two different vantage points One specifically directed towards the men and the other specifically directed towards the women. Now, obviously, both within mixed hearing, the men are listening in to the word that's slanted towards the women and vice versa. But during our second service, we had some technical difficulties, and so what will happen here is this is the teaching that is sort of slanted towards the women and some of the issues that women are feeling and need addressing within the story of the scriptures. So what will happen is I'm going to do the first half of the sermon, which is largely introduction, and then we'll get into the second half, which is from our live stream recording. That still went off successfully but unfortunately just didn't start until about halfway through the sermon, so you'll hear a slight change in the audio, but I also encourage you to.
Speaker 1:On our podcast there's a part one and a part two. This will serve as part two Go back and listen to part one and my hope is that these both spur on curiosities and conversations about what God is doing regarding gender and also will create some category collision with the way that we in the church often speak about gender roles and what it means for men to live out biblical manhood and for women to live out biblical womanhood. But I also hope that it will create a sense of freedom, and so with that we begin a teaching that has its eye on the women in our midst and is given in the hearing of the men and in light of the whole congregation. By the 1970s, 50% of single women and 40% of married women worked in jobs outside the home. Single women and 40% of married women worked in jobs outside the home. A recent study suggested that women working full-time in 2020's America actually spend more time with their children than women who were stay-at-home moms in the 1950s.
Speaker 1:When the story of men and women is told in American discourse, the story usually centers on economics, discussing very real wage gaps, the distribution of child care responsibilities and mental loads between men and women, and in many of our more extreme discussions regarding gender, the impulse is to flatten any and all differences between men and women. This, ultimately, is a discussion of power, and in our world, economic power is the ultimate expression of authority. One of the things we'll see today is that the scriptures can hold that there are differences between men and women without creating a hierarchy between them In light of our cultural conversations. The scriptures hold that there are differences that aren't merely performative. We live in a sort of post-gender society where people determine that they can choose their gender. Now, we're not going to get into issues of trans rights and theology here on this particular teaching. We're going to just kind of center in on the, the two sexes given as a binary in Genesis 1, but we can't ignore that we live in a society that largely is gender confused, and one of the things that strikes me is how zero-sum our cultural conversations and solutions are around gender. For us, in overly simplistic terms, the elevation of men means the diminishment of women, and the elevation of women means the diminishment of men. In part one of this teaching, I give some of the ways that things in our society have shifted, specifically regarding education. The ways that things in our society have shifted specifically regarding education. Now there's a similar conversation that plays itself out within the church itself, within the kind of wider streams of evangelical culture, protestant American Christianity.
Speaker 1:For some, the Bible is not just a book that has its origins in patriarchal cultures of the ancient Near East and first century Roman Empire, but is in itself, in its very orientation, patriarchal cultures of the ancient Near East and first century Roman Empire, but is in itself and its very orientation, patriarchal. What seems evident to me and many readers of the scriptures, what seems evident, then, to many readers not just to me is that there is a hierarchy that's enshrined in the differences between men and women. Men, it is said, are designed to be leaders, pastors, head of household, and women, on the other hand, are primarily helpers, nurturers, and are tasked with maintaining purity. Now we're going to see how the scriptures push back ever so gently against these assumptions. There are many movements in American Christianity that are proclaiming that they're taking back biblical manhood or calling women back to biblical womanhood. But oftentimes when we actually pay attention to the texture of the manhood or the womanhood that is described, we see that these are not biblical categories at all, but they're cultural categories that previously had supposed biblical sponsorship, that are being held up as models of faithfulness.
Speaker 1:If you listen to the podcast about the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, one of the things that's very evident from early on is one of the captivating features of Driscoll's message is that it gives a vision for men and women, a slot for both of them to fill, and it gives a very clear and distinct vision and in some ways it challenges the men to be more responsible and in some ways it elevates the status of women. But in many other ways it diminishes men and diminishes women, and some of the fruit that we see from that through the reporting is how the culture takes on a toxicity, an abusiveness that we have to question when we apply it to the overall theological scope of the claims. Now we factor that in with some of the movements that have taken place in American Christianity, which we're going to get to in just a moment, and we also factor that in with some of the technology that we have available to us in our day. At this point in history, we have a curated telescope into the lives of other people where we can apparently see the blessings of living faithfully. There's a whole subtle prosperity gospel that takes place every day in our algorithms.
Speaker 1:You have trad wives and men who lead their household with unquestioned authority and they proclaim to all the world see, look how simple, fulfilling, beautiful, rustically luxurious our lives are. And this, for those looking on, creates dissonance, and dissonance often creates shame. When our internal narrator takes on the voice of accusation, we say to our things like this If you only could make more money, your wife could stay at home and not have to work and she'd be happier and the kids would be happier. Or if only you as a woman could be content with staying at home and being a mother, then your husband could be the man he's supposed to be. Or for single people who are aspiring towards marriage, all of these swirling narratives can create false or unreasonable expectations. For people who are divorced. This often relitigates the shame all over again, telling us subtly and insidiously oh this is probably your fault, you couldn't fit into this mold and it broke your family. For people who will be called to singleness throughout their lives, these supposedly biblical categories for men and women have little to say to the single life. So it raises the question is it possible for me, as a man, to be a biblical man or for a woman to be a biblical woman if we're not married Now? Coupling that, we also live in the echo of a moment that reached its peak in the 90s and early 2000s what has become known as the purity culture movement.
Speaker 1:The basic premise of the purity culture movement was teenagers pledging that they would abstain from sex until marriage. Organizations and churches would host these retreats and the many preteens and teens would sign a literal printed pledge declaring their commitment to wait until their wedding night to have sex. Now I can see it it is absolutely right, a right response, for a Christian young man or Christian young woman to commit to remaining celibate until they are married. From the vantage point of the scriptures, sex is a gift that is reserved for limited covenant marriage relationship between one man and one woman. But the problem becomes, like many things, when we take that which is a gift is right and appropriate and we outsize its importance.
Speaker 1:Many of the implied messages surrounding purity culture were things like sex is the most important marker of your faithfulness to God, and thus if you stumble in that area, even though Jesus has forgiven your sins, how can you really know that you've been forgiven, and aren't you a diminished version of yourself? Throughout the course of the purity culture movement, women and young girls were often made to bear the brunt of the demands of purity culture, from everything to how they dressed to how they were perceived. Purity became solely about sex. Men spoke often of women as temptresses and Jezebels who were out to catch men and ensnare them, and in many instances of abuse, especially by leaders, it was the women who were made to feel like they were at fault because they must have tempted the man in some way. Way, you can see how these subtle but consistent messages make for a very fragile and unraveling sense of self for both men and for women.
Speaker 1:All of this is going on as the internet is becoming rampant in every house. Sex from the conversations in many quadrants of the white American evangelical church had become both an obsession, in that it received outsized importance in our discussion of following Jesus, and, at the same time, a taboo, in that it wasn't talked about other than to say don't do that. And young people, still with God-given desires and curiosity and with online pornography rampantly available, turned to that which they could access about sex in private. This has created an echo chamber of shame that so many people live with and again, the point is not to reject some of the more right and holy insinuations of the purity culture movement. There's been a so-called Christian backlash to purity culture that is quote-unquote sex positive and views the harms done by the broader purity culture movement as evidence of the Bible's instructions around gender and sex are at best outdated and at worst outright oppressive. But much of our confusion or cynicism around the Bible's sexual ethic, like our confusion and cynicism around the Bible's gender roles, are from the ways that these things have been co-opted or been outsized, not a product of the Bible's vision of men and women and how we are to interact together in light of God's coming kingdom.
Speaker 1:Feminism has become a cultural buzzword and often is viewed as a sort of curse word in church circles. The story that is told is that feminism emerged in the 1960s with the rise of birth control, but there have been waves of feminism in the last 150 years. The first women's convention was convened at Seneca Falls in New York in 1848, and it featured distinguished guests and prominent Christians such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony. The movement, the early movement for women's rights, was focused on their right to vote and was tied up in the abolitionist movement and the freeing of enslaved peoples. Abigail Favell, in her book the Genesis of Gender, describes the foundations of feminism and its impact on the church. Look at what she says. Abigail Favell says First wave feminists, for the most part, were not radicals or revolutionaries. Most were middle class wives and mothers, committed Christians who opposed abortion. Their aim was not to overthrow or subvert the system, but to gain legal representation within it. Feminism took on different shapes and waves as it departed from this sort of early Christian feminism. Shapes and waves as it departed from this sort of early Christian feminism based on the liberation of women and was co-opted by people focused on quote-unquote reproductive freedom. Sue Ellen Browder writes of how the feminist movement became entangled in the abortion movement as the male-led National Association for Repeal of Abortion Law, or what we know as NARAL, formed a political alliance with the National Organization for Women.
Speaker 1:All of these strands, oversimplified as they are, and so many more, bring us to a moment that is profoundly confused when it comes to gender. We're confused when it regards gender as a category writ large, but especially within the church. How do men and women relate to one another in light of God's coming kingdom? And again, what I want to point out is that often, within the church itself, we follow the pattern of the world, this inescapable zero-sum scaling of gender, where the elevation of men leads to the diminishment of women or, conversely, the elevation of women which I know historically, in a world that has been dominated by the story of patriarchy and male primacy, is a very rare event but where the elevation of women leads to the diminishment of men. The good news of King Jesus brings both men and women to fullness and flourishing. Yes, there are differences, but often the differences that we consign are not based in the Bible's instructions themselves. They're based in our own cultural categories. Today, we're going to look at one text that gives us a vision for how men and women are to complete God's work alongside him together, and I hope that it will create some tension for you, but I also hope it will create some freedom.
Speaker 1:Let's turn to the text. We are people of the book. Let's turn to the very beginning of this story that we are a part of Genesis, chapter 1. Beginning in verse 26 of Genesis 1, the foundational text for all humanity and gender. Look at the text. Then God said let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth. We go on to verse 28. And God said to them Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. We scroll ahead to verse 31. God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning and the sixth day.
Speaker 1:There are several things we need to note here. First, the creative work of the creator, god, on the sixth day of creation is wholly different movement than the previous five days. Yes, god creates similarly by the power of his life-giving word. But from the very beginning, these creatures of the sixth day are stamped with a different status. They are made in the Selim Elohim, the imago Dei, in the image of God and, as verse 27 elaborates, essential to that image is maleness and femaleness. Second, those made in the image of God share fully in the human vocation outlined in verse 26 and verse 30 to rule, to be fruitful, to multiply, to be conversation partners with God and to exist in the blessing of God. There is no hint here of differentiation in the shared mission or co-mission, or the shared vocation. Mission or co-mission or the shared vocation. This is a pre-fall world that we find ourselves in, which is important as we track the timeline of the story. Lastly, god pronounces his divine approval over humanity made in his image. He will eventually assess. It is Tov Ma'od Very good? In Genesis 2, we zoom down even more to the dust of Eden.
Speaker 1:I've talked at length about the shared human vocation in previous sermon series. You can check back one of my favorite teaching series we've ever done sort of the life mission of my life. It's called From Garden to City. We did it in 2021. I go through kind of an expansive vision of what our human vocation is found in Genesis 2. You can check that out, but for our purposes today I want to focus on a few of the details of the text that have specific words to say about our discussions on gender.
Speaker 1:First we go to Genesis, chapter 2. Let's read this together Genesis 2, beginning in verse 18. Then the Lord God said it is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper for him as his partner. The man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the air and to every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept. Then he took one of his ribs, closed up its place with flesh, and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
Speaker 1:So there's several things that are going on here. We see for the first time something that is reported not good. Remember God's assessment in Genesis 1 of everything he made was it was good. But now we have something that's not good and that is that the man is alone. We see that nothing in creation will solve this fundamental loneliness.
Speaker 1:The man is brought all the animals by God, and we hear reports of the man speaking, but we don't get the contents of what he said and this will be important in just a minute. But we're just told the man names the animals, and one of the things that a great question I was asked on Sunday about this text is doesn't Adam's naming of the woman whom we'll meet in just a minute, doesn't that declare his authority over the woman, much in the same way that he has authority over the animals? And again, if we go back to Genesis 1, both the man and the woman receive the same vocation. It's not given in degrees, where the man has one degree of authority and the woman a second. So that's our first thing.
Speaker 1:But the second is that many scholars think that Adam, when he calls out the names of the animals, is not expressing his authority over them. Rather, he is expressing their essential identity. He is calling them as they are, and so it's sort of cute for us to think about Adam naming the animals in kind of an immature or uninformed way, god delighting in that. That's one layer of the story that is kind of appealing, but what I think is actually going on here is that Adam, especially with his pre-fall vision of the world, radiated by the presence of God, is calling out the animals, their essence, for what they are, in a sort of platonic sense. And I think this is what happens with the woman. It's not so much that he has authority over her by naming her, but rather that he is expressing the essence of who woman is. So God sees that it's not good for man to be alone.
Speaker 1:God then intends to create, in the words of the NRSV translation that we just read from a helper as his partner. Now the words used in the Hebrew for helper as his partner are ezer, k'negda, and these words have been a source of much theologizing and much more frustration. The ESV, which has a strong hierarchical or complementarian bent in all of its translations of these contested passages places like Ephesians 5 and here we find in Genesis 2, translates this passage a helper fit for him. But as David Friedman and so many other Old Testament scholars point out, the connotation of these words is not simply one who comes and helps, but it is one who comes in a power equal to him. The forms of ezer, used in the Bible, certainly can mean to help or to be strong, but this has the connotation of one that has a power that is equal to the man, and this is the meaning that is evoked here of ezer k'negda. The point is that Eve completes this fulfilling of creation here in Genesis, chapter 2. That which is not good is rounded out into goodness, into wholeness, and the fact that Eve's temporal status as after Adam or created out of Adam did not denigrate her participation in the commission, again given in Genesis 1. Rather, the vocation of those made in the image of God can only be undertaken together.
Speaker 1:When Adam sees the woman for the first time, the narrator does something that is subtle but vitally important. Remember, it's always so important to remind ourselves that what we're reading, even though it is constituted of all these different genres and parts, ultimately is a story and the text that we read. We only heard about Adam speaking. We heard that he was providing names for these different animals, but here in Genesis 2, chapter 23, for the first time, we're going to encounter something that Adam is actually saying. I say this to you because we're reading a story and good narrators when they feature a character speaking for the first time those words hold revelatory significance. They say something about the character and what it is intended for and the direction and the destiny of that character.
Speaker 1:God first speaks as the creator. He speaks powerful, creative, delightful, blessing words. Here Adam's first words as he beholds the woman, are not only declarative, they are poetic. If you read on the text, the printed versions of the Bible, you see the words that Adam speaks are indented. The compilers of the scriptures and the translators are trying to get us to see that. This is a different cadence than prose. This is poetry. So pay attention to what's going on here.
Speaker 1:The first words the man speaks in all of creation is praise to God at last, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, for the beauty and the presence of his nearest neighbor. What is the greatest commandment? Jesus is asked Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second commandment is, like it and attached to it love your neighbor as yourself. Here Adam is embodying this greatest commandment. This is biblical shalom wholeness, integrity, peace. That is not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of God's fullness, because the woman is both Ezer K'negda in Genesis 2 and Selim Elohim or Imago Dei in Genesis 1, she has equal share in the vocation of all of humanity to rule, to be fruitful and multiply, to be a conversation partner with God and to live in the immersive blessing of God.
Speaker 1:It's only when we arrive at Genesis 3 where that goodness, that shalom, is marred by disobedience. I'm going to summarize this all too quickly. As the world is shattered and breaks apart, the serpent tempts the woman and she finds the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to be pleasing to the eye and she heeds the serpent's promise that it will make her like God. She takes and she eats and she gives some to her husband, and instantly shame clouds their eyes like fog on a windshield. They no longer see clearly, they can't discern good and evil. Rather, they only see themselves as naked, vulnerable, exposed, and they try to cover their nakedness, their shame, with the figs and leaves of the garden.
Speaker 1:Genesis 3, beginning in verse 8, tells us they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him when are you? He said I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? The man said the woman whom you gave me to be with me. She gave me fruit from the tree and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman what is this that you have done? Woman said the serpent tricked me and I ate.
Speaker 1:The lord god said to the serpent because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures upon your belly? You shall go and dust, you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and your offspring and hers. He will strike your head and you will strike his heel.
Speaker 1:The early church saw this, these words in Genesis 3.15, as the first pronunciation of the gospel, the proto-euangelion, the first announcement of the promise that a one born of the woman would eventually crush the head of the serpent. To the woman he said and this is where we find the first insinuation of hierarchy. I will make your pangs and childbirth exceedingly great. In pain, you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. And to the man, he said because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you In toil. You shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles you shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your face. You shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. You are dust, and to dust you shall return. It is said to the woman your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.
Speaker 1:For many, this is viewed as enshrining a hierarchy into the created order, man ruling over or having primacy over woman. But again, what's happening here? We have to remind ourselves where we are in the story. We are at the fall, the breaking, where God is pronouncing consequences for the actions of those made in his image. And again, it may seem like a small matter, but it's of the utmost importance.
Speaker 1:I don't think that God here is pronouncing consequences as a means of doling out punishment, as if he's saying oh you made this decision, let me show you what I will do. Oh, you made this decision, let me show you what I will do. I think there are inherent, connected decisions that we being made in the image of God. We have a mass amount of authority, a mass amount of influence in the world, and so when those made in the image of God make a decision for something that is less than God, something that cuts God out of the hierarchy that he has enshrined us in, we unleash forces in the world that are bigger than us. We unleash curses, not because God is somehow holding them over our head and saying I will do this to you as sort of a meeting out of punishment, but because God is just and he has given us freedom and he has inscribed the world in a just way, and so our decisions can have consequences attached to them, and I think that's what's happening here.
Speaker 1:But as God is pronouncing these consequences, we have to remember that we are at the fall. This is not God saying this is all as it should be. In fact, this is the first impulse to say that all is not well, that shalom has been broken and that God will spend the rest of the story restoring that shalom. Remember the great I am does not settle for the status quo of it is what it is. The Genesis 3 account is bringing into clarity the wider ancient Near Eastern world where, yes, men are dominant and the ground is broken. It seems that, even when things are good, that there is something looming underneath, ominous, broken, there is an exile that we live under the weight of, and this is the good news that Jesus will address as we scroll through the story. The first person who names God in the story is Hagar, genesis 16. Jehovah-ra, the God who sees me, the first person in the story who names God, from our vantage point is a minor character, but from God's vantage point is central.
Speaker 1:The Jewish law gives women a greater place of prominence than in other cultures, but it's still only a shadow of the fullness of God's intentions for his people. These intentions would be made clear when Jesus of Nazareth is born, and even his birth. If Jesus is the one who fully reveals God, it brings up some questions. If Jesus fully reveals God, does this mean that God is male, especially when considering that we refer to God as Father? Male, especially when considering that we refer to God as Father? Does this not re-enshrine and privilege maleness all over again and suggest a hierarchy within the created order?
Speaker 1:First, a theological question Is God male? No, god is spirit. He's not embodied or gendered in the way that we are made in his image, male and female. He transcends our cultural categories because he's the creator. However, we personalize God into these categories known in literary devices as anthropomorphisms, because our language is limited. Even saying that God is love does not fully encapsulate who God is. He is bigger than any conception that we have of love. God always transcends our categories. God cannot be contained in our words. He's only contained in the Word made flesh.
Speaker 1:I want to just give you a quick summary of the ways that God is imaged as what we culturally describe in feminine terms throughout the Bible, samuel you can put up that first one God described in maternal terms. God is not ashamed to be identified with women. You can just kind of survey those. You can take a picture of that. God's described in terms of women's cultural activity throughout the scriptures. See, god is not male. That does not mean that God is not God the Father. What that means is he is not gendered in the way we perceive of gender.
Speaker 1:Jesus comes as the God-man, not to say that God is a man. Jesus identifies wholly with the Jewish story. Matthew and Luke both feature genealogies tracing the story through Jesus' line of succession. Matthew, if you pay attention, privileges some of Jesus' female ancestors and some of the more shady characters. But Jesus traces the story and then places himself in the middle of the plight of the more shady characters. But Jesus traces the story and then places himself in the middle of the plight of the people of God.
Speaker 1:Election has never been about God saying before the history of the world I'm going to pick these people on my team and these people and they're going to make the right decisions. That's not what election is. Election has always been about God working his plans for the entire creation through a specific group of people. God is not a generalist. He is relentlessly personal. He walks through the garden in the cool of the evening.
Speaker 1:Jesus is a Jewish man, the eldest male in the family of the tribe of Judah, a carpenter's son, and in every single way Jesus subverts the cultural expectations that would have been attached to his life, especially as a Jewish eldest male. He doesn't take on leadership in his family from his father, yet identifies his disciples as his primary family. There's a moment in the Gospels where Jesus' mother and brothers are outside and they're wanting to see Jesus and the insinuation is hey, jesus, you're talking a little crazy here, why don't you get back in line? And the expectation would have been that when Jesus' family comes to see him, jesus gets up and he goes out. But Jesus doesn't get up. He says here are my mother, my brothers, my sisters. Jesus reorients the family against cultural categories. He's from the kingly line of Judah, but he doesn't become king by leading armies, like the vision of David Rather. He becomes king by giving himself over to the sinfulness placed on his shoulders death and the crown of our curse. He doesn't take on his father's trade of building, but rather becomes a rabbi through untrained.
Speaker 1:The second thing that we see is that both sexes are involved in Jesus' incarnation. Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary. It's far too easy, especially for us Protestants, to downplay Mary's role in Jesus' incarnation, but her central role has so many things for us to notice about the way that God is elevating women from their cultural expectations to his own gospel expectations. Mary is the first person to receive the good news of the gospel of King Jesus and she's the first person to respond with the obedience of faith. Let it be to me according to your word, mary is a theologian. Go look at Mary's song. On hearing this news, rulers will be cast down from their thrones, the poor will be filled with good things.
Speaker 1:New Testament scholar Lucy Pepiot sums up the maleness and femaleness that's involved in the incarnation of Jesus beautifully. Look at what she said. This is what God looks like when he becomes a man At once powerful, authoritative, secure, holy, angry at injustice, and also broken, vulnerable, isolated and weeping. He is both acquiescent and resistant in the face of violence, but he never retaliates like for like. In addition to this, the identity that we all bear in Christ is often described in feminine terms. The bride Becoming Christ-like defies any of our attempts to describe what this might actually look like in terms of essential male or female characteristics. Okay, so where does all of this leave us? One of the problems that we started with is we have this vacuum of healthy visions of masculinity and femininity in our culture, and thus that vacuum gets filled with shame, with toxicity, with myth and confusion.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to speak a specific word just to the women that are in our midst, and again I'm aware that the men are listening in. I'm also aware that this is like the worst version of theological mansplaining that could be possible, so some grace would be afforded. I don't think I have every insight into women. We hear from incredible women teachers on the regular here at Ecclesia, and there's a lot of reasons for that, but my sense is that sometimes some of this stuff just has to be said by a guy too, and so that's kind of what I think I'm doing here. So I don't think I have insight into every reality of being a woman. These are not all encompassing words. This is just like hey, maybe this is for women in season at our church right now, and if not, you'll go to lunch after All. Right. So to the women of Ecclesia, I just offer a few words humbly, in every way possible. Just yeah, just humbly.
Speaker 1:First, freedom the attention economy is built upon covetousness. The attention economy is oh, this app on my phone is free. I don't know what the product is. We are Some of the oldest sections in the Bible urge us that coveting is wrong. So it's not a new problem, but our technology is new and now we have this ability as we talked about a curated telescope visions of lives of others and the whole apparatus is designed to create in us a sense of lack. It removes us from the place that we are with people that love us and gives us a vision for a life that is so much better than ours. And that lack, when it is spiritualized, becomes not just a desire to acquire something else but a source of shame. Why isn't my life like that? Look at their life all the fashionable clothes, bespoke furniture, lavish trips. She's a stay-at-home mom, oh wow. Look at how she makes everything from scratch for her kids, greets her husband at the door and just so happens to film it every night. Oh wow, that woman is absolutely killing it in her career. Seems like she has everything going for her. These are all competing visions of not only what it means to be a woman, but the scorecard for success as a woman and contentment is rarely on that scorecard.
Speaker 1:We live in a time and a culture where women are being elevated and having increased opportunities to succeed and thrive in all sorts of ways. This is amazing, but we also live at a time where cultural gender norms have rapidly shifted over the last half century and this breeds confusion. And so I say to you, women, it's a wonderful thing to be a woman, it's a wonderful thing to be the woman that you are. God sees every bit of it, and even if you feel this constant tension, I just say to you that God is not loving you for the future version of you. Over this, you know somehow hypothetical version of you. He sees you where you are, with all the complexities of your life, and he's drawing near.
Speaker 1:1 Timothy tells us that godliness and contentment makes for great gain. Contentment does not mean that all is as it should be. That's not endorsing the circumstances, and certainly me quoting a Bible verse at you about contentment does not mean accept your lot in life. And that's that. Contentment makes for freedom, not just because it baptizes our circumstances, because it acknowledges that God's eye is ever on the sparrow, that not a single hair on our heads is unknown to him and that in his sight and in his presence there is freedom to live the current life that we have, without all this weird pressure that we apply to ourselves.
Speaker 1:Second proclamation we are approaching the Advent season where we tell the stories of Jesus, the incarnate Son, coming to us. In Luke 1, mary receives the angelic announcement of the birth of the Son of God, again the first to receive this gospel, good news. In Luke 24, it's Mary and the other women who go to the tomb and first hear the world-shaking news that Jesus is not dead, he is alive, he is risen. He is risen indeed, and they go and they tell the apostles, the apostle to the apostles, the first word that Jesus speaks upon his resurrection. In John's gospel, mary, a woman's name, echoing Adam's at last, and demonstrating that the curse has been broken forever To the women among us. The story of church history is a story of women faithfully and courageously proclaiming the reality of their king, gifted by God to be bearers of the good news of the kingdom. Carry that message with fire, with freedom, knowing that when you speak, the truth and the beauty of God are proclaimed and people are set free.
Speaker 1:Third, ladies we need vision, mission, quest. In Luke 10, two of Jesus' disciples, martha and Mary, welcome Jesus to their home. Martha, in line with the gendered expectations of the day, sets to work, to prepare the meal to serve the guests. Luke tells us that Mary, on the other hand, sits at Jesus' feet and listens to him. The posture that Mary adopts is one of a mathetes in Greek a disciple and in following a first century rabbi, like Jesus of Nazareth, this was a posture that was reserved only for men. So not only is Mary leaving Martha to do all the very real work, she's also breaking gender norms and taking the posture of a disciple.
Speaker 1:Martha is an embodiment in so many ways, of the very real bind. We put women in the bind between very real needs and demands. Jesus answers Martha's complaints. He says Martha, martha, you are worried and distracted by many things, but few things are needed, indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her. There's a real bind that women are placed in culturally that often men are not. This is not fair and we as a church have a holy calling from God to unravel these tangled knots. But one of the ways that women embody resistance to that cultural bind is simply by being steadfast at the feet of Jesus. Martha's protests are very real. Somebody's going to have to provide food for all these guests. I find it interesting that just a few stories before this, we see Jesus providing the meal and the feeding of the 5,000. He is the provider and sitting at his feet is, for women and for men, the better part. All right, last word, I'll invite the worship team to make their way forward. Thanks for your attention. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Motherhood Now. Notice how many asterisks there are. I almost filled the whole page with asterisks. Okay, here's what I'm not doing. I'm not saying that Jesus' vision for your life to become a biblical woman is to be a mother. That's not what I'm saying, because not every woman will, can be a mother, but every woman is called to. The nurturing, the concern, the creativity that is involved with being a mother I think about so often. You know how our dear friend Elisa and she's been in our kids' lives now for the overwhelming majority of their lives. And again, she's not our kid's mom, but the level of concern that she shows for them, the level of care. The partner that we have in her has been such an incredible gift to our family. And you think about like it's not just about your own biological kids, but it's about this network of who we are as the body of Christ and being people that say we are not confined to our small categories of nuclear family, but we are about living out God's vision here among us.
Speaker 1:In CS Lewis' the Great Divorce, the narrator meets a glorious woman. This woman is surrounded by an angelic procession. She is beautiful and radiant. The narrator immediately assumes, in this vision of heaven, that she must be Mary, the mother of Jesus or some other great saint. But the narrator's heavenly guide informs him that this is merely Sarah Smith. Lewis writes of Sarah Smith.
Speaker 1:Children left her care, loving their own parents more. Though men often loved her, something about it made them love their wives more, not less, as a result. And it's not just that she loved them, it's that as she loved them, they became more themselves. Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves.
Speaker 1:And so to the women among us I offer a sort of corporate prayer that we could be a place, a refuge, in both the way that we elevate women without diminishing men, but that we also say you are called and gifted by God to sit at the feet of the Creator, to proclaim the story of His good news and to out of the overflow of Christ's love in your lives, demonstrate what it means to be woman in all of its fullness. We thank you, we commend you to it. I'm going to pray for the Holy Spirit to come as we respond in worship. We pray come Holy Spirit, come Holy Spirit. Jesus, your work on the cross re-narrates our humanity in all of its fullness.
Speaker 1:And so, god, first, for the women in here, god who have been harmed by the teachings of the church that were askew or distorted. God, to those who have been diminished. God, I pray for the presence of Jehovah Ra, the God who sees to be present here right now. God, I pray that destinies and callings are being awakened. God, I pray that healing is being undertaken by the power of your presence here. Lord, you have conquered the curse. You wore the curse as a crown upon your head to demonstrate how thoroughly and victoriously you have trampled upon it, lord Jesus.
Speaker 1:So, god, help us to be a people who live out of the light of this victory. God, I pray your presence here would be heavy. Lord, to the men in our midst. God, I pray that we'd be men who honor the women among us. God, lord, as sisters in Christ. Lord Jesus, god, that we'd be a people who are different, a sign and a wonder to a world that is often confused when it comes to gender and so many other things that there is a way that has been paved by the good news of Jesus. We pray, come Holy Spirit, would you speak the words that I cannot speak here in this place. We love you, jesus. We pray all these things in your name, amen. See, I'm going to invite you to stand as you're standing and as we're worshiping. I just invite you to pay attention to what God might be saying to you here in this place. Don't turn away just because we're moving to a new part of the service. Just allow God to minister to you. He is here, he's present.