#I LITERALLY duct taped this together. LITERALLY. i did it on purpose for like commentary

[dirt-grub]

NOOOOOOO I JUST REALIZED MY FINAL PROJECT IS GONNA HAVE ME LOOKING LIEK THIS WHEN I PRESENT

[firstumcschenectady]

“On Not Being Silent in Church” based on 1 Corinthians 14:26-36

This passage starts out so well. It starts out reminding me of the good things about Paul, including that Paul would have made a good Wesleyan since he really likes order. His suggestions are sensible, and aimed at creating a positive experience for everyone present. He suggests that worship should be communal, that all who show up should have something to offer. For a small house church, that's a great model! Even for a larger community, it serves to remind all of us that being the Body of Christ is an active thing, that each of us have things to offer and the Body is at its best when we receive gifts from many people and use them together!

Paul reminds the church in Corinth that the purpose of their shared time of worship is to build each other up. The book of First Corinthians has a whole lot of suggestions like that, and most scholars think that's because the church in Corinth was spending a lot of time fighting with each other.

Paul seeks to limit the gift of tongues, which he does a lot in his letters. Paul is said to have the gift of tongues, but in the early church there were those who believed speaking in tongues was the best gift of the Spirit and the most faithful people all had it. Paul spends a lot of time fighting that, including in this passage. Here he limits the number of people who should do so at any one gathering AND he says that unless a partner in ministry is present who can interpret tongues, they shouldn't be spoken out loud. That is a very inclusive perspective, it means that no one present would end up just listening without getting anything out of it.

Paul gives instructions to those who speak prophecy too, also very practical stuff. He tells the church to carefully weigh what is said, not to take it as truth without discussion. Furthermore, he suggests that if two people are getting the same message, only one of them has to say it. That suggestion feels very much like a response to a direct complaint, and a reasonable response at that. He returns to the reminder that the work is to build each other up, and encourage each other. He says on theme in the end of the first paragraph, still responding to a direct issue. I imagine he was told, “They say that they can't prophesy one by one because the Spirit is moving in them!” As if in direct response, Paul says, “the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder but of peace.”

Beautiful. Uplifting. Profound. Reasonable. Paul is building up the church, he is guiding the people, he is dealing with the reality of human struggles, he is doing it all.

And then.

And then I want to duct tape his mouth shut. The rather interesting passage offering insight about the early church and the sensible solutions of Paul takes a turn for the worse, or more precisely it falls off a cliff. We're going to see if we can find a safety net for it in a moment, but first I feel the need to convince you to take it seriously. Those of you in the room who join me in wanting to duct tape Paul's mouth shut may also want to just ignore this passage as irrelevant, or even use it as proof that the Bible is irrelevant. You may not want to talk about it, and you may not think it is worth your time to bother with it.

The issue is that this passage has been used to silence women since the time it was written (which itself is unclear) and is STILL used today. So we need to face the passage and its role in our broken body of Christ, like it or not. The numbers aren't entirely clear, but in the United States about 11% of religious communities over all, and 10% of Christian faith communities have female clergy leading them. If you want to feel good about your denomination, you can here. The highest number of female clergy in any denomination in the USA is in the UMC :) However, that's still about 1/3 of UMC clergy. The numbers of clergy women are low in part because of the many denomination that don't allow clergy women including the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Traditions, most of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Missouri Synod, the Church of Latter-Day Saints and a whole lot of non-denominational churches.1 They quote this passage as justification.

Furthermore, you don't want to know how many times I've gotten this text quoted at me, and been asked to justify my calling. Nor do I really want to relive all of it. This is a safe congregation where the love of God prevails and we all work together to minimize the impact of sexism in our community and our world. The very few overtly sexist comments I've received here have resulted in incredible support coming my way. (Thank you all!) However, as is true for other issues as well, this community of faith is like a well protected and vibrant tidal pool – and the rest of the Christian ocean seems very far away and unimportant. However, the rest of the Christian ocean doesn't actually go away when we ignore it.

People still quote this terrible text, and they still follow its instructions. These simple words are used to justify the institutional sexism of the churches, which are as a whole much more sexist than the culture at large.

So, while I believe that all of you already have ways to respond to this text, I want to make sure we all have a quiver-full of them. You never know when you might want one. Here are a whole lot of ways that a reasonable human could approach this text without assuming that their female pastor should be out of a job, without just ignoring it:

1.  If you read along in the NRSV you'd notice that this text is put in parenthesis. That's because the majority of Biblical scholars believe that it is not an original part of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Rather, they think a later scribe wrote this into the margins to reflect the common practice of his time and it got accidentally moved into the primary text over time. This belief is justified by the fact that in our most ancient manuscripts this paragraph is in two different spots. It is also supported by the fact that in the rest of the 6 authentic Pauline letters, there are ABSOLUTELY NO LIMITS put on the activities of women in churches. To the contrary, in chapter 11 of this letter, women are instructed about how to pray and prophesy in church. There are MANY more examples of Paul speaking to, or about, women leaders of churches and supporting their work, but I think the point is already made: This particular text is unlikely to have been written by Paul, and does not reflect his thinking about women. Instead it looks like the conservative reaction of a later generation of thinker who distrusted women.

2.  If, for some reason, you or someone you are in conversation with doesn't think that is convincing, then we have some ways to work with the text assuming it is authentic to Paul.

a.  If Paul said it, then it said it to one particular community in one place in one time. Since it doesn't fit with other things he said, it seems like he was offering a solution to a particular problem. As no other faith community is the first century Corinthian church, the solution doesn't apply to all of us. (As an amusing aside, the “women” told to be silent in church are ACTUALLY “married women” according to the word used. This would suggest that if I took this text literally and believed it to be God's will then I shouldn't have gotten married this spring.)

b.  If this text is assumed to be authentic to Paul, then perhaps it fits into the argument he is already making in this passage. He has given subgroups limits in order to benefit the whole. He told those speaking in tongues to limit their gift, so as not to take over. He told those prophesying not to repeat each other, so as to respect the time of the others gathered. Many commentators have suggested that the women in the Corinthian church were really excited about Jesus and the chance to learn all they could. Because intensive Torah study had been limited to men in Judaism, the women may have been overwhelming the worship services with their questions. Thus, in order to not take over, Paul suggests that they work those questions out in private. It fits with his reactions to overwhelming subgroups AND his tendency toward practical solutions.

c.  Because of the lack of punctuation, it is not clear if Paul is actually speaking the words OR if he is quoting the men of the church! (This hypothesis holds a surprising amount of water.) In that case Paul is quoting that women should be silent, that they should be subordinate, and even that they should ask their husbands, that it is shameful for a woman to speak. But then HE is responding to those men who said so with, “Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?” (1 Cor 14:36, NRSV)2

Great. So, there are 4 reasonable responses to this passage which do not require that I sit down and stop talking. Amazingly a lot of Bible Commentaries don't come up with any of them though. One of them (that we own) tried to make this passage about keeping women from publicly embarrassing their husbands, and another (that we also currently still own) suggested that Paul was just making a good point about gender differentiated roles. Sometimes I think the Bible is one big ink blot test, something we all just project our already established biases onto. This serves as a commercial for the evening Bible Study: where we together read, question, learn, question, wonder and still question. We do our best to get information from many sources so we aren't led astray by other people's biases or our own.

Speaking of biases, this text has been used to weaken the Body of Christ throughout history. The Body is ALWAYS weaker when it represents less diverse voices. It takes the fullness of humanity to best be the Body of Christ, and the way this text has been used has stood in the way of that. The church has been weakened for nearly 2000 years because of misinterpretation of this passage. Let's be part of turning that around! Everywhere we go we can attend to who is at the table and who isn't. We can be voices that speak when groups of people missing (women, people of color, people living in poverty, members of the LGBTQIA community, younger or older people, etc), and in doing so heal the Body of Christ and the world. Thanks be to God it isn't yet too late. Amen

1 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/09/the-divide-over-ordaining-women/ and http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/quick_question3.html  These numbers are a bit dated, but I don't believe much has changed, unfortunately.

2 Summary worked from the insights found in “First Corinthians” in The New Interpreter's Bible Vol. IX, Leander Kirk, general editors (Abingdon Press, 2002)

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

July 16, 2017