Tuesday, May 01, 2007

God Calls Women (and Men) to Public Ministry

[This is the newspaper column version of this post.]

My weekly sermons appear on two different web sites and sometimes, readers send me their comments. One commenter liked a recent sermon in which I said that the Bible’s definition of a saint is anyone who turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ.

One thing this commenter wrote disturbed me. She wrote: "I'm also a priest - Though I believe women should keep silent in the 'church.'" She cited 1 Corinthians 14:35, where the first century preacher Paul writes, "it is shameful for a woman to speak in church," as the reason for her position. I don't agree with this interpretation of the passage. To me, it ignores the context in which Paul was writing.

Chapters 13 to 15 of Paul's first letter to the church in the Greek city of Corinth deal with what's called, "the gift of tongues." This is a rare gift God gives to some Christians, mostly to help them praise God in a way that brings them personal comfort.

At Corinth, there were Christians insisting that their possession of this gift made them spiritually superior. They often disrupted worship, many different people speaking in tongues at once. Without someone to interpret the meaning of these strange utterances, these people were making other members of the Corinthian church feel excluded and causing visitors to worship to think that Christians were kooks.

Paul told the Corinthian Christians that, at most, only three people should speak in a tongue and that even they shouldn't do it unless there was someone else able to interpret them so that everybody could benefit. Otherwise, Paul said, people should keep their mouths shut. "For God is a God not of disorder but of peace," he says.

Within the context of discussing disorder in worship, Paul then says that women shouldn't speak in worship. What's up with that?

The Corinthians and other first-century Christians apparently configured their worship in the way Jews historically had in their synagogues, men forming an inner circle or semi-circle in an area closer to the rabbi and readers and explicators, women and children consigned to somewhere behind a grated or meshed divider. Some women at the Corinthian church, unable to hear all that was being said, were calling out to their husbands, asking them to repeat things. To Paul, this was another disruption of worship.

But does any of this mean that women shouldn’t be preachers, worship leaders, readers, minstry leaders, musicians, or worship participants? I don’t think so at all!

Jesus, of course, bowed to the conventions of first century Judea when He only called men to function as apostles, leaders of the early Church. He did this, I believe, knowing that in that time and place, only men would be accepted in the role of leaders. But unlike other first-century Judeans, Jesus spoke to women with the same consideration and respect He afforded men. Even a casual reading of the Gospels in the New Testament will bear this out. And it always tickles me that Jesus chose women to be the first to proclaim the Good News of His resurrection (Matthew 28:1-10).

No wonder then, that the same Paul who wrote 1 Corinthians 14:35 also wrote: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul makes clear that speaking up in worship is no right. It's a call. But I believe that the God Who calls people to play their parts in the ministries of the Church calls women just as He calls men.

[Mark Daniels is pastor of Friendship Lutheran Church, 1300 White Oak Road, Amelia.]

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