Some days, it seems to me that the Kingdom of God is among
us. When I see wheelchair access to
sidewalks, for instance, I remember the teaching in the Jewish laws and
prophets to remove barriers from before the blind and lame. When I remember that I am a mandatory
reporter for abuse, I recognize the implicit Gospel, the good news that God
cares for the child, the weak. When I hear about mediation training and
teaching conflict resolution in schools, I hear behind that the Sermon on the
Mount and how deadly anger can be. When
I stand up to share what God has given me, I recognize that God’s Holy Spirit
comes to sons and daughters and enables them to worship in spirit and in
truth.
And then some days, I hear of Christians who have a real
concern that the evils of our society are permeating the community of believers
in Jesus, and they/we want to be counter-cultural. And suddenly, some of the very ways the
Kingdom has changed our world for the better come under condemnation as
anti-Biblical. And then it feels like we
have to start over.
Since the mid-1600s when the Quaker movement began, the
principle that God calls and gifts humans and humans in response recognize and
record God’s gifts has made it possible for the callings and giftings of women
to be used, recognized, and affirmed by recording them. When early Quakers took this stand, they were
astonishingly counter-cultural. George
Fox’s Journal records his response to someone who asked if women even had
souls. He prooftexted Mary’s song, “My
soul magnifies the Lord,” and said obviously they do have souls. The fact this
was being debated helps us understand the culture of the time. The second evangelist
in the Quaker movement was Elizabeth Hooten. She became an itinerant preacher and suffered
persecution in both England and the Colonies for it. Along with ten other
women, she was one of the group of evangelists called the Valiant Sixty. Mary Fisher traveled to Turkey to preach to
the Sultan. She was imprisoned and
flogged for her ministry by the Christians in England, but was received
respectfully by the Sultan of Turkey. Margaret
Fell, also jailed, wrote a pamphlet on “Women’s Speaking Justified,” basing the
legitimacy of women preaching on the Biblical witness. She spoke before King
Charles II on behalf of freedom of conscience in religious matters. One of the
martyrs for freedom of religion in the colonies was Mary Dyer, who persisted in
witnessing to the Massachusetts Bay Colony despite being banned. She was hanged on Boston Commons.
Margaret Fell’s pamphlet contrasts the stories of how God
used women with pronouncements often cited to exclude women from certain
activities and functions in the church.
She uses the creation of humans in God’s image as male and female to
conclude that God puts no distinction between them. She includes the fact that the church is
referred to as feminine in relation to Christ, and the church is also charged
with spreading the good news of Christ.
She tells the stories of Jesus sharing the good news of the Kingdom with
women and never despising them. She
remembers the loyalty of women to Jesus as followers even to his death. And she honors the women who visited the
grave as the first bearers of the news of the resurrection. “Go tell,” said Jesus. She points to the reiterated message that God
uses the weak to meet the objection that women are weak. She cites the
willingness of Apollos to learn from Priscilla as well as Aquila. She notes that Paul referred to women praying
and prophesying, that he advises women to set aside preoccupation with
appearance and learn without disputation.
She attributes the prohibitions from Paul against women
speaking out in the services to their unlearned and unruly manner of doing so,
just as Paul asked all to have orderly worship and not speak all at once.
To paraphrase a small part of her pamphlet: “And what about
those who have had the power and Spirit of the Lord Jesus poured out on them
and the message of the Lord Jesus given to them? Must they keep silent because of these
irreverent and indecent women of the past?
Must words spoken to tattlers and busybodies be taken as silencing all
women for all time? What has blinded men to take these scriptures and stop the
message and the word of the Lord in women? Can’t they see that Paul talked of
women who labored with him in the Gospel?
Can’t they see that the apostles joined with women and others in prayer,
and that the unity of the early church included women?
“In the Old Testament, God gave the Spirit to whomever God
pleased, including Deborah, Huldah, Sarah, and to Anna who witnessed to the
Messiah in Jesus when he was just a baby.
The Lord Jesus showed himself and his power to men and to women without
respect of persons; He poured his infinite power and spirit on all flesh. Women
and men led by the Spirit are not under the Law. Christ in the male and the
female is the same Christ; his wife is the church, where God said that the
daughters would prophesy as well as the sons.
And where God pours out the Spirit, those men or women must prophesy.”
Thank you, Mistress Fell.
Yet today in 2013, this must be addressed again and not to people of
evil intent, but to people endeavoring to read the Bible carefully and keep its
teachings faithfully. What can be said
to help them see that the Bible itself contains the seeds of the destruction of
gender-restricted roles in the church, seeds of hope that all are called into
freedom to love and obey God’s call without barrier?
We can start with the Old Testament to see these seeds of
destruction and hope. When Moses was overworked with hearing and mediating
disputes and judging between Israelite and Israelite, his father-in-law
suggested the following:
Exodus 18:21 Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the
people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place
such over them to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of
fifties, and rulers of tens: and let them judge the people (KJV). The Hebrew word translated here as “men” is
usually masculine, though sometimes it is translated as persons; the word for
rulers is masculine.
It seems probable that there were no women chosen to be part
of this group of early judges. In fact,
any subsequent group that read this literally would never put a woman in as a
ruler in this system.
It is not that different a statement from the one in 1
Timothy 3: If a man desire the office of bishop, he desires a good work. A
bishop must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good
behavior, given to hospitality, able to teach, not a drunk, not abusive, not
money-hungry, not a brawler, not a coveter. He should be patient, rule his own
house well and soberly, and have obedient children. And the same is true for deacons—they must be
serious, straightforward, honest, not drunks, not greedy, respectful of the
mystery of the faith with clear consciences, with wives of sober, faithful
character, not slanderers. Deacons also should have one wife, and their
households and children should be above reproach (mostly KJV; worth noting is
that “if a man” really means “whoever” as in “If a man has ears, let him hear.”)
It certainly appears from this that the activities and
position of bishop (sometimes called elder) and deacon (also called minister)
must be filled by men. And good
Christians trying to obey God read the Bible and believe this.
But look at the history of how God behaves, even in a world
where these are the norms. In Judges 4,
God chooses and gifts a woman to fill the role set up by Moses for men, namely
Deborah.
The world the Israelites lived in was decentralized into
tribal lands. All the people who had
witnessed the miracles God did for them in their journey to Canaan died
off. The Israelites began worshiping
Canaanite gods, and God was angry and allowed them to be raided and oppressed. Periodically, God raised up a hero who
delivered them. One of those heroes was
Deborah. She was a prophetess, married
to Lapidoth, and she was Israel’s judge.
People came to her from all over for judgment.
The word for judge here is shaphat. It means to judge, govern, vindicate, punish; to act as
law-giver or judge or governor; to rule, govern, judge; to decide controversy;
to execute judgment (http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=H8199&t=KJV).
It is an action performed by God, by Moses, by David, and by the coming Messiah
(Isaiah 2:4, Isaiah 11:4, Micah 4:3). (May
the Lord judge between us; the judge of all the earth; God judge betwixt us; the
Lord judge you.) Judges are included in lists with priests, Levites, elders,
heads, officers. The children of Israel came up to Deborah for judgment (mishpat), a word used of actions of David,
of kings, of God, of Moses.
The point here is that God chose, God raised up, God gifted,
and Deborah cooperated. She was
recognized by her people as possessing the Spirit and gifts of God that suited
her for this authoritative role representing God to her people.
Therefore, it seems wise to allow God the last word in the
church as well. Rather than take a
socially normative statement as a commandment for us to follow, let us likewise
recognize that God has chosen, raised up, and gifted women in our congregations
to act on God’s behalf and to pray, prophesy, sing, and teach in obedience to
God. This is still counter-cultural. Our culture is not friendly to the witness
that Jesus is present through the resurrection to teach us in our own hearts
and through each other, and we are responsible to obey, to be deacons in the
household of God.
Recall with me that Paul himself speaks lovingly and
approvingly of Phebe, a diakonos, a
deacon, a minister, a servant of the church at Cenchrea. Paul tells the Romans to receive Phebe in the
Lord, to assist her however she needs because she has been a woman set over
many to care for them, a guardian. The
word for “succor” (KJV) is prostatis. It
comes from proistemi, which means to
be over, to superintend, to preside over, to protect, to guard, to care for, to
attend to. In the root of that second
word is the idea of establish, keep intact, sustain, stand firm.
What we can learn from Phebe is two-fold. First, diakonos
is translated three ways (KJV): minister (20 times), servant, (8) and deacon
(3). We can find that Jesus advised his followers, “He that is greatest among
you shall be your servant.” Jesus promised that his servants would be with him
where he was going. Servanthood, doing
what another tells you to do, is at the heart of diakonos.
We can also learn that Phebe got the very least powerful
translation of the term, despite evidence in the next verse of her authority in
the church at Cenchrea. This helps us
remember that translations do not take place in a social vacuum, that the King
James Version, for example, comes from the same century that saw the rise of
Quakers and the imprisonment, beating, and hanging of women who witnessed
publicly to the presence and power of the resurrected Jesus and their own sense
of obligation to do what Jesus laid on them to do.
The witness to equality in ministry is not “Women’s Lib”;
the witness to equality makes space for women to be equally obedient to God as
men can be. If anything, the increasing
freedoms given to women in England and the Colonies derives from the Gospel and
is a sign that the Kingdom of God is here. (The fact that women are no more
perfect than men in their exercise of freedom is another sign of equality.) Let us once again return to acknowledging
that God has the right to call, gift, empower and inspirit anyone God chooses
and that we humbly listen to God’s word through God’s messenger, put our faith
in the God who inhabits each of us, and do what God tells us to do.
