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A closer look at some of the extant issues around Romans 16
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Hey, so first of all, my sincere thanks to everyone who has reached out to express their congratulations and their support for us and our family. If you saw the video down below, we'll post a link. Then a hospital is to pick up my new sister. But we were able to bring her new daughter that we just adopted home, and we are so incredibly privileged to have hundreds, literally thousands of people tracking along with us, watching and praying for our family and for Emma as she grows and gets stronger. So first of all, thank you for that.
Speaker 1:But second, we finished up Romans this week. On Sunday just past, we finished Romans chapter 16. This is a big accomplishment. We've been working at this for five years right now, and we have now covered the whole letter together. So yay for us.
Speaker 1:However, one of the things that we talked about here was the incredible amount of support and thanks that Paul extends to women within the early church. In the last chapter to Romans, there are 26 people that he name drops to say thank you to, and of those, about a third of them are women. And I think this is really important here, not only for how we think about women in the roles that we play in our churches today, but also for what is happening within Paul as he writes this. Remember, Paul has finished his letter. He is done teaching.
Speaker 1:This is his PS. It's just all of his greetings to all of the people who have contributed to his story in an outsized way. This is Paul at his most honest, most vulnerable, most gracious, most thankful. And there, we see the role that women have played in his life, the role that women are playing in the early church. Now my take on this is that what we are seeing at the end of Romans and in Galatians are some of Paul's earliest letters is the church in its earliest incarnation, where it hasn't yet given in to some of the cultural pull to lean into the patriarchy that surrounds it.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna say something here, and I don't want you to take it the wrong way, so stick with me. But when you are a marginalized community on the fringes of society trying to gain a foothold in the larger cultural conversation, the leadership pool you have available to you to draw from is a lot more shallow. Now what I'm not saying with that is that there's less talent on offer in these types of communities. What I am saying is that when you are a marginal community with less social prestige, those with real leadership talent are able to rise to the top before those who already hold a lot of social power are able to shove their way in clogging up the pool. In other words, the more dominant your cause, the more likely it will have all of the typical voices around the table.
Speaker 1:The more innovative, the more challenging, the more outside the box your community is, the more your leadership will necessarily reflect a true meritocracy. And so we see leaders who are unexpected. We see women rising to really important roles in the church early, just as Paul says, women who are deacons, women who are coworkers with him, women who are apostles in the early church. Because this is an indication of a church that has not yet given into the cultural expectations around it. And that's really instructive for those of us on the other side of the conversation.
Speaker 1:I'm not just talking about women in leadership anymore. I'm talking about any of the voices that are not present around the table. The more influential we become, the more politically astute we become, even the more wealthy we become, the more we tend to believe that the status quo is good for everyone. But when we are marginalized, when we're on the outside or the fringes of society, we allow ourselves to listen to more voices, and this was when the church was at its best. That's why, as I said on Sunday, it's not the role of a woman to come to speak to the church and tell us why she should be able to lead.
Speaker 1:That's why it's not the role of people of color to step into white dominated conversations, white dominated communities, and demand their seat at the table. It's the role of those who are in power. It's the role of those with a voice to look around the table and say, what is missing here? What are the voices that we are not listening to? Where are the places where our community is missing out on the full robust imagination of all these different perspectives accepted and welcomed in the way that Paul tells us so that we can actually be the church living and breathing in the world?
Speaker 1:Now one of the questions coming out of this is, well, what about those other places in Paul's literature where he seems to say something different? Yes. In some of his earliest letters, Galatians, for example, he says, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. In Romans, he's very glad to thank the women who have contributed to his story, who have shaped him, and who are leading in the early church. But in Corinthians, he also tells women to be silent.
Speaker 1:In Timothy, he also says that he does not permit a woman to exercise authority. Now let's look at those quickly here. The passage in Corinthians is actually quite easy to deal with because Paul is very clearly talking to women who are speaking out, yelling out in the midst of a church service. So this seems to be quite clearly related to a specific situation in a specific community where women are either used to being able to dominate conversations or women are coming into the community and not knowing how to comport themselves in that context and they're disrupting the service. And Paul says rightly, you shouldn't do that.
Speaker 1:He's speaking to a specific cultural context, and he's trying to correct that so that everyone is able to get along together, to learn together, to accept each other, and to learn from each other as it's appropriate. So the Corinthians passage is really not that hard to deal with at all. The Timothy passage is more difficult, and I'll read it to you here. First Timothy two twelve. I'm reading from the ESV here.
Speaker 1:It says, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man. Rather, she is to remain quiet. Now this one is troubling, and it's hard to make sense of, particularly when we have Paul in Romans commending Phoebe as a deacon, honoring Junia as an apostle, apostle, talking about Priscilla as a coworker in the gospel alongside him. So there's a couple options here. And the one that I tend to lean into and that I was hinting towards in the sermon when I talked about the transitions and the evolution within the early church, we see women in very central roles.
Speaker 1:And it's only as the church becomes more mainstream and more powerful that we start to see the role of women slowly being diminished and downplayed. The letter to Timothy, first and second, these are part of a section of Pauline literature called the Pastoral Epistles. And a lot of scholars I I would even suggest that probably the majority of critical scholars would say that these are probably pseudo epigraphal. Now what that means is that this is someone other than Paul writing. This is someone later after Paul's death, probably in the first century.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna suggest probably the January to the January who is influenced by Paul, now writing to address specific circumstances that Paul wasn't able to during his life. Now to modern audiences like us, that sounds like lying. We are very familiar with plagiarism. You don't take someone else's words. You don't lie and say that your words are their words.
Speaker 1:We have certain academic principles around writing that this wouldn't fly in our world today. But in the ancient world, pseudo epigraphy was a fairly well known concept. It was a way of continuing the work of your mentor, continuing the writing of your teacher after they were gone. And this wasn't considered dishonest. It was considered a way of honoring someone who had influenced you deeply.
Speaker 1:There's a number of different examples of this in ancient literature, particularly throughout Greek literature of students continuing the work of their teacher. Now at best, it is a student who really understands everything that their mentor thought and is able to continue that and apply it to new situations. But I would argue whoever is doing this for Paul in the Pastoral Epistles is actually leaning into the cultural expectation a little bit more than Paul did and they get this one wrong. Now, again, the tricky part here is that this doesn't mean we should dismiss what is written in the pastoral epistles. They were still part of the collection of texts that the community gathered together canonized when they made the Bible.
Speaker 1:And so these have the same authority that any other writing does, whether it was written by the historical Paul or by a student of Paul later in the second century. However, again, it does help us to understand the question of what is culturally influenced and what is not. Because this is what is happening every time we read our bible. We are deciding, we are making decisions about what words are influenced by a particular cultural context or bias and what words inspired by the spirit of God transcend that particular moment and apply across the board. And this is not something that I am doing or liberal scholars are doing or textual critics are doing.
Speaker 1:This is something that every single one of us are doing all of the time. Because the simple fact is that we don't live in the culture of the first century, and we don't do any of the practices that they did the same way. We take the spirit of what is being said, and we apply that to our context today. So even if I think second Timothy is written by a secondary author, which is why it contradicts with Paul's authentic letters like Galatians and Romans, I still want to take them seriously, but I want to understand them within their context. The same way that Paul is dealing with those who don't eat meat in Romans 14, whether either because they are Jewish and they are afraid about searching out kosher meats in Rome after the expulsion of the Jews, whether they are pagans coming from the Roman culture and not wanting to eat meat that's been sacrificed to idols.
Speaker 1:These are culturally specific issues that Paul is addressing. And what's happening in Timothy is the author there, who again I don't think is Paul, but an author who is writing within the canon of the scripture regardless, is again writing and applying his perception of cultural norms to a specific situation in his moment and his time. So while I take him seriously, while I understand what he's dealing with and why, I do not take that as the transcendent spirit of God and apply it then to my context now. And the reason I do that is because I have a myriad of examples of the ways that women did exercise authority over men, the ways that women did teach men all the time. And again, we see that in Romans.
Speaker 1:Phoebe is commended to bring the letter of the Romans to the Roman church. That means she is going to be the one to read the letter aloud, to explain the letter to the audience, to answer any of the questions they might have, which is, as I joked about on Sunday, not to put too fine a point on it, exactly my job as a preacher, except that I do it without the personal commendation of Paul to you. You just have to take my word for it. Phoebe came with the personal recommendation of Paul that she was able to speak for him, explain his words, exegete the scriptures for that community. And so women were preaching, women were teaching, women were exercising authority just like Phoebe was who was a deacon in the church in Cenchrea.
Speaker 1:It's only later as the church becomes more socially acceptable, as it has more social power, that it's able to lean to the social expectations around it, and the church actually becomes more like the culture that surrounds it. As Christianity became more powerful, we became more dependent on the culture that provided us that power. So absolutely, there are contradictions here within the primary Pauline literature and the secondary and tertiary letters of Paul, and we have to find ways to make sense of that. What we don't have to do is harmonize that. We can understand this as changing norms within the church, different cultural pressures and expectations that were imposed on the church.
Speaker 1:But I think the really beautiful thing is to go back to the earliest incarnations of the Christian story. And there we see an incredibly diverse counter cultural expression of leadership that is emerging from within the early community where those who rose to positions of leadership were accepted and honored regardless of whether those people would have been denied their rightful place and contribution in the larger culture around them. And that's what we ultimately want to lean into as a church today. Who are the voices who are not listened to, where the spirit of God is present leading us, teaching us, challenging us to think in new ways today. At Commons, we have been blessed with this incredibly profound gift of women in our community who lead, who teach, who shape all of us in ways all the time.
Speaker 1:But it's not their job to prove that they should have that place. It's my job to do that. It's our job to give them the platform. It's their job to teach whatever it is that the Holy Spirit leads them to as they lead us. So here's the question this week.
Speaker 1:Who are the women who are forming you spiritually? Here at Commons, that might be Bobby, Yelena, different women in our team who lead us and teach us. But are there women authors that you're reading, scholars that you are learning from, making sure that you include women, people of color, indigenous Christians who are shaping the ways that we think about this story? And are you inviting those voices to shape you in your personal journey this week? I'll list a link down below of a number of voices that I think are worth listening to, but I'd encourage you to jump on Twitter, find some of these voices, look at the ways that you need to invite voices from outside your immediate sphere of influence and allow them to influence you this week.
Speaker 1:By the way, if these videos are interesting to you, then you can help us out. Give us a like, subscribe, and by all means, always add a comment. I'll do my best to respond. But we'd love to hear from you, understand what it is that we can lean into as we prepare future teaching for somewhere down the road.