I know several women who hate women’s retreats. It is an interesting event. I’ve had some good times and some not so great.
One I went to as a new mama had worship led by a husband and wife team the first night. He was our church’s worship pastor, and they typically sang together. After the message, the husband dressed up as an old lady to perform a comic skit like a Titus 2 older woman teaching us younger women. He held up his wife’s size-4 Christmas red negligee and said in his falsetto, “If we were having trouble with our husbands looking at naughty pictures on the new World Wide Web thing, we should just wear one of these…”
Forget the fact that I was less than three months from giving birth to my third child and regularly fell into a bed containing every known human bodily fluid… even at age 24, I knew you could not work hard enough to thwart someone else’s contrary desires when they wanted to sin. No one had ever stopped me from sinning when I wanted it. In that moment, I had a violent daydream of throwing over my chair and slamming the door on my way out. However, I’d brought a new friend whom I’d just led to the Lord. I could neither leave her there nor explain to her why we were storming out with our nursing babies.
My daydream must have reflected in my body language because an older woman behind me leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Shhh. I’ll take care of it.”
Older men and women, speak when you see something. Your voice is needed.
On the last night of the women’s retreat, when only women were there, the worship leader kept declaring that she could feel the Spirit saying to her He wanted to do something really special. She said He was moving in our midst and had something unique for us that night.
I looked at my friend and asked her if she wanted to walk down to the lake to be baptized. She was so new to the faith that she didn’t even know about water baptism. But if it was the next step in declaring her faith—she wanted it.
When I went forward to tell the worship leader that I believed what the Spirit had for us was an impromptu baptism, she froze. When she could finally form a response, it was that she just didn’t know if women were authorized to baptize people. She suggested we wait. She would call her husband, and he would come back in the morning… we could do it first thing. I felt a little too raw to invite back the guy who blamed men’s porn use on the level of their wives’ sexiness, so I opted out.
When we returned to church the following Sunday, after our lead pastor preached on “forgiveness for the brethren” (likely thanks to the older woman behind me who took care of it*) I asked him what he thought about women baptizing people. I was genuinely curious, and completely content to live within the bounds of all the restrictions placed on women.
As a side note, I feel like men in leadership never throw each other under the bus as a professional courtesy since everyone eventually misspeaks and their turn is coming. They call it a conviction to “not touch the Lord’s anointed,” and mostly just preach forgiveness, and it’s easy to be misunderstood from the pulpit. But shepherds who don’t address it publicly are complicit. If an error was publicly clarified when preachers publicly misspoke, we would have more reverent speakers and, more importantly, congregations who were practiced at discerning truth.
My pastor told me he thought it was a good practice that when the Bible is silent on a subject, we should not speak additional rules. He did not see scripture ever saying that women could not baptize someone. Now, I see a hypothetical situation where a woman would not be able to let a man plunge her under the water.
The responsibility and consequence of leading is daunting, so I had no ill feelings toward the worship pastor’s wife who was scared about what role a woman could take. At the time, I merely saw it as quenching the spirit, not a gender issue.
I say merely, but we shouldn’t be cavalier in our interactions with the Spirit who knows the mind of God. We’re warned that it’s unforgivable to blaspheme the Spirit (think repeatedly ignoring and mis-attributing his conviction, even unto death) and Thessalonians talks about extinguishing, quenching or stifling the spirit, maybe by, or in addition to, despising prophecy. Don’t quench the Spirit; we don’t comprehend the ramifications.
But that’s just so scary: walking in the uncharted instead of the written law, letting the Holy Spirit out to play in all the uncontrolled, untamed possibility. What if we can’t control or tame the believers filled with the Spirit?!
We are to discern the will of God
We have mugs and cards that include the middle two phrases of Romans 12:1-2. “Don’t be conformed to the world,” and “renew your mind.” But notice the bookends. As an act of worship—become equipped to discern the will of God.
Here it is: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.”
Philippians 1:9-10 also tells us the goal is to have the ability to discern, or as the Common English Bible states it, decide what really matters.
I know there’s danger when considering experience as truth instead of a fixed point of reference. And some faith movements base truth on feelings instead of doctrine. For example, “I feel good in my heart about doing this, even though the Bible condemns it.” That’s dangerous, because I know I’m creative enough to justify anything.
So, how do we follow the rules when so much is not specifically written down, like whether or not a woman can baptize someone?
What really matters
A few years ago, my Sunday school teacher was talking about the Sabbath and following the 10 Commandments. I asked him, “Didn’t God prophesy that under the new covenant, he would write the law on our hearts?” He sighed, “Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still have to practice the Sabbath.”
It’s a common thought—but both Paul and James cautioned that if we seek to follow one part of the law, in order to be justified by it, we have to follow all of it. Seeking to be justified means you are presenting your case before God to show how worthy you are. But I would also look at it another way. Violating others with your temper while you tout sexual purity makes a mockery of Christianity to unbelievers. Keep the whole law or don’t advertise your holiness.
And even more difficult than the 613 Old Testament laws is the idea of truly embracing what Christ called the greatest commandment. Ingesting the command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul—no dark corners withheld. And then swallowing the sincere conviction to love the icky neighbor you think you’re better than as yourself. If we filtered every action through those two, we would not hurt so many others, or so readily justify war.
The right wrongness
I’m not saying to ignore the law. Jesus said whoever sets aside the least command or teaches others to do the same will be the least in heaven in Matthew 5:19-20. But he finishes with the warning that you are going to need more righteousness than those who keep and teach the laws to enter heaven.
What I believe really matters: is don’t scramble to do right before God at the expense of humans.
The law love in Romans 14 talks about holding fast to your conviction regarding what you eat. It had to do with meat killed in ritual worship of gods. Paul says your freedom to eat meat sacrificed to idols could cause a brother or sister to stumble. And if you cause someone to stumble, you’re not walking according to love.
We could look at this verse about meat in a couple of ways. First, we could count it up as a law we accidentally always followed, and brag about how holy we are because our burger was not killed in worship of Jupiter. (Although, the next generation might say it was slaughtered on the altar of capitalism.) Or second, we could argue that the Bible is irrelevant to our modern lives.
But even though we don’t have a pagan temple in the middle of our city sacrificing animals to Jupiter, the heart of this message is still relevant if we sympathize with the emotional reaction a first century, new believer might have felt if they previously took part in those rituals. (We participate in a symbolic and often emotional ritual when we celebrate the Eucharist.) The first-century new convert no longer wants to be associated with their former deity. They see participation as returning to enslavement.
In contrast, you want them to see that they’re not subjugated to the faith system they left. They have freedom in Christ to eat anything and glorify God for the food.
You both actually want the same thing, but there’s an impasse about how to get there. Do you eat the meat to show them your freedom? “Do not destroy, by what you eat, someone for whom Christ died,” and a few verses later, “Do not tear down God‘s work because of food.” Even though you can eat it and they should be able to eat it, doing what is right is not as important as loving them.
Your rules, lack of rules, extra convictions, and obedience to the law should not destroy the faith of someone for whom Christ died. The law of love supersedes.
Here’s how I might see this applying today. One believer is convicted that we should not exploit the crops of indigenous people, destroy the earth we’re supposed to steward with packaging and transporting food, or eat animals who show affection and fear. When I’m with someone who has a strong conviction and looks to me as a believer to uphold their idea of godliness—maybe, according to my faith—I should eat as them as a way to eat with them.
Yet, even this is not a rule. There might come a time when someone is weeping over their plate and they need to be set free. Your dogmatism, coupled with thinking that you are more right, will cause just as much pain by abstaining. Oh, the wildness of the Holy Spirit. You’re just going to have to pray in the moment for direction. But it is from him, you’re going to be free, and it’s going to be in love.
The wrong rightness
Pharisee is a word for evangelicals that conjures an evil villain for anyone who went to Sunday school as a child. And we quickly condemn the caricature as a bad guy. But ignore the bearded guy with fringes on his garment and substitute the word Pastor or Shepherd for the word Pharisee. They were the spiritual leaders and scripture interpreters.
Plus, if you’ve been in a religious space more than a minute, you’re more likely to be a Pharisee than not. Afterall, we are the church.
Ask yourself if all the men who’d dedicated their lives to studying scripture and leading Israel were actually filled with bloodlust and hate. Could some of them have been trying very hard to do what was right before God? I think the Pharisees and Sadducees really wanted to do the most-right, right-thing all the time. And, they desired to lead correctly.
But here’s how that played out. They were so careful to pinch off a portion of their herb garden, to tithe mint and rue and follow the law—but then when their elderly parents needed financial help they said, “Sorry, I already gave to God anything I might have given to you.” Jesus condemned this, but not because he was against tithing.
The Pharisees also wanted to honor the Sabbath. Don’t underestimate how important this was.
Super brief and ignorant summary of a volatile topic: God wanted his creation to rest every seventh day, to let the earth rest every seven years by not farming, and to return all property and release all slaves every 49 years (7×7) and call the following year, the 50th, The Year of Jubilee. This was so important to God that when Israel failed to do it, they were exiled to Babylon for 70 years to pay recompense for the 490 years of disobedience. The exile let the land rest for the missed Sabbaths. Even though there had been some loss of Jewish control over part of the land during the divided Kingdom after Solomon died and the Assyrian Conquest, being conquered and exiled by Babylon was the most decisive loss of Jewish sovereignty. Jewish ownership of the land was tied to obedience to God’s covenant; as promised, it was revoked when they disobeyed.
This is how it looks to me when spiritual leaders and scripture interpreters use Sunday morning to emphasize their stance on hermeneutics. Parsing out every jot and tittle, concerned with reading doctrinal statements to make sure everyone knows where they stand on issues. Angst for correctness while people leave the sanctuary in tears. Good thing you’re right, church, and everybody knows it. You’re doing great keeping the law.
Exodus 19:5-6 | Deuteronomy 4:40 | Deuteronomy 28:1-9 | Joshua 1:7-8
So, sticking to the Sabbath was a pretty significant doctrine when Israel was occupied by Rome and Jesus walked the earth. I think we downplay the sincere angst the spiritual leaders would have felt. Keep this in mind when you picture them insisting on keeping the Sabbath. The stakes are high. The leaders must keep everyone in exactitude with the law.
You are not supposed to work on the Sabbath. And Jesus kept breaking this rule in preference to human need. In this scene, Jesus and his disciples are walking through a field, hungry. Some disciples grab grain and eat it raw. Technically, this is harvesting.
Technically right, and technically righteous.
Yet, weren’t they a little off? Lifting hand from bowl-to-mouth wasn’t less work than lifting from plant-to-mouth.
The Pharisees had so much zeal for correctness; instead of discerning what truly mattered.
So, about those rules…
The Pharisees should have tithed and shown mercy. But when it comes down to it, God desires mercy over sacrifice. Jesus told the Pharisees to ponder the concept because he didn’t come for the people who get it right.
The world will know we are Christ-disciples by our love, but sometimes it seems like churches would rather be known by their doctrinal statements.
I had this concept affirmed on a podcast recently where the guest, Amy Byrd, discussed having to do some internal work about what drew her to a particular denomination where she worshiped for 15 years. She described her belief that “theological precision brought her closer to God, that precision was sanctification…”
So here I wrestle, one foot out of an issue-driven church convinced that sanctification is through adherence to gender roles. The spiritual leaders and law interpreters reiterate doctrines with zeal and fervor. They have good hearts, and much is at stake.
When my husband and I lived in Prague, we spent time with missionaries who often ignored the interpretations of their sending church. For whatever reason, they let me know when they were doing it. I also have friends who went to missionary school. While they were drowning in doctrinal precision, they were told by other missionaries, “Don’t worry, it’s different on the field.” I bet household codes are just not as important in trenches. I think church is just a thing you do on Sunday; the rest of the week is beyond the churchyard.
Christ called John the Baptist a reed in the wind when John doubted and wanted clarification. I feel camaraderie with John.
Because the winds of doctrine that buffet us are also inside the church. The issues the local church wants to exalt will knock you around just as much, and enough wind will uproot a strong tree. I want to bend on the extraneous, non-salvation issues, rather than push someone who Christ died for to the snapping point. After all, Christ did not come to break off the bruised reeds or snuff out the smoldering wicks.
Here’s to living the windy wild. Mercy, not sacrifice. Love, not getting it right.
Oh, but you should still Sabbath…