Advent Series 4: why women, a reflection on the women in Jesus’ story

Two quick notes first:

1. The sermon series is just 3 women because Rahab’s story was preached on by another pastor at the time this series was created, in Dec. 2022, and we do not have audio for that sermon. We will be posting another podcast on her story soon.
2. We at Asking For me, though on a spiritual journey that has taken many twists and turns, still believe in the Bible as a source of hope and joy and curiosities. We believe that scripture is inspired by God, but we also deeply believe God meant for us to wrestle with it with fear and trembling and to continue to struggle to better understand God, Jesus, the work of the Spirit, and the purposes of The Church for times like the one in which we are now. Because of our continued wrestling with what we call The Bible, there are times we have to step away from “traditional” sources (that word can use some defining of course) and consider the ways in which we have learned what is true and right, how we continue to think within a preset bias or not, and whether we still commit to One Interpretation To Rule Them All. This is a lifelong task for any one -“believer” or not- who wants to better know the truth. This is what we commit to do. It is a journey for sure. It is hard and treacherous at times. It is what we are meant to do.

Thank you for continuing to journey with us!

Watch our Youtube channel… or click on podcast above if you prefer.
Transcript of recording below.

Hey there, so this morning I wanted to highlight a couple of books, well a few books, three books that have been particularly helpful to me as I love Jesus, and I love his word, I love the Bible, I love hearing the stories of Jesus and how he interacted with people. And so much of my own spiritual journey has been around issues of gender and my own ethnicity, as someone who’s adopted ethnicity, has played a big part in my life growing up in a predominantly world.

It’s been a lot, so gender and ethnicity certainly have been major issues for me over the course of my whole life, and trying to make sense of what the Bible has to say about these things and what the Church has said, and they’re not always the same things. Particularly around gender, we’ve been doing, I’ve posted on asking for me the sermons that my husband, Rob, who had been at the time was a pastor at a church in our former denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA. And in December of 2022, he did a series on the women of Jesus’ genealogy, and I posted the audio to those three sermons. that he did. He only did three of the four women.

And so the reason that I decided to post those is because it was so important to the kind of trajectory of my husband and I leaving the denomination that we were in. It really, looking back, he and I both have recognized what a huge turning point that was for him as a PCA teaching elder.

Now, one of the things, if you don’t know about the denomination and how they’re ordained, like elders have to say when they’ve changed their views on, you know, big primary issues, whether it’s salvation I mean, there’s a lot of views that some people would consider primary, but if you’ve changed significantly on a view and you can no longer align yourself with the views of the PCA, then you are obligated as an ordained minister to, or elder, both teaching and ruling elders, need to say to their session, hey, you know, I’ve shifted my views on this. And some of those views will mean you have to leave. I mean, it’s clear you have to leave. And you know, there’s so much that goes along with that. In terms of polity and governance, like, there’s all kinds of things that happen.

For Rob and I, you know, it all started. I mean, you can say it all started when we got married. I mean, when we were dating, I, you know, 12 years ago now, 2012, Rob and I met. And, you know, when you’re dating in your 30s, and have both been in really rough relationships in the past, you’re not playing games. It’s like, okay, let’s lay out all our cards. This is what we’re looking for. This is, you know, deal breakers, right? Like, you just go through the list.

One of the things that we talked about was our denomination. Now, it seems like a funny thing to talk about, but when you’re serious, you’re serious. And for me, it was, you know, I had come back to Christ in 2007, after spending about a decade away from Christ and away from Christians. I had, you know, in my late 20s. I just wanted absolutely nothing. to do with Christianity. I thought it was oppressive and cruel and I was just dealing with a lot of my upbringing and and messaging that I got. I was a woman and as a person of color and as someone who was adopted and you know all those messages and so I had spent a lot of time wrestling with God’s perspective of who I was personally, like it was very personal.

But fast forward, you know after several very dark years where I was floundering, I mean anyone who knew me then, knew me as a party girl, knew me for all the things I was doing involved in. And you know fast-forward 2007, I was… things happen and I ended up realizing I needed to come back to Christ. That’s my journey. That’s me. At some point I felt like the Holy Spirit was talking to me and I was at my absolute worst, my darkest times and I really felt like Jesus was there and calling me back. And so I came back.

I started attending a church where I really heard the gospel clearly and beautifully in a way that I really hadn’t very often, at least before, you know, very much growing up it was, you know, you need to ask Jesus in your heart or you’re going to go to hell. That’s the message in a nutshell. Of course it was more to it, but in a nutshell, it was like you need to ask Jesus into your heart. So I asked Jesus into my heart a hundred times easily as a kid and I got every other day I was asking Jesus into my heart because I was so afraid of going to hell. I was so afraid of doing the wrong thing and upsetting God, right?

So anyway, fast forward to 2007, I came back to Christ. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to understand the gospel. I wanted to see what was so beautiful about it because I knew it was very much a, you know, the lost son, you know, often called the prodigal son. At that time, I read, someone gave me the book, The Prodigal God by Tim Keller and Tim Keller, of course, was PCA. And so I thought that Tim Keller represented the PCA. That’s not what I want to talk about. But all this to say that I was in this denomination, that I saw Jesus beautifully. and really felt called to be there and to get involved. I became a music director and art director. We did things in the community. I was very involved in the life of that church for several years.

And then I met Rob, my husband, and he was a teaching elder in 2012. We had these long talks about things like complementarianism and egalitarian. And what does that mean? And how do we make sense of, you know, is there differences? Is gender a binary? Are we adhering to gender roles? And are we, you know, people talk about caving to the culture? Are we, you know, you can get into the culture. There’s more than one culture, right? Like you came to a culture. any given side. And so it’s like, you know, we came in the culture on the one side where the social norms dictate what our gender roles are. On the other side, are we dictating gender roles onto the culture and saying this is how we we need to be because the Bible says so. Yeah.

All that to say, you know, Rob and I have these long conversations about how we really believed about gender and equality and what that means in marriage because clearly that’s very personal to me. And I wanted to make sure I was marrying a man who was not going to abuse his authority or position, you know, as as an ordained minister and in my life. We had long conversations about authority and what that means. Does it mean that the man has the final say and all that kind of stuff? And and you know, we were 38 and 39 when we met. He turned 40 and soon after we met and then by the time I got married, I was 39. And at that point, I had some hesitations, not about Rob, but about the direction we were going. Just, you know, I needed to know that he was okay if someday we had to kind of cross this bridge. Like, are we going to continue to align ourselves with the denomination that we don’t agree with? And he said, yeah, absolutely not. Well, when we crossed that bridge, you know, we come to that bridge, you know, we make that decision like.

And so we’ve always now some people would accuse us and someone did kind of saying, well, it sounds like you always had one foot out the door. Like that was your plan all along. No, no, absolutely. not. Our plan all along was to follow Jesus. Our plan all along was to say here are issues that are coming up that we can address in our culture and to understand better what does God’s word really say about this and what do we really believe God’s intention is for us to live in these times. And what can we, I don’t want to say compromise, but just kind of let go, right? This isn’t a primary issue. It may not even be a secondary issue. Is this something that’s going to make or break our relationship with our denomination and with other people? Does it not go to a church that does XYZ because it’s heresy, right? We’re constantly thinking through those things. There are absolutely churches that I will not be a part of because I think they’re heretical, right? And to kind of say that people like us are just so liberal and we just kind of let anything go, it’s mischaracterizing what we’re doing and who we are. It’s not who we are. And I think a lot of people would be kind of surprised at some of the things that I would draw a hard and fast rule on because I’m not public about those things. Those are not things that are primary to me. That’s the key. Those are not primary issues that I go around telling everybody this is where I’m going to put my flag. Flag.

Gender. So fast forward to 2022. I’m registering this series on women in Jesus’s genealogy. And around that same time, I mean, it was kind of a perfect storm. And I’ve talked about it in other places. I won’t go into it here, but there’s lots of things happening for us personally in the church that we were at with other pastors, both elders in our church and around our church, like in the surrounding areas of Utah. There’s a lot of tension. There’s a lot of misunderstanding. There’s a lot of lack of understanding and humility, really, where people were mischaracterizing things that Rob was doing or saying. And some of that was around ministry, ethos, if you will, ethos, ethos. where our belief, our deep belief, both Rob and I, believe that we meet people where they’re at. We’re not trying to pull them to where we are. We’re not trying to condemn them or judge them for where they are. They’re at where they’re at. And we try to understand it. And we try to give lots of space for how people are feeling in that moment and then figure out ways to show them Jesus. That’s how we minister. And it’s not going to be all at once. We just throw all these things at them. Well, you need to do this and this and this. That doesn’t work. Anyone who’s worked with people knows. That’s not what we do. We move where God’s moving. We try to help people where they’re at and say, here are some things to think about and let’s do this work together. It’s very much our heart and ministry and continues to be what we do.

So in 2022, by the time the sermon series comes along, there were a couple of really big cases happening in the denomination we were in, and one of them had to do with some women who had come forward and accused of a teaching elder or pastor of abuse, of sexual harassment, intimidation, abusing his position, and he was suing them. He was suing them for defamation of character and disparagement or whatever, and Rob and I had such a hard time with that for multiple reasons. I never knew him, Rob knew him, they weren’t buddies or anything, they swam in the same circles if you will, but you know, we had such a hard time with the way that the denomination as a whole was pushing back on this case and the fracturing that we saw happen among our friends. I mean, pastors and their wives and people we knew were all just kind of falling apart on these lines of do we support the pastor, do we support the victims, why do we have to choose between the two, and so much of it started to occur to both Rob and I that so much of it was, you know, this misconception of power and control and authority in the church and the abuse of those things when it comes to women, and especially women because I mean, it does happen to men.

I mean, it certainly happened to my husband on more than one occasion. I mean, this last time was kind of the final straw, but there have been other times throughout his career where there has been an abuse of power against him. And so, he and I talked a lot in those days about our role in the denomination and how we were going to respond because we’ve never been people that can just ignore what’s happening around us. We’re just not the people that are going to say, oh, well, that’s that church and it’s none of our business. The church is the church. We are the church, all of us together. And when one part of the body is hurting, we’re all hurting. And we’re all trying to heal. We’re all trying to heal that part that’s hurting. That’s the point. That was the point of Paul saying all that. We all work together. We all. give and take.

But for us, like this question of what do we do with women in the church and how do we, do we listen to them, do we respect them, do we hear what they have to say, and do we give them, I mean it’s really about giving them back their own agency to say, this is how I think this situation should go. Because the people with the authority and with the power and with the control and with the influence, people get to stand at the mic at the presbytery level or get to be involved in the committees. All of these people are men. They are men.

And somewhere in translation, it gets lost, right? The truth, the complexity, the female perspective just gets lost. Because then, here’s the tricky part.

When you talk about female perspective and you say, well, is there a difference? Because you kind of get into this catch-22 if you’re not careful. Because is there a difference between a male perspective and a female perspective? And it’s an interesting question because you can say on one hand, yes, there is. There is a difference. You need to hear women. You need to hear what women have to say. I mean, you could use an example, I’ve heard it used a thousand times. Like, you know, you ask a dad about his kid and you get one answer. You ask a mom about the kid, that same kid, get a different answer, right? Now, there’s multiple reasons for that. There’s all kinds of reasons. That’s not what I want to talk about.

But it’s an interesting question when it comes to power and authority because there are those folks who very much want to say that men are inherently better at holding power and authority, that they’re wiser, they’re more discerning, they’re not, you know, they’re not emotional, or they’re not, they don’t give in to the culture, or whatever, whatever the, all the things that you’ve heard, I’m sure. I’ve heard, you’ve heard, we’ve all heard.

What’s interesting about it all is that when you talk to some of these folks who have aligned themselves with the complementarian theology -for those who don’t know, you know, complementarian is this idea of like complementing each other in a sense of not, you know, oh, you have a nice dress today, but the complements in terms of like an angle, like complementary angles where they complete each other, right? or this idea of, you know, you have certain gifts, I have certain gifts and together we have all these gifts. But the men are always slightly more gifted and they’re slightly more competent and they’re slightly more powerful and women are the weaker vessel, right?

So, December of 2022, at the point we had been talking about this abuse case. We talked a lot, Rob and I talked a lot about the report that came out by our denomination on domestic abuse and sexual abuse and spiritual abuse. There was a whole section in the report about spiritual abuse and how that’s become a problem in our circles and how it relates to all the other kinds of abuses. It’s often secondary abuse that happens in light of the other, you know, domestic, sexual, physical abuses that happen.

And Rob and I were talking a lot about the future of the church we were at and how the struggles of so many people, people that were leaving our church because of our denominational affiliation.

Now, people wanted Rob to, from the beginning, when we first got there, there was a good group of people, large group of people who wanted Rob to be, uh, to ordain women. Like, they wanted that conversation. Like, why can’t we ordain women? Why can’t we, in essence, leave the PCA and ordain women and be fully affirming of the LGBT community?

Now, Rob and I certainly have talked about that over the years many, many times, many times. And we felt at the time that that church was not ready for that. And I think that was a mistake. I think, I mean, looking back, hindsight being what it is, I’m not sure it would have gone any differently, to be honest. I think that if we had gone ahead and said, you know what, we’re going to leave the PCA now, things would have been awful. I mean, I don’t know, it’s hypothetical, no one knows. What happened happened the way that it happened.

So 2022, by the end of the year, Rob and I had had these long conversations about gender and abuse and women in the church and trying to make more sense of whether or not we could stay in the PCA, whether I could stay.

Because honestly, I probably could have taken or even leave in. I probably could have could have left a long time ago. And I didn’t because of rap, because I love my husband, not because he’s the man who has the final say. It’s because I trust him, I love him, he’s wise, he’s discerning, he takes all things into account, he’s thoughtful, he’s all the things that I married him for, and I trusted his wisdom and integrity that when the time is right, the time is right. And for him, it wasn’t right yet. And I agreed to that.

And I agreed to that right up until the second that he sat down next to me in January of 2023 and said, “We need to get out. We need to get out of the PCA.” And he said to me, and I’ve written about this before, I said it before elsewhere. He said, I am sorry that it took me this long to really understand what it’s like to be in your shoes. And he said, we got to go. Like, it was just like, that’s it, we got to go. There’s too much pain. And he said, he said in that moment, “If I have to choose between the denomination and my wife, it’s not a choice.”

Thankfully, he meant my wife.

And so yeah, we prayed, we cried, we just sat with that for a couple of days. And I had written, I mean, I had already written a long letter, just getting all my thoughts out on paper about the many, at that point, many, many ways that I felt the PCA had lost its way. There were things going on that were just, they were too much for me. I could no longer just, you know, either stick my head in the sand and just, you know, people always say, well, just, you know, keep your head down, stay off the radar, just do what you got to do locally. It’s like it’s, it’s too, there’s too much, eventually it piles up too much where you just, you know, it’s like, okay, you don’t do a couple dishes in the sink, but eventually there’s too many dishes and you got to do them.

And so I just felt this pressing, like, need to write it all out as clearly and as, as carefully as I could write it all out. So I’d been sitting around on my computer for a while and I showed to Rob and he said, yep, that’s it. And he made some tweaks here and there, added some things and, and we. ended up sending it to our session, the elders who were responsible for our souls. And so at that point it was like, we had had hope being, I mean, somewhat naive.

Again, looking back, it was like, wow, we were a little bit naive about how that was going to go. Because what we’re doing essentially is critiquing the denomination that these people love and cannot see. They can’t, they can’t take the critique. They just can’t. And so it was, you know, it was very, it was wishful thinking in our parts that it would go somewhat smoothly. And talking to other people who have left, like, they’re all like, yup. Like, uh, yeah. There’s been several people who have reached out since then, or people we know who have left, who have also commiserated with us. Like, it doesn’t matter. It’s, it’s a bad breakup. It’s like breaking up with someone and they just burn your effigy, right? Like they just, they’re just absolutely go scorched earth on you. Um, and, and there’s no way to, there’s no real way to avoid that because you try, you try to do the best you can. You try to be gracious. You’re just okay. We’re just cutting ties. We’re done. Yeah. Lose my number, right? We’re just going to move on. But, but some people just can’t handle that and they need to make sure that everybody knows it’s your fault, not theirs.

So all that to say, uh, so much of what happened in 2022 and the beginning of 2023 was about gender. I mean, if you were to boil it all down, you know, you look back 20 years from now, someone studies my life and looks back on that time period. And so much of it goes back to gender and what we make of God’s view of women.

And so all that was introduction to what I wanted to say and that’s… I want to share these three books a book that my husband gave me that he had read in a class in his seminary was this book called … can you see it? [Showing book on video.] The Jesus of Asian women and it’s a collection of essays about Jesus and his relationship to women throughout the gospels and personal stories of women theologians all over the world who have experienced Jesus. It’s just this really beautiful a book that just really helps me kind of put things into perspective and understand theology a little bit differently from just, you know, what we tend to, you know, Western, European, Martin Luther or whoever, and just kind of branching outside of that perspective.

It was just really helpful and beautiful, particularly a chapter or an essay on Korean women and their experience of the cross and their experience of the symbol of suffering and pain and shame and how Jesus restores us through the work of the cross and it’s beautiful. And there’s another book that I’ve particularly been helpful also in some men and women essays, Vindicating the Vixens. Can you see that? I’m using this weird background, so it kind of blends in, it’s funny. Vindicating the Vixens, revisiting sexualized, vilified, and marginalized women of the Bible, Sandra Glahn, editor, and there’s a mix of people from different backgrounds just discussing the women of the Bible, not just the four women of the genealogy, though they are in there, but other women’s stories as well.

And just thinking three women’s stories in the Bible and the cultural context is really important. I think some of that has gotten glossed over in my circles in the way I was raised. and that these stories were not given the context that they needed to have to really fully understand their place in the Bible and in theology.

And then finally, this book, which is from my circles, solidly from our theological camp, a professor at Covenant Seminary that my husband attended and just adored, Dr. Jerome Barrs, who’s a lovely man who has written several wonderful books and essays and just has such a tender, tender heart, especially towards women and understanding the role that gender has played in theology and in our orthopraxy, which is you know, the way that we actually do things in the church, not just what we say we’re going to do, but how we actually do things.

So this is the book called, oh, that didn’t show up at all, Through His Eyes. There it goes. Through His Eyes by Jerram Barrs: God’s Perspective on Women in the Bible. His view of Eve at creation all the way through the Bride of Christ, as depicted in the book of Revelation, the letter of Revelation. Revelation of John.

Those books, and I haven’t done like a proper review of any of them because there’s just so much there. I highly encourage you to pick them up if you haven’t read them or haven’t heard of them, and if you’re interested in just hearing these perspectives. If you’re a traditional, you know, very, um, complementarian, Orthodox, historical, et cetera, Dr. Barrs is probably a good one for you to pick up, and his work is fantastic.

And, I also wanted to say that both Rob and I have since looked back over that time period. And, you know, God, God certainly works in mysterious ways. I kid around that God brought me to Rob to save him from the denomination. Um, and it’s, you know, I say it chuckling, but it’s not, it’s not that funny, to be honest. It’s, um, it’s heartbreaking. Because in a lot of ways, Rob and I both wanted the PCA to be different and wanted it to take a different direction, but it’s kind of done this backlash.

And I think what we’re seeing across the cultural landscape right now, particularly in the church, the American Evangelical Church is facing this kind of backlash to the movement of women becoming more visible, sort of, becoming more vocal about our role in the church and in history and how we bring back the power and authority of women who are called to those positions. I think that what we’re seeing in the evangelical landscape right now is this fracturing of all these people along these lines. We don’t want to give more fuel to the fire. We don’t want to add fuel to the fire. There are people who will always be hateful about women in ministry. I mean, those people have every argument in the Bible. They feel they’re biblically sound. They believe they have their standing with God Himself, that this is how -even me saying God “Himself”- this is how it’s always been, this is how it’s always going to be. They certainly have that stance. So can we fight them? No. I’m not fighting them anymore. I don’t need to. If you feel that’s your purpose in life right now, to fight people there, then great, do that, but I feel that my calling right now is to do something different.

And so we’re figuring out what that is and trying to be in those circles where this isn’t even the issue anymore. We’re not even talking about whether women can be in ministry. We’re not even talking about that. There are other things happening across the country, across locally, things that are happening right here in my town that need addressing and spending all this time and energy and trying to figure out gender equality has been exhausting in the church and in various places in our culture. It’s too much. Let’s focus. Let’s focus on the things that are more pressing.

And for me, it’s not to say that we don’t work on women’s issues. Don’t get me wrong, because we certainly do. There are certainly things that are happening along gender lines that I feel is absolutely the work of the church right now to protect people and to make sure that we’re not giving into the culture.

I mean, you know, the people that want to accuse us of doing that are certainly giving into their own culture in ways that I don’t think is biblical. And I don’t think it’s God’s heart. And I continue to do that work. And myself, I continue to ask the Holy Spirit to convict me when I’m wrong. And to show me the truth, I do not want to be led astray. I don’t want to, you know, make something fit my agenda. I want to follow the truth. And I deeply believe that the time now for the church in America right now is to protect those who need protecting, for their very lives. I mean we’re talking about their lives, the right to live, the right to exist, and to advocate for victims of abuse in our churches who are not getting justice and who are suffering among us. It’s just, it’s not the way. It’s not the way the church should be. And I want to be part of correcting that for the future, for my friends, for my children. And I pray I’m not going to be led astray; this is just not the way the church should be.

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