TOO MUCH OF THE WOMAN. Why are there more women in church than men? The average Christian worship service in the United States draws an adult

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1 TOO MUCH OF THE WOMAN Ruth 1:6-18; John 20:1-2, Why are there more women in church than men? The average Christian worship service in the United States draws an adult congregation that is 61 percent female and 39 percent male. About 90 percent of the boys who are raised in the church abandon it during their teens and twenties and most never return. On a Sunday in the United States, one in five married women will worship without their husbands. I don t know how good these statistics are, but on the basis of my experience I am inclined to believe they are relatively reliable. There are slightly but only slightly fewer men than women in the general population, but this is insignificant in accounting for the discrepancy in the number of women and men at worship. Something else is going on here. Making this even more difficult to understand is the fact that for all of Christian history up to and including the present men have controlled the institution of the Church. The largest denominations of Christians in the United States, the Roman Catholics and the Southern Baptists, still prohibit the ordination of women, and in most denominations with a couple of notable exceptions it is still men who occupy positions of power and authority in the Church. You would think that with men running the show they would have the support of their brothers in the pews. Strange But there s more, and it makes the phenomenon even stranger. There is no surviving religion of any longevity, including Christianity certainly, in which men have not controlled the images for God. This is the legacy of patriarchy, a word which means

2 most simply of the fathers. Our Christian faith inherited this patriarchal bias from the two traditions from which it emerged, the religion of Israel and the world of Greek thought. In both these cultures, the males are treated as superior we might say that the male was God and accordingly God was thought of as male and cast in images of father and warrior and king. But this is wrong. God is infinite. Maleness is a finite category, limited, incomplete, and utterly inadequate for thinking about the infinitude of God. It is astonishing to me that so many otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people continue to use exclusively male terms to refer to the divine. Is this not a violation of the second commandment that prohibits the worship of graven images, the making of idols? Except that it is more subtle and pernicious, because it is not an idol of stone or wood but of an idea. And, of course, the commandment notwithstanding, the Bible itself is cast in these images and would seem to endorse them, because the Bible is itself the product of patriarchal culture, a book that in many ways preserves the values of male superiority, and this makes it very confusing for people who have been taught to revere the Bible. How can they see through its patriarchal bias? By first admitting that the Bible is not God. It is testimony to God, at best a book written by men under the influence of divine inspiration. The question is where does the human leave off and the divine begin in this process of inspiration? Consider, for example, the story of Ruth in the Hebrew scriptures. This is a story of a deep friendship between two women, Ruth and Naomi, who is Ruth s mother-in-law, a relationship that leads Ruth to adopt the faith of Israel, Naomi s faith. In even the brief passage that is our lesson for today you can see the controlling assumptions of patriarchy. Both Ruth and her sister-in-law, Orpah, have lost their husbands, Naomi s sons. The

3 presumption is that these women who are still young have no status and no opportunity apart from having husbands. What if they were to live together with Naomi? Might this not be a fine and full life? Not according to Naomi, who is the spokeswoman for the values of patriarchy that underlie this book. According to Naomi, the daughters-in-law will have no security without husbands. To make her point, Naomi absurdly says to them, Do I still have sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Every hope these women have is premised on finding a man, which in the cultural setting of this story is probably and sadly true. The beauty of this story is in the relationship of the women in it. The tragedy of this story is that this and all relationships are confined by patriarchal values. Our job as readers is to lift the beauty free of the tragedy and find God therein. Consider further the famous story from the Gospel of John of Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Jesus, a story that is read every Easter morning. By any reckoning, Mary is every bit as much of a disciple as Peter or Philip or Andrew or John. Over and over again in the New Testament she shows herself the one who gets what Jesus is talking about when the men miss the point. And she is faithful to the end. Still, however, the Church, the patriarchal Church of popes and an exclusively male clergy fails to recognize this and prohibits women from serving in the clergy because, it says, Jesus called only males. But we don t know this! This is the patriarchal bias of the Bible and the Church, but as for what it means to be a disciple, there is no finer disciple than Mary Magdalene, even by the Bible s own telling. We are observing this Sunday as the day of Mary Magdalene, Apostle. Generally, an apostle is someone who has seen the risen Christ, and by this criterion it would be hard

4 to deny Mary Magdalene the title. But still she is cast as lesser to the men. We see this in the way she is presented in the Easter story in John. She is the one who keeps the faithful vigil at the tomb. Where are the men? Moping back home. But Mary is deeply moved, distraught by Jesus death. In the story, Jesus appears and tells her he is going to the Father and to go tell his brothers that he is going to the Father who is God. And Mary goes and gives this Easter announcement to the male disciples. Let s see if we can re-imagine this story without its traditional patriarchal bias. The disciple, Mary Magdalene, stayed at Jesus tomb after the men who were also Jesus disciples went back to their homes. Her distress at the death of Jesus is compounded by the apparent theft of his body. She weeps in sorrow and in rage. As the sun is beginning to rise, she feels a presence. She can see a figure through the morning haze. Who are you? she asks. A body has been stolen from this tomb. Do you know anything about it? The figure comes forward but remains strangely vague, like an apparition. Mary hears her name spoken. The voice is familiar but impossible, the voice of Jesus, her teacher, her dearest friend. Jesus, is that you? she asks incredulously. Dear Mary, says the figure standing before her, and with that greeting she knows it is Jesus. She starts toward him. You cannot touch me, Mary. I know that breaks your heart. It breaks mine. I have loved you so, but I am spirit now and fading fast from the world we have shared. I come to you to ask you to carry on in my place. You have understood me and the vision of God I have tried to teach better than the others. You alone know that this has all been about love. The others are good fellows, but they think always in terms of rules and

5 hierarchies. Where I have spoken of a community, they seek to establish a kingdom. Where I have spoken of compassion they think of judgment and authority. You understand all this, Mary, and only you can finish this work we have begun together. The others will not want to listen to you. They will say you are only a woman. But they are too much attached to the old ways. And they do not really understand our need for God and for one another. Their desire is to dominate and control. There hasn t been enough time, and I am sorry to leave you with all this, Mary. And I am sorry to leave you who are so very, very dear to me, you whom I love. Please, Mary, don t forget me. Mary tells the other disciples about the appearance of Jesus and his hope for the future of their movement, but they discount this as the response of a woman who is only a woman. And this has been the way of things in the church ever since. Returning to the original question: why are there more women in church than men, especially since men have had their way in the church from the beginning? It s a puzzling question. I wonder if at least for a certain kind of man the answer is that there is too much of the woman in Jesus and his gospel of God s grace. What do you think? Amen. Mary Magdalene, Apostle, July 22, 2007 Emanuel Lutheran Church