One of those letters is a letter from Paul the Apostle to the church at Corinth, in Greece. Paul had founded the church there, and in this letter writes to address a number of issues that seem to have sprung up there after he moved on to start other churches.

One of the issues there had involved how the church should worship. It seems that a number of the folk had been granted the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues – a sort of private prayer language. But the problem was, if lots of folk were speaking in tongues during worship, and no one was able to interpret what they were speaking, the rest of the congregation would just be lost.

So let’s just hit this text straight on – is it true that “Sit down and shut up!” is the final word of the Lord with respect to women in worship?

And what do we do with this admonition, how do we handle it, how can we (and do we dare?) say that Paul was just plain wrong on this, but right on the other stuff?

When confronted with something like this, a veteran preacher knows just what to do – run to the commentaries, to see if the biblical scholars can bail us out! And in fact, they just might do that for us, in a way.

You see, some scholars theorize that these words about women being silent in worship were not, in fact the words of Paul the Apostle himself, but instead were later additions. It seems that in early New Testament manuscripts, these words do not always appear in the same place in the letter – in some versions, they appear as the final words of this chapter. This leads them to believe that these words were what they call a “marginal gloss”, that is, comments later added by someone to margins of the manuscript, which later copyists incorporated into the letter in the form handed down to us in the Bible.

(You can imagine what a novelist like Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code and its best-selling sequels, could do with this idea – a monk (an albino monk, for some reason it is always an albino monk), his misogyny fed by the scorn of a woman who rejected his awkward advances, in the dark of the night steals into the scriptorium, and adds words to the text which will ensure that women will be oppressed for centuries to come….)

Lending support to the idea that maybe these words were not Paul’s words is the fact that in his other letters Paul is all about inclusion, not exclusion, about how in his view followers of Jesus were counter-cultural in their willingness to set aside cultural and societal differences in order that the church might be one community in Christ. For instance, in the Letter to the Galatians he writes, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28). And Paul seems to have put this theological view of the equality of all into practice in the churches he founded – from his letters we know that leaders in the church at Philippi were two women, Euodia and Syntyche; that Phoebe was a deacon in the church at Cenchreae; that Priscilla was a leader of the church in Ephesus, then in Rome. Would it really have been likely that these women could have been leaders in the church at the same time as they were forced to remain silent in the most important activity that the church engages in, worship?

Lending additional support to this view is that fact that later letters, letters which the scholars are sure were written by someone other than Paul, share the same underlying cultural attitude of mistrust towards women as do those verses demanding that women be silent in church. So for instance, in the letter known as First Timothy, we read “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” (1 Tim. 2:11-12)

So perhaps we can let Paul off the hook here – maybe the words are not his.

And yet, that does not really solve our dilemma, because the church went on to incorporate the First Letter to the Corinthians into the canon as we have it today, thereby putting its stamp of approval on the letter as a whole – including those words about women being silent in worship. And as just noted, the same sentiment was repeated in that First Letter to Timothy as well. So the problem remains – is “Sit down and shut up” the final word of the Lord with respect to women in worship?

Here is what I believe. First, that we simply have to acknowledge that we are all creatures of our own time and place, shaped unconsciously by the societal and cultural norms we swim in from the day of our birth. We carry the prejudices and biases of our world around with us, however well intentioned at heart we might be.

I remember as a child sitting at the dinner table one evening with my family and with my grandparents, my father’s parents. I must have been a teenager, and so of course I knew it all, and so I was horrified to hear my grandfather refer to – and here it was in the late ‘60s, the time of great unrest in this country around the issue of civil rights – to hear my grandfather refer to some people as “Negroes.” How, I wondered biting my tongue, could he be so insensitive, so clueless, so perhaps even bigoted. While he did not use “the N word”, didn’t he know that the respectful term was “black”?

As I grew older, and perhaps a bit wiser, and certainly a bit humbler, I thought back on that conversation when one day I was accused of racism because I referred to someone as “black” – didn’t I know, I was scolded, that the respectful term was “African-American”? And then, some years later, I learned that “African-American” had itself gone out of favor, because no one said “European American” for white folk, and saying “African-American” implied that folk of African descent were somewhat of lesser American than those of European descent.

My grandfather and I were not so unalike, and I came to learn that we both were simply in some ways caught up in our society’s cultural norms, norms which once were commonly accepted, but over time had changed.

I believe this is what happened in the early church. In the early days, when the church was young and radically different from the cultural norms of the day, when part of its success was its being a place where the disenfranchised in society could come together across the strict boundaries which had previously separated them, the good news that in Christ all were one was joyously accepted. Here women, previously assigned by culture to the home and subsidiary roles, could be leaders; here what mattered was not your ranking in society but your willingness to serve each other, to share your gifts for the building up of the church. But over time, as the church grew and became more accepted, the pressure mounted to conform more with the norms of the dominant culture, to become more “respectable.” And the first casualties of this accommodation were women, who were told to “Sit down and shut up” in worship. And to make sure this stuck, they wrote it down.

But thank God for those who did not sit down and shut up. Thank God for women down the ages – and for women in our day and age – who reminded us that Paul and the early church were fallible, as are we; thank God for women who went back to these old texts and helped us separate that which was the product of human culture from that which are divine and eternal truths; thank God for women who reminded us that just as God is not a white male, we can and should be inclusive in our namings of God, using images of God, as does the Bible and the historic Christian tradition, that are feminine as well as male; and thank God for women who remind us that, in the words of the United Church of Christ’s identity campaign, God is Still Speaking.

For God is still speaking. Our living God will not be imprisoned in culturally bound readings of our ancient texts, and will not be silenced by those who would throttle the Gospel’s message of inclusivity, of love, of justice, of fullness of life for all people, of freedom in Christ Jesus. God would not remain silent, and so Martin Luther hammered his 95 thesis onto the door of the castle church in Wittenberg; God would not be silent, and so the congregational churches joined together to fight for the freedom of the Amistad captives; God would not be silent, and the faithful at last discerned that human slavery was an abomination before God and had to be ended in this nation; God would not be silent, and so people of faith sat down in Greensboro and walked in Birmingham and marched in Selma; God would not be silent, and so Congregationalist Antoinette Brown became the first woman ordained to the Christian ministry in 1852, and the United Church of Christ became the first denomination to ordain a gay man and then a lesbian woman; God would not be silent and so women like Christine Burns and Dirkje Legerstee and Emily Heath could respond to their calls to ministry in their times and places; God would not be silent, and so women like Bobbie Jordan and Donna Grohe could hear and respond to the call to be Co-chairs of the Board of Deacons here, like Board chairs Jackie Clayton and Gale Rockwell before them.

Thank God God is still speaking, and thank God for women and men of faith who listen for God’s ever-unfolding word for us.

Amen.