Cover Your Head

Sermon

I pastor in a suburb of Dallas, TX. The first year I moved there, my first year as a lead pastor, I attended our annual district assembly, which is when all the pastors in our district - about 80 churches - gather to do church business (it’s thrilling, you can tell that, right?). I had just given my pastor’s report - standing in front of everyone and sharing what the last year has looked like at our church. I was standing in the lobby and an elderly woman came up to me and pinched my arm.

“What do you do with these?” she shouted at me.

I was confused, startled. Deer in headlights. What do I do with what?

“These.” She shook my arm (which sort of hurt, given that she was pinching my skin. “What do you do with these? For work?”

Oh. She was asking about my tattoos. What job do I have with all these tattoos?

I smiled and said, “I’m a pastor! I just gave my pastor’s report!”

I don’t think she heard me (I don’t think she was listening). “Well my nephew has a bunch of these and he can’t get a job.”

I sensed it was time to bail. So I smiled and said, “Tell him to be a pastor!” and walked away.

I laugh at that story, but believe me, it’s not the first or the last time that someone suggested that my tattoos disqualify me from being a pastor. At my church in Ohio, one of my leadership team asked about my difficult past, since I’d gotten so many tattoos before I got saved.

I mentioned that I came to Jesus when I was 7, and had no tattoos at that point.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve been made to feel as though I don’t really belong in the church, nevermind to be a pastor. I’m sure this shocks you, but I was a weird kid growing up. From listening to punk rock and metal to playing D&D to reading comics, I was a boy out of time. I didn’t get Netflix shows, I got to really explore the insides of lockers.

All this to say that I learned pretty early on that if I wanted to fit in, I had to suppress those parts of myself that didn’t fit the mold. And if that was true at school, it was doubly true at church. My parents, my pastor, my youth pastor - none of them knew what to do with a kid who was as interested in watching The Exorcist as he was studying Exodus.

And here’s the thing - I’m a straight, white guy. The parts of myself I learned to suppress to be a good Christian and pastor were hobbies and interests (like horror movies, metal and tattoos).

No one ever told me when I wanted to be a pastor that I couldn’t because of my gender. But I have female and trans friends who have been told just that.

I was never taught that my culture or skin color would be a barrier to preaching. But I have friends of color who have been told that again and again.

So friends, new friends, I want to be very clear today. This passage is a little bit of a dumpster fire. It’s confusing, and we’re going to get weird today - wait for the bit about the angels. But what I want you to hear crystal clearly:

God did not make a mistake in creating you. And in rescuing you from sin, in transforming you, God does not require you to turn your back on who you are. Rather, God restores us to our true selves, the self we hide, the self God created and knows and has always loved.

Salvation isn’t about you becoming less you. It’s not about conforming to the mold of some moldy old white guy. The good news of Jesus is, to quote Paul from elsewhere, Jesus in you, the hope of glory.

So let’s talk about Corinthian head coverings. Or hair styles. Probably.

If you’ve been here for the last several weeks, you know we’re in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. This network of house churches in the city of Corinth was a mess - I like to joke that if you think your church has problems, reading this letter will make you feel better. But honestly, I appreciate that the Corinthians were trying, in many ways, to live out Paul’s teachings about Jesus.

They made a lot of mistakes. A lot.

But they were trying.

Case in point this passage. Which as I already mentioned is a dumpster fire.

Reading the commentaries on this one is fun. They can’t even agree if Paul is talking about head coverings or hair styles here. Theologian Richard Hayes, in his commentary, admits as much and warns teachers and preachers of this passage that we have to begin with intellectual humility and honesty.

Humility: we’re not really sure what’s going on in this passage. Paul’s argument is unclear, convoluted and even contradicts his own theology elsewhere.

And honesty: when we preach this, we’re not going to pretend we know what’s happening. At least not completely.

So what is clear is that this is an issue that’s happening when the community gathers to worship. And the women are doing something - letting their hair down or maybe removing a head-covering - while they’re teaching and preaching and when they do this, it marks them culturally as men.

Have you ever been to a church where all the men wear suits and all the women wear dresses (you’re in the South of course you have). It’s a little like the women are standing up, slipping out, putting on a suit and coming back in to preach.

The women are acting like men when they teach and preach. This is why I said I love the Corinthians. After all, we know from Paul’s other letters that a key component of his teaching is that ‘in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female.’ So the Corinthians are saying, Oh, okay. So let’s get rid of the distinctions.

We’ll have all the women dress and act like men. Boom!

Paul doesn’t like this. And this is where things get… interesting. First, Paul says (in typical Pauline exaggeration) that if she’s not going to cover her head or let her hair down or whatever is going on here, then she might as well shave her head (which was a sign of shame in Greco-Roman culture).

His evidence? He says that men don’t do it (head cover or hair down or whatever) because they are the ‘glory of God,’ and then goes on to point out that ‘woman is the glory of man.’ We’re going to come back to this bit.

He moves into the creation story from Genesis 2, where the woman is created from the man:

1 Corinthians 11:8–10 NRSV

Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.

Paul (mis)uses this story as proof that women need a ‘symbol of authority’ on their heads. You know… because of the angels. (What? We don’t know. He literally doesn’t bring it back up.)

And you can feel him backpedal immediately, because he jumps quickly to say,

The New Revised Standard Version Head Coverings

Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. 12 For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God.

Now, I’m not saying that Genesis 2 means women are inferior to men! No, actually according to that story, we’re interdependent and need each other!

Okay… so, why do we need to be careful about the hair-head coverings?

I love where he finally lands:

1 Corinthians 11:13–15 NRSV

Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering.

He finally appeals to culture, custom and nature - none of which actually makes any sense. He’s essentially saying, “It’s just weird and gross so stop it!”

Now before we fix this, I want to hang out in this discomfort. Because some of us in here, who grew up being told the Bible is the ‘inerrant, infallible Word of God!’ are very uncomfortable right now. Are you okay with Paul not having a coherent argument here? Can you see a guy who feels the right thing… that something about these women removing their head coverings or letting down their hair or whatever is bad, but he can’t quite figure out why.

A few weeks ago, y’all looked at Paul’s words on sex and marriage, and he opened that section by saying, “Now this part’s not from the Lord, it’s just from yer old pappy Paul.”

A part in the Bible telling you this part of the Bible’s not part of the Bible?

Well… yes. Because the Bible isn’t an owner’s manual. It’s not Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. It’s a conversation - a long conversation stretching back thousands of years and spanning the globe. Paul wrote a letter - not even realizing it would become Scripture. And it was meant to be a conversation.

Paul wanted to show his work. And that was actually a way to invite the Corinthians - and us! - into the conversation. Activist and scholar Angela Davis can illuminate what I mean here. Earlier this year, I read her newly released third edition of her autobiography. The original edition was published 50 years ago, and Dr. Davis wrote a new preface reflecting on what it was like to reread words she wrote 50 years ago:

“As I reread this book, there were myriad moments when I wished I could have shaken some sense into my younger self. Why did I fail to perceive the glaring evidence of the way we were influenced by patriarchal and misogynist ideas? …Why was I so undiscerning when it came to sexism and homophobia? And why was it that I found ableist metaphors so readily available?

“…Not only did we lack access to such vocabularies and such ways of thinking, we often attempted to express what would eventually turn out to be entirely new forms of understanding within the framework of old paradigms, using vocabularies that would in fact militate against what we were attempting to express..

So why leave it in there? Why not edit the 3rd edition to be more in keeping with how she’s learned and grown over the last half century? Hear Davis again:

“…While I have expressed chagrin at recognizing how intellectually and politically immature I was, I realize that this was, in many ways, an unavoidable historical immaturity characteristic of our engagements with the world we wanted to transform. At the same time, I also realize how happy I am that many of us continued to press forward, which required an acknowledgement of our past capitulations to prevailing misogynist, ableist, and homophobic and transphobic ideas and vocabulary… Only by taking history seriously could these immensely important insights have eventually become accessible to us.” — Dr. Angela Davis, The Autobiography of Angela Davis, 3rd ed.

Do you hear the humility there? Dr. Davis recognized in her early work - and the work of her colaborers that the mistakes they made, indeed the sins they committed, were inevitable because they were engaged in the prophetic work of bringing about a new world.

Friends, this is the struggle we see in Paul and that Paul, to some degree, recognized in himself. It’s the reason he left his weird, messy, incoherent arguments intact in his letters. Paul - and indeed the whole of the early church - was engaged in a process of reaching for something new (Jesus called it the Kingdom of God). It didn’t exist yet in their world, and as they worked to bring it forth, they sometimes burst old categories like male and female and sometimes they defaulted back to the old categories because the Kingdom of God is still becoming. It isn’t fully here… yet.

So yes, we hope that, 2,000 years later, we have a little better idea of what Paul was straining at here. How this issue of gendered dress in worship, and a concern not to erase the distinctions between men and women is somehow a work of justice.

In his landmark history of racism, Stamped from the Beginning, Dr. Ibram X Kendi introduces vocabulary that helps us clarify discrimination. Speaking of racism, he distinguishes between segregationists and assimilationists. Segregationists are the racists everyone gets: those who believe there’s something inherently different about black and white people. The only answer is separation.

Most people today aren’t segregationists. But assimilationism is just as bad - maybe worse, becuase it’s harder to see. Assimilationism is the attitude that there’s still something wrong with one group - in racism, it would be black people - but it’s not their fault, and if they work hard or get the right help, they can be just as good as white people.

You can still feel the problem there, right? The problem is that whiteness is still considered the default norm. Black persons are measured as good or bad, successful or failure, based on how well they imitate white people. So it’s still racism!

I want to suggest to you that this is what Paul is straining for in 1 Corinthians. There’s something that really bugs him about these Corinthian women behaving like men when they teach and prophesy. Today, we can name what they were doing as assimilating. Typically, women weren’t allowed to teach or prophesy. But Paul came and told them, “Good news! God raised Jesus from the dead, and that has inaugurated a new world where women and men are fully equal - there’s no distinction!”

Immediately, in the churches Paul founded in Corinth, he started demonstrating this by raising up female house church leaders, pastors, prophets - all of it. And after he left, the Corinthians decided to get really radical by erasing the signs of gender distinction. They all started acting like men.

Here’s the real problem, the problem Paul didn’t have the words to name: by dressing and behaving like men, the Corinthian women were continuing to uphold and reinforce patriarchy. They were assimilating into the cultural assumptions that only men can teach and preach.

What needed to be resisted is not only the prohibition against women teaching and preaching, but also the patriarchal norm that centers men in positions of power and authority.

Paul didn’t have the language yet to express that. What we see is him straining against the sinful categories of the old world, reaching for the liberating goodness of the new kingdom. As the people of God have long done, we build on his work to continue building the kingdom of God here on earth as it is in heaven.

So what does it look like to reject both the segregationist distinctions that deny women full participation in God’s kingdom and also the assimilationist framework that centers maleness and masculinity as God’s ideal?

My friend Sue helps me see this. She’s part of our preaching team at Catalyst. She’s a mom and an educator (and on the side, she’s one of the people who’s working to choose textbooks in the state of Texas that actually teach history and not the white-washed revisionist lies our state government wants to propagate). One of the first sermons she wrote had this really beautiful story from her own life about her and her elder daughter. It was powerful and on point. But it was… uh… really… uh… feminine. And I pastor in Texas. We have some good ole BOYS in my church. I was genuinely worried how these guys would respond to such a feminine story.

I seriously considered asking her to change it. Which is what Paul was doing by telling these women to cover their hair or put their hair back up or whatever. Center the masculine concerns, expect the women to conform.

But I ultimately decided against saying anything. I mean, the story really was perfect and a big part of the reason we have a preaching team is to center perspectives that aren’t a married, cis-hetero white guy with no kids (me). So she preached the sermon. It was great. She cried during that story.

After the sermon one of those good ole boys came up to me. He said, “Pastor, no offense but...”

Oh great. Here we go.

“…That was the best sermon in this series so far. I bawled like a baby when she told that story about her and her daughter. That really helped me understand how God loves me better than anything you’ve said.”

I blinked.

Then I smiled.

“No offense taken,” I said. “You should tell Sue that. She’d love to hear it.”

Friends, God created you just as you are. We have been told a lie that there’s a mold or a format or a playbook we have to follow if we want to love Jesus. When Paul insists - rightly - that in Christ there is no more Jew and Greek, slave or free, male and female, he’s talking about the oppressive, unjust power dynamics that create differences. He’s not talking about denying the very things that make you who you are.

Whether your male, female or somewhere in between or beyond, God created you and loves you and frees you to become fully that person.

Whether your black or white, Asian, Latin, Native or multi-racial, God did not make a mistake in making you. God sees your ethnicity and names you as beautiful and beloved. You can’t be too black or not Native enough or whatever for God. God made you what you are. God celebrates and cherishes what you are.

God even loves those weird, horror-movie loving, D&D playing, comic-book reading white boys who don’t know where they fit. God knows.

And what our world needs is not a bunch of people suppressing who we are to fit some religious mold. The world needs to see the depth and breadth of God’s creativity. God needs a church that’s bursting at the seams, splitting apart the old world with it’s unjust systems and vocabulary, a church that’s working together, building on tradition and looking to the future as we bring about God’s kingdom here on Earth as it is in heaven.