Hilton Head Island, SC – 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
I Corinthians 14: 33b-40; I Timothy 2:8-15
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent. – I Timothy 2:12 (RSV)
Last Tuesday was Mardi Gras. As you probably know, Mardi Gras means “Fat Tuesday.” Fat Tuesday, or Shrove Tuesday in a more refined if also little-understood term, is a day on which many people eat and drink far more than they should and normally do. Many of them have no idea why they do it, but they do it. It is one of the many examples of cultural Christianity. France, where Mardi Gras started, I guess (unless it started in Cajun Louisiana), was once a Catholic country. France is no longer a Catholic country. It officially became secular as a result of the French Revolution. But the reason people did and still do go overboard in gustatory and imbibing excesses is because Fat Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday. On Ash Wednesday Catholics and others did and do vow not to eat or drink so much, and perhaps seriously to fast, or to give up some other pleasure as an act of penance. Most people, however, no longer either do that or know why in certain cultures they are expected to do it. Most of us, I suspect, are among them.
Lois and I live behind Holy Family Catholic Church. We happened to drive past on Wednesday morning just as the first people who attended the Ash Wednesday mass were leaving the church. There appeared to be as many people there as on Easter. The people who went to mass that morning had black ashes spread on their foreheads in the sign of the cross. Every year, forty-one days after Ash Wednesday, Good Friday comes, and two days after that (despite the way the Apostles Creed says it), Easter comes. In a way, Ash Wednesday, at least with the ashes, is also an example of cultural Christianity. Until the Protestant Reformation, all Christians had ashes spread on their foreheads, but now only Catholics, Episcopalians, many Lutherans, and some others do it. For five centuries, it has no longer been a ritual for all Christians.
By now you may be wondering what “cultural Christianity” is. In general, it means this: Every nation and ethnic group has its own unique patterns of what it means to be a Christian, and to them, that is an essential part of their concept of Christianity. To the Amish and some of the Mennonites, it means that boys and men wear black clothing and the girls and women wear bonnets on their heads. (We will come back to head-coverings later.) Salvation Army members wear uniforms. Many Christian clergy wear clerical collars, but not all clerical collars are the same. I didn’t wear one in my first church, because I didn’t know any American Presbyterian parsons who did. When I received a call as an assistant minister in the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, its pastor, Elam Davies, who was a Welshman, decreed that all its ministers had to wear collars. I had admired that man all through seminary, having attended Fourth Church every Sunday. If he told me I had to wear a suit of armor or a clown outfit, I would have complied without complaint. He influenced my ministry the most of all my many mentors.
From then on I wore a clerical collar until I became the founding pastor, and sadly as it shall transpire, the only pastor of The Chapel Without Walls. I didn’t wear a collar here because this was intentionally meant to be a nondenominational congregation, and I didn’t want anyone to come here for the first time, see the parson in a stiff round collar, and decide, “This is no place for me.” No doubt some heard me preach a few times and decided that anyway. However, I didn’t want a collar to deter anyone. Robes are also anathema to millions of Christians, but, a suit would definitely not suit me, and would connote a certain kind of Christianity I wouldn’t want connoted. Therefore here I do wear a black robe and black shoes - - - always. Elam commanded black shoes too. All these sartorial matters are illustrations of cultural Christianity.
For the first half of my life people dressed up to go to church, at least where I went to church. Now dress is much more casual than back then. Formerly, formality was cultural, and now informality has become cultural. Some people feel very strongly about this one way or the other, but I want you to know that what anybody wears to church is not a theological question at all, although to many it is a very important ecclesiastical question of cultural Christianity, although they might not perceive it as such.
Now let us turn to two biblical passages which are entirely cultural, with virtually no supportable theology attached to them, at least in my opinion. After having written what has come to be known as the “Hymn to Love,” the magnificent 13th chapter of I Corinthians, the apostle Paul addressed other matters he considered important for Christians. He talked about resolving ecclesiastical difficulties of any sort. Then he went on to say, “As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, even as the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home” (I Cor. 14:33b-35a). Then he says, “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a commandment of the Lord.” Paul was even more convinced of what he was convinced about than a certain preacher with whom I have become quite familiar over more than eight decades.
Without Paul, there would be no Christianity, but in this matter, he was greatly mistaken. That is because of the religious culture in which he was raised, and which he exhibited even after he was converted in a bolt-from-the-blue conversion on the road to Damascus. Paul, like most religious Jewish males of his time, was a sexist misogynist MCP, to use an acronym that surprisingly has fallen out of favor but still seems valid. There are numerous New Testament scholars who try to portray Paul as a feminist before his time, but if so, both he and they certainly mask it astonishingly well.
In first-century Judea, women dressed like women in twenty-first-century Iran are supposed to dress, according to the Supreme Ayatollah. They still dress like in many other places in the Middle East and North Africa. Keeping heads and all the rest of female bodies covered was and is an ancient cultural means of keeping women subservient to men. Paul also insisted that women must keep their heads covered. It is yet another means of keeping women uneducated, barefoot, and pregnant. If girls were as well educated as boys in culturally conservative countries, they might be able to break this base bias. But even in the liberal Western democracies, such as, to give an example, the US of A, women still are second class citizens culturally in many respects. Gentlemen, you could ask the ladies, and if you haven’t been told that many times before, they will gladly tell you now.
Some New Testament scholars also claim that the First and Second Letters to Timothy were not written by Paul, but by someone who wrote the letters after Paul had died. This person, they say, was writing for different circumstances in a later time. Maybe so. But I Timothy 1:9-15 says, “(W)omen should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel….as befits women who profess religion. Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness….For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman [and that in itself is a highly sexist term] will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.”
It still sounds like “barefoot and pregnant” rules to me. Now you may begin to understand better how it is that many fundamentalist and evangelical “Bible-believing” Christians think the way they do. Culture can be very supportive of religion, and religion can be very supportive of culture. But culture also can do much damage to religion, and religion can do much damage to culture. Too many nineteenth-century missionaries in too many parts of the world were more concerned with cultural norms from back home than with the essence of Christianity for the peoples they were sent to convert. They believed it was necessary first to put sufficient amounts of cloth over the bodies of people who lived in the tropics and only after that to expose them to what they saw to be the eternal truths of what they saw to be the unalterable Gospel of Jesus Christ.
When should Christmas be celebrated? It shouldn’t be in the winter, William Barclay said, because Luke says the shepherds were in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. The only time they did that, Dr, Barclay noted, was in the spring, when the ewes were giving birth to the lambs. The shepherds had to protect their future wool producers from being killed by predatory animals or large raptor birds. But we celebrate it on December 25 because Christmas was superimposed onto a Roman cultural holiday near the beginning of the new year. However, Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas later than the Western Christmas, because they use the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar. If you don’t know what either is, I’m not going to explain it, because it takes too much time.
Easter presents the same cultural problem. If you’re not aware of it, you’ll be interested to know that Ukraine in 2023 passed a law that they will celebrate both Christmas and Easter with the Western Christians, not the Eastern Christians, because they want to identify with the West, not the East. Culture doth make compromisers of us all. And if you don’t know why I said it that way, I’m not going to explain that either. When an ancient preacher evolves into more of a rabbi than a preacher, he gets into a much wider variety of subjects than he did when he was a just young whippersnapper, whatever a whippersnapper is, which I don’t know and don’t care. I do know, though, they exist only among the young, and never the old.
In 1983 the northern and southern Presbyterian denominations merged. I happened to be a commissioner from our presbytery at the national General Assembly of the two denominations when the vote was taken to unite the two major Presbyterian groups that had split at the time of the Civil War. There were a large number of “northern” Presbyterian churches in South Carolina, especially around Charleston, but they were “Black churches,” formed by freed slaves after the war, not “white churches,” to use two awkward terms. Because I was one of few ministers in the Charleston Presbytery (like a diocese or district or synod to use other ecclesiastical lingo) who had been a pastor in both the northern and southern branches of Presbyterianism, I was asked to preach the sermon at the presbytery meeting in which the two presbyteries united to become the Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery. We met at the James Island Presbyterian Church in Charleston, the largest Black Presbyterian church in what had been the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America and was merging with the congregations of the Presbyterian Church in the United States to become The Presbyterian Church USA. (These lengthy titles had more to do with culture than with religion, as I hope you might imagine.)
I, being an ecumenist, (there’s a word that isn’t used much anymore, because there isn’t much interest in ecumenism anymore) decided that all of us, Blacks and whites, southerners and northerners, should sing “In Christ there is no East or West, in him no South or North.” So I called the pastor of the James Island Presbyterian Church and asked him what hymnal they used. It was the maroon Presbyterian hymnal, the same one we used in the First Presbyterian Church of Hilton Head when I was its pastor,which had been commissioned in 1955 by both the Presbyterian Church in the United States (the Southern bunch) and the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (the Northern bunch), and the Reformed Church in America (a Dutch, but not Presbyterian bunch).
So I, knowing that there were two tunes that could be used with that hymn, and that one of them was what you will see in a few moments as No. 415 in the hymnal we use, also maroon, but a hymnal of the United Church of Christ, which was a merger of the Congregational Church and the German Reformed Church (which is why we have so many German hymns and tunes in this hymnal). The second tune is called McKee, and both maroon hymnals say that it is a “Negro Melody,” which was OK to say in 1955, but probably not in 1983.
In any event, I joyfully said to the Black pastor of the James Island church, “Then let’s use the tune “McKee.” He asked, “How does that go?” So I sang it to him, over the phone. He, a Black parson, said “We don’t know that one.” “Well, do you know ‘St. Peter?’” I asked, and then I sang that one to him. “We know that one,” he said. “Okay,” I said, “we’ll sing that tune.” And we did. And for that service, on that occasion, which was an historic moment for the Atlantic and Charleston Presbyteries which that day became the Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery, because everyone knew that hymn to that tune, it was a joyful rafter-raising musical moment.
Is Cultural Christianity Christianity? Yes, and No, but I won’t take much time to explain what that means, either. Sometimes culture greatly enhances Christianity, and sometimes it warps it. Sometimes Christianity enhances culture, and for the most part I think it has done far more good than harm to culture, but sometimes it changed what shouldn’t have been changed, and retained what ought not to have been retained. For example, it hasn’t changed nearly enough how male Christians treat female Christians, but it finally allowed women to come to church without covered crania, which is a small gesture toward equality that is probably appreciated by women.
God puts up with all of us, whatever our culturally unique customs may be. He does that because He has no other choice. He doesn’t force anybody to do anything. Instead, he speaks to each of us in a still small voice, whether or not we know He is doing so. At our best we try to do what we know we ought to do, but we do it in distinctively cultural patterns. Thank God for God. He oversees all of us in all our varied cultures. If we follow His gentle leadings, we can learn to live with one another and appreciate different kinds of people in their many different kinds of settings, accepting one another in all our magnificent and mystifying peculiarities. Join hands, then, people of the faith/ Whate’er our race may be/ Who serves our Father as His child/ Is surely kin to me.