“Women and the Sacred”

I Corinthians 14:34  As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

I Timothy 2:11-15. A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

Today I intend to talk about women and their relation to the sacred.  And by that I don’t mean women’s experience of the holy so much as religion’s effect on the environment of women.  Given that I’m standing here in the pulpit, not being silent, it’s evident that women have come a long way from the days in which these passages from the New Testament were written.  However, Biblical ideas about women have stood the test of time more than you may at first realize.

 Before I go further, it’s worth noting that the authors of the new testament books which so influence our culture, were not contemporaries of Jesus, but men who came later and who were seeking to shape the church. There is much evidence that points to the fact that Jesus was  unusually egalitarian. (by the way,  The DaVinci Code, a novel currently on the best-seller list, is about how historical forces used the church to suppress women, and about how other scriptures that celebrated women and the feminine and may have been more representative of Jesus, have been suppressed.)

 Advancement of women’s rights accelerated in part once Biblical and historical research revealed the Bible to be the work of individuals reflecting their own culture and time. Passages like the ones read earlier need not be read literally as mandates for how women should be treated in 2004. The liberal church, including the Unitarian and Universalist denominations, have led the way in viewing the Bible from this perspective. Universalist Olympia Brown was not silent in church, for example. In 1863 she was the first American woman to be ordained into any denomination.

 Yet, as liberated as we may feel we are, we are still a product of our times and our culture.  When I was a student minister at First Parish in Norwell, the women of the church held a creative fundraiser.  The church has had only 28 ministers since its founding in 1645 (353 years ago). A history of each of these is posted on their web site. The Norwell women decided to dress as the minister’s wives and tell a bit of the church history through the eyes.  A member of the church is a collector of period dress, and it was fun to put on clothing from the old days – long sleeves, full bodice, hats and all.  But it turned out that very little information was available on these clergy wives.  They were surprisingly invisible  in the church records.  In many cases even their names were lost  -  on paper they were known only through reference to their husbands –as  Mrs. William Witherell and Mrs. Thomas McGill and so forth. Women were pretty silent even in our own churches.

 Although the struggle for women’s rights may not be over in this country, the fact that our own denomination now has 50% female ministers is significant. American women by and large are used to voting, working outside the home, and thinking and speaking for themselves.

 This is one reason the images of Afghani women shrouded in their burqas, so appalled American women when our attention focused on them after 9/11.  Filmmaker Meena Nanji, in a documentary (made before 9/11) described the plight of women under the rule of the Taliban:.

 “[Women] are not allowed to work, not allowed to go to school, must live in houses with darkened windows lest they be seen from the outside, cannot go outside without a close male relative, cannot be treated by male doctors so that, since women doctors are virtually non-existent, they cannot be treated if sick. If they are caught breaking these laws, they can be severely beaten, imprisoned or even killed. Beating, rape, even murder of women goes unpunished. Under Taliban law their very existence, it seems, is immoral.”   

All this, according to the Taliban, was to safeguard women and their honor. Their reasoning was religious.  The Taliban were one of the mujahideen groups or "holy warriors.” They had freed their country from Soviet occupation.  Taliban with a small t translates as ‘religious student’. To restore order and their own culture, the Taliban introduced their own form of Islamic law.  Their aim was to set up the world's most pure Islamic state. And yes, the strictures on women were severe, but it was viewed by many as the cost of restoring order.  To oppose these strictures would have been to transgress the religion of the state.

When the US went into Afghanistan,  the Bush Administration spoke forcefully about their concern for Afghani women.  Laura  Bush, in a radio address, implied that the war would partly be an effort to free Afghani women.  She said:

“[The prohibitions] imposed on women in Afghanistan do not conform with the treatment of women in most of the Islamic world, where women make important contributions in their societies Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish. The plight of women and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty, carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control. Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror … because in Afghanistan, we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us.”

 Last month, Afghanistan's 502 member loya jirga gave birth  to a democratic constitution, the country's first. The constitution sets the framework for the first democratic government in the history of the country, to be named "The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan."  The country will have an official civil law system, with the caveat that no civil law may contradict the laws of Islam. Women, strictly repressed under Taliban rule, are officially recognized as equal to men and allocated 25 percent of seats in the lower house of the parliament. 

It is hoped that Afghani women will make significant gains under the new Islamic republic.  For the first time in ten years a woman was allowed to sing on Afghani television. (January 12) Only time will tell whether these advances will take root and grow or whether fundamentalist restrictions on women will take hold once again.

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Iraq is another location where religion, politics and  the rights of women have been in the news. Some twenty years ago, Iraq was a modern industrialized nation, her women highly educated  There were many secular, well educated, successful women holding prominent leadership positions in medicine, business and government.  In urban areas virtually no women wore the black body-and-head covering abbayas.  When Saddam Hussein came to power this all changed. Tribal law and Islamic law were blended to codify women’s oppression.  A rapist’s crime would be erased if he would marry his victim. A male relative would not be guilty of murdering his female relative if she had had sexual intercourse – including rape – that could dishonor the family.  A man was allowed to take up to four wives. Iraqi women lost considerable ground.

Today, Saddham’s laws have been repealed.  Since the war with the US, a governing council that includes three women has been appointed.  A new government and new laws will be put in place.  However, in January, the Council voted to place family law under the jurisdiction of Islamic law. This move could create clashes between the various Islamic schools of thought regarding marriage, divorce, and other family issues. Zakia Ismael Hakki, a female judge, stated, "This new law will send Iraqi families back to the Middle Ages. It will allow men to have four or five or six wives. It will take away children from their mothers. It will allow anyone who calls himself a cleric to open an Islamic court in his house and decide who can marry and divorce and have rights."

It has been often charged that religion is politics made sacred. In this case, religion is being used to keep women submissive.

As you know, Iraq has been quite chaotic since the war. The chaos on the streets under US occupation has caused many women and girls to feel imprisoned in their homes.  An article in Amnesty Now confirms that, in increasing numbers the Iraqi people are turning to fundamentalist Islamic law for stability in this uprooted and unstable time. Perhaps nothing has been so visible or so open to misinterpretation as what Muslim women wear.Many educated and highly placed Iraqi women are choosing to wear the Islamic headscarf.. In western eyes, burkas automatically symbolize oppression. But for some Muslim women in Iraq where western standards of women's liberation are regarded as too secular and permissive, these garments represent an important religious and moral statement.. They are not attracted to a Western model of women's liberation.  Muslim women say they'll have to find their own way -- within Islam.

Most of today’s  Iraqi women have not been alienated from Islam by the misuse of it for power.   Dr Imam Majid, director of women’s medicine at Baghdad Teaching Hospital says: “When you have a problem, you go nearer to God.” Allah remains their true God and their comfort. Many Muslim women scholars say the Koran is liberating and that it is clear on the equality of women.  The answer, they say,  lies in education:  more Muslims, particularly women, should read and interpret the Koran for themselves.  Change has to come from within.

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We tend to think that a roll back of women’s rights couldn’t happen in our advanced, educated US society. Sometimes I wonder. Recently,  Jay Severin, a popular, conservative radio talk show host was asserting that the “liberal media” distorts things. To prove it, he read a recent obituary of a woman.   The obituary said the deceased  “had fought for the rights of women all her life. Severin was disgusted.  “This woman had fought for the Equal Rights Amendment,” he fumed, “which is an illegal bill, seeking special rights and privileges for women!” He was sickened that the newspaper would allow such a spin making some misguided idiot sound like a hero.  Here is the full text of the Equal Rights Amendment which so angers him, and which failed to pass in this country:

 Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

 That’s it.  The US has not seen fit to pass this amendment.

 On the international front, in 1979 the UN General Assembly adopted a  bill called the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (or CEDAW). It is often described as an international bill of rights for women.  CEDAW defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for national action to end such discrimination. In the past 25 years, 167 nations have ratified this bill, including some of the poorest nations in the world.  But the United States hasn’t – we stand apart with countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and the Sudan where women have almost no civil rights.

 Change in the US, as with all change, has to come from within. Liberally minded Christians have been stuck between a rock and a hard place given the well known New Testament texts such as we opened with this morning. But there is an Evangelical Christian group,  founded in 1988 called Christians for Biblical Equality, with members from over 80 denominations, that offers cause for hope. Christians for Biblical Equality oppose the vast majority of conservative Christian denominations by promoting gender equality.  There is plenty of support for their point of view in the Bible, they say, and they are putting out scholarly articles to prove it.

 And what’s very good news is that their journal, called The Priscilla Papers, won two awards from the Evangelical Press Association this year. These Evangelicals bring to the world’s attention many Biblical passages that demonstrate full standing of women.  "We see women in the first three centuries called by every title there is in the church - deacon, apostle, elder," a spokesperson says. "It wasn't until the fourth century when the church became more institutionalized that women started to get forced out."

 The individual and collective decisions we make and our understandings of the world flow out of our personal and religious foundations. There is no getting away from it. Religion informs both nations and individuals about what is true and religions shape our highest ideals as well as our blind spots.  Our understanding of concepts as diverse as freedom, justice, security, equality and the proper rights and roles of men and women are both  deeply religious – and deeply political in nature.  This is why it is so important that we stay engaged in the dialogue as religious people.

 We began this morning by reading a responsive reading written by Margaret Fuller in the mid-1800’s in which she described a new manifestation in which every arbitrary barrier is thrown down in which women and men are equally free to grow.   Her message of hope is not lost on us today, and hope is celebrated in the lyrics of John David in the song the choir will sing for us now.