It's been an interesting few days preparing for our Cafe Theology service on Sunday evening. I'm due to preach on the topic of gender on Sunday week, with the title: 'A woman's place'. As this is a somewhat enormous topic, embracing as it does the relationship of one half of humanity to the other, I thought it might be helpful to get people thinking about the issues in advance (and possibly give me some pointers as to where on earth to start in preparing the sermon). We'll be considering clips from four fairly recent films - including Skyfall, which I've blogged on before - asking ourselves what view of women these films convey and then considering some texts from the Bible, asking what happens when the Bible collides with these offerings from contemporary culture. I'm not expecting any easy answers, but it should be an interesting conversation.
Some people complain, with some justification, that the Bible is a sexist book. It was certainly written at a time and in a place where patriarchy was total and women were extremely vulnerable. Without the protection of a husband or other male relatives, a woman was helpless, with no means of providing for herself or any children. The female reproductive system was seen as unclean and menstruating women could not go to the temple to worship God. On the subject of menstruation, I once overheard a rather disastrous evangelistic exchange where a (very nice) Christian man was trying to share the gospel with a highly intelligent atheist woman who was interested in gender studies. He made the catastrophic mistake of quoting and then elaborating on Paul's words in Philippians 3.8: Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ (NLT). He explained that the word rendered 'garbage' literally means 'excrement', and some have argued that it refers to soiled menstrual cloths. You can imagine how impressed a young female atheist was to discover that the apostle Paul referred to menstruation in order to convey to his readers something that was utterly revolting.
But it's too simple to say that the Bible is sexist and have done with it - or that Christian women should be subject to 3,000 year old attitudes to their sex. Jesus treated women with respect, talking with them, healing them and teaching them. The first people to learn of Jesus' resurrection were women and, according to John's account, the first person the risen Christ appeared to was a woman. Women formed a very significant part of the forming of the early church; even the supposedly woman-hating Paul listed several women among those who had worked alongside him to spread the gospel in Romans 16.
Tomorrow (or rather later today, as it's past midnight), we'll be considering two key questions, both in film and in the Bible: does a woman need a man? And: can a woman have power? Come along if you're interested and join in the conversation.
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