Names Matters

1 Timothy 2:8-15
September 26, 2010
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.”
What a crock that is.
Jap. Raghead. Kyke. Nigger. Bitch. Dyke. Faggot. Chink.
Tell me again that names can never hurt. Tell me again that names don’t matter.
These slurs and derogatory names slip into our common language and eventually we don’t even realize it.
“Paddy wagon.” It’s the name of the police van that picks up the drunk Irishmen. I’m Scotch-Irish to the core, and I did not know my heritage was being slurred until I found myself in the back of a police wagon a couple of years ago.
We really do violate the image of God in others and in ourselves and sometimes we do it so casually that we are not even aware that we are doing it.
But names matter, and the matter of names and naming is profoundly important for an authentically progressive Christian faith. It is not a matter of political correctness; it is a matter of hospitality and it is a matter of justice.
We talk a whole lot here about hospitality, about the welcome of strangers, about honoring the outcast and the marginalized. Hospitality is one of our core values, and it is one of our central practices of Christian spirituality, and it is foundational for justice. Hospitality is less Martha Stewart and more Margaret Sanger; hospitality is first about making the table open to all and then about making it beautiful. Hospitality is about justice.
So how do we square that with the passage I just read? How can we be a place of authentic welcome when we are gathered around a text that commends such practiced and systemic exclusion?
Before I jump into the swamp of exegesis, I want to open it up for just a minute or two with this question: what do you recall about the very first time you saw or heard a woman leading worship?

So, again, how do we square these experiences with the passage I just read?
Well, we could just stick with the lectionary cycle of readings that conveniently skips over these words from 1 Timothy and the parallel passages elsewhere in the letters of Paul. That would be easy and certainly more comfortable.
But if we pick and choose what we like and don’t like about scripture then we really are no different from those who proof-text to support exclusions of gays and lesbians and, still in some churches, women from positions of leadership and authority. If we do that, we really are no different from those who proof-texted support for segregation and slavery before that. If we do that, we really are just another voluntary association of like-minded individuals, and that is not the church of Jesus Christ.
So we have to take the time and the care and the study to wrestle with these texts, and, through them, to wrestle with our own limited vision, our own conflicted and contested histories, our own idols, our own prejudices. In other words, when we wrestle honestly with these difficult texts, we wrestle also with ourselves.
That is why names matter. That is why, moreover, our names and images for God matter so much, and that is why such names and images remain such hotly contested terrain.
You think this stuff is settled just because Clarendon has a long history of women leaders? You think this stuff is settled just because Clarendon has been ordaining gay and lesbian leaders for 15 years? Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers are even today holding a conference on ordaining women.
About the time Clarendon was ordaining the first out partnered gay elder in the Commonwealth of Virginia – take another bow Ron Bookbinder! – about that time, Cheryl and I were sitting in a worship service at our church in Lexington, Ky. It was the first Sunday of the new interim senior pastor, who was following a pastor whose voice was prophetic enough to drag me back to seminary. The interim began preaching, and before three minutes had passed Cheryl was poking me every time the man used a masculine pronoun in reference to God. You know how at baseball games fans will post banners with a “K” every time their team’s pitcher strikes out a batter? It was like that, minus the banners. Every image of God as male and people in the congregation were mentally posting banners.
Theological convictions aside, it was a profoundly inhospitable act and one that is so easy to avoid as to be laughable. I dare say that you rarely notice the way the Rev. Peg True or the Rev. John Green or I refer to God in worship here. I’ve been preaching here most every Sunday for more than seven years. I have never referred to God with masculine pronouns, and only use the “father God” image in the Lord’s prayer and when we occasionally sing, “This Is My Father’s World,” which, I confess, I put in worship about once a year because it reminds me of standing next to my dad in church when I was a little boy. He loved that song.
Obviously, there is nothing wrong with imagining God as the loving father running to welcome the prodigal home, but that is far from the only experience of the divine that human beings have, even human beings who understand the fullness of God through the story of the human man, Jesus of Nazareth.
The gospel story we heard a few minutes ago, Luke’s account of Easter, tells us that the first to proclaim the gospel, the good news, were the women who went to the tomb. If they had not testified to their own experience of Christ as risen maybe the entire enterprise would have died on the vine … or, better, on the cross.
Indeed, the gospels include numerous stories of Jesus in the company of women who are clearly practicing ministry, and Paul names at least two women, Prisca and Aquila, as coworkers in the mission field. If they’d kept their mouths shut some early churches would never have gotten off the ground, and who knows if we’d be gathered here this morning.
So why the admonishment to women to keep silent that become so strident by the time of the Timothy correspondence, which comes decades after Paul though it is, in accordance with customs of the time, attributed to him?
In a word – and a decisive word – patriarchy.
The dominance of male power that held almost unquestioned sway in Western civilization well into the 20th century was the air that men and women in first century Palestine breathed. There was no other air. As the early church began to transition from a movement anticipating the imminent return of Jesus into an institution that would carry forth a tradition of worship and sacrament the church recapitulated institutional models of its culture. We must remember this as we read and interpret, not only because it helps us understand the context of scripture, but it helps us understand our own context in which we, too, recapitulate inherited institutional models.
“How,” you may ask, “have we, a progressive community certainly not bound by such sexist things, recapitulated institutional models of our culture?”
Look around this very room. You think the first church, the church of Prisca and Aquila, sat in rows of pews facing a preacher at a lectern? That is, in fact, pretty much a mid 20th century institutional frame – and one that clearly valued the central importance of a singular, male, voice, who stood on high to pronounce an authoritative word.
Even though we still gather like that mid 20th century church, we are not it. Thanks be to God, the father and mother of us all, the divine breath, the Creator in whose images we are created male and female, filled with that breath of God.
Why bother with this in 2010 – more than 50 years since the Presbyterian church first ordained women as ministers of the word?
In part to remember and honor the stories of those first women ministers, women like Peggy Howland who was one of the first and who still faithfully agitates the church through the Presbyterian Peacemaking Fellowship, on whose board she still serves; and women like Jeanne McKenzie, who was the first woman pastor in National Capital Presbytery and who still faithfully agitates the church through the board of More Light Presbyterians – which she helped found years ago; and women like Madeline Jervis and Peg True, who stood tall on the shoulders of their sisters.
This is living history, and it is not yet history secured because the same patriarchal power structure that scripture simply assumed – but did not bless – remains in place in far too much of the church and broader culture today.
Backsliding is not just a Baptist word, although the Southern Baptist Convention, with its contemporary advice that women be “gracefully submissive” to their husbands coming years after some of the same Baptists had ordained women pastors, has certainly raised backsliding to an art. It is, in fact, possible to go backwards. Hard-won gains can be lost in forgetting.
That’s why names, especially names for God, matter so much.
If the ultimate figure of authority is always and only imagined as male, then male authority is understood as normative. I don’t want to live in such a world, and I surely don’t want my sons and daughter to.
Almost 30 years ago, theologian Sallie McFague wrote:
The power of the patriarchal model is both its inclusiveness and its exclusiveness. It expands to include all of heaven and earth, and in so doing orders all of reality in a hierarchy in which women are always subordinate and invariably identified with the inferior or bodily dimensions of life. … But the model excludes women as well by not naming them, by refusing to include their functions and occupations as metaphors for God that will return to them as models for their own self-identity.
More succinctly, and a few years earlier, Mary Daly simply said, “If God is male then male is God.”
And then there is no place in the world for women doctors, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, pastors, or, to follow the logic to its natural conclusion, no place for women beyond the carefully circumscribed roles of wife and mother.
That is the logical of patriarchy. It does not take much imagination to recognize the implications for every other marginalized population. If male is God then what names remain to be assigned to all those others?
Which brings us back to where we began with a list of names used to exclude and oppress.
But, if God birthed creation and nurtured it, if God includes the feminine divine, if God is the breath of Spirit, if God is wisdom incarnate, if that which is of God is reflected in human beings of every race and nation and gender and sexuality and age and ability, if all of that, then we need so many new names to use for God and we need to bury forever so many of the names we have used for each other.
Most all of this I learned from my mother, an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Amen.