Being a pastor is not about having an overarching vision or being a great speaker or even about being a good leader. It is about enabling the multiplicity of gifts within the church to come together and play out as different people all serve God in various ways. It is about loving and laying your life down for those you have been entrusted with.
But many young men in seminary do come at it from a different direction, one of ambition and vision.
This passage, and a few others from Paul, are used to restrict the roles of women in the church. And at a first reading, it certainly looks like that’s what he’s saying. But a second look, especially if looked at through the lens of Jesus’ life and teachings, reveals something different. We can’t just pick and choose what we like from Paul, or treat him just as one stream of Christian thought. We treat all scripture as authoritative, and must view it holistically.
That means taking the life and teachings of Jesus as the ultimate guide, with Paul as the strategist, putting those teachings and truths into practice within particular cultural, social and political contexts.
In this case, he is writing to Timothy, the bishop of the church in Ephesus, where there are clearly specific issues around men (plural) being angry and violent, and women (plural) being vain and spending unnecessary money and time on appearance.
But then in verses 11 and 12, it shifts to singular, implying that he is talking about a very specific situation between a husband and wife. The verb here is an explicitly negative term, also used for murder – it is never ok for one person to dominate another, and in this case it is about women (or a woman) towards men (or a man).
But if you look at the context of Paul more broadly, his vision is of all people using the gifts they have been given to serve. Women versus men never comes into those commands, women are never barred from any of those lists of gifts, including apostleship! (See also, Junia.)
The gospel is subversive, by its nature opposed to the powerful and the popular. In the Roman Empire, the hierarchical power structure was an unbroken line between Caesar to fathers to children. The empire was the household, or oikos, of Caesar – but Paul uses that same term here in Timothy to describe the new world Jesus is building, the oikos of peace, the oikos of Christ.
As Christians, we are to go against the grain. Supporting the powerful over the powerless, supporting men over women – there is nothing subversive or radical about supporting that. That is the natural, worldly order of things. But Christ’s household is different. Christ’s household includes the Samaritan woman at the well, who went into her town and preached, proclaimed the truth of Jesus. Jesus did not tell her to stop teaching and wait for Peter, but chastised the disciples for trying to restrict her.
Let us not put human restrictions on what God has set free.
– Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, August 21, 2022