It’s been a while. I wanted to post this sermon I preached in college chapel last month as a conversation starter. So, what do you make of it?

Paul’s subversion of norms in 1 Cor 11:2-16

So, ten years ago we’re mid-way through a series on 1 Corinthians at our church’s afternoon service, Sunday Break. We used to have three Sunday gatherings, a morning one for everyone but especially families, a late evening cafe style interactive, multi-media one and a service designed for those who wanted something ‘classic’ — what most of us would call a hymn-prayer sandwich. Some 60 people who’d been church members for a very long time; people who’d heard many sermons on most passages of scripture, seasoned church people who erred on the side of traditional… Lovely people.

I am reading the passage to this fairly staid, two-thirds female audience of 60 years old and up and I am hearing titters as I read, which give way to gales of laughter when we reach v10 — ‘because of the angels’ — and cries of ‘what’s this about!’

I stop reading. We begin to unpack what this section might be about in a more interactive sermon than I was planning and that they were used to. It becomes clear that these good bible reading, bible believing folk could not remember when they last read it if at all; and certainly most had never heard a sermon it.

Interestingly, if you follow the common lectionary — that week-by-week journey through the bible — you will never read this passage in any of its four years.

Now we are reading this a week after the launch of Project Violet, a major study on women navigating Baptist life in today’s world. Project violet indicates something needs to happen — there’s nothing about 1 Cor 11 in it that I’ve found yet (it’s not that kind of study) — but there is a lot about the need for justice in relationships.

Perhaps what Baptists need at this point is a bit of Pauline mischief?

This passage appears bafflingly opaque unless Paul is doing something subversive with the norms and niceties not just in Corinth but apparently in all his churches, something that will not put off those from outside continuing too explore what this new movement is about (if that is what v10 is about – we’ll come back to that).

Turning to the commentators, you find a whole plethora of possible readings — sociological, rhetorical, theological (usually based on a pre-understanding of the theology of men and women in the people of God, combined with an assumption that this is what the passage is about). You find scholars homing in on the words and concepts that they think lie at the heart of the passage so they can give their take on the whole.

You’ll find vast quantities of ink spilled on the meaning of head/headship and emerge from the lake none the wiser!

As readers we seem to be in a such a hurry to get to meaty bits so we can have a row about headship and head coverings that we miss how the section is framed and framing is often the key to grasping what a section might be about — especially with Paul.

It also frequently helps to read him backwards — from his concluding remarks to the argument that led him there. And I wonder if that assists us here too

So v2 commends his hearers for their good practice in relation to what follows, unlike v17 where Paul is positively scathing about their treatment of the poor and hungry at the shared meal, shaming those who should be honoured, suggesting it would really be better if they didn’t gather at all.

So what does this suggest about v3-15?

It is also noticeable that this section, and the next don’t begin ‘now concerning’, alerting us to the fact that this is not a topic raised by them in their letter to Paul — although they did have a question about their gathering (and the use of gifts in it) that Paul gets to in chapter 12.

So here we have something that Paul has probably heard about from Chloe’s people, his source of insider information about what’s going on in the gatherings. Chloe’s people were probably slaves, so those at the bottom of the social food chain and maybe those who were benefitting from the churches doing what Paul had told them. Or maybe those who were beginning to suffer from the fact that men who they were someone, were letting the gathering drift from Paul’s practice.

But v2 suggests Paul is being more positive than negative here.

Then v16 says that whatever Paul has just said is the practice that he lays down for every gathering involved in his movement. So does this mean it’s about more than household management or after dinner etiquette that will not seem outrageous or off-putting to outsiders, about more than what men and women do with their heads when they gather?

And then there’s all the honour and shame language here, littered across the section; all the talk of glory and disgrace, shame and dishonour, authority and community cohesion in such a short section — Mark Finney’s your reliable guide here.

To whom does it refer? In the next section (from v17) the onus is on the shaming of the church by its behaviour; the whole church body is shamed because the poor and hungry are shamed in its midst by their mistreatment. Do we find the same pattern here — except in reverse; that what the church is doing in v3-15 honours the church by honouring the weakest, most likely to be shamed members (something Paul elaborates on in chapter 12 especially v23-26).

I have been drawn to Bruce Winter’s reading of this passage that argues Paul is addressing the husbands and wives who host the gatherings in their workshops in Corinth’s backstreets. But while he helps me to make sense of a lot of what Paul writes, he does not capture some of the playfulness of Paul’s language, the things that reduced my congregation’s staid older ladies to giggles of exasperation.

But he does help in suggesting that the angels of v10 are human rather than heavenly messengers sent to check that the gatherings of Jesus followers were not subverting public morals. Which they weren’t — at least, not in the way they suspected!

So maybe the most helpful reflection on this text is in Carla Stafford Works’ book on Paul and the Marginalised, called the Least of These which talks about subverting veil customs in the city in the interests of affirming equality of all in the congregation, especially the weakest and least honoured female members of the community.

She quotes the Roman historian Sarah Ruden on this who says,

if the women complied — and later church tradition suggests they did — you could have looked at a congregation and not necessarily have been able to tell who was an honoured wife and mother and who had been forced, or maybe was still being forced, to service twenty or thirty men a day. This had never happened in any public gathering before

Her suggestion is that Paul’s advice was that all women — regardless of marital or social status — should be veiled and take part as equals in praying and prophesying out loud in the gathering. This means that every woman looked equal and would be heard on an equal basis, their words weighed on their merit, not on their economic, social or marital status.

I think this is a really helpful insight. It captures the likely life experience of women at the bottom of the empire’s food chain, women with no rights even over their own bodies. But I think it’s missing the framing of these verses. This is not new. This is what Paul teaches in all his assemblies so that when the messengers come to see if anything subversive is happening, they don’t because the subversion is hidden in plain sight: every woman looks to be of equal status and is dressed appropriately — even if some of them did not, because they could not, wear the veil at any other time of the week.

Paul urges equality of belonging and participation by treating all women with the same honour conferred by society on those who are married. Thus no one is shamed and outsiders are not put off the gospel

Oh, and men are told not to show off (something Corinthian men we prone to do!)

The core theology is in v8-12, the heart of which is the phrase ‘in the Lord’ which might be an echo of a baptismal formula like Galatians 3:28, but strongly suggests that while society distinguishes between people on the basis of race and class, gender and social position, the Jesus movement does not. All are equal

I wonder how this lands in our congregations, our practice of welcome and inclusion, our commitment to the equality of participation by everyone in the room regardless..?