Not For Polite Conversation (Part 2): Sexism

So today we are going to talk about sexism.

We are in a series that we've called Not for Polite Conversation, things that aren't often talked about.

And certainly I knew when we planned these series, this series specifically, that this is an issue that is significant in our culture and would be around and in the headlines, but I did not anticipate the wave of stories and situations that would be so prominent in the news as they are today.

In fact, if you have been around, you certainly have heard of the hashtag MeToo movement or the Time's Up movement.

And even last weekend there was an award show in which so many of the celebrities came in wearing black as if to say, you know what, it is over.

Time is up.

We don't want to see one sexual discrimination act or one sexual aggression act that goes without some kind of rebuttal or a response.

Now I don't know how you respond to Hollywood actors and actresses wearing black.

Maybe some of you thought this is wonderful, that this is great.

Maybe some of you said, you know what, I'm not sure that this should be the group lecturing the rest of the country on how to live.

And it would be fair to say that several of the people who wore black in that or maybe will in the upcoming State of the Union kind of speech are people who have made belittling comments in the past.

Maybe they are people who have done things that are sexually suggestive or unwanted.

Maybe they're people who participated in some kind of discrimination.

Or maybe they've stood by quietly, as others have experienced discrimination.

But it is certainly a good thing, even if people had been part of things in the past, that today the cultural moment has moved them to a point where they start to say, enough is enough.

We don't want to live in a country where these kinds of things are true about us as a people and where it's other people's experience.

So sexism is basically living in a in a place where prejudice and discrimination are accepted based on somebody's sex.

And what sexism is, is it's fostering a stereotype that is based on somebody's gender.

And what is happening now in our world is we're starting to say, in our cultural moment, we want to live in a world where some of what has been okay in the past is no longer okay, and we want to live in a world where women and men are seen as being people who aren't going to be categorized or stereotyped based on just their gender.

In fact, if you click on the link that's tied to the message online, what you'll see is that we have an article.

We have the full uh conversation that you saw just a snippet of, but we have a link to an article that talks about microaggressions.

It's not written from a Christian perspective, it's written from a woman who says, most people today would say, you know what, I'm not sexist.

And yet there are so many microaggressions, little things that are done that communicate and foster the notion that somehow one gender is less than.

And again, what's happening in our culture is people are saying enough, it's time that we change, that the stereotypes go away, that the minimization, that the inequalities go away.

It's time that we live in a culture in which women would not be seen as sexual objects any longer, and where any kind of sexual aggression is not tolerated in our country.

You know, these ideas really go back to the Bible as well.

In Genesis chapter 1, we see that God created men and women and he created them in his image.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

This is Genesis chapter 1, verses 26, 27, right in that area.

Genesis 1:26

And what it says is this that God, when he decided to make human beings, made men and women in his image.

And what's significant about that is that that comes before Genesis 2, where God creates Eve out of the rib of the man, because a lot of people have tried to make some a lot out of that, that rib identity, but what happened is before that, God says, I create men and women, I create them both in my image.

In other words, they both have value, they both have gifts, they both have dignity.

There is not some distinction in value between the genders.

And then Jesus takes this up, and we see this in John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

And John chapter 4 is the passage that we're kind of camping out in in these weeks.

John 4 · chapter mention

And in John 4, Jesus comes and he talks to this woman where he crosses a gender divide.

And it's hard for us, living in the United States in the years in which we live, to fully understand how radical it was what Jesus did.

Because men did not have conversations with women in public in that area of the world at the time.

And Jesus goes and he talks to this woman.

Not only does he talk to her, he drinks from the same cup, he extends friendship and love to a woman that has been shunned in many ways by her society, and we'll show you that in just a few minutes.

But what we see is we see Jesus saying, I want to live in a world in which I don't just accept the cultural norms, but instead I'm willing to challenge them and see some difference in them.

Now the truth is, and you know this, and that is we live in a world in which this isn't necessarily so.

In fact, it isn't so.

And there are several evidences of this.

One of them is we still live in a world that sees a lot of generalization or a lot of stereotypes.

In fact, prejudice and discrimination thrives on stereotypes and it thrives on generalizations.

And here's what I mean: a stereotype is basically any time that you have an experience with one person, I'm gonna draw a few stick people here, and then you say, because it's true of this person, it's true of everybody who is similar to that person.

And so what we do is we move from kind of an individual to a group, and we say, because it's true of this person, it's true of all these people, or we move from the group to an individual and we say, because I believe that this group over here is like this, therefore this person must be like this.

And all discrimination, all stereotypes have some kind of a relationship to this, either from an individual to a group or from a group to an individual, where we're saying this is the way it is.

I saw this recently, I was listening to a presentation, and the man who was presenting said, uh, you know, I'm gonna tell a story, and it's kind of an emotional story, so all you women out here will probably get emotional.

Now, do you hear it in that?

What's he saying?

He's saying women are the more emotional people than the men, and all the women are going to get emotional when I tell this story.

Now you may say, well, women are more emotional than men.

That's for you to figure out.

But that is a stereotype, it is a generality, and what you are doing in that moment is you are making a microaggression against a gender because you're saying, because you're part of a gender, you must be like this.

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that my wife and I spent some time with her family over Christmas and Christmas and New Year's.

And somehow, when we were there, the topic of driving came up, and evidently, according to my family, I'm known as an aggressive driver.

And as we were talking, somebody said to my wife, my wife's name is Faith, they said, Faith, you drive like a man.

Now, do you hear the stereotype and the gender statement that's made there?

Men are aggressive drivers, women are not.

Now, it's fair to say to my wife, Faith, you're an aggressive driver.

She is, by the way.

But what's not fair, or or what's a stereotype, is to say, because you drive this way, you drive more like that gender than the other gender, because now what you're doing is you're saying men are inherently aggressive and women are inherently not as aggressive.

My wife, to her credit, I think, handled it really well in the moment.

She said, you know, I don't know whether you intend that as a compliment or if I should be deeply offended by the way that you just said that.

And by the way, it isn't just something that goes from men to women.

Sometimes women will stereotype men.

Sometimes they'll say, you know what?

All men are, fill in your blank.

Because I know what men want, and all the men that I know all have the same.

You see what you're doing?

You're saying, I assume that this group's this way, so this guy's this way, or I had an experience with this man, so all of them are this way.

And that is where prejudice thrives, and we see it all the time.

But it isn't just that, there's a minimizing that happens as well in our culture.

And when I say minimizing, what I'm referring to is instead of seeing women and men as equally gifted, equally valuable before God, sometimes our cultural narratives will produce kind of a sense that says the value of, let me just say, women specifically can be minimized to something based on a very narrow criteria.

Here's where I see this.

Naomi Wolf wrote a book in the early 1990s.

Naomi Wolf is not a Christian, she's a secular feminist, and her book was called The Beauty Myth.

And in the book, she basically argues this.

She basically says that in buying into the idea that my appearance is what matters, that women have perpetuated the beauty myth that has said, my real value in this world is how I look.

And that in doing that, we have minimized, as a culture, now this again, this is Naomi Wolfe's ideas, she's saying we've minimized women's intelligence, their character, their contributions beyond how they look.

You see, as a culture, there's no question that how somebody looks matters, and that in some ways that has restricted it.

There's another article from another person who's a known feminist, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who has been a professor at Princeton.

And she wrote an article for The Atlantic uh several years ago now.

And there was a time in her life when she left her position as a professor, chair of a department at Princeton, and she went to work for the State Department.

Hillary Clinton had taken the job as Secretary of State.

She called her and said, Would you work and run one of my areas in the State Department?

And so Anne-Marie Slaughter, for a season, was commuting from her home in Princeton, leaving two children there with her husband and working in Washington, D.C.

all week and then coming home on the weekend.

And she wrote an article, became the most uh clicked-on article that the Atlantic ever had.

And her article was called Why Women Still Can't Have It All.

Now, the reason I bring this up is not to say that women can't have it all, but to say that when Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote that, she received all kinds of negative feedback, mostly from other women, saying, You have set back the cause of feminism by decades with this.

And what she basically responded with, and I'm paraphrasing, is she said, you know, all I was saying was we've been told by our feminist agenda that in order to really be successful, I have to take the most prestigious and successful career that I can have and still raise my kids.

And she said, I came to see that my kids needed me.

And here's just my response.

And that is, men and women both make those choices.

Not just women.

To say, Am I going to be present and at home or am I going to maximize every career opportunity that I have?

But what Anne-Marie Slaughter was doing was she was saying, saying, in a sense, even our feminism tells us that if we don't do everything, if we choose to stay home, or we choose to restrict our upward potential.

By the way, she was still a full-time professor when she gave up her job with the State Department.

It wasn't like she wasn't working.

And she came back and said, But I needed to prioritize something different in my life.

And I want that choice to be just as respected as if I had said, no, I can do everything.

And then there's another way that we see sexism alive and well in our culture, and this is what has been maybe most prominent recently, and this is the sexualization of our culture.

And if you've been around Orchard Hill for some time, you know that our message here is not, oh, our culture and how bad our culture is.

But I don't think there's any question that in our culture, sex sells.

And in the sexuation of our culture, what's happened is we have made sex such a big thing that I wonder why we're so shocked when men behave badly.

Now, don't misunderstand me.

Men behaving badly is a hundred percent on them.

But what I mean is this if you look at some of the network anchors who've been fired for their jobs because of behaving poorly, and they did, those same networks run primetime TV shows in which America laughs at people who do things that are incredibly similar.

That's hypocrisy at a minimum, is what that is.

And if you think back just about last year when Hugh Hefner died, so many people came out and said, Oh, he was a liberator.

He's a person who's pioneered the sexual revolution.

Really?

He made his money selling pictures of naked women.

That is the sexualization of our culture.

And if we're going to say he's a pioneer, then at the same time want to somehow say that's okay, but other stuff isn't.

We need to call all of it as something that is degrading in our culture.

Again, not that one excuses the other, but what I'm saying is don't turn a blind eye to this piece of it.

You know, a generation ago, there was a guy on TV, a mythical character, Archie Bunker.

I'm too young to have like lived that in real time and watched it, but you've probably seen reruns of this.

It is horrifying to see Archie Bunker now.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Any of you ever see a rerun of that and you think, oh my goodness, he's sexist, he's racist, how is this okay?

And it wasn't.

And now when we look back, we all say, how is that?

That is not okay.

I wonder if the next generation will look back at this generation and say the same thing about the TV characters that are on now.

In fact, I'm confident that the next generation will look back at Barney Stitson and say, How is that okay?

And if you don't know who Barney Stitson is, good for you.

Mythical TV character.

On one of the networks that fired their news anchors for behaving in ways like Barney Stitson.

Okay, so we have generalization, we have minimization, we have sexualization.

By the way, in John 4, it's possible that Jesus was addressing and dealing with all of these.

Because when Jesus went, the women were generalized, stereotyped.

That's why the men didn't want to talk to the women.

The women belong over there.

They were minimized, they were the ones who had to get the water.

And certainly this particular woman seems to have been sexualized in the fact that she had five husbands and was with another, and that seemed to be her way to make her way in the world.

And in fact, I would even go so far as to say that the other women probably were also discriminating against her.

And the reason I say this is in the text, in John chapter 4, verse 4, we're told that Jesus met the woman at noon.

John 4:4

Well, what this probably means is that the other women would come later in the day when it was cooler.

None of the women would go at noon.

In other words, she went at noon to avoid the scorn of the other women.

And so it was Jesus who said, I'm going to cross this barrier and I'm going to connect with this woman.

Now, why do these kinds of things exist?

Well, I would say that at least part of why they exist is ignorance.

And when I say ignorance, what I'm referring to is sometimes people don't even realize when they're being sexist.

Sometimes you or I may not even realize all of it.

In fact, I didn't watch that award show last Sunday, but a friend sent me an email and said basically, here's what's going on.

Everyone's wearing black.

And then she said this.

She said, and when Justin Timberlake came up on the red carpet, they played his new song.

And she told me what the song was.

I am not enough into Justin Timberlake to know his new song.

But evidently his new song is Put Your Filthy Hands on Me.

Now get the picture here.

Everyone's wearing black, saying we don't want any sexual discrimination.

Hey, Justin Timberlake, put your filthy hands on me.

That's what was going on.

I'm going to choose to say it's ignorance, not outright hypocrisy.

But at a minimum, sometimes it's just being completely unaware of how one thing leads to the other side of this.

Now, beyond ignorance, there's a power dynamic that sometimes happens where some people are in power and say, you know what, I don't want to give up power, and so I'm going to keep power, but probably what drives that is even bigger than that, and that's what I'm going to call self-interest.

In fact, again, in that same arena, all the people in black, there have been many reports about people who knew about some of the behavior that they were protesting beforehand, and yet they show up wearing black.

Now, why?

Why would they now say, you know what, I'm so against this, but five years, 10, 15 years ago, they would say, I'm gonna keep quiet.

This isn't my issue.

You know what it is?

It's self-interest.

Because at one point they're saying, if I say something, I won't get the role.

I won't make the money, I won't have the career, it isn't worth saying something.

But now when the cultural moment has shifted, all of a sudden they're saying, you know what, we need to say something.

I need to be part of this movement because now it's in their self-interest.

Now, again, I'm not saying, oh, that's so awful.

What I'm saying is we're all naturally driven by self-interest.

And what's happening right now is the tide is turning in our culture in such a way that the self-interest is now on the side of saying, speak out.

But Jesus shows us something even greater, and that is he shows the courage to say, whether this is in my self-interest or not, speaking out or being the person who says, I am for people who don't have a voice.

I'm willing to do even when it isn't advantageous.

You see, Jesus went and befriended this woman.

And what do we see that happened to the woman?

She went back to town, she told all her friends and said, I think we found the Messiah.

Here he is.

And we don't even know if she had friends or if she was just talking to people at that point.

But she came and said, We want to go and and see this Jesus.

Because she had experienced the freedom of being seen as a person and not an object.

Now, to be fair, if I were just to kind of say, okay, that's Jesus, that's the that's the Bible, and let's let's go be like Jesus, you could say, okay, that that was good, and and I can try that.

But you've probably heard people say, well, isn't the Bible, isn't the church itself sexist?

And where this comes from is several passages that appear to say things that establish a hierarchy of men than women.

Here's one example.

Ephesians chapter 5 seems to do this.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

And Ephesians chapter 5 is the passage that's best known for being about wives submit to your husbands.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

Here's what it says.

Ephesians 5, 22, wives, submit yourself to your own husbands as you do the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.

Now, as the church submits to Christ, so wives should also submit to their husbands in everything.

And so here's what happens for some people is they can say, I can see created order, I can see Jesus, but when I come to the later parts of the New Testament, especially, and although you could argue about whether this is unique or not, it seems like there is this hierarchical language.

And if if there's anything that's hierarchical, then it can't somehow be that Jesus is abolishing or for.

Equal value or for not being sexist.

So here's how people deal with it.

One, they just say simply, this is why I reject Christianity.

This is part of why I don't want a God like this.

Like you may have a God like that, but my God is this kind of a God, so I'll just ignore either those passages or Jesus altogether and say, say there has to be a God who is not like that.

Others would say, okay, I do believe in the Christian version of God, Jesus, but but this part doesn't square with how I think things should be.

Therefore, I choose to say this doesn't really say what it appears to say.

And so for some people, what they'll do is they'll come to this and they'll say, this just has to be all cultural.

Or in the case of Ephesians chapter 5, they'll say, chapter 5, verse 22 doesn't even use the word submit in the original language.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

It's supplied by a translator.

It goes back to 521, which says everyone should submit to everyone.

So there's nothing unique here about a wife submitting to a husband.

Now the problem with that is that the passage is supplied, or the word supplied there because in the way the Greek works is the verb was supplied in saying, yes, everyone submit to everyone, but there's something here that I want the wives to have.

And then the same idea is repeated in Colossians 3 and in 1 Peter 3.

And so to say, hey, the text doesn't say it doesn't seem to work.

To appeal to culture seems to say, well, Jesus went radically against culture, but then the church, inspired text, went back and adopted culture.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Others will say, I'm going to double down on this.

And so what they'll do is they'll say, well, well, there's a hierarchy, and God has men and then women, and God wants that to be the way that it is.

In fact, I saw an article this last week by somebody who took this approach and was writing basically to say, Ephesians 5, where it says that husbands should sanctify their wives, that what that means is husbands should correct their wives.

Now, I believe that both spouses should be free to challenge each other, that that is what is healthy in a marriage.

But by not talking about the dynamic of how that could go both ways, what was being implied is that is that men have some kind of unique role that the woman doesn't have.

Now, again, I understand how he was trying to get there, but I think it misses the broader teaching.

So let's just talk for a moment about this idea of submission.

And again, this is maybe a rabbit trail, but my guess is there's many who would say, you know what, I can follow the message, but but this undoes it for me.

And again, there are other passages that deal with other things we don't have time to deal with at all, but but just this one.

And there are two things about submission that I would like to just say.

One is we have to understand that in the Bible the idea of submission is not as pejorative as it is for us.

And what I mean is it says right there that the church submits to Christ, and there are places where we're told in the Trinity that Jesus submits to God the Father.

In other words, there's equal value, equal status, and yet sometimes there can be a sense of saying, I submit, which is part of the perfection and beauty of God Himself.

And so to say wives submit to your husbands is not to say wives are less than, as much as it is to say, say, say there's a unique role.

And then the second thing is we need to understand the broader context here.

And the context is always important in understanding Scripture.

And this is what we try to do here with all text, and that is not dismiss them out of hand, not kind of explain them away, not double down, but say, what does this teach on the whole?

And then say, how do we assimilate it into our thinking?

And what this text really does is it challenges both husbands and wives to live selflessly.

It challenges the husband by saying, husbands, love your wife as Christ loved the church.

This is an incredibly striking command because it's saying, give your life away on behalf of your wife.

That's what it's saying.

And then it says, Wives, I want you to submit to your husbands as the church submits to Christ.

I want you to be selfless and serve your husband.

In other words, it's painting a picture for both husbands and wives of saying, I want you to enter your marriage, not grasping for power, but not kind of saying, How can I get in charge of the other, but how can I serve?

How can I come alongside?

How can I support the other?

And when we come to understand that in the broader teaching of the Bible, then what we can say is, you know what, wives, if you're a wife, you need to grapple with what the command is that says submit to your husbands and husbands, you need to grapple with the command that says, love your wives as Christ loves the church.

I've been a pastor for over 20 years.

And what I can tell you is that anytime that a husband kind of tries to appeal to this and say, well, she needs to submit, he is on a bad path.

And anytime a wife comes in and says, you know what, he needs to love me like Christ loves the church, she's on a bad path.

And here's why the command is to the husband to love, to the wife to serve in that sense.

In other words, worry about what you can do, not saying you better serve me.

Now, now one other thought here on this, and that is if you're in a relationship, a marriage especially, in which somebody is threatening, somebody is demeaning, somebody is consistently intimidating.

Especially if they try to use these texts to say, and now you need to surrender, submit to me.

I do not believe that that is a fair or right use of this text ever, and I believe that taking yourself out of that situation may be the most biblical act that you can take.

Now I realize, again, there will be people who will disagree with that, but I believe that that that text is not saying stay through abusive kinds of behaviors, even if it isn't physical.

And so that's an important point of clarification.

So let me just take us to this point here.

So Jesus basically challenges the cultural norm.

So how does Jesus help us to really do this?

So here's the challenge.

Our culture has hit a tipping point where it says this can't be anymore.

But what is our culture's reason?

Our culture's reason is basically this.

And that is we should hit uh we should change because all people are equal.

And if you ask them why are people of worth or value, what they'd say, well, it's just self-evident.

Really?

You know what's self-evident in our world is that if you look at nature, is that the strong prey on the weak.

That's how animals get their dinner every night in the wild.

The strong prey on the weak.

Why is it different for people?

It's different because we're created in the image of God.

In other words, without coming to a Christian worldview, here's what will happen.

In our culture, we will have a cultural moment where we say, you know what, this is bad, this is bad, it should be different.

And I agree completely with our culture on this.

But what will happen is when self-interest doesn't say any longer this is the best path, what we'll do is we'll revert to saying, I want to get what's good for me, instead of I'm going to care for other people.

And when I look back at my life, my peak of sexism, not that I'm devoid of that altogether now, was when I was in middle school.

There were some things that I said, probably ideas that I had that weren't very right on.

And here's what I know.

If you simply go to my middle school self and you say, hey, awareness, stop it.

That isn't good.

And you arrange things in self-interest in such a way that it's better for me not to, but you don't deal with the root, what will happen is those attitudes will come back.

But if you come to see what Jesus Christ did on behalf of all people, it can melt you out of self-interest.

Let me show you just just one other thing here, and this is from Proverbs.

In Proverbs, there's an idea that runs throughout it.

It's the word righteous.

And when you and I hear the word righteous, what we often think of is personal holiness.

But Old Testament scholar Bruce Walkie says that righteous in Proverbs means somebody who's willing to disadvantage himself or herself for the sake of the community.

And that the wicked or the unrighteous in Proverbs are those who are willing to advantage themselves and disadvantage the community.

And that if we read Proverbs that way, that it'll change the way that we read it.

Here's what we read in Proverbs chapter 14, verse 34.

Proverbs 14:34

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.

So disadvantaging ourselves for the good of others, that exalts a nation, but sin, wickedness, will pervert a nation, basically.

And then Proverbs chapter 15, verse 9.

Proverbs 15:9

The Lord detests the way of the wicked, those who basically say, I'm going to disadvantage others for my own gain.

But he loves those who pursue righteousness, who will disadvantage themselves for the good of others.

And here's my point.

But there won't be real lasting change without acknowledging God and without coming to a point of saying, I will be melted by what Jesus Christ did on my behalf.

Because what he did was he disadvantaged himself for me.

And until I see that, and that is something that I savor, what will happen is I'll say, okay, what's in my self-interest, but but when that melts me, when that melts you, what we will do is we'll live and we'll move in the broader world and say, I am willing to disadvantage myself for the good of others because it's what Jesus did for me.

It is what Jesus did.

Philippians 2, he who had all divinity did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but he humbled himself and became obedient to death on a cross, became a servant.

He disadvantaged himself.

And when you and I see that, what we'll see is that then we can have the courage to bring about cultural change the way Jesus did, to say, I can oppose the stereotypes, the minimization, and the sexualization of a gender.

And that's where we'll get the strength to live differently.

So we're going to pray, and then I'm going to set up communion in Wexford, and Joel and Brady will set it up in Butler County and in the Strip District, and we'll partake of communion together.

Father, we come to you today and just simply ask that you would help each one of us to see what you have done on our behalf that Jesus did disadvantage himself for us.

And that it would help those of us who have any opportunity to serve others to disadvantage ourselves for their good.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Would you stand?

And just before we open the communion tables, I want to just mention that here in Wexford we'll be having a core gathering on Wednesday night where we'll talk about where we're going for the year, share where we're at with year end giving in 2017.

And so you may say, well, who's in the core?

How do I get to be part of the core?

If you want to be in the core, come Wednesday night, 7 o'clock.

It's in the chapel.

Should be a great event.

There's a dinner ahead of time as well.

So now what we're going to do is sing.

We're going to open the communion tables and you can come forward, go to the back in the balcony, and partake of communion.

And when you do today, maybe dunk the bread in and say, God, thank you for having Jesus disadvantage himself for me so that I could experience all his goodness and help me to be the kind of person who's willing to live that way for others.

And so let's respond with the team.