Telling Women What to Do

Telling Women What to Do
A sermon by Dr. Bill Levering
Preached at the First Reformed Church of Schenectady, September 20, 2009

It's a popular enterprise for religious types to tell women what to do.

It's popular in the Bible. Big sections of Levitius tell women what to do in terms of rules for their behavior. In something like schoolyard ethics, women are proclaimed unclean, essentially that they have cooties for a week every month. Imagine a quarter of women's adult life as untouchable, that is unclean. More telling, if a woman had a male child, she was unclean for a month. If she has a girl baby, two months.

Paul loves to tell women what to do in the New Testament. Keep quiet, don't teach, keep your heads covered, be obedient to husbands.

Religions still tell women what to do, usually in the form of what they can't do. Almost every major religion has a part of it that excludes women from leadership. Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and the conservative branch of the Presbyterian church still do not honor the gift of women's leadership. These are usually the groups that are also opposed to having women make decisions of any kind for themselves, domestic, political, or health related.

But it's not just wacky religous types that tell women what to do. In our culture, advertising spends much more time and money targeting women. We tell women how to look, what to wear.

This is never more apparent than at weddings. The list of things that a bride has to worry about is enormous. Something borrowed, something blue, bouquets, veils, trains, makeup, hairdo. The man? He just needs to remember to brush his teeth. Tuxes don't even use cufflinks anymore.

Last year, American women spent 8 billion dollars on cosmetics to keep up with the beauty standards set for them by the advertising industry.

Let's not forget that women only got to vote one lifetime ago and that the abortion wars are all about controlling what is going on in women's bodies. It is not coincidence that the loudest voices in the anti-abortion movement are men's.

But it is not just American culture. If fact, it is worse around the world. A March 2009 report from the British medical journal The Lancet reports that over 100,000 women died in fires in India in a single year, many of them from domestic abuse. The Lancet reports that many of the 100,000 women who died in fires in India in a single year were actually killed in domestic abuse. Hundreds of women are murdered by fire when recent husbands don't get the dowry they expected. Dozens are forced to throw themselves on their husbands pyres. Still. Today. In India, women only own 1% of real property of any type.

Around the world, women are under-represented in democracies, including ours. They are, in many ways, the oppressed majority.

Telling women what to do is a popular enterprise in health care as well.

• Only 14 states require maternity coverage. Anthem Blue Cross along with many other insurers has been fighting health care reform. They want to treat pregnancy as an optional condition, therefore uncovered as it is now in many plans.
  
• The vast majority of states allow insurance companies to charge women more than men, even though they statistically make 75 cents on the dollar
  
• In 8 states if your husband beats you regularly and you go to the emergency room you will not be covered because an abused spouse qualifies as a pre-existing condition.

We have been controlling women significantly more than men. But is that a bad thing? Sometimes we should tell different groups of people differing things. Whether they are insurance companies or women or north Koreans, sometimes different conditions engender differing rules.

The prophets were very bossy, but almost always to rulers and the powerful. Jesus was a little bossy on occasion, usually to individuals and to the powerful. "Woe to you, scribes and pharisees" was something Jesus apparently like to shout. When men brought Jesus a woman who they said sinned, he yelled at them first. Jesus shows us a prejudice for the poor, for the downtrodden, for the persecuted. Who are these people? Statistically, women.

So who are the powerful in the world? Who are the arrogant? Who make war? Isn't it obvious? Men.

If we as religious people are interested in telling people what to do, if we are to speak truth to power, we should be actually telling men to bring justice for women.

It is the voices of women we should listen for in the issues of our day, not the voices of power that are usually male. But in fact, men usually do not listen to women. The communication scientist Deborah Tannen documents what we can find out in listening to any conversation between genders: men interrupt women much more than the other way around.

Jesus introduced an understanding that reverses the power structures of the world, but it will take some getting used to. As civilisation has progressed, it may occur to us that just because men are bigger, they shouldn't boss women around all the time.

What does it mean to listen to women's needs rather than dictating their servitude? This means actively working for equal pay for equal work, this means taking child care seriously as a culture, this means letting women make decisions about their own health. This means removing all barriers to leadership and advancement.

In Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free. When shall we believe this?