The Money Under the Mattress--October 20, 2022
"But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ. Any man who prays or prophesies with something on his head disgraces his head, but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved. For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or to be shaved, she should wear a veil. For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God. Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. But if anyone is disposed to be contentious—we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God." [1 Corinthians 11:3-16]
Sooo... this is quite a passage, isn't it?
If it felt like we had left the minefield earlier and were past the complicated and provocative places in this letter, well, now we have ambled our way right back into the danger, it seems. And I've got to admit to you that not only does this passage seem really, really hard to find some kind of present-day devotional connection for, but the logic in this passage is really hard for me to follow. With all due respect to the apostle, I can't follow Paul's train of thought, but he seems to think he is perfectly clear and his conclusions perfectly obvious to everyone, even when he throws out a phrase like "because of the angels" out of nowhere. If I am going to put my cards on the table, I need to admit to you that this is a really difficult passage for me to make heads or tails out of, and we're going to have to stumble our way to some kind of meaning for us rather precariously.
That said, I have often been reminded by that line I have heard attributed to biblical scholar Renita Weems that when we find ourselves wrestling with a biblical text, there is value in refusing to let go of it, like old Jacob, until it gives us a blessing. And so, rather than just shrugging this section off altogether as obscure or determining that it has nothing to teach us, let me suggest we press on and at least keep wrestling until something dawns on us.
But first, a historical detour, if you'll indulge a fellow text-wrestler... I'll bet you know someone who lived through the Great Depression. Maybe it's far back, now that we are ninety-plus years removed from the great stock market crash, but I'll bet you have some recollections of those who endured, and were shaped by, those years. For folks who went through the worst of the 1930s, almost everyone was affected permanently by the hardship of the Depression, and it shaped the habits and mindsets of many of that generation, even for decades after the Depression was over and the post-World-War-II boom was in full swing. Many who had to scrape by, saving and reusing whatever materials they could, were forever changed into being prudent and frugal. Many who knew what it was like to have nothing would never waste anything again--not food, not clothing, not old broken tools, nothing. If it could be fixed, they fixed it. If it could be saved, they saved it. Many who went through that time stopped trusting institutions like banks and instead kept their valuables hidden in the house. It was a coping mechanism, or really a survival strategy, that almost everyone who lived through the Great Depression became familiar with.
Of course, for people who had never lived through a time like that, it seemed strange to see their parents or grandparents saving up and washing old aluminum foil, or storing stacks of newspapers, or even hoarding things that would almost certainly not be used again. And for some people, the skills and practices they had learned during the Depression--which were almost universally necessary during the worst of those times--eventually became hang-ups they couldn't let go of when times got better. To those of a younger generation, the practice of saving old tinfoil or twine in drawers in your kitchen might have seemed irrational, while to those who lived through the Depression, it was a carryover from what they had learned as common sense in their formative years.
Now, I want to propose a thought experiment of a sort. If you lived through the Depression and had learned to scrimp and save, or to hide your money under your mattress because you didn't trust the banks, or to hoard used materials in case you needed them again, it would have seemed just universally true that everybody should do the same. All your neighbors were saving household goods; all your friends and relatives were keeping their money under the mattress rather than in a risky bank, too. So it just would have seemed universally true that everybody should follow those practices, too--because they were the coping skills you all had learned by going through the same things. [We might point today the way school children today are growing up learning to have active shooter drills, and wonder at how that experience is skewing and scarring them--or for folks who lived during the height of the Cold War, what it did to a generation who grew up hiding under their school desks in case of nuclear fallout.]
But at some point, the skills and habits of that Depression-era generation might no longer have been as useful or universal. At some point the conditions in the wider world changed. We have, for example, the ability to recycle aluminum or glass or plastic so that wholly new products can be made. We have the FDIC that insures the money in bank accounts in case the bank would fail. We are increasingly moving away from periodicals printed on paper, to be read once and thrown away the next day. And there are a host of other ways that the needs and habits of daily life are just different from the ones that created the Depression-era generation's survival skills. They had a purpose and a rationale in the time in which they arose, and we don't need to fault the people who lived through those times and were shaped by them--but we can also perhaps recognize that those habits which seemed universal and necessary for survival at one time were actually the product of a particular time and place.
We can be grateful for the ways our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents learned to endure through difficult times. And we can choose to learn from their examples and find ways to use their insights to guide us through the circumstances of our times. But we also can recognize that some of the things they took as universally true might not be useful or applicable in other times or places. Plenty of mothers have told their children, "Don't forget your coat," in childhood, but we also knew it didn't mean we had to wear a heavy parka for a summertime day at the beach.
I want to suggest at least the possibility that some of the same thing is going on here in what we call First Corinthians. Paul has some very strongly held positions about what the "right" way to wear hair was for men and women, particularly in the context of public gatherings of the Christian community. And while Paul seems to think that these are universal or "natural" truths--timeless and independent of culture or circumstance--perhaps these are the kinds of customs that were bound to his time and place. After all, even though Paul speaks against men having long hair here in First Corinthians, he surely would have also known about the practice in ancient Israel of the "nazarite" vow--like Samson famously took--whereby men would refrain from cutting their hair or beard for a period of time, or even as permanent vows. In ancient Israel it was not degrading or shameful to be a man with long hair, but in fact, it could be a sign of deep devotion to God that you had made this nazarite vow. However, in the Greco-Roman culture in which Paul and his readers lived, there was a different set of assumptions about what "normal" or "natural" hair or dress was supposed to be. And perhaps, like those who lived through the Great Depression and were taught the practices of saving, reusing, and not spending, Paul is reflecting what everybody in the time in which he lived took to be "the way things are."
Now, I don't mean to just dismiss Paul patronizingly and say, "That poor fella was only saying what people in his time said, and he only thought what people in his time thought--we are free to ignore him because we live in different times." If the analogy between Paul in the first century and the Great Depression-era generation of the '30s is a fair one, then we wouldn't just dismiss the experience of those who lived through the Depression, either. We just might have to stop before automatically copying their habits in other times and circumstances. There were reasons for saving, scrimping, and hiding your money under the mattress. And those were such important habits that they probably preserved a lot of families long enough to see them through until times were better. And even in a day when we have the FDIC to insure bank accounts or online newspapers instead of needing to hoard stacks of old yellowing daily papers "just in case," we can certainly still learn from them the importance of good stewardship of what you have, and the danger of being wasteful. So it's not that we're free to just dismiss what an earlier generation thought was important.
And yet at the same time, we aren't being responsible if we just copy the practices of another time or place as though they are not context dependent. There was, after all, a time when it seemed "obvious" that a respectable man of means should wear a powdered wig--and now, in a time when we can wash our hair more frequently and don't have the same fear of lice, we have other ways of wearing our hair. Failure to wear a powdered wig isn't the social scandal in twenty-first century American that it might have been in, say, eighteenth century France or England.
So here's what I want to propose for Paul and First Corinthians. If he lived--as I think he did--in a time when there were certain assumed codes of dress and appearance that differed for men and women, then it's at least worth asking, "What would have been the consequence of flagrantly violating those standards in public, and would it have been worth that cost?" There are times, after all, when it is important to stand against the "conventional wisdom" of the day and to be willing to go against the flow, no matter how controversial or troublesome it makes you seem. But that is not always the case--sometimes, the choice to stand out is just causing a whole lot of scandal for no good reason. And the question to ask, perhaps, is when we should be willing to be provocative for our faith in Christ... and when being provocative is really just being a jerk or wanting attention. I'm reminded of an insight of Gerhard Ebeling who talked about causing the "right" kind of scandal versus the "wrong" kind of scandal as Christians. And if we are making a big fuss over something that isn't really a gospel issue, we are putting obstacles in the way of others being able to hear the Good News.
I think that's why Paul had been so laser-focused earlier in this letter on the question of meat sacrificed to idols--he knows that he doesn't care about where his meat came from, but he knows it could become a huge stumbling block for someone else, and he doesn't want someone else's faith to be snuffed out because they weren't mature enough yet to get over the idea of meat that had come from a pagan sacrifice before it was sold in the market. And so here, I think Paul would tell us, too, that the choices we make as Christians, even down to the ways we dress or carry ourselves, will leave an impression with other people, and we should be at least mindful of why we do, or do not, provoke people with our choices.
I could--in the name of "Christian" freedom--insist on wearing a baseball cap everywhere I go, indoors or outdoors, in home visits as well as in public worship on Sundays. But there are so many folks for whom it is a sign of disrespect to wear a hat indoors that I don't waste my energy fighting that battle and insisting on wearing a hat when I sit down in their living rooms to visit. Does God care? Not really, I don't think--except that God cares that I show respect and love to my neighbors. What shape and form that respect takes will change in different cultures and different times--much like there are cultures in which it is a sign of respect to take your shoes off when you enter someone else's house, and cultures in which that would be seen as being overly familiar or casually rude. To me, it seems a waste of time, energy, and good-will to go around thumbing my nose at those customs when I could instead build a rapport with people by avoiding things they could take as signs of disrespect. But I should also be aware that those customs and mores are not fixed in stone, and that the ways we show respect may change over times or contexts. Social expectations will change over time, and I don't have to fight to keep one dress code or another in place for all times. What does endure is the call to love, and that includes being mindful about what will show respect or disrespect to others--and knowing when it is important to challenge others' expectations, versus knowing when it is wiser to live within social custom.
For what it is worth, the Gospels show us that Jesus had the wisdom and grace to know how to navigate those waters, both when to go with the flow and when to push against it. The same Jesus who tells Simon Peter they need to pay the temple tax and go along with what is expected of them in Matthew 17:24-27 [in fact, making a point of saying that he is doing it "so as not to cause offense," mind you] is the same Jesus who has no problem scandalizing the Respectable Religious People while the woman at Bethany anoints his feet, or when he strikes up a conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4, or when he invites himself over to the house of Zacchaeus or Matthew. Jesus is neither intimidated into staying inside other people's expectations all the time nor obnoxiously obsessed with upsetting people just for the sake of upsetting people. Maybe that's the cue we should take, and maybe that's what Paul is trying to get at here: there are times when we choose to be winsome and not to be abrasive, and there are times when our faith calls us to stand out--but to know we are going to risk catching flak for it, and to know how and when to spend our chips to do so. If we are never intentional about critically thinking why we are doing what we are doing, we'll end up like the person who still hoards newspapers because of Depression-era habits. But if we are wise enough, and self-aware enough, to ask, "What is the right thing to do in this moment, this context, and this situation?" we can know when to ride with the current, and when to go against the flow.
The one other thing we'll have to acknowledge, though, in all of this conversation, is that there may well be things that we in our day and time think are timeless and universal truths that may just be artifacts of the culture in which we live. And before we insist that some particular hang-up of ours is a universal and timeless rule, we would be wise to step look beyond ourselves and see whether the customs ingrained in us are the result of our unique circumstances, rather than laws carved in stone. There are times we will want to keep doing what we have been taught by "conventional wisdom" and common sense--and there are times we'll see those are just what are used to doing.... and that maybe we don't have to keep storing our money under the mattress any longer.
Lord, give us the wisdom to know how to navigate the waters of our culture and our time with humility and grace.
