Even though Mother’s Day is not a holy day in the Christian tradition, it is a great opportunity to recognize our moms and it is as good a time as any for us in the church to think a bit not just about mothers, but about women in general. This is a good thing to do, I think, because there seem to be an awful lot of women in the world!

To help ease our minds into this topic, let me share with you some answers given by elementary-age children to various questions about mothers. “Why did God make moms?” One answer: “To help us out of there when we were getting born.” “What ingredients are mothers made of?” “They had to get their start from men’s bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.” “Why did God give you your mother and not some other Mom?” “God knew she likes me a lot more than other people’s moms like me.” “What did Mom need to know about Dad before she married him?” “Did he say NO to drugs and YES to chores.” “Why did your Mom marry your Dad?” “My grandma says that Mom didn’t have her thinking cap on.” “Who’s the boss at your house?” “Mom doesn’t want to be boss, but she has to because Dad’s such a goof ball.” “What’s the difference between moms and dads?” “Dads are taller and stronger, but moms have all the real power because that’s who you got to ask if you want to sleep over at your friend’s.”

It’s clear that even rather young children have some very strong ideas about mothers and fathers and, in a larger sense, about women and men. In one of those interesting convergences of events that happen every so often, later this week a movie will debut across the country that is based on a book that makes some amazing claims about women and gender issues in relationship to the historic Christian faith. I am talking, of course, about The Da Vinci Code,ⁱ now one of the most successful books of all time, if you count number of copies sold. The book claims to reveal several fantastic new understandings of Jesus and God and the church that are all based on historical fact, even though the book itself is a work of fiction. Over the next few weeks we will look at the major claims made in the book, and we will see how they square up with historic and traditional understandings. To give you a hint about the general direction we’ll take, let me tell you that I have read the book and I intend to see the movie. I also have consulted several books and other sources, all by reputable scholars, including a former classmate at Princeton Seminary. These sources have titles such as, Cracking Da Vinci’s Code,ⁱⁱ Breaking the Da Vinci Code,ⁱⁱⁱ Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code,^iv and Decoding the Da Vinci Code: Historical Reality versus Murder Mystery Mythology.^v Do these titles tell you anything?

The topics of the nature of femininity, masculinity, the relationship between the two, and the relationship of both to God, are not new topics. They go all the way back to the creation stories themselves and they pervade every major theology and philosophy and world-view. There is much in the Judeo-Christian tradition about these and related issues, and therein lies part of the mystery and intrigue and scandal of The Da Vinci Code. Part of what the book proclaims is summarized in the words of one of the key characters in the book, Robert Langdon: “Sophie,” Langdon said, “The Priory’s tradition of perpetuating goddess worship is based on a belief that powerful men in the early Christian church ‘conned’ the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine…. The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.” (Page 124) The book goes on to claim that women were given exalted roles in early Christianity but the later church repressed women. It claims that the early church celebrated the divine feminine principle, in part using secretive sex rituals. It claims that Mary Magdalene was the chief of all Jesus’ disciples, indeed, that Jesus and Mary were married and that their bloodline succeeds to this very day.

There is no way, in just these few sermons, that I will address all the issues raised in the book in any kind of detailed fashion. But I do hope to use the book as an entry point into vital issues of our historic faith that still are important today. Here, then, are some interesting questions to ask: What is the role that God designed for women in the world and in the church? What is the actual history of the role of women in the church? What did key figures like the Apostle Paul and even Jesus himself have to say about women? And what are you and I supposed to do with what our faith teaches us? Entire careers are based on these kinds of questions, but we can at least hit the high spots on this fine Mother’s Day morning.

Just last week the Social Security Administration released its annual list of the most popular names given to American children born the previous year. For the 10th year running, “Emily” is the most popular name for girls, and since 1999, “Jacob” is the most popular for boys. The girl’s list has few biblical names but the boy’s list is dominated by them because, as the president of the American Names Society noted, there are a lot more men mentioned in the Bible than women.^vi There is no question that the Bible is dominated by stories of men. There is one simple reason why: the cultural world of the Bible was patriarchal. And that should come as no surprise because pretty much every major world culture and most of the minor ones have always been patriarchal. Does this mean that our Christian faith is fundamentally a patriarchal faith? Not necessarily. There are many key women in the foundational stories of the Old Testament, women like Ruth and Esther. In the New Testament, there are even more. The first hint of this occurs in the New Testament in the genealogies of Jesus, genealogies that contain the names of several women from the Old Testament, this in an era when women’s names were almost never included in such lists. And in Christian history as a whole, though it is dominated by male figures, there are significant female figures as well.

We should note that even in the highly patriarchal society into which Jesus was born, he gave women a much larger and more important place than would be normally expected. Several women, including Mary Magdalene, are often included as present with him throughout his ministry. Jesus had public discussions with women. He healed women. And it was women who first discovered the empty tomb on Easter morning. The most influential figure after Jesus in the New Testament period was the Apostle Paul. In the portion of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome that we read a few moments ago, several women are mentioned as having roles that are at least as significant as the men’s roles. This is true of other’s of Paul’s letters. In the Roman list, Paul mentions Phoebe as a deacon or minister in the church of Cenchreae; Prisca, who was involved in the support of the Gentile mission; Tryphaena, Tryphosa and Persis who are all co-workers with Paul; and Junia, whom Paul calls “foremost among the apostles.” Now, some are quick to point out that in some of Paul’s other letters women have a much diminished role, but modern scholars question whether these letters were actually written by Paul himself, and other scholars note that—for his day—even though there is some evidence of a patriarchal attitude in Paul, he was actually quite progressive in his treatment of women, much more progressive than the culture around him. The same can be said, of course, for Jesus himself.

As we begin to move out of the New Testament period and into successive generations of church history, the issues of women in the church become more varied and complicated. There were some attempts in some quarters of the church to completely discredit women and to place them in second-class status. Dan Brown and Da Vinci Code tell us that the Emperor Constantine was responsible for this, but such moves actually occurred much earlier. Brown also wants us to believe that Jesus’ original intention was for his “wife,” Mary Magdalene, to continue his work as the chief apostle, and that their work would be carried on by their child, but that Constantine and his successors quashed that information. In fact, the early church was never so matriarchally oriented. And there is no credible evidence to suggest that the early church was interested in the celebration of the “divine feminine.” Throughout Christian history there are notable examples of the church’s failure to rightly value women, but we have to note as well that, generally speaking, those societies today which most highly value women are precisely those societies of the Western world that all trace their philosophical and theological underpinnings to Christianity! And there are innumerable examples of women like Joan of Arc, Catherine of Sienna, and Susanna Wesley whose contributions have been vital to the healthy development of the Christian faith down through the ages.

And so, let’s go back to the Bible to see what it actually says about women. Even thought parts of Genesis seem to give Eve a bad rap, other parts of the story squarely put the blame for our original problem with God on Adam’s shoulders. And those same stories tell us that male and female were created in God’s image. I’ve already mentioned some significant women in Old Testament history, and I’ve mentioned something of Jesus’ and Paul’s attitudes toward women. But perhaps the best biblical summary of God’s intention and design for women is contained in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:25-28).

In our society today there is much made of the differences between men and women, and not just differences, but of actual warfare between the sexes. Clearly, men and women are different. And societies over the centuries typically have addressed this fundamental fact of our nature by elevating one gender over the other. In the early Christian society as Da Vinci Code understands it, women and femininity had perhaps even the upper hand. But Paul was speaking of a new society, one that he had encountered in the person of Jesus and in the fledgling community of people who were trying to live out the implications of Jesus’ words in their own lives. Paul was speaking of a new society that Jesus called the Kingdom of God. And in this new culture, gender is unimportant, just as race or class or social position are unimportant. The true biblical view, the Christian view, is of a community and a reality that is coming into being that celebrates and affirms our essential humanity regardless of the differences we experience and embody here on earth. It is a reality based not on physical reproduction or the supposed exalted status of our gender identity, but based instead on our essential equality before God since we are all God’s children to begin with. A healthy Christian understanding for today’s world rightly seeks to appreciate the differences that God created into each of us, while also understanding these differences in no way eliminate our fundamental equality before God. A healthy Christian understanding also recognizes that we do not worship either the “divine feminine” or the “divine masculine;” we worship God alone, who is neither male nor female, but stands outside these created categories and represents a reality of being the likes of which we do not yet comprehend.

One of the questions asked of those elementary school children about moms went like this: “How did God make mothers?” One answer given, “He used dirt, just like for the rest of us.” That kid has his theology straight. We all started from the same place and we all end up in the same place: God made us, male and female, neither better than the other, both equally loved in the eyes of our Creator.

Amen.

ⁱDan Brown, Doubleday, New York, 2003.
ⁱⁱ James L. Garlow and Peter Jones, Victor Books, Cook Communications Ministries, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2004.
ⁱⁱⁱ Darrell L. Bock, Nelson Books, Nashville, Tennessee, 2004.
^iv Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.
^v Kenneth E. Bailey, www.CDBaby.com, 2005.
^vi Information taken from an Associated Press article by Kasie Hunt, May 12, 2006.