One of the female pastors I interviewed for Holy Mischief told me a story about having begun her sermon the week of Brock Turner’s sentencing with “It’s been a hard week to be a woman.” Several men walked out of worship during the sermon because, they told her, they did not want to hear about “women’s issues” in church.
Well, it’s been a hard week to be a woman again this week. John McArthur is a well-known and influential Evangelical preacher and author. This week, in a public event celebrating McArthur’s 50 years of preaching he suggested that Beth Moore should “Go home” (Moore has been teaching for years, but has recently taught on Sunday mornings in some more high-profile congregations) and he went on to lament that the church was “caving in to women preachers.”
And lest one think such ways of continuing to denigrate professional women are limited to religious circles, the day before McArthur’s comments, the Huffington Post ran an article about the advice given during a leadership training event for 30 female executives at Ernst & Young. In addition to rather inane and arguably gnostic “advice” related to clothing, nail care, and hair styles, the participants were told things like:
“Women’s brains absorb information like pancakes soak up syrup so it’s hard for them to focus… Men’s brains are more like waffles. They’re better able to focus because the information collects in each little waffle square.”
And… “If you’re having a conversation with a man, cross your legs and sit at an angle to him. Don’t talk to a man face-to-face. Men see that as threatening.”
Hmm.
Maybe that’s the problem when women preach. Are we looking at you too directly? Perhaps if we positioned pulpits at an angle…
It is easy to make fun of this sort of non-sense. Because even my pancake-like brain knows good and well that it absorbs (and more importantly can then use) information every bit as well as any waffle-brained man I know. Making fun of it is too easy. As a theologian in the ELCA (a tradition that prides itself on its intellectual rigor) it is too easy to be self-congratulatory over our more sophisticated hermeneutical lens.
And yet. I’ve had a little bit of push-back on the title of my book. I chose Holy Mischief because one of the female pastors I interviewed shared having been accused, with another female colleague, of being up to “no good” and to “mischief” for offering retreats for women in which (gasp!) no male pastor would be available to supervise.
Yes. Sometimes mischief is holy. Mischief is holy when it is a playful refusal of the status quo. Mischief is holy when it insists that the way things are is not the way things are meant to be. Mischief is holy when it ignores the demands of a patriarchal, racist, and homophobic world in order to hear the calling of the Holy Spirit. Mischief is holy when it ignores the concerns about the power of the powerful (one of McArthur’s stated concerns is that women want power, not equality) in order to follow the call of the one who entered into our world as powerless as a baby. Mischief is holy when it turns the world upside down (Acts 17:6).
I am grateful for the witness of the holy mischief of the amazing and gifted women who continue to answer God’s call in the face of demands that they go home.
Links to both stories mentioned above:
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Mindy Makant 