Co-Laborers; Co-Heirs: Eve and Adam

It's a really confusing time to know what it means to be a boy or a girl or a man or a woman, to know if masculine and feminine are words we should keep using. For example, this year, the name Leah Thomas has been national news, very prevalent in our news. Leah is a swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania who made national news this past spring for becoming the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division One National Championship.

Here's her story. Leah swam on the UPenn men's swimming team for the first three years of college. Then COVID happened, and then she joined the women's team. This past year she made national headlines after her performance in December 2021, where she posted the nation's fastest ever time for a woman in the two hundred and five hundred yard freestyle. And her story became this national debate about sports, about fairness in sports, about what's going to happen to Title Nine as the transgender movement takes off. Title IX was set up to protect women's sports. What will come of that?

It just highlights for us the confusing moment that we inhabit. If you have kids, if you are kids, this is a confusing time to grow up. And it's also extremely important. Gender is extremely important. I want you to think about how you introduce yourself, how you define who you are. Every day with people we don't know, we give an explanation for who we are. We give an interpretation and a lot of that is based on gender. And yet those words are confusing. They're really important to us, but there's a lot of confusion about what words we use and how we use them.

So yes, we're going to tiptoe back into a conversation again on gender. I did this in 2018. We preached a series on the gospel and gender, and we're going to enter back into this in two parts. One is going to be a sermon series. I'll tell you about that in a second. The other, which I'm really excited about, is bringing a friend in, Doctor Sam Andradeus, who's doing a seminar for us October 21–22 called "The Gift of Gender."

I'm going to point you to this video of Sam right now. Excited to have Sam come here. Sam was a pastor at the Village Church in New York City in the 2000s where his church was talking about and trying to figure out how to minister in a context where gender and questions about gender and transgenderism were everywhere in the 2000s, which is where everybody else is now. He's written a book called Engendered, and if you were here in 2018 when I preached that series, basically everything I said was kind of a hypertext link to Sam. He's really brilliant. He's done his doctorate in this and he's going to do a two-day seminar for us Friday night and Saturday morning, helping us think through all these categories and questions. I encourage you to bring all your questions. He's the specialist. I'm JV, and he's going to be doing all of his material. It's suitable for middle school and up. We'll have childcare only for CTK people. We encourage you to sign up for this early as we're advertising this with other churches and we want to make sure you all get priority. Okay, we love them, but you all get priority.

Along with this, I'm going to be doing, starting today, an eight-week preaching series particular on gender in the body of Christ, the church. And this is sort of 201 material that built on some of what Sam has taught on. Why are we going to do this? I know that maybe a question: why would we talk about this in church? A couple of reasons. One is that in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of scholarship that's come out. Writers like Amy Byrd, Beth Allison Barr, Kristen Cobes Dumes, Cynthia Westfall, before them Sarah Bessie, talking about this question about gender and gender particularly in the church.

There have also been a lot of scandals that have come out in the last couple of years and we're very familiar with this. The Me Too series of scandals that were kind of unveiled. Also the abuses of the Southern Baptist Church, the church too movement. There's been a lot of conversation around gender. So the topic—this is one that I think the church has to continue to be talking about—is gender a gift or is it a curse?

Here are some sub-points: How do we worship and live and work together as engendered persons, bodies and souls? How does our church avoid the pitfalls of patriarchy and abuse? Is there anything good that we can still say about being a man or being a woman?

So today we're going to go back to the beginning, to Genesis. And I'm going to make you all do a bunch of reading. If you saw that in your bulletin, we're going to go through parts of Genesis one through three. If you find that in your bulletin, I'm going to kind of start and stop you so you get some context of what we're doing as we read God's word together.

So first from Genesis one, we come to the end of the six days of creation, and this statement is made over the first man and woman. Let's read this together.

Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them." — Genesis 1:26-27

Then we're gonna skip to chapter two. Chapter two goes from the 30,000 foot view of the creation to the on the ground where God makes the first man and the first woman. Let's read together from 2:15 and following.

Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and to tend it. The Lord God commanded the man saying, "From any tree of the garden, you may freely eat, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For on that day that you eat from it, you will certainly die." Then the Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him." And out of the ground, the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the livestock and to the birds of the sky and to every animal of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. And the man said, "At last, this is flesh of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She will be called woman because she was taken out of man." For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed. — Genesis 2:15-25

Chapter three then highlights the fall when the man and the woman take from the tree that God told them not to eat from, they both eat from it. And this is what happens next. This is the curse and the fall.

Now they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man and said to him, "Where are you?" And he said, "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself." And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?" The man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me some of the fruit of the tree, and I ate." Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" And the woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." Then the Lord God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all the livestock and more than any animal of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. And I will make enemies between you and the woman and of your offspring and her descendant. He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel." To the woman, he said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain, you shall deliver children. Yet your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you." Then to Adam, he said, "Because you've listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten the fruit of which I commanded you not to eat saying, you shall not eat from it, cursed is the ground because of you. With hard labor, you shall eat from it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles, it shall grow for you. You shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread until you return to the ground because from it you were taken. For you are dust and to dust you shall return." — Genesis 3:8-19

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Is Gender a Gift or a Curse?

I want to consider this question: is gender a gift or a curse? And we're going to look this under three headings: gender in creation, gender in the fall, and gender in redemption.

We spent a lot of time on Genesis one and two both last year and several years ago, so I'm gonna fly over this material quickly. It's a review for many of you who were here. But I wanna remind you of this: the creation story is also the creation of gender story. It's also the creation of gender and the Bible makes four critical points in these first two chapters. That we are made in glory, equal, asymmetrical for partnership. Men and women are created in glory. Those words, image and likeness.

If you're looking for a compliment, probably the highest compliment you could pay to any human being are those two words: image of God, likeness with God. There is so much glory and dignity inherent in that statement, and it sounds really normal for us. That sounds normal because we live in a society where we say, yeah, all people are made equal. But this is not how the world has thought throughout most of our history. To say that human beings are created in God's image, image bearers, inherent dignity—that was utterly unique in the ancient Near East.

So many of the other creation myths go like this. This is the one for Marduk from Sumeria: Marduk created seven men and seven women as slaves for God. Slaves—remember that—not image bearers, for the Gods to use and expend with as they pleased. And so what this led to in Sumerian culture is that people are also expendable. They're trash. If they die, it's not that big a deal. Human life doesn't matter.

Now, nothing could be further from what God says in His word, but this has been the foundation for some of the things that we think most matter. Martin Luther King Jr., this was a backbone of his work in battling racism, slavery, the Jim Crow laws, and the remnants of the slavery movement in our country. This is what he said about the whole concept of the Imago Dei as it's expressed in Latin—the image of God is the idea that all people have something in them that God injected into them. And we must never forget this as a nation. This is what I want you to hear him say: "There are no gradations in the image of God."

That leads to my next point: no gradations in the image of God. All people are made equally—men and women as image bearers of God. So Genesis 1:27, which we just read, was breaking news in the ancient Near East. It's equal: men as God's image bearers, women as God's image bearers. It's not that he is and she's a little less than.

And in Genesis 2, we read that after God created the man and put him in the garden, it's the first time that there's this statement that begins to be changed. Throughout the creation story we read, "good, good, good, good"—all these benedictions on how creation was made. And then suddenly in Genesis 2 we get to "not good." What's said that's not good?

It is not good for the man to be alone. — Genesis 2:18

In other words, incomplete. The male is incomplete as the image bearer of God. Bearing God's image cannot be fulfilled solely by the man; both male and female are needed. Equal as image bearers.

And then Genesis 2 goes on to say the next thing: equal but not equivalent, not interchangeable parts, not exactly the same. Do you know what asymmetry is? Symmetry is when something looks the same. You take a piece of paper, you fold it in half, you cut out half a heart shape and you open it up, and they match—that's symmetry. Asymmetry is when you open it up and they don't match. And this is what's held up to us: men and women are also created asymmetrical.

So let's look at this. When it says here that God looked for a suitable helper for the man, verse 18, this is really important. We sometimes call this "help meet" in English, which is a poor translation. It has a sense of like "daddy's little helper"—diminutive, less than. But the original word in Hebrew is not diminutive and it's not weak. It's used actually to describe God's Holy Spirit, which is the most powerful force in the universe and holds all things together.

Instead, Ezer implies "like but unlike," asymmetrical. And the phrase for the woman here, "suitable helper," makes this really explicit. She is an Ezer Kenegdo. Ezer Kenegdo. Can you say that with me? Ezer Kenegdo. Good. You learned some Hebrew this morning. That means a suitable helper, but it's one who is a helper who opposes. She's opposition. This is pre-fall. This is built into the relationship between the man and the woman. There's sameness but opposition. There's tension built in from the very beginning: like but unlike, equal but not equivalent.

And this is expressed even more in the raw materials from which they're both made. We didn't read this section, but in chapter 2, the first part of it says that God took the dust of the earth, formed it, and breathed into it the breath of life—that's how He makes the first man. In Genesis 2:21, we read that the woman was made from the man's body, from his rib. So in other words, they're made of the same substance. She's made from him. This is really important and again, unique in all of ancient Near Eastern literature.

The Egyptians, the Mesopotamians all said this: women are made out of a different substance, a lesser substance, therefore they have less substance. Different raw materials means lesser in value. And this is what's unique here. The woman is made from the man, from his substance. What does that mean?

Again, the woman is the part that is missing in the man. He is incomplete without her. Woman is that peace in him that's missing. Only male and female together—and I'm not just talking about marriage—male and female together do you see something larger than this? The fullness of God's image bearing represented.

This leads to my last point. Again, the review: men and women are created for partnership. For partnership. This is underscored in the instructions that God gave Adam and then extends to Eve. What is it He put them in the garden to do? This is the language:

Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and to tend it. — Genesis 2:15

Now those two verbs—cultivate and tend, work and keep, however you translate them—are used over and over and over again in that order, in that sequence throughout the Old Testament and they are really important words. Let me give you a hint of where we're going with this.

So in Genesis one, we read that the creation of the earth was done in seven days. Now if you're an ancient Near Eastern, you're hearing this story for the first time you're like, oh, I know what happens in the seven days span of time. All of these—all these surrounding cultures around Israel—all of their temples were dedicated over a seven day period of time. Temple garden. This is underscored in the instructions God gives Israel in creating the temple and before that in building the tabernacle. They are to make all these ornate, beautiful decorations inside the tabernacle and in the temple that are all fruits, trees, vegetation, hearkening back to the garden. Garden, temple.

If the garden is supposed to be a temple, what does that mean about us? This happens over and over in the rest of the Bible. Every time the tabernacle is put up, it is meant to be made facing east. What was in the east? Eden. Eden sat on a hill facing east and Ezekiel sees this picture of a temple again on a hill facing east. Over and over: garden, temple. And this plays into who we are and what we're made to be. Priests of the garden temple, God's royal representatives.

God gives Adam and Eve this work: work, tend. Work, tend. Cultivate, keep. It's the same pairing in the same order. So do you understand what this means? This is so amazing. God has made us for partnership, men and women for his glory. This is what we're designed for. This is where I'm getting the phrase this whole sermon series is based on: co-laborers, co-heirs, partnership for his glory. That's the original design blueprints of what it meant to be a human being and an engendered human being—in glory, equal, asymmetrical in partnership. Called to service as his priests in gendered ways.

Gender: Gift, Not Curse

Now what I want you to notice right here before I move on to the new materials: gender is not a consequence of the fall. Gender is not a consequence of the curse. You might think about that about how, because of how people talk about gender now. Like it's something that is a relic of the past. It's something that we should get rid of. It's something bad. Like we need to throw this away. And I get that, because there's so much heartache, isn't there, that's come in the interplay between our genders? This comes in the tension and even the oppression among genders. You know, we live in a world that weaponizes gender. This is why it's such a confusing time to raise kids, to be a kid. Man, if you're in middle school or high school, I am sorry. It was confusing when I was growing up in the eighties. It's way more confusing now. So much confusing, so difficult to navigate. But does that mean we should get rid of gender? That's what our world is saying. Get rid of it. But here's my point and I'm going to hit this every week: gender is a gift. It's a creational good and it's not something we should quickly and easily dispose of because of that. Maybe it's a gift you want to return from God. You're like, no thanks, take this one back. But it's a gift nonetheless. That's gender in creation.

What about gender in the fall? And this is where we're going to enter into new territory in Genesis three. I've not taught on this before. What happens to God's image bearers, and especially our gender in the fall?

Now, if you're not familiar with that language—the fall—you know enough about what the word implies. Fallen and can't get up, right? Fallen and broken. Things fall apart, right? The language of fall is what happens when sin enters the world and the curse and everything that comes from that. And this is a familiar story to lots of Christians, but I want to slow down and ask the questions and notice gender in the fall. How does gender keep popping up over and over in the story? Notice: God doesn't get rid of gender at this point. Instead, even the curse comes along gendered lines. So let's look. We're going to look this morning at the two sins and the two curses.

Now, a word first about curse, about cursing. This is a confusing word. I don't know about you, but I grew up for lots of years thinking, what do we do with this language of curse? It seems arbitrary and weird. Anybody think that? I'm the only one? Okay, one person in the back. Thank you.

It's as if God—this is what we think—God is like, "Now I'm going to teach you a lesson you ain't ever going to forget. Zap!" God is going to really give it to him now. And I want to remind you, if you think that's what curse means, you've watched too many science fiction movies. That's not what's going on here, and that's not even the character of our God.

Throughout the Old Testament, what do we read about God's character? This phrase over and over and over again:

The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

So it can't be, "I'm gonna teach you a lesson you ain't ever gonna forget." This isn't arbitrary and this isn't weird.

Instead, I want you to think about what happens in our sin. In our sin, we experience some of the same effects of curse. Curse implies two things: it implies pain and it implies consequence. Now, they're of a much greater magnitude of pain and consequence than you and I face for our sins. And this is why—because Adam and Eve are not just representing themselves. They are representative of the human race that is to come. They're representative beings. And so the pain and consequence that come from their sins are similar to ours and dissimilar. They're similar in what we face. They're dissimilar in how far they spread.

Think about this: if tomorrow the President of the United States calls a press conference and says, "I am declaring war on Canada," then guess what? You're at war. I'm at war whether or not any of us voted for it. Why? Because our president is a representative head of our nation. In the same way, the pain and consequence that came from Adam and Eve's sin affects us even though we didn't vote for it. Even though it is not ours personally. And just like with the president—in that example we're at war. So Adam and Eve's sin put us at war with God, with one another.

The Pain and Consequence of Sin

So when God confronts Adam and God confronts Eve, he tells them first pain and then he tells them consequence. And I want you to notice this—in fact, it's the same words in Hebrew: painful labor. Painful labor for the man, painful labor for the woman. For her, painful labor—more painful labor in childbirth. For him, painful labor in producing from the ground. But both of them experienced the pain that comes.

The painful labor is not arbitrary. It's not saying, "I'm gonna get you now. Gotcha." No, it's directly tied to their sins and the consequences in relationship. Both the sin of the first man and the first woman are relationship sins, and I want you to really think about this.

We know about relationship sins. Anybody ever experienced betrayal by another person? Let's think about betrayal. You know, betrayal has gradations to it—how serious it is and how hard it is. So if you go to the grocery store this afternoon at Harris Teeter and the clerk is checking you out and that person betrays you, is that painful to you? No, right? Of course not. If a casual acquaintance you've known for several years—let's say the person who delivers your mail—that person betrays you, is that painful to you? Not so bad. If a really good friend who has known you for many years and knows you at your worst and all your secrets—that person betrays you. How about that? Now we're starting to hurt. Then if a spouse betrays you, that takes years to recover from. And if an image bearer in an imperfect relationship with the God that he and she serve betrays—how deep is that cut? How great is the brokenness and the fallout from that? Do you get it?

All of the sin, which means pain and consequence, is definitely connected for Adam and Eve to the relational sin that they commit.

So, we're talking about Adam's sin and then Eve's. What was Adam's relational sin? Do you realize that the command to not eat from this particular tree is only given to one of them? It's given to Adam before the creation of Eve. And then twice—twice after the fall happens—God confronts not both of them about eating the fruit. He confronts Adam only: "You did this. Why did you do this?"

It's as if Eve's sin is not connected to that somehow. This is all on Adam. Now, why is that? Because Adam's sin was not just breaking the relationship with a command of God, but breaking relationship with God. It's a betrayal of trust and intimacy and closeness. God had told him this, and therefore God holds him accountable to this.

So Adam's fault, his failure, his disobedience—as opposed to Eve—the consequences directly related to the breaking of that commandment to relationship with God. God had warned him, what would happen if you ate from the tree? Remember? What's gonna happen? Death. Death will come, and it doesn't happen like that. It didn't happen immediately, but listen to what God says is the consequence of his relational sin. God says:

For you are dust and to dust you will return.

Death enters the world. The ultimate alienation, right? The ultimate in separation. It's a consequence of what Adam has done.

Sin entered the world through one man and death through sin. — Romans 5

So Adam's sin is a relationship sin, breaking of relationship with God, and it plays out in this curse that comes—death, the ultimate alienation.

Eve's Sin: Breaking Partnership

Let's talk about Eve. When God does confront Eve about her sin, God doesn't confront her about eating of the fruit. Like, "You shouldn't have done that. You knew better." But disobedience to the command—He confronts her about being deceived. Paul picks this up famously in the New Testament. Some of you all know this very well. He says:

It's not Adam who was deceived, it was Eve.

Now don't misunderstand Paul. He's not saying that women are more prone to deception than men. That's just ridiculous. Right? Who's blamed for causing the deception? The serpent. The serpent's the one blamed and cursed for the deception.

What is Eve held accountable for? Listen closely. She's accountable for breaking the partnership with Adam. It's a relational sin between the two of them. See, think about this. Let me put this in Lord of the Rings terms for some of y'all. It's the breaking of the fellowship of the ring, right? What kind of suitable helper has Eve turned out to be? Has she helped him? No. It's a very poor one. She has not been the ezer kenegdo. She's not helped him to tend and keep as a co-laborer, co-heir. In her sin, she broke unity with him. She destroyed the partnership with Adam. The fellowship of the ring is broken, right?

And the result then, the consequence comes directly related to that. Eve's sin was a relationship sin between Adam and Eve. Her curse is a relationship curse, consequence between the two of them. It's gone from this—"flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone"—to the curse, right?

Yet your desire will be for your husband, he shall rule over you.

See, this isn't again, this is not God being mean. Gotcha, right? That's not what God's doing here. He's not teaching us a lesson we'll never forget. The rupture between humans and God that Adam brought about means pain and consequence of death. The rupture between humans, one another, that Eve brought about means all kinds of pain and consequence in our relationships with each other.

But let me be really specific so you don't mistweet me here this morning, okay? Objectification of women, exploitation, misogyny—these are not God's plan. God's not like, "Hey, here's a great idea. Eve, I'm going to especially make you bear this. I'm going to especially be cruel to you. I'm going to teach you a lesson you will never forget." Power dynamics between men and women are not God's design.

What we saw was God's design, right? In glory, equal, asymmetrical for partnership in gendered ways. Serving as priests—gender itself. Bottom line: gender is not the problem, y'all. Gender itself is not the problem. Relationship sins and relationship curses—that's what we're feeling the effect of. The pain, the consequences of our alienation from God and from one another. That's the enemy. That's the problem with gender. It's not gender itself. It's all this other mess.

The Promise of Redemption

But we know that's not the end of the story, right? Not a bad news sermon this morning, right? Genesis 3:16 has the good news, this promise:

Jesus is that seed of the woman—capital D descendant in your reading of this this morning—who would come to crush the head, bruise the head of the serpent, to die for our sin, to defeat death, empty tomb.

Hallelujah. What a Savior, right? That's us. That's what we believe.

So why then? And here's the big question. So why? Why all this mess around gender in the church? Why is it like this? Why is it the curse that felt like we're still living out in our relationships with one another? Why don't we see more redemption in gender in the church? Why is it so dang hard? I'm so glad you asked. I'm so glad you asked.

Here's what I find is I think we're stuck like John Steinbeck says in East of Eden. We're stuck trying to figure out what to do with gender in a fallen world. And the church has tended unhappily to be stuck between what I think are two cul de sacs that don't get us much of anywhere. Two options that don't really feel like a whole lot of redemption. The one is egalitarian and the other is complementarian. If you don't know those words, bless your heart, right? Egalitarian and complementarian. Let me look at both those briefly.

Egalitarians are a branch of Jesus' church who rightly emphasize that men and women are created equally in the image of God. Man, they get that part right. But here's their answer to the problems of gender in East of Eden: they focus on equality and fairness above all else. And I understand why you would do that. Because you look at all the patriarchy, you look at all the oppression, all the bad, all the horrible fruit, all the ways that's played out in destructive ways in our relationships and our churches. You're like, yuck, no thanks. Surely God wants nothing to do with that. I would say, you're right.

So what egalitarians would say is: how can anything but absolute equality above all else be right? But by insisting on fairness, you can end up with a theology where both men and women lose. And this is sometimes really hidden in egalitarian theology. If you reinterpret or ignore the problem passages of the New Testament—the ones you thought I was gonna talk about this morning—that speak to gender differences, and you emphasize sameness and fairness so much, you end up rendering gender as meaningless. You can end up with this: men and women are interchangeable parts. And you can't say anything that's special about being a woman. Anything unique about being a man.

Here's why this is lose-lose. Let me give you an example of this. In 2013, right at the beginning of Obama's second term, there were a whole group of female House Representatives that were elected as freshmen, and they all came in at the same time. This was highly celebrated in the news and it should have been, right? Great freshman class comes in. Maureen Dowd, who writes for the New York Times, writes an article called "We offer more than ankles, boys." And it's celebrating the fact that we have all these new women coming into the House of Representatives. Her article's like, it's awesome. This is finally fairness coming into place. But what was hollow about that article was she could never say why it matters to have women in leadership. There was nothing unique in her article. She said nothing about the unique things that women bring to higher office. Now, why didn't she do that? Because she's really smart. She knew: I write this article and I start defining gender differences, people are gonna get really mad at me.

But this emphasis on equality above all else can mean that we have nothing to say about what's great about being a woman. The Bible has lots of things to say that are great about being a woman. Or what's great about being a man. The Bible has lots of great things to say about what it means to be a man. Come to our gender seminar. Sam's gonna talk all about this. This is really important. It's not very compelling.

On the other side are the complementarians. Complementarians say that men and women are not the same, that they're made to go together, as in complement, to learn other, not say nice things, but to fit together. So far so good. Asymmetry, right? And complementarians try to hold out as best they can the plain meaning of the really hard parts of scripture that say stuff about gender that we don't want to hear. This is the tribe that CTK is part of. Just full disclosure, right? We are a complementarian church in a complementarian denomination. And again, I sympathize so much with this perspective, trying to really honor scripture. But the problem is that complementarian theology in the last thirty years has in a lot of ways been reduced down, distilled down to patriarchy. Right? It's just about hierarchy and preserving power for men.

Here's where I see this: complementarians a lot of times are mostly talking about what women can't do in the church. Which is so far afield of scripture. Right? And again, this is lose-lose and it's lose-lose not just for women. Let me just make that really clear. Our churches are weak and sick when half the church doesn't have a voice. Our churches are weak and sick when half the church's gifts aren't used. Our church is weak and sick when the perspectives of women are not considered or asked for. Right? We can easily turn in complementarian circles, women into children or seductresses or ghosts. Man. And we've also empowered foolish men without a lot of accountability.

We've baptized machismo as somehow biblical. We've created something that I think has in a lot of places very little to do with scripture. And look, the creation blueprints of engendered humans is we're created in glory, equal, asymmetrical partnership for the glory of God as priests. This is what God has made us for.

It's not that men can do everything and women sit around and watch. That's not right. I think about Jesus's command—question about this: you know, this is how it's supposed to be in power dynamics in the church.

The greatest of you should be the slave of all. — Matthew 23:11

What's in view in scripture is not mere equality, which is good, nor mere difference, but partnership for the glory of God. So my problem with egalitarians and complementarians is exactly the same: trying to overcome the sin and the curse without Jesus. Right? Trying to figure out a way to deal with gender without Jesus. Aren't we people of the cross? Aren't we people of the empty tomb? Aren't we people of a hope that is beyond all hope in this world? Why then isn't that bleeding into this conversation better?

A More Excellent Way

Let me riff off of 1 Corinthians 13. Many of you will recognize 1 Corinthians 13 as the love chapter of the New Testament. It's always preached at weddings. Well, here's where it fits in the book of 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians is a difficult letter of the New Testament. It's Paul writing to this church that was like the problem child church of the New Testament. All this infighting and people getting drunk at the communion table while other people are going without. One guy's sleeping with somebody else's mom and this is just allowed to happen in the church. And Paul addresses all these problems and then he comes to chapter 13, he says, "Now, can I show you a more excellent way?" And he lays out for the church this call to love. And it's so beautiful that lots of people who don't even know Jesus have heard it at their weddings. Because we're like, man, I want some of that.

So this is what I want for the church: Can we find a more excellent way with regard to gender in the church? Can we find something better?

Before you mistweet me: no, we're not leaving our denomination. No, I'm not making up new theology. No, I'm not trying to come up with new interpretations for stuff. But here's where we're going over the next few weeks. I'm on a quest. We're on a quest for the next eight weeks. You'll hear from several of us as we walk through the pages of Scripture—four Old Testament passages, four New Testament, not the ones you think we're going to talk about.

I want us to find—we want to find as elders—a more excellent way to answer the question: Is there a way that through Jesus, the church of Jesus Christ can recover the design blueprints of partnership for the glory of God? That we're created in glory, equal, asymmetrical and in partnership to serve as priests. Is there a way forward with that?

Here's my thing: my hope is something better than egalitarian reductionism and complementarian and really patriarchal, hierarchical power plays. I want something. We want something for our church that smells like Jesus. That smells like redemption. That has his fingerprints on it.

Don't we want a church where kids come and they're like, "Come visit our youth group and they're part of our church," and they may come from families that don't know anything about Christ, but they watch something here modeled that's so different in how men and women relate to one another? Don't we want people to walk out of here and go, "Man, I tasted something of the glory. In a world filled with pain, I tasted something of the glory. Something of redemption in these relationships." Don't we want this? Don't we want this?

Prayer

Let's go to the Lord in prayer together.

Father, we thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. I pray, Father, as we walk through Scripture these next weeks, as we have Doctor Sam Andrades come and give this seminar on gender: Lord, we pray that we would be a church that leans more and more deeply into your Spirit's work and your redemptive power. We pray that we would settle neither for a full rejection of what your Scripture says and embracing of what the world says, nor for looking back and trying to just create laws. Lord, we pray that we would be a church that highlights the beauty and glory of what it means to be an image bearer made like you in relationship with one another for your glory.

We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.