Sunday August 9th, 2026 Bulletin
Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
August 9th, 2026
Perplexing Texts: Girls just wanna have FUNdamental Rights
Ephesians 5:22-6:9
When I was young, the church my family attended had three pastors: the head of staff, and two co-associate pastors, one of whom was a woman. She preached occasionally and offered pastoral care. Her name was Margaret, and she had a short haircut and she was a strong swimmer, and she had a tendency to be a bit dour but she cared about the congregation. It was not until I was in seminary, beginning to talk to other women about their sense of call, that I realized what a blessing it was to have grown up with Margaret as my pastor, with the example and knowledge that women could be ordained ministers. As I discerned my vocation and wrestled with whether or not I would go to seminary and pursue ministry as a profession, I worried and wondered about many things: would my faith be strong enough for this work? Could I balance the demands of preaching weekly with all the needs of the congregation and the community? Could I actually find a job, or would I be too liberal, too focused on social justice for a church to hire me? With all of those concerns – Not once did it occur to me that my gender could be an impediment to my ability to preach or to teach or administer the sacraments.
One of my housemates in seminary was a Catholic woman. She remembered feeling called to ministry even as a young person, but she didn’t know what to do with that feeling, because in her worldview and experience, there was no place for women in ordained ministry in the church; only men could be priests and in church leadership. She thought for a long time that she would have to be a nun. Then, she decided she would go to graduate school and study theology so she could eventually get her doctorate and teach – because women still can’t be ordained as clergy in most Catholic churches.
My best friend in seminary, Kathryn House, changed denominations, moving from the Southern Baptist church of her childhood to American Baptists who welcomed her with open arms, put her on the church council. After several years of study, they sat her down in a folding chair in front of their sanctuary one hot October afternoon, and every member of that scrappy little congregation on Centre street in Jamaica Plain laid hands on Kathryn and blessed her, one by one affirming her call to ministry by ordaining her as a pastor. We were in a pastoral cohort at the time and along with Kathryn we all wore black t-shirts from a women’s leadership conference that said: Nevertheless, She Preached. Her brother, who is also a pastor, changed denominations too – but he went to the PCA, which still doesn’t permit women’s ordination. There was stress at the Thanksgiving table for years over that one.
This is the 8th and final Sunday of our summer series on perplexing texts. We’ve grappled with bears mauling children, the witch of endor, Christian Nationalism, and confusing parables. All of those scripture passages were suggested by you all, but this one is from me: the preacher’s perplexing text. Because what do we progressive people do with Paul’s teachings about mutual submission in relationships – about wives submitting to their husbands, children to their parents, and slaves to their masters? This text pushes my buttons as a feminist, as a liberationist, as an anti-racist! It’s problematic not just for women, but for the LGBTQ community – because it presumes typical gender roles and describes marriage as being between one man and one woman. And it’s troublesome for anyone who is an abolitionist, because it presumes not just the existence of slavery but calls for obedience within that power structure!
Look – we don’t often talk about these texts. It’s one of the household code texts, which prescribe roles and relationships within families and in the church. There are several others, most notably in the letter to the Colossians and 1 Peter, but also in 1 Timothy and Titus. The revised common lectionary leaves them out, and so lectionary preachers like me say “thanks be to GOD” and move on. But there is a disturbing movement in our country, of those who want to roll back basic rights for women, lgbtq people, and people of color. There are – increasingly, it seems – Christians promoting narrow, “traditional” gender norms and hierarchies along with white supremacist racial hierarchies. There are evangelical leaders who would have been considered extremely right-wing fringe 10-15 years ago, but who have moved into the mainstream in our current era. They believe and affirm that there are only two genders. That the only acceptable marriage is between a man and a woman and that households and families should be led not in equal partnership but by the husband. Doug Wilson, pastor of self-proclaimed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, advocates for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and a move instead to “household voting,” in which only the male heads-of-household could vote. Even within our own denomination, there is a new movement led by young, ultra-conservative white men who are seeking to infiltrate moderate or right-of-center congregations and “take them over,” to promote anti-gay, patriarchal, racist theologies and practice. They call themselves “Presbyterians for the Kingdom.” Look them up.
So I’ve begun to feel like it’s a disservice to you all, who I love and respect, to avoid these texts. Your identity as a church of true, full diversity and belonging drives our shared witness to God’s love and justice in this place. Maybe it’s good for us to occasionally wrestle with the parts of scripture that are used to justify dehumanizing theology and prop up heinous hierarchies.
So here we go!
First, remember that we can’t read scripture with only our 21 st century lenses, but also through what we know about the time and cultural forces at play when and where it was written. In this passage, Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus, and he’s adding a Christian spin to categories that were commonly used to describe relationships and roles in the Greco-Roman world. Aristotle, for example, framed household management and the role of the Paterfamilias through these same categories: husband, wife, and children, and master/slave. In the wider world at that time, patriarchy ruled, and relationships were defined not by love but by power. Women, children, and the enslaved were the lesser, weaker, lower members of the household directed by the landholding male. Paul, however, wrote elsewhere that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, but all are equal in Christ. Earlier in the note to the Ephesians he claims that Christ has torn down the dividing wall between us, bringing near those who were far off, and making strangers and foreigners into family.
At a time when Christ followers were being persecuted in Roman culture for not adhering to the social norms or power structures that required worship of the emperor, when Paul himself acknowledges the radical restructuring that comes with discipleship – How can Christ believers practice their faith without inviting undue persecution? Model the selflessness of Christ in our relationships. Note that he calls people to mutual submission – not only wives to husbands but also husbands to their wives. To our 21st century ears, this might seem like propping up patriarchy, but Paul is actually giving women and children and the enslaved agency and status that they otherwise wouldn’t have had in Roman society.
We can also interpret scripture with scripture – pointing to the centrality of women disciples in the gospel: the Syrophoenician woman who challenged Jesus openly and changed his mind, the woman at the well who was the first to acknowledge Jesus as messiah, and the Marys who were the first to hear and proclaim the news of Resurrection! And don’t forget the leadership of women in the early church, to Dorcas and Lydia the purveyor of purple cloth who supported the apostles and hosted a congregation in her home.
And, we can affirm what my old college chaplain always said: God gives us brains and expects us to use them! This means we can also point to science and sociology that shows us that gender is shaped by a variety of variables, both internal and external. Falling not within a strict male/female binary, but across a wide spectrum that manifests beautifully in a diversity of ways.
And, we can celebrate our experience of women in leadership in this congregation since the 1960’s, and – my own experience of the Spirit’s hand in my life, resting on my head and moving through the voice of this congregation to affirm my call to ministry. Thanks be to God!