can a woman be a priest?

You all know I’ve wrestled, and have been wrestling, hard over what it means to be a man vs. a woman in Christ’s church. I wrote out my rejection of typical evangelical complementarianism comprehensively in six parts a couple years ago, but that was a beginning, not an end. I needed to reject complementarian theology so I could make room for an exploration of right theology, rather than swing instantly to its polar opposite, which is a natural but flawed inclination.

Beginnings don’t translate very well to the internet, where any half-formed thought you hit “publish” on can be pasted over you like an everlasting scarlet letter, as if you are not in fact an ever-evolving human who is thinking and processing and wrestling with God.

Nonetheless, I claim this as another beginning—a start, not an end, at articulating my journey toward right theology of gender.

Since writing that six-part series, I have left one extremely complementarian, conservative evangelical, non-denominational church and entered into a traditional, hierarchically-structured, Anglo-Catholic leaning mainline Protestant church. Not exactly the feminist flag-waving egalitarian situation anyone expected (least of all me).

In the Anglican Church of North America, the ordination of women is an open question. It is debated among the College of Bishops. Some dioceses have decided that women should be ordained as priests; others (including mine) have decided they should not, although a woman discerning the priesthood could technically be ordained under the oversight of an affirming diocese outside her own. I don’t know which side has it “right,” but I am certain that this space of tension and debate is healthier than the prideful, fear-based shutdown of either extreme.

That’s why I remain.

When there is enough respect between the differences of opinion to hear one another’s best cases, to assume good faith, and to acknowledge there is merit in both sides, there tends to be more respect for everyone—including the women whose lives hang in the balance of the debate. For example, my priest is of the opinion that the diaconate and priesthood ought to be reserved for men, but he is also willing to learn from women. He is able to see the God-given wisdom in women. He is not afraid to discuss even the hottest of theological debates with women.

Perhaps this is what I wish complementarian pastors and Christians knew: Even if I think there are problems with the complementarian position, the biggest problem I’ve seen is a lack of respect for women (and their advocates) as thoughtful human beings who deserve to be heard—not shut down, not treated as dangerous or deceptive, not whispered about in elders’ meetings behind closed doors. If you can’t be respectful in debate, how can we trust you to respect us in any other setting?

A serious handling of the differences between men and women must be willing to see and consider the nuances of where women are welcomed in Scripture. Jesus welcomed women as apostles (John 20:16-17); Paul welcomed them as deaconesses (Romans 16:1); Philip welcomed them as prophetesses (Acts 21:9). If we are still asking questions like “Should women have any co-ed leadership positions in the church?” we are hardly having a serious debate, because clearly they should and did, and the current efforts to shut them out of preaching and teaching and leadership ministries are merely a reaction to a cultural moment, not a reflection of God’s heart or God’s Word.

But “Should a woman be a priest?” is a serious question that I’m still mulling over. There are no Jewish or Christian priestesses in the Bible, though there are women teachers, preachers, evangelists, missionaries, prophets, judges, rulers, and worship leaders. This demands us to ask further questions: “What makes a priest different from a teacher, preacher, evangelist, missionary, prophet, judge, ruler, or worship leader?” In most evangelical churches, not much: the pastor is the teacher, the preacher, the evangelist. If a woman is endorsed by God to do all those things, what stops her from being a pastor?

I think this is where being in an Anglican setting has helped me understand. The priest in an Anglican church isn’t just the person who leads the service and gives the sermon. Anyone could do that—in fact, women are welcome to lead prayer services and teach co-ed catechesis in my church. But in the communion service, the priest acts in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” to distribute Christ’s body and blood to the people in the Eucharist.

That’s a completely different set of responsibilities than anything else on our list.

If the Eucharist is all symbol and no sacrament—as it’s treated in non-mainline churches—then it makes very little sense to me why a woman couldn’t be a pastor. But if it is a sacrament, if there is mystery, it makes a lot of sense to me that she couldn’t be a priest.

A woman can’t act in persona Christi. Christ came as a human male, not a human female.

Christ came as the new and better Adam, not the new and better Eve—He came to correct where Adam failed, for the sake of Eve, not where Eve failed for sake of Adam. Adam’s failure was in tending to the garden as the guardian of the sacramental fruit. The priest, in persona Christi, tends the sacramental bread and wine for the Bride of Christ.

If we overgeneralize the maleness of Christ to give all men a spiritual calling or status that all women can’t have, we fall directly into the Genesis 3:16 power dynamic that Jesus lived and died to abolish. But if we erase the maleness of Christ altogether as a meaningful distinctive of why He came, we lose a vital pattern-key to exactly how He fits into the whole Biblical narrative, and what He continues to accomplish through His body and blood.

Having a priest hold up the bread and the cup each week and say, “Behold the Lamb of God. Behold Him who takes away the sin of the world. Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb,” has become a comforting reminder that God Incarnate came to right every wrong—all the way back to when Adam failed to tell Eve the whole story of the sacred trees and then stood by silent while she chose death. Sure, untold numbers of such priests and pastors have also failed miserably to protect the Bride as they ought (the ACNA’s own current archbishop being a prime example), but Jesus didn’t. Jesus loved her as His own body and laid down His life for her.

Does all this mean I think it’s wrong for a woman to be a priest? No idea. Maybe. Maybe not. I waffle between wondering how much sleep God really loses over the chromosomes of the person handing out the bread and remembering that He struck dead the two priests, Nadab and Abihu, who offered “strange fire” in Leviticus.

Either way, I trust that there is something that matters about being created male or female. Women have a distinct capability that no man can have in the bearing and nurturing of children. In the human family, only women can be mothers. Perhaps in the family of Christ, only men can be “fathers”—though sometimes the fatherhood of a priest looks more to me like mothering, as he is charged with all the motherly activities of nourishing, discipling, catechizing, nurturing, knowing, guiding, and loving the “children” who make up his parish. (And like a mother, he never gets a break.)

Or to say it another way, maybe women are made to be priests—of a different sort of church. We are the priests of the temples of our homes, a different kind of sacred space. As much as I sometimes wish otherwise, I am not replaceable in my home—my husband can help me and try his best to imitate me, but only I will ever be Mama. Only I will ever be the one who can nourish and disciple and catechize and nurture and know and guide and love like a mother.

Unfortunately, the churches that most need to wake up and have this discussion in a productive way are also the ones who have thrown the baby out with the Roman Catholic bathwater. Priests, Eucharists, sacraments, mystery—they’re all just parts of the pre-Reformation boogeyman. So I doubt this post gets much further than helping me think through my own ideas with more clarity. But that’s okay.

as a beautiful olive tree in the field

I type this while intermittently staring at “Our Lady of the Olives,” which rests against the wall just above my computer screen. It’s a print of a painting by Nicolò Barabino: A white-and-deep-blue clad Mary holding an infant Jesus on her lap, framed by olive branches and a floral-wreath border. The top of the painting says Quasi Oliva Speciosa in Campis.

As a beautiful olive tree in the field.

Serendipitously, Trader Joe’s was selling little potted olive trees today. I bought one. Today is the anniversary of the day my girls and I went to the little white Anglican church for the first time.

One year of being weekly washed in the water of the Word.

One year of dwelling in the body of Christ, and inviting Him to dwell in me, at the sacramental table.

One year running free, unencumbered by the burden of needing to know and be right about everything.

It’s been a year of asking questions (so many questions), learning, and consistently being humbled by the rigidity of my paradigm or the incompleteness of my understanding. A year of noticing how many things I have gotten exactly backward, and never thought twice about before. A year of discovering—as if for the first time—who God is.

Thus, Our Lady of the Olives graces my desk. A reminder that God humbled Himself to come to us fully human: the kind knit together cell by cell in a mother’s womb, the kind birthed through blood and travail, the kind that becomes an inconsolable newborn or a tantruming toddler or a strong-willed child. A reminder that the Father crucially partnered with Mary—and many women before her, all the way back to Eve—to enact redemption, and that for a time, she was His very tabernacle dwelling. Somehow a holy God did not think Himself too good for us, even though we so often think ourselves too good for Him.

A reminder, too, that the Creation project began with a temple garden, lush with life and color and goodness, like the flowers that frame the figures in the painting. That the Creator delights with me in my garden’s blossoms, my children’s antics, my home’s sanctuary. He tabernacles here with us.

I went looking for Him in so many places—across the country, overseas, at a certain type of church, inside a certain version of the Bible, in my own ideas and projects and “glorious purpose”—and though He never abandoned me in any of those things, I found Him here.

Little old here.

Common and nondescript, but simultaneously significant. Like a beautiful olive tree in the field.

Like a little white church on the corner.

the Pharisees vs. the Gospel

In the not-quite-nine years of this blog’s existence, I have published 249 posts and currently have a backlog of 99 drafts. So if you’re reading this, this post managed to become the 250th post instead of the 100th unfinished draft. Random fact of the day.

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One of my very first weeks at the Anglican church, a line from Father Joe’s sermon stuck with me: “In my previous tradition, the Baptist church, what we seemed to care about most was how to be really good at arguing.”

I’ve never been Baptist, but I’ve been in a fair number of churches where the primary value was definitely arguing. The “best” Christians were always in a defensive stance, holding onto the Bible as both sword and shield, as if our purpose was to guard God Himself from the people and ideas “out there.” I learned all the tactics and talking points, and I learned the Bible really well so I could make even better moves than most. When I was in it, it was fun, like playing a sport with my “team,” and all the camaraderie and belonging that entails—even though in reality, we were little more than gossips and keyboard warriors, too cowardly to have meaningful discussions with real people about real things that didn’t fit neatly into our categories.

If I had stopped there with my study of the Bible instead of digging deeper, if my life had stagnated instead of winding through periods of intense pain and change, if God had not proved far more faithful to me than I was to Him, I’d probably still be having fun playing for that team in our imaginary game—while blind to the real war trying to rip God’s Creation apart.

This is the war Jesus came to fight, not as a great arguer or even a great warrior, but as a human baby, a growing boy, a man of sorrows and a suffering servant. He expanded the boundaries of God’s holy kingdom by feasting with the poorest sinners. He rebuked those who weaponized the Scriptures by being the Word of God in the flesh. He seized authority over all Creation by bowing His neck to His accusers, He ascended to the throne of heaven by being crowned with thorns and raised up on an execution tree, and He shattered the power of death by committing His spirit into the hands of God.

And He left us with one job: to take the good news of His kingdom to every corner of the earth, welcoming people from every tribe and tongue and nation to the glorious banquet halls of His communion table, where there is no space for the greed and self-importance of the flesh. This vocation is the continuation of Christ’s mission to sew the world back together, to undo the power structures and value judgments and myriad abuses of a post-Edenic humanity through the abundant hospitality of the Holy Spirit. To usher in the New Creation.

The real war is not the old game of “my church vs. the outside world.” It’s not Christians-who-are-right-about-everything vs. Christians-who-are-wrong. It’s not cultural ideas vs. God, who needs His army of Bible-wielders to shield Him; it’s not conservatives vs. progressives; it’s not men vs. women or white vs. black or rich vs. poor.

In this country, like ancient Israel before us, it’s a lot more like the Pharisees vs. the Gospel of Jesus Christ (see Luke chapter 15).

We can all stand on the defensive around an invisible idol, protecting our small god and his many demands and limitations from anyone’s questioning, or we can lay down our weapons and come together to the table of the bounty of the King of Kings. He is delighted for anyone to repent and return to His open arms—the question is, will we, too, be delighted when even sinners are welcomed to eat at this table? Or, like the embittered older son who did everything “right,” will we resent our Father’s goodness toward the prodigals, and reveal ourselves to be a long way off from the true heart of God?

Jesus said of the Pharisees in His day,

“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”

Matthew 23:2-4

This was the reality of being on that argumentative “team.” I could tell you all the right things to do and think and believe, and back them up with Bible verses—but never lift a finger to love you through your real-life pain, proving my knowledge to be meaningless.

I’ve grown weary of spending my life on the defensive for a God who does not need my defending. Let me spend it instead throwing open the doors of His love, mercy, and grace for every hungry soul I can find, whether they fall in line with my particular statement of beliefs or not.