Isaac S. Villegas is the pastor of Chapel Hill (NC) Mennonite Fellowship. This reflection is a revised version of a sermon on Isaiah 1:10-18 and Luke 19:1-10 that he preached on October 30, 2016, at Community Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Last year I was in Manizales, Colombia, spending time with my grandmother. We sat in her bedroom, two chairs with a table beside us, a table set up like an altar. There was a large statue of Jesus in the middle, dressed in a royal robe, a crown on his head, a scepter in his hand—el nino Jesus, a figurine, a doll, looking as if she bought him from some kind of American Girl catalogue. She was a pious woman—mi abuelita. She told me that she prayed to Jesus every morning and evening, the first and last thing she did with her day.

Towering behind Jesus, overshadowing the royal doll, she had a portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mary, the mother of God. She also had this smaller version on her table. I brought it, for show and tell.

After my grandmother told me about Jesus, about what she talked about with Jesus, when she prayed, she with one hand pointed at all the pictures of Mary surrounding her Jesus, and with the other hand she picked up this one, and said: “La Virgen, madre de dios, nuestra madre—la senora María, she reminds me that God is always on my side,” she said, “as a woman—that God chose a woman, that God is for women, siempre para la mujer.”

My grandmother died a few months ago. She was an ordinary saint. She raised eight children, mostly on her own, because her husband died when their children were young. My grandmother and her sister raised my dad and his sisters and brothers—all of them, raised by two women, a household without male headship in a machismo culture, a world run by men, for men.

I think about her when I read God’s words in Isaiah: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:16-17).

God is for the widow, which is another way that God is for women, because in Israel, from the beginning, women found their meaning through men.

Women were defined by their relationship to men—by their father, by their husband, by their son. Women had no identity other than explaining how they were related to a man. They were valued by what they could do for men—for helping with a man’s household, for birthing and raising children, most importantly, male children. A society by and for boys, not girls—for girls only in so far as they were useful for boys.

Women were possessions. We learn as much from the Ten Commandments, written to Moses and the men of Israel: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or slaves, or ox, or donkey” (Exodus 20:17). The “you” of these commands are the men in the community, men who possess things, like slaves and oxen and donkeys and a woman, a woman called wife.

And, apparently, the men needed these commandments because they were going around taking oxen and women that didn’t belong to them. The commandments were a protective document, protecting women from the most egregious offenses of men. If you were a woman, you just had to hope that a decent man would pick you—that it would be a decent life as his belonging, that he would be a good protector.

There’s a thread of sexism that has been woven into our Scriptures. And there’s also a call within those same Scriptures to untangle ourselves from harmful patterns of gendering our relationships. That’s what I hear from this passage from Isaiah: “Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes,” God says, “Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice… plead for the widow.”

Let me read to you a definition of a widow in Israel, the definition of the Hebrew word for widow, for almanah: “a post-menopausal woman whose husband has died and who has no secure attachment to a household headed by an adult male, in which she can be protected and represented,” explains Carolyn S. Leeb. A widow is a woman with “no remaining value to the society and no one on earth to protect her.”[i]

Plead for the widow, God says, because they have no social function, no meaning for the community, no place among the people, no seat at the table. They’ve lost their worth. Their bodies are no longer valued because they are not valuable to men anymore. Yet, Isaiah tells us, God is for the widow even if society doesn’t want her. God is for women.

That’s what my grandmother knew. That’s what she saw in Mary—that God choose to draw close to a woman, that God became an extension of Mary, her flesh as Christ’s flesh, holy; her blood as Christ’s blood, poured out for us; her body broken for us. When my grandmother talked with Jesus and sat with Mary—every morning, there in her bedroom—she knew that God was for her. If God was for Mary, my grandmother knew that God was for her, on her side. In Mary she saw herself—a woman beloved by God.

This is good news for women, given our rampant sexism exposed during this election season. Not that misogyny and patriarchy are new. Those sins are as old as Adam and Eve. Instead, this election season has pulled back the curtain just enough to catch a glimpse of our sickness, as a culture, the disease that infects the male psyche—about how we, as men, are taught to think about women, how we are taught to think about ourselves, our bodies, our words.

This is not a safe world for girls, for women—all our structures of power are set up for men. Like the world of the prophet Isaiah, our world is still set up to privilege the lives of boys and men. And God says to us, to all of us who benefit from this system, “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean.”

Our temptation, as church people, is to blame the world, to blame our culture, to say that we’ve been corrupted by powers outside of us, a sexist world that has invaded the life of the church—that we would have it right, if left to ourselves, as the people of God, spotless and pure from the influence of the world, of our culture.

But the reality is that sexism has been part of our identity from the beginning, from the moment Adam blamed Eve—that’s our story, the story of the people of God. We’ve always been organized as a community that benefits men, that privileges male headship, male leadership.

1 Corinthians 14:34, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says.”

1 Corinthians 11:9, “for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake, but woman for the man’s sake.” Woman created for man’s sake.

It’s too easy to blame the world for our sexism. We’ve got a problem in ourselves, with how we use our Bibles, with how we organize our churches. As a church leader, I’ve seen how we treat women. I’ve seen how women have had to fight, to struggle to exercise their gifts.

When I think about this world, our world, and this church, our church, and how I’m supposed to live out my gender—as I think about my role in this system that benefits me, that privileges my voice, my body, I wonder if Zacchaeus should be my guide, our guide as men.

Zacchaeus has to choose a side. He doesn’t get to have Jesus and all his friends at the same time. He doesn’t get to be with Jesus and still have the respect of society at the same time. There is no third way for Zacchaeus. When he chooses Jesus, he gives up his status in the community. He gives up his respectability. “Zacchaeus hurried down and was happy to welcome Jesus,” it says. “And all who say it began to grumble” (Luke 19:6-7).

As men, what would it mean to betray our masculinity—to live our gendered lives, as male, in a way that betrays ourselves, that betrays the systems of patriarchy that surround us, that infuse us, that colonize our minds and bodies?

What would it mean to queer our gender, to become neither male nor female, as the apostle Paul says in Galatians—to abandon our male privilege, to undermine the male privilege of our brothers in the world, in the church?

There’s no way we can do this on our own, as men, because we don’t know how to see ourselves clearly, truthfully. Our call is to listen, to submit ourselves to the women among us, for them to guide us, to lead us. And the sign of our faithfulness, perhaps, will be a hushed grumbling of patriarchy. As they said of Zaccheus, may they also say of us: “And all who saw it began to grumble.”

And my grandmother will smile from heaven, watching as we become a church par las mujeres.

“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean”

[i] Carolyn S. Leeb, “The Widow in the Hebrew Bible: Homeless and Post-menopausal,” Proceedings of EGL&MWBS, 21 (2001), 61-67.

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