10-2-13 Women Covering Their Head

Chairman

Thank you. Again for Jacquie:

“If 1 Corinthians 11 verse 5 is her authority to preach, why has she not get her head covered?”

Now I don’t know whether that you feel that you are not preaching tonight, Jacquie.

Rev. Jacqueline Henry

I seem to remember it goes on to say that if I didn’t cover my head I ought to have my hair cut off. Well I have. So “if a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off; and if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head” (1 Corinthians 11:56).

Well, in Paul’s day it was a disgrace for women to have their hair cut. In fact in my mother’s day it was a disgrace. My mother tells me that she never forgot the time when she had her hair shingled, and went home and her father beat her for it. But things have changed now, and we don’t expect all women to keep their hair long; most of us have our hair kept fairly short. And again in Paul’s day, unmarried girls would wear their hair long. In fact if you look at our teenagers they still do, don’t they? But when a woman was older and married, then she would cover her head; and unless you were a teenager, any other women with their hair loose were prostitutes. It was a way of seeing that they were prostitutes without being too overt about it. So I think this was something that definitely applied to Paul’s time.

And I did want to say that Paul does talk about things that he thinks the Lord has said to him, and things that he thinks are from himself and I did have some verses. In 1 Corinthians 7 verse 10 he talks about marriage and then he says, “To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord)” he was sure that God was speaking through him. But in verse 12, “To the rest I say this,” and then he says, “I, not the Lord”, and in several places Paul talks about the things that he is sure God has said for all time and the things that he, Paul, is saying for that present moment.