Following the deaths of the Spartan King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the various Greek city-states decided they needed to pull together. Xerxes’ gargantuan army and navy were poised to overwhelm Greece, indeed the whole of Europe. At the eleventh hour the Greeks realized they needed each other.

Traditionally, Greece looked to Sparta for leadership on land and to Athens for leadership on the sea. But in this case there were misgivings about giving Athens command of the city-states’ combined fleets (despite Athens’ contributing the largest number of ships). Herodotus isn’t clear whether the reluctance was due to lack of confidence in or envy against Athens, or due simply to a recognition of Sparta’s moral capital.

The point is: Athens “got it,” to quip Herodotus: civil war in the face of an external threat is suicide.

Or, in Facebook-speak: mutual defenestration means self annihilation. When the enemy is at the gate, that’s not the time to be throwing each other out the window.

Rather than lobby for their traditional right to command, Athens accepted Spartan command of the navy as well as of the army. The result: two brilliant victories — one by Greece’s combined navies (at Salamis) and one by Greece’s combined armies (at Plataea) — and one huge and final retreat by Xerxes. The result: daughters of neither Athens nor Sparta were exported to harems in Persepolis.

There are times that call for a sense of measure and proportion — times when you need not to be doing a smack down on each other. Fifth century B.C. Greece it figured out. Will we?

On one front, we face militant Islamists who have declared a reverse Crusade on us, demanding we either grovel before a disincarnate cosmic monad, or die.

On another, Mormons, arguably the fastest growing religion on the planet, knock on our doors with their terminal niceness (with, as Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven chillingly recounts, notable exceptions) and their uber-Disney promise that not only can you wish upon a star but you can get your own star where you’ll be a god or goddess.

Then there are the angry atheists who grouch about the immorality and intellectual suicide of faith. And just wait until this Christmas season’s (how deliciously ironic) release of the movie based on Philip Pullman’s vision of anti-Narnia: The Golden Compass.

Meanwhile, mainline Western churches languor under the sway of pre-pagan eros and post-Christian heterodoxy, embodying in a way that couldn’t be more precise Jude’s prescient warning about “ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).

It’s an extraordinary time for evangelicals to rediscover the stability of the Bible’s meta-narrative of creation, fall and redemption —  the one true and enduring story that puts the lie to the false stories of jihad, of self-deification, of autonomy, of faux Christianity. A stability that allows us to read each other’s odd takes on the story with sufficient grace to account for the Grace that took on flesh to cover all our inadequacies.

In the end, much more is at stake than when the beneficiaries of the sacrifice of King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” took stock of the price that had been paid for them. Nothing less than the opportunity to embody an answer to the prayer of the Second Person of the Trinity: “May they all be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you: may they be in us that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21).

Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion,—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,—came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter revolves around three sinners who respond to their sinfulness in wildly different ways and with wildly different results. The adulterous pastor Dimmesdale hides his sin, and nearly loses his soul in the process. The sinned against physician Chillingworth never forgives. Instead, he grows obsessively vengeful and finally becomes devil’s food. Hester Prynne owns her guilt, accepts the full consequences of her sin — and even goes the second mile, so to speak, by generously (if misguidedly) protecting the identity of both her paramour and her husband. In the end, she emerges with a quiet radiance about her. She becomes a magnet for others whom sin has left “wounded, wasted, wronged, and wretched,” especially women. She can comfort and counsel chiefly because of her crucible.

It was impossible for me to read The Scarlet Letter and not burn with Hawthorne’s anger at a world and a church that suffered the male pastor’s hypocrisy and the male physician’s duplicity at the sinful woman’s expense. Yet the world Hawthorne longs for in the future — one in which “the whole relation between man and woman” is established “on a surer ground of mutual happiness” — I find in the new creation Jesus came to inaugurate in the first place. How sad that it remains so elusive.

Jesus comes to an adulterous woman’s defense, demanding that the sinless among the (male) scribes and Pharisees throw the first stone, and setting her free when her accusers wither at his challenge (Jn 8:1-11). Jesus accepts the hospitality of Samaria’s infamously five-times-over serial-adulteress (Jn 4). Jesus allows the up-close-and-personal touch of a woman who is marked out only by the moniker, “a sinner” (Lk 7:36-50). Jesus chooses women as first to witness his resurrection, and with his “Go tell …,” makes them, if you will, apostles to the apostles (Mt 28:1-10). Surely, this is part of what he did to “make all things new” (Rev 21:5).

Even the apostle Paul — whom Hawthorne’s Puritans would arguably have considered more an authority anyway — sees a different and new place for women in Jesus’ new creation. Paul notes approvingly the fact that women are praying and prophesying in church — a sign of the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy that the day would come when God would pour out his Spirit on all people (1Co 11:2-16; Joel 2:28-32; and cf. Ac 2:16-21). He calls Phoebe a “minister,” employing the same term he applies to Jesus, to himself, to Timothy, and to what appear to be junior officers in the church — in fact, he (at least as I understand the text) lays out in his first letter to Timothy specific requirements for women who are to fill this office (Rom 16:1; 15:8; 2Co 3:6; 1Tm 4:6; 3:8-13, and note. v. 11). He may number a Junia among the “apostles” (interpreters disagree) in the same way Luke numbers Barnabas among them (Rom 16:7; Ac 14:4). Paul accepts the hospitality of Lydia, an unattached, business woman — no doubt one of those “new Roman women” whom Bruce Winter’s scholarship has brought into relief (Ac 16:14-15). And so important are his women Philippian “coworkers” Euodia and Syntyche — “who have been fellow athletes with me in the gospel” (to render his phrase overly literally, just to make the point) — that he urges their reconciliation for the sake of the ongoing ministry (Php 4:2-3).

To be sure — if I correctly understand two passages in Paul’s letters, 1Co 14:29-63 & 1Tm 2:9-15 — there is a point of demurral. A point at which women in the church defer to, as an Episcopal bishop recently put it to me, “a male presbuterate.” But what that point of demurral is isn’t obvious. And I would submit that according to Jesus and Paul, it’s not the first thing you look for. In fact, you only realize what it’s there for in an atmosphere that is alive with men and women co-laboring together in the gospel ministry. There have to be a thousand ways ecclesiologies can respect the dance that Paul envisions — and the whole argument about “ordination” is altogether beside the point.

In the last few years, I’ve been blessed with a number of relationships and models that have made it more important to me to urge us all to work harder to approximate the world of vibrant male-female co-laboring in ministry that Paul experienced and promoted.

Just for starters …

There’s Carla Waterman, with whom I team-teach in the Robt. E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. Carla is the sister I never had. It’s amazing to me the way she completes my sentences. My, “That you may have life,” inevitably leads to her, “And that more abundantly.” My, “That reminds me of a carburetor that’s got too rich a mix of fuel and air,” invariably prompts her, “You know, it’s like your yard is a jungle you want to make into a garden.” Carla says she looks to me for grounding. I look to her for wings.

There’s Carolyn James, whose books, When Life and Beliefs Collide and Lost Women of the Bible, boldly, biblically, and astutely encourage women to become students and sharers of God’s Word regardless of the shape of specific vocation.

There’s Geri Scazzero who complements her husband Pete’s (author of The Emotionally Healthy Church and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality) voice so nicely, if forcefully — using her public strength to urge him to protect her by telling people the truth, not necessarily what they want to hear.

There’s Vicki Taylor, my co-laborer at Orangewood Presbyterian, whose own tutelage in Christ’s school of suffering gives her a whole-souled winsomeness, whether she’s singing or counseling or mothering or speaking in public.

Of course, there’s Shari, my wife, who has chosen to teach her sons at home, all the while supporting my various ministries — nobody will ever know how much of what I teach or write that is of any value has really come from her.

And, finally, there are any number of women who have come to a testosterone-rich RTS/Orlando for training in ministry. Often from left-of-whoopee denominations, these sisters have convictions that have led them — often in defiance of church officials — to come to us for training that is theologically orthodox. They do so just so they can stand in pulpits that otherwise would be sub-orthodox. Their courage shames me because, unlike them, I’m in a theologically “safe” denomination — gee whiz, the most courageous thing I’ve done in years is force my eyes to accept contact lenses. But these sisters’ bravery bespeaks the promise that Jesus is not finished with his new creation.