1 Corinthians 11:2-16 Culturally Male and Female

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his sermon series titled 1 Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in.

Introduction and the Challenge of 1 Corinthians 11

Good morning and welcome to Recast Church. As Ben said, I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here and we are in 2023, I mean 2024. We're past 2023. We are in 2024. Can you guys believe it? Did it seem like, did it seem like it just went like a snap and here we are?

It's pretty crazy. In this new year, my hope and prayer is that we grow together, as Ben even mentioned, growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service. And as far as in our faith, we're going to be finishing 1 Corinthians here at the first start of the year, kind of hopefully kind of by winter on into spring a little bit, we'll finish 1 Corinthians.

And then I think we're going to go over to one of the Old Testament books. I'm kind of toying with the idea of Hosea, but I'm not 100 sure. We'll see where God leads us. It's all God's word, so it's all good.

So wherever we go, we're going to be in God's word. You can be assured of that. And so it's, we'll see where the Lord leads in this new year. The message this morning is what I've heard some pastors jokingly refer to as a spacemaker sermon.

Now what's a spacemaker sermon? A spacemaker sermon is look around, there might be more empty chairs next week than there are this week, depending on how offended people get about the message. And I say that tongue in cheek because I'm convinced that you guys will at least follow what the word of the Lord says.

I am not getting up here to try to make space. I am not getting up here to offend. I'm getting up here to declare and proclaim God's holy and precious word to us. And whatever we do with that is up to you.

But I'm going to be committed to this word. And so some people in our culture are very offended by the church's willingness to talk directly about God's word regarding gender roles. And I'm not ashamed of that in the least.

And I don't give any caveats about that here. As we walk through the Bible passage by passage, book by book, paragraph by paragraph, we will be forced to deal with sections of scripture that are cryptic, are directly confrontational to our culture, or are just flat out confusing.

And I believe that this passage this morning ticks all of those boxes. But not only does it tick boxes, but it also ticks people. It ticks off people. More than a few people in the modern Western culture.

As a matter of fact, on my passage, you can go back into the 1800s and find all kinds of stuff written about this. It was resolved what this passage meant. And then in the 1960s, there is an explosion of scholarship on this passage.

There's probably more written since 1960 about this passage than there was in any generation prior to this, in part because people are ticked off that this passage exists. Do I have anybody's attention yet?

They're like, what are we reading this morning? You'll see. Many who study this passage are tempted to give up on it. As a matter of fact, some more liberal scholars would say this obviously wasn't written by Paul.

It takes a lot of work to understand it. And the little that we do understand seems to be more than a little abrasive to our culture. I'm going to read it, obviously, but as I read it, I'm going to encourage you to lean into some of the tough things that we see here.

There's some tough things just in interpreting it. Paul uses the word head as a literal body part, like the part that's on top of your neck, and he also uses it as a figure of speech. And he goes back and forth between literal and figurative uses of that word, and that impacts the interpretation.

Paul will state a lot of things that the Corinthian church understood from their cultural perspective in Rome that we just don't get. For example, what did a head covering mean in their culture? What did it mean for a man to have a head covering in their culture?

And it would really help if we knew exactly what the Corinthians were doing wrong that Paul sets out to fix. I think I've got an idea of what that is here, and I'm going to obviously be preaching that.

But more than only leaning into the difficulties of this passage as I read it, I want to consider what is obvious from this passage. This issue matters enough to take up Paul's time and attention, for the Spirit to reveal it to him and to the church, and for us to be reading about it in the Holy Scriptures this morning.

And further, I would suggest to you that by identifying that this passage exists, by seeing it in here, relationships with people matter. Male and female relationships in the body of Christ matter, and they matter enough to God to speak into those situations.

And as we live in a culture that can hardly define the word woman anymore, I am hopeful that some of what God says here in this passage will break in through our fog, creating some increased clarity from God's holy word.

God has me speaking into the distinctions between male and female this morning, per his text, because he is the author of life. And this early church was confused about how they ought to be expressing themselves as male and female in the gathering.

And from this perspective, this passage has a timely message to speak to us here in 2024, in an era of increasing confusion regarding gender. So, let's open our Bibles, your scripture journals, or your devices to 1 Corinthians chapter 11.

We're going to start in verse 2 and read through verse 16, that entire paragraph there. Again, recast, I want to remind you this is God's holy word. This is not Don's word. I didn't say this. I didn't write this.

This is what God desires to communicate to us this morning. Now, I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I deliver them to you. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ.

The head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven.

For if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short. But since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God.

But woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head because of the angels.

Nevertheless, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman. For as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman, and all things are from God. Judge for yourselves. Is it proper for a wife to pray to God with her head uncovered?

Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is a disgrace for him? But if a woman has long hair, it is her glory, for her hair is given to her for covering. If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God.

Prayer and the Glory of God in Creation

Boy, do we need to pray. Father, as we come to a text that is so confusing to us just at first blush, I would guess that many of us in this room have read this passage. Maybe some of us many times have just breezed past it and gone, oh, there's the head covering thing again.

Father, I pray that you would speak to us what you desired to originally communicate to your church through this passage, that we would strike all the cultural mess around us and just find what you have to say about the situation here.

Father, you have had a glorious, you have created gloriously. You have designed the world. You have put structure in place. Everything from laws of physics to the way that biology works to plants and animals and us.

You are our creator. You are the designer of this place. You are the one who if things came with an instruction manual, you would be the one to produce it. And so, Father, I pray that you would guide us and direct us into these kinds of thoughts about how high are your ways, how lofty you are, how almighty you are in your creative acts, and that you would allow us to peer into the structures, to live in your world, to live and move and breathe in this place that you have designed and created for your honor and glory.

I pray that you would allow this message to bring us deeper into your glory, deeper into your design, deeper into the way that you have made us, that we would flourish in this place because we see how you've designed it and what you desire for each one of us in our unique place in life.

Father, I thank you for the cross. I thank you for the place where we have hope that this mess that we see around us is going to be fixed. Where we know you created it good, we broke it, and we continue to break it day by day by our sin.

But you are putting it together through Jesus Christ, and we look forward to that day when not just humanity, but male and female worship you in truth, in right relationship with one another, and right relationship with you.

Father, I pray that even now as our voices mingle that sopranos and altos and tenors and basses and all the, and then those who don't even know what that means, all of us, our voices mingle together in praise and glory to you, our creator.

In Jesus name, amen. Thanks to the band for leading us this morning, and I encourage you to get comfortable like I do every week, and reopen your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 11, 2 through 16. Maybe more than any other, maybe more than normal, I want you to be able to look at the text with me and see that the things that I'm saying are coming from the text.

And I rarely do this, but I want to give a little bit of a caveat here at the beginning. I want to state at the start that I pray fervently, that I get the understanding right as I study. I do as much research as I can fit into a week, and this one pressed me pretty hard.

And yet, it's wise for me to state at the outset here that I'm preaching this morning, my own convictions about this passage after some pretty deep study this week. There are many, many, many, many, many opinions about this passage.

There are many books written on this passage, and even the translation in English translations of this vary widely, so that if you have on your lap the new international version, the NIV, it's going to vary widely from the ESV that I'm using.

And just to be aware, I'm preaching from the English Standard Version, so some sections might be hard to connect from your Bible to the ESV, and we'll talk through that. And hopefully by the end, it makes a little bit more sense to you.

This is because of some simple issues that you might not be aware of. So it's not just the cultural problems with this, that our culture doesn't like this passage very well. But it's not just that that we have to deal with.

But the Greek language has one single word in Greek that means both woman or wife, depending on context. And it has one word in Greek that means either husband or man, depending on the context. So you see, gune means wife or woman.

Ener means man or husband. And so only the context will clarify which one. And so that becomes a little bit tricky in this passage. Are we talking about all men and all women? Are we talking about wives and husbands?

The ESV happens to follow my understanding of the text as well, and that is the husband and wife relationship is the central focus of the text. And I believe that to be the case by some of the cultural things that we see here in the text.

Paul begins in verse two with a very rare commendation. So we'll start at the shallow end at least. And that is that there's at least a verse in here that's easy to understand. It's verse two. Most of this letter though, and it's ironic that even that one is a little twisted up in people's thinking because Paul has been really negative.

How many of you have through some of these messages on first Corinthians? So raise your hand if you've been here for at least a couple of them. And the funny thing is I see some of you that were here and you didn't raise your hand and I'm like, maybe you just haven't showed up yet.

But he's been pretty negative and here he commends them. And he says, well, at least you follow, at least you pay attention to me and you follow my instructions. You're like, Corinth? What is he talking about?

What's a very specific narrow way of commendation here? Most of the letter has been negative and corrective to them. But here in verse two, he's glad that they remember him and continue to maintain traditions.

I believe that the phrase there for traditions, it's likely that when it comes to the church meetings, when the church is gathering together in Corinth, they follow at least the loose liturgical formula that Paul left with them.

What do I mean by that? As chapter 11 begins a section discussing the issue surrounding the gathering of God's people, the physical gathering, like when they get together, he is glad that they are doing the right things.

They're doing the right things in their gathering. In other words, he's going to address communion next week. They are taking communion together. Here he talks about praying and prophesying. They are praying together.

They are studying the word together. He's saying, I'm glad you're keeping up the traditions that I left you with. I left you with some instructions. I left you with some things to do. And so I'm glad that you're continuing that every Sunday in your gatherings, but, and here you go, here we go.

It's the letter to the Corinthians. But there are some things about your gathering that need correction, he goes on to say. Of course, of course there's something that needs correction. This is Corinth.

They're always going off the rails for our benefit. Does anybody have a sibling? It might've been an older brother, younger sister. Might've been somebody who always pushed mom's and dad's buttons and you got to see it and learn from them.

Anybody? So some of you have that, had that benefit of being able to see that. Let's let Corinth be that for us, church. Let's let them be the brother who's always constantly pushing the buttons and is constantly showing us what not to do because they have done a good job so far.

And so let me start by reconstructing what I believe, and I believe this firmly, that they are doing wrong in their gatherings so that we can then better understand Paul's corrective to them and start to make sense of this really tricky passage.

Married women in the church who were coming to faith in Christ were in essence, now I say in essence because I'll mention here in a moment they didn't exchange wedding rings, but in essence what they were doing in the gathering is they were taking off their wedding rings as a sign or a symbol maybe of their freedom in Christ.

We don't know what the motivation was, but the women in the church were beginning, those married women in the church were presenting themselves as unmarried. And I'm not exactly sure whether because of the freedom in Christ that they felt that they could do this.

I'm speculating why, but they were doing it. They were acting unmarried. And it was sending very mixed signals out to a Corinthian culture that was already very highly sexualized as we could see in chapters prior to this.

So this is kind of a tinderbox. Oh gosh. This is kind of, I did not even, that's in my notes. That was completely off the, that's terrible. It was a tinderbox though. It was like that. I mean just in all the ways that you can take that.

So yep, just like that. And so in that highly sexualized culture for the women who were in that gathering to present themselves as unmarried was a problem. And just as a side note, there's a bunch of potential reasons why they may have been skipping their quote unquote wedding rings in the gathering.

And that could simply be that they met in homes. That's a possible reason why this is an issue. Women in that ancient time wore their symbol of marriage out in public but took it off or never put it on while at home.

And so they might have thought, well I'm at home. I'm in a house. I don't need to wear my head covering, not wedding ring. So it's all kind of confusing until you understand that husbands and wives did not exchange wedding rings in ancient times.

Instead a married woman in the culture of this time would cover her head with a scarf or a shawl when out in public to show that she was spoken for, hitched, unavailable. Interestingly and just neither here nor there, just a fact.

I don't love it and I don't really get it, but men did not wear a symbol of marriage in that time. They didn't wear a head covering. They didn't do anything. They didn't have a ring. They had no demonstration of marriage out in public.

But the women did. And so they would cover their heads as a sign of I'm taken, I'm spoken for. The hair and the head of a woman communicated a lot in that culture. There's a variety of different things that a woman could communicate by what she wore or did with her hair or head by going out.

Head covered, married. Hair pinned up on the head, available but chased and respectable. Hair down running long over her shoulders, illicitly available and or a priestess of the mystery cults of Dionysius or Sybil.

A priestess available for sexual liaison. Hair shaved, she was disgraced and ashamed. So understanding how this head gear spoke into their cultural context helps us a little bit in understanding what is going on here, at least gets us on a good trajectory.

But understanding the nuance of how they wore their hair or what they did with their head doesn't clear up all of our cultural fog, not in a long shot. It will not mitigate offense from our culture that doesn't want to distinguish at all in any way shape or form between men and women in or outside of marriage.

How many of you know we live in a culture like that now? Doesn't even want to have any distinctions between male and female. But it will help at least to understand the head covering thing to know what we're reading here and understanding their culture.

Christ, Husband, and Wife in the Order of Creation

So Paul starts with a teaching he wants everyone in the church to understand in verse three. He starts with a statement to men. He addresses the men first. Likely, I mean, I think that by the words that are used here, likely married men.

And he reminds us men that Christ is our head. Christ is over us. Married men in the room, speaking directly to you, we are not without a leader. We have a king. We have a lord. We have a master and authority over us.

And he is meek, he is loving, he is mild, and he is just, and he is holy, and he is worthy of our loving obedience. Amen? And he goes on to say that the head of the wife is her husband. And this is not to say that the wife has no relationship herself to Jesus.

Of course she doesn't. Scripture bears that out in so many passages. You can't let this passage undo other passages. Of course the woman can relate directly to Jesus. But the husband here is not assigned a mediatorial role as if a wife needs to go to her husband and then her husband prays to Jesus on her behalf or something like that.

That's not at all what's being taught here. I read so much about the way that this word though, head, is used metaphorically in ancient Greek. Chapters on this. And it is never far, the usage of this word as a metaphor is never far from the actual physical anatomical part of your body, your head, the part on top of your neck here.

What is the head? What the head is to the body is what Christ is to the church, is what the husband is to be to the wife, is what God is to Christ. God is to Christ. In this passage, I have no doubt that this is a leading and a guiding and an empowering and yes, an authority role.

How does God lead Christ? That's a good question. How does God, the Father, lead Christ? In love, by loving him, by endorsing him, by speaking, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased, speaking and uttering those kinds of words, by empowering him, by sending him with authority into the world, by the Son of God, willingly submissive to the will of his Father, all of those components in Father and Son.

And often overlooked in this passage is the glaring fact that everyone, everyone, everyone except for God the Father has a head. Paul is here expressing the core of this passage, that if rejected, if verse three is rejected, it will render the rest of the passage incoherent.

If you don't believe that Christ is the head of man and man is the head of his, husband is the head of his wife, then the passage isn't going to isn't going to gel. You're going to be utterly confused the rest of this message.

Either we accept that God has established the husband as the head of his wife or we will not grasp anything else. So, Paul tackles what they're doing in their gathering that is going against the basic principle in verse three.

He takes for granted culturally that if a man prays with his head covered, he is dishonoring his head. Who's the man's head according to verse three? Christ. He's dishonoring Christ. Some have done a deep dive into historical and cultural data to find what I believe to be the case here.

Why is it offensive for a man to pray in that culture or to pray or to prophesy with his head covered? We have all kinds of statues of the emperors and people and soldiers worshiping the pagan gods. And do you know the first thing that you notice unique about all of those statues as over and opposed to other statues that we have from Greek and Roman times?

Their head is covered. The pagan practices of worship to the Greek gods and goddesses was to humble themselves to take a cowl and put it over their head, to take a hood and put it over their head, to take a scarf and put it over their head, to veil themselves from the gods, to demonstrate some level of humility or something like that.

I believe that it's offensive for a man to prophesy with his head covered because that was tantamount to the pagan practices of the time. We don't know. And I want to be humble about this. We don't know that definitively.

Now, I'm getting off into culture. I'm getting off into some different nuances. The Bible doesn't tell us why the average Corinthian would have gone, yeah, duh, of course it's offensive for a man to pray with his head covered.

You see it in the text? The text doesn't tell us why. You have to do a little bit of digging to get down to what you think is the problem there. But it is given to Paul and also he expects the Corinthians to agree with him wholesale that men should not cover their heads when they pray.

We'll talk more about applying that later. But in verse 5, he gets to the heart of the matter. A wife who prays or offers her interpretation of Scripture in the gathering without her head covered dishonors her metaphorical head, which in the formula of verse 3 is her husband.

And this dishonor, we do know, this is quite direct and teased out in the text. How is she dishonoring her husband by not wearing a head covering in the gathering? Well, she's acting unmarried. She's presenting as available.

I would be very ashamed. And just this illustration doesn't go like a one-to-one correlation. Giving announcements is not equivalent to prophesying or praying in the gathering. But I can tell you definitively that I personally would be very ashamed if every time that my wife got up here to give announcements, she took her wedding ring off and slammed it on the table and then gave announcements.

How many of you just know that? That would be offensive. And how many of you might have a question mark over that act? Like if she came up and she did that every time, you'd just be like, wait, what? What are we doing here?

Don, we needed to get together for coffee and talk. How are you doing? Yeah, no, that would not be good. Now, as ludicrous as that sounds, this is the equivalent to a woman in Corinth standing to pray with her head uncovered.

She was going against the cultural expectations of her day. And this is important because it demonstrates a principle that we think about very little in the church and we need to think of more. And it is this.

We live in a society. We live in a culture. Our faith is expressed in a community of people, a context, which is America 2024, Matawan, Michigan, all of these things. We live among people who do things like wear wedding rings, people who do things like celebrate birthdays, people who do really fun things like watch football, right?

Yeah, I almost heard a go blue there. I'm just going to pretend I heard it. But where those cultural things express God's values, where they come up against what God has ordained, what God has designed, His plan, His purpose, salvation, things like marriage, like sexuality, like gender, like worship.

We ought to be mindful about what we're communicating, amen? Because we are communicating something. I have to consider and check on myself from time to time when I use slides up here. I use illustrations to consider what they mean.

Some memes and cultural funnies will evoke sinful, there's Homer, sinful thoughts in some people. We live, move, and breathe in a culture full of meaning. I don't know if that even speaks to anybody, but when I was growing up, I was not allowed to watch Homer Simpson.

So, that was kind of like one of those things, it's like you throw it up there, but it's like, I don't know what that communicates to people. A Christian has to be mindful. A Christian has to be thoughtful about what they're communicating.

Is this passage saying, thou shalt wear a wedding ring? Is that the takeaway? Make sure you're wearing your wedding ring? I don't think so, but I do think it's saying, thou shalt do whatever is culturally appropriate in your culture to not send mixed sexual messages, including your availability, but that comes down to modesty and all kinds of things.

In verses 5 and 6, Paul uses an example from his culture that once again pertains to a woman's head. Praying with her head uncovered in their culture is compared to the cultural shame of an adulteress who would have her head shorn.

And he is saying here, if you want to look the part of an adulteress and flirt with that lifestyle, flirt with that communication, why not go all in and shave your head? Paul is being, I believe, somewhat dramatic here, and he's speaking this way for shock value.

I don't believe for a second that Paul has any expectation that a woman reading this letter is going to go make an appointment with her hairdresser and shave her head bald as a result of this. He's saying this is how extreme you look when you act unmarried.

The Glory of Man and the Dignity of Woman

But now in verses 7 through 10, Paul supports the encouragement for married women to keep demonstrating their marital status. He says that men don't cover their heads because they in some way reflect the image and glory of God.

The gathering is to be all about God. And this is indeed, I think, a compliment to man saying that God is glorified in man. And yet in a secondary way, the man is glorified in his wife. Man, this is a misunderstood verse, I think.

I'm going to state what I hope is obvious to set the stage. I am not a woman. I hope. So I don't know exactly how this hits for women, but I hope to explain it in a way that adds dignity to it because I think the dignity is already in the passage.

You see, in the very beginning of the Bible, speaking about our origin, speaking about our creation, and what we are therefore in our very beings, the story starts with our creation in His image, male and female.

Different in roles, different in functions, different in glories, tied together in spiritual relationship to our Creator. This passage does not disagree with any of that. It doesn't speak against any of it.

Instead, Paul here is describing the logic of his culture as to why a woman covered her head as a sign of marriage while a man does not. This is not a sentence here in the Bible that denigrates my wife but elevates her place in my life.

You see, man was the original crowning created glory of God. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but there was a time in human history, a real time. We don't know if it was a day, a month, a year.

How long did it take him to name those animals? But there was a time on planet earth when you would have looked to see what was the greatest crowning achievement of God. What had He created that most glorified Him, and what would it have been?

Adam. It would have been Adam. And He said He created it. Good. But we know something more that Paul's going to point out here in a second. There was something missing, wasn't there? There was something missing.

He created it intentionally that way. The place that you can look to see the glory of God is in man. And I wouldn't even extend that word out to say mankind. Obviously, it's not long before male and female created in God's image.

But he does that intentionally. He breaks it out into two parts. So where can you turn to see God's glory? Humankind, man specifically. But where can you turn to see the greatest glory of a man? Particularly a married man.

I believe this passage is saying his wife. And even in a more generic sense, between the sexes, the glory of mankind is found, I believe according to this passage, in the feminine. She is the beauty while He is the beast.

I don't say this to appeal to some form of petty flattery or something, you know, just kind of like nuanced machismo, kind of like, oh, all the ladies are great or something. I say this to assuage female angst over this passage.

And in the least, I think that verse seven is saying something profoundly misunderstood. In the way that God made man at the end of his creative acts, as the culmination of glory, the feminine is the ultimate glory of a man.

I can tell you this personally, and this is true, I think. And man, I recognize that there might be some men that this doesn't resonate for, and that's something you need to wrestle with. But I can tell you honestly, that there's no more profound glory surrounding this man than my wife, Linda.

There's no more glory surrounding me than that. And I think that is a pretty cool reality. I think that's a pretty cool reality. No amount of muscle, no amount of achievement, no amount of accomplishment matches the glory of the wife that God has given to me.

I want to hear some amens among you married guys. I think it's true. The glory of the man is found. The glory of the husband is found in the wife. Paul backs this up from creation, saying that men were made out of mud while woman was made out of man.

What is the greatest thing ever produced by man or out of man? Woman, an image bearer of God. Not kingdoms, not skyscrapers, not bridges, not ability on the battlefield or prowess on the athletic competitions.

None of that matches what God did through man in taking his side and producing the woman. And she was made to feel something missing in him, the text goes on to say. In verse 9 it says, for man, for him, and that can sound possessive.

Look with me at verse 9 real quick. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. And that can sound really like a possessive thing, but it need not be interpreted that way. She is not made for his possession, but in its original context, if we go back into the Genesis story, we would see she was made to fulfill a relational lack that the man had in the beginning.

The only thing that was not good was that the man was alone. God performed an intentional two-stage creation in order to make sure that men know that our race is not complete without the feminine. So the same reasons that support a man not covering his head in the worship gathering is the reason a woman should cover her head during the worship gathering.

The glory of God not to be veiled in the church, but the glory of man to be covered in the church. A wife is the glory of her husband, and when she presents herself culturally as unmarried, as they were doing in Corinth, it confuses the way that God has designed her to be the glory of her head, that is, her husband.

For this reason, Paul says in verse 10, a woman should have a symbol of authority on her head as she prays or prophesies within the gathering of God's people. And then he adds a mystical and confusing motivation, something that really gets at scholars because of the angels.

Any of you ever read that phrase in there and just gone, okay, I don't even know. I actually wrote in my notes earlier this week when I was going through my very first reading, it says under because of the angels.

Can I skip this? I wrote that in there. I wrote that. Do I have to address this? Because it's so confusing. Many commentaries are surprisingly even short on this point, simply because we lack the context to understand it.

We don't know. They would have understood it. For some reason, Paul leaves that hanging. The Corinthians, obviously, he believed and knew that by communicating that because of the angels, they would have gotten it.

And so we need to look into how would the Corinthians have understood the angels. But here's my likely unsatisfactory answer to what the angels have to do with the proper relationship between male and female within the worship gathering.

Significant Jewish traditions explain that the angels present at the creation of humanity are keepers of the hierarchy of created order. That's what a lot of Jewish scholars believed. And so some level of judgment is in mind here that is culturally lost on us, but at least still present by faith.