women — Andy James

a sermon on Luke 1:26-56 for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
preached on December 23, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Music is an integral part of this time of year. We’ve been hearing holiday songs for most of this month already if not longer, and there is incredible variety in style and subject. Nearly every popular music artist makes an album of holiday songs, but the subjects of holiday songs stay pretty much the same. The secular songs talk about winter, cold weather, snow, family, and friends, and the religious ones tell popularized and shortened versions of the various Christmas stories from the Bible along with some material from legends and history.

One of the greatest and most common subjects of these songs is Mary, who is also the main subject of our reading this morning. While we may not hear these songs quite so frequently on the radio, these songs about Mary are some of the best holiday music out there, if you ask me. They take a lot of different forms and focus on many different parts of the story. A lot of these songs are settings of the Magnificat that we just heard read and will sing ourselves in a few minutes, and at our Taizé prayer service the other night, we sang another very simple setting of it that managed to show the spirit of joy in Mary’s song in only a couple lines. Other songs about Mary simply attempt to tell the story of how Jesus came to be born, like a well-known carol from France that tells the story of Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel or the song I just sang by John Bell from the Iona Community in Scotland. Still other songs reflect on Mary’s reaction to the news that she would bear God’s son, with one I heard this year even taking a very earthy view of Mary’s encounter with the angel as it depicts in word and song the strangeness of this very intimate encounter between an angel and a young girl.

But as much as I love all this music about Mary, this year I have realized more than ever before how difficult it is for me to identify with Mary. I haven’t been visited by an angel, so I can’t know what it was like for her to experience Gabriel’s presence as she did. I am not a parent, so I can’t go into Christmas drawing connections between the birth of my own children and the birth of Jesus. And since I am not a woman, I can’t imagine what it is like to carry new life of any sort into the world, let alone a son who would be so special and transformative!

With all these limitations, I think it is very easy for me to miss important things about this story—but all of us stand at a disadvantage here because this story has almost always been told through male eyes. The gospel writers were all men, and although Luke tells this story so beautifully, no man could fully capture the feelings and challenges of a story that is so closely connected to a woman’s experience.

We in the church have too often quieted the voice of women over the centuries. While there have been a number of notable women who have contributed their scholarship and spirituality to the life of the church, it has only been in the last one hundred years that women have been given voice in pulpits in many churches, and those who have a closer experience to this key figure of our faith remain locked out of leadership in so many traditions even today. There is something very much missing when half of the human race is not allowed to offer their own perspective on such an important moment in the story of our faith.

And yet amidst such quiet for women, Mary spoke up—even if we have to hear it through the voice of Luke. Mary spoke up when no one seemed to care, when she faced exclusion from society for getting pregnant before she was married, when her story of divine parenthood for her child just wasn’t believable. Mary spoke up not just to claim something for herself, not just to reclaim her personhood, not just to announce that she too had a voice, but Mary spoke up so that others might hear, so that others could understand what she was going through, so that others could join her in praising God for this new thing that was taking shape in her.

This wasn’t an easy thing for her to deal with in general, let alone for her to talk about—her acceptance of it wasn’t a given. God didn’t ask Mary to sign up for a special trip, give up an evening to go to a sales presentation, or even to make a big donation to a favorite charity. Instead, through the angel Gabriel, God asked Mary to give up nine months of a relatively normal life for the pain and struggle of pregnancy. God asked Mary to take on the responsibility of raising a son at a very young age when it wasn’t entirely clear if she would have to do so alone. God asked Mary to stake her reputation as a virtuous woman on a visitation from an angel that she alone witnessed and that others had no incentive to believe.

But the reality is that Mary didn’t have much else to give—or much else to lose. She herself points out her own lowliness, and it seems that there is not much else she could do to be a part of what God was doing in the world around her. Yet in spite of all the obstacles, all the pain, all the ridicule it could bring, she somehow welcomed the angel, listened carefully, and responded hopefully, “Let it be with me according to your word.”

But her acceptance was not the only way that she spoke up. As she sorted out what all these things meant and talked to her relative Elizabeth, another woman who faced pregnancy in an unusual circumstance, Mary suddenly figured it all out. In talking with Elizabeth, she moved from a meek moment of submission and acceptance to a joyous offering of praise and thanksgiving. As she recognized more of what this child would mean, she was ready to praise God, not just for the gift she had received but for this child who would change everything for everyone.

What is our Mary moment? What sort of request in our lives would bring us to wonder and reflect as she did? What could God ask of us—male or female, rich or poor, young or old—that would challenge us and bring us to this kind of new life? What would make us confront our fears and our challenges and speak up with a word of hope and praise?

Because as a man I can’t know the full meaning of what it would be to give up as much as Mary did, I suspect any comparison I might offer would fall a bit short of the incredible offering that she made. But the great medieval mystic Julian of Norwich wrote of what she learned through her own visions of Mary:

I was not taught to long to see her bodily presence whilst I am here, but [instead] the virtues of her blessed soul, her truth, her wisdom, her love, through which I am taught to know myself and reverently to fear my God.

Perhaps then our words and actions can live out this truth, wisdom, and love of Mary each and every day. We can join in Mary’s commitment to opening ourselves to God’s work in us just as she did—not just being virtuous but living in faithfulness, truth, peace, justice, and love with one another and modeling these things for our world so that God’s new way might take hold in our world. And we can offer our own words of praise for what God is doing in us and around us, for mercy that transforms lives and hearts, for strength that scatters the proud, brings down the powerful, and lifts up the lowly, for generosity that fills the hearts and minds and stomachs of those who are in need, and for promises kept that show us how God has been, is now, and always will be at work in our world.

So as we bring our preparations and waiting to a close and join in celebrating this Christmas, may we do our best to be like Mary, opening ourselves to whatever God may be asking of us, speaking up to call others to join in God’s transformation of our lives and our world, and singing out in joy for God’s wondrous gift of new life born in a manger some two millennia ago and taking hold in our hearts once again this Christmas.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.

a sermon on Proverbs 31:10-31 for the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time
preached on September 23, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

I suspect you might call it a unique occupational hazard: anytime I walk into a church service, whether it be for Sunday morning worship or for a special occasion like a wedding or a funeral, I immediately spend a few minutes analyzing the bulletin. This summer I did this a lot—during my sabbatical, I managed to make it to some sort of worship service every Sunday except for one! I read through the bulletin partly for practical reasons: I like to know what is ahead in the service and what to expect in this different context, because I feel more free to worship when I know what is coming up. But part of this could also be called “morbid curiosity.” What hymns have been chosen for the day? How are they related to the scripture reading? What are the scripture readings? Is the pastor following the lectionary? Will the pastor confront a difficult text, or will she stick to the easy way out?

Now whenever I walk into a wedding and see Proverbs 31, our text for this morning, listed as the text for the day, I start to get a bit worried. I begin by wondering who picked the text, the pastor or the couple. But then I start to ponder what the pastor might say or do with these words. Is he—and it is almost always a he when this text shows up at a wedding!—going to use this text to encourage the couple to embrace traditional gender roles in the marriage? Is he going to tell the woman that she needs to pay very close attention to these words as they begin life together? Or is he going to congratulate the man on choosing a woman who is so perfect in this regard because she can cook, clean, and sew as the Bible intends?

This may seem a bit unlikely, but trust me, all of this—and far worse!—has happened! Some readers of this passage suggest that it simply promotes a return to days of old, with women remaining at home to sew and knit, then take their wares to town to sell, among other practices. One Presbyterian minister, Matthew Henry, suggested in the eighteenth century,

This is the description of a virtuous woman of those days, but the general outlines equally suit every age and nation….
This description let all women daily study, who desire to be truly beloved and respected, useful and honourable.

But even more recently, a commentator suggests that a virtuous woman says to her husband through her actions,

Dear, I’m going to town but I don’t need any money because I’m taking some of the fine linen which I have made and will trade it in for some items of food which you will really enjoy.

Is the point of the Bible really to talk about how a woman is to please her husband with little or no regard for how he should treat her? I for one surely hope not!

When we who tend to think a bit differently about these things come upon a text like this, we so often prefer just to leave it alone. We pass off interpretation of these texts to these sorts of readers who promote what at best can be considered an old-fashioned perspective and at worst is an encouragement for women to be seen as second-class human beings entitled to far less than men. However, I think we sometimes need to confront these sorts of bad interpretations head-on and offer something else. We could spend hours dismantling the cultural gender stereotypes and historical concerns that are a part of so many readings of this text, but today I want to lift up three things that can help us see these words differently.

First, the opening line: “A capable wife,” our translation reads—but is that really the best translation? It’s a nice parallel with the husband in the next verse, but an equally good translation of the original Hebrew can be a “strong woman,” a “woman of worth,” a “warriorlike woman.” (Kathleen O’Connor, “Exegetical Perspective on Proverbs 31:10-31,” Feasting on the Word Year B Volume 4, 75) This strong, worthy, warriorlike woman is quite likely—but not necessarily—a capable wife, and she certainly does not exist solely to serve her husband’s every need, whim, and desire.

Once we start to see this “capable wife” a little more clearly as the “strong woman” that she is, we need to step back and put this text in its broader context. So the second thing we must recognize is that Proverbs 31 does not stand on its own—it serves as the conclusion of a book of wisdom sayings. Several times earlier in the book, Wisdom itself has been portrayed as a woman, and in the broader context of the book, it makes as much sense as anything that this concluding poem simply lifts up this woman Wisdom once again, pointing us to the way of life that emerges from the guidance of Wisdom. The poet is clearly out to make a poetic, not overly realistic, statement here—in the Hebrew, these twenty-two verses form an acrostic poem, with each line beginning with the next consecutive letter of the alphabet. The resulting poetry, then, seems to suggest a lot less about the behavior of a wife standing subordinate to her husband and fulfilling his every whim and desire and a lot more about the benefits for anyone who lives in the way of wisdom—anyone who makes a lifelong, “full-fledged commitment akin to the decision to choose a partner for life.” (O’Connor, 77) What a fitting conclusion to a book that has lifted up the ways of Wisdom from its very beginning—and what a wonderful change it is for even this ancient text to suggest that the model for this kind of Wisdom might actually be a woman!

Finally, this poem can serve as helpful instruction against the kind of attitudes that pervade those old-fashioned interpretations of this text that I read earlier. It can remind us of the countless faithful women who are lifted up throughout the Bible, like those we sang about in our last hymn, who stand with the strong woman Wisdom of Proverbs as examples of the kind of life all of us, male and female, are called and invited to live.

These women are far more than capable wives. They are brave in the face of violence that threatens them, their families, and their communities. They take decisive and hopeful action when there seems to be no way out. They stand up to bigoted men and oppressive systems—anyone who suggests that they are anything less than human. They show the kind of hospitality needed to make space for new and different things to take hold. And they share the kinds of good news that come from an empty tomb, even when no one else dares to speak up.

While there remain plenty of less-than favorable words about women in the Bible, these faithful women, marked especially by the strong woman Wisdom of Proverbs, open the way to a different way of thinking about women in the life of the church and our world, not living as second-class citizens or left only to be “capable wives” but rather to be welcomed as full embodiments of God’s justice, love, and grace for all humanity and full bearers of God’s image in their own lives each and every day. Those places in the Bible and in history where we see something different are quite likely to be reflections of the culture of the time rather than of God’s way of life with humanity, and we should be proud to keep working toward fully embodying the call of the apostle Paul:

There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free,
there is no longer male and female;
for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

So may all of us, men and women alike, be like the capable wife and strong woman of Proverbs, enjoying the benefits of Wisdom in our lives and our world:

living in trustworthiness and hope,
doing good and not harm each and every day,
working fairly and productively for justice and peace for all creation,
making good investments of our time, talent, and labor,
strengthening ourselves for the sake of others,
keeping our lamps burning for safety through the night,
offering a hand to all who are in need so that all might be safe and fulfilled,
being a productive partner in life and work,
speaking wisdom and kindness in all our words,
and living in the happiness of God each and every day.

So may the Wisdom of God come to dwell more fully in us each and every day until she comes to dwell with us forever. Amen.

Speaking Up and Singing Out

The Capable Wife and Strong Woman