Ain’t She a Woman?

        Other texts, however, are homiletical landmines. Take the Epistle of James, for instance. Martin Luther called James "an epistle of straw." He thought it undermined the gospel of grace by preaching works righteousness.

        Our Old Testament reading is similarly radioactive. Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings for folks who want to win friends and influence people. It’s a field guide for how to get ahead in King Solomon’s royal court – and how to approach life in general. If it were printed on its own today, it would surely be shelved in the "Self Help" section of the bookstore.

Will Willimon, a United Methodist Bishop, writes:

        I understand Will Willimon’s objections, but I don’t altogether share them. (Hey, I was that kid in the fourth grade. Somebody had to write down those names for the teacher).

        The subject – or rather the heroine – of today’s reading is the quintessential virtuous woman – from the perspective of an ancient near eastern man. When I was a pastor in rural Virginia, I was often asked to read this passage at funerals for women who had died in their eighties or nineties. For many in the generation that preceded women’s lib, this scriptural superwoman was a role model.

        Each line in this poem begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. From A to Z, this woman gets the job done.

        Best of all, this woman makes her husband look good. He can sit in the city gate amongst the elders and receive the adulation of his fellows. "Such a wife you have! I should be so lucky!"

        How this woman is regarded by her peers is perhaps another story. You have to wonder if the ladies in her sewing circle are as generous in their praise as the male writer of this poem.

        In her novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, Allison Pearson depicts the struggle of a modern mom who tries to live her life very like this proverbial powerhouse, while holding down a job outside the home. The novel opens with the heroine in her kitchen at 1:37 a.m. on a Monday. She is removing store-bought mince pies from their wrapping and "distressing" them to make them look homemade before she sends them with her daughter to the school Christmas party. She describes the delicate procedure:

        On the one hand, there is much to admire in this old-fashioned lady. She would make a good C.E.O. in almost any Fortune Five Hundred company, if only she hadn’t grown up in the second century B.C. On the other hand, for all her virtues, this woman has no standing apart from the good she can do her husband.

        Truth be told, this woman reminds me a lot of my grandmother, who could milk a cow, plow a field, pick bales of cotton with her bare hands, and with those same rough, calloused hands sew stylish clothes for my sisters’ Barbie dolls. My grandmother never finished high school, but she could quote the Bible with more accuracy than any seminary professor I ever met, and do it while putting up a batch of wild plumb jelly made from plumbs she had picked herself.

        But Opal Shive Loveless did not measure her worth solely by the prestige she brought to her husband, who worked just as hard as she did to scratch a living from the reddish sand of their farm in West Texas. She knew herself to be, first and foremost, a precious child of God, a sinner saved by grace, a lamb of God’s own fold. She didn’t live her life to please her husband. She lived her life to show her gratitude to God, who loved her first.

        If you had asked my grandmother to quote a scripture passage for Christian women to emulate, she wouldn’t have cited the virtuous woman in the last chapter of Proverbs. She’d have told that story about Jesus setting that child amongst his status-conscious male disciples. My grandmother was "the least of all and the servant of all," but if I had ever said that to her face, she’d have laughed out loud and told me to quit talking nonsense.

        At least one commentator I consulted on this passage wrote that the best thing a preacher could do with this text would be to ignore it. In his opinion, the text is hopelessly mired in patriarchy and unworthy of a modern congregation’s attention. This particular scholar was amazed that this passage should be included in the Common Lectionary in the first place.

        I have more respect for modern Christian women than that. This idealized "perfect wife" of ancient times is hardly the perfect model for women of faith today, but you’ve got to admit, she’s got backbone. If you see this woman solely as a victim of male chauvinism, you aren’t reading the text carefully. If anything, it’s men who come off badly in this passage. All they seem to be able to do is sit in the city gate praising or criticizing each other’s wives.

        This woman isn’t Wilma Wallflower; she’s more like Sojourner Truth, the former slave, who electrified the Women’s Convention when it met in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. After a man had told the assembly that women should be cosseted and protected, Sojourner Truth got up and said:

        Ain’t this figure in Proverbs a woman? You bet she is!

        The best we can do is to let her be just exactly who she is, and to thank God that the man who wrote this poem so long ago did not have the final word.