Woman of Valor

Here is my message from Sunday. The passage was Proverbs 31:10-31:

Today we conclude our series on Proverbs having looked at anger, words, work, righteousness and money. There were several other things we could have also addressed, that we touched on some, like justice, prudence, obedience, happiness, marriage and relationships and what all these things tell us about God and faith. But we conclude with the one issue that really needs to be dealt with these days, and it was in fact the only theme that someone asked me to talk about and that is what has become known as the Proverbs 31 woman. The passage we heard this morning, at least for a portion of the church, has become one of the most used, and I would argue one of the most abused passages in scripture. Rachel Held Evans, a prophet that we lost way too soon several years ago, wrote in her wonderful book A Year of Biblical Womanhood, “In the [Fundamentalist] Christian subculture, there are three people a girl’s got to know about before she [hits puberty]: 1) Jesus. 2) Ronald Reagan, and 3) the Proverbs 31 woman… Wander into any Christian women’s conference and you will hear her name… [and] Visit a Christian bookstore, and you will find entire women’s sections devoted to books that extol her… [visit any] Christian College” and you will find guys wanting to date her and girls trying to be her.

The Proverbs 31 woman has been held up as the ideal woman. She has become the standard by which women, if they want to be biblical will be judged and the passage is sort of a checklist against women. And that’s all fine and good, if damaging, except for the fact that the portrayal here, or of seeing her as the ideal woman, has nothing to actually do with what’s being portrayed in the passage. And that’s on top of the fact that this being the model of the traditional and ideal woman doesn’t match the reality that what’s upheld as traditional as their image and role for women is very new. And so, I am going to propose an entirely different way of seeing and viewing the Proverbs 31 woman, that I believe is not only more authentic to the text, but also to the tradition of the passage. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first. Way back in our first message on Proverbs one of the things I said was that while proverbs are true, they are not always universally true. That is that different proverbs are true in different circumstances and so they will often contradict each other, such as we say that birds of a feather flock together but opposites attract. Both are seemingly true, even though they say the opposite thing. Similarly, proverbs can’t always be taken literally. We have to seek the truth of the message while not forcing them beyond what they are telling us, and when we try and read them as being literally true they tend to fall apart. So, we have to keep that in mind when we think about the image of this woman portrayed in Proverbs 31, that this is not a task list, a job description for the ideal woman, and to treat it as such as destructive to everyone involved, men and women.

Got Righteousness?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Proverbs 11:2, 4, 21; 12:10; 15:3, 25; 16:31; 17:15; 19:17; 21:13; 24:17-18; 31:8-9:

Righteous or righteousness are church words. Other than 80s surfers who would say things like the waves were righteous dude or anyone trying to describe Ferris Bueller because he is a righteous dude, and then other than talking about people who are self-righteous, that is they think more of themselves, or think themselves better than they should, we only use that term in church. But the problem with even talking about righteousness, or of being righteous in church, is the fact that it has different meanings and understandings at different times and places and in different settings. And so to really address it, as Proverbs does, we have to try and give it some definition so that we understand what it means in its usage so we can then understand what it means for us to try and apply to our lives as we too see to become righteous dudes and dudettes. After all, we are told that gray hair is a crown of glory, or as my wife calls them her wisdom highlights, and they are gained through living a righteous life.

And so I know some of you want to know how to avoid getting gray hair, and therefore want to do the opposite of what we are about to discuss, and others who are coloring your hair, just know that you are covering up the indication of your righteousness. Now, just because you have grey hair does not actually mean that you are either wise or righteous, because Proverbs also wants to say, as the immortal Buck Owens encapsulated in a song, there is no fool like and old fool. And so it turns out that how you know if people are actually living lives of wisdom, or at least seeking wisdom, was by how they lived. But, just as a reminder for those who have been here for prior weeks, or as new information if you are hearing this message on proverbs for the first time, the book of Proverbs was written in order to instruct young men of the upper social classes who are about to embark into the world and entering into marriages and leadership positions to instruct them in the wisdom they need in order to be able to do the right thing, to live a righteous life, to pursue and come to know wisdom, who is personified as a woman. And that idea of doing the right thing is really important because as I said in the first message on this, while Proverbs is about wisdom, it is not wisdom for wisdom’s sake. It is about how we live in the world and it calls for us to be living it out, to be doing it, and that plays a critical role in our understanding of righteousness.

Got Money?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Luke 6:17-26  and Proverbs 10:22; 11:24, 28; 13:7, 11, 22a; 19:4; 22:2, 7, 26-27; 23:4; 27:23-24; 30:8b-9:

Most of us are familiar with the Beatitudes found in Matthew from the Sermon on the Mount, which is a series of blessings, including Jesus saying, “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the kingdom of heaven.” Now we can compare that against the passage we heard from Luke, in which Jesus says, “blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Luke’s version is widely considered to be most likely be the original version of this blessing dealing with financial realities, whereas Matthew has spiritualized the blessing. In Luke’s gospel this emphasis also makes sense because of his emphasis on economics and the poor. And Jesus certainly talks about money and possessions and how they affect our relationship with God and with each other. Of course, Jesus is not the only person to make this emphasis. 

Scripture is full of guidance and teachings about it, and that, of course, includes what we just heard as some of the teachings from Proverbs. And again, remembering that the purpose of Proverbs is to instruct young men of a certain economic class about what they need to know if order to be productive in their lives, these economic instructions make total sense. Proverbs tends to have a fairly positive view of money and of wealth, as long as that wealth was not gained in illicit ways, such as by lying, cheating, stealing or unjustly, to name just a few. and, just as Jesus has a lot to say about money, and we ignore that at our own peril, so too does Proverbs have a lot to say about money, and so that’s where we’re going to be spending our time today, and unlike most of the time in which the preacher begins talking about money, you don’t have to hold onto your wallets.

Got Diligence?

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text Proverbs 6:6-11; 14:23; 21:5, 25; 24:30-34; 26:13-14: 

In 1904, Max Weber, a German economist and philosopher, began writing what became his seminal work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is considered one of the founding works in the creation of the field of sociology. Weber argued that it was the Protestant reformation which created the spirit of capitalism and drove the northern European countries to economic prominence because Protestantism imbued the idea that everyone was called by God to be productive in life, that all had a calling, and that the ideal was no longer to be secluded in the religious life, which eschewed things like making money, and instead the ideal became working hard for the community and for yourself, with all the benefits that came from that. Weber argued that in particular this was driven by the Calvinist belief in predestination, and since under predestination you didn’t know if you were truly saved or not, the only evidence might be seen in what happened in your life, and hard work and frugality were seen as signs of election, plus if you were gaining wealth it must mean that God was blessing you, and therefore another indication that you were saved. Now it could be argued whether Weber is correct or not in his analysis, but this idea of hard work has been tied to our understanding of labor, wealth and worthiness in America. That if you are poor, it must be your fault, at least to a degree, an idea we will come back to. And yet, some of our ideas about work go back much further than Weber. It goes back to scripture, and in particular, to the views, or at least some of the views found in the book of Proverbs. And so today we are going to be looking at some of the proverbs about work and laziness, or a more general term of diligence.

Now to help us understand these proverbs in particular, it’s important to remember the purpose of Proverbs which is to provide instruction to young men of a certain social position as they are about to embark into adulthood, meaning getting married and also assuming their proper role in society as leaders. And so while the proverbs may have been known to those of lower class, or day laborers, that was not to whom proverbs was primarily addressed. Additionally, as I said in our introduction, Proverbs is an overly optimistic book, and while it is not fully this way, it does at least give off the impression that if you do the wise things, and work hard, that good things will result, including wealth and success, and if you follow the way of foolishness that the opposite will result. That is if you do x, y will happen, and thus if bad things are happening, it is not because of outside forces, it’s not because God is punishing you for something, but because of what you have chosen, or not chosen, to do. And since one of the things that the teachings and laws want to do is to make sure first that there is a next generation and second that they will be protected and cared for, the proverbs can make a little more sense within that context.