Sermon – September 20, 2009: Gentleness Born of Wisdom
Sermon for Sunday, September 20, 2009 First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Gentleness Born of Wisdom
Proverbs 31: 10 -31; James 3: 13-4: 3, 7-8a; Mark 9: 30-37
Right after we finished Divinity School I was asked to preach at a classmate’s
wedding. I chose for my text one of those charges to husbands and wives from the later
Pauline letters. It enumerated the duties a wife had to her husband, and went on to say that
the husband likewise had duties to his wife, to the extent of giving his life for her, as Christ
had given his life for his disciples. The point of the sermon was the daunting and difficult
degree of responsibility which my friends were undertaking, each to the other, and how this
submersion of their individual selves in the enterprise of marriage was, for both of them, a
domestic instance of Jesus’ maxim that one had to give one’s life away to gain it.
I knew that scriptures like the one I was addressing had been blamed by many
feminists for a certain kind of traditional Christianity’s restriction of women’s freedom. What I
wanted to point out was that the particular verses located freedom for both sexes in
unselfish dedication to the other.
Another friend was being included in the wedding by being given the role of reader,
so it was his job to get up and read the scripture I’d selected. The crowd was largely made
up of recent graduates of a progressive seminary and their enlightened associates, and I
don’t think I’ve ever been in a church and seen the Bible read to a more pronounced
reaction. The duties of the wife are listed first, and her submission urged, before the
husband’s corresponding self-sacrifice is mentioned, and so as poor Campbell Lovett read
the scripture there was audible angry muttering and, if memory serves, hissing from the
congregation.
I like to think I made sense out of the scripture selected for those listeners, and I
hope to make sense out of the lectionary’s offering us today the long tribute to a wonderful
wife and mother which concludes the book of Proverbs. It’s another scripture which some
people regret, as it may be used to suggest that the apotheosis of any female’s potential
resides solely in successfully slaving away for husband and children. Some of you may still
be dealing with reactions aroused by the passage from Proverbs and will have a hard time
accepting what I will now say, but I think it’s true. The proper application for Proverbs 31 for
Christianity is to recognize it not as a description of a sex role, but to see it as a testament to
the power that any human being can possess in the lives of others if love can motivate one
to be unselfish. The very thing that some people dislike about Proverbs 31, that the
person praised by it is living entirely for others, makes it jibe with the advice offered both in
the gospel by Jesus and in the passage we have from the letter of James. In both of the
latter following Jesus is equated with humble attention to others.
It’s not odd that women should be impatient with a Christianity which is grateful for
female devotion and self-denial and doesn’t make men feel the same obligation.
Christianity is a religion of devotion to loving service and serene acceptance of self-denial to
that end, no matter who a person is. Following Jesus Christ leads to looking after other
people, and especially to concern for the weak, from whom the only reward can be
gratitude and an acknowledgment that you deserve better than you’ll get when you’re
good.
That’s how Proverbs 31 ends. Everybody agrees the woman’s so wonderful she
should get some credit in public and a share of the wealth she’s produced. She’s worked
tirelessly and wisely for everyone else and she gets praise, and the idea that her praise
should be more general–that she have a good reputation, say–and they suggest the
extraordinary idea that she should get some direct benefit from all her labor. “Give her a
share” they say, betraying the fact that she’s done all this work without being able to expect
a share. She’s done it for love, apparently, and everyone else who benefited from all that
love is happy about it.
Of course loving other people is fulfilling. God made us that way. Caring about,
caring for others is good for us. The problem some people have with the image from
Proverbs 31 is that there’s an unequal sharing of the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of
caring for others. The woman does all the work. That’s a valid criticism, and why we need to
apply this picture of competent and carefree care taking to everyone, not just to one sex or
the other, or to one age group or another, or to one economic class or another.
The husband in this ancient ideal does nothing, except show up at the end to say
how great his wife is, and to hint broadly that she may have neither beauty or charm but
because she fears God she’s worth bragging about. The only other thing we know about
him is that he “sits in the gates”, which means he hangs around downtown and takes in the
passing scene and solves the world’s problems in conversations with other guys who have
been spared having to look after themselves or anyone else by having a paragon of a
woman take care of everything.
I want to develop the theme of being unselfish as the secret to life but first I have to
do something about the happy husband at the end of Proverbs, because he gets to have
it pretty good without demonstrating any great amount of unselfishness and that needs to
be addressed. We know that in ancient Judaism nobody admitted to seeing anything
wrong in these arrangements because it was a patriarchal society. Some ancient cultural
habit, probably based originally on brute strength, gave men the ascendancy, and all kinds
of social conventions reinforced the subjection of women.
Christianity is against that. There’s supposed to be no privilege to being Jew or
Greek, slave or free, male or female. All have their identity and their hope by participating
in Christ, who is for everyone, across every kind of distinction between person and person.
Equality for the sexes remains to be achieved, and not everyone is convinced that God is
for it. God is for it; and the problem with the way God is for it is that we’re not all going to be
elevated to the position of the husband who sits in the gates and has it good for nothing.
We are asked to be raised, instead, to the confident self-forgetting problem-solver on
whom others depend.
In the beginning of the book of Proverbs, just to point out something I never noticed
before so I now think is clever, Wisdom is personified as a woman who embodies God’s
insight and industry. That’s what the student of Proverbs is supposed to want. Well, the
student of Proverbs is pretty likely a young man, because that was a privileged type of
person in Jewish society, so the wisdom has been gathered for him. The book begins with
a lot of bad choices a young man can make. He can fall into the clutches of an adventuress,
of a woman who lures him away from a life of virtue, somebody with sex appeal, which we
all know can be fatal to sensible decision-making.
In the beginning of the book of Proverbs the alternative mate for the young man is
the goddess-like Wisdom herself. She, and not the woman resting on a couch of spices, is
what a young man should be pursuing. Then we have chapter after chapter of good
advice, and it all concludes with this image of the formidably capable wife. She is the
human equivalent of Wisdom. She orders everything well. She is the source of life for
everyone around her. She also, as the husband pronounces at the end, surpasses what
foolish young men might be tempted to think are attractive qualities in a woman when he
says “beauty is vain and charm is deceitful, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be
praised.” First the book introduces the ethereal female Wisdom as a man’s proper object
of affection and pursuit, and then tells us what’s wrong with the wrong kind of woman, and at
the end shows us that we can have all that godly good organization and sustaining work in
the right kind of a woman. The right woman is one who respects and works alongside God,
an embodiment of the delivering advantages of Wisdom herself.
The two other scriptures are meant not as appeals to young men seeking mates,
but to human beings seeking the life Christ comes to give. The thing which secures
people, in every case, is unselfishness. More than that, it is selflessness, by which I mean
an instinctive inattention to one’s own agenda, so that one immediately is focused on what’s
important outside oneself. This is the wisdom which comes down from above. It is humble
and helpful and adaptable, looking to the interests of the other. It counts on love.
Jesus has a lesson for his disciples which leads to the same approach. Jesus wants
the disciples to comprehend the humility they must demonstrate, the abandonment of their
own importance they must achieve, and so he pulls a child into their midst. The child has no
great status and, especially as unrelated to any of them, is usually looked after by other lowstatus
people, namely women. Jesus says that discipleship means looking after this child .
They must be nurturing, caring, responsible, forgoing self-importance and projects which
look more important to the world. Discipleship is not the elevation of big reputation, big
achievement, big power, big property. Discipleship is being raised to the status of one
who takes care of everybody else, especially the others who are weak. It is by exhibiting
the single-mindedness of the caretaker from the last chapter of Proverbs, who tirelessly
spends self to give life to what’s within her reach, that a person finds the right way to follow
Jesus.