16 PENTECOST, PROPER 20, YEAR B
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY
20 SEPTEMBER 2009
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Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37
Hearken back to the first reading, if you will, the reading from Proverbs. The litany of qualities that make up the ideal wife. This is a poem compiled fairly late, just four or five centuries before Jesus’ birth, compiled from sayings known as Hebrew Wisdom sayings, directions on how to live good and faithful lives. This poem is unusual, since each verse begins with a letter from the Hebrew alphabet, in sequence, forming an acrostic pattern. Did you know that in some Jewish households today, this poem is read before every Shabbat, or Sabbath, Friday dinner? It serves as praise for the head woman, the wife and mother of the household. (Give her a share of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the city gates.” It has also been traditional to recite this poem on Mother’s Day, although until the new lectionary it was not found in the Sunday readings of the church.
That’s one way to look at this unusual reading: as praise and thanks for wives and mothers.
There are other perspectives, though. It’s well nigh impossible to BE this wife! I’m exhausted just hearing her daily routine and accomplishments: up while it’s still night, organizing food, tending to the poor, buying land, planting vineyards, gathering wool and flax, spinning. She has a business making and selling clothes, she’s always happy. I give up! And she does all this so her hubby can sit around all day in the city gates chatting with the other town fathers. It’s clear that she’s valuable simply because of what she can do for her husband. This is patriarchy, the way things were back then. Because of her “he will he will have no lack of gain.” What’s a poor preacher to do with this text? One commentator suggests that we ignore it altogether. “It is astonishing,” he says, “that (this text) should have been included in the…Lectionary at all!
So what DO we do with it? On the one hand this Wisdom poem attempts to be a lovely tribute to women. On the other hand, though, it is hugely unfair--it sets an impossible standard to live up to. No wonder so many people want to ignore it.
But then again, there’s a third way to consider the poem. In those days it would have been an unusual writer who would even have SUGGESTED that a husband would elevate a woman to the glorified position this ideal wife has. Imagine a guy publicly surrendering such power and authority to a woman, letting her take over all household decision-making. Unusual in those times, even daring. An upside down world has been created, with a person of no power raised to an unheard of level.
Many centuries later we hear Jesus, and we see him reaching for a child, a little child. Another reversal of the usual order of things. Jesus reached for the child, not because “it” is sweet and innocent but because a child in those days was ranked with slaves, with little status in the community or in the family. Child mortality was high; childhood then has been described as a “time of terror” (Molina), with 60 percent of children dead by the age of sixteen.
Nevertheless, Jesus reached for one of these little ones and placed it among his disciples. “The only way you can welcome me is by welcoming one of these children,” he said. Jesus was creating an upside down world.
Changing the status quo makes people uncomfortable and is threatening to those who are satisfied with the way things are.
I suppose, when you come right down to it, our lives are always in a state of transition. God’s children, even way back, constantly transition from one thing to another, with the threat of change ever present. It may be that the “capable wife” poem gives a hint of change for women, even then. Maybe.
But there’s no doubt about Jesus. Clearly, Jesus reached out to draw in those left out, reaching down to pull up those at the bottom. That was Jesus’ signature message. The message of the Gospel. Good news for all.
And yet, not such good news for those comfortable with the way things were.
We live in a time of transition, too. In recent decades many left out have been drawn in, some at the bottom have been pulled up. The gospel calls us to keep on drawing in and pulling up until we become one. In an op ed piece last week about changes in our country, the writer pointed out, “Our president is black, the secretary of state is a woman, the new Supreme Court justice is Hispanic, the nation is changing, becoming more inclusive. If some see that as a redemption of promise…..others regard it as an embodiment of threat.” To that list we need to add gay and lesbian people, too, and the further inclusion of them as well as into the full membership of society and, indeed, of the Episcopal Church. The nation is changing, the church is changing. The status quo has shifted. And this is threatening, even terrifying, for many.
One of the most common reactions to fear is anger. This has long been so. There is increasing anger in our country these days. Just turn on your television, radio or ear to the newspapers and blogs. Some of it swirls around the debate over health care reform. But I suspect that what the anger really reflects is fear over other changes as well: people’s fear of the inclusion now, as the op ed piece says, of other people who once were kept apart. People are feeling that they are losing control over their own lives. “I just want my country back!” cried one woman recently. This time of transition is unsettling.
Jesus faced this fear and anger in his own day. Fear over his vigorous inclusion of outsiders into the kingdom he was proclaiming. And Jesus got angry at the opposition to that inclusion. Jesus’ brand of anger was Gods’ brand of anger, which was a response to injustice, to the harm we humans inflict on one another, especially on the powerless. God’s anger, Jesus’ anger (remember the tables he overturned in the Temple?), is a zeal for justice, boiling over for justice, seething for justice.
The writer Kathleen Norris points out that the anger so many of us humans express, on the other hand, is so often a different deal, reflecting the fear of threats we feels this full inclusion poses against ourselves, the fear of changes to our status, fear of our being taken over by people we don’t feel comfortable with. Early fourth century Christian monks said that anger is the most dangerous of human passion. We get tangled up in our anger. And we let our media and rabid politicians and even some religious leaders fan it into full-blown flames.
Whereas God’s anger serves as a call to us to “set things right,” as Kathleen Norris puts it, our human anger plays tricks on us and leads us deeper and deeper into violent words and actions, which harms others as well as ourselves.
Even when we are zealous for the changes God is calling for, even when we are eager for the inclusion of all God’s children into the community as Jesus commands, still the changes can bring confusion and even fear, as things seems to slip forward too quickly into unchartered territory.
How can we live through these times of transition, perhaps acknowledging our own discomfort, but with dignity rather than fury at those making the changes? How can we be those change-agents ourselves? How can we bring ourselves, gradually or suddenly to latch hold of God’s desire for justice and full inclusion of all God’s children, making God’s desire our own desire? How can we let God’s anger against injustice be our anger, directing it towards fixing the evil systems that oppress without railing against those who disagree? And then, finally, how can we let ourselves relax into simply marveling at the new glimpses of the Kingdom of God, praises?
You know, truth be told, I don’t have a precise formula for how to accomplish all that. How we do it is for us to figure out. But I’ll bet we can find ways, with God’s help.