The Proverbs 31 Sermon I Should have Started With
Proverbs in our lives • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Last Wednesday, I made a number of mistakes. So let’s get right to it and start over with the sermon I should have preached on Proverbs 31, annotated with the Proverbs that I might could have listened to and avoided this whole thing.
So here goes.
Proverbs 31 is a chapter that has been used to traumatize generations of young women into believing that they can never live up to what they should be, but that they should spend their whole lives grinding away, working day and night trying to reach the impossible standard.
That is spiritual abuse, even if the people who said so were well-meaning.
I thought I could thread the needle and lift up some of the virtues described in the chapter (in a general sense) while speaking words of hope that no one lives up to the standards but Jesus.
Proverbs 10:19 “When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but the prudent are restrained in speech.”
I felt like leaving the chapter alone would seem like running away from a challenge.
Proverbs 16:18 “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
I thought I understood enough of women’s experience that I could speak to it.
Proverbs 15:22 “Without counsel, plans go wrong, but with many advisers they succeed.”
Of all people, I should have known better.
My title in my day job is Data Consultant, but my training and background comes from Sociology. Every year, at the American Sociological Association conference, dozens of people walk around in shirts with slogans like “Cite black women” - because despite being a discipline focused on understanding systemic inequality with a rich diversity of social scientists, the most influential papers and journals remain dominated by white men, even in fields like gender studies. What’s more, in a discipline that is concerned with the intersection of different marginalized identities and how they affect people’s lives, it would be tough to argue that goal is possible to reach without listening to the people themselves. Every year, I’m reminded visibly of all of this, and every year I acknowledge they’re correct.
And yet.
I thought since I was doing a sermon series on Proverbs, I needed to cover it’s most controversial chapter, chapter 31, on the capable wife.
I thought that since I knew it was controversial and had been used to hurt people, I could help remedy some of that.
I thought that, as a sociologist and caring husband and person who tries to advocate for people who don’t have the advantages I do, I thought I had the tools.
I thought that if I read a handful of commentaries and rejected the ones that were misogynistic (like the one that talked about “screeching feminists”), I could pull things together and create a better balance.
But you know what I didn’t think to do?
I didn’t seek out what women hurt by the impossible standards of Proverbs 31 had written or said about it and cite women about women’s issues. Instead I relied on what I had to hand, despite none of the half-dozen commentaries on Proverbs that I had handy being written by a woman.
I didn’t ask those around me whom I knew had struggled to escape the grip of purity culture and oppressive gender standards about whether or how I should talk about what I knew was a delicate issue.
I didn’t stop to consider the damage that taking a “both and” approach - that there’s problems and good advice OR that it’s symbolic and impossible but also aspirational - to consider the damage that could do.
I should have known better.
After all, Proverbs is full of advice I could have heeded.
The clever see danger and hide;
but the simple go on, and suffer for it.
The reward for humility and fear of the Lord
is riches and honor and life.
Thorns and snares are in the way of the perverse;
the cautious will keep far from them.
Folly takes the easy path, while wisdom is cautious, humble, and does not step beyond their capability. And my experience cannot suffice to interpret this.
So I tried to take the advice I’ve been sharing with y’all. I slowed down, I listened, I read, and I filtered my impulses through those who know better.
In particular, I read Anna Gazmarian’s new book “Devout: A Memoir of Doubt,” and by “read” I mean devoured in a single day. Gazmarian is a poet, wife, and mother who grew up evangelical and deals with multiple complex mental conditions.
She has a complex relationship with faith and the church, in part because she was so often looked down on or even actively rejected because she didn’t meet the very specific and strict standards of their interpretation of an ideal woman. She failed to show up to classes when in the throes of depression. She dared to share the truth when she struggled to feel good or doubted her faith. She even dared to date someone who was in the process of becoming a church leader and then stop dating. Never mind that the breakup was because that person decided to go out with someone else, she was eventually asked to stop participating in the life of that church once he became a ministry intern, because the leaders worried she could be a “distraction” for him. In a telling section about her experience of college Christian small groups, she writes:
Sitting with these girls, I was angry that the Bible was being used as a weapon designed to minimize my experience. Surely that wasn’t what a loving God would do. (53)
I don’t think Gazmarian has stopped doubting and struggling with faith, though she has found a faith community and husband that welcome her in all her messiness.
And the book is remarkable in that it seamlessly weaves together stories that reveal the depth of ups and downs in her life with not only factual (research-based) information about mental health conditions and what we know about treating them and stories from the Bible that help give meaning to both her perspective and those of others around her, good and bad.
She can do this in part because she has continued to read the Bible daily her whole life, but as she has explored and claimed her own faith, she has interpreted them in ways that are consistent with her experience of the world, despite the struggle, in her words “learning to accept the good that had been salvaged” (130).
The portrait of women in Proverbs 31 can be critiqued as dependent on belonging in an extremely privileged class to start, with access to servants and fine materials. Or it could be treated purely as metaphor, an extension of the personification of wisdom that ultimately points to Jesus. It could be discussed as empowering and countercultural and pro-woman for its time.
But the truth is that sometimes the trauma that something has been used to inflict means that it’s no longer useful, at least for now, whether or not there is some truth or value theoretically embedded in it.
And let’s be clear - this isn’t a critique of usefulness in some sort of post-modern take what feels good version of faith. The scriptures, especially the Gospels, constantly emphasize one interpretive key. In the words of Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth a Johnson “Christian teaching must serve care of all in every instance”. If you read the Bible or listen to a sermon and come away feeling like it’s our job to treat certain people as lesser or demand the impossible of certain groups, something has gone wrong.
If men are the only or the chief players, then women are inevitably auxiliary to their deeds. But if women’s contributions and struggles are equally valuable, then the story must be told a different way. The point is not just to include women in existing narrative structures in order to make the dominant paradigm look inclusive (the “add women and stir” strategy); rather, the goal is to reshape that narrative paradigm so that female perspectives are as central as male ones in a community of mutuality (the “change the recipe” strategy).” (Friends of God and Prophets, 33)
Add to that Ada Maria Isasi Diaz’ perspective:
“For Hispanic women, the questions of ultimate meaning that form the core of mujerista theology are basically questions of survival, which here means much more than barely living. Survival has to do with the struggle to be fully. To survive, one has to have “the power to decide about one’s history and one’s vocation or historical mission.”” (En La Lucha, 34)
These women aren’t writing from the privileged perspective of the woman in Proverbs 31 that can afford finely colored clothes for their children. They draw on the experience of domination, subjugation, exploitation, and repression and challenge us to reject interpretations that place any kind of unjust expectations on women, children, or the poor.
This perspective is deeply familiar in Proverbs. To take just one example:
Do not rob the poor because they are poor,
or crush the afflicted at the gate;
for the Lord pleads their cause
and despoils of life those who despoil them.
They don’t reject the Proverbs or Wisdom tradition though, despite passages that have been problematic. In fact, Johnson lifts it up, writing:
“interpreting the friendship and prophecy of the gospel tradition in the context of the wisdom tradition shows that the passion of God is clearly director toward lifting oppressions and bringing life to the world.”
Proverbs teaches us that the wise person fears, loves and trusts God, but is also both pragmatic (recognizing the realities and limits of the world they are in) and ethical (treating all fairly and taking special care for family, children, the poor, and those lacking the training to make their own wise decisions).
Jesus declared he came that [all] may have life and have it abundantly. So I guess my closing message of this series on Proverbs is this: take advantage of the wisdom in Proverbs and throughout the Bible. Bind it on your heart as a hedge against the voice of folly. But use it to find strength and hope in love, and reject any interpretation (yours or someone else’s) that fails that test. Can we as individuals or a society be legitimately convicted and called to change by the words of Scripture? Certainly. But we are called to judge and tear down neither others nor ourselves. God has called ALL OF US good; who are we to disagree?
Don’t stop engaging the scripture if you feel like its standards rob you of hope. Instead, seek out where the hope is. The idea that all (good) Christian women (or anyone) are failures if they don’t work 18 hours a day selflessly, both caring for the poor and creating prosperity - that idea doesn’t square with Jesus’ message or the message of Proverbs. Yet, an entire generation of young Christian women in the US was raised up with that model held up as a paragon of virtue. The rod of discipline (figuratively) is necessary at times to learn and grow - but the fear which is the beginning of wisdom is not fear for ourselves (whether fear of failure or of punishment) but awe of the Lord - the kind of awe which leads us to trust and follow Jesus.
Just as pastor Kelley Bayer Derrick taught us last month, taking up our cross isn’t about suffering. It’s about following God’s calling in our own lives, which will look different for each of us depending on our context and our gifts. My hope is that as we approach Holy Week and Easter, you have been nourished and challenged to seek out the message of scripture, the message of God’s wisdom, and ultimately the message of the cross and resurrection in how you live your life, firm and content in the knowledge that God’s wisdom in Jesus will continue to seek us out, even after we submit ourselves to folly and turn back toward the Lord (and others) looking sheepish.