The television drama Mad Men is about an advertising firm in Manhattan in the 1960’s. Watching this show it’s impossible not to reflect on how much has changed in this country in fifty years. For one thing, the characters -- men, women, and pregnant women alike -- smoke and drink almost constantly, whether at home or at work. The clothes and hair styles, of course, also look different. What were you all thinking, by the way?! Now maybe I’m just a Gen X-er, raised on a steady diet of feminism, but what continually surprises me in this show is the roles and relationships of men and women. All of the advertising executives in the firm are men, and all of the secretaries are women. One of the main characters is a new secretary who has just joined the firm and -- simply because she is new, young, and attractive -- she receives constant attention from the men in the office. The best of them at least engage her in conversation; the worst just leer at her as they pass her desk.
So for someone like me who missed out on the fifties and sixties, the office relations on Mad Men are remarkable, but the relationships between the men and women get really interesting when we meet the wives of the wealthy ad execs. For the most part, the married women on the show are stay-at-home wives and mothers. In one scene a newly-married ad exec is on the phone with his wife the day he returns to work after his honeymoon. His wife wants to know what he’d like to have for dinner. “What do I want?” he asks, surprised at her question. But he quickly comes up with an answer: “Rib-eye. In the pan. With butter. Ice cream for dessert.”
At that point my husband turned to me and said, “I’d sure like a wife like that.” “Yeah,” I responded. “So would I.”
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And yet even those seemingly perfect wives of the past pale in comparison to the woman we heard about in our passage from Proverbs. This list of attributes possessed by the so-called “capable wife” is long, extensive, comprehensive, and to be honest, a bit exhausting -- this woman does everything from gathering food to making clothes to buying property. I’m all for the empowerment of women, I certainly believe women can do anything they set their minds to, but the list of things this woman accomplishes would be impossible for any one human being to achieve on her own.
Which begs the question: is this for real? Are we really supposed to live up to this? And who is “we” -- wives only, or all women, or women and men, married or unmarried? After all, a lot has changed since this was written, and now that we’re enlightened about equality and sexism, we’re not supposed to ask women to take this text seriously...are we? Or, at least, if we are going to ask women to take it seriously, then we’re also going to ask men to take it seriously too, right? -- after all, shouldn’t the Bible be an equal opportunity employer?
There are many occasions when we read something in the Bible that seems so outdated, so different from our current cultural norms that it is tempting to simply disregard it. There are plenty of texts in the Bible -- texts filled with violence, texts that demean women or children or foreigners, texts that simply don’t make any sense to us -- that we’d like to do away with, to never read or contemplate. For me, at first glance, this is one of those texts. As a working wife and mother I struggle every day to live up to my own ideas of what a “capable” spouse and mom looks like. I suspect many of you do, too. And believe me, my ideas don’t come anywhere close to the list in Proverbs. Hearing that list read makes my standards seem hopelessly low, even though most days I struggle to attain them. After all, the word capable sounds like it’s describing the minimum. Most of us would probably say we are at least “capable.” The wife described here deserves the label “superwoman.”
But I don’t think this poem -- or any of the texts we struggle with -- is in the Bible to make us feel badly about ourselves, any more than a show like Mad Men is meant to make us nostalgic for the good old days which were generally only good for a select few. Instead if we stick with today’s biblical text and others like it that make us uncomfortable, if we struggle with them, even argue with them, I believe we will ultimately be blessed by them.
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So let’s start by placing this poem about “the capable wife” in context. Chapter 31 is the last chapter in the book of Proverbs. This book is one of several books in the Bible known as “wisdom literature.” It is a collection of sayings, poems, essays, and even riddles that offer advice for living a good and faithful life. Proverbs is essentially the collected wisdom of ancient Israel, addressing one’s relationship with God, parents, children, and spouse.
Because ancient Israel was a patriarchal culture, many of the instructions are more relevant to men than to women. The book opens with a father giving advice to his son. There are several characters in the book; one is Lady Folly, a seductive adulteress. The father essentially warns the son, “Steer clear of that one!” Lady Folly is contrasted to Lady Wisdom, the personification of wisdom and faithfulness.
In the first chapter of Proverbs, there is a verse that reveals the secret of wisdom: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” it tells us. So we discover early on that Lady Wisdom fears the Lord. This doesn’t mean she is afraid of God, it means she respects God, she stands in awe of God, she seeks in all things to honor God and to honor her relationship with God, which is the most important relationship in her life.
Just as that theme shows up right at the beginning of Proverbs, it also reappears at the end, in today’s passage. Chapter 31 verse 30 says that this wife is a woman who fears the Lord, meaning her faith is more important to her than anything else -- more important than looks, than wealth, even more important than perfectly behaved children or a spotless house.
And so, from beginning to end we discover that Proverbs addresses a topic from which we all can benefit -- men, women, adult, child, young, old, married, single -- and that topic is simply our relationship with God and how that relationship informs our lives and our interactions with others. Just as we look at the secretaries in Mad Men who hide their intelligence in front of their bosses and think they are hopelessly misguided, we can look at some of these attributes of the capable wife and conclude that they too are outdated. Yet much of the advice in Proverbs -- including this poem about a wise and faithful spouse -- still speaks to us today as a reminder that we are all called to seek wisdom, wisdom that begins with fearing, respecting, honoring our Creator.
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Where is it that we gain this wisdom, that we learn how to fear, respect, and honor God in all things? Well, for most of us, it is in the church. In church we come together with people who are all trying to figure out what it looks like to follow Jesus. Maybe that is why one theme that runs throughout the Bible is God’s people coming together to form a community. In the Hebrew Bible -- our Old Testament -- that community is the people of Israel; in the New Testament it is first the disciples, then the newly formed church. In the Bible, both Israel and the early church are referred to metaphorically as God’s bride or, in the New Testament, as Christ’s bride. God’s people -- whether Israel or the church -- has a unique relationship to God, a covenant relationship, a relationship that is not unlike a marriage.
So if we look again at this passage in Proverbs, how can we understand our role as a church, as the bride of Christ, in light of the many attributes of the capable wife? One thing that strikes me in this litany of talents is this wife takes care not just of the members of her own family -- her husband and children -- she also opens her hand to the poor and reaches out to the needy. As a church isn’t that what we are called to do? To take care of one another, yes, but also to be constantly concerned with the plight of the poor and needy, to care for them as if they were part of our beloved family, to reach out to them and welcome them into our church, just as Jesus welcomes them.
In the passage we read from Ephesians, the author is comparing the marriage of two individuals to the marriage of Christ and the church. Because the church has earlier been described as the body of Christ, the author extends that analogy to suggest that as Christ cares for the church, which is his body, so a husband should care for his wife in the same way he cares for his own body. The apostle Paul writes extensively about what it means that the members of the church together form the body of Christ: it means that every person in that community has a crucial role. It means that it takes an interconnected group of people working together for that community to thrive, just as it takes a group of organs and appendages to create a functional human body.
Understood this way, we find that it’s okay if none of us can be the kind of wife described in Proverbs 31 -- it’s even okay if we can’t even live up to today’s standards of the perfect spouse, parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt, daughter, son, or sibling. It’s okay because before we are any of those things, we are first children of God, and as children of God the most important thing we can do is seek the kind of wisdom that comes from respecting and honoring our Creator. When we gather together under this roof, in the house where Jesus sits at the head of the table, we remind each other that only when we combine our particular gifts, the gifts God has given each of us, do we become -- together -- an adequate partner to Jesus. And sitting around this table with him, we must also recognize that our table, our house, is not yet full, there are many empty spaces and there are people outside these walls who need to be in here. They need to be here because we need them here, because they have gifts and knowledge and talents that we do not but that are key components of the body of Christ. But they also need to be here because they need to know the love and peace and mercy of God, they need to know that their identity as God’s beloved child is what truly defines them, not the images of perfection we see in the media, not the impossible standards we exhaust ourselves trying to live up to.
The older we get the more it may seem like cultural norms are changing. Women are CEOs, men are stay at home dads, gay couples marry and raise children, an African American is president. It would be easy to regard most of the Bible, and especially a text like today’s, as no longer relevant to the world we live in. But the reason we still take the Bible seriously, in spite of all its contradictions and inconsistencies and anachronisms, is that it points us to an unchanging truth: wisdom, true wisdom, the kind that gives life meaning and satisfaction, begins with seeking to understand our origins: who we are and, most importantly, Whose we are. Together, as the church, we are the bride of Christ, we are God’s chosen people. May we come together in that role, each contributing our own unique gifts and talents, and may we invite others to the empty seats around the table, that we may all honor the one who shows us the way of true wisdom. Amen.
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