Proverbs 31 (links validated 8/8/24a)

Arguably no one has better resuscitated the mangled overuse of Proverbs 31 the way that Rachel Held Evans did in her 2012 book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. This book recounts the year Evans spent trying on and living out every one of the Bible’s command explicitly directed toward woman. In January of that year, she focused her attention on Proverbs 31. As she had been tacitly and explicitly instructed throughout her life, she decided to make this poem into her to-do list. Getting up before dawn, she made it her mission to do what the woman in this poem does every day and even long into the night. After all the text is clear, “Her lamp does not go out at night.” After a lifetime of hearing the text the way I warned about at the start of this commentary, Evans glories — nearly crows — over the best translations of the Hebrew phrase “eschet chayil,” which bears no small meaning...

Proverbs 31 is a little like that: it’s a glimpse into the distant past. This chapter is a window on another time, an ancient culture, a society structured very differently from our own. Sometimes we forget that. When you’re looking at an old photo of your great-grandparents, sometimes maybe you quietly assume that if by some magic trick of time travel you could get back to that day when the picture first was snapped, you would fit in pretty well. You imagine you would maybe enjoy talking with those folks, driving that old Ford, and spending a few days in that house during that time. But if you could travel back in time, you might discover you wouldn’t fit very well after all because so much would be different that you’d feel lost. You’d hop in the old Ford and turn the key only to find that nothing happens. After all, what’s a starter button? In conversations with relatives from back then, you might be unsettled to hear the vaguely racist way they refer to various ethnic minorities (and maybe it would not be so vague!). You might be struck by how little they know of the wider world (having maybe never traveled more than 50 miles from home). If you described your life to them–including things like movies, shopping malls, restaurants, and travel abroad–your pious and well-meaning forebears might slap a “worldly” label on you. Exploring Proverbs 31 is like that—it’s a trip back in time. When we forget that and try to make these verses some kind of a contemporary portrait, that is when we may get led astray.

A recent issue of Time magazine had a fascinating piece on Serena Williams. She is arguably the greatest tennis player of all time (male or female), a creator and displayer of fashion, a public figure and outspoken woman. And she has just become a wife and mother. Her description of her struggles to be perfect is moving. Across a picture of her on the front cover are the words, “Nothing about me right now is perfect. But I’m perfectly Serena.” In the article, she says, “I still have to learn the balance of being there for her, and being there for me. I’m working on it. I never understood women before, when they put themselves in second place or third place. And it’s so easy to do.” The stress of juggling family and career has brought out the same insecurities in Serena as other parents feel. “I don’t think I’m doing it right.” One wonders how Serena would react to Proverbs 31 and the comments above about “fearing the Lord” and about reading this description of a noble wife in the light of the Gospel.

If you are from an old-enough generation, you may remember the tv commercial (I'm assuming it was just a USA commercial, but I don't know...) in which a woman sang, "I can bring home the bacon...fry it up in a pan..." The song was related to "I'm a Woman," written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and sung by Peggy Lee. The song begins, "I can wash out forty four pairs of socks and have 'em hangin' out on the line..." The refrain is "'Cause I'm a woman...W-O-M-A-N! I'll say it again." The woman described in Proverbs 31 begins to take on some of that superwoman aura. She seems to do it all. Home, family, business. Everything she touches turns to gold...

Scroll down the page for Mann's reflection.

("At one time or another it is something maybe most of us experienced, probably as young children. Perhaps you were at your great-grandmother's house, rooting around under an old bed or in some musty closet when suddenly you ran across a shoebox. Curious, you slipped off the cardboard lid and peered inside.....")

I want to share with you an event that happened in this sanctuary after our formal worship was done last Sunday. I say after our formal worship was done because quite often that is when another form of worship begins. One of our members was going to have chemotherapy this past week for the very first time. If you can imagine what it is like to know that a poisonous chemical is going to be pumped into your body in a couple of days—extreme anxiety doesn’t quite name it. But two of our members, who had already been through all of that, went over and simply sat with her, listened and shared their own stories. Out of their own weakness they gave the gifts of comfort, strength and courage. She phoned me later in the week and said that those two were heroes...

Scroll down the page for this resource.