A Woman of Substance: A Sermon for 6 Easter by the Rev'd Emily Rose Proctor
I don’t usually depart from the lectionary, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to preach on Proverbs 31 on Mother’s Day. After all, this poem has been alternately titled: The Good Woman, The Good Wife, The Capable Wife, The Woman of Substance and the Woman of Strength.
In fact, the Hebrew word “Hayil” applied to this woman in proverbs literally does mean “strength” or success, and can refer to economic or military strength or strength of character. In the Old Testament it is most often used to describe kings and heroic MEN.
Interestingly, the only other time it is used to describe a woman is in reference to Ruth, a Moabite woman praised for her hard work and resourcefulness under difficult circumstances.
But I’ll be honest, this is a text that inspires some ambivalence in me as a woman.
On the one hand, the poem makes a noble effort to lift the woman up out of traditional patriarchal stereotypes. Instead of focusing on her attractiveness or obedience or knack for bearing healthy children, it highlights her economic contributions to the household. Far from home-bound, this woman is described as “like a merchant fleet, bringing her food from afar.”
The poem encourages husbands to trust their strong, capable wives—trust them to use their gifts, to manage finances, to make business decisions, and to give generously to the poor. And the ideal wife described in this poem is no pushover. In v. 17, she girds up her loins—that’s military speak for getting ready for battle.
In this poem, “fear of the lord” looks a lot like using your gifts and resources to their utmost potential to be a blessing not only to your family, but to the whole community. And at the end of the poem, the author argues that his wife deserves to be adequately compensated for her work—and publically recognized for it.
On the other hand, this amazing woman is still expected to manage the household, while her husband sits among the elders of the land, making the policies and decisions that will have the most impact on society. Her “business” is still “women’s work”—making clothing—and she stays up all hours of the night to get everything done and wakes early to make sure everyone is fed.
Is this woman for real? I want to ask. Or is it just some male fantasy of a wealthy super-mom? I mean, really, how happy can her husband and kids be if she’s working all the time and not getting any sleep?
In the original language, this poem is an acrostic alphabet poem, which means that the first word of each line begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, implying that the woman of strength, literally has it all—from A to Z.
So is this poem just another piece of propaganda claiming that women—or any of us for that matter—can have it all? Wealth, security, a good reputation, a thriving business, a happy and healthy family, and a conscience at-ease? Don’t you think mothers have enough pressure on them these days to do-it-all and be-all-things-to-all-people without the Bible and its preachers piling on?!!
What I keep coming back to is that question that opens the poem: a woman of strength, of substance, of value, who can find? I think at its core, this poem is an invitation. An invitation to think of the strong women in our own lives and history and to, as the poem suggests in v. 31, give them their due praise for the works of their hands. Not such a bad idea on Mother’s Day either…
So…there is one strong woman, of great faith, that if you don’t already know about, I want to introduce you to today. The youth who came to our Dangerous Dozen Sunday school class on her a few weeks ago got to learn about her, but it didn’t seem fair to only share her with the youth and not the rest of the church. She is such an inspiration to me, that I wanted to share her with you too.
I was trying to think of who I could compare this “Strong Woman” to today, and the best I could come up with was Beth Moore, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Beyonce all rolled into one.
Surprisingly enough, I’m talking about a MEDIEVAL saint, one that was finally in 2012 named a doctor of the church. She wasn’t a biological mother with children of her own, but she was a Mother with a capital “M” in her role as founder and leader of two Benedictine convents in the Rhineland of Germany.
She is known as Hildegard of Bingen. She is such a renaissance woman that I feel that almost anyone can relate to something in her story.
Into theology? There’s a reason Hildegard was named a doctor of the church, along with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. She wrote three major theological works, the first of which was over 500 pages and took her ten years to write.
More of a visual person? Well, turns out she illustrated her visions, and they are fascinating. One of my favorites is one in which the Trinity is represented by what looks like a blue Christ, whom she calls the incarnation of divine compassion, being birthed from a womb.
Want to eat healthy or find herbal remedies fascinating? Check out her books Physica or Causes and Cures. There’s even a website called “HealthyHildegard.com” that turns her writings on nutrition and healing into a kind of modern day health blog.
Ever feel like going on a rant against the government or certain religious leaders? Well, if Twitter had been a thing in the 1100s, you can bet Hildegaard would have been tweeting up a storm. Instead she wrote letters. Over 400 letters in which she passed on the words and visions that she received from God, where were sometimes encouraging but more often critical of the religious and political elite. In a sense, she lived up to her name, which means “place of battle” and carried on the prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power.
She also launched the first known preaching tour by a woman, preaching all over the region at various cathedrals and monasteries, even into her mid-seventies! Her messages were often calls to repentance, highlighting corruption in the church, which she pictured as a weeping mother in pain. That’s a whole ‘nother mother’s day sermon!
Proverbs 31 closes by lifting up “fear of the Lord” above other attributes typically praised in women such as charm or beauty. Well, Hildegaard took “fear of the Lord” to a whole new level, but for her it came to mean something empowering and freeing. Like the woman of strength in Proverbs, “fear of the Lord” didn’t mean holding back for fear of punishment, but obeying God’s desire that we use and share the gifts God gives us. It meant obeying God even if that meant risking the anger or hostility of others.
Hildegard began having visions at an early age, and at first was afraid to share them. Yet her not sharing this divine gift began to make her physically sick. Her own body became a place of spiritual battle, until finally, in her early 40s, she received a vision from God in which the command to write was so clear that she finally obeyed, eventually winning papal approval to continue writing and sharing her visions with others.
But theological and prophetic visions weren’t Hildegard’s only gifts. For many people, it’s her music that speaks to them the most. Hildegard wrote the first surviving sung morality play and composed beautiful original liturgical music, which has in the last couple of decades been rediscovered and performed to award winning success. When you go home google “Hildegard of Bingen’s Symphonia” to listen to some of her hauntingly beautiful melodies.
For Hildegard, “music was necessary for salvation, because it was the best representation of the state of humanity before the Fall…”
As she writes in her famous letter to the Prelates of Mainz:
“Music stirs our hearts and engages our souls in ways we can’t describe. When this happens, we are taken beyond our earthly banishment back to the divine melody Adam knew when he sang with the angels, when he was whole in God, before his exile.
In fact, before Adam refused God’s fragrant flower of obedience, his voice was the best on earth, because he was made by God’s green thumb, who is the Holy Spirit.” I love that image of the Holy Spirit: God’s green thumb!
Many of Hildegard’s songs reflect her belief that “all of creation is a symphony of joy and jubilation.” They call attention to what Hildegard calls the “greening” power of the Holy Spirit, for which she coined the term “veriditas.” That idea of the greening power of the Holy Spirit has had a deep impact on the way I think about the Spirit and also how I experience God in creation.
I’m a poetry-over, so of course, I’m going to make you listen to one of her poems, which is also a prayer:
Holy Life-Giver,
Doctor of the Desperate
Healer of everyone broken past hope,
Medicine for all wounds,
Fire of love,
Joy of hearts,
fragrant Strength,
sparkling Fountain,
Protector,
Penetrator,
in You we contemplate
how God goes looking for those who are lost
and reconciles those who are at odds with Him.
Break our chains!
You bring people together,
You curl clouds, whirl winds,
send rain on rocks, sing in creeks,
and turn the lush earth green.
You teach those who listen,
breathing joy and wisdom into them.
We praise You for these gifts,
Light-giver,
Sound of joy,
Wonder of being alive,
Hope of every person,
and our strongest Good.
And yet, for all her creative productivity, Hildegard was often sick, stuck in bed, unable to move, and many think she suffered from migraines. She lived in a world that rarely honored the full spectrum of women’s talents and leadership potential or allowed them to find full expression.
She spent the majority of her childhood and young adulthood literally locked away in an anchorite cell in a monastery with another woman who believed that “fear of the Lord” meant suffering and deprivation. Hildegard received no formal education.
And yet, she persevered, blossoming and finding her own way to lead and to shine and finding joy in God’s mercy and creative, restorative work in the world. For her, the typical “mid-life crisis” was instead a “mid-life awakening.” I’ll turn 40 this year, and I take great comfort in knowing that Hildegard’s most creative and productive period in her life didn’t start until she was in her 40s!
I don’t know if the woman in Proverbs 31 was a real, live woman, but I know that Hildegard was. She never gave birth to flesh and blood children, and yet so many called her “Mother” and what she “gave birth to” over the years still blesses the world today!
Hildegard was an artist, poet, theologian, healer, musician, preacher, leader, and prophet.
She wrote theological books, medical books, poems, songs, plays, sermons, and letters. She oversaw fundraising campaigns, annual budgets, daily worship, building projects, and protests.
She fed, clothed, taught, guided, mediated between, and cared for the women at the two convents, crossing the Rhine River twice a week for over 14 years to make her pastoral visits at the second convent in Eibingen until she died at the age of 81.
I hope you hear in her life, as well as in the poem of Proverbs 31, what I hear, which is a call to blossom and shine, with whatever seeds of creativity and goodness and mercy and passion God has planted within your own soul.
And I hope that the story of her life gives you hope that God can help us overcome all kinds of obstacles in order for us to use the gifts that God gave us.
I hope that on this Mother’s Day you can answer the question of Proverbs 31: A woman of substance, who can find? by singing the praises of all the amazing women in scripture and history and in your own lives.
And I hope we can all let the works of their hands and voices inspire us to live more fully into who God created us to be. After all, wouldn’t that really be the best Mother’s Day present of all?