Finding the Perfect Spouse

A Reflection for XVII Pentecost (Proper 20)                     All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC September 20, 2014                                                            Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Proverbs 31:10-31            Psalm 1                                James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a                       Mark 9:30-37

“Finding the Perfect Spouse”

Catalog cover of Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci 

I started off this week being straightened out by Judy Mumma, the office administrator here in the church. I asked her if she had read the first lesson as she made copies for the Bible Study, the one that begins with the question of what are the criteria of a capable spouse. I suggested that I thought it was patronizing and doesn’t it give an impossible list to live up to - as it was a list made up by a mother-in-law for the kind of wife her boy needed around the palace. After all, how many women in our congregations take raw flax and turn it into linen? She fixed on me a look that would have frozen mercury, and while she admitted that linen manufacture was not one of top ten marketable skills on the Outer Banks, she opined that it was very good to see that women were respected and noticed for all they do, working in the workplace and taking care of the house and children while the man just sits around and puts his feet up. Not all that brightly, I pulled up a line from the old Enjoli shampoo commercial, a bastardization of the old Peggy Lee song, “I Am a Woman” - the line that that was sung by a sultry, skinny blonde “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan. and never let you forget you’re a man.” Luckily, a parishioner came in at that time and pointed out that this was not a fight I had any chance of waging, much less winning.

This chapter of the Book of Proverbs begins with an acknowledgement that this was a collection of advice given to a King, of whom we know nothing, by his mother who had named him “Lemuel” meaning “belonging to God”. In the first nine verses of the chapter, she begins, as mothers tend to do in speaking to a son who is missing the point:

“No, my son!

No, son of my womb!

No, son of my vows!”  

These are the three short declarative sentences which come out of relationship of love from the creative force that brought forth the life of one who thinks he is in charge. This is a metaphor of God speaking to God’s children who think they are in charge of all creation. 

She launches into warning him about loose women who will trap him and admonishes him to avoid getting drunk for he will forget to protect the afflicted. Save the booze for the people who need to forget, she urges. Never forget, she says, to stand up to defend the rights of the poor and needy. She then moves on to the idea of a perfect spouse, creating an acrostic poem in which the first letter of each line is another letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I don’t think it is about the perfect spouse because remember, the Book of Proverbs begins with the search for Wisdom – the  feminine attribute of God, the compassion of God - and portrayed as a woman crying out at the City Gates, the place where the legal business of the community takes place. Now this 31^st chapter is the other bookend which ends the Book of Proverbs with the search for Wisdom in human form, an icon of compassion who is praised in the city gates demonstrated by a woman.

When they do the work of justice, there is a tension within the Hebrew community between the following of the law which is about the knowledge of ruling, behavior, power, and order on one hand, and the place of mercy and compassion on the other. This tension is played out throughout the Hebrew and Christian scripture and indeed in the scriptures of all religions. Look at the opening line from the lesson for today from the Epistle of James: “Who is wise and understanding among you?  Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.”

Yet, hold that tension, for the Psalm for today is Psalm One. I remember the first time I used that Psalm pastorally. It was in the summer of 1982, and I was doing my Chaplaincy Training at the University Hospital.  After working all day on Friday ministering to my floors, I began a weekend shift on duty as the sole Chaplain in the building. The weekend would end on Monday morning when I would go back to work in my wards. There was a room to catch cat naps if I was lucky, but never trust in luck. The idea was this macho reasoning that we needed to think and minister even when we were tired, off balance, and alone. A young man was brought into the Emergency Room with a gunshot wound, the first of many that weekend – how much of a love affair we have with guns! This had been a family fight as he and his stepfather were both armed. The stepfather, who had been defending the family, was now being held by the police and the young man was brain dead. Past any more medical help, he was put into a room to die. I talked with the young man’s family and they spoke about how much of a burden his violence had been to the family. Nobody wanted to stay with him and so they went home. 

Being my first night working alone, I decided that no one, no matter how bad, should die alone. So, in between calls, I sat by his bed through the night. At one point I decided to pull out the trusty Prayer Book and read the Psalms to him as comfort from the God that forgives all sins. I started with Psalm One and realized that there was no comfort in the last line - “So the way of the wicked is doomed.” Psalm Two’s warning was less helpful: “Lest the Lord be angry and you perish for God’s wrath is swiftly kindled”. And so it went: Psalms of Damnation for the wicked and Psalms of Hope for the righteous but not for the sinner. It was at the 22^nd Psalm that I came to the Psalm our Lord sang on the cross when He was dying and realized that Jesus knew what it was like to die forsaken - and yet God redeems even the cross. The 23^rd acknowledged that we were both in the valley of the shadow of death and needed help, but it was finally at the 38^th when the Psalmist acknowledged that he was indeed a sinner and still trusted in God for salvation. God does not desert even sinners who call to Her. Hours later, long after the dawn, the family came back, and we prayed together for compassion for all members of this broken family. He breathed his last late that morning with a few members of his family around him. Such as it is that all ministry, all faith, all of life, is in that creative tension between order and mercy.

The Gospel story for today from Mark continues that theme of how compassion and order live in creative tension. Jesus tells his disciples that his ministry is to enter fully into the brokenness of the world. The disciples cannot understand that because they believe something like “If you are good, then God is good to you and nothing bad ever happens to you, but if you are bad, then you deserve bad things happening to you.” To undercut that tension, the disciples want a return to some order and they argue about who is greater. To answer them, Jesus picks up a beggar child - in third world countries there are always children begging on the streets - and he takes this filthy beggar and lifts the child in his arms and tells them “when we welcome (and for the word “welcome”, Mark uses the Greek work “DECKOMAI” which can mean more than a “Howdy do” but can mean love, honor, respect even cherish) “when we welcome such as this child, we welcome, love, honor, respect and cherish Jesus.

“To love, honor and cherish” is what we promise in our Wedding service because it is a sacrament in which the couple act out, in their lives, the Holy Space where two or more are gathered together in Christ’s name. It is not about finding a perfect spouse, with a checklist of attributes passed down from your parents. Marriage is a creative tension between keeping the vows we make - order – and learning how to show mercy to each other when we, as we all will, fall short of all the expectations.

Finding the Perfect Spouse (Poem)

For her new Southern Catholic in-laws, my Yankee,

Protestant mother tried cooking up fried chicken.

They politely ate with utensils, but bird was cranky.

Mom invites using fingers, caused faces be stricken.

Near tears, failing with arts of manners and cuisine

but love came to the scene as greasy fingered father

looked at her as if she was his long sought for queen

which he would no, never, trade for all or any other.

There would be many other times when she, or he

would fail, falling far short of perfection absolute,

or worse find stuff over which they did not agree

as air grew frosty enough to comfort a malamute.

Yet as long as he lived, and beyond, love bloomed,

ordered by forgiveness in each new day groomed