SERMONS
AND REFLECTIONS
A
Successful Life
Nancy
T. Ammerman
September 22, 1997
Prov.
31:10-31; Mark 9:30-37
Who
can find a virtuous woman? Years ago, as a member of the Girls’
Auxiliary — GAs — I memorized this whole passage, in King James,
of course! It’s a daunting piece of scripture. Given the list of
things at which this woman excels, it is no wonder she "rises
while it is still night." She makes clothes, both for her family
and to sell. She brings home vast quantities of food from afar off.
She invests in real estate and agriculture. She supervises a household
staff. She does charity work. And, of course, she supports a happy and
successful husband and children. This is a woman who has it all. She
has material success and comfort, a loving family, honor in the
community, and (I think we are to assume) real pleasure in her skill
and success at the work she does. She has made it. It’s a picture
that in our own ways many of us probably envy. While we might not want
to get up at dawn to spin wool into yarn or weave fine linen, we know
that to have meaningful work to do, to do it well, to achieve success
at it, and to be honored and loved by family and community, is a high
goal indeed. This is not a bad thing. While we may scoff at the poetic
excesses in this description, we can also recognize the
"virtue" in this virtuous woman’s life.
So
why are we still so uneasy with this text? Is it simply because all
the virtue seems to be directed at the well-being of a household, that
it’s the husband who gets to "sit in the gates" and the
wife who gets up at dawn to feed and clothe him? Surely that’s part
of our uneasiness. I think we do have to worry about a scripture that
paints this sort of picture of a good woman, while telling us in Psalm
1 that a good man is one who meditates on scripture all day long!
But
there’s more to my unease with this scripture, and to get at it, I
think we have to look at the gospel story from Mark. Here we find
Jesus and his disciples traveling around Galilee, teaching and
healing. In Mark’s telling of things, the inner core of disciples
has already experienced the Transfiguration with Jesus. They are
beginning to realize that they are part of a very big cosmic event.
The crowds following Jesus are big, and they are frequently "in
awe" of him. There are healings and other miracles. Jesus is
clearly a hit, and the disciples are getting pretty excited about
being on the inside of a really big deal. Never mind that Jesus is
also telling them that he’s headed toward Jerusalem and likely to
die there. That message seems to get filed in the "it doesn’t
make sense, so I’ll ignore it" file. These guys are riding the
crest of a good thing, and they want to make the most of it. So they
start arguing about who’s the greatest among them. This was not, by
the way, a discussion that would go away easily. Not two chapters
after this episode, we find James and John putting in their request
for prime posts in the new government they assume Jesus is about to
establish. We laugh at the hard-headedness and apparent petty jealousy
of this bunch of disciples, but I think they were just trying to think
ahead. If Jesus is leading a revolution, and doing a pretty good job
of it, then they needed to think about how they would organize their
government, who’d be in charge of what, who’d handle negotiations
with dignitaries and who’d handle fixing potholes. They had a pretty
good idea of what constitutes a successful life and how to make it
happen.
If
it had turned out that way, we might even picture these guys as the
equivalent of that virtuous wife — getting up at dawn to tend to the
affairs of state in such a productive and skillful way that everyone
in the government would call them blessed.
But
Jesus, as always, turns their expectations upside down. While they
have visions of entertaining heads of state, Jesus tells them that
they should be thinking about entertaining children — the most
powerless and insignificant persons Jesus could possibly have chosen
for an example. The audacity of this example is perhaps only exceeded
by Jesus’ other examples in other times and places — lepers, sick
and unclean women, prostitutes, foreigners. It’s really quite an
amazing list, these people Jesus held up as examples and compatriots
for us. Jesus speaks here not of affairs of state, but of hospitality,
of receiving the poor, the outcast, and the stranger into our midst.
So
just what is Jesus trying to tell us about what a successful life
looks like? Surely hard work and achievement and happiness aren’t
bad things. Indeed, in other places, Jesus commends people for wise
investment and diligent work.
Here
Jesus tells his followers to welcome children. Why? Because in so
doing, we know that we have welcomed Jesus himself, and in turn the
one who sent him. We have, in other words, entered into the household
of God. We have acted as if this world were actually a world with God
in charge. We have, for a moment, lived in the midst of the reign of
God, where sickness is no more, where women receive justice, where
there are no foreigners, where children have a home. This is the world
toward which Jesus invited us to direct our work, to take as the
measure of our success.
Well
and good, you may say, but what on earth does that mean? It does mean,
I think that we take seriously how we make our living and how we spend
our money. There are just some jobs that do not lend themselves to
spreading God’s love and justice, no matter how broadly we define
that. And there are ways of spending money that do absolutely nothing
to help us glimpse God’s reign on earth. A successful life in
God’s eyes certainly includes how we choose to invest our
occupational energies and how we use the monetary fruits of our
labors.
Beyond
what we do as an occupation, working out God’s reign on earth has to
do with how we live together. It means acting in caring and nurturing
ways, taking the needs of others, including "the least of
these," into account. Our virtuous woman can, in this sense be a
model. Caring for family, household workers, and strangers is, indeed,
a virtue for all to pursue, regardless of gender.
But
choosing an occupation and caring for others is not the end of it.
Aiming our work God-ward must mean that company policies are as much
our concern as our own individual conduct. Policies and products that
do not care for the well-being of persons should not bear our stamp of
approval. Jobs that do not pay a living wage are hard to justify, for
instance, in a world where we are seeking God’s reign, looking out
for widows and orphans as much as for those who think they have a shot
at being "the greatest in the kingdom."
Making
ethical decisions that take everyone, especially outcasts, into
account, acting in a caring way in our relationships at home, at work,
and in all our connections, and finding work to do that brings glory
to God and to God’s creation. That is the ministry to which we are
called, and it is those activities that finally define our success.
But
such a ministry of service is not easy. Living for the sake of others
can indeed prove difficult and draining. Those who would live as
ministers in the world need to be a community of priests to each
other. We need to listen to each other as we mull over the dilemmas
and decisions in our lives. We need to pray for each other and
admonish each other. We need to laugh and cry and sing together in the
face of a world where God’s reign is often hard to see. We need
communities of faith that take all their members’ ministries
seriously, calling people together in worship and study and fellowship
— for the sake of the world. Successful lives depend on it. Success,
then, is not something you earn for yourself out there alone in the
world. It is something you give to the world while surrounded by the
household of faith. Go forth, then, in the strength of the communities
of which you are a part, to be a servant in this world, to welcome
children and other "little ones" into places of honor, to be
about the reign of God.
