Women and War 3 Although rarely discussed, the story of Jael in the Book of Judges presents an extraordinary moment: A solitary woman commits murder in her own tent —and puts an exclamation point on a battle full of intrigue and daring. Jael is inexorably linked with Deborah, Israel’s infamous judge, prophet, and warrior who lived about 1250 BCE. On that fateful day...
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Women and War, 2 Like a warm breeze on a perfect summer morning, a voice of grace and compassion rings across 3000+ years in this Sunday’s reading from the Old Testament (RSV, Year C, track 1). The voice doesn’t belong to a grown man, or to a woman full of years. It is the voice of a child—a girl who was kidnapped...
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Bible Women and War 1 Warfare has been a constant as long as human beings have roamed the earth. The sad truth is this: war happens. We do everything we can to avoid it, but combat occurs, both in distant parts of the world, and in our own towns (Orlando, Beirut, Minneapolis, Aleppo, New York, etc.). What might we learn from Bible women regarding warfare and conflict?...
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Excerpts from a sermon at St. David's, Minnetonka, Minnesota...
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It seems that the world has been filled with purple this week in memory of Prince…but for those of us who love stories of women in the Bible, the color purple also belongs to Lydia. And Lydia comes up this Sunday, in the RSV lectionary. Lydia’s biblical story, recounted in Acts 16:13-15, begins near water outside the town of Philippi, where...
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Why does Martha of Bethany have such a bad reputation? Because she’s so organized? Because she complained to Jesus? (I like that about her; it takes some chops to complain to The Guy.) Here’s the well-known part of her story (Luke 10:38-42): Martha is cooking dinner for Jesus and the disciples. Sister Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening. Martha needs...
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One of the things I like about Mary Magdalene is her willingness to look into the darkness—whether it be her own demons or the darkness of the empty tomb. In John 20, my favorite account of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene sees that the stone blocking the entrance to the tomb has been moved. She runs to tell Peter, who looks inside, sees nothing, and returns home. She...
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No human being in the New Testament, besides Jesus, listens better than Mary of Bethany. As we go deeper into Lent and come closer to the cross, consider the unmatched gift she gave him: the deep and profound gift of listening. And it’s not just a gift for him—for through her endeavor, we learn how profoundly active and passionate real...
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My mother-in-law always grieved Leonard, her tall and handsome father. She was three when he died; he was twenty-eight. He was a millworker in the woolen mills of Lawrence: young and healthy one week and gone the next. Family history says that he went into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1918, thirty long miles away, and "didn’t come out." Best...
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Many women in the Bible suffer, caught in the midst of unimaginably harsh choices and pain. Think of the woman in Judges 19, whom we'll look at today. Most Christians do not know her story, and are surprised to find it in scripture. We’ve swept the pieces of it—and her—under the collective Judeo-Christian rug for 3000 years now. And she's not the...
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