I was looking forward to preaching this Proverbs passage. Since childhood, this has been one of my favorite Bible passages, a faith interpretation of the goals of the Women’s Liberation Movement. I even calligraphied the passage for my mother one Mother’s Day. Imagine my disappointment when I hit the exegetical books early in the week and read the authors blasting this as the lectionary committee’s choice. “Skip the whole thing!” they said. “Choose something else to preach on, but don’t—whatever you do—don’t preach this.” Since this fall’s preaching is about discipleship—what being faithful individuals and faith communities means—I was shocked. Ruby (the virtuous woman) had been my model woman. Apparently, scholars thought this text presented the outmoded notion that women’s work is all manual labor—all household and family oriented—while a man’s job is civic, intellectual, and power based. Well duh, I thought. What translation are you reading? Sure, Ruby gets up and fixes the kids’ lunches before sending them off to school, but she’s also buying real estate and improving it, supervising the workers in her cottage industry, manufacturing products for sale, while generally making sure that life runs the way it should. What is not powerful about that? The only thing Ruby doesn’t do is sit in the gate with the elders like her husband. When would she have the time?

I couldn’t find Ruby interpreted the way other metaphorical women are in the Old Testament. Song of Solomon has been sanitized by theologians who say, “This isn’t about the glories of physical love between a man and a woman, it’s a metaphor for the relationship between God and the Church.” Hosea’s wife is abused by the prophet so God can point out to stubborn male Israelite elders their hypocrisy, but poor Gomer is sanitized by scholars who say, “It’s only a metaphor. Hosea didn’t really do that to his wife.” What we have in Proverbs, scholars say, is “an insight into God’s ideal for humanity,” and suddenly we can’t see it as a metaphor of our corporate relationship with God. Suddenly Ruby is simply an ideal for individual women to live up to. Or not. Depending on whether you want to believe this is anti-female.

What I see is a failure to read scripture consistently. Apparently, it’s no longer cool to believe women can produce the bacon on the farmstead if they’re going to fry it up in the pan—they can only “bring it home.” Let’s suggest that Ruby is a metaphor of the Bride of Christ. If we can do that with Song of Solomon, surely we can do it here. Then, Ruby is a description of discipleship—for men, for women, for individuals, for all of us together. What if we figured that it was the Church’s job—all of us—to do the “manual labor” for Jesus? What if we figured it was part of God’s call on our lives to do what Ruby does—to make sure people are fed, clothed, have meaningful work, then to be productive ourselves and act as stewards and improve our real estate—the earth?

Apparently what is wrong with that reading is that Ruby doesn’t sit in the gate with her husband. Now, “sit in the gate” is Biblish for “serve on the City Council.” Sitting in the gate was how the men governed the town—in religious, military, and judicial matters, settling property disputes and awarding damages, deciding who was going to carry out the garbage, ensuring clean water supplies—you name it. The gate was where public transactions took place. An elaborate hierarchy determined who spoke and how they were heard. Women were not part of that power structure. In plain English, if Ruby is the Church, the Church has to let go of the notion that it is supposed to be a power broker. A careful reading of how God gets things done and God’s declared vision for the coming kingdom bears this out. In making promises in the Old Testament, God always chooses the youngest, the littlest, the least likely. Even women. Think Deborah and Esther and Hannah. Think Jacob and not Esau. Think David and not Saul. It’s a pattern. Jesus comes along and starts telling people that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed—small, invasive, a noxious weed. He could have said, “Himalayan blackberries.” There is a reason we are reading about Ruby—domestic wonder woman, the go-to girl of the ancient world—along with the story of Jesus feeding the 4,000. It is because if the Church is Ruby, she still doesn’t do it all on her own.

What this means to Springwater is this. There are two things that consistently set our collective heart beating here: food and youth. When I first came here 3 ˝ years ago, we brought enough food for the Resource Center to fill a small basket every week or so. Since hearing the challenge last December to help fill the shelves, we’ve been filling the big red tub almost every week. Look at the chart in fellowship hall for a tally of the number of pounds we bring every week to the Resource Center. It’s amazing! And week after week, the food disappears from the shelves in Estacada as fast as we bring it in. Every day, 30,000 people in the world die from hunger. Thirty thousand! What seemed like an enormous amount of food a few minutes ago—sometimes nearly 200 pounds a week!—suddenly seems like nothing. The bags of pasta, the cans of tomato sauce, the peanut butter jar you carry in here—what is that to 30,000 people? Nothing! But Ruby doesn’t feed them all on her own. We are only asked to be faithful and to trust God for the rest. In the case of world hunger, that means doing the best we can with what we’ve got where we’re at. In other words, help stock the shelves at the Resource Center. Eat simply yourself, eat locally. Don’t overbuy and throw food out, avoid eating food whose production creates waste.

Hunger is something that touches our collective heart. Young people are another Springwater passion. We devote many of our resources to children, and it pays off. When other pastors hear me talk about our Sunday School and youth group, our Vacation Church School and Playtime with the Pastor, they are astonished at the numbers for our size. We have a passion for nurturing the faith of young people—helping them to know they are loved, pointing to how God cares for them, teaching them about their faith. I think I caught it from you. Last week over lunch in Estacada with the ecumenical pastors, one of the pastors remarked sadly about so many young people who seem to have no sense of motivation to be educated or to be productive members of society. He wondered if there was an essential lack of hope in young people. “If I work hard, what does it matter—I’ll never get ahead, I’ll never earn what my parents did. If I go to school, what does it matter—there won’t be any jobs when I get out.” Many young people have no hopeful future in their hearts. As far as they are concerned, there is nothing to work toward and they have no goal. This is absolutely counter to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The most important thing the Church can offer to young people—ours and everybody else’s—is the hope that there is a future and that the future is in God’s hands. There is meaning to life, and it is that we are in God’s hands.

No, Ruby doesn’t do it all on her own. Springwater isn’t called to save all the 30,000 doomed to die today from starvation. There were plenty of hungry people 2,000 years ago, but Jesus didn’t spend every day all day long feeding them. Right now, we’re just called to do the best we can to keep the shelves filled in Estacada. There are thousands of kids in America who wonder what the point of life is, and who give up hope. Right now, we’re just called to live as if we have hope, to continue to point out to our kids and their friends and their friends’ friends, the hope that in life and in death we belong to God. And that is enough.