Those who spend their time
listening only to Praise and Worship music as it is packaged by the mainstream media
and publishing houses will miss the brilliant homiletical interpretations of
scripture that can be found in music that is being made outside the boundaries
of the Christian music industry. Much, if not all Praise and Worship music
avoids narrative. It’s verticality is focused on God and Christ in a timeless,
“awesome God” kind of way. It is meant to facilitate worship as adoration. If such music were to stray one inch toward
narrative, it would shift from being adoration to being thanksgiving. Instead
of praising God for who God is in and of God-self, the music would have to tell
some of the story of why one is
praising God in the first place – a story would have to be told and we would
find ourselves remembering God at
work in particular times and places.
Homiletics is always a timely, and time-saturated reflection of who God was and
is and continues to be. It is “expository”
and banks on memory, and, as we all
know, memory is a theologically contested domain. Memory can be selective.
Memory can be influenced by ideology, patriarchy, the will to power, and
suffering. How one re-members the past in the present is the key to homiletics.
It is in this contested
homiletical domain of memory that we experience the music of Sherry Cothran on
her CD entitled Sunland. Cothran
wrestles with the memory we have of the women of the Old Testament – Rahab,
Jepthah’s daughter, the Woman of Endor, Jael, Deborah, Huldah, and the Strange
Woman of Proverbs.
Cothran’s interpretation of
the so-called “strange woman” in the book of Proverbs is not standard fare. It owes
much to her education with Hebrew Bible scholar Jack Sasson at Vanderbilt
Divinity School, filtered through her poetic genius and her pastoral and
homiletical sensibilities.
In most of the standard
biblical commentaries, this “strange woman” is at odds with the “wise woman.”
As Cothran’s lyric puts it:
Maiden
of the storm
For
chaos you are blamed
But Cothran's lyric doesn’t leave
the strange woman there, “banished to
the dark” by “a man” because she is “a woman he cannot tame.” Instead, Cothran
sees in her an interruption in human-contrived order – a Godly interruption, “made”
by God:
In
a world with a rage for order
God
sends a wind that won’t obey
In
a world with a rage for beauty
God
has made something strange
Strange
woman.
In a similar way, biblical scholar Claudia Camp speaks about the Strange Woman as a kind of "trickster" character, one who in many ways intersects and
mirrors Woman Wisdom.
Instead of seeing her as
evil, therefore, Cothran’s song invites us to see in her a feisty,
trickster-like power for life in the midst of one’s orderly “place” in a man’s
world.
And she sees other women in the Old Testament, such as Lot’s wife, as
representing this same power. And she also identifies this excluded life-force
with the narrative of the Christ-child – who represents the same creative chaos in the midst
of contrived order.
You
bite the serpent back
Upset
the applecart
Stare
back at what you lost
Without
turning into salt
Stay
away from our men
Our
model citizens
There’s
no room for the strange woman in the inn
Again, Claudia Camp:
We need more of THIS kind of music. Deeply poetic, educated, devotional, grounded in faith, and
always re-thinking biblical truth for our world in new and helpful ways. Take a listen to this amazing song: Strange Woman.
