As part of a series on biblical prophets, this sermon by Pastor Brooks focuses on the prophet Deborah. Listen to it now.
Sermon Scripture–Judges 4:1-9
To provide a visual image for thinking about prophets this morning, I want to first read a couple of brief excerpts from two poems. With the death of Maya Angelou this past week, sales of her autobiographical book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings jumped to the top of the charts. The title of this book comes from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar that reads:
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
In her book, Angelou uses the caged bird as a metaphor for her struggle against the constraints of racism. Angelou additionally wrote her own poem about a caged bird in which she declared:
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
With the imagery of these poems set before us, I invite you to reflect this morning on prophets as caged birds struggling to fly free and whether such prophets have lessons to teach us in our own struggles.
There is an ancient rabbinic interpretation that suggests Deborah was once a caged bird. In our scripture reading for this morning, we are told that Deborah sat underneath a palm tree as Israelites came to her for counsel. According to the ancient rabbinic interpretation I came across, Deborah didn’t sit under a palm tree because she enjoyed the outdoors. She sat under a palm tree because her home was a cage, a prison, a small male-dominated fiefdom ruled by the constraints of patriarchy. One of those constraints was that a woman was not allowed to be alone with other men in her own house, so if Deborah wanted to counsel others and teach the sacred scriptures of her faith, she would have to do so in the open air.
The story of Deborah, however, isn’t just a story about a bird managing to escape her cage for a nearby tree, because once Deborah flew out into the broader world, there was a larger oppressive reality with which she had to contend. Our text says that the Israelites had been oppressed for 20 years by the Canaanites and their nine hundred chariots of iron. In other words, the Israelites were in a cage of their own. They didn’t have the military might to compete with the Canaanites. What they needed was what underdogs so often rely upon: courage matched with cunningness. And, this is precisely what Deborah delivered with the help of another woman named Jael. We see the courage required when the warrior Barak says he won’t go into battle without Deborah, and Deborah says she will go. Notably, she says that the glory of the battle won’t go to Barak. It will go to a woman. That woman was Jael. Jael lured the commander of the Canaanite army into her tent with the promise of safety, and when he was fast asleep, she nailed a tent peg through his temple. There you have cunningness, and with it, the Israelites fly free from their cage.
Despite Deborah’s remarkable accomplishments as a leader, there is a history of attempts to put her back into the cage. A couple of months ago a new book came out by Joy Schroeder that details the different ways Deborah has been interpreted by Jewish and Christian writers from ancient times to today. While some have looked to Deborah as a champion of feminist causes, others have been made uncomfortable by her. For those who expound the need for women to submit to their husbands, the idea of a woman who commands men into battle is a problem to be solved. Some have argued that in fact Deborah was not a public leader. She did all her business in private. She was Israel’s stay-at-home mom. She was tending to the nest the way a woman should. Others have argued that because the men of the time were failing God so badly God used a woman to show them up. In other words, God was scraping the bottom of the barrel to prod the men to behave and take charge. Still, others have simply argued that Deborah is a negative example of what women shouldn’t do. For all of these interpreters, women are to stay in their rightful place: the home which also becomes their cage.
When it comes to Biblical interpretation, it is true that there are multiple interpretations one can give for any scripture, and the question for us is which one shall we choose for ourselves. I found one essay that celebrated Deborah as an unmarried woman to whom unmarried women today could look for inspiration. While the translation that I read earlier describes Deborah as the “wife of Lappidoth,” another translation describes her as the “woman of Lappidoth,” a place of origin. Yet another translation reads the “woman of torches.” Variations of this last one include the “woman of flames,” “fiery woman,” and “spirited woman.”
Interestingly, the name Deborah means “bee” or “hornet,” so in addition to having some fire, she might have also had some sting. We could think of Deborah as someone who came to disrupt the picnic of the powerful. Yet, for every person who sees a bee that stings, there are those who will want to see Deborah strictly as a honeybee confined to her hive. One way to consider how to view Deborah is to think about who would be her counterpart in other periods. Consider the following quote about Deborah:
The position of this woman appears to have been the same as that of president of the United States, with the additional functions of the judicial and religious offices of the nation. Hence this woman was President, Supreme Judge, and Right Reverend in the Theocratic Republic of Israel.
Does this sound like some modern day feminist supporting Hillary Clinton’s run for president? Actually, it’s not. That quote comes from a male Methodist minister in 1887. He was a supporter of the right of women to vote. You would think that we would have come along ways since 1887, but I wonder how many male ministers today preach on Deborah. I suspect that the words of the abolitionist and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her book The Woman’s Bible still apply today. She wrote:
We never hear sermons pointing women to the heroic virtues of Deborah as worthy of their imitation. Nothing is said in the pulpit to rouse [them] from the apathy of the ages, to inspire them to do and dare great things, to intellectual and spiritual achievements, in real communion with the Great Spirit of the Universe.
There are those who have taken up the mantle of Deborah today, who are seeking to make sure cage doors are rattled open. One essay I read this past week was entitled, “Deborah: A Fundamentalist’s Worst Nightmare!” Part of the essay reads:
Deborah…defies nearly every restriction placed upon the ‘ideal’ woman of faith. She does not fit neatly into the quiet-submissive-barefoot-and-pregnant-housewife-that-would-never-dare-exercise-authority box. She’s assertive, strong, and forthright. She holds the position of judge, prophet, and military commander (talk about a career gal, eh?).
The author goes on to talk about how Deborah’s path was determined by God rather than the conventions and constraints of the status quo. Notably, the etymology of the word prophet is “one who is called.” We might think of prophets as often being made in the mold of Deborah. They are called to rattle open cages for not only themselves but also for others who are oppressed.
It might seem overwhelming and rather preposterous to think that one’s own actions could ever free anyone, but maybe there are a couple of ways we can think about this to make it more conceivable. One way is to think about it as a step-by-step process. For some, the first step might be becoming more critically aware of the cages that do exist and how people have struggled against them. This past week I had my own consciousness raised when I read an article about how colleges can actually maintain and reinforce inequality rather than serve as pathways for upward mobility. The article talked about how it is that college can be a launching pad for wealthy students while sometimes leading to downward mobility for poor students. The article also talked about ways to counter this phenomenon. In other words, it gave ideas for rattling open the cage.
A second step in step in striving to be prophetic difference makers is to look for a palm tree outside the cage. Find that place where others can’t hold you back, where you can find your voice, where you can be free to speak your mind and know that others will listen. Perhaps, our church can be like a palm tree oasis. This is the place people can come to not only think outside the box but fly outside the box as well.
This connects to another reason for how I think becoming a freedom-seeking prophet can become more conceivable. Sure, Deborah was a great individual, but she wasn’t great all by herself. She went into battle with Barak. She had a whole army of soldiers, and she had Jael, her courageous and cunning partner in liberation. If our church is an oasis of palm trees, then perhaps all of us our escaped birds. On Sunday mornings, these pews are our branches. It’s together that we can discover the power of our wings and truly take flight. Amen.