Women of the Bible

Jo Dykes

I am so excited to be teaching/facilitating a new adult education class this fall on (selected) Women of the Bible!   Let me introduce both myself, and the class, to you. My name is Jo Dykes and I joined Church of the Nativity a little over a year before we were all quarantined by Covid, so I still, regretfully, have not met so many of you, and am really looking forward to doing so. A lifelong Presbyterian, I often visited Nativity with my son David and his family, Jill, Abby and Emmy before I moved here, and was so impressed by the friendliness and easy acceptance I felt. And of course, I loved Stephanie’s sermons.  So it was a forgone conclusion, when I moved from Martinsville, Va., that I would also become part of the Nativity family.

Always active in First Presbyterian in Martinsville, I have missed (as all of you have) the fellowship and working together for the past two years while we were on “lockdown”.  So when things started returning to normal, it seemed normal to me to volunteer to teach an adult “Sunday School” class.  Because of the recent surge of cases, the continuing emergence of variants, and the need to be ever vigilant,  I’m afraid the “new normal” is going to include living our lives the best we can: masked, sanitizing and distancing when necessary, but pushing on the best we can. So we decided to “push on” with this class. For the months of September through November, we will meet in Corlett Hall from 9:30 to 10:15 am each Sunday.  (Believe me, I know that is early!  But it seemed the best time to make the class available to members of both worship services….and won’t it be fun to see those people we don’t always see, because we meet at different times?) I will try and make it worth your time to get there, and we will be meeting the most amazing women! Wonderful women, beautiful, deceitful, kind, flawed, brave, loving, conflicted, evil, caring, intelligent, ambitious, wise, destructive, strong women. (Just like women we all know.)

I have taught this class twice before, both times at First Presbyterian in Martinsville , with a 30 year gap in between, and I am so excited to be teaching it again.  Just as reading the Bible seems to satisfy our explicit needs at every age, so reacquainting myself with these women, at different ages has changed my perceptions and views of them. And I am not alone.  I was interested to discover as I began to study the new literature, that just as society and culture has changed, so has the literature. I laughed out loud when I read that Queen Vashti, (of Esther fame), who was seen as stubborn, selfish and disrespectful, when I first met her in my teen age years, is now viewed as strong, independent and freedom loving. (Discussion, anyone?)

In the first two months we will be studying the women of the Old Testament in chronological order, following the rise of the Israelites, from Eve to Esther. And No. We can’t study all 315  women in three months. I have selected some of the most well known, as well as some you may not know,  to study. I will be including a list here in the coming weeks, and if I have left out someone you really want to know more about, I’m open to change. We will try and cover 2-3 women each week. Again, if that seems too ambitious, we will re-evaluate. In November, we will begin our study of the New Testament, and I want to skip straight to the women of Jesus’s ministry, both before his death and after it. Then we will go back to the beginning, and meet the young girl who became the mother of our Lord, Mary, the Madonna, who was with Him through His crucifixion. And that will lead us into Advent.

I will be telling you more in the coming weeks.  I am so excited about this study and hope you, both women AND men, will plan to come to “Sunday School” this fall.

Question of the week:  There are many stories of fathers and sons in the Bible, but only two (that I can find) of Mothers and daughters. Can you
name them? (Hint:   One of them is a good big sister.  The other was the heroine of a best selling book in the 1990’s that was a “must read” for book clubs across the nation.      (Answer in next week’s Glad Tidings)