The Cup of Water

preached Sunday, November 11, 2007 at Christ's Church for Brooklyn

“It’s Getting Better All the Time.” The first sermon series Joe preached asked the question, Melvin Udall’s question, “Is this as good as it gets?” And of course this second sermon series is a sort of answer…No! It’s not as good as it gets…it’s getting better, getting better all the time.

Which is why it’s weird, today, to preach a sermon on justice. Sermons on justice tend to be prophetic. They tend to be a little angry. They tend to be expressions of the kind of “holy discontent” Joe talked about in his first sermon here, expressions of the “I know this cannot be as good as it gets because this sucks!” variety. In fact, my confession for today is that—on this matter—I don’t see how “it’s getting better all the time,” at least, not if “better” means “getting more just.”

So why “justice,” now? It took me awhile to get my mind around this and what I finally realized was that I wasn’t supposed to preach a sermon on justice.

I was supposed to preach a sermon on being just.

What’s the difference, you might say. Just this: that talking about justice, as a concept, however powerfully and prophetically done, is talking about a final state of affairs that is so beyond us, so vastly different from what we know and expect of ourselves and each other, that we automatically talk about it passively. We wait for it. The day of the Lord, when everything will be made right. We wait for it, because the job is too big and too complicated and too difficult for us to understand or accomplish. The eschaton, the end of the ages, the Judgment Day, when Jesus comes back to judge the righteous and the wicked, and the righteous will be rewarded and all tears will be wiped away, and justice will reign. We wait for it, because it’s God’s job to come down and establish the justice and righteousness of God’s kingdom on earth.

But is it?

[Read text: Matt 25.31-36; unison, 37-39; 40-43; unison, 44; 45-6.]

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory…” Here we are, then, at the Judgment Day: and Jesus, who’s the Son of Man and who’s also a shepherd and also a king, Matthew got a little mixed with his metaphors here but it’s all good, is putting some people or maybe sheep over here on his right, some people or maybe goats over here on his left. And we all know what that means: the good people get what they deserve, and the bad people get what they deserve…now that’s “justice.” Praise God for the Judgment Day when finally everyone gets what they really deserve! When God finally gets around to sorting it all out properly! It was a long wait, but this was worth waiting for!

Is this God’s justice? Is this what this story’s all about?

I gotta tell you, I don’t think so. And it’s not just that I’m theologically uncomfortable with traditional doctrines of hell and eternal punishment (although, I confess, I am). No, there’s a lot about justice in this story, but it’s not located at the end. God’s justice is present, but it’s not about the end result. It’s not about who goes to eternal this or that. God’s justice is present, or absent, in the words and actions and lives of all those people gathered there in front of the throne of glory. It’s about who’s been just and who hasn’t…and no one in the story understands that.

No one gets it. Not even the good people on the right, and certainly not the bad people on the left. Not anyone. And not us either—who read this story and hear a parable of judgment and hellfire and brimstone and consider that God’s justice done. God’s justice is not the separating of the sheep from the goats, is not the reward of eternal life or eternal punishment. God’s justice is not about the judgment day, the end result, the tallying up.

God’s justice in this story is the cup of water.

And God’s justice is being done by people who don’t even know that that’s what they’re doing. Because they’re not concerned with “justice.” They’re not concerned with the final tally, the end result, with making sure that everyone gets exactly what they deserve in the end. They’re too busy being just, right now, in the moment.

They’re too busy meeting the needs they see all around them—those concrete, nonnegotiable, universal human needs that so heartbreakingly often go unmet. Food. Clean water. Shelter. Health care. Human sympathy and contact. “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or in prison?” Never. They never did. And every single time they encountered another human being in need. That’s Jesus’ answer, of course. “Just as you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.”

I’ve often heard this answer used to teach the lesson that we should strive to see Jesus in every person we meet. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t. It would probably mean a great deal of improvement in our social relations with a great many people if we could really do that. But I don’t think that’s what’s really going on in this exchange between the righteous and Jesus here. Jesus doesn’t say, “gotcha! that was just me in disguise, there.” No; instead, Jesus calls them “the least” in the world. Not the powerful Son of God, the king, in disguise. They really are the “least.” But these righteous cared for them anyway. Not because they saw Jesus, but because they saw need.

And what I hear in Jesus’ answer is that it doesn’t matter that they never saw Jesus in those hungry, thirsty, naked sick imprisoned people. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t see what they were doing as a service to God. It doesn’t matter that they didn’t think of themselves as God’s agents of divine justice and righteousness on earth. In fact, it seems to be to their credit that they didn’t, that they weren’t caught up in these questions. It seems to be to their credit that they were too busy being just to bother with questions about God’s justice, and who deserves help and who doesn’t, (and what in the end, will I deserve?) It seems to be to their credit that they were too busy being just to worry about when God’s justice will finally arrive, when everything will be finally made right, when they will finally get their reward, how long they will have to wait.

Me, I worry about these questions. Why? Because I’m a theologian. It’s my job to ask these questions and try to answer them. I ask these questions about justice and injustice, sitting in my office chair, in my home—my comfy, comfy Manhattan apartment. I think about all the injustice I have witnessed, heard about, read about. I think about the year I lived in Changsha, China, an American foreign teacher with a cushy job, a good salary, a travel allowance and a brand-new apartment provided with heat and A/C and a washing machine and no utility bill to pay…and how, from my kitchen window, I could see the construction workers from the countryside camping out under a tarp to sleep and washing themselves under a water spigot outside in the mornings, outside that nice new apartment they’d built for me. I remember how overwhelming that sight was, and how helpless it made me feel. What could I do for them? How could I even figure out what they really needed? How could I talk to people about how unjust it was that people would consider such a job good luck—coming into the city for months at a time, camping out in the heat and the cold away from their families, enduring cold and loneliness and, who knows what, for their lives were a mystery to me. How could I talk to people about the reasons behind such a situation? And what were those reasons? I wonder, why? Why are things this way? How did they get so messed up? How did we human beings make such a mess? And I wonder, how do we fix it? And what am I supposed to do?

Everything I see leads me to this sense of how immense the task is. Of how many people, in so many places, in Brooklyn and beyond, are squeezed and gripped and crushed by these systems and forces that I don’t understand, that seem to require the sacrifice of others on the altar of success and productivity and getting ahead in the world. And I freeze. Where do I start. What do I do. How do I do it. It’s too big for me. I don’t even understand how it all works really, so how can I act? Some people can’t see the forest for the trees; me, I can’t see the trees for the forest. I get lost in the hugeness of the problems I see. And I want to cry out, God, where are you? Why don’t you get down here and do your job already? There are hungry people here, thirsty people, lonely and sick and dying people, we need justice! How long do we have to wait?

I used to think that, somewhere out there, there were amazing and heroic people who understood these difficult things; these people knew what was going on, understood the big picture, understood the history and the politics and the economics and the red tape and knew the answers, and how to cut through the red tape to get stuff done. I used to think that my best shot would be to find those people, and learn from them, learn what they knew that I didn’t. And what happened is that I did find some of them. I found them here. Some of them are here today and some of them would be here, except that they’re off elsewhere, being just…

But what they know, that I’m still learning, is that in some sense being just is simple. It’s as simple as handing a cup of water to a thirsty person. And even though they’re completely aware of the enormous systems of injustice we human beings have somehow woven together, that seem so impervious to our tiny actions, these amazing heroic people, these righteous people, are out there handing out cups of water anyway.

Talk to these people. Learn what they do. If you don’t know what to do, ask them. They can tell you, not because they understand things so much better, but because they have learned that no matter how small you feel, or how little you think you know, you can do something. Because being just is sometimes as simple as a cup of water.

Casey’s blog used to have a quote from Ghandi up at the top. She’s changed it now, to something disappointingly philosophical by Kant, but it used to read, “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” A cup of water. It’s not the cure for all the injustice of this world. In that sense, it’s insignificant. But it is very important that you give it.

This kind of action takes faith. It takes faith because we don’t see how these cups of water make a dent in the injustice that grips our world. There’s no end to the needs that cry out to be met. The list is long. Just listen to the text: hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, lonely, imprisoned people. That’s a lot of need. It takes faith because we don’t get to see that big picture, we don’t see how that Day, when all needs will be met and all injustices righted, can possibly come. We don’t see how it’s getting better all the time.

Maybe you’ve felt, as I have this week, that this effort for the H2O project is small, insignificant in the face of all the need, all the injustices facing us. Maybe you’ve felt, as I have occasionally this week, that giving up coffee, or whatever it is you’ve given up, is just purely symbolic. Maybe you’ve felt, as I have, frustrated and a bit angry by all of this sacrifice, suspicious that in the end, it just isn’t enough. But Jesus says to us: I was thirsty, and you gave me water. We won’t see the thirsty people who receive the water our dollars help provide. We won’t be there in person to hand them that cup of water. We have to act in faith. That’s what being just requires.

It takes faith to believe that no matter how insignificant our acts of justice may seem to be, they are important. That no matter how small they are, they do have an effect. That what we do for the least of these, counts. That when we go about the daily, godly business of being just, those cups of water mean something. And they do. For the people who receive them, they mean life triumphs over death. For the people who receive them, they mean good triumphs over evil. For the people who receive them, they mean justice. They mean God’s righteousness.

We forget that. I forget that, when I sit in my apartment and think about injustice, asking my theological questions, feeling overwhelmed by the realities outside my window. I forget that no matter how enormous the problem of systemic human injustice is, each cup of water is a victory over it. Not total. Not once and for all. But real. For those who receive that cup of water, it is the triumph of God’s justice and righteousness—a taste, a foretaste, of what that ultimate day of triumph will be.

That’s what we learn from Jesus here. Justice doesn’t wait for the Judgment Day. Justice isn’t the business of the king. Justice is not meted out on brass scales at the end of the age. Justice is not something we receive. It’s something we do: not justice, but being just. In ways big, sometimes, but mostly, small. Being just is meted out in cups of water, in canned goods, in donated coats and hand-knitted caps for newborn babies, in long hours at hospitals and ESL classrooms and support groups. And in skipped sodas and caffe lattes and gallons of milk and beers, and coins collected in a blue plastic cup: all to give that insignificant, all-important cup of water to the least of these, who need it so badly.

And maybe, just maybe, that cup of water will enable someone to say, yes, Lord: things are getting better. Getting better, one person at a time.

"Who is the neighbor?"

Luke 10:25-37

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He said to him, "What is written in the law? What do you read there?" He answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied,

"A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, `Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.' Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise."

“Who is my neighbor?” This question belongs on the Bible’s list of The Worst Questions Ever Asked in the History of the World. Alongside, “how many times must I forgive my brother?” and “when you come into your kingdom, can we sit at your right hand?” and “am I my brother’s keeper?”, this question lives in biblical infamy.

But this isn’t the only bad question that's asked in our text. The first question is, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Well, what’s wrong with this question? Maybe nothing, as far as it goes. But notice, it’s not, what do I have to do to be a good person, or to please God, or what have you. It’s, what must I do to inherit eternal life? What do I have to do to get the reward? But even before the man opens his mouth to ask his first wrong question, we know it’s bound to be grim. The story, after all, identifies the man as “a lawyer.”

At first, Jesus plays the lawyer’s game. He knows the man is just asking to test him. But even so, he answers the man on his own grounds, asking his counterquestion in terms that a lawyer will understand. “What is written in the Law?” Jesus asks him. And the man of course knows the answer, as do we all. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, etc., etc., and your neighbor as yourself.” That’s right, Jesus tells him. A gold star for the lawyer boy. Now all you have to do is go do it: “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

And it is here of course that the story really gets going. Because in answering the lawyer on his own grounds, by accepting the premises of the lawyer’s wrong question, Jesus leads him straight into the point at which his question and assumptions are all wrong. The lawyer knows the answer to his question. The lawyer knows the Law, knows the Good. The lawyer knows what Jesus will answer, even. The lawyer knows a whole lot. But what Jesus knows, that the lawyer doesn’t, is that knowledge isn’t enough. Knowing the answer is not really the answer. The real answer, to the right question, is not about knowing the Good. It’s about doing it. “Do this,” Jesus says, “and you will live.”

The lawyer knows he’s caught. As are we all. You may have heard, perhaps, of the “famous seminary experiment of the Good Samaritans.” The experiment was designed to test whether or not people thinking “helpful, religious” type thoughts would be any more likely to stop and offer assistance to someone who needed it. So the researchers recruited seminary students, told them to give a talk on the Good Samaritan, and made them late for it. Then they said, “hey, you’re late—you better get going” and placed a slumped-over man, coughing and moaning, in their way. Less than half of the students stopped to offer any help…and apparently some of them literally stepped over the man in the alley in order to get to their destination and give their talk on the Good Samaritan.

This appalling truth about humanness is why Jesus corners the lawyer with his simple and indisputable pronouncement: “Do this and you will live.” Know this, and only know it, and you’ll know what it is you lack, the exact dimensions of your failure. But do this, and you will live.

The lawyer, the seminary students in a hurry, all of us, we’re all caught, we’re all cornered. And so the lawyer, advocating for himself (or perhaps all of us), wanting, as the Bible tells us, to justify himself (or all of us), hastens to ask that desperate, infamous follow-up question.

“And who is my neighbor?”

We all know the parable Jesus tells in reply; we know it by heart. A wounded man, a priest and a Levite (the seminary students of their day, if you will), and a Samaritan ( perhaps today's devout Muslim?). Jesus’ strategy in reaching the lawyer changes with the telling of the parable. At first, he accepted the legalistic question, leading the questioner straight into the absurdity of the divorce of knowledge and action. But the lawyer pushes on, even further into the absurd--preferring, apparently, to be absurd rather than wrong. He’d rather be silly than stupid, rather be ridiculous than repent. And so Jesus tells a story, and at the end, as he so often does, instead of answering the wrong question asked of him, he asks his interrogator a right question instead. Not “who is my neighbor?” but “which of the three was a neighbor to the wounded man?”*

The difference between these two questions is vast. “Who is my neighbor” can only be answered in one way, with a list of who is not: not Samaritans, not wounded men on the sides of roads, not homeless people with a hacking cough, not people in Africa dying of AIDS, not people I don't know, not those people who need so much help that I don’t have time in my busy schedule to give, or any idea how to really help them. But “who was a neighbor to the wounded man?” is not answered that way. And the lawyer--smart man!--gets this answer right, too: he answers, “the one who showed him mercy.” Who is the neighbor? Not the wounded man; the Samaritan! Because the answer to Jesus’ question is that one makes oneself a neighbor—not somebody else.

And how? By being a neighbor to that person. The answer to the right question is not an identity; it is an action. This is why it is no accident that the neighbor in Jesus’ story is a Samaritan, a despised person, a reject, an outcast. It’s not identity that makes a neighbor.

Making oneself a neighbor is active. No, more than that—it is proactive, a preemptive strike of neighborliness. The wounded man does nothing to make the Samaritan his neighbor. He just lies there, wounded. It is the Samaritan who acts: who approaches, binds his wounds, takes him to the inn and provides for further care. The Samaritan makes himself the neighbor to the wounded man through his actions. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus concludes: Go and make yourself a neighbor to the wounded.

But—like the lawyer—I have a follow-up question to ask. What if this were a different story, one we don't know by heart, one where there was no good Samaritan to stop and help—just a priest and a Levite who walk by, and a wounded, abandoned, dying man on the road? Were there no good Samaritan in the story, what would we say? That the wounded man had no neighbor because no one made himself a neighbor to the man? Maybe that would be true, but it’s also only partially true, which means of course that it’s also a lie. Because, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story” is that all three travelers should be neighbors to the wounded man; that all three are neighbors to the man, even if only one of them acted like it.

The truth is, the wounded man does not just do nothing to make the Samaritan his neighbor. Sure, he doesn't do much. He just lies there, wounded. But that's exactly it. It is his woundedness that makes the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan his neighbor. It is his need that puts these passers-by under obligation to respond to it. Were he not wounded, they would have passed on the road with a nod and a smile, or perhaps less than that. But he is wounded. He is in need. And the neighbor must answer.

The priest and the Levite pass by on the far side of the road. That is their answer. But the Samaritan, Jesus says, “came near” the wounded man and “when he saw him he was moved with pity.” I imagine that he saw the man’s face, and that the wounded man’s glance was one of both supplication and demand. Begging: please help me. And commanding: you must help me! The wounded man has the right to make this demand, simply because of his need.**

Who is the neighbor? Does the Samaritan make himself the neighbor through his neighborly act, or does the wounded man make the Samaritan his neighbor through the fact of his need?

Like all either-ors, to pose the question this way is to present a false dilemma. Yes, the woundedness of the wounded man makes the Samaritan his neighbor; yes, the action of the Samaritan in being neighbor to the wounded man makes him his true neighbor. What we learn from this parable is both of these things. What we learn is not just that the Samaritan comes through as the true neighbor, the one who showed mercy, but that the priest and the Levite fail, utterly, because they refuse to recognize their obligation to the wounded man’s need.

Do we understand their failure? If we’re honest with ourselves: yes. We are too often the priest and the Levite of the story who pass by on the other side of the road, the seminary students of the experiment, who step over the fallen man in the alley. We are stuffed full of knowledge of the Good and so preoccupied with it that we have forgotten that Good is not something you know, it’s something you do. Or perhaps we might even say, God is not something you know; God is something you do.

We live in a wounded world. It’s a world full of wounded people on the sides of roads full of busy people walking by them. We are the neighbor, with the power to help and to heal. Those wounds make us the neighbor. The only question left is, do we act like it. Do we?

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." We, too, can give the right answer. And Jesus tells us: "Do this, and you will live."

Let us pray together the Prayer of Confession:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your name. Amen.

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that we may both know and understand what things we ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.



*from Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: “The parable of the Good Samaritan ends with the famous inversion which Christ makes of the original question. They asked him, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ and when everything seemed to point to the wounded man in the ditch on the side of the road, Christ asked, ‘which of these three do you think was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The neighbor was the Samaritan who approached the wounded man and made him his neighbor” (198).

**from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity : “The gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving—this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. But is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches in a dimension of height” (75).

Who is She, and how do we know Her?: A sermon for Trinity Sunday

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
"To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth--
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world's first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

I know a lot of smart people. Really, really smart people. People who intimidate me with their wit, their vocabularies, their incredible breadth of knowledge. I’ve sat with them in class, I’ve learned from their lectures, I’ve read their blogs, Igo to church with them. But wise people? I don’t even know if I know anyone I would call “wise.”

The thing is, we don’t really talk about wisdom much so to tell the truth I don’t really know exactly what it is, or at least, I don’t really know exactly what it is we mean we say wisdom nowadays. I have a vague idea that wisdom is a special kind of knowledge, different from ordinary knowledge, or book-learning, or just being smart or quick-witted. When I think of a wise person, I think of somebody old: wisdom being something acquired through years of first-hand experience of the trials of life—something that, therefore, is undefinable, personal, non-transferable, and cannot be hurried, or achieved simply through effort or desire, or even anticipated. It’s sort of a compensation, maybe, for the wrinkles and the gray hair and the achy joints, and perhaps the reason why old people generally think the world—now being run by the upstart youngsters in their 20’s and 30’s and 40’s and 50’s—is going to hell in a handbasket. But that’s it—that’s all I can really say about wisdom. It’s something vague and undefinable that sometimes old people get, if they’re lucky, if they live well and long and pay attention to stuff, and process their life’s experiences in the right way.

That isn’t what “wisdom” means in our text for today.

To begin with, unlike us, the Israelites thought a lot about wisdom. In fact, there’s a whole genre of OT literature called “wisdom literature.” Proverbs is “wisdom literature” along with Job, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations.

But that’s not all. We think of wisdom generically, as just a sort of way of thinking or living that is attained by a few people by living well. But wisdom in the wisdom literature of the OT is altogether different. It is not something that human beings achieve by living a long time, or even by living well. The wisdom of the wisdom literature in the OT is not human at all. It is God’s wisdom.

But even in saying this we may be tempted to think of this as simply a way of saying that God is really wise: God knows a lot more stuff than we do and even knows a lot more than we do about what is good for us. Sure, God knows a lot of stuff. Maybe even everything. But this isn’t what God’s wisdom is, either. It is not an attribute of God, like omniscience, or a way of saying what God is like. The wisdom of God is itself divine. The wisdom of God is God.

This is why Wisdom is personified in our text today, because to talk about Wisdom is to talk about God. Wisdom in this sense is one of God’s ways of being present and active in the world.

And Wisdom is a woman: divine Sophia.

In our text today, Wisdom speaks directly to us. She makes a lot of claims for herself, as divine Sophia, God’s own wisdom. She claims that she was there at the very beginning, at God’s side during the very act of Creation itself. She is “the first of God’s acts,” and witnessed the establishment of the heavens and the seas and the foundation of the earth. She was, she says, “beside God like a master-worker,” suggesting that perhaps she even participated in God’s act of creation.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God. He was there from the beginning, and through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Of course, John's prologue is a lot more familiar to us than Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs 8. We have all heard it before, many times. Probably a lot of us could recite it from memory without ever having tried to really memorize it. And of course we all know who it is about, right?

But the amazing parallels between Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs and the prologue of the gospel of John are not accidental. They are, rather, extremely deliberate. Wisdom, divine Sophia, is used as a way of describing God’s action and presence in the world. And of course, nowhere is God more present than in Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. As articulated by John’s gospel, then, Jesus, like Sophia, is God’s presence and action with us in the world: there from the beginning, involved intimately in the act of creation. The claims made by Sophia in Wisdom’s speech in Proverbs become, in John’s gospel, Christological claims.

But Wisdom is a woman.

Perhaps the fact that God can be seen and spoken of not only with masculine images and metaphor like Father and Son but also with female images and metaphors is not surprising. We're familiar with Jesus' statement about Jerusalem, how he longed to gather her home like a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings. We know that God is not male, or female. Perhaps both, or neither, or more than, or utterly other than; but never simply, only, male, or female. Nevertheless, I was told once during an especially vulnerable period of my Christian faith, “isn’t God a man?” Unable to respond at the time—unsure if my instinct to yell, “no!” was even faithful—I kept silent. Is God a man? I wondered...Jesus was a man. And Jesus was God incarnate. Does this mean God is a man?

Since then, my question has been not “is God a man,” but “how could anyone believe God is a man?” Of course this is a complicated matter. But on one level, this belief is possible because the Christian tradition, on the whole, speaks of God almost entirely in masculine language. Nowhere is this more evident than in Trinitarian language, which has been so sanctified over the years that it has become really the way to talk about who God is. Who God is in God’s self, and who God is to us. We theologian types call these the immanent and economic trinities. We talk about God in three persons, triunity, the one-in-three, perichoresis, aseity. We talk about social trinitarianism and discuss what works belong to which person, or if all three persons are present whenever God acts. Believe me, it’s complicated and wearying, and it’s been going on for nearly two thousand years.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a.k.a., "the first Sunday after Pentecost." Pentecost, of course, is a day with which we are all reasonably familiar, though sadly none of us remembered to wear the traditional red. But Trinity Sunday I would bet most of us have never heard of. Perhaps you, like me, did not even hear the word “trinity” in church growing up. Those of us from the Church of Christ don’t use that word much; Alexander Campbell, one of our founding fathers, didn’t like it: it isn’t biblical. "Bible things by Bible names!" So while we talk comfortably about God the Father, and Jesus the Son of God, and rather uncomfortably (I mean, let’s be honest) about the Spirit, we do accept the idea of God in three persons…we just don’t call them a trinity.

Why bother with the Trinity? Basically, Trinitarian talk is just our attempt to hold together two essential affirmations about the God we believe in: that God became human, and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus Christ; and that God is, and has been, and will be the same God who has acted in the history of the people of Israel, and who moves among us today as Holy Spirit. How do we talk about a God who is so diversely present to us, and yet the same? The best solution the theologians of the third and fourth centuries could come up with was to talk about Father, Son and Holy Spirit: the three-in-one.

So on this Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate God the Father, who sent the Son, who sent the Spirit, our Comforter—what does it mean to talk about Wisdom, the female symbol of God’s presence and action in the world, divine Sophia, and Christ the Son as the new manifestation of Sophia?

I don’t really want to advocate straight up heresy. Not really. Not here, anyway…if you want heresy, go read my blog. So I’m not suggesting that the doctrine of the Trinity is a bad doctrine, that we need to dump it or revise it or ignore it. I’m certainly not trying to add a fourth member to the Trinity. No, what I'm saying is radical--but radically orthodox: We must be careful about assuming that any human formulation—no matter how old, how venerable, how traditional, how carefully worked out—captures the essence of God, definitively. God is so much more than any human way of naming or describing can capture. God cannot be captured. C.S. Lewis told us this: he’s not a tame lion. (And he’s not really a lion, either.)

God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is Wisdom, divine Sophia. God is Mother, a jilted lover, a fire, a wind. God is all these and none of these. God is Mystery that cannot be contained in any one image, any one metaphor.

Each way of imaging God and speaking of God teaches us something unique, and something new, I believe. The triune God of traditional Christian Trinitarian doctrine teaches us that God so loved the world that he sent his only son; a son who died for the sake of God’s beloved creation, and who promised us the Spirit in his absence. But this does not exhaust what can be said of God. So the question to ask, as we read this text on Trinity Sunday, is, what unique and new thing does Proverbs teach us about God through the voice of divine Wisdom?

Let’s look at our text again with this question in mind. It begins with Wisdom telling us that she cries out to us, and that she cries “to all that live.” This inclusive mission does not take heed of boundaries like nationality or gender or class or ability, or require that one be faithful before she’ll call. Her call is to us and to all that live. That’s everyone.

But that’s not all. When God, as Wisdom, calls out to all who live, it means not just that God wants everyone to hear but that everyone can hear Wisdom’s call. These days, I hear a lot about how Reason is untrustworthy, compromised because of the Fall, and how we have to be suspicious of human wisdom in order to be faithful to God’s Wisdom. Some of this I think is true. Obviously human knowledge is limited—we don’t know everything, and can’t know everything. Often we don’t even know or want what is good for us.

But if Wisdom’s call goes out to all who live then it reaches everyone, even those who do not know God as Father, Son and Spirit; and if Wisdom’s call is meant for all who live, then it means even those who do not know God as Father, Son and Spirit can hear Wisdom’s call. And unless Wisdom calls in vain, it means that all who live can respond to her. Human beings are not “ruined” when it comes to Wisdom; instead, we were created to be able to respond to Wisdom’s call when he hear it.

And now it makes sense that Wisdom’s speech turns into a poetic description of Creation itself: Wisdom was there from the beginning, observing and celebrating and participating in the creation of all things, including human beings; and thus we are in some sense creatures of Wisdom. We can hear her call and know Wisdom for who She is. Not just some of us; but all who live.

And so our text ends with God’s Wisdom “rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” People, God loves us. And not just like a disappointed father loves a wayward and prodigal son. God delights in the human race! God beams down at us, smiles, laughs, rejoices in us humans very much, I think, the way I watch Clare as she laughs, eats, says “Hi Da!” and “CAT!” while maniacally giggling at our poor patient cat, as she takes her wobbly first steps and grows those funny looking front teeth. I’m shameless—she has her own blog now just because one blog couldn’t contain the immensity of maternal delight! God is rejoicing in this inhabited world and delighting in the human race—children of God, children of Wisdom!

Yes, Wisdom is a woman. And what we see in this text is that Wisdom is God present and active in this world: God loving and delighting in his creation, God calling out to us and to all who live. God the Father sent his Son and his Holy Spirit to us; and God as divine Sophia calls us all home, delighting in us as a woman does her child. God is all these, and none of these. God is mystery that cannot be contained, contained in all things, in the Wisdom that created all.

"Unready"

Isaiah 6:1-8

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said:

"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory."

The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out." Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!"

Luke 5:1-11

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you--unless you have come to believe in vain.
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.


Today is the fifth Sunday of Epiphany. The Season of Epiphany is all about discovering who Jesus really is. The scriptures and stories we read during this season are stories of miracles, of healings, of teachings that show us that Jesus is not just some guy from Galilee, but someone special; someone touched by the divine, someone who—by the time we get to the story of the Transfiguration—is divine.

Of course, our perspective, as readers and hearers of these biblical stories, preserved and canonized and handed down through generations, is one that takes the outcome for granted. And we know, of course, that this perspective is exactly what is not taken for granted by those in the stories themselves. The crowds, the disciples—sometimes I think even Jesus himself—did not share our automatic certainty that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. They are always on the cusp of grasping this astonishing revelation...and then, most often, losing it. They are always in the middle of the epiphany, while we are ages past it.

It is of course nearly impossible for us to recreate the mindset of the people who lived these things, who walked and talked and watched and learned from the man Jesus, the man who occasionally is revealed to them as Someone Divine. We can’t forget that these things have happened. Even when we try to place ourselves within the narrative, as one of the disciples, or one of the crowd, or one of the many healed, our knowledge of Jesus’ identity—the very thing at issue in the stories—is a matter taken to some extent for granted, shaping how we imagine our participation in the event that reveals it. It is for this reason that we find ourselves with the easy conviction that we would have known, we would have followed, we would have said thank you, we never would have crucified, or mocked, or doubted, or denied.

So I will not ask you to imagine being there. I honestly don’t think that we can forget who Jesus is to us long enough for imagination to do the work we ask it to do.

Instead, let’s consider what these stories have in common. Sometimes, especially during ordinary or green time, the texts in the lectionary seem rather arbitrary and unrelated. This week, however, the experiences of Isaiah, Peter and Paul all seem to follow a pattern, despite the wide separation of years and circumstance that distinguish them. And because that is so, I believe the lesson we learn from the commonality of their experiences, recorded for us, is one that we can best learn not by reaching backwards with our imaginations to try to picture what it must have been like for them, but to scrutinize our own present to discern where the pattern of these experiences repeats itself in our lives, in its own unique permutation, despite the wide separation of years and circumstance between us and Isaiah, Peter and Paul.

Isaiah tells us that in the year King Uzziah died, he had a vision. He saw the Lord: as if God were a king, on a throne, with a court of seraphs as attendants. I had a professor at Harding, Mr. Eddins, who referred to such as “heavenly critters”—to emphasize the fact that we don’t really know what “seraphs” are, or what the word really means or even how to translate it, as seraph is really just an Anglicized version of the Greek-icized version of the original Hebrew word. But the symbolic point of the throne, the robe, and the heavenly critters is clear: this is a powerful and singular God Isaiah sees. And Isaiah is filled with a sense of God’s power and holiness. And because Isaiah sees just how powerful and holy this God is, the more acute his sense of his own human vulnerability and un-holiness becomes. Instead of joining with the heavenly critters in their chorus of praise, instead of proclaiming joyfully the holiness and glory of God, Isaiah voices instead his sense of his own unworthiness and fear. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips,” he cries out.

Likewise, we see Peter protest in response to Jesus. Jesus asks a favor of Simon, later to be called Peter, which he seems happy enough to do. To get away from the pressing of the crowds, Jesus hops in his boat and asks him to put out a little way from the shore, so that Jesus can continue teaching. When he finishes, he tells Peter to go catch some fish. And here, I can’t help imagining a bit, that Peter’s reaction was in reality a little more dubious than what we get recorded in the text. Perhaps even a little miffed. After all, what does a religious teacher know about catching fish, and why would someone clearly not an expert presume to instruct someone who does it for a living? Just because he’s so smart, doesn’t mean he knows everything. But Peter does it anyway, though a little less than graciously. And when Jesus is proved right despite all expectation, Peter is amazed. But the expression of his amazement does not take the form of simple astonishment, or praise, or even a declaration of allegiance. Instead he falls down at Jesus’ feet and says, “Go away!” Why? Because, Peter says, he is a “sinful man.” Like Isaiah, Peter’s experience of the divine prompts, not acceptance or glad recognition or relief, but fear and a sense of being unworthy.

It is in Acts that we get an account of the story of Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus. Unlike Isaiah’s vision, we get a third-person rather than a first-person account: Luke’s version of Paul’s story. But in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul refers back to that experience: “Last of all, he appeared to me, as to one untimely born; for I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” In Paul, even in retrospect, we see the same reaction repeated. The stark difference between himself and Jesus is not softened by the passage of time. The vision of the divine, even the remembrance of that vision, prompts a recognition of unworthiness.

I want to ask you now to think about yourself; not to ask you how you would feel or what you would say if you suddenly had a vision in the night of God on a throne surrounded by heavenly critters, or if Jesus appeared to you in the middle of the subway. But to ask you, do you, as I do, understand exactly what that feeling of vulnerability, fear, inability and unworthiness feels like? To be facing up to a task, and think, I cannot possibly do this? To be facing a person, and know yourself to be completely inadequate to give them what they need? To be facing the future, and worry helplessly because you have no idea what will happen to you? And dare I ask you, what manifestation of the divine was it, in those instances of fear and self-doubt, that you were reacting to? Did you see God there? Do you see God there now, in retrospect?

God doesn’t wait for us to be ready for a vision. He doesn’t require preparation for a call. God simply breaks into the mundane, unpredictably and unaccountably, and—there it is. And you have to deal. And of course, our first moment, no matter who we are, Isaiahs and Moseses and Peters and Pauls (or even Jesuses?) notwithstanding, our first instinct is to refuse. To say no. To say, I am not ready. I am a man of unclean lips. I am a sinful man. I am unfit to be called an apostle.

But God doesn’t care. Our unreadiness is a fact; it is an aspect of being human. But God doesn’t care. God calls us anyway, in the very situations and circumstances that define the nature and shape of our unreadiness.

Did I say God doesn’t care? Of course God cares. To our first, instinctive, utter refusal of God’s call, God answers: but yes. To Isaiah, the man of unclean lips, God sends a heavenly critter to clean those lips, with the message, “your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” To Simon Peter, Jesus responds, “Do not be afraid.” And Paul, reflecting on his Damascus road experience, can say, despite his unfitness, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.”

Do not be afraid. Your guilt has departed and your sin blotted out. By the grace of God you are what you are, and God’s grace is not in vain.

And now what?

Isaiah: “here am I, send me.” Peter, who left everything and followed. Paul, who writes the church in Corinth, “I have handed on to you what I received.” Let me suggest to you that these three unready—unclean, sinful, unfit—human beings together model for us three steps in answering our own call from God. Isaiah’s simple declaration gives us the first: acceptance. No more protesting or arguing, but acceptance that even this powerful, mighty God is asking us, you, me, for help; asking us to be God’s presence in this world. Peter’s action gives us the second: leave it and follow. I don’t know what form this may take in your life. It took a radical one in Peter’s—not just a job change, but an apparently complete forsaking of material goods and any prospect of security. Paul, finally, gives us the third: handing on what has been given to us, making “brothers and sisters” of all whom we encounter, proclaiming to them the good news through which we are being saved and through which all may be saved.

“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”

Amen.