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.
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.
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.
11 comments:
Outstanding! I preached from this Proverbs passage a month ago. I so wanted to take it more in the direction that you did but I chickened out. Kudos to you.
I focused primarily on Jesus as an additional manifestation of wisdom. Although I liked what I preached: how Jesus used wisdom sayings (proverbs and parables) to teach us about relationship with God, ourselves and others, yours was truer to the Proverbs text.
Great stuff. How many came forward at the invitation :D
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the encouragement. I wouldn't for my part be inclined to think you "chickened out." Preaching well means knowing your audience, right? Barth notwithstanding, I don't think you really want to "hurl the gospel like a stone" at your people. The message you preached sounds like one that would benefit your audience--whereas this sermon would likely not (for various reasons, one of which is, I do think this sermon remains quite vague and offers little concrete take-home stuff).
No invitation song to speak of...but the singing worship was IMO incredible--kudos to Nate for that.
I love that you force us to think about God as not being contained. We preacher folk and theological folk often make that claim but do so in ways that are ineffective or as Scott points out, we bail out before saying what we really mean; therefore, we just confuse the heck out of our hearers. However, you pulled it off in your sermon. You did it in a way that is effective - God is so much more than we can know and his love for us is as well. That message I can take home and chew on.
Here's the problem with a sermon like yours and sermons that I often preach - they are hard to digest, as you say in your comment above. There aren't bulleted points to hang on to, clips from movies to back up said points and preaching from a manuscript like you did and like I do is a hard task to pull off. Writing for the eye is much, much easier than writing for the ear. While I think CCfB is getting to the point of being trained hearers of manuscripted sermons I still think they long for language and messages that are easily heard and digested. I'm not at all suggesting that your sermon was too lofty or too hard to digest but as our preaching has become more formal I've been thinking of what CCfB needs and these things come to mind.
I look forward to reading more of your work in the future and maybe come fall, I'll actually get to hear you! :)
Thanks for your willingness to share God's gifts with God's people.
Um...I think the only person I'd be more scared to preach in front of would be my dad.
I always hesitate to post questions like this for two reasons, a) because I'd rather ask this over coffee and b) because I'm afraid I'll come off as some curmudgeonly crank just looking to pick a fight. I'm not looking to strain out gnats here.
Since I can't fly to NY and buy you coffee, please take my questions with the spirit they are intended.
Before I get to that, let me say that I love the way you write and can only assume I would feel the same about your preaching. Wish I could have been there to hear this. Love that you used this text and love the humility and boldness with which you approached it.
I did wonder and was concerned by the consistent use of the word metaphor in reference to the Trinity (oh, it's also possible that I misunderstood this, and that you weren't saying what I thought you were saying). While I think it is correct to say that we cannot fully understand God, I'm not sure how we can speak of Jesus as a metaphor for God. If a metaphor is the comparing of two like things that are not actually alike (the world is a stage), how can Jesus be a metaphor for God and also actually be God? It seems like the difference between saying "my wife is a princess" and "my wife is Rachel".
I'm really not trying to be difficult. I just wonder if in our desire not to contain God, we don't allow Him to contain Himself.
What a great question this is.
And since I had a rather lengthy answer that disappeared on me...hopefully I can do better more briefly this second time around.
It seems to me that the motivation of your concern is a high Christology, in which Jesus is God: an assertion of identity, not likeness through unlikeness (metaphor). I understand this and actually have a rather high Christology myself (that being the only way I can make any soteriological sense out of the cross). Thus in the sermon (unless I slipped up somewhere) I don't refer to Jesus as a metaphor for God; I refer to Trinitarian Father-Son language as metaphor. What's the difference? Jesus is God: Trinitarian language is one possible way of articulating in limited human language and concepts the relationship of differentiation/identification of Jesus and God. Historically, it has been the only way. But that doesn't mean there aren't other, equally apt (and equally un-apt) ways of conceiving of that relationship in human language.
Interestingly, particularly in light of the Christological concern, is the fact that the biblical text bears witness to the mediating role of the Wisdom tradition in establishing the very point of at issue: the identification of Jesus as God. As hinted at in the sermon, Wisdom was an established figure for God, and so Jesus became identified with the Wisdom tradition (through the Logos symbol) as a means of equating Jesus with God. We generally readily acknowledge Wisdom as metaphorical, yet are reluctant to call Jesus metaphor; and yet Jesus' identity was in part established through the mediating use of the Wisdom metaphor.
For me, the difference lies in a conviction that Jesus was indeed a real person, in the flesh. This is what is non-metaphorical, if you will. But our subsequent references and attempts to make sense of this event and this person are inevitably fallible--somewhat right, somewhat wrong, and always incomplete (metaphor).
Excellent. You're exactly right, my concern was born out of a high Christology. So, do you think that Christ was speaking metaphorically when He spoke of coming "from the Father" because His actual relationship to God would have been too difficult to explain? I haven't actually ever considered this. I don't know that I could have ever articulated what it means for Jesus to have a Father that is Himself (this is where the humble "I don't know" comes in), but I always assumed that His choice of Father was indicative of the fact that the relationship resembled (though in a perfect state) that between earthly fathers and children. That God isn't simply a force explained best by the metaphor of Father, but an actual being whose state of being is best explained by the word Father. Does that make sense? I'm thinking off the cuff somewhat and may better explain or even dispute myself at a later date.
By the way, I'd like to add your blog as a link from my own.
Yes, I would say the use of "Father" in that context is metaphorical, not least because Jesus encouraged his followers to call God Father as well, as in the Lord's Prayer. We believe as well that we are "children of God" in the same way. So I find it difficult to suppose that the relationship Jesus indicates in his invocation of God as Father is unique, when we are encouraged to use the same language and to think of ourselves as children of God.
I am always honored when someone thinks enough of my blog to link to it. My thanks.
"I understand this and actually have a rather high Christology myself (that being the only way I can make any soteriological sense out of the cross)."
If you haven't already, you might investigate Rene Girard's take on how the cross saves. He argues that the cross is the pinnacle of God's efforts to save humanity from cycles of violence. If nothing else, this is a great antidote to penal substitutionary atonement.
Here's a link to some summaries by a friend of mine.
I have come across this in an indirect way and haven't read Girard myself. At some point--say if I ever get the chance to teach an intro theology class--I want to pick this up. I'm very sympathetic to this and found Experimental Theology's statement re linking of prob of evil with soteriology right on.
Weaver's Nonviolent Atonement is an interesting read, as is George Hunsinger's refutation (interesting in the sense of witnessing direct theological exchange).
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