This
first Sunday after the Festival of Pentecost, which we celebrated last week, is
known in some religious circles as Trinity Sunday. It is a day that churches may set aside to
acknowledge the doctrine of the Trinity – God in three persons, blessed trinity
(as the old hymn goes)….Father, Son, and Holy Ghost…Creator, Christ, and Holy
Spirit.
Interestingly
enough, the doctrine of the Trinity is not Biblical in origin. There is no place in our Holy Scriptures that
describes these three personifications of God in such closely interwoven
terms. In fact, the word “trinity” is
never used in the Bible.
However,
through Old Testament stories, we are introduced to Yahweh, Elohim, the one
God, the Creator. Likewise, in the New
Testament, we follow in the footsteps of Jesus and come to understand his
unique relationship to God. And finally,
most dramatically in the story of Pentecost, but prominently in the Gospel of
John as well, we become acquainted with the Holy Spirit. However, it was not until the Council of
Nicea in the 4th century that this notion of the three personages of
God – the Godhead - was codified in the Nicene Creed as orthodox Christian
doctrine.
For
most of us growing up in the church, the trinity was pretty much a done
deal. It was assumed that we believed in
it – in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost – remember?
Looking
back on it all, the Father part was pretty easy to fathom. All we had to know was what the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel looked like. God was
the old man with the beard residing in the white puffy clouds of heaven –
rather like Father Time, Cecile B. DeMille’s Moses, and the ancient prophets
all rolled into one.
And
if we did not know what the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel looked like, that was
all right because we could just listen to the language used to address God in worship. The images handed down to us were
overwhelmingly masculine – father, king, lord, bridegroom, master.
The
common language of worship conveyed a simple, straightforward, and limited (if
not completely unimaginative and one-sided) message about who God was. You see, it was not often that we were told
that, in addition to being bridegroom and king, God was also like a mother hen
shielding her chicks from the fox who preyed on them, like a woman in labor, a
midwife attending to a birth, a mother nursing her child, a seamstress,
or a bread baker (all Biblical images as well).
The
Jesus Christ part of the trinity was also pretty simple for us to conjure up in
our minds – dealing with an historical figure as we were. His gender was pretty straightforward. After all, he was a first century Jewish rabbi.
And
then there was the Holy Spirit – that most nebulous part of the trinity and so
difficult for us to adequately describe.
It swirls. It flows. It envelops and surrounds. It comforts.
It protects. It somehow is all
around us in an amorphous gossamer winged type way – and it is completely
genderless.
Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit: it is not hard to understand how, in the process of
morphing and refining itself, Christianity became buried under layers and
layers of patriarchal (male-centered) influences. And so it is not hard to understand how down
through the ages – even today - our sense of the divine has become steeped in
masculinity as well.
After
all, we had God as the old man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Jesus as
the young upstart Jewish rabbi, and the Holy Spirit as a sexless entity that we
could not really put a finger on anyway.
If majority rules, then two out of three is not bad. God is clearly a man. No doubt about it!
Several
years ago, shortly after Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, was published,
the Portland Art Museum offered a Sunday afternoon program about the artwork
associated with the novel. As many of
you know, at its core, Brown’s book deals with the role of the sacred feminine
in Christianity. Joe and I decided to
attend the lecture – even though it was mid-January and the wind chill was well
below zero – not a great afternoon to be out and about.
We
had to park quite a few blocks from the museum, and as we walked – all bundled
up - toward Congress Street, we realized that people in their scarves, hats,
and mittens from every direction were converging with great determination on
the museum as well. In fact, when we
arrived 20 or so minutes before the scheduled start time, the atrium was
already filled. Now that in and of itself was remarkable
because we all know that anyone can walk into any event here in Maine two
minutes before it begins and always find a good seat.
Not
that particular day, however! Joe and I
ended up watching the presentation from the top floor of the museum overlooking
the atrium. It was also simulcast in the
museum basement. All in all, over 1200
people came out that frigid Sunday afternoon.
Clearly,
something about the book had struck a deeply personal and spiritual chord in a
lot of people. Catholics and Protestants
alike seemed to have come searching for something they had not found in their
church experiences – a place to look, a direction to follow, a shred of
evidence, not that God was not a man, but that there was more to God than
masculinity.
And
here in the Old Testament book of Proverbs, in the passage we just read, we
find, clearly drawn, this additional, much needed perspective on God. As Presbyterian pastor, Sarah Segal McCaslin, notes, “This is a magnificent
passage, and the female voice resonates majestically. The masculine is, for a
moment, set aside and the feminine steps into the spotlight. Not quietly or passively, but
with the grand confidence of one who knows that she is close to God, close to
the very source of all things, and herself the means to access closeness with
God.” The Greeks call her Sophia. In “The Message” Bible translation, she is
Lady Wisdom or Madame Insight. And she
is most definitely a woman, a tantalizing peek at the divine feminine.
Who
is this female entity that is trying to wedge her way into the masculine
Godhead we all grew up with? Well, first
of all, Lady Wisdom is not the product of the human mind. If we had to connect her to anything human, it
would be better to say that she is of the heart, fostered in intuition.
However,
more accurate still would be to proclaim that she is part of who God is. As theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “It
was as if (God) needed a woman's imagination to help him make (everything), a
woman's eye to tell him if he'd made them right, a woman's spirit to measure
their beauty by.”
Perhaps
echoing ancient goddess worship, this passage in Proverbs describes Lady Wisdom
as a partner with God in the beautiful drama of creation – an architectural
associate.
Madame Insight is perhaps the Word (with a
capital “W”) about which the Gospel writer of John wrote – “In the beginning
was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Wisdom is the breath – the pneuma – the
sacred Spirit that inspires all creatures to come to life. She is part of who God is – and she was there
at the very beginning of it all, putting her stamp of order on everything.
As
Presbyterian pastor Jeffery Howard writes, “Wisdom decided that two atoms of
hydrogen should be joined with one atom of oxygen to form a molecule of water,
and God said that it was so. Wisdom ordained that every action should have an
equal but opposite reaction making rockets possible, and God made it happened.
Wisdom established the rules of evolution, which has produced the biological
diversity of the earth, and God created the plants and animals and the DNA that
made this happen. The author of Proverbs described God’s creation as a dance
where God and Wisdom whirl and twirl and rejoice in each other’s arms.”
In
Lady Wisdom, an alternative view of who God is unfolds, and it is an
exceedingly different view than the one most of us grew up with. Lady Wisdom is not staid and serious. Rather she is playful, merry, gamboling. One Biblical translator describes her like
this: “ I was daily his delight, dancing
and frolicking before him always.” Here in Proverbs we find that it is Lady
Wisdom who drags God the father out on the dance floor to do the jive, the
two-step, and the cha-cha. It’s like
Dancing with the Stars at the moment of the Big Bang.
However,
Lady Wisdom did not simply disappear after the dawn of creation. She still roams the world and is ever-present
– though maybe not always on her best behavior.
As the author of the Book of
Proverbs notes, sometimes she can be loud and boisterous – that Holy, cranky,
noisy, troublesome Spirit whose coming we celebrated just last week. The author tells us that Lady Wisdom stations
herself at that most public of places, the city gates. She is in the thick of
life itself.
“She’s taken her stand at First and Main, at
the busiest intersection. Right in the city square where the traffic is thickest,
she shouts, “You—I’m talking to all of you, everyone out here on the
streets!
Listen, you idiots—learn good sense!
You blockheads—shape up!”
As
UCC pastor Kirk Moore describes her;
•
She speaks the truth and hates deception
•
Her advice is wholesome and good
•
She gives instruction
•
She lives with good judgment
•
She attains knowledge and discretion
•
She has good advice
•
She has insight
•
She has strength
•
She loves those who seek her
She walks the way of righteousness and
along the paths of justice.
Because
we tend to be so bound by those male pictures of God that we grew up with in
church, Lady Wisdom is frequently an unacknowledged image of divinity. However, we forget about her at our peril
because when we fail to acknowledge her, our perspective of who God is becomes
severely limited.
As
your pastor, I believe that part of my role here is to deepen and broaden and
generally enrich your understanding of the divine – and to challenge you not to
limit your perspective of who God is because of archaic church language and
images you grew up with. Some of you may
have noticed that I try very hard not to refer to God as male – or for that
matter as female. To put one consistent
gender - either gender – male or female - on God diminishes the Holy One. And so, until I feel that you appreciate my
referring to God as mother (and I am not sure that some of you would), I will
not refer to God exclusively as father either.
Oh,
do not get me wrong! There is still life
and spirit and truth in all that male imagery – to be sure. However, without a complementary affirmation
of the sacred feminine, it is a closed off life, a boxed in spirit, and a
partial truth.
That
being said, even as your pastor, I am not asking you to give up your masculine
mental pictures of who God is. I know
that it is hard to change what has been ingrained since childhood. However, I do encourage you to, as Sara
McClaslin urges, “re-imagine God beyond gender categories; it remains a
personal and internal exercise to read between the lines as we encounter the
stale language of patriarchy in parts of our tradition.”
And
I would challenge you to embrace Lady Wisdom – she who was there with God since
the very beginning of time, her presence adding a dimension to the Holy One
that is so enriching. Why embrace her? Because she who stands at the crossroads of
life itself – beckoning to us, bringing us into relationship with the divine in
new and startling ways, is the one grabbing us by the wrists, pulling us onto
the dance floor, urging us to dance, to dance with her, to dance with God.
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