First Presbyterian Church
Deep and Wide Wisdom
Sermon for May 7, 2006
by Pastor Susan Barnes

Our unison reading is Psalm 23. Listen for the word of God as we read it together in Psalm 23.

1 A Psalm of David. The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.

2 He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; 3 he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.

4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff -- they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long.

Anthem

The Wisdom of Solomon is a Jewish text, written in Greek. It is part of what we Protestants call the apocrypha, what scholars call “intertestamental literature” and what Catholics call just another book of the Bible. It was probably written in the first century bce, but incorporated very old ideas about getting wisdom. In the old testament, the Hebrew Bible, wisdom is personified as a beautiful woman, present with God at the beginning of the world.

Listen to 9:9-10 from the book the Wisdom of Solomon.

9 With you is wisdom, she who knows your works and was present when you made the world; she understands what is pleasing in your sight and what is right according to your commandments.

10 Send her forth from the holy heavens, and from the throne of your glory send her, that she may labor at my side, and that I may learn what is pleasing to you.

Proverbs is also part of the wisdom tradition. Listen to the word of God as it is found in Proverbs 9:1-10.

1 Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars.

2 She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table.

3 She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls from the highest places in the town,

4 "You that are simple, turn in here!" To those without sense she says,

5 "Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.

6 Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."

7 Whoever corrects a scoffer wins abuse; whoever rebukes the wicked gets hurt.

8 A scoffer who is rebuked will only hate you; the wise, when rebuked, will love you.

9 Give instruction to the wise, and they will become wiser still; teach the righteous and they will gain in learning.

10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

This ends our reading from Proverbs.

Listen for the word of God as it is found in Acts 9:36-42.

36 Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity.

37 At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs.

38 Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, "Please come to us without delay."

39 So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them.

40 Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, "Tabitha, get up." Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up.

41 He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive.

This ends our reading from God's word.

I chose these text for today because I wanted to preach on them before I preached on the book The DaVinci Code. One of the book's themes is that the church has been suppressing many texts about the ‘Sacred Feminine.' It made me impatient to read that; I don't know what the author has been doing for the last fifty years, but he hasn't paid attention to what's been going in biblical scholarship. I figure that if people have been writing PhD dissertations, scholarly articles, popular books, and worship services about the feminine qualities of God and the leadership of women in the early church, it's pretty much not suppressed anymore.

Many of our church members have read the book and I've gotten a lot of questions about it, so I wanted to clear a few things up. The Gnostic gospels are second and third century writings about and by different groups of Christians. Most of their books are incomplete; none of them are whole narratives like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The gnostic gospels do not uniformly uphold women and women's leadership in the church. The gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying “Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

That's just not a biblical idea of heaven. Men are not the pinnacle of creation.

But for a long time, the language in our English Bibles talked about men when they meant human beings, and mankind when they meant humankind. I remember being confused by it as a child.

Someone asked me this week about how women can be in God's image if Eve was created from Adam.

The answer to that is easy. In Genesis 1, the creation story tells about how the world was created in seven days: first, light, day and night; second, sky and water; third, earth and plants; fourth, moon, sun and stars; fifth, fish and birds; sixth animals and human beings; and on the seventh day God rested. That brings us to Genesis chapter 2, verse 4. In the second part of that verse, another creation story begins. That's the familiar story of Adam and Eve, where God makes a human being from the ground before the plants and animals. God breathes life into that first human being.

So we have these two creation stories.

And then we have tidbits of the creation tradition I read about in the wisdom of Solomon. Verses in Proverbs and Jeremiah 1 refer to a creation story where wisdom was with God when the world was created. I think we have these different creation stories because poets were unconcerned with reasoned explanations; they just described their feelings and uncovered truth.

In the very early church, women were leaders; today we heard this brief mention of Tabitha the disciple. But as the church became organized, decentralized, and institutionalized, women's leadership wasn't upheld. Part of it, I think, was that temple prostitutes were a common way for pagans to worship at temples dedicated to Roman gods like Zeus and Artemis, or in Greek, Diana. Temple prostitution was exploitive and early church fathers wanted to distance their churches and their writings from that practice. An easy way to do that was to de-emphasize women's roles in the church. Also, Christian leaders wanted to fit in; they didn't want to be too radical in a hostile society. And certainly, having women continue to lead was radical.

So if we want to uncover what is feminine about God in the Bible, we have to work on it; we have to listen hard. Certainly biblical times, both old and new testaments, were set in patriarchal societies where women weren't valued as much as men were; for the most part they couldn't hold property, couldn't serve as witnesses in court, couldn't inherit from their parents, and couldn't vote on anything. But there were lots of exceptions to those traditions, and sometimes the exceptions are mentioned in just a few words.

Our reading from Acts describes a miraculous resurrection of Tabitha. Did you notice she was called a disciple, without a word of explanation? And what was Tabitha's work? Making clothes for widows. This was a woman serving other women; Peter and other men disciples thought she was valuable enough to heal. That's a little amazing for the time; but Jesus also healed women.

When biblical women had power, the Bible tells it matter-of-factly, as if it were not out of the ordinary. We, at least those of us in the Presbyterian church, have been paying attention to those stories for a long time. Perhaps that kind of attention hasn't made it into the mainstream culture, but it is here.

We need to recognize those verses that speak of God and giving birth to us, nursing us, protecting us, loving us. Not so we can conjure up an easy God who approves everything we do, but so we can appreciate the depth and breadth of God, confident God is all-encompassing and everlasting. That is a god we can rely on.

We need to recognize that God is deeper and wider than we know. Abstract ideas don't help us think about God. Concrete ideas do that. Think about the choir singing of God as a shepherd. I love that image of God caring for us the way a shepherd cares for the sheep. But that image doesn't help us when we want to know why there is evil in the world. It doesn't help us when we want to figure out how to get along with an annoying sibling, or how to take care of our aging parents, or why people we love or admire die too young. I think we need some wisdom for that.

Composer Brian Wren once said that using just one image for God is idolatrous. We need to pay attention to all the different ways the Bible speaks of God.

Imagine God as a mother, tenderly caring for us because we came out of her body; we are a part of her. We are creating in God's image. We are created in her image.

I know for some of you that's a little uncomfortable; speaking of God as ‘her' is jarring and is so startling it prevents you from praying. But for other people here, it is cool water for their thirsty souls. Speaking of God as ‘she' means that we women really are created in God's image too. We are not stuck with the second creation story where the first woman was disobedient and a temptress.

Knowing we are created in the image of God matters because it inspires women to be pastors, elders and deacons, to serve as church leaders. God calls them, the church needs them, and not just to minister to other women. We all need them, men, women, and children. Without them, we miss out on their gifts God has given us to build up the body of Christ.

I heard a black clergywoman describe a conversation she had at a general assembly. Upon learning she was a clergywoman, the man said, “Oh I've heard of you. You're the seminary professor.”

She said, “No, that's Katie Cannon.” Apparently he thought there could be just one super clergywoman who could be a pastor and a professor in two different parts of the country. The idea that there might be more than one capable black clergywoman was too hard to imagine.

Sexism hangs on. I served a church once where the men served an annual dinner to the whole church and much of the community, and the next day the women would gather in the kitchen and re-clean all the pots and pans the men had cleaned the night before. The men knew the women would do it and the men even joked about it as they scrubbed. A few times they even scrubbed those pots hard, thinking maybe this is the year they'd do it right, but it didn't matter – the women still complained. 2

I was surprised by their arrangement.

One woman explained it to me, saying about her husband “He cleans like a man.” At first, I gently challenged her on that statement; I knew plenty of men who could cook and clean. She listened to me but kept right on saying it.

I soon figured that it was more comfortable for her to think all men can't cook and all men can't clean well than to think her husband was at fault. She could feel superior in this one area. But her remarks and her attitude and her actions really hurt the church.

I still know plenty of men who cook and clean and make a home with their wives. And not just young modern couples I marry; plenty of retired men share the housework with their wives out of love. We've started to move beyond automatically assigning tasks to people based on their gender.

Automatically expecting all references to God to be male narrows and shallows our understanding of God. I would rather think of a deep and wide God full of wisdom and strength.

The images in our first hymn “I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry” are very concrete parental images of God: “I am with you.” “I care what happens to you.”

And the images in our next hymn are also concrete. This is the hymn that was first titled “Strong Mother God.” But the Methodists wanted to put it into their new hymnal, and didn't want to list it in the index by first line as “Strong Mother God.” They were afraid people would be upset. So Brian Wren wrote another verse, and turned it into the first verse, calling it “Bring Many Names.”

Hymns stay with us in a way that sermons don't. We remember hymns that we learned as children. For many of us they remain our favorites. The hymns we sing shape our theology and influence the way we think about God. That's why it's important we sing about a variety of God's images. Using a variety keeps us from thinking of our deep and wide God in just one way. The authors of the stories we read in the Bible want us to think about a rich, textured God, not one a one-size-fits-all God. It took those authors at least three tries just do describe the wonder of God's creation.

So we honor God and do ourselves a favor when we are at least willing to consider new ideas about the One who is both eternal and creating new things every day. What are the new names we can bring? What stories about God's loving acts will we tell? We can't bring them and we can't tell them if we get stuck on saying that God has to be and act only in certain traditional ways. God's way too deep and wide for that.

1 Proverbs 3: 19 The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; Jeremiah 5:15 It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.

2 This part was contributed by my husband who was with the men when they cleaned the pots.