This month marks the end of two years serving as a pastor in charge of a small, rural congregation in Georgia. This is something I literally never expected to experience, even as I moved to Chicago to attend seminary a little over 20 years ago. I had resisted my calling partially because I could not see myself as "preacher." For most of my life, this resistance was subconscious, but it became explicit as I prepared to go to seminary.
While I have become an adequate preacher over the years, as a United Methodist Deacon, the idea of becoming a pastor was still foreign to me. I may be clergy, but I still have a hard time with pastor. Call me deacon, call me minister. Just call me Vince. But pastor? Turns out that at least for the last two years, it was the right place for me and, I hope, the right place for the people I have served with.
As this time draws to a close, I find myself drawn back to sharing my reflections on this page. While many of the posts on these pages started as sermons, I often provide additional context and flesh them out a little bit to share here. Other times, I simply share thoughts on faith that occur to me while reading the texts for the week, or watching TV or a movie, or listening to the radio. Wherever I find evidence of God as I journey through this world.
This month, while starting with the lectionary texts and the church calendar, I am also inspired by things going on in the world. War, violence, hate masquerading as faith, Pride month, the splintering of The United Methodist Church into various and sundry other things (see again hate masquerading as faith). It is a lot to take in, and it comes at us non-stop. Jesus came into the world, showing us a better way, offering us God's grace, calling us into positive relationships with God and each other.
This past weekend, many churches celebrated Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday comes along as a transition from the Easter Season back into Ordinary Time. Following Pentecost as it does, it is a time to celebrate the fullness of God as made known to us through Jesus. And I find that the fullness of God and the stories we read on this Sunday offer us new ways to think about some of the conflicts we have in the church in particular (see Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 and Psalm 8).
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We recently celebrated Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost marks the end of the Easter season and celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit fifty days after the Resurrection. The Sunday following Pentecost is called Trinity Sunday in the Church calendar. It is a day for us to celebrate God’s fullness, a day to consider the multitude of ways in which God is known to us, the multitude of ways that we understand who God is. It is a day for us to praise God and to delight in God.
But one of the things we discover as we dig into how we understand God is that it is pretty much impossible to precisely define God. In fact, I recall one of my professors in seminary saying that the notion of the Trinity is so difficult for us to understand and define, we probably shouldn’t even try.
Part of the reason for this is that, while we may use metaphors to get some idea of who God is, all of our metaphors will fall short in some way. They may give us a sense of what God is like, but they can never describe the fullness of God. We might describe God using a shamrock, but we always lose something in translation. We may think of God as a divine parent, but God is so much more than just that.
But the other reason it is so difficult for us to understand and define the fullness of God is that our Bible is absolutely littered with different understandings of who God is. There are so many different examples in our scriptures of how people understood their relationship with God -- God is a mother hen, God is a mighty fortress, God is vengeful, God is loving -- it quickly becomes clear that God cannot be easily defined. Our attempts to limit God to a particular definition invariably fall short. When we try to confine our notions of God to a narrow definition, we always leave something out.
Now if you are like me, you grew up with the traditional language for the Trinity - God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (or Spirit). God the Father is an old white guy with a long white beard. Jesus is a younger white guy with a brown (or blond) beard. And, if you were lucky, the Holy Spirit is a dove. Of course, with the language of Holy Ghost that was common in my church growing up, I sometimes had the image of something out of a Scooby Doo cartoon in mind. And, like that show, once you pull off the mask you frequently find another old white guy.
And then comes Wisdom. With all of the traditional male imagery for the Trinity, what do we do with the text from Proverbs on Trinity Sunday?
As I was reading the text from Proverbs in preparation for this message, I admit that the language sounded so familiar at times. “I was formed in ancient times, at the beginning, before the earth was” (Proverbs 8:23, CEB). “I was there when he established the heavens” (Proverbs 8:27, CEB).
Perhaps like me you are reminded of the first chapter of John which we so often read at Christmas (John 1:1-4, CEB):
1 In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
2 The Word was with God in the beginning.
3 Everything came into being through the Word,
and without the Word
nothing came into being.
What came into being
4 through the Word was life,
and the life was the light for all people.
Or perhaps you are reminded of Paul’s hymn in praise of Christ from Colossians which starts (Colossians 1:15-17, CEB):
15 The Son is the image of the invisible God,
the one who is first over all creation,
16 Because all things were created by him:
both in the heavens and on the earth,
the things that are visible and the things that are invisible.
Whether they are thrones or powers,
or rulers or authorities,
all things were created through him and for him.
17 He existed before all things,
and all things are held together in him.
The early church writers connected this Wisdom that we find in Proverbs to Jesus. The relationship between Wisdom and God during the act of creation helped the early church writers to understand the relationship between Jesus and God. This is why these early writers, writing in praise of Jesus, used such similar language to what we read today from Proverbs.
Of course, it is not as obvious in English why this is such a big deal. In English, we tend not to gender our nouns. A car is a car and wisdom is wisdom, and we find no deeper meaning than that. But in many other languages, that is not necessarily the case. In ancient Hebrew and in Greek, Wisdom is a feminine noun. In fact, throughout the book of Proverbs, Wisdom is personified as a woman. In Greek translations, Wisdom becomes Sophia. Sophia, Holy Wisdom, was celebrated in the early church. The former cathedral and seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church, now a mosque, in Istanbul, Turkey, is the Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom.
What does it mean that here in Proverbs we see Wisdom alongside God when the world is created? What does it mean that the early writers of the church looked to Wisdom to help them understand Jesus?
These are important questions for so many reasons. These questions speak to our assumption about who God is and how we understand God. These questions speak to what we consider sacred and how we understand the importance of other people. And these questions speak to how we understand the place of gender within the Trinity, which could in turn give us a starting point for our conversations around gender in the church.
Wisdom, who is with God at the start, was having fun. Wisdom was smiling before God during the act of creation. Wisdom was frolicking. Think about the images that raises in your minds. Wisdom, the first of creation, there with God, frolicking.
While the writer of Hebrews may not have had the idea of a Trinitarian God in mind, that writer did lift up a feminine image alongside God. That is an act that is still as important today as it was for the Hebrew religious leaders and the leaders of the earliest Christian communities. It is important for all of us to be able to recognize ourselves, to see ourselves, in the image of God. And given that the early church writers used this imagery in thinking about the relationship between Jesus and God, this feminine image is also rolled into Jesus.² (This is something we find again in the writings of Julian of Norwich as we will see below.)
The Psalmist reminds us that we have been made only slightly less than divine. The Psalmist was speaking about humanity, all of humanity. Not just some people. Not just certain parts of humanity. All of us. “Do we praise God for creating us and our fellow human beings? How, then, could we praise God the Creator in our reality, where not every human being is regarded as being ‘a little lower than God’ and crowned with ‘glory and honor’?”¹
Part of honoring God as known to us in Jesus, part of praising God as we see throughout the stories of the Bible, is honoring the people we share this life with – our family, friends, and neighbors, and those who don’t look like us, think like us, act like us, love like us.
The trick with trying to define God, trying to explain the Trinity, is that we have to be far more expansive in our descriptions than we are used to being. As I noted at the beginning, I grew up with the language of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. But if that is all I ever conceive of when I think about God, the sacred, the divine, I leave out nearly half of creation. But when I consider Wisdom, Wisdom who according to Proverbs stood alongside God at the beginning of creation, Wisdom who inspired the early church’s conceptions of Jesus, Wisdom who is still associated with the second person of the Trinity in the Eastern church traditions, I am able to conceive of a God even larger than the one I grew up with. I am able to see a God who contains masculine aspects and feminine aspects, and everything else between and outside of that binary.
In doing so, I am also better able to recognize God’s image within the numerous others of all sorts of backgrounds and identities that I meet everyday. And all of this by the grace of God.
To help us think about this, I want to close with a couple of paragraphs written about the Holy Trinity by Julian of Norwich. Julian was a nun and writer in England during the late-1300s to early-1400s. She is remembered for her theological writings and her mystical experiences of God. In her Revelations of Divine Love, she writes:
I beheld the working of all the blessed Trinity, and in the beholding I saw and understood these three properties: the property of fatherhood, the property of motherhood, and the property of the Lordship, in one God. In our Father almighty we have our keeping and our bliss as regards our human substance, which is ours by our making without beginning. And in the Second Person, in wit and wisdom, we have our keeping as regards our sensuality, our restoring, and our saving: for He is our Mother, Brother, and Savior. And in our good Lord the Holy Spirit we have our rewarding and our recompense for our living and our labors which will far exceed anything we can desire, owing to his marvelous courtesy and his high plenteous grace.
For our whole life is in three. In the first we have our being, and in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilling. The first is kind, the second is mercy, and the third is grace. In the first, I saw and understood that the high might of the Trinity is our Father; and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother; and the great Love of the Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have and own in our natural kind and in the making of our substance.³
We praise and delight in God for all that God is, even as we struggle to find all of the right words. And we play in and wonder at this world that God has created us as a part of, a world filled with a dizzying array of people, all made in the divine image.
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¹ Eunjoo Mary Kim, in Connections - Year C, Volume 3, 8.
² In an earlier reflection for Trinity Sunday, I di a little more to think through the implications of Wisdom and Christ in one person: Thoughts on Trinity Sunday (or a Multi-gendered God)
³ Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chap 58, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).