June 12, 2022
When a culturally informed Christian missionary group encounters a community of people with no prior knowledge of the Christian tradition, they do not begin by sharing the texts of Christmas, with the birth of God for us, nor with Easter, with Christ’s victory over death and evil forever. They begin with Proverbs. Across human cultures collections of proverbial wisdom are common and highly respected. The approach of the wise proclaimer is not ‘you must accept these, or else!’ But instead, ‘here are ours, will you tell us more about yours?’ It is a place of finding synchronicity, or not. Much like posting a quote, or a bumper sticker, or even a tattoo of a wise phrase.
The Hebrew Book of Proverbs Is a collected library of handed-down wisdom, stretching generations, situations, and even wisdom from neighboring religions. It has a preference for a pattern of ‘eat this not that’ two-part phrases. Godly ways vs wicked villany. Our lesson this morning is not entirely bound by the ‘do this, not that’ pattern. It is a vast cosmological sketch of capital W wisdom, an exciting examination of the presence and scope of the divine reality that is akin to a human relationship. This discernment is capital W wisdom: Hokma in the Hebrew, Sophia in the Greek: It is like a name, it is spoken of in the feminine. It was in some ways a fresh understanding, of what always was. Sophia is God’s very creativity and communication and intellect and wild presence in the midst of the creation. In this section of Proverbs the wise guidance is heavyweight and unsubtle: love as much as you are loved by God.
In the Christian traditions this text is used to give depth and language to the experience of both Jesus being one with the Father, and with the Holy Spirit being one with both Son and Father. What does the unity of God in the three characters feel like, It feels like this wild presence, this passionate relationship, this profound authority, and this prismatic diversity: all in One. It is Trinity Sunday. The Trinity is the oxygen of Christian-ness However, this focus on a Sunday after Pentecost was a choice before it was a tradition. A bit of a hallmark holiday, but like so many of those- it focuses on something precious. Father Son and Holy Spirit is the name by which we name the One God. If you are listening to a stranger speak of God, and they could be Muslim or Jewish or Christian, the use of Father Son and Holy Spirit, all three like a name such as June Carter Cash, it matches the faith to the shape of Christianness. The Trinity is a name, it is about relationship, between the persons or characters that are also wholly One. For we who claim Jesus as the shepherd we follow, God is both concretely One, and superabundantly tri-character-ed. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God is a Mystery, a very real and potent Holy Mystery. An ultimate presence and guide And energy.
Today we are also celebrating our graduates, sending some of our friends into a wild and frightening world That is also brimming with hope. This time of the year is a good chance to remember that wisdom and caregiving does seem to require a Divine sort of countenance: mountains of love and oceans of patience. The young persons we love may not make the choices we would make the first time or the second time or the every time but still we love them support them hold them in prayer and welcome them always. Young friends, you will get barrels of advice in the days to come. And I know you may not really be listening. But here are my few bits of proverbial wisdom, anyways. The first is to know, to repeat, to hear, and to share that you are never alone or unloved. Wisdom’s passion for her children In all their rainbow of identities and expressions, is a wholehearted neverending passion. It is a love that we, as people who are committed to Jesus, are duty-bound to be agents of.
Therefore, graduates I urge/invite you to make a real effort to find a sacred community. To be a part of a place where you can give and receive love, where you can invest your heart and soul in the deepest reality and be a part of a multigenerational community. Only being in relationships with peers is more likely to lead to worse decision-making. We all need someone to not embarrass and someone to emulate. I really want a commitment to a spiritual community to be a church and I absolutely want that to be an Episcopal one because I’m a bit partisan, But good golly as long as it is one that doesn’t cause harm to you or others – find and be a part of a faith based community.
My second bit of wisdom is that wisdom I seek to recall every day right now, is about how we confront the evil that is shouting destruction at our treasures. All of us can be easily dismissive to how evil malice creeps into our lives. Trickles down in casual forms like ‘everybody’s doing it’ and ‘nothing I can do really matters’. The wisdom of this faith tradition is to pay attention to what is really going on, that the forces of evil can and will make use of our lemming-like tendencies.
May we instead hear and hold fast to the drumbeat of the Wisdom of God. May it move your feet, stir your whole selves, to be brave, to stand up, act up, and speak up against evil. The wholehearted Christian way, the one that claims the wild presence and wisdom Of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is one that is for the goodness that we all were created to be and it is against dehumanization. It is a way that even God needs loving company in.
So today as we open our hearts to the Wisdom of God, may we find it already in our hands. Today take the bulletin home. Find in its breadth of tradition one bit of juicy goodness that meets a real need. A sentence, verse, whatever. Take it and make it into something shareable, something to remind yourself, of whose you re and who we are to be. For we are all missionaries in a world that does not know what it doesn’t know. You are on a mission to proclaim the choice of love, not hate, to choose service, not selfish, to choose hope, not despair. Take your own proverb, and let it lead you, or someone in your life who needs a lifeline, deeper into union with the loving passion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the One God of all.