Sermon 05/17/09
Proverbs 1:1-4, 20-23, 33
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It’s probably a sign of age that I have been thinking lately about the wisdom of proverbs and sayings— aphorisms, maxims and so on — and their roles in our lives. So, I tossed the lectionary for the day and turned to Proverbs for further inspiration. I started at the beginning (a very good place to start) and read that David, king of Israel, promoted proverbs as a medium for passing on wisdom. I wondered what wisdom I had gotten from sayings. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Don’t cross the bridge before you get to it. From China: When you drink the water, remember the spring. From Africa: A wise man never knows all; only fools know everything. From Czechoslovakia: When a fool knows when to be silent, he will be sitting among the wise. Another from China: Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. I should have warned you that this will be an interactive service. Here comes the interactive part, so everybody wake up. I’d like you to share some proverbs from your lives. Try to state the proverb as you’ve heard it, recall who said it and the circumstances of the time, and tell why you remember it. ( Congregation was invited to share there own samples of this type of sayings. ) The scripture reading this morning said that the purpose of proverbs is to pass on wisdom, to guide people in living their lives wisely. But, what is the source of this wisdom? Did it come from David, the king of Israel? David himself says not. He refers to Wisdom as if it is a spirit. He also uses the feminine pronouns for Wisdom. That reminded me of the Sophia traditions, so I thought I’d look into that history. Here’s what I found: In Greek philosophy, Sophia, goddess of Wisdom, was the creative power that formed the cosmos out of original chaos. The Hebrew biblical tradition, in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (texts outside the canon), sees Wisdom as Sophia and Sophia as Yahweh’s companion in creation. In other words, Sophia is the divine feminine, the feminine side of God. Another name for Sophia is Shekinah (Shuh keen uh), the English spelling of a grammatically feminine Hebrew language word that means the dwelling or settling. A book by Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey, entitled The Divine Feminine; Exploring the Feminine Face of God throughout the World, is a thorough discussion of this topic and the source of the following abbreviated history of Sophia. Baring and Harvey found that The Shekinah reveals the missing imagery of God-as-Mother that has been lost or obscured in both Judaism and Christianity. Rick reminded me that, in the Odes of Solomon, from the early 2nd century, the personal pronouns for Spirit of Wisdom were always feminine. Later, scholars working in a patriarchal environment said, “This must be a mistake,” and translated the text using male pronouns. Returning to the Baring and Harvey work, The Shekinah is the image of the Divine Feminine or the feminine face of God as it was conceived in the mystical tradition of Judaism, originating perhaps in the rabbinic schools of Babylon and transmitted orally for a thousand years, until it flowered in the writings of the Jewish Kabbalists of medieval Spain and southwestern France. The 13th century work, Zohar, the Book of Radiance or Splendor that was the principal text of the Kabbalah, contemplates the mystery of the relationships between the female and male aspects of the godhead expressed as Mother and Father... The essential conception of this mystical tradition expresses itself as an image of worlds within worlds. Divine Spirit (Ain Soph)..., beyond form or conception, is the light at the center, the heart, and moves outward as creative sound (word), thought and energy. The Divine Feminine is now understood as cosmic soul, the intermediary between the godhead and life in this dimension who, as the Shekinah brings together heaven and earth, (brings) the divine and the human (together) in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship. The Wisdom Books of the Old Testament (of which the greater part were mysteriously lost), written down from the 4th to the 1st centuries B.C.(E.),...the Shekinah comes to life in the passages where Wisdom (called Hokhmah in Hebrew, or Sophia in Greek) speaks as the Holy Spirit calling to humanity. (As you heard in the scripture reading), She tells us that she is immanent in our world, with us in the streets of our cities, calling to us to awaken to her presence, to obey her laws, to listen to her wisdom, promising her blessing if we can only hear her voice and respond to her teaching. These magnificent passages transform the voice of the Shekinah, speaking as Divine Wisdom, from abstract idea into presence, friend, and guide. She speaks as if she were here, in this dimension, swelling in (our) midst..., accessible to those who seek her out. The Kabbalistic tradition describes the feminine image of the godhead as Mother, Daughter, Sister, and Holy Spirit. This aligns with the references in the new testament to the Holy Spirit as Comforter. From John 14: I will pray to God and God will give you another Comforter, that she may abide with you forever, even the Spirit of Truth... The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom God will send...shall teach you all things. Some groups of early Christians had an image of the Divine Mother. They named her the “Invisible within the All.” They spoke of how, as the Eternal Silence, she received the seed of light from the ineffable source and how, from this womb, she brought forth all the emanations of light, ranged in harmonious pairs of feminine and masculine energies. They saw her as the womb of life, not only of human life, but the life of the whole cosmos. They named this Divine Mother as Holy Spirit and saw the dove as her emissary: at the baptism of Jesus, it was the Divine Mother who spoke to her son. One theory about Jesus is that he was a Gnostic, a believer in the philosophy that enlightenment comes from within. If Jesus was a Gnostic, he would have been very comfortable with the Divine Mother speaking through a dove to him on the occasion of his baptism. And this brings me back to a question that’s been nagging at me: What’s the difference between wisdom and knowledge? Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. George Bernard Shaw said: We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility of our future. Finally, I find this passage from Baring and Harvey an amazing connection between the ancient philosophies and my own here-and-now world: Today we might imagine the Shekinah as the light that manifests as both wave and particle, as the deep unexplored ‘sea’ of cosmic space, and as the extraordinary complex structure and organization of energy manifested as matter, a word that comes from the Latin word for mother...After so many billions of years, the energy of life has evolved a form, the planet Earth, and a consciousness, our own, which is slowly helping us to explore the mystery of what we are. Blessed Be! If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world. So let it be. Proverbs 1:1-4, 20-23, 33 Meditation: |
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