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SERMON - January 29, 2012

Rev. Kevin E. Johnston

What Have You to Do With Us?

Psalm 111; Mark 1: 21-28

 

The Message

It was the Sabbath – a usual, ordinary, run-of-the-mill day of worship. Everyone was there, for unless you were was undergoing specific cleansing rituals, or too sick to leave your bed, religious law demanded that all attend the weekly services, study, and teaching sessions in the local Synagogue.

There they were, men on one side, women and children on the other – some sitting, some standing at the back- all eager to hear what the visiting Teacher, or Rabbi, had to share with and say to them that morning.

He had arrived in Capernaum just the other day with a small entourage of former fishers. They said they were his followers – that they had left their lives, their families, everything they had, in order to “fish for people” as he had invited them to do. Perhaps not exactly sure what this new “fish for people” career-path was, the four may have been eager, excited, and just itching to get on with the business of learning what it was this Jesus-guy had to teach them. .

Jesus might have contacted the local Synagogue president and told him that He and his band were in town for a few days. Or maybe the president had heard of him and sought Him out. Could it have been that Jesus was invited to speak to the congregation that morning, or would He have offered on His own to share His thoughts and spiritual knowledge? However he ended up being present in that capacity really doesn’t matter, I guess. For something totally unorthodox was about to unexpectedly, and unimaginably transpire, explode perhaps, that would shake the small worshipping community to its roots.

We are told that He was teaching. Was it the pre, or post service adult Bible study he was leading? Was he the “preacher” during worship? Who knows? Does it matter at all anyway? A small crowd could have surrounded him out in the Narthex as He arrived, before everyone had entered the Sanctuary. Or maybe it was afterward, during “coffee hour”, that people gathered together around him. Who knows? I guess the particulars weren’t that important for the writer of our story.

Regardless of what the scene may have been, the people were surprised at his teaching. None of the stories about him indicate that he had any special training. He doesn’t appear to have studied at the nearest college, university, or seminary, let alone granted his degree and was ordained. And he did not seem to be anything like their Scribes.

In Clement Leibovitz’ 1994, Memoirs of God, the Divine muses,

“Mortals claim that I know everything, I can do anything and I am everywhere. I am, in their words, Omniscient, Omnipotent and Omnipresent.
Then why do I have so much trouble communicating with them? … In order to make it perfect I would have to make [human beings] a God. This was never my intention. As a result, communication between [mortals] and me is a problem.”1

“Why do I have so much trouble communicating with them?” God asks. Why indeed?

There’s a famous story that comes to us from Hasidic Judaism:
“about the sage who came home from the synagogue one day and found his nine-year-old daughter crying bitterly. He asked her what was wrong, and she told him, between sobs, that she and her friends had been playing hide-and-seek and when it was her turn to hide, she hid so well that they had given up on finding her and went off to play another game. She waited and waited for them to find her, and finally after about an hour, she had come out to find herself all alone.
As the sage comforted her, he mused to himself, “I wonder if this is how God feels. He threatened that if we abandon His ways, He would hide His face from us and deprive us of His presence. I wonder if God has managed to hide from us so successfully that we have given up looking for Him and have gone off in other directions. And I wonder if God feels lonely and abandoned.”

Why is God so hard to find in the modern world?”2, asks Rabbi Harold Kushner. I wonder that myself more times than I care to admit. Perhaps you do too. Why is God so hard to find?

Kushner goes on to suggest that one of the “many reasons” for this: “is that, while the abstract concepts of religion, … may be of divine origin, the embodiments of organized religion here on earth are human institutions, created and run by fallible human beings, and never quite able to avoid the flaws of their human creators.”3

Whomever it was that composed the psalm Hugh shared with us noted that “the good life begins in the fear of God”. In some translations, fear is replaced for reverence. And “the good life” is more-often named as wisdom.

Now, in my mind, “fear” conjures up some pretty unhealthy and unfriendly images. It’s characterized4 as a “distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.” And fear is often understood as “a specific instance of or propensity for such a feeling; perhaps concern or anxiety.5

According to scripture“… wisdom…means holy astonishment, complete wonder and awe at what God does in my life and the life of everyone around me. Wisdom is the first thing God created, “The first of God’s acts long ago,”….” 6

And “[for] biblical Judaism, Wisdom is one of three primary mediators…or personifications of divine power and presence. …. Wisdom is consistently feminine in grammatical gender across Hebrew…Greek…and Latin”7

“Wisdom is the most developed representation of God’s presence and activity … “casting herself as sister, mother, female beloved, chef and hostess, preacher, judge, liberator, establisher of justice, and a myriad of other female roles wherein she symbolized transcendent power ordering and delighting the world. She pervades the world…interacting with [the world] to lure [Creation and all that lies within it] along the right path to life.””8

”Sophia is Israel’s God in female imagery” … that places the stress on God’s nearness [and] activity… . As such she is a concrete manifestation [or expression] of God’s Spirit…represented as a bird, a symbol of female deity” 9, not unlike the dove that descended upon the Jesus-figure at his baptism.

She “strides…with a noisy public appearance. She is a street preacher, a prophet who cries aloud in the market and at the city gates… Sophia is a giver of life, she is a tree of life, “she is your life”(Proverbs 4:13) [and] so intimately is the divine blessing of life associated with her that she can proclaim “whoever finds me finds life”(Proverbs 8:35)… She has knowledge, insight, and strength that she wishes to impart; her words are truth. Worth more than finest gold or silver, she …promises that those who seek her will find her.” 10

“… the street preacher, life giver, agent of justice, architect of creation, and God’s darling becomes [at the same time] a construction worker, butcher, vintner, sender of prophets, and compelling hostess. Having built a house and prepared her table, she sends her maidservants out to the public…to become proclaimers of her word of invitation: “Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine I have mixed”. The call is to leave foolish ways and walk in the ways of Sophia, which are ways of insight, life, and peace. … [Her] constant effort is to lure human beings to life.” 11

Wisdom-Sophia “is a breath of the power of God;…a flawless mirror of the working of God…before the beginning, being the fashioner of all things…[and as a channel of] recreative [energy has] the power to make all things green [and new] again.” 12

“…specifically said to have been created by God. She is similar to the “glory” of God…representing the plan of God that human beings could glimpse in creation and in human affairs… . … The figure of Wisdom was a symbol of God’s activity in the world”13

“The author of…John’s Gospel…described the Word…which had been “with God from the beginning” and had been the agent of creation … Like the divine Wisdom, the “Word” symbolized God’s original plan for creation. When Paul and John spoke about Jesus as though he had some kind of pre-existent life, they…were indicating that Jesus had transcended temporal and individual modes of existence. Because the “power” and the “wisdom” that he represented were activities that derived from God, he had in some way expressed “what was there from the beginning.” These ideas were comprehensible in a strictly Jewish context, though later Christians…would interpret them differently. … [The] first Christians still had an entirely Jewish conception of God”14, or the Divine.

And so, perhaps if the Jesus-figure – or the Word, expression of the Divine – was originally interpreted and understood as such – was, or is, Jesus the equivalent or counterpart of Wisdom-Hochmah-Sophia within Jewish understanding? To go a bit further – is it possible that the Christ is the same as Wisdom? And if we also have that “Christ” within us, would that mean that each and every one of us has the gift of wisdom, or perhaps are wisdom?

We heard something quite disturbing at Presbytery this past Wednesday that I want and need to make you aware of. Over the past few years, the United Church of Canada’s Permanent Committee on Ministry and Employment Policies and Services has been evaluating how “the church” has been carrying out its mission and ministry. A report was published this past November, suggesting a proposed new initiative for supporting paid accountable ministry persons, as well as a new model for ministry at all levels of the UC.

In this document, which I have posted two copies on the bulletin board outside the main office, we discover that much of the “power” continues to go upwards. Not a lot of control and authority remains at either the congregational or Presbytery levels.

But the kicker is that:
"A primary consideration is the financial cost of this proposed model. It is estimated that it would require a personnel staff person for every seventy-five pastoral charges, or thirty personnel staff deployed regionally through the Conferences.
There is currently the equivalent of at least one personnel minister in each Conference. It is proposed that that role be evolved into this new personnel role and augmented by seventeen new positions.
At an approximate annual salary and benefits cost of $70,500, these additional positions would cost $1.2 million dollars (the total cost, including the thirteen positions currently funded, represent less than 2% of the annual payroll for ministry personnel). There would also be costs associated with office space, support staff and travel."
(seehttp://www.united-church.ca/files/communications/news/general/111130_report.pdf, page 10)

We who were at Presbytery were challenged to not only read and study this document, but afterward complete an online survey responding to this, in order that the “powers that be” who make the decisions on behalf of the whole, have as much wisdom in their decision-making process concerning this.

And so I am inviting – no, challenging – you as well to participate in this, to take the opportunity to have your voice heard in this potential change. If you are at all able, please access and read the full report, and complete the survey by mid-February, if you want your voice to be heard in the mid-March presentation to General Council Executive. Feedback received after that date will be shared in the presentation, and may, or may not, have any bearing or impact.

This is your church. It does not belong to congregational boards and councils. It’s not Presbytery’s, or Conference’s church. And it definitely does not belong solely to General Council and its executive – the ones who make all the decisions on behalf of the whole. If you are concerned at all about the future of who we, as the United Church of Canada, will become in the future – indeed the very near future – your wisdom and authority as the Christ is not only needed, but also needed. For if you/we, the people, don’t take action and at least try to have our wisdom and voices heard, who, and what, we are, and may be in the future, may have consequences ahead more dire than we could ever, or even want to, imagine.

“Why do I have so much trouble communicating with [human beings]?” the Divine mused. “Why is God so hard to find…?” asked Kushner. Perhaps you ask the same question.

And again – I’m wondering. I’m wondering if perhaps Sophia-Wisdom might be calling to us – both as individuals, and as the community of Fifth Avenue Memorial in Medicine Hat, or the United Church of Canada – to do and be? I’m wondering what she might be crying out to – inviting and challenging – us to become, to speak out, to be, and to do? Is it possible – however real or remote it might seem right now – that we are to find new life, re-creation, and transformation in her ways?

“What have you to do with us?” the tormented man asked the holy-in-the-midst-of-the-people that day. Perhaps a lot more than we realize.

And may it be so.