Wisdom the Mother of Salvation

Epiphany V: A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church Year C

Proverbs 8:1–4, 10–17; Psalm 111; James 3:13–18 ; Luke 7:18–35

Does not Wisdom call…

Holy Fount of Wisdom, I dare suggest that is not the question. The question for our time is not, “is Wisdom calling.” It is, is anybody listening?

Wisdom is calling. Wisdom is calling. Wisdom the Mother of Salvation is calling.

Let us pray:

Sophia with Dove, Sue Ellen Parkinson

My prayer is Miriam’s prayer,
Mother Mary’s prayer – Let it be.
Let it be with your woman-servant
according to your word.
With these words
the Word of God was formed
in the woman of God.
On this day, as on that day,
let the daughter of God
bring forth the word of God again. Amen.

Wisdom is calling gold plated tin pot dictators in white houses. Wisdom is calling the worshipers of white supremacy. Wisdom is calling plutocrats and autocrats. Wisdom is calling the selfish, the warmongers, the bullies, the unmerciful; those to whom James chapter 3 speaks. Wisdom is calling those who use their power for the benefit of those who look like them, think like them, pray like them, love like them, lie like them, cheat like them, defraud like them, steal like them, discriminate like them, hate like them. Wisdom is calling the fake and the phony in pulpits and at podiums and in political office. But is anyone listening?

Wisdom is calling in Proverbs. Take my instruction and not silver, and knowledge but not choice gold. But the ones most in need of instruction at Wisdom’s knee are hoarding silver and hungry for gold though they are full to bursting and vomit it out to make room for more. They build enterprises whose value could feed hungry children but instead, launch midlife crisis phallus shaped rockets into the already crowded heavens. Hungry and hoarding and hungry for yet more. Wealth enough to buy a small country or an even smaller president is not enough. Wisdom is calling and they won’t even take the call. Wisdom is calling those robbing the Earth of her resources, polluting her seas and skies and stripping and razing her forests and jungles, bleaching her coral and starving her children while they gorge themselves. Wisdom is calling.

Wisdom is calling to us too, for all the the woman-born, all earth’s children are all her children. Mother is calling. She who is Understanding calls the mighty and the minute, the wealthy and the ones in want, the conqueror and the conquered, the pious and the pitiless, the innocent and the iniquitous. Mother Wisdom is calling out in our first lesson:

By me royals reign,
and rulers decree what is just.
By me governors govern,
and nobles, all who judge rightly.

If I were the kind of preacher of take the poetic imagination of scripture literally, I might say that Wisdom is calling but the phone lines and fiber cables and satellites are down. For there is no Wisdom in the governing structures of the land when legal asylum claims are dismissed, appointments broken and websites and apps taken down; not just to suspend operations, but to create confusion and fear, weaponized to intimidate.

There is no Wisdom in a land where governors round up suspected immigrants or anyone else with brown and black skin and spend millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars shipping people, families and children to communities where different values and policies predominate; but, refuse to coordinate, to make the lives of the hungry poor even more difficult and as a first step towards their white American, Ameriklan paradise.

Weaponizing God’s children, Mother Wisdom’s children, in their petty power games, while women bleed to death and die from easily treatable miscarriages and pregnancy complications or, after spending days in their car or on a plane until they can find someone who can and will treat them often, at the cost of their fertility; in pro-life states with the highest maternal morbidity in the nation.

Wisdom is calling governors and legislators and those who would puppeteer presidents. Wisdom is calling those once-noble black robed judges who sit high and low and rip the right to medical care from women and trans children and their parents. Wisdom is calling. Pick up the phone America – that’s with KKKs. Wisdom, the Mother of Salvation is calling.

Wisdom is calling. And just who, might you ask, is this God-like, Goddess-like Wisdom? The Scriptures tell us in Proverbs – in today’s reading in chapter 8 and earlier on in chapter 3:

She is the Divine Subcontractor: the Ageless God through Wisdom founded the Earth.
She is the Sanctified Street Walker: crying out at the corners and in the alleyways.
She is the Holy Hostess: setting a table for the simple, the foolish and the ignorant.
She is the Womb Of Life: the Maker of All created her as the beginning of this journey, as the first of their work from the time before time.
She is a Tree Of Life: Shelter under her shade and suckle on her fruit.

The embrace of Wisdom was so scintillating that these few verses in Proverbs were not enough and there is an entire book devoted to her glory and her splendor. Wisdom – one of those books some think are extra, but are canonical to the majority of Christians on the planet; for they were indeed included in the very first two testament Christian Bibles and have been faithfully passed down to us who still deem them scripture. And Wisdom chapter 6 – my students would say that was not on the assigned reading but a professor and a preacher can add an extra texts anytime she chooses! Wisdom chapter 6 says:

The beginning of wisdom is the most sincere desire for instruction,
and concern for instruction is love of her,
and love of her is the keeping of her laws,
and giving heed to her laws is assurance of immortality,
and immortality brings one near to God…

Wisdom is calling. Is anyone listening?

Is anyone listening to a Wisdom that says truth and understanding are better than silver and gold. Does anyone want to hear anything about a Wisdom that is, in the words of James: unselfish, peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial, and sincere?

Is anyone listening? For that matter, is anyone listening to Jesus?

John listened to the talk about Jesus and he was determined to find out if this holy gossip was indeed the holy gospel. He sent the two of his disciples who asked their question and they listened, perhaps with bated breath: are you the one or should we wait for another? Because we have been waiting Jesus. We have been waiting for you to fix this mess. I mean, that’s what John’s disciples were saying 2000 years ago. We have been waiting, living under the subjugation of this occupying empire that thinks nothing of throwing us to the ground with a police boot, I mean a Roman boot, or a knee upon our necks.

In my sanctified imagination, like our Mexican and Guatemalan kinfolk, John’s disciples said: we go hungry while the food we grow is taken in taxes and tariffs to feed them and, they grow fat on our labor but consider us an infestation in our own country. Some of us have been uprooted and had our homes seized so that they could build palaces upon the bones of our dead. So Jesus, we are listening for a word of wisdom. Are you the one?

Are you the One we can trust with our hopes and dreams; our sorrows and our schemes. Are you the One? Are you the One Jesus, who will redeem us from this fascist self-absorbed emperor and his greed and his ruthlessness and petty violence and all the ways it beats down upon us, denying us our very human dignity, are you the One? Are you the One who will liberate us, free us, save us? Jesus, are you the One? Are you the One they say is God’s child? Are you the One whose mother said the wings of Wisdom enfolded her in a holy embrace impregnating her with the love of God, are you the One?

Blessed is the one who has the good sense not to be scandalized by Jesus. Jesus said:

Blessed is the one who is not offended by me, by my words, by my witness, by my wisdom.

But some of his kinfolk and his skin folk rejected his teaching. His disciples began singing, “They not like us.” And the damnable Christian tradition of emphasizing the Jewishness of some of those who did not accept his teaching laid the foundation for Christian antisemitism and anti-Judaism. The folk that turned away from Jesus and his teaching were no more or less Jewish than Jesus’s disciples. There were Pharisees and biblical scholars (you know them as scribes) in both groups. Paul never stopped being a Pharisee. To be perfectly honest, Jesus was probably a Pharisee by formation. He never rejected his own Judaism. He saw it more expansively than some of the folk around him could comprehend.

Then Jesus answered them, “Go and take this news to John – run tell dat – what you have seen and heard:
those who were blind receive sight,
those who were lame walk,
those who were diseased-in-skin are cleansed,
those who were deaf hear,
those who were dead are raised,
those who are poor have good news proclaimed to them.
And blessed is the woman or man who is not scandalized by me.

Jesus called the crowd out on it hypocrisy, the whole crowd, everybody in the street: women and men, children and elders, Jews and gentiles, enslaved persons and free persons, those who owned slaves and those who owned nothing, folk just trying to get through the marketplace without running into traffic.

Jesus said they were like children who didn’t know what they wanted. Or, they knew exactly what they wanted but Jesus would not comply: dance when we say dance, weep when we say weep, jump when we say jump. Assume the position young black and Hispanic men. Comply, comply, comply! Submit. But there are some things you don’t submit to. There are some things you don’t comply with. We are living in an age where the test of faith is not just whether you proclaim Jesus as the Messiah and Liberator but whether you comply with and submit to the evil of this age.

They were arguing over the form, expression and public facing witness of religious faith. John came as a monastic and they said that’s demonic. Jesus came on the get down, laughing and drinking – and I mean drinking – and eating and they said Jesus was a drunk and a glutton. You know those folk: preachers shouldn’t look like that, dress like that, go to those places, drink like that, eat like that – especially if it’s expensive. But on the other hand, poor folk shouldn’t eat like that, spend their benefits like that. They are the folk who tell you you are too charismatic or not charismatic enough; you preach too long, too loud or your sermons are too short and too monotone.

But Jesus said, that’s all right. They can call me everything but a child of God for, Wisdom is

vindicated by all her children. Wisdom, the Mother of Salvation, his other mother. Jesus had two mommies: the Ever Blessed Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit who is female according to the feminine gender with which she is always articulated in the Hebrew Scriptures of Jesus. That’s a whole other Trinity right there.

In his mother tongues, the languages he learned at the knee of his holy mother Miriam called Mary to erase her Jewishness, in Hebrew and in Aramaic, Wisdom and the Spirit of God were feminine. Jesus would have had to have invented an imaginary language in order to refer to the Holy Spirit as he/him. Remember that the next time you read your Bibles and remember that translation choices have been made for you by scholars who sometimes not only don’t look like you but who don’t even see you. Divinity was more than a father to him; his God language was flexible and inclusive reflecting his understanding of God and of Wisdom, the Mother of Salvation; perhaps they were one and the same.

Wisdom is calling. Are you listening? Or did you miss her because her voice was in a different register than you were expecting, than the one in which you were told power resides.

Jesus told John’s listening disciple: One day, Wisdom will be vindicated by all her children. Though they be pressed hard and long, Wisdom’s children will endure to bear witness that Wisdom’s ways are God’s ways. When it looks like it’s all over; when it looks like the enemy has won, just remember: Wisdom will be vindicated by all her children. We are in hard times right now. Harder times are yet coming. And not everyone will make it. Yet and still Jesus says: Wisdom will be vindicated by all her children. Because empires fall prey to their own rot and ruin. And God’s children, like Jesus, God’s very own most precious Child, though they die; yet shall they live. That was the gossip turned gospel on the lips of Jesus.

Jesus is that One. The one who raises the living from the dead. That one. Jesus is the one. The one who is born in spit and shit yet for whom the angel sang. Jesus is that one. The one who hails, not just from the line of David, but from the line of Bath-Sheba. Jesus is that one. Jesus is the one. Jesus is that one who touched the untouchable and forgave the unforgivable and loved the unlovable while seeing the invisible and doing the impossible. Jesus is the one whom the grave could not hold. Jesus is that one. Jesus is the one who opens the door of salvation into his mother’s house. Jesus is that one. Jesus is the one who is endures eternally as the love of God poured into human form. Jesus is that one.  Jesus is the one whose life eternal is offered to us through the bloody passage of Calvary. Jesus is that one. Jesus is God’s child. Jesus is Mary’s child. Jesus is wisdom’s child. And Jesus is our elder brother, our holy sibling our hope of liberation here in this world and, our way of salvation and in the one to come.

Jesus is the one of God and God’s Child, the one of Wisdom and Wisdom’s Child.

In the name of the One who waded in the waters of Miryam’s womb, walked the way of suffering as one of the woman-born, and woke from the grasp of death in the deep darkness of the morning. Amen.