Ormewood Church on Easter
This is excerpted from my
talk for Ormewood Church this past Mother’s Day. The complete scripture was
Wisdom of Solomon 7:22b-30 (NRSV), a portion of which I’ve included here. The “her”
is Wisdom, Sophia. Thanks to organizing pastor Jenelle Holmes for inviting me!
There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy…loving the good…humane…steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. …For she is a breath of the power of God…in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets; for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with Wisdom.
If
you saw all these qualities in a personal ad or on a resume, you just might
want to meet this person! I say “might” because this is a list so awesome many
of us would feel intimidated.
This
is a description of Sophia, Greek for Wisdom, and in Jewish wisdom literature, you
could say she was the feminine side of God, the counterpart to God the Father. This
scripture was written by a Jewish mystic deeply influenced by Greek philosophy
who lived around the time of Jesus. As I grow older and the world seems more
and more stupid and ignorant, wisdom becomes a quality I pray for in all our
leaders and all of us!
In
another text it is said that Sophia was with God from the beginning—without Wisdom
nothing was created that was created. If this sounds familiar, the mystical
Gospel of John takes as its prologue a similar assertion, that the Word, or
Jesus, was with God from the beginning, and without Jesus, nothing was made
that was made.
On
this Mother’s Day, I invite us to think of motherhood as sometimes biological
and sometimes spiritual. Note the present tense in the following examples. We
need to hear these words even today:
“As
a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you,” God declares through the
prophet Isaiah (Is 66:13).
Jesus
laments over Jerusalem, “How often have I desired to gather your children
together as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not
willing” (Mt 23:37).
And
the Psalmist gives us that comforting goal of resting in God:
I hold myself in quiet and silence,
like
a little child in its mother’s arms,
like
a little child, so I keep myself. (Ps
131:2, NJB)
One
of our spiritual mothers, the 12th century Julian of Norwich, even prays
to the founder of our faith as “Mother Jesus.”
And,
when told his mother and siblings have come to see him, Jesus himself famously
says, “Who are my mother and brothers and sisters? Those who do the will of God
in heaven.”
I
say the Lord’s Prayer every morning. Early on, I changed the “Our Father” to
“God, Mother and Father of us all.” I pray this way because my biological
mother and father loved me in different ways and I returned that love in
different ways, and so it is in our relationship with God, I believe. For many
without a mother or a father, or who have an imperfect mother or father, God
may serve as a spiritual foster mother or father.
The
Christian faith grew from a handful of persecuted followers scattered
throughout the Roman Empire in the first century after Christ to the equivalent
of almost a state church by the fourth century, becoming culturally fashionable
and politically advantageous. Even the Emperor claimed to be a Christian.
This
mixing of church and state made some followers of Jesus nervous, anxious that his
countercultural teachings, such as concern for the poor, the marginalized, the sick,
the old, orphans, children, and those with disabilities would be lost in the
collusion and confusion of church and state. They were also worried about the
transformation of what had been a Christian movement
into a religion and religious
institution, the Church.
So,
so-called spiritual mothers and fathers went out into the wildernesses of the Middle
East to pray. They became known as the Desert Mothers and the Desert Fathers. They
did not believe Jesus came to save only Christians—rather,
they believed that Jesus could save the whole
world from its excesses, its materialism, prejudices, hatred, self-absorption,
violence, and cruelty.
They
were concerned for the interior life
that we in the 21st century would understand as the spiritual life.
But
the spiritual life for them was as real as the exterior life in which they
labored to be self-sustaining communities that could welcome and feed the
stranger, the refugee, the pilgrim, and those escaping mistreatment and
injustice, including women.
Paying
attention to our “interior dwellings,” our souls, proves to be the beginning of
an intentional spiritual life that will benefit our guests, whether young children
or elderly parents, neighbors or strangers.
My
mom and dad were role models of this spiritual life in different ways. My dad enjoyed
studying scripture and teaching Sunday school. My mom was more of an adventurer
in the spiritual life, reading the writings of mystics and contemplatives of various
traditions. In this sermon, you can hear my father the teacher in my words, and
my mother the contemplative-wannabe in my regard for the spiritual life.
But
it was not until my mom was in her 80’s that she had what could be called an
amazing epiphany. And, a surprise to me, it came at the hands of a Baptist
preacher from Atlanta, the Rev. Charles Stanley, whose television broadcast she
watched whenever she was unable to attend her Baptist church in Los Angeles. On
one of her visits here I took her to First Baptist of Atlanta, by then moved to
the suburbs, and she was thrilled to meet Rev. Stanley, though I had explained
he was not affirming as she was of gay people like me.
Her
“ah-hah” in the final year of her life, she explained with some glee, was that
she had always known that God loved us generally,
but for the first time in her life she had come to believe that God loved her personally, thanks to Rev. Stanley.
Surprised,
I kidded her, “Mom, haven’t you been reading all my books?!”
The
19th century English poet and mystic William Blake summed it up well
when he said, “We are put on earth for a little space that we may learn to bear
the beams of love.”
The
spiritual teacher Henri Nouwen added that our time on earth is a brief span to
say to God, “I love you too.”
A related post: “Peace! Be Still!”
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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser.
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