Help My Unbelief s3

THE FEMALE WISDOM OF GOD

A Mother's Day Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan University Public Worship Stanford Memorial Church May 10, 2009

Happy Mother's Day to all of you on this 5th Sunday of Easter. One unassailable statement we can make without any exception is that we all owe a huge debt to our mothers, starting of course with the fact that, without them, none of us would be here today. Their work in carrying us to term and then giving birth to us was far more substantial than what our fathers did in those early days of our lives, with all due respect to fathers like myself. And we'll get our

Fathers' Day on June 21. I won't go on to comment upon mothers' continuing influence in our lives, but I do want to give special greetings and thanks to all of the mothers present in the congregation today.

The Bible has a lot to say about mothers, from many Old Testament stories to the pre- eminent place of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the New Testament. God self-defines as a mother in the book of Isaiah -- as one who nurses, carries her children on her arms and dandles them on her knees: "As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you."i But perhaps the most extensive female imagery of God is that of Sophia or "Wisdom," as the word has been translated from the New Testament Greek. This is what we have in the reading this morning from the Book of Proverbs: "Does not wisdom call and ... raise her voice? ...Wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you may desire cannot compare with her... Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth... Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed."ii

1 This almost sounds like Jesus at the Last Supper, speaking language which has become the words of institution for the sacrament of communion: "He took a cup...he took a loaf of bread...This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me."iii Jesus speaks of himself in today's gospel lesson from John as the true vine, and explains that "Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit."iv He goes on to say that "If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you."v This passage, and that from Proverbs, may sound reminiscent of what's said at the very beginning of the gospel of

John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

There are a number of current biblical scholars who link the Word that becomes incarnated in

Jesus with the Old Testament Wisdom or Sophia, which is imaged in female terms.vi

One of the most prominent is Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza from Harvard Divinity

School, in books like Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet.vii Various New Testament passages, Schussler Fiorenza argues, depict Jesus "as Sophia herself...[for] Jesus does what

Sophia does."viii This is symbolized in the famous Hagia Sophia (or Holy Wisdom) Church in

Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey, historically dedicated to Jesus Christ, although it’s subsequently gone through stages of being a mosque and now a museum.ix Sophia is Jesus and vice-versa.

Having better appreciation of biblical depictions of God as Mother, and of Sophia or

Wisdom being incarnated in Jesus, might help a lot in the continuing debates about ordaining women as ministers and priests throughout the Christian Church, not just in Protestantism, but in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions of Christianity too. I still remember well a seminal event for me when I was a divinity school student at Harvard in the early 1970’s. It wasn't until then that the first woman ever was invited to preach at the Harvard Memorial Church

2 in the center of campus. Philosopher and theologian Mary Daly arrived one fall Sunday in my second year from a Jesuit institution, Boston College, less than five miles away. After delivering a sermon entitled “Beyond God the Father,” she led a walkout from what she called a hopelessly patriarchal church. Two years later in 1973 she published a book by the same name.x

The assistant minister at the time, the Rev. Peter Gomes, who later became the minister

(and incidentally was our Baccalaureate speaker here at Stanford last year), has written of her presence and action in Harvard’s church as “truly revolutionary.”xi Many other women like

Mary Daly, with some male allies, have been responsible for stimulating countless changes in the church over the last half century. Together those transformations have resulted in what Gomes has called a paradigm shift, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.

Among the changes has been the development of a whole new field of feminist theology and Bible studies.xii Biblical scholar Marcus Borg has described this change as “the single most important development of theology in my lifetime.”xiii Innovative academic programs and centers have been created in seminaries and university-based divinity schools nationwide.

Feminist theology has also deeply affected life in the pews of churches, providing a new lens through which to view the entire Christian tradition – one which has liberated men as well as women from a male monarch view of God, with all of its political and social implications.xiv For example, inclusive language has become assumed in many church hymnals, liturgies and Bible translations.

The new biblical scholarship has highlighted Jesus’ relationships with women – showing how radically different his approach was from that of the culture and religion of his day. Since the Bible -- Old Testament and New Testament alike -- was formed and recorded in a thoroughly

3 patriarchal context, women’s roles were primarily domestic. As children, women were their father’s property, and then marriage marked ownership by their husbands. Fathers were to be obeyed by their daughters, and husbands were to be obeyed by their wives.xv The community that Jesus built around him, however, was egalitarian and inclusive,xvi encompassing women in strikingly new ways.

For example, Luke records in his gospel that Jesus “went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve [male apostles] were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for him out of their resources.”xvii

Women follow Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem in the final days of his life. His female followers don’t desert him at the time of his arrest, as do the twelve male apostles. The women don’t betray him or claim not to be disciples as he is tortured and crucified. Women are present at the cross, according to all four gospels. But their faithfulness doesn’t end there. It’s women who go to his tomb on Easter morning and find it empty. Then all four gospels record that it’s

Mary Magdalene, either alone or with other women, who reports the good news of Jesus’ resurrection to his male followersxviii as the “apostle to the apostles,” as she was called by Saint

Augustine.xix

So it's time for female spirituality to be thoroughly appreciated -- on this fifth Sunday after Easter, on Mother's Day, and in this new millennium. A minister friend of mine who graduated from Stanford, Forrest Church, has written in some detail about Mother God.xx He explains, "If God the creator is a parent, and we are God's children...God the mother strikes me as much more descriptive of God's possible nature than does God the Father." This is not only

4 because "In our new, ecologically more sensitive age, the divine female, procreator and keeper of the creation, offers a dimension to the Holy that seems both natural and more obvious than it has since...Goddesses ruled over the rites of sowing and reaping, of birth and death." It's also because historically "Fathers send their sons to war; mothers remain at home to grieve" their losses. Forrest Church reminds us that it was Julia Ward Howe who is responsible for the holiday we celebrate today. Soon after the Civil War she issued the first Mother's Day proclamation. It didn't have to do with chocolates, flowers, and greeting cards. The proclamation founded Mother's Day as an antiwar holiday. She wrote: "Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience...From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."

So, Mother's Day at its inception was to be an annual festival of peace and love. Julia

Ward Howe asked that this be a day on which we "take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God." Mother's Day was meant to honor those who instill in their children the values which Forrest Church titles "respect for others, generosity of spirit, cooperation, forgiveness, and loving kindness."xxi

So, let this be at least one Sunday, although ideally it should be every Sunday, when we remember God's words from the book of Isaiah: "As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you."xxii Let it be a Sunday when we remember the words of Sophia, the female wisdom of God, when She says in the book of Proverbs, "To you, O people, I call... [to] learn prudence, acquire intelligence... Wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you may desire cannot compare

5 with her... I walk in the way of righteousness, along the paths of justice... Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."xxiii

6 BENEDICTION

May the Love, which overcomes all differences, which heals all wounds, which puts to flight all fears, which reconciles all who are separated, be in us and among us now and always. AMEN.

--Frederick E. Gillis

8 i Isaiah 66: 12-13. ii Proverbs 8:1,11,23; 9:5 iii Luke 22: 14-20; See also Mark 14: 22-25; Matthew 26: 26-29; I Corinthians 11: 23-25. iv John 15: 5. v John 15: 7. vi For an accessible account of this, see the chapter entitled "Jesus, the Wisdom of God: Sophia Become Flesh," in Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), pp. 96-118. vii Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet (New York: Continuum, 1994). viii Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, as cited in Ruth C. Duck and Patricia Wilson-Kastner, The Trinity in Christian Worship (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), p. 103. ix Rev. Rebecca, "Developing a Biblical Sophia Christology," www.franciscan- anglican.com/sophia.htm x Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). xi Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (New York: Avon Books, 1996), p. 120. See his account of the walkout on pp. 120-121. Mary Daly has also written of it in Mary Daly, Personal History, "Sin Big," The New Yorker, February 26, 1996, p. 76. xii For overviews on feminist theology, see Ann M. Clifford, Introducing Feminist Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001) and Janet Martin Soskice and Diana Lipton (eds.), Feminism and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For feminist biblical scholarship, see Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (eds.), Women’s Bible Commentary (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998) and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Searching the Scriptures (New York: Crossroad, 2 Volumes, 1993 and 1994). xiii Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), p. 70. xiv Ibid. xv Anne M. Clifford, Introducing Feminist Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), p. 76. xvi See, for example, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, “Women in the Pre-Pauline and Pauline Churches,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 33 (3 and 4), 1978, as reprinted in Janet Martin Soskice and Diana Lipton, Feminism and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). xvii Luke 8: 1-3. xviii Anne M. Clifford, Introducing Feminist Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), p. 78. xix Teresa Okure, “The Significance Today of Jesus’ Commission to Mary Magdalene,” International Review of Mission, Vol. LXXXI, No. 322, as reprinted in Janet Martin Soskice and Diana Lipton, Feminism and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 314. xx See, for example, Forrest Church, God and Other Famous Liberals (Simon and Schuster, 1990). xxi Forrest Church, The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), uncorrected manuscript, pp. 38-53. xxii Isaiah 66: 12-13. xxiii Proverbs 8: 4-5, 11, 20-21; 9: 5-6.