Trinity Sunday Sermon (May 30, 2010)
“Christ our Wisdom,” Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, cf. 1 Corinthians 1:30
Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday and our belief in God as Three in One. When we recite the Apostles’ Creed, we affirm our faith in God as the Trinity: “I believe in God the Father almighty . . . and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord . . . and in the Holy Spirit . . . The three parts of the Apostles’ Creed name the three persons of what we call the Godhead. In the first Baptismal Covenant in the United Methodist Hymnal, the pastor addresses all with three questions. “Do you believe in God the Father?” “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” And the responses are the three parts of the Apostles’ Creed (p. 35).
For most Christians over the centuries God has been known as One God in Three Persons. When John Wesley adapted the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church, providing the Twenty-Five Articles for the Methodist Churches of America, he began with the first, “of Faith in the Holy Trinity”:
There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there are [be] three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. (The First of the Twenty-five Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church, from the Discipline of 1808 collated against Wesley's original text in The Sunday Service of the Methodists, 1784, edited by Dennis Bratcher, on the Internet at http://www.crivoice.org/creed25.html, accessed May 29, 2010; compare the first of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion As established by the Bishops, the Clergy, and the Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, in Convention, on the twelfth day of September, in the Year of our Lord, 1801, on the Internet at http://www.anglicansonline.org/basics/thirty-nine_articles.html, accessed May 29, 2010).
In the scripture text read from Proverbs, listed in the Revised Common Lectionary and used by many churches on Trinity Sunday, we meet a woman let’s call Lady Wisdom.
One way to think about the Book of Proverbs in the Bible is as an education manual, or even at the beginning as a sales pitch for ancient Hebrew education. Beginning with chapter 10, most of the verses are independent proverbs that would stand on their own, often presenting a variety of topics within the chapter or section. “A wise child makes a glad father, / but a foolish child is a mother’s grief” (10:1). “Treasures gain by wickedness do not profit, / but righteousness delivers from death” (10:2). But the first nine chapters are an extended introduction. It opens with a long list of words for education, knowledge and wisdom.
The book is,
2 For learning about wisdom and instruction, / for understanding words of insight,
3 for gaining instruction in wise dealing, / righteousness, justice, and equity;
4 to teach shrewdness to the simple, / knowledge and prudence to the young–
5 let the wise also hear and gain in learning, / and the discerning acquire skill,
6 to understand a proverb and a figure, / the words of the wise and their riddles. (Prov. 1:2-6, NRSV)
These words describe the wisdom you get from reflection on the proverbs. Another feature is the repeated reference to father or mother and child. “Hear, my child, your father’s instruction, / and do not reject your mother’s teaching” (1:8). “Listen, children, to a father’s instruction, / and be attentive, that you may gain insight” (4:1). This parent-child relationship may be the meaning, but often it comes across as a metaphor–a figure of speech–where father is the teacher, the wise man, and the son or child is the student. “My child, be attentive to my wisdom; / incline your ear to my understanding, / so that you may hold on to prudence, and your lips may guard knowledge” (5:1).
Within this long introduction to the proverbs of the later chapters, Proverbs refers to wisdom as a woman, lady wisdom we might call her. We call this personification, referring to an idea as a person. Our scripture passage begins,
8:1 Does not wisdom call, / and does not understanding raise her voice?
2 On the heights, beside the way, / at the crossroads she takes her stand;
3 beside the gates in front of the town, / at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
4 "To you, O people, I call, / and my cry is to all that live. (Prov. 8:1-4, NRSV)
Lady Wisdom is inviting people to come and learn from her. But later in the chapter, she makes some remarkable claims.
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago. (Prov. 8:22)
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth– (Prov. 8:25)
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always, (Prov. 30)
We are reminded of the beginning of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (Jn. 1:1, 3).
Think of word as an expression of wisdom, that is God’s word as an expression of God’s wisdom. The words of others, of course, may very well be expressions of foolishness, but Jesus as God’s word, God’s representation to us of what God is like, is central to our Christian faith. If God is love (1 Jn. 4:8), we know that because Jesus demonstrated what love is for us.
This personification of God’s wisdom, that is, of his word, is a common theme in the Old Testament and later Jewish literature. In the Wisdom of Solomon, a book in the Old Testament Apocrypha, written by a Jew living in Alexandria, Egypt about 50 B.C., he talks about the deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt under Moses. In describing the death of the firstborn in Egypt, he says to God,
For while gentle silence enveloped all things,
and night in its swift course was now half gone,
your all-powerful word (lovgoV, logos) leaped from heaven, from the royal throne,
into the midst of the land that was doomed,
a stern warrior
carrying the sharp sword of your authentic command,
and stood and filled all things with death,
and touched heaven while standing on the earth. (Wisd. Sol. 18:14-16)
The Bible begins, in Genesis, by describing a series of God’s acts of creation by a series of commands, “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). “And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters’ ” (Gen. 1:6). This is understood as God creating by his spoken word, by his Wisdom in our reading from Proverbs, by his Word, that is, Jesus, in the Gospel of John, chapter 1.
In the Gospel of Luke, after Jesus answers a question sent to him from John the Baptist, who is in prison, he compares the responses to John’s ministry and his own. He says,
We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not weep. (Lk. 7:32)
The flute playing and the wailing, of course, are not literal. That they did not respond to flute playing by dancing, means they did n0t respond to the message of John about repentance or the message of Jesus about the Kingdom of God. The wailing refers to the wailing of professional mourners at the time of someone’s death. Here it is another picture of the failure of the people to respond to the messages of John and of Jesus. “Nevertheless,” says Jesus, wisdom is vindicated by all her children” (Lk. 7:35; cf. Mt. 11:19). Later in Luke, again in reference to the people’s failure to respond, Jesus says, “Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute’ ” (Lk. 11:49). This looks like a quotation from a book called the Wisdom of God, or perhaps it is a reference to the Holy Spirit. But according to Matthew, it is Jesus himself who says it (Mt. 23:34). Here we have another identification of wisdom, God’s wisdom, as Jesus.
There is more to what we believe about Jesus.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers–all things have been created through him and for him. (Col. 1:15-16)
According to F. F. Bruce,
Christ, in addition to being the image of God, is the ‘firstborn of all creation’–or as [Bruce translates], ‘firstborn before all creation.’. . . This cannot [mean that] he himself were the first of all beings to be created. On the contrary, it is emphasized immediately that he is the one by whom the whole creation came into being. What is meant is that the Son of God, existing as he did ‘before all things’ (v. 17), exercises the privilege of primogeniture [i.e., the privilege of the firstborn] as Lord of creation, the divinely appointed ‘heir of all things’ (Heb. 1:2). He was there when creation’s work began, and it was for him as well as through him that it was completed. (The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians, NICNT, 1984, pp. 58-59, on Col. 1:15)
And in the Book of Hebrews it says,
in these last days, he [i.e. God] has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being and he sustains all things by his powerful word. (Heb. 1:2, 3a)
Of Jesus, Paul says–in the last verse of our scripture reading today–“He [that is, God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’ ” (1 Cor. 1:30-31).
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