January 19, 2025 – Second Sunday after Epiphany
Link to Service – no link available
Proverbs 8.1-11
Wisdom of Solomon 10.15-21
Wise Women’s Words
Second Sunday after Epiphany
Peg was a senior member of The Community Church of Calumet, the first congregation I served as settled pastor. Truth be told there were quite a few senior members at the Community Church, many of them quite keen to see what their newly-minted minister would bring. One morning after church, Peg greeted me at the door with some kind words about the service and addressed me as Reverend Froggatt. At the tender age of 26, I was still learning to wear that honorific, so I replied, “Oh, that’s OK Peg, you can call me Alan.” She smiled and said, “Reverend, I’m old enough to be your grandmother, and I will call you what I please.” She was very kind about it, and there was no malice in her voice, but in that moment I learned an important lesson, that if a parishioner wanted to pay me the respect of calling me Reverend, then I should graciously accept it.
I tell the story not because I expect any of you to call me anything but Alan but rather because of the wisdom Peg, and others like her at the Community Church, shared with me in the early years of my ministry. It was only one piece of a lasting lesson they taught me. Still being new to ministry, I had heard the horror stories that some of my colleagues told about the resistance of the older generations to change in their church. And here is the lesson: my assumption was that the older the member, the less they would be open to new ideas. However the elders of that church, the elder women in particular, people like Peg and Marjorie and Lucille and Tracey and all of that cohort, turned out to be the generation that was most open to change and new ideas, far more so than the generation between mine and theirs. I learned my lesson, and ever since valued and cherished that knowledge and wisdom of those elder church women of the Community Church of Calumet.
A good deal of the inspiration for thinking about wisdom this morning comes in fact from you. Last Sunday, after we spoke about the magi, or wise men, more than one of you reminded me of how much more appropriate than three wise men three wise women might have been. Instead of such esoteric gifts like myrrh, frankincense and gold – think perfume, aromatics and bitcoin – wise women’s gifts would have been much more practical, things like diapers and casseroles and a jug or three of wine.
Did you notice from our readings this morning how the personification of wisdom in the Bible is almost uniformly female? Jennifer read from Proverbs chapter eight this morning, “Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out…” Chapter nine continues the theme: “Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars… she has mixed her wine, she has set her table… she calls from the highest places in town.” In the Bible, Wisdom is a woman.
The passage I read from the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon – a passage Diane Lindsay read for us two weeks ago as well – brings more of the same: “Wisdom delivered a holy people and blameless race from a nation of oppressors. She entered the soul of a servant of the Lord… she gave to holy people the reward of their labors; she guided them along a marvelous way… she brought them over the Red Sea and led them through deep waters,” and so on. Whenever we encounter wisdom in the Bible, whether the Old Testament, the intertestamental apocrypha, or the New Testament, she is almost invariably female.
I’ve told you about Iola before. She was one of the pillars of the Bridgewater Congregational Church in western Connecticut. Bridgewater was, and remains, a fairly affluent community, but Iola didn’t have much. But she was a dauntless supporter of her church, and she was resourceful. Bridgewater is known for its annual country fair, run by the volunteer fire department, and local organizations had small booths where they could sell their wares. Iola was an excellent baker. She made breads of all kinds, and her cinnamon rolls were to die for. So Iola organized the cooks and bakers of the church to make different kinds of breads and cookies and brownies to sell at the fair. The church had already been doing this when I arrived and when I learned of it I thought “What a nice idea, supplementing the church budget by selling a handful of baked goods.” Friends, Iola was a force to be reckoned with. The first fair of my ministry saw three or four thousand dollars worth of breads, cookies, brownies and the like sold. But this was only the beginning. The church also began selling lemonade at the fair, and through Iola’s powers of persuasion the entire congregation began baking until the church booth at the Bridgewater Fair amped up the bakery sales to unbelievable levels – one year Debbie made 100 loaves of Anadama bread for the fair booth – and by the time I left we were taking in more than $12,000 of pure profit. All of it due to the dedication, the inspiration, and the wisdom of Iola. Like the story of the widow’s mite, she gave but little, but she gave all she had and so did we.
The literature of lady wisdom, or as it is more commonly referred to as the Wisdom literature of the Bible contains many of the church’s most-loved parts. The book of Psalms is wisdom. Proverbs is wisdom. Ecclesiastes is wisdom. Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, is wisdom. And what is arguably the finest book of ancient literature, not just in the Bible, but in the entire western canon, the book of Job is wisdom literature. A major portion of the apocrypha is wisdom, including this morning’s Wisdom of Solomon and the longest book of the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, or the Book of Sirach. So for a long time in biblical history, wisdom was an idea that shaped the lives and beliefs of people of faith, and truth be told, continues to do so today.
The Hebrew word for wisdom is hokmah; we know the Greek word better: it is Sophia. Anybody know a Sophia? We have a Sophia in church today, and she is wise, is she not? For a large chunk of biblical history, wisdom was the organizing idea when it came to living out one’s faith. Reading more deeply into the book of the Proverbs, we learn that Wisdom was present at the creation of the world. “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work” she declares in chapter eight. “Ages ago I was set up at the first, before the beginning of the earth. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brough forth… when the heavens were established, I was there… when the skies were firmed above, when the fountains of the deep were established, I was there… I was beside the Creator like a master worker.”
The Hebrew idea of wisdom is more than an ideal, it is a way of life; literally, it means ‘walking in the way,’ a way of understanding our own lives in the light of God. And as it makes its way into the New Testament, the figure of wisdom becomes embodied in the figure of the Holy Spirit, hagia Sophia, again, the feminine expression of God. Much of the historic church, being a patriarchy, lost sight of this for a while, leaving that bit of tradition to the mystics in our midst who kept the truth. Being filled by the presence of the Spirit of God, that spirit which gathered and created the church, is to walk in the way, and to embody that same wisdom in ourselves.
Susan was a saint at Second Congregational Church in Beverly. She was smart as a tack, extremely well read – we would often exchange New Yorker articles with each other – and she brooked no nonsense from anyone, including her minister. One of Susan’s wisest observations remains with me still. Very short of stature, she would still size me up from time to time and say, with a twinkle in her eye, “Ministers come and ministers go, but I’m still here.” Minsters come and ministers go, but I’m still here. And indeed, over her long life Susan had seen a number of ministers come and go at the church, but it took me a while to understand that there was more to what she was saying than the succession of clergy. Two years before I left Beverly, Susan passed away, and it was only as I was writing her eulogy that the deep and profound truth of her words struck me. It is not just ministers who come and go, it is also the congregation – it is every single one of us – we all come and we all go, and at the end of the day, what remains is the church – the church is still here. While we are contingent, the church is eternal. When you and I are long gone, the Church of Jesus Christ abides. Susan was but one in a long line of wise women who generously shared their wisdom with me.
Now gentlemen, I do not mean to exclude any of you, any of us, from this morning’s sermon. The Bible is filled with men of faith and wisdom; it is filled, for better and for worse, with masculine images of the deity. But the persons of Wisdom and the Holy Spirit of God remind us that the characteristics of faithfulness and understanding and wisdom and knowledge are the property of no single gender. To have a heart for Jesus, to have a heart for the least and the lost as Jesus expressed it, to have a heart for justice and for inclusion and for truth, these are the marks of wisdom and knowledge, for hokmah and Sophia in whatever language we choose. Wise woman and poet Maya Angelou once wrote, “The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious – the desire to reach hearts is wise.”
I began this morning with one Peg, I will close with another. Our own dear Peg Lieberman shared her heart and her wisdom with us throughout her life, did she not? And at the end, Peg made what to many of us would be considered one of life’s most difficult decisions, that the years she lived were enough for her. It was a decision rooted not in ambition, but in the heart of wisdom. And if you were not at Peg’s celebration of life, I want to repeat what I said that day: the very last thing she said to me was, “God bless you Alan.” It is a blessing I will always carry with me, as I will Susan’s idea of the abiding nature of the church, as I will Iola lived knowledge that you don’t have to be rich in things in order to be a linchpin of the community of faith, as I will Peg’s gentle reminder that respect is offered as a gift, not as a due, a gift to be humbly received. They and so many like them are wisdom embodied, and we would be wise to value wise women’s words.