Part II: Soaked in Mystery

By Pastor Marcia Sietstra

Isaiah 42:5-9, 14-16

John 1:1-5

Today’s sermon is part 2 of last week’s sermon, in which I talked about the ways humans have tried to define God. As some of you will recall, I talked about how ancient people used words that describe human characteristics to describe God, e.g. God is like a king, or like a shepherd. Today I want to begin by reading a 3rd text I chose as I wrote today’s sermon. In it, God is described as the spirit of Wisdom.

Proverbs, chpt. 8: Does not Wisdom call’and raise her voice? ‘She takes her stand before the gates and she cries out: To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live’ Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When he established the heavens,,,,,,, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep’And now my children, listen to me: happy are those who keep my ways’for whoever finds me finds life.

I chose the te’t because it so vividly describes some aspect or the divine as priceless Wisdom, and wisdom in the Bible is always described as ‘she.’ There are actually several other texts in Proverbs and also in the New Testament in which the divine is personified as Wisdom. In all the references I’ve found, this aspect of God—Divine Wisdom—is a ‘she.’ (It’s another of those human words—she—used to describe that which is divine.)

I tried in vain to explain this to my son one time when he was quite young. We had gotten into a discussion about God, and James insisted that God was a man. It was natural for him to think so, since every Sunday he heard us pray, ‘Our Father who art in heaven’’. All the fathers James knew were obviously men. I explained that, in the old days when the writers of the Bible were writing, the father was the absolute head of his family. He made all the rules, everyone looked to him to take care of everything; wives and children were quite literally owned by the father, and all of life was built on this system of male headship. To call God father was just the way these people tried to say that God, like a father, is the one in control, the one who deserves respect, the one who loves humanity as much as a human father loves his children. That’s what the writers of the Bible were trying to say.

My son was unconvinced. Then I tried telling him about images in the Bible where God is called ‘she.’ For example, Jesus, in one parable, portrays God as a woman who sweeps every corner of her home, searching for one lost coin, implying that God searches for each of us. Luckily, my son, ‘gets it’ now, at the age of 18, but it took me a lot of years to explain that all these male and female references to God in the bible are simply ways humans have tried to say what God is like.

To call God she is still a relatively new thing in the church, and like my son, people need a while to get comfortable with female imagery, because we are so accustomed to hearing predominantly male images to describe God.

Say, for example, that I asked you to pray only ‘Our Mother who art in heaven’’ It’s more comfortable to pray Our Father/Mother who is in heaven’If we believe what the church has taught for thousands of years, that God is much greater than either male or female, and that God is, in fact, Spirit, then presumably we can call God mother, or friend, or comforter, or Wisdom, or judge, or king, and so on, since each is only a partial glimpse of what God is like.

I read once about a woman who was trying to explain to her husband how meaningful it was for her to image God as a mother. Her husband didn’t like change of any sort, and he was very resistant until she pointed out that he seemed perfectly comfortable singing to God as a rock last Sunday in church, when they’d stood and sung one of his favorite hymns, ‘Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me’let me hide myself in thee!’

Now think about that for a minute. He was comfortable calling God rock, which means: a large mass of minerals composed in the earth’s crust. But he resisted calling God mother, even though God certainly has many characteristics of a good mother. God can be gentle, but firm, God nurtures, and loves us unconditionally. How like a mother! The only reason we can comfortably call God rock and not mother is because that’s what we are used to! And we are used to it because people who wrote the hundreds of writings that became our Bible, wrote about their experiences of God. And when they did so, they called God father because in their day and age. That was the term of highest respect and closest relationship that they knew. Today mothers are as respected and revered as fathers, so today we can call God by either term and be theologically appropriate.

Beyond that, there is one very good reason to call God mother, even though it feels a bit awkward at first, and here’s the reason: What we call God affects the image of God we carry deep within our subconscious. Nearly every one of us here was taught, since we were children, that God is spirit. But last week when I asked you how you picture God in your mind, I bet nearly every single one of us had a male image in our heads. If we restrict God to one image, and one gender, we risk trapping God in the limitations of human categories. And God is so much greater than one category, either mother or father.

God is spirit—and the more terms we use for God, the greater our conception of God will be. So don’t limit the ways you imagine God. The Bible has dozens of terms for God. To use all of them and new ones will help us remember that we are worshiping the God who is behind all the images, the God beyond the reaches of our knowledge, the God who is profound mystery, beyond human understanding!

I invite you to turn to the John 1 text for today (p. 90 of the 2nd section of the Bible, the Christian scriptures). Perhaps the writer of the gospel of John was trying to say something about this mystery. When he begins with In the beginning was the Word, Word doesn’t mean the Bible. Your first clue is that it’s capitalized, and the next clue is that it goes on to say taht the Word existed before the world was made. John says, ‘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. In him was life and the life was the light of all people.’

John would have been familiar with the te’t I read you from Proverbs, which sounds a lot like what he wrote: Does not Wisdom call’and raise her voice? ‘She cries out: Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. Llisten to me: happy are those who keep my ways’for whoever finds me finds life.

I think John was saying that Jesus was a word from God, Wisdom in action, a message in human form, because Jesus showed us what God is like. He was a deeply mysterious man, this Jesus, but he possessed wisdom about how human beings could live lives of such peace and harmony that they could experience abundant life, here and now. He possessed such wisdom and such love that people became convinced that somehow he was more closely related to God than anyone else who had ever lived. And so they called him, in Greek, the logos, the divine word.

The Chinese translate John’s Gospel by using the Chinese word for mystery where we translate it as Word. So our text would read, ‘In the beginning was the Tao.’ The Chinese listener would understand ‘Tao’ to be ‘divine mystery.’

Last week I told you about the tendency to see God as being ‘out there’ when we used human terms to describe God, terms like almighty king and master and lord. When we use terms that are less anthropomorphic (human-like), words that capture more mystery, it is easier for some of us to imagine the God who is ‘right here.’ When I call God Spirit of Life or Spirit of Peace, or Wisdom, or Truth, or Perfect Love, there is a sense of God being everywhere, encompassing all of life. These terms for God let God be soaked in mystery.

Did you know that 99.9 % of the universe remains beyond our telescopes and comprehension? How much of God does too? We don’t know. But this is a church that permits dreaming and searching, as we try to discern what is good, what is holy, what is ‘of God.’ And this is a church that permits restlessness, believing in the restless Spirit that broods over the water, the Holy Spirit that intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. Amen.