Wisdom is a woman.
Preacher: Rev’d Trudy Payne
‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his works…and I was beside him…delighting in the human race’.
Wisdom is speaking here, wisdom who was there at the beginning of all things, created, not equal with God. But so important that this unseen, shadowy presence is seen as God’s creative process in the world. Look at our psalm reading: ‘Oh, Lord how manifold (that means ‘varied’) are your works; in wisdom you have made them all’. Wisdom takes us into the heavenly realms, there’s a cosmic setting here as the earth is brought into being and the Word of God speaks the world into life with ‘let there be light’. That word of God which the gospel identifies as Jesus. Hence the illustration on the front cover. [This was a photo of the night sky, stars, no buildings or people.]
We need to find out a bit more about wisdom. Not a person, more an idea, a principle, a quality. Yes, the dictionary definition is ‘the quality of having experience, knowledge and good judgement’. It’s as though this quality is hard-wired into creation, and we can expect God’s actions to have this quality.
There are two things we need to know about wisdom. Firstly, let’s look at the Greek word for it ‘Sofia’. That’s one of the languages used in the Bible when it was first put together. ‘Sofia’… that’s a word you may recognize. It is of course a girl’s name: yes, the female presence at creation, it’s what reminds us that God doesn’t have to be seen as exclusively male. Wisdom is a woman.
That matters. That matters a lot, in a world where women and girls are routinely discriminated against and abused; where is assumed that men and boys deserve better education, better food, better jobs, better healthcare, better well, everything. A world where girls as young as 12 can be ‘married’ because it suits their parents. Where some countries, even in Europe, are systematically eroding women’s rights.
That matters. The church has been run by men, and women have been largely written out of early church history. That bias is still there. The Patriarch of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox church, is best friends with Vladimir Putin, and again is eroding women’s rights in defence of Christian family values.
But things are changing…women are presidents and prime ministers, they run central banks, they are ambassadors, CEOs of charities and big companies. And this year, a woman stood on the steps of the Capitol in Washington and took the oath as the first woman Vice-President of the USA. Kamala Harris symbolizes, for women and for people of colour, what is possible.
‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his works…and I was beside him…delighting in the human race’. That’s the second thing. Genesis 1:31 tells us ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good’. That includes us. The prophet Isaiah, speaking to God’s people, says ‘you shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God’ (Isaiah 62:3). That relationship between God and his people took on a whole new dimension as God became visible in the person of Jesus – born of a woman. That’s what the gospel reading (John 1:1-14) is about, even though Mary isn’t mentioned. [The painting shown here is Leonardo’s ‘The Madonna of the Rocks.]
So wisdom is a woman, and wisdom delights in the human race. What does that mean for us today?
It means firstly that discrimination on gender grounds is simply wrong. The creation stories make one thing clear: ‘So God created humankind in his image…male and female he created them.’ (Genesis 1:27) And this makes discrimination on racial grounds wrong too: this was all humanity. There is only one human race on our planet; it’s called ‘homo sapiens’ and we all belong to it.
Secondly, if God delights in his people, so should we! In all their glorious diversity. That’s one of the things I love about our church, we are so different yet we have our faith in common. That’s what I love about London. I walk down my road and see black families, Asian ones, white ones, Chinese ones, renters and home-owners, young families, retired people. It’s like the world in a single street! Yet we share a common humanity. But Maya Angelou expresses it better in her poem ‘The Human Family’:
‘We seek success in Finland,
are born and die in Maine.
In minor ways we differ,In major we're the same.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.’
Amen