Trinity Sunday
Preaching
Preaching and Reading the Old Testament Lessons:
With an Eye to the New
Perhaps no doctrine of the Christian Church is more obscure in the minds of church-goers than is the doctrine of the Trinity, the fact that God is One in three Persons. The early church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. debated long and hard before they arrived at a satisfactory statement of the doctrine, and still today, persons misunderstand or distort the teaching.
The doctrine of the Trinity took shape out of the testimony of the scriptures, beginning with their witness to Jesus Christ. Most of the writers of the New Testament were originally Jews who believed in one God. But when the apostles and disciples encountered Jesus of Nazareth and witnessed his life, death, and resurrection, they became convinced that he was fully Immanuel, God with them, the Person of God incarnated in human flesh. After Christ's resurrection and ascension, the apostles and disciples also found that God in Christ continued fully to be with them in the Person of the Holy Spirit, as Christ has promised. Thus, the one God of the Old Testament was fully present in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He was One, in three Persons. Not only the Father, but also the Son and the Holy Spirit, are wholly divine, the Son also having been fully human and incarnated in human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. The Son who is with us is God. The Holy Spirit who comes to us is God. They are not lesser deities than the Father, and to all of them, Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, we pray and give our adoration.
It is rather strange, therefore, that the lectionary for this Sunday of the Trinity designates a passage about Wisdom from the Old Testament, as if Wisdom is somehow a Person in the Trinity.
The figure of Wisdom in our text for the morning is personified as a female figure. She calls to human beings to listen to her and to learn her teachings (vv. 1-5). She is described as the product of God's first act of creation (v. 22), and she says she was present when God made all of the rest of the universe (vv. 23-30). God rejoiced in her (v. 30), and she rejoiced in God's creation of the world and of human beings (v. 31).
On the basis of this text, many persons in our time have therefore claimed that Wisdom is a divine figure, and we have abroad in our society what has come to be called Sophia worship, Sophia being the Greek translation of Wisdom. Principally such Sophia worship has appealed to radical feminists, because Sophia or Wisdom is a female figure, and they do not wish to say that a male, namely Jesus Christ, is their Savior and Redeemer. So for many such radical feminists, the worship of Sophia has replaced the worship of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Such Sophia-worshipers find their deity in all of creation, in, through, under all things, as a kind of spirit pervading the universe. She is identified with the vital forces in the natural world and even with sexual drives in human beings. Thus, at the Re-imagining conference of 1993, a conference that since has been repeated every year, Sophia was prayed to in these words:
Sophia, creator god, let your milk and honey flow ... Our sweet Sophia, we are women in your image. With nectar between our thighs, we invite a lover, we birth a child. With our warm body fluids, we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations ... We celebrate our bodiliness, our physicality, the sensations of pleasure, our oneness with earth and water.
From tapes of the conference, Tape 12-1, Side B
We need to call such worship by its proper name, however. It is idolatry, because you and I worship the one God who has commanded us, "You shall have no other gods besides me" (Exodus 20:3; cf. Mark 10:17-20). He has revealed himself to us in his incarnation in Jesus Christ, and he continues to be our God and to be with us in the Person of the Holy Spirit, who is given to us from the Father and the Son.
So how, then, are we to understand this text from the Old Testament about Wisdom? This personified figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 will probably become clear for us if we understand Wisdom in the Old Testament (and indeed in the apocryphal book of Wisdom) as the plan of God. Wisdom was there with God when he made the universes, the fifty billion galaxies that our astronomers tell us they have discovered through their telescopes. God had a plan when he created all things and persons. And he delighted in his plan, because he wanted to make a creation that was "very good" (Genesis 1:31).
On the basis of this text from Proverbs, you and I can celebrate God's good plan -- how he brought forth the rivers and raised up the mountains; how he laid out the fields with their good earth, and how he established the deeps of the seas; how he brought order out of chaos and made a world of delight and beauty and fruitfulness, that you and I were given to enjoy.
We can, however, also realize how often we distort God's plan for a good world, how readily we trash our environment and how sinfully we distort the loving relationships in which he has set us; how blindly we have turned his abundant life into darkness and death for ourselves and all things.
But the scriptures have something else to say about God's wisdom, about his plan for his world. In the New Testament, who becomes identified with the wisdom of God and in fact replaces all which that female figure does in the Old Testament? Jesus Christ. "Christ Jesus," Paul writes, "whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Christ is the wisdom of God, and in him is found the truth of God (John 14:6). Moreover, the eternal plan of God is to unite all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10).
So through Christ, God has made all things (John 1:3) and according to Christ, he orders all things. According to his love in Christ Jesus, God loves his world. According to the teachings of Christ, God calls and instructs all people. According to the forgiveness of Christ, God forgives and redeems his world. According to his purpose in Christ our Lord, God will save his world.
There is no other name under heaven given to us by which we may be saved than the name of Jesus Christ our Lord (Acts 4:12). Sophia is not our God. Jesus Christ is our God, the one through whom the Father in his mercy revealed himself, and the one with whom he sends his Holy Spirit always to be with us.
The doctrine of the Trinity took shape out of the testimony of the scriptures, beginning with their witness to Jesus Christ. Most of the writers of the New Testament were originally Jews who believed in one God. But when the apostles and disciples encountered Jesus of Nazareth and witnessed his life, death, and resurrection, they became convinced that he was fully Immanuel, God with them, the Person of God incarnated in human flesh. After Christ's resurrection and ascension, the apostles and disciples also found that God in Christ continued fully to be with them in the Person of the Holy Spirit, as Christ has promised. Thus, the one God of the Old Testament was fully present in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He was One, in three Persons. Not only the Father, but also the Son and the Holy Spirit, are wholly divine, the Son also having been fully human and incarnated in human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. The Son who is with us is God. The Holy Spirit who comes to us is God. They are not lesser deities than the Father, and to all of them, Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, we pray and give our adoration.
It is rather strange, therefore, that the lectionary for this Sunday of the Trinity designates a passage about Wisdom from the Old Testament, as if Wisdom is somehow a Person in the Trinity.
The figure of Wisdom in our text for the morning is personified as a female figure. She calls to human beings to listen to her and to learn her teachings (vv. 1-5). She is described as the product of God's first act of creation (v. 22), and she says she was present when God made all of the rest of the universe (vv. 23-30). God rejoiced in her (v. 30), and she rejoiced in God's creation of the world and of human beings (v. 31).
On the basis of this text, many persons in our time have therefore claimed that Wisdom is a divine figure, and we have abroad in our society what has come to be called Sophia worship, Sophia being the Greek translation of Wisdom. Principally such Sophia worship has appealed to radical feminists, because Sophia or Wisdom is a female figure, and they do not wish to say that a male, namely Jesus Christ, is their Savior and Redeemer. So for many such radical feminists, the worship of Sophia has replaced the worship of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Such Sophia-worshipers find their deity in all of creation, in, through, under all things, as a kind of spirit pervading the universe. She is identified with the vital forces in the natural world and even with sexual drives in human beings. Thus, at the Re-imagining conference of 1993, a conference that since has been repeated every year, Sophia was prayed to in these words:
Sophia, creator god, let your milk and honey flow ... Our sweet Sophia, we are women in your image. With nectar between our thighs, we invite a lover, we birth a child. With our warm body fluids, we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations ... We celebrate our bodiliness, our physicality, the sensations of pleasure, our oneness with earth and water.
From tapes of the conference, Tape 12-1, Side B
We need to call such worship by its proper name, however. It is idolatry, because you and I worship the one God who has commanded us, "You shall have no other gods besides me" (Exodus 20:3; cf. Mark 10:17-20). He has revealed himself to us in his incarnation in Jesus Christ, and he continues to be our God and to be with us in the Person of the Holy Spirit, who is given to us from the Father and the Son.
So how, then, are we to understand this text from the Old Testament about Wisdom? This personified figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 will probably become clear for us if we understand Wisdom in the Old Testament (and indeed in the apocryphal book of Wisdom) as the plan of God. Wisdom was there with God when he made the universes, the fifty billion galaxies that our astronomers tell us they have discovered through their telescopes. God had a plan when he created all things and persons. And he delighted in his plan, because he wanted to make a creation that was "very good" (Genesis 1:31).
On the basis of this text from Proverbs, you and I can celebrate God's good plan -- how he brought forth the rivers and raised up the mountains; how he laid out the fields with their good earth, and how he established the deeps of the seas; how he brought order out of chaos and made a world of delight and beauty and fruitfulness, that you and I were given to enjoy.
We can, however, also realize how often we distort God's plan for a good world, how readily we trash our environment and how sinfully we distort the loving relationships in which he has set us; how blindly we have turned his abundant life into darkness and death for ourselves and all things.
But the scriptures have something else to say about God's wisdom, about his plan for his world. In the New Testament, who becomes identified with the wisdom of God and in fact replaces all which that female figure does in the Old Testament? Jesus Christ. "Christ Jesus," Paul writes, "whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Christ is the wisdom of God, and in him is found the truth of God (John 14:6). Moreover, the eternal plan of God is to unite all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10).
So through Christ, God has made all things (John 1:3) and according to Christ, he orders all things. According to his love in Christ Jesus, God loves his world. According to the teachings of Christ, God calls and instructs all people. According to the forgiveness of Christ, God forgives and redeems his world. According to his purpose in Christ our Lord, God will save his world.
There is no other name under heaven given to us by which we may be saved than the name of Jesus Christ our Lord (Acts 4:12). Sophia is not our God. Jesus Christ is our God, the one through whom the Father in his mercy revealed himself, and the one with whom he sends his Holy Spirit always to be with us.
