Women of the OT, Part 5: Sophia

 WE GATHER 

PRELUDE 

BRINGING IN THE LIGHT OF CHRIST 

WELCOME & ANNOUNCEMENTS 

*HYMN Go, Make of All Disciples UMH# 571 

*CALL TO WORSHIP 

L: It was easy to come to worship this morning. 

P: We feel welcome and look forward to the worship service. L: How hard it is to enter God’s kingdom. 

P: We have to be ready to let go of the things that tie us down. L: Get ready. God is waiting for you. 

P: Open our hearts and our spirits, Lord, to receive your word for us. AMEN. 

*OPENING PRAYER (IN UNISON) 

Lord, you have called us here this day for healing, hope, and transformation. As we listen to the Scripture, pray our prayers, sing our hymns, and hear the words of wisdom, open our hearts to hear your claim on our lives; that we may fully and joyfully serve you. AMEN. 

*HYMN Come, Thou Almighty King UMH# 61 

WE PROCLAIM GOD'S WORD 

CHILDREN’S CHAT 

OLD TESTAMENT READING 

Proverbs 1: 20-33 

The Call of Wisdom

20 

Wisdom cries out in the street;
    in the squares she raises her voice.

21 

At the busiest corner she cries out;
    at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:

22 

“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
    and fools hate knowledge?

23 

Give heed to my reproof;
I will pour out my thoughts to you;
    I will make my words known to you.

24 

Because I have called and you refused,
    have stretched out my hand and no one heeded,

25 

and because you have ignored all my counsel
    and would have none of my reproof,

26 

I also will laugh at your calamity;
    I will mock when panic strikes you,

27 

when panic strikes you like a storm
    and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,
    when distress and anguish come upon you.

28 

Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer;
    they will seek me diligently but will not find me.

29 

Because they hated knowledge
    and did not choose the fear of the Lord,

30 

would have none of my counsel
    and despised all my reproof,

31 

therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way
    and be sated with their own devices.

32 

For waywardness kills the simple,
    and the complacency of fools destroys them;

33 

but those who listen to me will be secure
    and will live at ease without dread of disaster.”

MUSICAL INTERLUDE AND OFFERING 

NEW TESTAMENT READING 

Mark 10: 17-25 

17 As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. You shall not defraud. Honor your father and mother.’ ” 20 He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” 21 Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money[a] to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 22 When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

23 Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” 24 And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is[b] to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

MESSAGE "Women of the Old Testament, Part 5: Sophia" 

Friends, we’re now up to part 5 of this sermon series I put together where we’re looking at stories about women in the Old Testament, and then holding up what we learn in those stories against what we learn from Jesus in the Gospels.

Today’s woman is the only one of the six we’ll be looking at in this series who the biblical author might not have meant for us to think of as a real, literal person. For the purposes of making a sermon title, I called this woman by her Greek name, Sophia, the name we see show up in Greek transcripts of the words of Jesus and Paul. It sounds really nice to call her Sophia. That’s a pretty, and relatable, name. Most of us know a Sophia.

But, if I was being a purist and only referring to her presence in this lection from 1 Proverbs, I wouldn’t call this woman Sophia, I’d call her by her Hebrew name: Hokmah. Hmm. That’s a harder sell to my anglocentric brain. I can’t exactly imagine embroidering “Hokmah” on a decorative pillow for a baby’s nursery. But, I’ll argue whatever you call her, Sophia or Hokmah, it won’t make her words any more palatable.

Both “Sophia” and “Hokmah” mean “wisdom”. Solomon, son of David and author of the book of Proverbs, imagined wisdom anthropomorphized as a woman, walking down a city street and warning her neighbors of the coming calamity. Sophia, or Hokmah, stands on a street corner, or just outside your gated community, yelling. “Engage your brain. Think deeper, stop trolling, and quit clinging to your ignorance, because those deflecting behaviors won’t do a thing to help you. I’ve been right here the whole time, and you haven’t been listening to me, and if you keep that up, it’ll be too late soon.”

Would you listen to her? A woman named Hokmah, standing on a street corner, yelling at passersby who won’t listen to her, claiming that something terrible is going to happen? I’d always love to put myself in the role of “person who sides with the benevolent biblical characters”, or, more specifically in this case, “person who heeds Wisdom”. But I ignore the call of Hokmah, of Sophia, just on the other side of my white picket fence as often as anyone else does. And y’all, when we get to Advent, we’ll talk about Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist, who similarly yells warnings from the side of the road, while eating bugs and raw plants, and I have to imagine Sophia Hokmah the same way. The fact that we’re picturing her as a woman makes her feel even crazier than John the Baptist. If we heard Hokmah on the corner, right outside this very church, sincerely, what would we do? Would we sit next to her, take her seriously, and listen to her advice? Or would we deride her as a homeless bag lady and call the cops? The thing about our girlfriend Sophia, the voice of Wisdom, is that if we let her start to sink in, she holds us accountable for our worst impulses.

Lingering on those bad impulses that keep us from heeding wisdom for a moment, this morning’s Gospel passage comes from Mark, and it’s a story of a person seeking out the Hokmah within Jesus, but feeling stung by the words when they come out. The man specifically asks what he needs to do to earn eternal life. That sentence alone could set Jesus off in a number of different directions. Because we’re inclined to have one particular assumption about what this man means, that he’s asking what it takes to gain admission into a traditional interpretation of Heaven, we risk closing ourselves off to the depth of this question. If this man was sympathetic to the beliefs of the Pharisees, he would have, as a base belief, that the “righteous” experience a resurrection of the body after they die. So the man’s real question is, what does it take to be “righteous”? And then Pastor Natalie would add that pursuing righteousness leads you not just to earning a religious passage to the Good Place, but an earthside enjoyment of the highest quality of life.

So what gets you that outcome? Jesus went classic on the guy and suggested he follow the Torah, the same Laws that his friends and neighbors have followed since the time of Moses. If it got our ancestors through their struggles, then it should help us, too. But then this man surprises Jesus, and says that he’s confident he already follows the Torah, and he wants to challenge himself to a deeper level of righteousness. That’s when he gets the Sophia he didn’t want to hear: righteous folks don’t flash their bling. Sell your pretty stuff, give the money to Hokmah over there at the corner so she can go buy a sandwich, and while you’re over there, listen to what she’s been saying.

The hard truth is that we’re reluctant to listen to Sophia because she taps into our deepest fears. And even worse, she makes us face that our own behavior is often what also makes our fears come to fruition. After the week we just had, where the Southeastern US has been hit hard by both Helene and Milton, we can’t read the words “when panic strikes you like a storm, and calamity strikes like a whirlwind” without taking pause. Not only did our disregard for climate change lead us this way, but the failure of our elected officials to help greatly amplified the tragedies, and when these disasters happen, they always hit the poor the hardest. On the eve of Milton’s landfall in Florida, I saw dozens of social media posts from folks who live in the mandatory evacuation zones, explaining why they decided to stay even though their Mayor told them they would die if they didn’t leave. Nearly all the reasons came down to the greed of the rich making evacuation impossible for the poor–gas prices skyrocketing before stations ran out of fuel, local hotels charging hundreds of dollars per night of lodging, airlines charging upwards of $2,000 for a flight that normally costs a tenth of that. While roads are flooded, homes are destroyed, towns are leveled, and the most powerful people in the country ignore all of it and argue about who should be our next President, where is Hokmah? Sophia? Where is she?

I imagine Hokmah is rowing a cheap canoe down a flooded street in North Carolina, crying as she sees towns that will never be the same. And she’s saying, “When will it be enough? When will the rich and powerful have enough money and clout to care? Don’t keep your eyes closed because you don’t want to look at it. Don’t go put a bunch of nasty comments on someone’s TikTok because that fills the void for an hour. And don’t keep mudslinging and dividing people because that’s the path of least resistance. If we don’t come together, start caring about one another, and help each other rebuild, there will be nothing left. If we help one another, we can do anything?”

Because Jesus, in his classic hyperbole, taught us that we could put a camel through the eye of a needle easier than we can access the abundant life Jesus wants for us if we won’t do away with our greed. And the greatest voice of reason might come from the person we least expect to hear it from–a woman, a poor person, a transient person, a homeless person–but if we can open our ears to hear it, then the blueprints to build the Kingdom come right with that.

Amen.

*HYMN This Is My Song UMH# 437 

WE RESPOND 

JOYS & CONCERNS 

PASTORAL PRAYER 

We ask for your wisdom to discern your ways and path for our own lives.

We ask for your wisdom to discern how to deal with others we meet, live with, work with, shop with, drive our roads, with, wait in line with, eat with and be with daily.

We ask for your wisdom in the difficult situations we may have to deal with as we go through life.

We ask for your wisdom when voting in the upcoming elections.

We ask for your wisdom in dealing with injustices in our world.

We ask for wisdom for our leaders in our world, our countries, our states, and our communities.

We ask for wisdom for our church leaders, worldwide and local.

We ask for wisdom for our Pastors as they preach your word, inspire, lead and grow us as disciples.

We ask for your wisdom as we reach out to those in need in our communities and in our world.

We ask for wisdom as we minister to those who are homebound and in nursing homes.

We ask for your wisdom as we minister to those in hospitals, in recovery and rehab.

We ask for your wisdom that not only enlightens us but transforms us and guides us in our daily walk with you.  Amen

~ written by Rev Abi, and posted on Rev Abi’s Long and Winding Road. http://vicarofwadley.blogspot.ca/

THE LORD’S PRAYER 

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen. 

*HYMN Pass it On UMH# 527 

SENDING FORTH WITH BLESSING 

POSTLUDE