A thought about John 16:
According to polls, increasing numbers of people identify themselves as “spiritual and not religious.” Sometimes church folk think this is “an easy way out” – a way of believing in God without committing to church. But might being spiritual actually be more demanding and life-changing than being religious?
What does it mean to be “spiritual”? At the very least, it means being open to what is beyond the material and measurable, and being willing to live not just by what is measurable and material, but in accord with the deeper reality of the world. And that can be a lot more life-changing than just attending and supporting church – being religious.
Church at its best, of course, helps us develop a true a healthy spiritual life. And being spiritual apart from a religious tradition, at its worst can become pretty vague and self-serving.
So I hope our worship this Sunday is the kind of religious observance that opens us all a few cracks more to the Spirit of true and authentic life.
A thought about Proverbs 8:
The ancient Hebrews do not act as though they have a monopoly on Truth. In their faith-story, they know God specially liberated them from slavery from the Egyptian Empire and in this they know something essential and foundational about God. But they accept that other people and other religious traditions also catch something of the Truth.
In the Book of Proverbs, for instance, they accept many wisdom sayings and images of God from other cultures and traditions, and adopt them as “scripture” alongside their own story – like in Proverbs 8, where they speak of a power alongside God (a feminine figure named Wisdom) through whom God orders the created world and makes it good, and who in turn delights in what is made.
This figure of an “intermediary power” between God and earth is not Hebrew in origin. It appears in a number of other cultural and religious traditions which cannot imagine (a perfect) God being “corrupted” by directly dealing with (an imperfect) earth. The Hebrews do not share that negative view of the earth, but they accept this (foreign) image of “a separate power of God” and they name it Wisdom (in Greek, Sophia), affirming it to be part of God, and in this way expanding their understanding of God and how God works. In the Christian tradition, this “person” or “holy power” of Wisdom is seen by some as the second person of the Trinity that comes to be incarnate in Jesus, and by others as the Holy Spirit.
All of this makes me think. I used to think that when the church was gifted with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2, the Pentecost story) we were being given something special that the rest of the world doesn’t have. Now, especially with the Proverbs 8 image of Holy Wisdom being at the heart of the cosmos and of the history of the earth and its people from before the beginning, I wonder if the gift we are given is the freedom to be open to the spiritual wisdom that resides in the cosmos, in the earth, and in all its peoples. I wonder if we’ll have a chance to taste this freedom in worship this Sunday.
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