Towards Sunday, May 22, 2016 (Trinity Sunday ... and May 2-4 Weekend!)

Reading:  Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 (Celebration of God's Wisdom -- the Great Sophia, who is called into being along with the cosmos, as the underlying spirit and way of wisdom embedded in all things, and available to all humanity as the key to good, true and sustaining life.)

When I was just a kid in the faith in a very exclusivist conservative church, the idea I got (maybe even was taught) was that 

• first there was God, 
• then Jesus came into the picture to save us from our sin against God, 
• and then (only) for those who accepted Jesus as God's saving Son, there was the special gift of the Spirit and, with it, the possession of true truth that non-Christians just do not have.

Understandably, life has made me question that understanding of things.

So I am intrigued by a different procession that seems to be suggested to Christian ears by the reading from Proverbs 8: 

• first, God creating and calling things into being; 
• second, the Spirit of Wisdom -- Great Sophia, expressed from God as the principle organizing force, the true way of being (even the Logos, we might say?) of all the universe and available to all (really all!) who are willing to look and be open; 
• and third (if you are Christian and looking for how Christ fits into this holy parade), there is Jesus the Christ who brings this universal, cosmic wisdom to incarnation in a single life in a single point in time (which seems to suggest that Jesus is not the way in to some special, unique, exclusive dispensation of graced wisdom apart from the rest of the world, but is a way into the deep and fundamental wisdom that all the world at its best is universally open to).  

Why do I suddenly feel like part of the human race?  
And is that what God is trying to make me, by helping me be Christian?