She is the Book of God's Wisdom--the feminine generosity of God's love

“She is the book of God’s commandments…”

--Baruch 4:1

She is.  In Hebrew literature, wisdom is depicted as feminine, referred to as “she.” And the first question I always stumble over is: why? Why would a patriarchal society depict this essential quality as feminine? There are those who argue that it is simply a figure of speech, like calling a car or a ship “she.” But, throughout much of the wisdom literature she is not only referred to with a feminine pronoun, but also with feminine traits, feminine attributes. As far as I can tell from my brief research, there isn’t an answer, but only speculation. But, for me the question itself seems so much more important:  Why? What did this patriarchal society see in the feminie that conformed to their archetype of wisdom?  Was it simply that they had seen too many men behave like fools? Too many men, kings, judges, priests, rabbis, merchants and even shepherds had made it utterly clear that wisdom wasn’t something that came easily to men?

I don’t know. But, in my own foolishness, I like to think about it.

And speaking of foolishness, here is a brief reflection on this passage.  First, Baruch is one of the Deuterocanonical books in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but not a part of the canon in Protestant or Jewish scripture. It is a prophetic work attributed to Jeremiah’s secretary, Baruch (app. 580 BC), though some scholars think it was actually written by an anonymous author in the first century. 

Now, back to that She who is the book of God’s commandments. This phrase comes near the end of a lengthy passage on the foolishness of Israel.  In ironic and sometimes bitter terms, the author dwells on Israel’s rejection of wisdom, in fact her almost complete ignorance of her ways.  “Nothing has been heard of her in Canaan, nothing has been seen of her in Teman…” (3:22) and no one seems to know her path.  The prophet tells the people, look around! You want to know why you were conquered and dragged off to Babylon?  Because you have “forsaken the fountain of wisdom!” And what is that fountain? The book of God’s commandments! The Word of God. The Law!  Israel is suffering in exile because she rejected the Law.  And –as we see time and again in the books of the prophets—to reject the Law of God is to choose exile; it is the path of foolishness.  God’s law is love, mercy, justice; to reject it is to dwell in anxiety and fear and isolation. A permanent state of pandemic, if you will!

So, how do we return from exile?  How do we find Wisdom? Open the book! She is the book of God’s commandments.  For us, today, we look at our Bibles and we might wonder, who can read all that? And where do you start?  For me, it was page 1; Genesis 1. But, for some, it might be easier to start with a psalm (open your Bible right at the middle and you will probably find yourself in the Psalms).  Or maybe you want to read one of the Gospels first. Mark is the shortest.  But, no matter what—open your Bible; just open the book. She is there; in fact, she is the book. She dwells there in the revelation of God’s loving presence; a wisdom beyond any you could imagine.

Lost in my Covid anxieties and distracted by movie making, I missed a few book of the Bible as I was reading my way through the prophets. I want to go back and pick up a few of these as I go. This is the first of one of those looks back.

I think one of the things God’s word teaches us, is to stop being so distracted. Be attentive, be present to the moment.  As Christ reminds us in Matthew, don’t worry about tomorrow. There is enough of life today, if only you will live it. 

This morning, a man and his wife were walking past as I sat on the porch. I waved, and they waved back. And then I noticed them pausing, and overheard him telling her,

“He’s that guy! The one who walks and reads at the same time.”

So, I got up and walked over to say hello.  As I came up, the man asked me,

“What do you have there?”

And I looked down to see I was still holding a couple of pages of poetry from a friend. I had been lingering over them as I sipped my coffee. As I started to tell them what it was, I heard his wife exclaim:

“Oh Lord, he loves poetry! You should see the shelves of books he’s got!”

And suddenly, on a Sunday morning, here I was standing at the curb talking with an almost stranger about something we both hold so very dear.  And I wondered: Does this happen to anyone else? I love this life. I love the way the squirrels leap about my lawn. I love the way the sunlight looks on the green of the leaves. I love the sudden comforting breeze on a July afternoon. And I love the way strangers become friends. 

Less than an hour later, this couple drove up in front of our house and the man got out of his can and handed me a book from his shelf, some poetry he loves and wanted to share. 

And that seemed to me a revelation of its own.  We don’t hoard or hide the things we truly love. We share them. Maybe that is how God feels about His law. In fact, maybe that is the heart of His law: the golden rule, so to speak.  Be generous. Is that what it means to be wise? That beautiful generosity of self-giving? Kind of like a mother's love?  In my foolishness, that’s another one of those things that I wonder about.

Its appointed time… a meditation on Habakkuk & God’s wonderous ways

“…the vision is for its appointed time…” 
--Habakkuk 2:3

“Pestilence goes before Him

and Plague follows close behind.” Habakkuk 3:5

Its appointed time.  I like that.  The assurance that there is an appointed time and that what is to be revealed will be revealed when God wills it. There is great assurance in that phrase, even if it also feels a little like a warning.  There is a vision, and it has an appointed time.  That implies someone to view that vision (a prophet) and a time to reveal that vision to the world (a prophetic moment).  This very short book feels like a miniature Job.  It is 3 chapters long, and begins with the prophet demanding answers from God:

How long am I to cry for help while you will not listen?...
Why do you countenance oppression?... contention and
discord flourish… the law loses its grip… the wicked
outwit the upright and justice comes out perverted!” (1:1-4)

Followed by an enigmatic response from the Lord that includes a fearsome vision of destruction, pestilence and plague, and then almost abruptly, the prophet’s demands fade and we hear one of the most beautiful psalms in all of scripture.

As with Job—it is that strange, enigmatic (and somewhat frightening) vision of God’s glory that leaves me pondering. In both books, the vision God reveals is so awesome it seems frightening. God tells Habakkuk that He is about to do something “which you will not believe.” The Lord is stirring up the Chaldeans “that fierce and fiery nation”(1:6) to come and seize Jerusalem; they with their horses fast as leopards and fiercer than wolves at night (1:8) will come with their nets to scoop up their prisoners and drag them away to be devoured. 

What are we to make of a God who promises to stir up our enemies against us?  That is one of the questions Habakkuk wants God to answer.  Yes, Jerusalem has grown corrupt, her leaders become oppressors, and her merchants have begun cheating the poor and the vulnerable, but what about those poor and vulnerable, the innocent and the faithful? Won’t they too be gathered up in the Chaldean net like so many fish in a dragnet?  Won’t they suffer, too? Is that justice? Is that love?  In desperation, the prophet cries out: Even in Your wrath, remember mercy! (3:2).

And here I am 2700 years later, morning coffee and Covid mask easily within reach; pleading for the same thing. Contemplating going back to my library and classrooms, fearful of stepping outside the cocoon of “isolation” and distancing, I too want to cry out:  Remember mercy, Oh Lord. Like the prophet, I too am wondering what God is up too.  Because things don’t look fair, the world doesn’t seem just.  The enemy is at the gate and they’ve brought their nets!  Every day there are new totals of the sick and the dead.  Everyday there is some new opinion from someone about what should be done and an oped piece telling us why the experts are wrong! I read headlines about people or companies getting rich off the pandemic. And about people and families losing their jobs and homes. And political leaders claiming they can’t do anything to help.  The world feels like it is falling apart.  And though here at my house, we have plenty of toilet paper, plenty of coffee, peanut butter and refried beans in abundance, I fear my resources are waning. My sense of security falters, my hopefulness wavers, my goodwill fades under the constant sense of dread and anxiety fueled by the endless cycle of bad news: the virus, the politicians, the economy, and on top of that it is Summer in Houston!!  Aaargh!  Please, God! Remember mercy! And while Your at it, could send us some rain?

But then we come to that strangely beautiful ending:

“Though the fig tree blossom not

nor fruit be on the vines,

though the olive crop fail

and the fields yield no food;

though the sheep disappear from the fold

and no cattle in the stalls,

Yet will I rejoice in the Lord,

and exult in my God, my savior.” (3: 17-18)

Even when everything is against him, when there is nothing left to celebrate or rejoice in, the prophet says: Still I will rejoice in the Lord.

And the more I contemplate this powerful little book, the more I sense that is the real lesson of not only this prophet, but perhaps all the prophets. Rejoice in the Lord, even when things look bad, even when the world is falling apart, even when you have nothing left in the cupboard and the enemy is at the gate and he’s brought his friends: plague and pestilence with him… Yet will I rejoice in the Lord.

Perhaps the lesson is also a lesson of perspective.  How are you going to look at the difficulties in your life? What will you learn from them? Will they teach you despair? Will they teach you cruelty? Defensiveness? Selfishness? Or will you learn patience and endurance? Or will you let them teach you something even better: humility and faith?

It isn’t easy, but I am going to try and learn to praise God even when my stalls are empty and my fields are barren.  Even when the Instacart person brings me the wrong ice-cream! And it’s half melted!! I am going to try and learn to rejoice in the Lord…

And it all goes back to that “appointed time.” The assurance that God is in charge, and that there is a plan, an appointed time when all will be revealed and all will be made clear and beautifully, mercifully, better than anything we could imagine.  The vision will be revealed in “its appointed time.” And until then we have a practice we need to work on: gratitude, patience, humility, faith. Even when things look their worst, we rejoice in the Lord. Not because we are blind to the suffering, but because we are –each and every one of us—candles lit with the flame of God, called to set the world on fire! And so we rejoice in the Lord, exult in our savior.  That is how we share the light we’ve been given to share. Because that is what we were made for.

Read Habakkuk –you can finish the whole thing in less than 15 minutes. And then, take a little time to let the words seep down into your soul. You may find this ancient little work sticks with you, haunts you for days, weeks, after. Heck, it may even change your life.

Jonah & the comedy of Faith

“Man and beast shall be covered with sackcloth
and call loudly to the Lord…” (Jonah 3:8)

The book of Jonah is collected with the prophecies of the Minor Prophets in the Old Testament, but it contains no actual prophecy, instead it is a comical short story about what it means to be a prophet.  It is such a simple story it feels like a fable. And because it is so very familiar to all of us with its story of a man swallowed by a whale, we feel like we know it, even if we’ve never read a word of it.  But, I challenge you to open your Bible and find it (between Obadiah and Micah) and take a few minutes to read it.  It truly is a SHORT story. Four brief chapters, in my New Jerusalem Bible Jonah takes up two pages; if the print in your Bible is larger it may stretch to three. But you can definitely read this story in about 10 minutes.  I highly recommend it. Ten minutes will rarely be spent more productively and delightfully.

It is a masterpiece of comedy. A satire about an unwilling prophet and his efforts to escape God’s call, it also contains a beautiful message of hope about the mercy of God and His transcendent love. 

The basics of the story are this: God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach to them about their wickedness. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, a nation that had been terrorizing the world (and the Israelites) for a century or more, sacking, looting, plundering, dragging people off to slavery and worse.  Jonah doesn’t want to go, so he runs away from God’s call and tries to hide in a distant land. That is where the whale comes in and before long Jonah is spit out on the shore and walking the streets of Nineveh proclaiming that the end is near!  But the people of Nineveh hear this and take it to heart and they repent and God relents and shows them mercy and Jonah falls down in the dirt like an angry child and says: See!  I knew you were going to do that! That’s why I didn’t want to come here in the first place.

What I find so fascinating in this tale isn’t the famous whale that swallows the prophet and vomits him up on the beach, but the depiction of a man (Jonah) trying to escape God’s call, because he thinks he knows better.  There is a great deal of spiritual sustenance to be found in this tale. Heck, even Jesus found it important enough to mention it a couple of times.  But, you have to read it yourself.  Let yourself get lost in the story. Let yourself laugh at the foolishness of men, and the strange wonders of God’s workings. Let it seep down into your soul. And when you get to the part about even the sheep and cattle dressing up in sackcloth and ashes, see if you don’t find yourself grinning at least a little. 

Something we too often forget is that reading the Bible can also be fun. If you are curious about reading scripture, this story is a great place to start.  And when you are done, you may want to look up the charming Veggie Tales movie version, too! I love those darned pirates who don’t do anything, and their catchy theme song.