Wisdom/Sophia as the Voice-print of God.

The reading from the Hebrew Scriptures on Trinity Sunday was from Proverbs 8.  It is about wisdom’s role in creation.  Since the word for wisdom in Greek is sophia, the text talks about a female character.  “Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?  On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand [saying] ‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago….’”  And it goes on to describe Sophia/Wisdom participating and delighting in God’s work of creating the world.  And there are more interesting passages about Wisdom — including a whole book by that title — among the apocryphal books that are not included in many Protestant Bibles.

The place of Wisdom in Christian theology has always been ambiguous.  Some virtually equate her with the Holy Spirit.  There are references in the tradition to Jesus as Wisdom as well.  Protestants have tended to practically ignore her altogether.  But the greatest cathedral of the Christian East is named after her: Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Interest in Wisdom has perked up in the last 100 or so years, largely due to her emergence in Russian theology, especially by a writer named Sergius Bulgakov.  Bulgakov influenced one of the greatest American Christian thinkers of the 20th century, Thomas Merton.

It is unlikely that I completely understand Bulgakov’s theology; however, he seems to be saying that Wisdom is like the voice-print of God on creation.  God, of course, creates by speaking in Genesis 1.  Speech is both Word and Spirit (breath), which is to say that creation is inherently trinitarian.  Bulgakov’s view appears to insert Wisdom into the process as sort of the vibratory signature of the triune God which is imprinted on creation, giving creation its character and relating it all to its Creator.  It is a way of talking about Christianty’s panentheistic understanding of creation, that is, God is not identical with creation (which would be pantheism), but is somehow in creation.  Wisdom/Sophia is how God is in creation in the form of God’s identifying voice-print.  That’s the best I can do with Bulgakov for now.

The reason this is all more than theological doodling is that it tells us the nature of wisdom, in the sense of what it means for people to be wise and act wisely.  Basically, wisdom means thinking and acting in accordance with this basic voice-print by which God is present within creation.  That is, wisdom means seeing God’s shape and mark on and in everything, beginning with ourselves, and extending to all creation, from grains of sand to supernovae.  We act wisely when we treat everything with awe, wonder, respect, gratitude, and humility, because everything participates in God’s nature, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  Everything is a transcendent miracle.  There is no such thing as a mere, inanimate object which we may dispose of as we please.  Rather, everything is imprinted with God’s name as belonging to God (Psalm 24:1).  

Wisdom/Sophia thus provides an otherwise missing connection between God and creation.  Without her, it is possible to believe that God generated the creation without leaving any echo or identifying mark of divinity in or on it.  In which case it would indeed be a neutral object, a blank slate, a set of “resources” and commodities for humans to dominate, defile, degrade, and destroy.  And this includes other people.  Unfortunately, this is the way humans have behaved for almost all of our history, a sorry circumstance for which we are beginning to pay dearly.  Messing with what belongs to God never ends well; it is the surest way to experience the transcendent love of God as blistering wrath.

Only waking up to Wisdom, that is, a knowledge that God is present with and in the creation, which includes us, will give us a pathway out of this catastrophe.  If it is not indeed too late already.

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Ascension Means Jesus Is Everywhere.

One of my favorite little snippets of Scripture is Acts 1:10-11.  It is the passage about Jesus’ ascension into heaven after his resurrection.  The disciples are with him as he rises into the air and disappears behind a cloud.  Then it says, “While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.  They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven?’”

First, I love the advice that the disciples are not to waste their time gazing into the sky, waiting for him to come back, like dogs staring out the window looking for their master to pull into the driveway.  Neither are we supposed to be pouring our mental energy into figuring out exactly when he’s coming back.  Jesus has earlier told them that it is not for them “to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”  In other words, the specific time-table for the return of Jesus is not their concern.  

We have in the last few years witnessed some Christians misled by idiotic proclamations of the exact date.  This happens in every generation, which is part of the point.  We are to live the the urgency and immediacy of God’s imminent Presence.  God and God’s Kingdom is always near.  Indeed, Jesus says it is within us! (Luke 17:21 KJV). 

Secondly, The implication is that there is work to be done down here!  Jesus says to the disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  He’s talking, of course, about the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, 10 days later.  The church is given an assignment, which is to be living witnesses to the good news of God’s love for the world revealed in Jesus.  That witness has to go out to everyone on the planet.  Get to work!

Finally, the question arises as to where exactly Jesus goes.  I mean, the more cynical and literal among us might observe that, had Jesus gone into the sky at approximately 3 miles an hour, he would not yet have reached the orbit of the moon.  The text says that “a cloud took him out of their sight.”  Now, there are places in the New Testament where the church is referred to as “a cloud of witnesses.”  I am wondering if Luke is telling us that Jesus’ mortal, visible form kind of gets dissolved into the gathering of his disciples as they go forward in continuing mission in his name.  Then they ruminate on this for over a week and then his Presence is activated by the Spirit, and the church explodes in missionary activity.

The angels’ last word to them is to say that Jesus will come in the same way as they saw him go into heaven.  Can this mean that the Lord will eventually reappear out of the community, the cloud, and be somehow directly visible once again?

In the meantime, Jesus dwells “in heaven.”  This does not of course mean at some coordinates in the atmosphere or outer space, but in a sense everywhere.  Maybe Jesus becomes omnipresent in a way akin to how astrophysicists say that anything attaining the speed of light expands to fill the universe.  As the Light of the World, perhaps we may think of Jesus ascending into all things.  He becomes one with all, and immediate to all, but at the same time not as recognizable and distinct as he was during his earthly, mortal existence.  We know him now not as a distinct and separate person, but as the One in whom we trust, whose teachings we obey, validated and inspired by the Holy Spirit.

While present to us in this subtle form, the Lord does make his presence more directly felt in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, in prayer, and in the gathering in other ways.  We carry out his mission of compassion, healing, forgiveness, and hope, confident that he does emerge again into a more directly sensory form, in the end, when we will see him face to face.

In other words, the Ascension does not mean that Jesus goes away and is now distant from us, and we carry on in his absence, awaiting his return.  I find it more fruitful to imagine the Ascension to describe the way Jesus — God’s love — is invisibly present in all things, with it being the job of those who trust in him to show this presence in their actions.  He has not abandoned us; but now he is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

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What to Do with Communion Leftovers.

Antidoron.

Or: What to Do with Communion Leftovers.

I know this is going to sound somewhat odd, especially for Presbyterians.  But as my eucharistic theology evolves I have been thinking about the bread and the wine.  (I am using “wine” to refer to fermented and unfermented grape juice.)    

I was in a conversation with my Russian priest friend the other day, when he indicated that we can identify one’s eucharistic theology simply by noticing what they do with the leftover communion elements.  

In “high” liturgical churches — Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and perhaps some Lutheran — they are first of all careful to only consecrate enough of the elements for the number of people who will participate.  Then anything that is left over is consumed by the priest, or sometimes may be reserved for a future service.  In some places I even think leftover elements are buried. 

But, first of all, I have a problem with the practice of only preparing “enough.”  One aspect of the Sacrament is a witness to God’s abundance and generosity in creation and salvation.  This is hard to imagine when we have just a small amount of the bread and wine before us.

For instance, I get frustrated by baptisms that use as little water as possible.  I witnessed one baptism in which the pastor barely dipped his finger in the water and then shook it (!) so that by the time his hand reached the head of the person being baptized it must have barely been damp.  Presbyterians already have enough of a problem with matter and symbol and anything sensory.  We need to emphasize the water and use a lot of it.  We need to get wet!  By the same token the elements of the eucharist are not incidental.  It doesn’t have to be about the volume of bread and wine consumed, but it should be clear that God has provided more than enough!   

I mean, in nature, God is ridiculously promiscuous.  A single oak tree can produce like 10,000 acorns in a year.  So I don’t like the optics of just preparing enough for those present.  It makes God look cheap.  I don’t have a problem with having leftovers.  The issue is what to do with them.  

Now, I certainly don’t hold to the Roman Catholic view of “transubstantiation,” in which the elements somehow become physically the Body and Blood of the Lord.  One problem with transubstantiation is that it identifies realness with physical materiality.  I do hold to Calvin’s view of the “real presence” of Christ in the Sacrament.  For Calvin this is spiritual presence and therefore more real than mere limited, physical presence.  

At the same time, I do believe that the elements — and the people — are indeed changed in the Sacrament.  On the one hand, the elements become more than just ordinary bread and wine simply because of their use in the rite and that the sacred words have been spoken over them.  On the most basic level, this is like when a particular baseball becomes special when it was the one your child hit for a home run in Little League.  But this is even more special than that because we are saying words Jesus told us to say and doing things Jesus told us to do.

The bread and the wine are changed into more than special bread and wine.  While the elements certainly remain bread and wine, they do in some sense become, at the Lord’s command — “this is my body;” “this is my blood” — his Body and Blood.  This does not happen in terms of physics, but spiritually; not outwardly so much as inwardly.  

Jesus goes into this in some detail in John 6, where he states that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (v. 53).  The Lord clarifies this teaching few verses later, when he says, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.  The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (v. 63).  

When we remember that the inspiration for this discourse is the actual feeding of the hungry crowd on the hillside, we realize that the physical bread serves to ground and focus analogically and metaphorically the real bread which is Jesus’ presence and words.  The bread is not incidental and disposable any more than is the water of baptism.  Through these elements we remain rooted in creation.  Matter and bodies are valued precisely because of the sacramental freight they bear, showing us that God comes to us in and through what God has made, and not by means of some gnostic, anti-material, psychic fantasy.

Therefore, the elements do indeed become charged with God’s Presence for their sitting on this particular Table and having these particular words spoken over then, and being offered to these people with this intent and this these thoughts focused on them.  This change is fulfilled when the bread and the wine are actually consumed and interact with each participant.  Yet even the bread and wine left behind still carry this charge, even if unreleased.  

We do need to be conscious and careful about what we do with the leftovers, because my priest friend is right: it expresses something about what we believe about the bread, the sacrament, creation, and Jesus.   

Presbyterians, unconsciously influenced by Zwingli (at best) and a knee-jerk antipathy to everything “Catholic” (at worst) tend to dispose of the leftover elements by three methods.  

1. The worst practice, in my view, is to throw the bread in the trash and pour the juice down the drain.  This is wasteful and ungrateful even for normal bread and juice.  Who would dispose of perfectly good food this way in their homes?  This is a sign of our sinfulness, that we would take a gift of God — especially something he has made significant in our specific obedience to him — and simply decide it is now worthless and relegate it to the category of garbage.  If your child bakes you a cookie you thank them and at least pretend to eat it.  You do not toss it in the trash in front of them.  At the very least, let’s treat the leftover communion elements like the real food they are.  To throw them out in the face of a world hungry for both food and grace, is an abomination.    
2. Another practice is to leave the bread outside for birds, and pour the contents of the cup out on the ground.  This is a little better, if done with gratitude, prayer, and consideration, in that it shows some respect for the elements and semi-ritually returns them back to nature.  On the other hand, in my experience birds are not always interested, and the bread just sits there getting weathered.  This can easily be seen as careless disposal, little better than throwing it in the garbage.  After all, “for the birds” is what we sometimes say about something we don’t value.    
3. Still better is when the elements are either consumed or sent out with the representatives of the church to be shared with homebound people in the congregation.  Here is a good use.  But most churches would not do this every time the sacrament is celebrated.  (One church I served did send the deacons out with the elements after every celebration; I never hesitate to commend them.)  

The Eastern Orthodox have something called the Antidoron.  The Antidoron is bread that is blessed but not actually consecrated in the eucharist.  (They don’t use much bread in the actual eucharist.  The priest chops it fine, mixes it with warmed wine, and literally feeds it to the people by a small spoon.)  In some churches the non-consecrated bread is cut into cubes and sent out with the people.  The Antidoron may be given to anyone, therefore it is also a way to include non-Orthodox around the edges of the sacrament.

Once when I attended an Easter liturgy at an Antiochian Orthodox church, it was clear to the congregation that I was a visitor.  Parents must have pointed me out to their children as a worthy recipient of Antidoron, for several kids, after having received communion themselves, took some pieces and gave them to me on their way by.  By then end of the service I had almost more Antidoron in my cupped hands than I could handle.  I felt very welcome!

Would it  not be inappropriate to use a strategy like this with our communion leftovers?  That is, what if we Presbyterians encouraged participants to take some pieces of the communion bread with them as they leave and give it away as a sign of blessing and inclusion?

Taking the bread to shut-ins in the congregation is one obvious use.  We could also offer it to others whom we meet.  Who can say that this kind of sharing of the literal bread might not inspire some recipient to wonder and ask about the true Bread of Life, Jesus Christ?

Such a practice would indeed reveal something about our theology.  Giving away the bread reflects what we know about Jesus, who gives his life for the life of the world.  It would speak of God’s abundant love overflowing in creation.

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