An Interesting Inheritance

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

We’ve designated today “Heritage Sunday” at Clarendon, and this morning we’ve celebrated some wonderful moments from our past.

The church, especially the church in the Reformed tradition, has a curious relationship to its own past, so calling a Sunday “heritage Sunday” immediately puts us in something less than perfectly smooth waters.

After all, we are a “religious” people, and the very roots of the word “religion” mean, in part, to be bound back, or to be attached by ligaments – that’s the “lig” in the middle of the word – to be attached back to the past – that’s the “re” at the beginning of the word.

But if you are also part of a religious tradition whose slogan is “the church Reformed and always being reformed” then clearly not all of the ties that bind are necessarily eternal. The challenge comes in discerning the difference between links that should remain strong and ones that should be let go of.

After all, you know the old joke: how many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb? Change?!?

Heritage Sunday is not a designation of the whole church; just something we wanted to do here as we begin our 90^th year as a worshipping congregation and as we enter a season of change. On the liturgical calendar of the broader Mainline Protestant world this Sunday is designated as Trinity Sunday. Talk about an interesting heritage: the three-in-one God; the mystery of Father-Son-Holy Ghost, Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer, Presence-Wisdom-Power, Almighty God-incarnate word-holy comforter.

There are countless ways to add up the three persons of the Trinity.

This particular theological construct is one of the most interesting parts of our inheritance. Alas, another part of our inheritance – the tendency to literalize the metaphorical – significantly reduces the richness and power of Trinitarian theology.

For example, despite a wealth of images of God offered in scripture, we’ve tended, following Trinitarian language, to reduce God to “Father” and, and the same time, to lose sight of the humanity of Jesus in his relationship to God. And, of course, the Spirit remains a big ol’ hot mysterious mess most of the time!

But our own tradition, our own sacred story, provides resources to deepen our understanding of God. Take, for example, the passage from Proverbs: who is Wisdom? This figure which has been, from the beginning, with God?

To begin with, wisdom, like the Word in the prologue to John’s gospel – in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God – wisdom, like the Word, was with God from the beginning. Wisdom is also clearly a feminine figure, and perhaps a feminine aspect of God’s self.

But before we go further, it’s crucial to remember, and to state it over and over and over again: all of our language about God is metaphorical and approximate. Our names for God are not God, and God will not be confined by the limits of our language or our imagination.

As the great Thomas Merton said, “Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time.”

In such a world, the great and essential comfort we can rely on is also this simple: wherever we find ourselves, there God is also, always, already.

Now, in our present situation, that means that God is with us through the changes, just as God has been with this congregation for nearly a century. The wonderful thing, the great gift, in our own particular heritage here is that we’ve been for 90 years a community that has always been open to the new things that God is doing in our world, and thus, we have been a community that has embraced change over and over again.

That doesn’t mean that change has come easily and without discomfort, but it does mean, for us, right now, that we have only to look around this space to know that we stand faithfully in a long line of faithful mothers and fathers of the faith who were open and willing to change. That is a heritage worth preserving and honoring with our own actions in response to what God is doing in our time in this place.

Our first hymn this morning is one of my favorites. It was sung at my ordination almost 15 years ago; someday I’ll sing it at a retirement service; and – heads up kids – one day, I hope way on down the road, I’d like it sung at my memorial service.

The song means a lot to me because it was written for a particularly significant moment in the life of the Presbyterian Church: the 1988 General Assembly that celebrated the reunion of the northern and southern branches of the church upon the opening of the Presbyterian Center in Louisville that brought together sister denominations who had been estranged since before the Civil War.

The Presbyterian Hymnal, published in 1990, was created, in part, to serve the newly reunited denomination, and, of course, it contains this song.

I’ve taken this slight musical excursion to lift up a several points for this day:

We are a people used to, and rather adept at change, including in hymnals!

We are being called into a season of renewal, which feels obvious all around us just now, and that entails change, including, as it happens, in hymnals!

You’ve no doubt noticed that we’ve been using this purple hymnal for a while. What you may not have noticed is that it’s a sampler of a new Presbyterian hymnal that will be published sometime this fall. We’ll be talking further about this in the weeks to come, but for the moment I wanted to lift up this particular artifact of our history.

Early in Clarendon’s history, when the congregation was less than 10 years old, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United State of America, published The Hymnal. I’m not sure what color it actually was, but I’m going to call it blue. It served the church for 20 years, until The Hymnbook came along. The great Eugene Carson Blake served on the committee that put it together, and I wonder how long they debated the shift from the hymnal to the hymnbook.

Be that as it may, the red hymnbook served the church until The Presbyterian Hymnal came along in 1990, and there are still countless Presbyterians across the country who refer to this as “the new hymnal.” Among the concerns that prompted this hymnal was the recognition that our hymnody at that point used almost exclusively male language to refer to God, and that our theological heritage is, in fact, far richer than that.

Wisdom, which has been there from the beginning, perhaps as the feminine divine, takes her stand at the crossroad, our text tells us. In this congregation, we have a long, rich heritage of standing at the crossroads and looking boldly toward the future through the eyes of wisdom, discerning with care and prayer the future that God is calling us into.

Whether the crossroads concerns new ways to sing God’s praises, reappraisals of our sacred space, new understandings of how we are called to serve our community or new understandings of whom God calls for ministry, we have a powerful history here of listening for God’s call and, when we have heard it, saying, simply, here I am Lord, send me. May it continue to be so among us. Amen.