Trinity Sunday 2001 | John 14:8

*Preached at Grace North Church June 10th, 2001.*

When I was in growing up, I was always encouraged to make lots of friends at church; presumably so that I would make fewer friends at school among the heathen. In fairness, I don't know that this admonition was conscious, but even at my young age, the message came through. I think it really bothered my mother that my best friend was a Catholic--heaven forbid. Of course you could say she was right to be concerned, because, look what happened!

"Be ye not unevenly yoked," the Bible says, talking about marriage, but when you are below a marriageable age, it applies as well to friendships. In high school this note was sounded louder and more insistently than ever by our youth group leader, although by that time I was in very little danger of making any non-Christian friends at school because I was such a religious FREAK at that time, even the mainline Christians would no longer speak to me.

I wonder what my mother would say if she knew that many of my friends today are witches? Even though my folks generally have good health coverage, it's still not something I plan to spring on her anytime soon.

Now, of course, when I say "witches" I do not mean that these friends of mine are evil or Satanists, but that they follow the native religious tradition of Europe, which is enjoying a considerable revival in the US. Neo-paganism, as the religion is called nowadays, is now the second fastest-growing religion in the country, second only to Mormonism. Neo-pagans do not worship one God as we say we do, but a pantheon of gods and goddesses, each tied in some way to nature, and all subsumed in the body of the great goddess, the personification of the universe itself.

Goddess worshippers see the goddess in everything, in the dirt, in the oceans, in people, and in the sacred groves. Religious observance for them is about attention to the natural cycles of the sun and moon. Solstices and Equinoxes are their high holy days. Instead of locating divinity in some being far far away, witches believe there is enough divinity to go around, and that all the earth is sacred.

It is hardly an evil religion. Not only are they not Satanic, they don't even believe in Satan, and it's hard to worship a god you don't even believe in.

"Witch" comes from the old English word "Wicce" which means "to shape" or "bend," and most witches, or Wiccans, as many of them prefer to be called, use the power of their prayer to shape the energy that abounds in this world towards healing and wholeness for all beings.

I know many, many people, especially women, who have abandoned the worship of the Christian god for the Goddess, and as horrifying as it might sound to staunch Christian folks, they have very good reasons for doing so.

For one thing, the Goddess is pictured as female, and this already has Christianity beat, at least as far as many women are concerned. One woman has described the Christian God as "an all-male, single-parent family with a whoosh of vapor," and it's easy to see how some women might be uncomfortable with this image. It is hard for women to see themselves reflected in the divine in Christianity. If God is all-male, where does a female fit in?

But it isn't just about gender, although that is very important. Goddess traditions are polytheistic, there are lots of gods, some of them more moral than others, but all of them valuable. Some carry on the Greek European tradition, worshipping Hera, Zues, and Dionysius, some the Nordic pantheon with Odin, Thor and the like, and some carry on the Egyption native tradition, honoring Isis, Osirus, and Horus.

In the Abrahamic traditions, however, we see a great unifying tendency. The Jews and Muslims insist that God is one, and at various times in their histories, did not hesitate to kill anyone who said differently.

One Wiccan friend of mine confided in me that one God is simply too tidy. "I'm a messy person," she acknowledged. "I need a messy God."

In my opinion, one does not need to leave the Abrahamic traditions to find a messy, morally ambivalent deity. And one certainly does not need to leave Christianity to find the feminine reflected in divinity. But you do have to dig a little.

Instead of focusing on the traditional formulation of father, son, and holy spirit, I would like to expand our discussion of the trinity to the second-string players in the Christian pantheon: namely Sophia, Mary and Satan.

Now an interesting thing happens when we mix up our first-string with the bench-warmers. What we wind up with is not one trinity, but two, a masculine trinity, and a feminine one. Let's take a look at each of them.

The masculine trinity is still an all-male, single-parent family, but the whoosh of vapor has been replaced by a snake, or more specifically, by Satan. Now before anyone falls over in a dead faint, allow me to explain.

In the masculine trinity, we still have God the father at the top of the triangle, and subordinate to him are his two children, Jesus and Satan. Both Jesus and Satan are referred to in scripture as God's sons, both are seen as God's very earliest creations, both are referred to as "the morning star," and Satan is even referred to as a god in his own right, as the "god of this world."

In this trinity there is a very definite hierarchy; everything flows from the top down, and no one on the bottom does anything without the permission of the one at the top. Satan could not, if you'll recall, visit disaster upon Job without God's permission, and likewise Jesus is always going about doing his Father's business. But as tidy as this heiarchy seems to be, it is also fraught with conflict. Jesus is the good boy, Satan s the bad boy, and God the father waffles between the influence of the two, at one moment ordering the genocide of the Amalekites, and in the next exhorting us to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with him.

The masculine trinity exhibits diagnosable psychological pathologies that could keep a therapist busy until kingdom come, and in fact, those who follow this god, and at the same time insist upon his absolute goodness usually end up in need of therapy themselves from the unresolved cognitive dissonance.

Fortunately for us, the conflict so evident in this trinity happens at a distance, for the masculine trinity is not really of this world. God sits on his throne in heaven, judging the world, Satan works in the heavenly court as the accuser, or heavenly district attorney, and Jesus sits at God's right hand functioning as the celestial advocate or defense attorney. And as these three frat boys are out there somewhere playing courtroom, meanwhile the rest of us are safe on earth just trying to get by.

But fortunately, we do not have to try to get by alone. We have help, ever-present help in our trouble, compassionate and loving help in our distress, for while the masculine trinity is away at work, the feminine trinity is here at home with us.

The feminine trinity also has three persons, of course: Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, Mary, the mother of God, and Ruach, or the Holy Spirit, which is feminine in both Hebrew and Greek.

Now, you have heard me talk in the past about Sophia. I recall I began one sermon by saying "before Jesus was born as a man, he was a woman." I was referring to the early Christian tradition that states that Sophia was the pre-incarnate Christ, who was later born in the body of the man Jesus. But other early traditions recognize Sophia and Jesus as distinct beings, as the great basilica of St. Sophia in Constantinople attests.

In scripture, we meet Sophia in the book of Proverbs. She was the first born of all creation, in whom God delighted in the beginning and through whose handiwork the whole world was made.

It is she that stands in the marketplace, calling all people to come and dine at her table. It is Holy Wisdom who beckons us in the midst of the hustle and bustle of our daily lives to stop and smell the roses, to remember what is really important, to re-order our priorities.

Just as Sophia ministers to our heads, so Mary ministers to our hearts. For if Sophia is the goddess of wisdom in our tradition, Mary is the goddess of compassion. The sacred heart of Mary breaks for all the pain in the world, and unlike her son who is away out there somewhere, Mary acutely feels the pain of every creature. Catholics instinctively pray to her when they are in need, and think it is not wrong to do so. I mean, when you were a kid and you were in trouble, did you run to mom or dad? Just so, Catholics have always known that the Mother of God would be much more likely to kiss their owies than God the Father, who might punish them. It is truly amazing that a figure like Mary actually retained the title "Mother of God" in our tradition, but to our great benefit, she did. It shows the tenacity of women to hold on to an image of god in which they can see themselves reflected, and the temerity of men to completely eradicate the sacred feminine, from whose body all life flows forth.

The third person of the feminine trinity is the Holy Spirit, one of our first-string players. In Hebrew, her name is Ruach, in Greek Pneuma, and both of these words are feminine, and indeed, the Holy Spirit if referred to as "she" in many ancient Christian prayers. Since then our tradition has turned a blind eye to the Spirit's gender, and we more often speak of the Sprit as an "it" or even "he" of all things, no doubt because our tradition is so squeamish of any hint of femininity in our gods. It is the job of the holy spirit to comfort and to sanctify, which means to make holy. The Holy Spirit works towards the divinization of the world, finding what has been lost, cleaning what has been soiled, remaking what has been broken.

In contrast to the volatile masculine trinity, the feminine trinity eschews conflict in favor of harmony. The three goddesses work in concert for the remaking of the world, imparting wisdom, compassion, and healing in equal measure, wherever it is needed. The feminine trinity is not in conflict, nor are they in competition. Instead, they are the very image of god-in-community, the holy women who tend the garden of this good earth.

While the holy men are in heaven doing their own thing, the holy women are in our midst, looking after the children, doing the really important work.

The next time you hear Christianity spoken of as a monotheistic religion, kindly correct them. We have as diverse a pantheon as Mt. Olympus ever was, and our gods just as bizarre, fallible, and wonderful as theirs.

In retrospect, perhaps my friend didn't reject Christianity because it wasn't messy enough. Maybe it was actually that Christianity that was TOO messy for her. In any case we both agree that acknowledging the feminine in the divine is important, and in our own tradition, the most intimately concerned with human beings. It is time to break the code of silence about our goddesses, bring the hidden pantheon of Christianity out of the closet, to acknowledge the feminine face of God to which we all relate, if only unconsciously.

God is not only good, God is also conflicted; God is not only in heaven, God is on earth, too; God is not an old man, but comes to us in the form of women of wisdom, compassion, and healing as well. And God is not one, my friends, but many. God is messy. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.

Holy Wisdom, you touch our minds with inspiration, and give us God's own thoughts; Holy Mary, you pour out compassion upon the suffering of every being; Holy Spirit, you guide us into all truth. Help us to see God's face in every face, to behold the divine in every creature, to see divinity spilling out from this lone planet into the universe. Help us to feel and to know that we are a part of that great work, give us tools and will to help in the remaking of the world, and let us not be afraid to be messy, even as you are messy. Amen.