wisdom

All living things are touched by divine grace—and caught up together in movement toward union with God.

Nevertheless, I think that John’s prologue has much more to say. In speaking about this Word become flesh, it also speaks powerfully to us about what it means to be human. Over the years, I kept returning to a few verses that changed the way that I saw the entire prologue and which consequently changed my entire theology.

Wendy Farley formulates a theology of Wisdom incarnate--unleashed by divine desire, found in ordinary life and born in a manger.

Is John 1 a midrash on the creation story and the song of creative Wisdom? If so, its writer has infused it with profoundest joy.

“Speak truth to power.” The phrase resonates with the biblical prophets and the courage it takes to challenge those preoccupied with maintaining their power at the expense of truth. The phrase rings true in Robert Mugabe’s rule over Zimbabwe, or in the stonewalling silence of a church in the wake of a sexual abuse crisis.Yet in American culture, and especially in mainline Protestantism, the phrase has become hackneyed. Pastors invoke the phrase in sermons; seminary professors use it in classroom lectures; groups organize around it. One person even suggested that the phrase is the very heart of the pastoral vocation. Is it really?

The crucified and resurrected Christ becomes the standard against which to measure all accounts of wisdom.

When I was in Croatia this past May I went on a hunt for kulen, a specialty sausage found in a region of Northeast Croatia called Slavonia. You can’t buy kulen in any store, of course. To get it you’ve got to have friends in very high places—in backwater villages of Slavonia where people raise their own pigs and prepare kulen according to recipes passed on in families for generations.

Because we know almost nothing about the wise men, our imaginations take wing. If we were brought up in the Christian faith, these characters have ridden across our minds and hearts ever since we were taken to our first Sunday school pageant.

Thou shalt not be ridiculous. Paul says, "See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil." When Paul wrote that wonderful sentence he probably was sitting in an upper room in Athens. It was late at night, quiet, and all the fools were asleep.

Deborah, a wise woman who sat.