Texts: Proverbs 8:1-4; Wisdom of Solomon 7:24-27; Ephesians 3:1-10
Speaker: Joel Miller

I have, in my mind, a pastoral scenario I’m yet to act out. 

It would happen during one of those conversations where someone asks : So, what you do?  Usually, when I say I’m a pastor, there’s not much interest after that.  They may ask the name of the congregation, and, if they’re really brave, they may ask What’s a Mennonite?

But how, I wonder, would folks respond, if, rather than saying “I’m a pastor,” to the question “What do you do?” I would say something like this:      

I help lead a local chapter of a global, 2000-year-old nonprofit organization.  We are 100% member-owned and donor-supported, but open to all.  We have voluntary multigenerational weekly meetings where children are celebrated and adults share their gifts.  Our vision is the reconciliation of all things; our mission is to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly; and our bottom line is love.

I’m not sure if that would extend, or abruptly end the conversation, but maybe some brave day I’ll find out. 

Put that way, it does sound pretty sweet – or like the church PR department went a little overboard.  But it’s not too far from how the New Testament letter to the Ephesians talks about the church.

Ephesians is most likely a second-generation letter.  It opens in the voice of Paul the apostle, but the language and themes point to a disciple of Paul.  This need not be scandalous.  Writing in the name of a respected, recently deceased, mentor was a common practice in the ancient world.  Rather than a brand new gathering of believers, the recipients of this letter had probably been at it a while.  They’re the kids who grew up in Sunday school, now adults, rethinking what it is they’re part of.   

What they’re part of, the writer assures them, is a big deal.  Paul, as we’ll call him, gets right to it.  The plan, he says in his opening statement, now in full motion, is that God would “gather up all things in Christ.” (1:10)

All things is a lot of things, as broad a sweep as one can make, cosmic in scope.  But the grand vision of all things gathered up in Christ has a grounding in material, flesh and blood reality.  It’s the church, Paul goes on – it’s you and me, gathered together, doing and being church – which now functions as the body of the gathering Christ.  The church as the body of Christ is: “the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (1:23)

The Greek word used in the New Testament for church, ecclesia, had a long history.  The ecclesia was the public assembly for the ancient Greek city-states, centuries before Jesus and Paul.  It was where adult male citizens of all classes gathered, almost weekly, to make the big decisions – electing officials, making laws, going to war, holding magistrates accountable.  In theory and sometimes even in practice, the ecclesia gave the middle and working class as much power as the wealthy.  It is considered the first known direct democracy – open to Greek citizen males. 

This is the word Paul and the New Testament writers pick up to refer to the assembly of Christ followers, the church.  In this ecclesia, the original Paul writes to the Galatians, there is “no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female.”  Through Christ, they were all one, all children of Abraham. (Gal. 3:28-29).  And yet, they were all quite different in the range of their humanity and how they were categorized by society.  There was within the church, a rich variety that reflected the variety of creation itself.  The ecclesia, the disciple of Paul writes to the Ephesians, is the body of Christ: “the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

But this gathering up of all things in Christ was not yet fully realized.  And so there’s another thing about this ecclesia, this new humanity.  And here’s where it ties in to Wisdom.  Ephesians 3, verse 10: “Through the church, the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”      

To repeat, as the writer to the Ephesians sees it, it is through the new eccleisa, the assembly of Jesus-people – male and female, slave and free, Jew and Greek – that the Wisdom of God we’ve been talking about this past month, in its vast variety, is given voice and agency in this world. 

We can go back to where we started at the beginning to find an image for what this might look like, Proverbs 8.  That’s where it says that Wisdom is calling out.  And that’s where it says, that Wisdom takes her stand at the crossroads. 
“Does not Wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?  On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand.” Proverbs 8:1-2

If Wisdom stands at the crossroads, and if the church is in partnership with Wisdom, then it sounds like the crossroads is where the magic happens, where the Spirit shows up, where Christ does the gathering of all things into Godself.      

The Judeans return from exile, eventually encounter the wisdom of the Greeks at a crossroads of cultures.  They start writing their own Wisdom literature, gifted to us in our scriptures, which are a confluence of wisdom from Hebrew and Greek traditions.  Wisdom lives at the crossroads where people meet one another, where paths cross. Wisdom is a busy cosmopolitan intersection. 

Maybe you’ve encountered Wisdom at a similar crossroads.  A visit to another country.  A friendship with someone of a different faith.  A change of vocation where the wisdom of your previous experience mingles with the wisdom of the new.  If you want to find Wisdom, find a crossroads.  There, Proverbs says, is where she’ll be. 

And if you want to be an agent of Wisdom, as the church is called to be, you’ll find your calling at a crossroads near you.  Perhaps where business meets ethics.  Where medicine meets compassion.  Where education of the mind meets the formation of human spirit.  Choose your crossroads and wisdom will be waiting for you there. 

For those who have been taught that Christianity has an exclusive corner on the Truth, it can be strangely disorienting to encounter Wisdom elsewhere.  Is it a crisis of faith if Buddha or Indigenous knowledge systems start making more sense that our inherited form of Christianity?  It could be.  Is this part of the very good news our tradition proclaims?  For sure.  Wisdom “pervades and penetrates all things” according to the Wisdom of Solomon. 

Imagine how the history of Christian missions would be different if missionaries went out into the world with an openness to the Wisdom standing at the crossroads with other peoples and cultures.  Imagine if these crossroads were places of abundant life and mutual learning. 

Or maybe the crossroads is a lot closer to home.  Dorothy Day was eight years old, living in San Francisco in 1906 – a second or third grader for those of you around that age. In that year, a massive earthquake destroyed over 80% of the city.  It was a devastating event, but what left a permanent imprint in the mind of young 8 year old Dorothy was the way neighbors helped each another through the crisis.  People shared their food, their extra clothes, and whatever shelter they had with friends and strangers.  Dorothy Day later wrote in her autobiography: “I wanted life and I wanted the abundant life. I wanted it for others too….I wanted every home to be open to the lame…and the blind, the way it had been after the San Francisco earthquake. Only then did people really live, really love their brothers. In such love was the abundant life and I did not have the slightest idea how to find it.”  

She went on to found the Catholic Worker Movement with her friend Peter Maurin.  It did not, you may guess, lead to every home in the nation becoming a refuge for the poor.  It was not the culmination of all things gathered up in Christ.  But it became many ecclesias around the country, little intentional communities, living at the crossroads of crisis and compassion, witnessing to the Wisdom of God in practices of hospitality, mutual aid, and nonviolence.  A line that Dorothy Day would repeat over and over again was: “To make the kind of society where it is easier to do good.”  The church, at its best, is that kind of society, that kind of ecclesia – a gathered body that makes it easier to do good, that makes the Wisdom of God a little clearer to the eyes.

We in the church live at the crossroads of listening for Wisdom, and, despite our shortcomings, being a kind of demonstration plot for Wisdom’s ways. 

We do this in the spirit of Jesus Sophia, who, at the end of his earthly life, gathered his closest companions around a table – the crossroads of human hunger and the abundance of creation.  He reminded them that the bread they eat and the cup they share are like his own abundant life – given for many, enough for all.  He said that even though he would no longer be with them in body, that they are now his body, the Sophia of God now alive in them, in us.  . 

This is not through our own doing, but through Jesus Sophia.  We are the church through God’s work of gathering up all things in Christ.  The creative presence of Wisdom pervades and penetrates all things: even Kroger bread and Welsh’s grape juice.  Even times of crisis and devastation.  Even us.