Called into life

If the seed falls on unreceptive ground, it will not live.

If the seed falls on neglected ground, it will not live.

If the cry of Wisdom goes unheeded, you will not live.

The call from the Sacred Story today is a call into life. – Isn’t it always?

We hear the call into life today from deep into the season of Lent; the season of paying attention for the call, for heeding it, for tilling the soil of our being to make it healthy and receptive.

I have taken a rather different journey through Lent this year, as I visited a number of congregations each following different paths. I have spent time with Athelstone, who are following Illustrated Ministry’s non lectionary based invitations to attend to the heart this Lent. On both visits there, I have been given Jesus’ challenge to those who will hear to keep treasure in, and of, the kin-dom of God. Such treasure endures and rewards beyond any earthly riches.

At Clayton-Wesley in Norwood, I used liturgy I had composed for L3: Liturgy, Learning, and (purposeful) Life, a MediaCom resource, which follows the Revised Common Lectionary. The story that week led us to the well of Jacob, and an unnamed and deeply known woman’s transformative encounter with Jesus, the Living Water. Composing Lent and Easter liturgies for L3 over the summer, and preparing my Lenten study with the Psalms, Through the Valley, for publication with MediaCom at the same time, I have been entering the Sacred Story through the lens of return, of life and death, of life before and life after death, for much longer than even these past weeks and their travels.

And this week, I am with you, Spill the Beans (from my beloved Scotland), and the Women’s Lectionary.

How have you been travelling through Lent this year, with these stories perhaps not so often heard, or at least, not heard in the context of Lenten reflections? What stories linger with you from the Women’s Lectionary? What insights, challenges, invitations, have planted seeds for life’s potential?

Standing here, one week before the last week, let’s pause to take stock: how have we listened, paid attention, with the posture of Lent? How have we already been heeding Wisdom’s call? Tilling the soil of our being to remain or become again healthy soil, receptive to the seeds of life’s potential?

And so we arrive here, having attended to our hearts and the treasure we choose to keep; having reached for Living Water through Lent’s wilderness; listeners, learners, ready for Wisdom’s call.

Many are the wonderings about who this remarkable figure, Lady Wisdom is, or is modelled on.

She speaks in the arenas of men.

She speaks in the locations of prostitutes, anti-Wisdom women of deception.

She speaks with power, or empowerment; power, or authority, in ways reserved for the Divine. She speaks with ‘such power that to disregard her teaching is to court death in the scheme of the act-consequence relationship (vv. 31–33),’ so says Carol R. Fontaine in the Women’s Bible Commentary (p. 155).

Influences for the use of a figure Lady Wisdom may be found in surrounding Ancient Near East cultures: Nisaba in Sumeria, Ma’at in Egypt, or Inanna or Ishtar, fertility goddesses in Canaan. For some, though, the influence seems more down to earth, in the ‘highly valued roles of wife, mother, wise-woman, and princess-counselor’ (Fontaine, 155). Fontaine points out that earlier in Proverbs 1:8, ‘your mother’s teaching’ is synonymous with ‘your father’s instruction;’ the role of women in educating children not necessarily merely a reflection of the lesser status of both women and children. But more, perhaps, an indication of the value placed on women as leaders within the domestic domain. What have we done with ‘difference’ to make it hierarchical, in so many ways?

Whatever the influences we see behind the figure of Lady Wisdom, it is important not to lose the impact of her as a woman imbued with power in what was – however highly women may have been valued in their way – still a male (heterosexual, gender normative male) society.

It makes me wonder, as the Luke 8 passage comes into conversation with the Proverbs 1 portion for us today, about the structure of Luke’s telling of the story at this point.

Hearing the parable of the sower and seeds directly after the introduction of the women with Jesus, and their leadership within his close community of travellers, evoked a question for me I’d not identified before.

How did listeners hear the parable and understand who might be able to claim a place with the good soil?

Which is to hear the seed as the potential of the kin-dom of God to grow, the sower as Jesus (and what a parallel with Lady Wisdom calling in the streets for any and all who will be receptive), and humans as the soil. Pretty standard interpretation.

But I had not considered the question – who can be good soil? Does naming the women with Jesus directly before telling this parable offer a challenge to assumptions that women (or anyone not-men) are not good soil? I don’t know, I simply wonder.

Because the inherent assumptions about much of the teaching in Proverbs is that the students are young men. And yet. Again, for the first time, my attention is drawn to the set up of parent-child as much as student-teacher in the opening of this profound book. And that means women teaching children, who must have also learnt wisdom from their mothers.

Because they would not have learnt it at school. Only boys becoming men attended the various kinds of schools beyond the home. And that men go on to philosophical schools and different occupations beyond the home has long been seen as an indication of a hierarchy of the sexes – and I am not saying that is not what is happening here.

But. Is there a hint about the nature of Wisdom’s – God’s – Way that actually, even within the paradigm and structure of patriarchal privileging of men, also affirms women as bearers of wisdom, enacters of Wisdom’s Way, good soil with the potential for growing the life of the Realm of God? I wonder.

For that would mean that none of the impediments we construct to inhibit ourselves and each other – the rocks of gender or class or race that impede; the weeds of poverty or lack of education that strangle; none of that Wisdom, God, accept. For the Divine, all are welcome at Wisdom’s Table. Allare invited to till the soil of their being to become healthy soil, receptive to the seeds of life’s potential. All invited. All challenged. All called again in this season of tilling soil.

So I ask again a question I posed earlier: how are we tilling the soil?

There is a quality of listening named in the letter of James: the practice of ‘quick listening’. Which is to listen with a readiness for action, ready to enact the call we hear. To listen to Wisdom, as she invites, with a readiness to enact wisdom.

Is quick listening like tilling the soil, removing weeds, fertilising, digging out the rocks and old roots – to keep the soil healthy and receptive to the seeds?

This Lenten season, Christian communities gather together in our different places and formats, taking the same, and different, journeys to the cross. As we do, we practice listening, ‘quick listening’, shaping ourselves as those who listen to Wisdom in order to enact Wisdom; tilling the soil for receptiveness to the seeds of the kin-dom of God.

We hear the Word read aloud in our midst, we hear a reflection on that Word, and we pray and sing with the Sacred Story and our living of it day to day. quick listening.

Quickness to listen is hearing the declaration of all creation and joining in their song of praise to our Creator.

Quickness to listen means we hear the Word and its calling out of our turning away – our letting the weeds creep in – and our enactment is to pray our confession.

We hear the affirmation of forgiveness, and we enact it in our turning back to the way of Wisdom.

Our prayers for others are not merely words, they are our embodied commitment to enact God’s peace and healing through our relationships every day. To nurture the seeds to grow healthily and drop more seeds of hope and potential for others.

I wonder what practices of listening carry us each through every day beyond our gathering together, shape our instincts for healthy responses to the various challenges we face?

studies and discussions.

praying together and alone with God.

Creativity and presence in creation.

Podcasts, books, music, poetry …

God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with Wisdom. Who pays attention and tills the soil of their being, listening, heeding, enacting, growing, Wisdom’s Way.

If the seed falls on unreceptive ground, it will not live.

If the seed falls on neglected ground, it will not live.

If the cry of Wisdom goes unheeded, you will not live.

The call from the Sacred Story today is a call into life, as always.

Listen, then, and get ready for life to begin again.

Amen.

Sarah Agnew, Pray the Story, sarahagnew.com.au/pray-the-story-podcast