The Spirit of Wisdom.

A Sermon for Pentecost

June 8, 2025 at Holy Communion

Wisdom 7:22–27

“Though Wisdom is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things” (Wisdom 7:27) In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

As part of my contribution to the wider church, for the past few years I have been part of a group producing parish resources for the one-year cycle of Sunday readings that we use here at Christ Church, and its Old Testament readings in particular. This week, I received two e-mails with critical feedback about today’s Old Testament reading from the Book of Wisdom.

That reading is about the Wisdom of God, presented, as typically the case in the Old Testament, as “Lady Wisdom.” It describes Wisdom as a “breath”—that is, a “spirit”—”of the power of God,” who “passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets” (Wisdom 7:25, 27). So the reading is appropriate to Pentecost. And all around those comments it describes the attributes of the Spirit of God: “intelligent, holy, unique,” and so on (v 22 ff.).

Both people who wrote to me were concerned that this reading promotes an idea from about one hundred years ago called “Sophiology,” which they considered incorrect and dangerous. The idea is that the Wisdom of God is the underlying reality of all things. Wisdom is the essence of God, which the three persons of the Holy Trinity express in their relationship of love, and which creation expresses as the divine spark in all things which makes them capable of relationship with God and with others. All things are expressions of God’s manifold wisdom, which is God himself.

You don’t need to know the ins and outs of Sophiology, and you don’t need to be able to decide whether or not it’s a helpful way of thinking about God. It’s a complex topic. But receiving those e-mails made me reflect: what would make someone nervous about the idea that the fundamental reality of the world is God?

I wonder, because this idea should be intuitive given our Pentecost story. The point of Pentecost is that people from every nation receive a single Spirit, the Spirit of God, which allows them to understand and communicate with one another that the good news that in Christ human beings have become a single body in God. The Spirit comes as the Spirit of Truth (as in our Gospel, John 14:17), and the truth it preaches is that created human beings enjoy fellowship together in God as their spirits are opened and renewed. The Spirit comes to return creation back to the original unity in which it was created when the Spirit hovered over the formless void in the beginning (Genesis 1:2), the unity it had before the division of humanity at Babel (Genesis 11), the unity created Adam had when he walked with the uncreated God (Genesis 3:8).

That whole picture is impossible if God is one thing “up there,” and the world is another thing “down here,” with God and the world being entirely, irreconcilably different. And yet many Christians think about God in precisely that way.

And there may be a good motive in it. People who insist that there is an infinite gap between God and his creation may be trying to protect God’s reputation. Created things pass away. They are weak. They are small, finite. There is evil in the world. There is ignorance in the world. And because God in his perfection must be eternal, all-powerful, infinite, all-good, and all-knowing they think that creation cannot possibly be somehow “in God” from the beginning. So creation becomes for them a thing God makes as a master workman, even if it is a thing he makes in his own image like a carver might make a self-portrait in wood or stone. He stands back from it, looks on it from afar, jumps to its rescue when it starts to totter; but it remains apart from him. It’s just a statue that doesn’t have his breath in its nostrils.

The most important problem with thinking that way is how it will impact our relationship with God. If we are just God’s creature, we may spend our energies trying to be “our best selves,” living up to whatever we think God wants human beings to be like, but we will not aspire to be like God himself, like a child aspires to be like a good parent. We will ask God for the things we need and want which fulfill our understanding of our purpose on earth, but we will not aspire to want what God wants. Acquiring the mind of God, acquiring the will of God, acquiring his infinite love and perfect wisdom: we will not seek this if we think God is far away, because those are God’s qualities, so will think they are far beyond us. We will try to be good men and women, but not spotless mirrors of the glory of the Almighty (Wisdom 7:26).

But that is our calling. Quoting a psalm (82:6), Jesus said that “you”—men and women, here and now—”are gods” (John 10:34). We are gods because God is our Father, and divinity brings forth divinity. This is the point Saint Paul made about the Holy Spirit: “because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” (Galatians 4:6). The kinship of God and human beings means that we are capable, in our hearts—that deepest place where the divine fire burns—we are capable of experiencing the presence of God’s Spirit, which is the Spirit which cries out as a Son cries out to his Father.

You have been made for the divine nature to live in and through you. You have been made to love not the things that are best for you as a certain limited individual, but to love as God loves: to love the good, always and everywhere, the common good of all and of each. You have been made to know wisdom, not just the wisdom of what is best for me in my particular circumstances, but what is wise in itself, what is true and holy. When you pray, you have been made to utter the cry of deep to deep (Psalm 42:7), not to ask this or that thing that is convenient and needful.

In short, you have been made for communion with the Spirit of God. Your life is but one of ten thousand times ten thousand ways that the Spirit which pervades all things shows himself.

The good news of Pentecost is that communion with God’s Spirit is a gift poured out generously, luxuriously, on those who seek it in prayer.