Mother Wisdom Comes to Me (John 1 ✦ Sirach 24)

“Ancient Spirit of Wisdom” ©Jassy Watson Art

This sermon was first preached at Augustana Lutheran Church in Portland, OR on January 4, 2026. The full livestream of the service may be viewed here. (It may viewed here or below. The sermon begins at 32:00.) 
​Scripture texts: John 1:1-18 , Sirach 24:1-12

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May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you Oh Lord, my pulse, my breath, my life. Amen.

Blessed new year, friends, and welcome to 2026! All is not well. Yesterday, our authoritarian leader kidnapped another authoritarian leader and his wife, for committing the same alleged crimes he already pardoned another authoritarian leader for committing. As nations, and people, hang in the balance, to us a child is born. 

Last night, bombs our taxes pay for instead of healthcare and education rained down on our siblings in Gaza and Venezuela, killing God’s Image Bearers. And as the whole world looks on in horror at what demands deep analysis — why and how we got here, and what we ought to do to claw our way to some kind of sanity — to us a child is given. 

When everything in us cries out for justice, answers, a step by step YouTube video for saving ourselves and our neighbors, Christ comes, but alas: not as a king or a general; not as a professor with a syllabus, or a justice with a gavel. 

He comes as a baby, as A Word — a Living One, an ancient one, but still just a Word. Calling us to a different posture: of listening and hearing, not hustling. No, this Word will not be hustled. He will take decades to become the man who will stay dashing the expectations of those thirsty for war rather than a Way through. He will stay moving like Mist, like Mystery, like Mother, among those itching for a Master. 

Because he is, we’ll come to find, a Mama’s Boy, and She’s not so much visible in the color of his eyes and hair, as in the shuffle of his steps and the way he smooths his garments; in the tender way he holds his disciple’s feet as he washes them, and the way he cloaks his words in wait for ears to bend. 

A few weeks ago we plumbed Jesus’s human lineage and met Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, three of his four Great Mothers, the roots who remained alive and unbroken even after the axe of Assyria reduced Israel to the Stump of Jesse; The Roots of Jesse, the Prophet declared, would “stand as a banner for the peoples; rallying all nations” to the Branch of Jesse, the promised child of Isaiah 9 who we met on Christmas Day, when Jesus, born, sprang from the roots of relentlessly Alive Mothers. 

But today we’re called into even deeper, more ancient waters than we’ve yet seen, where nothing but visceral Being and swirling Breath dance about a Formless Void; where nothing yet Is but Is-ness itself, and all that can be known or heard or felt is a humming I AM.

So, as we meet him today, not as the descendent of those ancestors but the Son of the Void, John’ s gospel begs us, and I with him, to lay aside intellectual rigor: Do not take notes or try and collect every brick like we’re building a structure. We’re not. Instead, breathe and stay close in the flow of what follows, and revel in whatever lands like a butterfly about to flit away, because it might and that’s okay.

This Word, like Spirit and Wisdom, is not meant to be studied and grasped, but experienced and gasped: hallowed, not held. Like a song that transports you to another realm; like Jazz. So I invite you to breathe and feel.

I’m not trying to be poetic or abstruse here. We have the Gospel of John and Wisdom Herself to thank for that, and for an opening line that sucks us through a wormhole into another time: 

“In the Beginning,” John writes, “was the Word.” 

From a strictly literary perspective, these first words brilliantly set up the entire prologue that follows in todays gospel, at once giving everything and nothing away: For those without context, it will be a mess of artful gibberish, like jazz to the uninitiated. 

But for those with ears to hear, these first five words immediately and explicitly invoke the first five words of God’s story as told among the Israelites in Genesis 1: “In the Beginning God Created.” From this we’re meant to hear: “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God who created the heavens and the earth.” 

But at the same time, with this preexisting capital “w” Word, John plunges us deeper still into the unwritten, untold Lore of God: the origin story not of Creation but of Creator, which can only make sense to the senses as the Shapeless Ones move intangibly, though not imperceptibly, throughout the pre-cosmic void. 

Here, Divine Mystery cannot and is not meant to be thought or understood, but experienced. It’s the viscerality of God becoming Flesh that John wants us to feel in our own flesh, which is why he takes us to where time-before-time and place-before-space are entirely beyond our comprehension. 

And to be here and stay here, we must gather in the depths of Wisdom. 

She is more than a mere attribute of God the Father, more than knowledge known and passed down in the Son and Spirit. She is Divinity without a Body, pulsing through every body: Eternal as Creator, Word, and Spirit, and as unique in her own Being as she is inseparable from them. Which is to say, as she dances and twirls in and through God in the eternity that precedes the Beginning, she is Their unfurling. She is Creator’s partner and consort, the master architect and designer who some even say enables the creation of all God will make. 

If this sounds like heresy, worry not: A lot of Scripture does, especially to those who’ ve never read it.

In truth, our strictly-trinitarian language fails to capture God’ s fullness, and actually hinders us from Knowing God as the sages and prophets once did, as Jesus’s great mothers did, as the patristics and mystics once knew the God who eternally Was, before Being had breath and bones. 

And this failure was one of mankind -- by which I mean the kind of men — who labored over centuries to blur and erase God’s Divine Femininity, and contain the One God in three male persons. As if Three in One makes any more sense than Four in One might; as if the Creator who made us in Their likeness, male and female and every ineffable shade, gradient, and ombre between and around them, is Themself limited to a strictly binary male identity. Ha!

Indeed they are not, and Scripture makes that clear. The Holy Spirit has always been feminine in kind and kindness, and Creator’s love for creation has always manifested “like a woman in childbirth gasping in pain,” Isaiah wrote, as “a mother who comforts her child,” “who would never forget the babe at her breast, or be without compassion toward the child she birthed.” Even so, mankind made Creator, Son, and Spirit in their own Likeness, ironically transgendering God in the doing. That truth is plain enough.

But Wisdom… well how many of us have ever encountered Wisdom the Woman instead of Wisdom the thing? It’s not an accident that She has, for centuries, been plucked from her throne in a pillar of clouds, reduced from Creator’s Partner to an attribute He possesses, made into a Quality of God’s when she is his Queen of Heaven. 

But take heart: the Word stays loud. Throughout the books of Wisdom and across Hebrew Tradition, her everlasting intimacy with Creator is proclaimed: In Proverbs 8, she is “the master architect,” neither birthed nor created, but twirling and dancing and pouring herself into and out of God: Before water, mountain, dust and cloud, the Word says, She Was. Sound familiar? 

As Creator set the heavens in place, gave the sea its boundary, and marked the foundations of earth, Proverbs says, She was His Consort and his constant, ever at His side, delighting in His work and rejoicing in his presence, and he, in hers. 

Put another way, beloved, when the Creator formed the world from nothing, according to Wisdom’s design, all things were brought to Life from their mutually everlasting delight and pleasure. And that’s just Proverbs 8!

In today’s first reading, Sirach 24, we are called to witness and hear God’s Wisdom (as in, God’s Woman) as she sings her own praises in God’s High Holy presence, and glories in the midst of Her people, it says. 

What goes without saying is that no one who was not worthy of such praise would ever dare boast it in the Presence of the Most High, but Sophia does: 

Behold, the Knox Translation reads: “I am the first from the mouth of the most High, the primal birth before creation ever began, spreading like mist through it all.” 

Before the Word was spoken, before the Spirit hovered over the waters of Chaos in Genesis, here Wisdom lingers like a deep breath, not held but sighed. 

“Through me,” she sings, “light rose in the heavens, inexhaustible; I encircled the vault of the skies and walked on the waves of the sea, traversed the earth to every nation and people, presiding over them all, seeking a place to Dwell." Then, Creator gifted me a place to Abide, an everlasting Home in Jacob: His own domain and heritage.” 

Today’s reading in Sirach ends there, but I want you to hear the rest of the song she sang when Wisdom was really feeling herself: She took root and grew like a tree that shaded her people, she lingered in the city like the perfume of frankincense and myrrh; like a vine, her blooms became fruit for her people. 

And at the last she cries out, according to the Latin Vulgate: “Come to me, you who hunger for wisdom: For I AM the mother of all fair love. I birthed all reverence, all true knowledge, and the holy gift of hope. In me is all grace, of the Way and of the Truth; in me is all hope of Life and of virtue.” “Come to me, and eat your fill... For the remembrance of me is sweeter than honey, and my inheritance sweeter than the honeycomb. You who hunger and thirst for more will be satisfied; for those who come will not be put to shame.”

Have you heard this song before? I know I have.

Sink into the music: Not just Wisdom’s own song, but the symphony of all Creation, and the fog might lift enough to catch a glimpse of the eternal. Let it rattle in your bones or even buzz just a little bit, and the energy of Life crackling from the foundational what of Genesis to the transfiguring Whom of John’s gospel, may well pull you into the deep, resounding, primordial collision of Love Made in Creator and Designer. It thunders into Sound, and Sound into Word: The incantation of creation, of brand new worlds made from nothing but Love, erupted! 

What I’m saying, friends, is that what scientists have long called the Big Bang, I am now more inclined to see and hear and feel as the Cosmic Love Story of Creator God and Mother Wisdom, of Breath and Birth, of Son and Spirit, of everything and everyone-else words cannot contain and should not confess, lest the glorious mystery lose its resonance altogether.

Sometimes, beloved, it is best to soak and dwell and revel in the Mystery and Magic of Creation, until a truer Word comes. 

And he does. Right here in John. The ancient eternal Word comes in a rush of blood and placenta from a stretched and weary womb; in flesh and bone, with the face of the Father’s creative glory, and the tenderness of Mother Wisdom pulsing in his veins. 

I hope you hear that music as well:

The harmonies Jesus will weave into Wisdom’s melodies, as he embodies her grace, hope, and virtue, and becomes the Way, the Truth, and the Life Sirach says was Hers, in grace. 

I hope you feel proud Sophia humming, “That’s it, beloved, just like mama taught you,” as Jesus gives real food to the starving, and says, “Come: eat and drink for the sweet remembrance of me,” promising a satisfaction that lasts. 

And when she squeals with delight the way She did at the dawn of Creation, and then breaks into earth-quaking groans of grief as she witnesses Christ the Son offering up his own body and blood, and emptying himself for the Beloved — the way she, Mother empties herself for her own -- I hope her wailing bears down like an anvil in your heart, breaking you open too. So you can experience in your flesh and bones what cannot be expressed with words: The creative force of Love, visceral and alive.

Soon enough the Wise Ones will come: Having followed Sophia across the cosmos to his crib, the son of Wisdom, who perfumed her city with frankincense and myrrh, will receive their same gifts in kind. 

But we aren’t there yet. 

For now we’re still here at the beginning: when the Living Word who was with God, who was God, and with Them brought all things into being, comes to us with ten tiny fingers and ten perfect toes, with Mother Sophia’s “inexhaustible Light” of Life, shining for all people. 

For now, the Word has only just become flesh and made his dwelling among us, the way Mother Wisdom made her dwelling in Jacob. 

And so for now it is enough to dance and twirl and get dizzy in the wonder and mystery of Love’s first and greatest, most ancient Word, suckling at Mary’s breast, giving flesh to all His Great Mothers’ wildest dreams.

Breathe it in, Breathe it out, Beloved. And let it be, Amen.

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