Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 and John 1:1-4
June 14, 2026
Ancient Stories: Amplified is our theme for summer worship. Each week we’re exploring a different ancient text from the Bible that might make you walk away singing or humming a more modern tune. We started out with a little Bowie from the early 70s and turned the corner into the early 80s last week as we examined Abraham and Sarah’s lives “under pressure” with Queen and Bowie.
This week we continue into the 80s with a Queen song that I think might be a deep cut? I’ve long been obsessed with their 1986 album A Kind of Magic, but when I consulted Wikipedia I discovered the album only peaked at 46 on the U.S. Billboard Charts. This is a real travesty, given that some of their best songs are on this strange album. It was also their final tour with Freddie Mercury - the last time he had the stamina needed to perform sold out stadiums before his decline and eventual death in 1991, caused by complications of HIV/AIDS.
So I stand here today recognizing that most of you probably don’t even know the song One Vision by Queen. And I say to you: be not afraid. I love it enough for all of us.
Last week we spent a good deal of time pondering the nature of God. Remember those three questions that I said you can use if you ever need to lead a Bible study? What does this scripture tell us about God? What does it tell us about humans? And what does it tell us about the relationship between God and humans?
Those questions are still at the forefront as we dive into this week’s ancient texts from the book of Proverbs and Gospel of John. The text from John might be familiar to you because we read it almost every year on Christmas Eve. What does this scripture tell us about God? It feels like John is trying to tell us many things about God and his poetry made me think of this week’s song by Queen.
John says:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.
And Freddie sings:
One heart, one soul,
One mission.
One flash of light,
Yeah, one God, one vision.
This God described by John may be ephemeral and mysterious, but there is a real sense of unity of the spirit here. God is one. God exists in union. God is a flash of light, never overcome by darkness.
That one-ness of God from the beginning of time isn’t unique to John. We see it in today's passage from the Proverbs, too, as we read about Lady Wisdom.
Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible is personified as a woman and Christians over the years have called her sophia, Greek for wisdom.
Sophia stands at the city gate, in the crossroads. She’s down at Dara’s buying a lottery ticket and sitting on the patio at Aggieville Brewing Company having a drink. She’s directing pedestrian traffic on College Avenue right before a K-State Soccer Game and you might catch a glimpse of her this summer at Northview Pool. My guess is she can even be found in the ether - at those digital crossroads of Instagram and YouTube - crying out, making her voice known, shouting for our attention.
Sophia is everywhere all at once. There’s nowhere we can go to get away from her. What’s so important that she has to yell for our attention?
She says:
To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up, at the first,before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth…
When God established the heavens, I was there…
when God assigned to the sea its limit…
then I was beside her, like a master worker;
and I was daily God’s delight, rejoicing before them always,
rejoicing in their inhabited world and delighting in the human race.
Wait. What? She was there at the first? Before the earth? She was there when God made the heavens and the earth? How can Sophia be this important and most of us have hardly heard anything about her?
But there it is, in black and white. Sophia sounds an awful lot like the Word in the beginning of the Gospel of John, doesn’t she? “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God….” One light. One vision.
I remember when I first learned about Sophia in seminary and my thought was, “Wait. Is there a fourth person in the Trinity? Why has no one ever told me about this before???”
Theologians haven’t been quite sure what to do with Sophia. Some have equated her with the second person of the Trinity: Christ. Since the description of her is so much like the description of the Word made flesh in John 1, the idea is that Sophia and the Word are the same. They are the experience of God that came to earth in human form as Jesus. That Christ Force that moved into the neighborhood as an infant human, grew in wisdom and stature, spoke in parables, died at the hands of the Roman government, and somehow continued on in ways we can scarcely comprehend.
Christ, Sophia, the Word made incarnate in Jesus. And for those paying attention to gender, yes, this means that our tradition holds that Christ is both masculine (the Logos, the Word) and feminine (Sophia, Wisdom).
Others have equated Sophia with the Holy Spirit, who has long been understood as feminine and not just in fringe parts of Christianity. In fact, one of the earliest writings about the Trinity doesn’t mention “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Instead, Theophilus of Antioch, writing in the first century, refers to the Trinity as God, the Logos (Christ), and Sophia (Wisdom). [1]
So is Sophia the Holy Spirit? Or is she the feminine aspect of Christ? Or a fourth part of the Trinity? Or something else entirely?
We don’t know.
Now you might be thinking, “Okay, preacher. This might help me when I’m watching Jeopardy but what does it have to do with my faith life?”
Well - everything, really.
Because this confusion, this confounding, this not knowing is at the core of what it means to be followers of Jesus. Part of the good news of the Christian Trinity is that this weird and mind-blowing concept invites us into communion with a God that defies explanation. A God that refuses to be contained in a neat-and-tidy-box. A God who is beyond our wildest imaginings.
I went through a very long period where the Trinity made me angry. I even wondered if I could still be a Christian because I didn’t believe in the Trinity. Newsflash: you CAN still be a Christian without believing in the Trinity. I know we have plenty of faithful non-Trinitarian Christians in our congregation.
The Trinity made me uncomfortable because it felt too constricted. It felt like someone was trying to tell me, “Here. THIS is the way God is: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. That’s it.”
And when I listened to people try to explain all the ins-and-outs of how one person can somehow be three but also still just one, my head was spinning and I thought, “This just doesn’t make sense. At all. This can’t be it. God’s got to be bigger than this.”
Over time, the Trinity began to mean something else to me. These days, it feels more like an invitation than a doctrine. Sophia standing there in the street, beckoning, inviting us to step into a more expansive vision of the Divine that defies our definitions.
One heart, one soul,
One mission.
One flash of light,
Yeah, one God, one vision.
Perhaps the puzzle of the Trinity isn’t meant to be solved at all. Perhaps it stands there, like Sophia at the crossroads, as a testament to the vast, inexplicable nature of the Holy. Perhaps Sophia reminds us that it is wise, indeed, to hold onto our convictions with a lighter touch, and that our Stillspeaking God created us with open hearts and minds, ready to learn and grow.
“But how can we have a relationship with something we don’t understand?” you might be wondering.
Well, we all have relationships with people and things we don’t understand every single day, don’t we? I don’t understand how my voice is amplified so that you all can hear it, or how my image is floating through the ether to those of you on Zoom. I surely don’t understand how my car or phone work, but I use them every single day.
And none of us can truly understand the people we love. Even when we know them well, we can’t ever truly know them fully. Understanding someone is not necessarily a prerequisite for being in relationship with them or even loving them. Those of us who are cisgender, for example, can love and appreciate our nonbinary and transgender friends without needing to fully understand their experience. We don’t have to understand someone in order to fully love and respect them. Those of us who are white can listen to the experiences of our Black and brown friends when they explain what it’s like to live alongside the evil of white supremacy. We don’t have to have first-hand experience to believe it’s a problem.
The same must be true for the Holy. Though the experience of God might feel a bit like trying to catch a cloud in a jar, we can still be in relationship with the One who calls the worlds into being, stands at the crossroads proclaiming the goodness of creation, comes to us in human form, and is present in each and every holy breath we take.
This is what Sophia testifies to. Wisdom says that she was with God before the beginning and that they delighted in one another, rejoicing always, and rejoicing in the earth as it was being formed, and delighting in the human race.
Sometimes, prayer - sometimes, our relationship with God - sometimes, our faith - is not at all about having the answers. Sometimes it is simply about being aware of God’s gentle, loving gaze. Sophia is there delighting in us. Like a mother whose eyes sparkle every time her child walks into the room. Like a dog who leaps for joy when her humans come home from a trip. Like a tree that offers shade on a hot day and the sun that kisses our cheeks.
The God who we call Father, Mother, Holy Parent; Wisdom, Sophia; the Word, Christ, Logos; Holy Spirit, Paraclete, Advocate, Comforter delights in us.
Thanks be to God.
NOTES
[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/theophilus-antioch
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