“Wisdom Cries Out in the Street”

A sermon preached with the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California.

Video is available on YouTube and text is below.

Wisdom (Hokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek) cries out in the street. She raises her voice in the public square. At the busy intersection. The center of town. She is a goddess figure. A prophet figure. A mother figure. She is the wisdom of our God, personified.

I imagine her out there with a protest sign, marching steadily, unafraid to offend. And her words are offensive. They are cutting. “Because I have called and you refused, have stretched out my hand and no one heeded, and because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity,” she says. “I will mock when panic strikes you.”

If you don’t listen to me, I won’t be here when you come calling, she says. It’s not gentle. It’s not nice. It is desperate. A desperate call in a desperate time for God’s — for her — children — to learn that their actions have consequences. And that their words have consequences.

The Book of Proverbs, an admittedly complex and sometimes contradictory collection of material, is clear on the consequences of our words, specifically.

It is wicked to quote “concoct evil,” (16:21-28) we are told. “He who does evil listens to the lips of wickedness,” (17:4) we are told. “The lips of the fool will bring strife,” (18:6-8) we are told.” “A worthless witness will mock justice” (19:28). And perhaps most clearly, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (18:21).(1)

This collection of writings that first started to take shape from oral tradition over 1000 years before the birth of Jesus and over 3000 before the birth of social media tells us that words can be a matter of life and death. Our words have consequences.

And boy have seen that truth at play this week.

This week, wicked words jumped from the unverified mire of the internet to the national stage of mainstream media. Words that told us people – immigrants. Immigrants of color. Immigrants from Haiti. In the city of Springfield, Ohio … were eating pets. It feels terrible to even shape those words in my mouth. It feels shameful to have said them out loud. I feel Wisdom standing right here. Arms crossed. Head shaking.

And I must tell you these wicked words seemed kind of funny at first, at least to my ears, and maybe to some of yours too. Ridiculous. Cartoonish. So obviously untrue as to be hilarious. No I did not believe for a single moment that these words were true. But I did believe they were funny in that deep untruth.

So, I sat safely and silently behind my glowing screen and laughed at the memes and tiktok sketches, and the cartoons and jokes and humor pieces about how ridiculous these words were. And I drowned out the sound of Wisdom’s cries. I drowned out the sound of Wisdom’s threats. That words have consequences. And that these words were not funny. They were deadly.

And I learned that Wisdom knows that these are not new words. They had hurt and they had killed before. The Washington Post reported this week that “Stereotypes about immigrants eating dogs, bats or rats have long circulated in the United States — beginning during the wave of Chinese migration in the 1800s.”

“My first thought was: Here we go again,” said Anita Mannur, director of American University’s Asia, Pacific and Diaspora Studies program. “This is a trope we’ve seen time and time again that is used to ‘other’ people of color [and] new immigrants.”

“Here we go again,” Wisdom cries out in the street.

This week, Springfield municipal buildings were evacuated as a result of threatening emails. On Saturday, Springfield hospitals were placed on lockdown.