“The Heart Covenant & The Sacred Feminine"

A Sermon Preached by Rev. Bruce Sanguin
Oct 21st 2007

 Luke: 18 1-8,   Jeremiah 31: 27-34

The prophet Jeremiah envisions a new covenant between God and God’s people. Covenants in the Bible are sacred agreements, initiated by God and agreed to by the people. Essentially, they lay out the terms of the relationship. I will be your God, if you will be my people, says God. Being God’s people meant keeping the terms of the covenant. There were four or five of these covenants in Jewish history that covered most aspects of life, from moral to dietary to social to sacred ritual. If the people kept the covenant things went well for them, if they broke the covenant, not so well.

From exile in Babylonia, Jeremiah announces a brand new covenant. Says Jeremiah: “This will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke” (Jeremiah 31:32).

I hear in this an implicit evolutionary development. God is no longer going to hold their hand. It’s time to grow up. No longer will this covenant be about obeying an external authority. God is going to write this covenant on their hearts (31:33). This will be an inside out covenant. In fact, teachers will be redundant. There will be no need for them to teach the people to “Know the Lord”. As the prophecy says, “they shall all know” God, from the least to the greatest.

But as I see it, God still has a problem. Even if you write a new covenant on the heart of every person, you can’t force us to check in with our hearts. We are a resistant lot. In a way, we like the old covenants better – the one’s that are written on stone tablets or in books of law and enforced by external authorities if we break them. We like the rules out there on signs where we can see them – No Running On the Pool Deck; No Diving; Keep Out! Trespassers Will Be Persecuted; Thou Shall Not Kill; Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery. The truth is, we need a system of law. Our brains are part reptilian – the first part actually. Under stress, we revert to the law of the jungle. So I want laws, religious and civic, to protect me from not only others, but from myself. It’s one thing to put a law on our hearts. It’s another to get us to live by it.

So God still needs a strategy to deal with those of us who refuse to function from this inner spiritual law that is written upon our hearts. Well, God developed an inside out strategy for an inside-out covenant. God comes to us through the events of our own lives. Look carefully at the circumstances of your own life, and you can see a Divine Presence at work, refusing to accept our refusal to look to our hearts, and persistently badgering us to give Her a hearing. God never stops knocking on the door of our lives to remind us to take a look at what’s written there.

This is where the parable of the persistent widow is compelling. Traditionally, this story has been interpreted as encouragement to pray always for what we want. A poor widow seeks justice in a court of law and refuses to be dissuaded by a hard-hearted judge. He finally relents, just to get rid of her. So, this interpretation goes, if a bad judge relents to the demands of a powerless widow, how much more will God, as a compassionate judge, give us what we ask for if we are persistent in prayer. I’m not particularly fond of this interpretation.

Change the lens and imagine that God is the persistent widow and the judge is the part of us that is refusing to listen. Now, I’m interested. The parable works for me because it’s so similar to how God speaks to us through dreams. The powerful male Judge represents our ego. This part of us is disconnected from God and has no respect for people. If people can’t meet our needs, they are invisible to us. The ego loves power and has no heart to check in with. Its role is to Judge. This it does well, sitting in judgment upon others and ourselves. We all have an inner Judge that cannot see past our own needs and desires. It has no need of God. In fact, God threatens our seat of power, so the Judge’s role is to work to keep God out.

How do you think God might be portrayed by our soul in a dream? It would make sense that this ignored aspect of our life would be portrayed as a powerless, nameless, insignificant person. In 1^st century Mediterranean culture, a widow personifies these qualities perfectly. She is the voiceless one. Yet she demands to be heard. She is the powerless one, yet will not let the powerful off the hook. She is the invisible one, who nevertheless will be seen. In dream symbolism, she would represent a particular aspect, or archetype, of God – the divine feminine which has been neglected but which will not leave us alone. It is the widowed sacred feminine that returns to us again and again, trying to break through our defenses, trying to get the hard-hearted part of us to relent and take a look at the law that is written on our hearts.

This is true, whether you are a man or a woman. In fact, it is men in our culture who are most in need of the sacred feminine. Why is that men in our culture are watching so much TV, pursuing careers at the expense of relationships and family, struggling with addiction, joining street gangs, beating up their wives, filling up our prisons? Why are our churches emptying of men? Why aren’t we praying as men, listening to our dreams, weeping for our planet, dancing ecstatically, loving extravagantly, communicating authentically, committing to community? Why do so many of still live in self-imposed bubbles of isolation. Why are we still so uncomfortable with vulnerability? Of course, there are exceptions. And of course, women also have an inner judge that refuses to hear the voice of the sacred feminine. But, my observation is that it is men, more than most women, who are annoyed as hell by the voice of the divine widow who wants an audience with us.

Truthfully, the feminine divine has been a cultural pariah for millennia now. She is not interested in the ways of the world, nor in the stories we’ve told ourselves about what makes for a meaningful life. She’s not interested in an ethic of domination for personal gain. She is interested in the ways of love. She finds life in the deep within of things – in the sacred space of authentic relationships. She knows that the sacred covenant is written into the very heart of all creation, not only with the human ones. It is braided into fabric of the unfolding universe itself. She is a friend to creation, and weeps when we can only see the earth as a resource to prop up lifestyles that have nothing to do with the Heart Covenant. She is the fierceness within, who at times of war will defend the lives of her children, before the ambitions of the Empire. She is the subversive one, who refuses to move to the back of the bus called bigotry. She is the voice of the victims of all the judges and all the societies in every age, who were blinded by status and privilege. She is the one who trades in respectability for a divine madness and gets lost in the ecstatic dance of the cosmos. She comes to us in rags, poor and disheveled after millennia of neglect, but she comes, Leonard Cohen’s phase, “like a refugee”. And comes. And comes. She’s knocking right now on the door of our hearts.

Her other name is Wisdom – Sophia in the Greek. Jesus gave her a day in court very early in his life. Having heard her plead her case, his heart broke open. He read the new covenant that was written there and never looked back. He took her rags and exchanged them for royal robes. He gave up his throne for Her to sit on. He sat before her day and night as she taught him the deep love of God and the sacred story of creation. Finally, she reminded him that Her wisdom was written upon his heart – that he needed nobody to teach him about God. The only lesson She ever taught him was to look there. So, he sat in silence and one day became the new covenant, the very presence of Wisdom, and offered himself to the world. He put on the rags of his teacher and went out into a world that sat in judgment of him.

She comes to us, this widowed divine. She is the host of this banquet we are about to share. She comes to us through Jesus, the Christ, who has prepared this covenant feast. As we take the bread and the cup, let us look to our hearts. Everything we need for life is written there.