“The twelve were with him,as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.” Luke 8:1-3
A girl doesn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a prostitute, it’s generally a profession born of necessity and driven by an insatiable market demand. In the ancient world when Jesus was around, women who were prostitutes were just called “sinners,” a blanket term that covered a multitude of necessary survival traits. Since a woman was considered property, if she was banished or turned out of a home or a marriage, likely with no marketable skills, prostitution became a way of feeding herself—it was survival.
So it is no surprise that, more than once, Jesus found himself in a position where a woman who was a “sinner” hunted him down to kiss his feet and wipe away her tears with her hair, often pouring out some kind of expensive perfume as a gesture that she was laying it all on the line in hope of a new life. Confident that she would get a fair hearing at this man’s feet, even if she had to crash a formal “for males only” dinner and parade herself past a table full of men, perhaps even one or two of her former clients. We find in Luke 8:1-3 that Jesus had a cadre of female disciples such as this, former “sinners.” These very women he had freed from a life of “sin” (what we might call sex trafficking today), and the accompanying demons and infirmities, ended up providing financial support for his ministry out of their new jobs and their newfound lives as freed women.
Jesus had a group of women funding his mission—women he had set free—which indicates by the nature of the word “free” that prior to their falling at his feet like a refugee of war seeking asylum from an oppressive regime, they had been in a captivity known as sin. Ironically, the label of “sinner” wasn’t given to the system that forced a woman into such circumstances or the pimp that ran the prostitution ring rather, the one who bore the label “sinner” was the woman herself.
But Jesus saw the matter differently, instead of blaming the woman for her predicament, he simply set her free, not only from her internal demons and infirmities but from the system itself. He gave her the ability to build a new life. Perhaps Jesus was the first feminist.
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At the beginning of his ministry when Jesus states that he has come to set the captives free, he’s talking about human beings, all those who are enslaved to systems that force them to live apart from the joy and dignity of their very soul, which is, by the way, a God-given right for every human being.
The guiding energy of any movement such as feminism or liberation is to free people to experience their souls, the God-given source of their true nature. This is what Jesus meant by “free.” Freedom to experience the place of connection with God that is often blocked by the psychological trauma that comes with physical, mental and spiritual types of oppression.
Oppressive forces that enslave people by treating them as property are also forces that threaten a person’s connection to their very own soul. For the women in these stories, and for so many people in the world today, Jesus becomes a force stronger than the oppressive forces in the world that enslave. Jesus represented God, not just in a building but in the heart, a force that can set the soul free to experience the joy, freedom, peace, and eternal nature of God here and now.
Saint Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a person fully alive.” I’m sure these women of the ancient world became dangerously independent and fully alive when Jesus set them free. Independent enough to make their own living and give themselves to a worthy cause without selling body and soul. As the ancient poet Hafiz has stated, “We have not come here to be taken prisoner, but to surrender ever more deeply to freedom and joy.”
Quite a feat in a world in which women were considered the property of another person, subversive, in fact, to believe in something that doesn’t technically belong to you, your very self. This is often the first step to the recovery of the soul, believing, against the odds, that you can reclaim your soul from any kind of wreckage that may have been hoisted upon you in this life.
Perhaps the greatest gift Jesus gave women, besides the connection to their soul’s divine joy, was the permission to believe in themselves without apology.
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(Image above: Elephant Trunk Nebula, Hubble Space Telescope)
Before the beginning and at the end of the world in the Bible, there are two women. One is building a house and preparing a feast for the children of humanity, while the other is giving birth to a baby in the wilderness, fighting off a giant, evil dragon. At the beginning and the ending of the Bible’s timeline, there is a woman, creating something and at the same time trying to protect her creation from those who have come to destroy it.
Maybe you have not heard about these women, but you should. It stands to reason, though, because they are pretty well hidden. The woman before the beginning of the world, Woman Wisdom, is buried deep in the less popular and more obscure book of Proverbs. Woman Wisdom can be found in chapter 8, where she tells us she was “at the first, before the beginning of the earth.” (v. 23) “I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” (v 27-31) (NRSV)
From chapter 8 in its entirety, we see that while God creates the world, Woman Wisdom is busy constructing a house and preparing a feast for all the “children of humanity” whom she loves from her deepest heart. In her provision of wisdom and knowledge, she protects them from harm and evil. She teaches humanity how to live in harmony with God, creation and one another. She has “good advice and sound wisdom, insight and strength.” (v 14). By her “kings reign and rulers decree what is just,” by her “rulers rule and nobles govern rightly.” (v. 16) “I love those who love me,” she says, “and those who seek me diligently find me.” (v. 17) But “those who miss me injure themselves; all who hate me love death.” (v. 35, 36) God delights in her, (v. 30) as she is with him, “delighting in the human race.” (v. 31)
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So why haven’t we heard more about her? Why is the traditional creation story dominated by only a lonely, male creator? Maybe she has been hidden from our perception until now, maybe we are just now blazing the trail Wisdom’s House where she has been, all along, keeping the porch light on.
There is no refuting what the ancient editors of the Bible (those Hebrew scholars, priests and scribes who put the whole thing together) chose to leave in. Even though they hid her well, she is there, just like the woman at the end of the world in the book of Revelation, a “woman clothed with the sun and the moon was under her feet.” (12:1) She not only haunts the story with her irrefutable presence, but she completes what is incomplete, she brings balance to what is imbalanced. Like hidden or buried treasure being discovered for the first time, she helps us reclaim and understand with more depth, the value of these stories for our very faith.
These somewhat hidden women of the Bible shine new light on old stories. These women and other hidden stories of women in the Bible, as they come into the light, speak of a different narrative than the one we have always seemed to know. They give us the light we need to make our way to Wisdom’s house. The woman who was before the beginning of the world gives us the tools, insight and permission to rebuild what is crumbling before us, what is left of our faith world. It certainly has been a long journey to find her, but she is there, offering us not just a more balanced vision of faith, but life itself: “whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord.” (v. 35)
After all, it’s not as if women aren’t there in the very pages of the Bible acting as warriors, prophets, military strategists, and leaders of men and women, it’s just that we haven’t really seen them until now.
Seeing is believing.
In this video, I share some of stories of the hidden women of Bible i’ve written about in songs:
In this, the national week of goal setting and New Year’s resolutions, when purpose gurus, guides and coaches call to us from every corner, selling the latest and greatest methods for how to get what we want and live a meaningful life; I am drawn to the stillness of the Magi and the Christ child. To that moment in time when the wisdom keepers of the ages brought their most precious gifts to lay at the feet of the One who would lead the world beyond purpose and meaning into love. I am drawn to Epiphany.
The word itself is known for being a moment in which we have a sudden insight that re-orients our lives. It is also the time when we make space in the new year for the Magi’s visit to the Christ child, those wise people who read the heavens for signs and wonders and interpreted the wisdom they found. It’s a little odd for me as this is the first Sunday in a decade that I am not preparing a sermon. Last Sunday was my last official day in my appointment to a United Methodist church in Nashville, I’ve moved to Chattanooga and am beginning the next phase in my ministry and spiritual journey. Just like the Magi journeying to an unknown place to meet a mysterious, new life being born into the world, I am guided by a lot of unanswered questions. Mystery and wonder are at the heart of 2018, and I couldn’t be more excited about it.
I’m re-reading Parker Palmer’s beautiful book: “Let Your Life Speak.” In which he says: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.” He is in line with one of my favorite Sufi poets from the 13th Century, Rumi, who said, “let the beauty you love be what you do.”
But this is not easy. These are the kinds of sayings that draw us into epiphany, however, they are so ambiguous that they often crash and die in a culture such as ours. It feels as if being drawn into Epiphany is very often more of a myth than reality. We live out the reality of our days in a “get it done” culture. It seems like a fantasy to do something as strange as listening to your heart speak.
The goal-making, purpose driven, intention setting business is one of the most profitable industries in our culture, it is much louder than Epiphany. This time of year, especially, we are all scrambling to get our intentions in line with something that will finally make our lives work and move us further in the direction of where we truly want to go. The heart, with its mushy, ambiguous feeling center doesn’t seem too promising as far as the material things we want to achieve. But when it comes to finding purpose, true purpose from an authentic place, I’m afraid we’re stuck with having to navigate the ambiguous territory of the heart. Like the Magi, forsaking knowledge, reason and even Herod’s instructions to follow an odd, dancing light on the horizon.
So, before I sit down to write my goals for the year, I’m spending some time meditating on that moment when the wisdom keepers of the ages brought their most precious gifts to lay at the feet of the One who would lead the world beyond purpose and meaning into love. My truest purpose is somehow linked to the spirit of that encounter.
Because the past decade of serving some of the most traumatized, abandoned people in our culture has taught me that there is something a little deeper in all of us that lives just beneath the craving for purpose and meaning –this is the cry for love. Something born in the heart.
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Perhaps it was the cry of love that pulled the Magi across the hinterlands, averting Herod’s threatening watch, to a humble and lowly place where a new kind of king was born. The place where they crowned Love as the most powerful force in the universe.
This Epiphany, we can make the journey to that place, too, in our hearts. When the cry for love is met there, we seem to have an easier time finding our way to purpose and meaning in our lives. Strangely, in my own experience, this cry for love is answered best when I am opening my heart to this same need in others. Particularly those who are rejected, wounded, abandoned and traumatized.
When we look into the broken hearts of others with love, we often see the eyes of Christ, the God who is love, the Wounded Healer looking back at us. The brokenness of others is like a mirror of God’s love, staring into our own hearts, pulling from us the Divine love that lives within us all. Somehow, we have to see it in action to know that it’s really there.
Perhaps the Magi did not come to see but to be seen, to be fully observed by the eyes of heaven, to be changed by love. After all, they had been searching for purpose and meaning for so long outside of themselves, maybe seeing the Christ gave them permission to finally look within.
This year, I’m taking a new approach. Having spent the better part of my life setting goals to produce material successes (and often failures) in the world, I’m letting all of that go. I’m just going to let my heart speak and translate that into the world. I’m looking forward to hearing what love has to say.
What about you? What are some of your thoughts on goals, new year’s resolutions and epiphanies as you move into a new year? I’d love to hear from you, leave your comments in the section below.
Grace and Peace,
-Sherry
About the Author: Sherry Cothran, M.Div., is a speaker, musician, author and ordained minister. In addition to her ongoing work as senior pastor, Sherry has been featured in USA Today,UMC.org, led at Festival of Homiletics, was the Artist in Residence, 2015, at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary and the recipient of two grants from the Louisville Institute. Her sermons and blogs have been featured in Good Preacher, Abingdon Women, The Interpreter, Ministry Matters, Alive Now. An award winning recording artist, her most recent collaboration with indie film maker, Tracy Facceli, “Tending Angels” can be viewed on You Tube. Sherry is regularly booked as a keynote speaker, workshop leader and performer of songs and stories.
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A recent article by Harvard Business Review connects the influence of stories with behavior. It is called “experience taking” – we become like the characters in the stories with which we interact. Honest or dishonest, It’s how our brains work, we mirror. We become the stories we believe.
According the neuroscience of narrative, inspiring stories not only make us feel cozy, they cause us to trust the storyteller through the release of oxytocin, a chemical that helps us bond with one another. Often, the kinds of stories we immerse ourselves in become a larger story that holds us together, a narrative glue for our experiences. As storyteller Michael Meade says, “stories hold the world together.” Our brains are built to navigate the way forward by adapting to stories. Poets, storytellers and writers have known this since ancient times, that some of the most important information we need to develop can only be comprehended through the use of poetic and story language.
This is because, as John Truby explains in his book, Anatomy of Story, stories unlock a “dramatic code” that is unique to human nature. Through the use of characters, ancient archetypes, images, challenges and problem solving, stories help us interface with our own unique character and learn how to live out our stories in the world. The stories that we attach to have the effect of helping us to discover the story inside of ourselves. Without guiding stories, we seem to be lost.
Storyteller Michael Meade says that these days we are living in such chaos because we have fallen out of any larger story that would hold us together. When we fall out of a story, whenever we cannot perceive that there is any larger guiding narrative of our lives, we tend to lose hope.
The time of falling out of stories, he explains, is also a dangerous time, because not all stories send positive messages. In these times, people tend to grasp for any story that makes them feel powerful, in control and less anxious. So much of our cultural conditioning focuses on how to “control the narrative.” But the stories that lead us to our own, unique story within will help us learn that we don’t control the narrative, many great writers will quickly tell you that good storytelling is more about asking the story what it wants to be rather than trying to control what it will become. We grow as we learn to trust in a story that is true.
If we are to learn to trust our story, we need storytellers who are capable of pointing us to our true character, teaching us how to navigate the obstacles we will certainly face in our lives and let our story live authentically in the world.
Jesus understood this, he came from a culture of trusted storytellers who perfected the art of telling stories about God. He felt that he had come into the world at a time of chaos, when many people had fallen out of their story, been pushed out or simply had lost faith in a larger story. The spirit of the people had been conquered by many forces, including the force of institutional religion. He felt a particular mission to call back the “lost children” of God to live out their story in the world.
He became a trusted storyteller by so many because he spoke from the world of his own heart. He called it the kingdom of Heaven. He was approached over and over again to tell stories of what this realm of God is like. He used images that people from an agrarian and fishing culture could relate to:
It is like a tiny seed, a weed seed, that is planted in the ground and grows into a large tree that becomes a shelter and shade for all who need it in a hot and dry land.
It is like yeast buried in the dough of bread that makes the whole loaf rise.
It is like this, a master pearl salesman finds the one true pearl he’s been searching for all his life and he throws away all the others which seem to be only imitations of the real thing.
It is like this, too, a man finds a treasure hidden in a field. He goes and sells all his possessions so he can buy this one field where that treasure is buried.
The point is, we don’t have to chase a story in the world or control it in order to find our way. We don’t have to settle for a story in which we feel we are worthless or just cogs in a wheel. We don’t have to force ourselves to believe in a story that just doesn’t ring true.
Jesus tells us there is buried treasure inside of us all, and once we find it, everything we have chased after in our lives seems insignificant in comparison. We find it by living the story he shows us how to live, by trusting that the story he is telling us is true. As we do, we begin to see our lives bloom, we begin to see the impossible become possible. We become living parables in the world.
The greatest story ever told is the one inside of you.
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We all yearn for spring, for the thaw, with its fluorescent green and goldenrod. In the doldrums of the long winter, we are oblivious to spring’s surprises, her thunderstorms and her turbulent tornadoes.
We are not ready for what we love.
We’re living in a new normal. More ice, more snow, more fire, more wind, less rain and more rain than ever before. More heat will come with summer, more than we think we can bear.
The world is a beautiful and terrifying place all the time and it is where I belong. I belong to the earth, to the rivers, lakes and oceans, to the wind and the air, to the fires that rage, they are all me and I am them. In this biosphere, space ship earth that we are living on, we all get recycled.
We are reminded of this on Ash Wednesday, how very recyclable we are. I will say, as I take my finger and smudge it in some dust, push back the hair of those who have come from their precious brows and make the sign of a cross, “from ashes you came and to ashes you shall return.” It’s a sobering reminder that we are all connected through our very birth and death to one another, to creation, that all things capable of life are in fact, in one form or another, still living.
This comforts me.
I overheard two older men in a coffee shop talking about “little deaths.” One of them was a Wise Old Man,
I could tell, he was the one giving the advice to the man who was facing cancer. He talked about the “little deaths” in the form of all the things we lose, the car keys, the wallet, the life we once had, a loved one, our mobility, our freedom. He then said something about attunement. I became aware that I was eavesdropping and then stopped listening, though I could not help but smile. Attunement is simply the act of bringing all things into harmony. This WOM was trying to help the other find harmony in the act of living and dying. It was a beautiful thing to experience, the exchange of loving and caring in the act of comforting through truthfulness and wisdom.
Each day, we have something to give to someone along the way; a smile, a word of encouragement, an expression of hope. Think of all the things the world gives you without ever asking for anything in return. The sun shines, as does the moon, creating day and night, we love the contrast of light and dark and the beautiful moments as it changes. The earth brings food, creation brings rain and all the things that are needed for the conditions of life are provided for us for free. How much more we can offer the earth and one another when we live each day in the mindfulness that we belong to an order much greater than ourselves, and yet we have been invited to experience it, to become attuned to its natural rhythm, to rescue creation, each in our own small way, from the damages done.
This week, to those of us who receive the mark of the cross and follow the Christ on that journey of life and death and resurrection, let us meditate on that phrase, “From ashes you came and to ashes you shall return.” Let it be a reminder that though our bodies may be tethered to earth, our spirits were meant to soar. We belong to a greater gift than we could ever give, made real to us in so many ways, every day. The gift of life unending, the gift of the ashes.
We’re having a lot of conversations about breaking down stereotypes in our world today. This is a great thing, because even though we sometimes use stereotypes to help us figure out who we are, we can also use them to reject people that are different. Stereotypes can become threatening, hurtful and wounding in a variety of ways.
I know a thing or two about being the target of stereotypes and I’m sure I’ve been guilty of projecting them as well. In this short video on untamed women of the Bible, I talk about women who “smash the brands,” in the Old Testament and challenge the names used to label women who tried to express their individuality in ways that were not culturally acceptable. Stereotypes can cause division, suppress identity formation and lead to great suffering, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
For the past decade, I’ve worked with some of the most traumatized and rejected people in our culture who suffer from stereotypes. Homeless, refugees, immigrants and the poor. However, it has been my experience that when we decide to answer the cry for love and acceptance that comes from all human beings, particularly those who have been rejected, prejudice and stereotypes are shattered.
This is one of the first steps in effective social justice, heart change. It is in human community where we learn to trust one another and become open to difference that we discover our own deepest needs are met. This is where things like meaning and purpose are born, in love and friendship among strangers. This is where we overcome our own deepest fears and are able to lift others out of suffering.
I have found that it is impossible to break down a stereotype, or experience change in your heart just by talking about it. The walls between us come down as we decide to take action, to be in community with those who are different than ourselves.
There is a great scripture from my tradition that says, “do not forget to show kindness to strangers, in doing this, many have entertained angels unaware.” (Heb 13:2)
In my work with the homeless population, I experienced this more than once. The presence of the sacred as I opened my heart to the strangers in my community. Of course, my work was always tinged with fear, and I had to use some discernment to keep myself relatively safe. But heart change does require some risk, mainly the risk of moving out of our own comfort zone and opening our minds and hearts to the rejected. This is how the world changes, one heart at a time.
I wrote a song about it called “Tending Angels” and got to work with an award winning film maker, Tracy Facceli, to tell the story in this short music video. We wanted to break down the typical stereotypes of the homeless and show the real reasons people spiral into shelter insecurity. I hope it inspires you to spend some time with those who are different than you, particularly those who feel rejected. It is as simple as offering friendship. What you find might surprise you and it will most certainly change you for the better.
I’m Sherry Cothran, a pastor, singer-songwriter and author who was once known as the lead singer of the popular rock band, The Evinrudes. Check out more of my story here.
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Sherry Cothran, M.Div., is a speaker, musician, author and ordained minister. In addition to her ongoing work as senior pastor, Sherry has been featured in 
