God’s Daughters
July 27, 2025 • Proper 12, Year C
Hosea 1:2-10 • Psalm 85 • Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19) • Luke 11:1-13
There was a drama on TV in the nineties that I wasn’t allowed to watch. No one told me I couldn’t watch it. I just knew better than to ask. The show was called Sisters, and it was about four adult sisters, with strong personalities—made for conflict. One sister was a high-powered career woman. Another was a free spirit. Another was a stay-at-home mom devoted to her husband and children. The youngest sister was in her 20s, still figuring things out.
All the sisters had boyish names—Alex, Teddy, Georgie, and Frankie. Their father had wanted sons.
I pieced together the show’s storylines from commercials for the show and from a friend who did watch the show. The ex-husband of one sister started dating another sister, and the older sister broke up their wedding in a dramatic way. One hardworking sister grew jealous of another sister’s accidental success in the fashion industry. One sister became a surrogate when her other sister couldn’t carry a pregnancy. But the surrogate mother found it unbearable to give the child up to her sister.
I was fascinated by this family dynamic of four, very different sisters. My family had one daughter and one son. I was also fascinated by how each sister navigated the adult world of relationships, careers, and choices that felt impossible.
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A verse from our psalm this morning used to inspire Christians just as fascinated with the dramatic potential of a family with four very different sisters. The verse is this: “Mercy and Truth have met together; Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other.”
Medieval Christian poets and artists thought of Mercy, Truth, Righteousness, and Peace as a family of four sisters. These Christians believed that God had one Son, who was incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. But they also thought of God as the Father of four daughters.
In the thirteenth century, a bishop wrote a poem, in French, about a king who had four daughters named Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace. (Righteousness and Justice are used to translate the same word.) A peasant in the king’s kingdom committed a crime and was thrown into prison.
Mercy begged her father to release the peasant. Truth warned her father that if he let the peasant go, no on would respect the king’s power, and crime would be rampant. Justice reminded her father that the peasant deserved his fate. Peace threatened to flee the kingdom if her sisters didn’t stop fighting.
Finally, their brother spoke up. He offered to dress up like a peasant as an act of Mercy, and to satisfy Truth and Justice by taking the peasant’s punishment himself. Once those three sisters were happy, he’d declare Peace in the kingdom.
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Not only poets, but also medieval artists loved imagining salvation as a family drama. An illustration in a medieval prayer book has the angel Gabriel visiting Mary to announce she’s pregnant with Jesus on the bottom half of one page, and the four daughters of God on the top half of the page. Mercy and Truth clasp each other’s hands, and Justice and Peace kiss each other on the lips
Another painting shows the four sisters at the crucifixion. Mercy is nailing Jesus’s right hand to the cross. Truth is nailing his left. Justice is nailing Jesus’s feet to the cross, and Peace is piercing Jesus’s side. (Talk about torturing your little brother!)
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My favorite version of the four sisters drama is from a medieval English poem called Piers Plowman. In the poem, a man has a vision of hell, right before Jesus comes to set its inhabitants free.
A woman wanders in from the west. Another wanders in from the east. These women turn out to be Mercy and Truth. Mercy says that the eclipse they just saw after the death of Jesus meant that the world would come out of darkness, and the beam of light now penetrating hell would bedazzle the devil and set people free.
Truth tells her sister Mercy that’s a bunch of nonsense. Once in hell, always in hell. Truth proves this with a Bible verse from Job: “those who go down to Sheol”—the realm of the dead—“do not come up” (Job 7:9).
Mercy answers not from Scripture, but from the heart. She says she feels hope that people in hell will be set free.
Just then, the sister named Righteousness comes running from the north. She’s the oldest and should be able to settle things. Then the sister named Peace arrives from the south, wearing a beautiful outfit. Righteousness asks what Peace is all dressed up for. Peace says it’s to welcome everyone about to be set free from hell—Adam, Eve, Moses, and many more. She hasn’t seen them for so long. Righteousness asks if Peace is drunk. God gave his judgment that everyone who disobeyed him, from Adam and Eve on, would suffer forever.
But Peace says suffering just can’t last forever. Her theory is that God gave Adam joy in Eden, but Adam didn’t recognize it as joy, because he had nothing to compare it to. So God let Adam suffer for a while. Now, God was going to restore Adam to joy, so Adam would recognize joy for what it was. Peace also thinks that God himself wanted to understand Adam’s experience better, so God himself left the joy of heaven, suffered on earth, and even visited hell. Now, both humans and God have felt both joy and suffering, and understand each other the better for it.
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I’m not completely sure whose side I’m on these debates. I think I side with speak-from-the-heart Mercy over Scripture-quoting Truth. And part of me loves Peace’s idea of God becoming human to understand us more fully. But I’m not so sure about Peace’s theory that God allows such extreme and unequal suffering in the world just to make some people appreciate joy. And I often find myself siding with Righteousness, dreaming of a world where people’s actions have more fitting consequences.
I think medieval Christians were onto something important when they imagined salvation as a drama between four squabbling sisters. There might not be any really satisfying arguments or answers to why we suffer, or how we’re saved. Salvation comes from muddling through impossible dilemmas—and hopefully still speaking to each other.
When we look back to the Hebrew, the four sisters aren’t as far apart as they seem in English translation. The word for Mercy is chesed—sometimes translated as “steadfast love.” And the word for truth—emet—doesn’t mean factually correct or doctrinally accurate, but Truth in the sense of “being true” to someone else. The word for Peace is shalom, which includes a sense of Justice—not just lack of conflict, but deeper reconciliation.
“Mercy and truth have met together; * / righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The names of all these sisters, whatever their differences, mean quite similar things: sticking together, being fair and being kind. Not expecting any one person to hoard the greatest virtue, or to have all the answers.
*Much of this sermon is indebted to Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005).
~The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh