Guess where Jesus and all the early church theologians
learned their poetic and hope
filled vocabulary? From the prophets of Israel along with the songs and sayings
of the Psalms and the aphorisms of Proverbs!
In ancient Israel there were three groups of teachers: the prophets, the priests and the sages (wise
men and sometimes women.) Today’s unique
insight comes from the later group as recorded in today’s Proverbs 8. Here God’s hope for the world is personified
as Lady Wisdom (as opposed to Dame Folly.)
And Peterson renders this text in a way that demands our regular
repetition:
Do you hear Lady Wisdom calling? Can you hear Madame Insight raising her voice?
She’s taken her stand at First
and Main – or we might say right out on Park Square - at the busiest intersection.
Right in the city square where the traffic is thickest, she shouts: “You—I’m talking to all of
you, everyone out
here on the streets! Listen, you idiots—learn good sense! You blockheads, too—shape up!
Don’t miss a word of this—I’m
telling you how to live well, I’m telling you how to live at your best. I am giving
you the WISDOM of the Lord.
Right
out of the gate we’re told that God’s wisdom is public – it is not for private
consumption just by the highest bidder or the cognoscenti – God’s mercy and the
unforced rhythms of grace are for all
the people: the idiots and blockheads, the savvy entrepreneurs as well as the
addicts, the intellectuals and all the broken, wounded souls of the world., too. That’s
the whole point of the opening verse:
can you HEAR God’s wisdom being announced from the center of the city?
From Park Square? From the top of the gates to the places of commerce and
entertainment? In your newspapers or on TV? It is there. God isn’t far away –
God is right here and right now – not aloof in the heavens but smack in the
middle of human life.
So
let me ask you: does this sound like
anything else you might have heard in the Bible? The gospel of John is saturated in this type
of poetry: In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was in the world, in fact the world was there through him, and yet the world didn’t always notice. The Word came
to his own people but some of them didn’t want him. But whoever did – those who
listened and heard and believed… he made to be their true selves,
their child-of-God selves.
The Christian belief that in Jesus the depth of God’s truth
was revealed and lived among us – the Greek actually says dwelt among us, pitched
his tent in our neighborhood and became human flesh – begins right here with
Lady Wisdom in Proverbs. But it goes
deeper and gets better, too. The wise sages of ancient Israel who shaped the ministry of
Jesus and informed the poetry of the early Church, believed and taught that
God’s will has existed since before there was time. These teachers understood
that not only was there a balance to the created order, but that human beings
could live in harmony or opposition to this balance established before there
was time. If we opt for wisdom – the way of the Lord – the earth will thrive
and our neighbors will experience hope and trust. The Psalm we’ll sing in just a moment
celebrates this truth: O Lord how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have
founded a bulwark… to silence the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your
heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have
established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that
you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned
them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your
hands; you have put all things under their feet…
If, however, we chose to live as if we are smarter than God –
if we organize our personal and social lives around selfishness, bigotry or
fear – we will experience the consequences of disharmony: war, anxiety, ecological and economic
disaster as well as hatred, misogyny and racial bigotry. Proverbs proclaims that the essence of God’s
wisdom is not a secret: it is revealed in how creation is organized and is at
the heart of all ethical living. St.
Paul picked up on this second poetic truth about Lady Wisdom being with God
since before creation and uses it to describe Jesus.
Look
at the comparison chart between Proverbs 8 and Colossians 1: Paul used both the wisdom sayings of
ancient Israel as well as the poetic tradition of Judaism to help us get a
sense of the deepest meaning of Jesus the Christ. Before
the beginning of time, there was a holy order created for life. Wisdom revealed
it – Jesus embodied it – and our lives can experience it if we ally ourselves with it. God’s wisdom – God’s will – is
not a mystery. It is built into our soil and our air. God’s grace limits the
chaos of the sea by giving us dry land and God’s wisdom has been shaping all
creation since before the beginning of time. Like
both Genesis and the gospel of John say:
before the beginning, there was chaos – it was God’s loving wisdom that
came upon the chaos to give it order, shape and form so that all life might
thrive. And just so that there is no ambiguity, the precise nature of God’s
order looks like personal compassion and social justice.
That is the third insight for this opening commentary on
Trinity Sunday: Walter Brueggemann calls
the order and fabric of God’s wisdom embodied in these ideas the agency of a generative
moral coherence for all of creation. To be wise is to trust God’s path more
than our own public relations. It is to
live in harmony and connection with our neighbors, the earth and the Lord. Foolishness – ignorance – destruction: these are the opposites of holy wisdom. And
the choices we make in life hold ethical consequences as good and compassionate
choices eventuate in shalom; but sowing and reaping fear and discord bring us
back to the brink of chaos – or worse.
The
good news is that wisdom comes first: Brueggemann notes that Lady Wisdom was
with the Lord first and has been in divine intimacy with God since the
beginning of time. She is of the Lord while foolishness and disharmony –
destruction and despair – are not present at the start of this story – and only
come afterwards as the agents of chaos. These
are some of the truths that gave shape and form to how the early Church talked
about the blessings of Jesus – even his Cross.
They point to a love greater than death that embraces us sometimes like
a Father – or Mother – shows us the way of love like a beloved Child – and
speaks to us still from within the world and our own hearts like a Spirit.
When you let the insights from Proverbs mix with the later
ruminations of both St. Paul and St. John, my prayer is that you are starting
to sense that any conversation about the Holy Trinity is more like a Zen koan –
or poem – than an operating manual or rule book. Essentially the Trinity points us towards the
enormity of grace – a truth that encompasses beauty as well as sin, hope in
addition to death and fear – to say nothing about the sacred order of God’s
will exacted in reality throughout history. Grace is beyond definition – we can
know it, trust it, love it, taste it, experience it, share it and cherish it –
but we can never adequately define or limit it. The brilliant
Palestinian-American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, put it like this in a poem
entitled, “Kindness” that was used during our Good Friday liturgy.
Before you know
what kindness really is you must lose things,
feel the future
dissolve in a moment, like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held
in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must
go so you know how desolate the landscape
can be between the regions of
kindness.
How you ride
and ride thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers
eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you
learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel
where the Indian in a
white poncho
lies dead by
the side of the road. You must see how this could be you,
how he too was
someone who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple
breath that kept him alive.
Before you know
kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest
thing.
You must wake
up with sorrow. You must speak to it
till your voice catches the thread of all
sorrows
and you see the
size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness
that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness
that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you
have been looking for and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a
friend.
The words of
Paul in Romans – and the gospel text in John – I sense build upon the poetry of
grace initiated in ancient Israel as they insist that there is a right way to
live into God’s wisdom – even in the face of suffering – as well as a morally
bankrupt way that leads us towards trouble and injustice. Paul is telling us that in addition to
feelings and poetry there is an ethical quality to God’s wisdom that is
counter-cultural: even our pain can
become one of our teachers, he writes, for: We know that suffering produces
endurance, and endurance produces
character, and character produces hope, and
hope does not disappoint us, because hope is God’s love being poured into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit.
Please note
that the apostle is NOT telling u God’s wisdom is automatic. He is not a fool
who claims that all suffering is good because it always leads to endurance
blah, blah, blah. Not at all. We now that all suffering hurts – and not all
pain is redemptive. What Paul IS saying, however, is that when we trust that
God’s grace is the truth that gives moral cohesion to all of creation – when we
trust by faith that the arc of the moral universe tilts ever so slightly
towards justice to paraphrase Dr. King – then we can let go of anxiety,
allowing ourselves be transformed even by adversity because we know that the foundation
of everything begins in God’s love..
Let me rephrase
Paul’s proclamation like this: because we have been touched by God’s wisdom
–and trust God from the inside out – we are now able to be patient in our
afflictions just like Christ who endured the Cross. Paul is confessing that
once we have experienced true hope born of God’s love – a love most fully
revealed on Easter Sunday – then we begin to comprehend the living will of God
– the order of creation – so even though parts of our lives are agonizing or unfair,
we don’t quit. We don’t deny suffering but we don’t let it have the final word
either. The same goes for injustice or fear: we know it is real, not an illusion as the
Buddhists sometimes say, but it isn’t the end of the story. The resurrection
is the true end of one story as the Cross exposes – but it also the
start of a whole new life, too. When we
live from within the power, truth and love of Easter, the Holy Spirit pours hope
into our hearts just as Jesus promised. Troubles can develop
passionate patience within us, patience can become the forge of tempered
steel on the path of virtue, and anything else that connects us to human
solidarity can bring hope to birth because… hope is God’s love being poured
into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
That’s what St. John’s gospel underscores, too: When my Spirit comes, Jesus said, he will
guide you into all truth. The Spirit, you see, is intimately connected to the
Father and the Son – the Spirit is how Wisdom and Comfort are communicated to
our living flesh – and the Spirit is how we reconnect with God’s harmony,
balance, wisdom and moral cohesion in our ordinary lives. No wonder the early church wrestled with finding poetic
language for this blessing for four hundred years – and why most of us don’t go
anywhere near it today – not only is it nuanced and complicated, it also demands
that we make a moral stand against the relativism of contemporary culture.
Let
me put it to you like this: the Trinity
– inspired by Lady Wisdom and the sages and prophets of ancient Israel who
include our Lord Jesus Christ – tells us that God has given us a guiding
principle for life: harmony, balance, personal
compassion and social justice with all creation. St. Paul would push the envelope and say that
wisdom teaches that grace is at the heart of creation as the life, death,
resurrection and ascension of Jesus make clear.
But
let’s be real: grace, harmony, trust and
moral balance are not the guiding principles for contemporary Western culture.
No, if we had to summarize the heart of our values right now, the
quintessential American proverb would be something like: “Different strokes,
for different folks.” There are variations on this theme: live and let live – to each his or her own –
a man’s home is his castle – don’t rock the boat. But
they all mean the same thing and can be boiled down to one word according to
the old preacher, Thomas Long… whatever!
Long makes the case – and I agree – that
our laissez faire relativism means that there is NOT a coherent vision for how
best to live in the world. He says: It’s
as if each of us has been handed a little box of puzzles pieces that conveniently
snap together in any number of different ways. So if the picture I end up
assembling of what I think my life should look like ends up being wildly
different from what you piece together, big deal! Different strokes for
different folks. Why would anyone even expect that any two puzzles would end up
looking similar? Whatever, right?
Biblical
wisdom in Proverbs – and the mysterious poem we call the Holy Trinity –
suggests otherwise. They point to a consistent
vision for life – God’s shalom – that is just, loving, compassionate and
trustworthy even in the midst of suffering and instability. Small wonder that the best artistic depiction
of the Holy Trinity is not a static portrait of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit:
it is three women dancing! Usually a
Crone – in old age – a child – in innocence – and a mother – bearing life as
they all dance in unity and harmony. They are NOT all alike. They are not
automatons forced into a one size fits all ideology or spirituality; rather
they each have sacred and unique gifts that they bring to God’s dance – and
their expression is a joy to behold.
Dear people of God, I don’t think that it is coincidental
that Lady Wisdom in Proverbs is
feminine.
Nor do I think it is accidental that one of her descriptions at the
close of today’s reading could
be translated either as God’s helper in creation – a master worker who advances
the will of God in the world – or – a little child. Apparently the Hebrew root, ‘aman, is enigmatic – and ancient scholars are split on which way to
go: it could be master worker – divine helper – but it could also be little
child who delights in the creativity of God – suggesting to me that a principle
of “pleasure and playfulness is built into the structure of God’s sacred order
of compassion and justice.”
And
I have to tell you, I like both options – architect helping the Lord as well as
little child laughing with delight. It makes me think of the words of
Jesus: “unless ye become as an innocent child
ye shall not enter the kingdom of God.”
Having just spent last weekend with my grandson, Louie, I am totally
down with the personification of God being a giggling, little girl delighting
in awesome diversity of the human race.
Think about that one for just a moment, ok? Besides holding a newborn
infant to your chest while she sleeps, there may not be a more sacred sound in
all creation than that a little child’s infectious laughter. We were out at Hancock Shaker Village checking out all the
“baby animals” last Saturday. And man,
you should have heard my little dude laugh – especially as the baby chicks
strutted about and the piglets wallowed in the mud – it was pure innocence.
Complete joy. Total trust.
Wisdom’s followers – people of the Holy Trinity – have been
called to be playful just as much as we are to be compassionate and just. In
this we learn to live in harmony with God’s will and share it with all our
neighbors in a sacred dance. So
let me give you my take-away for Trinity Sunday – it is one I am still learning
after all these years and I have to work it every single day – but it is the
forever time-tested, spiritually un-contested, ethically never-bested and
unquestionably12-Step suggested way to live into God’s grace and wisdom in your
everyday, walking around, ordinary lives:
it is indubitably the practical way to make the blessings of the
Holy Trinity the core of your existence.
God, grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the
things I can,
And wisdom to know the
difference.
We
are not always in control of events – there is pain and war and fear and death
– most of which we cannot change: let it
go and leave it to God. There are also
other realities that we can change if we claim the courage to go against the
grain: we can make time for prayer, we
can interrupt our addiction to fretting, we can say no to those who would
devour our soul or compromise our compassion:
and as we do it God’s peace becomes our own. And of course there is the
wisdom – the Trinity – the grace of God that helps us know the difference.
The
question I asked myself over and again this week is what I ask of you now: do
you want to live in anxiety or the peace that passes all understanding? Do you want the Trinity’s promise of
serenity, courage and wisdom or Dame Folly’s chaos, fear and violence? Beloved, the choice is ours. Yes, I wrestle
with this everyday – but incrementally over time I continue to know from the
inside out that the more I trust, the more God’s love is poured into my heart
by the Holy Spirit. And there isn’t any
better news than that – so let the promise of the Holy Trinity come to those
who have ears to hear, hear.
credits:
still lacking its promised fulfillment. Hope realized is no longer hope. The stance that we call hope is one constantly made conscious of the fact that the present, the hic et nunc, is a falling-short of what is most to be desired. So the hope that is faith’s future dimension is always “hope against hope” (Rom 4:18). As faith must live with doubt, so hope must live with its antithesis, hopelessness, despair. What is hoped for must not be taken for granted, as though it were already experienced reality, already “seen”—for here too Paul resorts to the metaphor of sight: “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8:24-25).
