Would you like to be considered a ‘wise person’? I suspect the answer, whatever your age, your life situation, your field of work, or your network of friends, is that yes, you’d like to be considered a wise person. Especially if, like me, you’re an ‘elder’, someone who’s been around a while, and has lived through many challenges, for life itself is a wisdom teacher.
As Christians, we are very blessed. If we come to church, and we open our hearts, even more so than our minds, to all the lessons, prayers, sacred music, and, perhaps most importantly, to the loving community offered to us here at Christ Church, we will, almost by osmosis, begin to become wise.
It’s rare that we have an Old Testament reading from Proverbs, as we have this morning. In it, we are reminded that Wisdom, also called Sophia, was created by God right at the very beginning of all Creation.
Wisdom/Sophia tells us
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago…….When he established the heavens, I was there….I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight…rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
Even better, Wisdom/Sophia goes on to tell us:
“Happy are those who keep my ways…Happy is the one who listens to me…for whoever finds me finds life. And obtains favor from the Lord.”
So, wise people are happy people, who will obtain favor from the Lord. This is sounding very promising for us! All we need to do is to become wise.
But, how exactly? Now, here I invite you to what may seem a leap of faith. To become wise, we must transcend our enormous love of reason, as a vehicle that will deliver a good and happy life. Our minds are so very busy. We can come up with a thousand reasons to do, or to chose not to do, anything. We can think of all the ways we can become physically healthy, and all the reasons why to be physically healthy is really important, and then we can come up with lots of reasons why we should not bother to go work out today or why we should enjoy that second slice of chocolate cake. To be wise, we need to jump up a level, and ask; “What is the highest choice here?” What is the highest choice I can make for my physical health and well-being, and thus for my future with all whom I love and for all the creative work I have yet to do in my life?
Think of our world’s leaders and the choices they are called to make, in a world ever evolving, seemingly at an ever accelerating pace. For President Obama, what is the wisest choice of response to the risks posed by North Korea or by Iran? What is the highest response to the threats to the ecosystem of the Gulf from the massive oil spill?
In our own lives, the choices are far more personal, yet, at any moment in time, they can seem overwhelming. How to decide an optimal course of medical treatment? How to choose which graduate program to attend? How to confront a friend about a concern I have, or a relative about an addiction? What is the wisest thing for me to do in a relationship? How can I incorporate Sophia, wisdom, as a holy force that I can call upon? How can I bring the sacred into my choices?
Once I got terrifically wise guidance from a bumper sticker. I was driving into Chicago, to meet with Bishop Persell, at that time Bishop of Chicago, for my candidacy interview for the diaconate. I was within two blocks of the Cathedral, when I noticed the bumper sticker, on the car right in front of me. It read: If God is your co-pilot, move over.
To me, the message felt pretty clear. It’s not about all the reasons I can come up with, pro or con any particular choice I might make; rather, it’s about keeping my spiritual senses attuned to what God might be working out in the world and my seeking to be a sensitive instrument of God’s grace right here, in my own everyday life. For example, in a situation of someone else’s wrongdoing, I might be invited not to indulge in what may seem very ‘reasonable’ blame and anger, but, rather, to offer forgiveness, and to trust that God will guide me and give me the right words to use at precisely the right moment. Or, if I’ve done something that pricks at my own conscience, rather than be defensive and come up with ten reasons why my bad choice was a reasonable choice in that situation, I might instead go into repentance and offer my apologies to God, and then to my neighbor.
Last Sunday we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit in the celebration of Pentecost.
In today’s Gospel reading, from Jesus’s long farewell speech in the Gospel of John, Jesus is preparing his disciples for his departure. While Jesus was with them, the disciples naturally would turn to him to solve their problems and to meet all their needs. Now, the disciples are being sent to carry on His work in the world. Jesus tells them that now they will be turning to the Holy Spirit within them, both to find His presence and for guidance for how best to proceed. And here is the essence of wisdom: to access the Holy Spirit that is deep within us and let it guide us in the highest choice possible in any given situation. What really happens, deep within us, is that we come to know God, as we experience within ourselves the direction of the Holy Spirit.
When we are being guided by the Holy Spirit, it feels very different from coming up with lots of reasons for why we are doing what we are doing. Divine guidance softly drops in, and our job is to trust it and go with it. By coming to church and by opening our hearts and minds to God at work within us, we are keeping ourselves alert, awake, and ready for God to come in and be in us and to work through us in our normal everyday lives.
Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday. The Triune God is experienced as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Taken together, we experience God as above us, we experience the Son as around and with us, and we experience the Holy Spirit as within us. All three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are always with us in mutually loving relationship. The whole concept of the Trinity has challenged the best theological minds over the centuries. The simplest way for us to experience the Trinity is to know, deep in our souls, that we are walking with God in the mystery, we are never alone, and we will be guided at all times, if we open ourselves up to guidance.
When we say The Lord’s Prayer, which we certainly do on Sunday, if not at multiple other times during the week, we pray “Give us this day, our daily bread.” When we say those very simple words, we are saying, “We trust that we will receive whatever we need in the course of the day.”
When we receive guidance, when some wisdom drops in, it’s exactly manna from heaven, and we’re supposed to act on it.
So, when you are perplexed and bothered by a choice you need to make in your life, open yourself up to guidance from God. If you receive guidance, act upon it. This may take some courage, but that also will be provided, in exactly the amount you need, at the right time. It’s all about living in faith and having trust that you will be guided, and gradually, as you live and you learn, from all the challenges that come your way, and all the choices you make, you will become wise. You will be considered a wise person. You will be living in hope, which is not logical and not reasonable. Hope is a participation in the very life of God.
Canon Herbert O’Driscoll,, a renowned Anglican preacher, whose work draws on Celtic spirituality, has written a little gem of a book, Prayers for the Breaking of Bread, about the Collects, which are the short prayers near the start of the service. They ‘collect’ us together into a worshipping community.
Canon O’Driscoll writes, of the Collects:
“Within these prayers, there is great wisdom, great beauty of language, and great insight about the human condition. I suspect it would not be an exaggeration to say that some of the most beautiful statements ever made in the English language are to be found among them. As a small boy is a parish schoolroom in the south of Ireland, and later in boarding school, I had to learn many of them by heart.”
On this Trinity Sunday, as we seek to be in a mutually loving relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, as well as to be in a mutually loving relationship with one another, and as we open ourselves up to become wise, in closing I offer you, The Collect for Guidance:
Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget you, but may remember that we are ever walking in your sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
