Holy Wisdom

Propers: The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 32), AD 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Wisdom! Let us attend.

What is wisdom, really? And how does one lead a wise and a fruitful life?

It’s not the same thing as knowledge, not really. One can be very knowledgeable—might know the capitals of all the nations on earth, and all the elements on the periodic table—yet still live out a foolish and a wasted life. Conversely, one may not be terribly educated, yet still possess deep wisdom and live according to it, full of virtue, patience, compassion, and selfless, self-giving love.

Nor is wisdom quite the same thing as prudence. Prudence is applying wisdom to everyday things: life insurance might be prudent; going to bed early might be prudent. But wisdom itself is both higher and deeper than this. Wisdom is the ability to ground oneself in the deep questions of life, the universe, and everything, and to act accordingly: questions of value, virtue, meaning, and purpose; questions not just of right and wrong but of good and evil.

The wise person is unbiased, self-aware, benevolent, ethical, merciful, just, and humble. If knowledge is a matter of the mind, then wisdom is a matter of the spirit. Indeed, some of the wisest people I know haven’t any degrees on their walls. What they do have is a deep, abiding, and long-suffering love of hearth and home, faith and family, of nature and of nature’s God.

Americans at our best still value prudence. But we can become so absorbed in anxieties and risk-assessment that we lose sight of true wisdom, of the transcendence which undergirds and actualizes everything around us—the wisdom that makes life real. This is because, in order to be wise, we need silence, solitude, communion with both the natural and supernatural worlds. We used to have silence in abundance. But these days, it seems, we’re all of us drowning in busyness and in noise.

This is why we are drawn to the great religious and spiritual teachers. This is why we remember the names of Lao-Tzu, Socrates, and the Buddha thousands of years after we have forgotten the once-mighty Emperors of China or of Rome. We want to know wisdom; we seek out wisdom; how to live the good life, the true life, the real and fulfilling life—in other words, we want to know how to be human. And so few of us appear to have attained that here below.

Of course, most people who are wise live out quiet, happy, unassuming lives. So I suppose the very fact they go unnoted might attest to the depths of their wisdom.

Wisdom literature is nothing new, either in the Bible or in the Ancient Near Eastern world that surrounded it. Wisdom literature is just what it sounds like: books written on how to live a decent, good, and real life. They are primarily concerned with ethics, right and wrong, but they also speak of religion, because right and wrong must be grounded in good and evil. Many have tried to separate morality from metaphysics. Thus far all have failed.

In other words, what you believe about God, the world, and our place in it, will determine how wisely you live your life. There have been great teachers of wisdom and of ethics from every serious religious, philosophical, and spiritual tradition. But there has never been a great teacher of wisdom without any religion at all. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom—not the end, mind you, but the beginning.

Some of the Bible’s wisdom literature is deeply cynical, while other parts seem naively optimistic. I appreciate that they balance each other out when read together. Probably the most famous book of wisdom is that of Proverbs, supposedly written by a young King Solomon in his twenties, back when he was feeling his oats. Much of it is boilerplate: the wise person does this; the foolish person does that; so don’t do that.

But at one point Solomon personifies wisdom as a woman and contrasts her with a woman who personifies foolishness. “Here are your choices, young man,” he is saying (for such was the assumed readership of Proverbs 3000 years ago). If you choose woman Wisdom as your lawfully wedded bride, then your life will be fruitful, fulfilling, and happy. But if you choose instead to run around with woman Folly, well, she may promise you more fun at first, but ultimately she can offer a man only grief and an early grave.

As part of this image, woman Folly is portrayed as perfuming her bed to seduce the reader. But she’s perfuming it with myrrh, an incense primarily used in funerals; the message being that the bed prepared for us by Folly is in fact our deathbed.

This literary device—of turning Wisdom into a character; not just a list of advice to be followed, but a woman any decent man would surely woo and wed—proved itself to be rather popular. In the Greek books of the Old Testament, leading up to the time of Christ, Wisdom now takes on a personality of her own. She is portrayed as possessing a somewhat paradoxical nature: for while she is found on earth, Wisdom descends to us from heaven to gather and to guide us back to God.

She is the firstborn of Creation, God’s companion and delight; yet she existed before the world, indeed before all things. On the one hand, she is God’s creation, while on the other, she is the one through whom He creates everyone and everything. Wisdom is both God and yet from God. Her home is in Heaven, yet she dwells with us on earth. She is eternally begotten of the Father, and through her all things are made. Is this starting to sound familiar?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All things came into being through Him, and without Him not one thing was made … And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

For a thousand years before Jesus Christ, people spoke of Wisdom, not simply as a way to live one’s life, but as a person, a character, a woman who would love us, who would save us, who would lead us home and never, ever abandon us. Wisdom was God on earth come to reunite us with God in heaven. In her, God was both here and there, both immanent and transcendent, both personal and divine.

And so when Jesus came—when Christ was born of Mary in a cave on Christmas Day—and people asked, “How can this be? How can One God be both Father and Son? How can one Man be both human and divine?” we knew where to look. We knew who He was. “Christ,” wrote St Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, “is the Wisdom of God … who became for us Wisdom from God.”

And when Christ gave to us all He has and is—when He gave us His own Holy Spirit in Baptism, His own Body and Blood in the Eucharist—then that Wisdom entered us. The Holy Spirit became for us Wisdom, who is both God and from God. This is the paradox of Christian faith, the paradox both of the Incarnation and the Pentecost: that God is our Father in Heaven; God is our Brother, our Priest, and our King; and God is even the very Spirit and the Breath within our lungs, the Fire in our veins, the Wisdom in our lives. All are One. All are God.

For us, Wisdom is not simply a book to be read or a set of aphorisms to be followed. Wisdom is a person, a relationship, a romance! We can speak of Wisdom as our true bride, or we can speak of the Church as Christ’s true Bride. Either way, the gender doesn’t really matter here. What’s important is that the love God pours forth for you is greater than the love of a parent for his child, greater than the love of a bride for her groom, greater than the love each of us has for the breath in his own lungs and beat of her own heart.

God comes down to forgive you, to heal you, to rescue and to save you. God comes down to die for you, to love you all the way to hell and back. God will never let you go, never abandon you, never give up on you, and ultimately will burn to the ground anything that gets in the way of His bringing every one of us back home in Him. Know this, and you have Wisdom, not just as a trait but a wife. That’s what’s real, that’s what’s true, that’s what’s right.

For to us, Wisdom is a person. And if our relationship to Wisdom begins in the fear of the Lord, it nevertheless ends in love and in grace and in life everlasting. This is the promise of God in His Wisdom. And God does not break promises.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.