Rev. Kathryn Ransdell
St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church
Serve Me, Says the Earth
Sept. 16, 2012
A reading from the Wisdom of Solomon, found in the Apocrypha:
15 May God grant me to speak with judgment, and to have thoughts worthy of what I have received; for he is the guide even of wisdom and the corrector of the wise.
For both we and our words are in his hand, as are all understanding and skill in crafts.
For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements; the beginning and end and middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild animals, the powers of spirits and the thoughts of human beings, the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots;
I learned both what is secret and what is manifest, for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me. There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle.
For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets;
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail.
She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well.
At the end of last Sunday's service, I asked Latash Nahanee if he would offer our benediction. Being the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant that I am, of course, in my mind, I pictured him saying a few words and offering a blessing, just like me. I like to call this me-ology, which is the study and focus on all things me. And as I've told you before, every so often me-ology needs to be reined in with my mantra, "Get over your cheap self."
Latash is a member of the Coast Salish Nation, specifically the Squamish nation. I met Latash when he came and gave a presentation on First Nations spirituality. There was something about him that connected with me, and our paths have overlapped the past couple of years. Latash always has this ability to show-up at just the right times on Sunday mornings. And when he is here, I sense in him something unique, and deep and powerful. I attribute it to his spirituality founded in his First Nations culture as well as he might just be an old soul. I like being with old souls.
As he sang last Sunday morning, what was true for me was the experience, that the singing is not just for itself, that instead, something happens because of the singing. It's a similar experience for me when I attend Taize, like we offer on the 4th Sunday of the month. The singing is a transcendental experience, almost like a portal to something greater.
When I experienced Latash's singing, there is some deep nudge in my soul that asks me to see the world around me in a way that I have yet to see it. It raises in me questions that have no easy answers and leads me to wonder whether I am any different from those philosophers who lived in the 1st century, who Luke records in the book of Acts, "spend(ing) their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new." This idea of whether we are spending our time in nothing slapped me across the face this week when I was watching a news show and a couple from the Bachelor was being interviewed and the focus was the plastic surgery she endured so that her body would be back to what it was pre-baby. This was being celebrated and of course, her husband was asked what he thought of it, and of course, he liked it. What are we telling little boys and little girls when we manufacture the body in such a way that only one standard is perfect?
Sometimes I wonder if what we are doing is really living at all. The isolation, the consumption, the waste. TS Eliot said it like this in 1934, just a year after this sanctuary was built:
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
(T. S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock, 1934)
I really wonder sometimes about this...Where is the Life that we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Today, we sit with this word, "wisdom." In our first text, Paul engages the philosophers of Athens, a character-type we would normally classify as wise. And one might say it is a wise decision to make an idol to almost everything, but just in case you forgot one, it wouldn't hurt to make an idol to the unknown god. It's always good to cover your bases when it comes to gods.
But Paul announces that he knows this unknown God and that this unknown God is known and knowable:
"From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us."
This is one of my favorite poetic lines of Scripture: "so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for God and find God--through indeed God is not far from each one of us."
For "In God we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, "For we too are God's offspring.'"
I don't want a theology where we have ceased searching for God. To me, that is what it is all about...the search for God. And there are times when I feel closer to God, but that doesn't mean God has moved (again me-ology)...God is not far from each one of us.
And our second text is from the Wisdom material that is found in the Old Testament books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and some of the Psalms. It is also found in two books from the Apocrypha, which represents the 5th-1st centuries BCE of the Jewish story, when it lived in the Hellenistic culture. For most of you, this is probably new to be reading from the Apocrypha, and, you will have to find within yourself what authority you give it in the same ways that you must decide the authority you give the Old Testament, New Testament or any other sacred writing.
Although we don't know much about the person speaking, we know that the person has gained exceptional life experience, intelligence and understanding in his or her life. And it is the embodied Wisdom that gives him these insights, one of my favorites being "the beginning and end and middle of times."
The middle times are when we put into place the things that will shape our lives, build or destroy relationships, connect or disengage us from others...it is the middle times where the decisions we make, and the decisions we don't make, and the context in which we were born define this journey we will take on life.
And who gave this person these insights, intellegences, and understandings?
Wisdom. This mysterious being that we spend very little time with in organized religion. We don't really know where to place this being that is touched on and hinted at throughout Scripture. Even Jesus refers to her: 19 "The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners !' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds."
In the West, the Trinity is neatly tied with a bow on top so when we are confronted with this idea of some being poured out before all creation and that creation delighting with God and in God and with creation, well, it is more mystical than intellectual.
My friends who came through Vancouver last week, Dr. John and Rev. Diana Holbert, could not have come through Vancouver at a better time. Dr. Holbert is a retired Old Testament and preaching professor. After the services he gave me two books, "Delete: What not to say in a sermon" and the other, "Preaching Creation: The Environment and the Pulpit." From Dr. John Holbert's writing comes this translation describing Wisdom's beginnings, found in the book of Proverbs:
"I was beside God as a confidant; I was a daily delight, rejoining before God always,
rejoicing in the whole creation and delighting in the human race."
Before anything else was created, wisdom is poured out, birthed, by God. We cannot rush too quickly to ascribe Wisdom to the role of the Holy Spirit? But I'm not interested in a philosophical discussion about Wisdom this morning. We just stay with Wisdom, walking her path and learning what she has to teach us.
Dr. Holbert shares another scholar's definition of Wisdom: "Wisdom is an inexact term that is commonly used to refer to knowledge regarding life that God has built into the infrastructure of the natural and social worlds, the search for those understandings in everyday experiences, and the transmission of the results of that search." (-- Fretheim, God and World, from Holbert, Preaching Creation.)
Wisdom is not ahistorical suggestions for how to live a happy life; wisdom is directly connected to the infrastructure of the natural and social worlds. What he is suggesting is radical...that the infrastructure in the natural world is wisdom and there is something for us educated, intelligent, control-freak humans to learn.
Isaiah captures Wisdom found in the natural and social world:
23 Listen, and hear my voice;
Pay attention, and hear my speech.
24 Do those who plough for sowing plough continually?
Do they continually open and harrow their ground?
25 When they have levelled its surface,
do they not scatter dill, sow cummin,
and plant wheat in rows
and barley in its proper place,
and spelt as the border?
26 For they are well instructed;
their God teaches them.
27 Dill is not threshed with a threshing-sledge,
nor is a cartwheel rolled over cummin;
but dill is beaten out with a stick,
and cummin with a rod.
28 Grain is crushed for bread,
but one does not thresh it for ever;
one drives the cartwheel and horses over it,
but does not pulverize it.
29 This also comes from the Lord of hosts;
he is wonderful in counsel,
and excellent in wisdom.
This is a Scripture about how to plant a field. There is a natural order by which things work, and, this illustrates the beautiful interdependence of wisdom and nature, of wisdom and creation.
I will be the first to admit that we are no longer an agriculturally-based society. Metaphors of farm life really don't connect with us. But that doesn't mean we dismiss them as antiquated. Instead, it is a plumbline to see how far we have gone askew.
We gain wisdom from engaging this created world. And to engage the created world, we must get out of our heads this idea that we have been given this world to dominate and subdue it, which is the interpretation of the creation story that has undergirded human action and industrial revolution for some time now.
Ethan has a children's book about the story of Creation. And when it comes to the description of the creation of humans, the narrator interprets what God did and said as this, "People are more important than anything else God created."
May God forgive us for all the times we have believed in this me-ology, in centuries past and in in the present.
Wisdom shapes us to be equals among creation, to find our connection again to this created order and find our places in the cycle of birth, vitality, decline and death, rather than running to get plastic surgery when nursing a child deflates your breasts.
I believe that in this 21st century Christianity is going to a deeper level of consciousness, that maybe after 21 centuries we are finally getting over our me-ology and focusing on the rest of creation. Maybe, just maybe we will begin reading our most famous bumper sticker scripture, "For God so loved this world that God gave his only Son so that we may not perish but have eternal life."
It doesn't so, "For God so loved me..."
It says, "For God so loved this world..." This cosmos.
As my friend, Dr. Holbert, said as we took a late ferry ride home after being on Bowen for a beautiful walk through the old-growth rainforest, maybe there is a different way to read the Scripture that would lead us to a different way of being in this world.
He wrote, "Under the teaching of WomanWisdom we can learn to live with the natural world rather than strive to dominate it. Under her call to delight and joy, we can delight in the natural world rather than see it only as means for an ends. She still has much to teach us."
I don't know the last time you delighted in the natural world. If you are like me, this past week, you have rushed to work, done your wash, cooked some meals at home and had some take-out, pushed your way through your day with an extra cup of coffee. The world for most of us is a means for an end. The world--the created order--is here to serve me.
Maybe that's changing.
Serve me, says the Earth. When Latash sings, this is the unspoken word that tugs at my soul.
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(I would like to give significant credit for this sermon to Dr. John C. Holbert for what he taught me this week, in-person and through his newly-published book regarding preaching and creation. John C. Holbert, Preaching Creation: The Environment and the Pulpit. Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon. 2011. I am grateful for the teachers who cross our paths at just the right time.)
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