Eleventh Sunday after Trinity
19 August 2012
Where May Wisdom be Found?
A sermon by the Revd Dr Sam Wells
Readings
1 Kings 2.10-12, 3.3-14; John 6.51-58
When I first left home, and university, and started out in life as an adult with a job
and a flat, there was a woman I used to go and talk to – an elderly woman, of what
today we call ‘more senior years.’ When I had something on my mind, or didn’t know
what to do, I used to go and work things out with her. She didn’t say too much, but I
felt she heard me, intellectually and emotionally; and when she did speak, it wasn’t
usually to say something clever or spontaneous, but usually to remind me of
something we’d talked about and faced before, something I’d forgotten, something
she brought back into my story from a different angle in a new and helpful way. She
understood me, and loved me, and sometimes teased me. But she was never taken in
by my self-deceptions or self-pity.
When I moved away, I missed her very much. This was before the days of email, and
she didn’t use the phone – so I’d lost the person I turned to when I was in a hole, and
I felt the ache of that absence. Where, I wondered, may wisdom now be found?
Today’s Old Testament reading is a story about wisdom. Christianity has long been
ambivalent about wisdom. For the ancient Greeks, wisdom was about the most
precious thing there was. Their central pursuit they called the love of wisdom – or
philosophy, to use the Greek term. For them, wisdom was the intermediary between
the ethereal world of the gods and the earthly world of human beings. They thought
that wisdom could somehow draw heaven to earth and earth to heaven. When the
early Christians spoke of the fully human, fully divine Jesus, it’s easy to see how they
attached to Jesus everything the Greek philosophers had said about wisdom.
But Christianity’s always been suspicious of conventional wisdom. St Paul pointed
out that if Jesus had followed Greek wisdom he’d never have gone to the cross.
Throughout Christian history figures like St Francis have played the fool, and turned
the world upside-down, and pointed out that God’s love for the wayward creation is a
crazy, foolish love, rather than a wise one. And the saints show that faith is by no
means just about the head but always also about the hand and the soul and the gut
and the heart as well.
Today wisdom is seriously out of fashion. We don’t like things that seem to be
restricted to elderly males with long straggly beards. The whole idea that just a few
people have something profound and valuable and hard-earned seems unfair and
exclusive and suspiciously intellectual. The internet has democratized knowledge,
unleashing a torrent of information and an ocean of opinion, but placing less
emphasis on percolating understanding. And the Olympic Games have shown us
once again that what our culture most values is physical prowess and eternal youth –
the qualities that seem to overcome limitation and defy death; and the slow
distillation of wisdom has little appeal alongside such stirring valour. If we do seek
wisdom it lies in the company of the therapist and the counsellor: it comes from
pondering the mysteries of our own experience and trying to find a pattern in our
own personality.
But that still leaves us with a gnawing quandary in our heart and an aching absence
where we long for wisdom to be. Where may wisdom be found?
The church’s two greatest theologians, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, offer us a
helpful way of thinking about wisdom. They say wisdom is vital, but is just one of
seven dimensions of a truly healthy life. That flourishing life is founded on wisdom
(which they call prudence), but also on courage, temperance, and justice. And it’s
refined by faith, hope, and love. These seven aspects of flourishing life are called
virtues. This configuration gets us away from the Greek tendency of thinking wisdom
is everything and the contemporary inclination to overlook wisdom almost
altogether.
The point about the virtues is that they never operate alone: they always hunt in
packs. What I found in my elderly female companion was not prudence alone but
prudence shaped by love and faith. Remember all those budget speeches when
Gordon Brown used the word ‘prudence’ so many times. The reason why it didn’t
quite ring true was that there’s no such thing as true prudence that isn’t accompanied
by courage and hope. Right now our economy and our political leaders need courage
and hope even more than they need prudence.
Think about the virtue of justice. It’s common for Christians to say they work for
justice. But what the virtues show us is that justice isn’t a self-evident abstract ideal:
it requires the existence of just people. And justice can’t flourish without other
virtues like prudence and temperance and courage and love. You may recall a few
years ago a judge set to prison two people who worked in a homeless hostel in
Cambridge because some of the residents were found to have used drugs on the
premises. The judge followed the law – but the result couldn’t be called justice,
because it showed no prudence, no temperance, no trust, and no love. Justice on its
own without the other virtues can quickly turn into a monster.
The other point about the virtues is that the word virtue originally means ‘power.’ If
you want to be a person of real fibre, someone who isn’t a pushover, who can’t be
manipulated or seduced or deceived or bent out of shape by every passing fashion or
fear or feeling or foe, then you want to be shaped by courage, temperance, prudence,
justice, faith, hope, and love. Where may such virtues be found?
The middle of August is an agonizing time for all those who sat A-levels earlier in the
summer and now find out whether they’re going where they planned to go, did worse
than expected and now have to make adjustments, or did better than expected and
have to decide whether to dream a little differently. It’s hard to overestimate how
much passion and angst and sleeplessness and heartache goes into these few days.
It’s like a concentrated version of the whole of a school career, with failure and
frustration and hope and aspiration all condensed into a tight ball of suspense and
judgment. Underneath it all is one simple question: what do you hope a college or
university education is going to give you? And the same is more or less true of every
decision a parent makes about their child’s education earlier on in the piece, going
back to infant and junior school. What’s the aim of education? What kind of a person
do you want your child to grow up to be?
And here the story of Solomon and his dream offers us an unambiguous answer. You
want to be wise. Not clever, though that’s nice; not knowledgeable, though that’s
useful; not athletic, though we’d all take a few more gold medals; not wealthy, though
it’s nice to have a bit of luxury now and again; not beautiful, though we can all learn
to smile; not multi-talented, though we can all dream; not famous, though we all like
a bit of attention. Solomon doesn’t ask for any of these things. Solomon asks for an
‘understanding mind’ – sometimes translated a ‘listening heart.’ He’s asking for
wisdom.
And, thanks to the great philosophers and theologians, we can recognize that there
can be no wisdom without courage, temperance, justice, faith, hope, and love.
Without those virtues wisdom is stripped down to desiccated qualities like
knowledge, information, cleverness and wit. But with those virtues, with courage,
with temperance, with justice, with faith, with hope, and with love, you can find a
true wisdom that’s truly the highest aspiration of any education, infant, junior,
secondary, college, and beyond.
Look at what God says to Solomon: ‘Because you’ve asked for wisdom, and not riches
or honour, I’m glad to give you riches and honour as well.’ The point is, riches and
honour are useless without wisdom – and the same goes for beauty or cleverness or
athleticism or fame or any concoction of talents. If you’re looking for an infants’
school for your child or a university for yourself, and you’ve ploughed through league
tables and journey times and gossip about courses and fears about competition,
there’s only one question that really matters: is this a place where I or a person I care
for can learn wisdom – and in learning wisdom become a courageous, patient, just,
faithful, hopeful, and loving human being?
And what, in practice, does that wisdom mean for you and me? What does it mean to
have a listening heart and an understanding mind? I believe it means the capacity to
hold together two things that are seldom juxtaposed. On the one hand lies the ability
to incorporate intricate complexity and diversity, to comprehend profound pain and
alienation, to live with serious ambiguity and tension, to appreciate enormous depth
and texture, to perceive patterns in that kaleidoscope but to enjoy its myriad wonder
even when a pattern is hard to see. On the other hand lies the ability to live and speak
and act from deep simplicity and unassuageable joy: to bring from the storehouse of
complexity what’s timely for today, and to do so with disarming and memorable
elegance. In short, to fathom complexity yet render simplicity. That, I believe, is
wisdom.
And so I ask again, with trepidation and longing, Where may such wisdom be found?
Well, wisdom requires humility, so it has to be a place that listens to tradition,
because tradition is the distilled and crystallized wisdom of those who have gone
before us. It has to be a place of diversity, because to grow in wisdom requires being
confronted with those who look and think and believe and live differently to oneself.
It has to be a place that’s close to real poverty, because only the truly poor know what
it means to live on what money can’t buy and to depend utterly on the grace of God.
It must be a place that’s comfortable with ordinary, the everyday business of eating
and selling and singing and cleaning and talking to strangers and friends. It needs to
be open to the extraordinary, the wonderful in sight and sound and beauty and truth.
And, if you look back to the Solomon story, it must be a place that begins and ends
with worship, because only in right relation to God can one gain perspective on all
other things.
What I’ve just described is a church. The embodiment of wisdom is perhaps too
much for any one of us alone to aspire to. But we’re not called to aspire to wisdom on
our own. We’re called to aspire to wisdom together. That’s what a church is called to
be. A church is called to be a community of wisdom that holds together the
complexity of tradition and humility and diversity and the poor and the ordinary and
the extraordinary on the bedrock of worship, and yet issues forth in gestures and
words and lives of disarming simplicity and infectious joy.
That’s what a church is called to be. That’s what this church is called to be. Solomon
had a dream. I have a dream too. This is my dream: that one day in the future, maybe
sooner, maybe later, the Lord will appear to all those who love St Martin’s, and will
ask, gently, that terrifying and thrilling question: ‘Where may wisdom be found?’
And we shall answer, humbly, meekly, but truthfully, ‘Here. It may be found here.’