Sermon: Wisdom

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 23rd February 2014

Service:

Evensong

Readings:

Proverbs 8:30-31

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 10.2M)

‘I, wisdom, was daily God’s delight, rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race’. (Proverbs 8.30-31)

+ In nomine Patris…

One aspect of Christian discipleship, and the ministry of this Cathedral, is the pursuit of wisdom. That pursuit is in theological endeavour, that constant searching and re-searching of the God who searches us out and knows us; it is in delighting and rejoicing in God’s creation, animal, vegetable and mineral; and in paying attention to the ways in which we shape wise living as people who are open to be formed by the promise of the coming Kingdom of God.

More widely seeking out wisdom is part of the human enterprise and quest. My colleagues at the University of Surrey search and re-search the intricacy of creation. They may not put it like that! They research the world and some of its biggest challenges, so in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences a challenge around the global availability of water has been researched and addressed so that ground breaking water desalination technologies have been developed. In the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences prostate cancer diagnostics have been worked on and research into many different aspects of human health around diet, nursing care and midwifery. In the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences not only is dance and theatre delighted in, but in psychology, sociology, politics, English literature and art they observe and reflect on what it is to be human as social animals for the betterment of human existence. That is something of what a University is about, pursuing wisdom in researching, learning and wondering. And there is more besides. Surrey Satellite Technology even searches the very heavens.

A nagging worry, though, is that this research and human pursuit of wisdom somehow denudes creation of its beauty. It might be said to dismember beauty. But that would be to ignore Wisdom’s presence in and through creation. As Wisdom says herself:

When God established the heavens I was there,

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above…

when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was beside him, like a master worker,

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race. (Proverbs 8.27, 28a, 29b, 30-31)

There is wisdom dancing delightedly with God in the very creation of the world. So in what is discovered of the world we don’t detract from the mystery of creation but rather expose and reveal that in which wisdom delights, and we delight in it too.

What is striking to me in that reading from Proverbs is that word delight. It is a delightful word. It sounds as if something is being lit up, illuminated and coming alive in a new way. Proverbs delightfully describes the God who delights in us, and Wisdom, she who delights in God’s creation and each creature of it. Wisdom is woven around and into the very fabric of creation. In pursuing wisdom we don’t unravel that fabric rather we delight in the threads and see how they are connected to the other threads. We follow where wisdom has already danced.

To be able to delight in something or someone is a great gift. The prophet Isaiah does this, speaking of a renewed creation, a new Jerusalem, that is no longer desolate or forsaken but is fruitful and what he calls, Hephzibah, meaning, ‘My Delight is in Her’ (Isaiah 62.4). The challenge for us, and indeed for a University without a theology faculty, is to ask how that delighting in the created order - human beings and the physical world - is understood in the one way missing from the modern secular University, which could be called the doxological approach. Doxology is about glory, the glory of God and the glory ascribed and offered to God.

Delight is the key to this doxological approach, an approach of the offering of worship. Wisdom’s song is a song of worship and glory and delight. Worship picks up the strands of wisdom’s fabric and weaves them to lay them around and before the throne of grace.

We see this in the life of Mary’s. A free translation of the Magnificat might go like this, ‘My soul magnifies the LORD and my spirit delights in God my saviour’. This delighting in God our saviour by Mary allows God’s Word to be woven into the fabric of her existence and make it her song. In the Magnificat Mary weaves the story of God’s wisdom into her life in a delight-ful way. The challenge for us is how we pick up the strands of wonder and delight in God’s creation and all that he does for us. Where do we find God’s wisdom in what lies ahead of us this week, in the sorrows and trials as well as the joys of life?

Delight and wonder in God’s wisdom is integral to a vision of the heavenly worship that Revelation describes. The vision of jasper and cornelian, of rainbows and emeralds, of flashes of lightening and pealing thunder, flaming torches and seas of glass, of creatures and flying birds is a delightful and delighting vision of the offering back of worship to the Creator, to whom wisdom is a delightful companion. Doxological searching and re-searching takes us ultimately back to the source of all things, the One ‘who was, and is, and is to come, the Lord God, the Almighty’. (Revelation 4.8b)

What Revelation describes is not an otherworldly event but a vision of a world renewed by wisdom and delight in which all threads come together in worship, praise, adoration and delight:

You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive, glory and honour and power,

for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. (Revelation 4.11)