Sermon: Lady Wisdom’s Children

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Trinity Sunday 30 May 2010, 5pm

Barbara Brown Taylor

• Proverbs 8

Thank you for welcoming a stranger to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. This is my second trip to the Land of the Long White Cloud but my first at this particular season, which has given me new eyes—for the sideways slant of the sun’s rays, lighting the earth at an angle unknown in my part of the world; for the fattening of the sheep—or at least their wool; for the thinning of the crowds, as those who can afford to flee the chill of winter head elsewhere in search of the next perfect climate.

It is the exact opposite, where I come from. The first strawberries have just appeared, the temperature is climbing and the chimney sweep is raising her annual clutch of noisy babies in my chimney. Last year one of them fell through the flue and sat in the fireplace looking confused until I dusted him off, stuck him back up inside the chimney, and listened while he told his mates that they would never believe what had just happened to him. He had been to hell and back, and the devil was a big woman with white hair.

Since I am here tonight, with you, what I notice most is that the church calendar matches the earth’s seasons better here than it does where I come from. Back home, the great feasts of the church year all happen while the days are warming up. Easter means it is time to get the garden in. Pentecost means school is almost out, and Trinity means a sermon on church doctrine followed by a national holiday that marks the start of summer.

After that it is beach towels, rubber rafts, and camping trips all the way. The church calls it Ordinary Time—but plenty of churchgoers call it Time Off—weeks and weeks when everyone expects church attendance to be down, not only because there are so many things to do out of doors but also because there is not much going on in church: no trumpets, no big crowds, no special Lenten speakers or Easter parades.

For all I know people take time off here too, only for different reasons. There’s some good skiing on the South Island, I hear. Plus, you need some weekends to get the furnace serviced, winterize the car, and put flannel sheets on the beds—all those ordinary things to be done during ordinary time. God may not take a Sunday off, but almost everyone else does.

I know this sounds like a pep talk about showing up for worship, but it’s not. It’s about the demotion of the ordinary, at least in the life of faith—not just ordinary time but also ordinary people, ordinary places, and ordinary speech—ordinary life, in short, which is the kind most of us live most of the time.

For some people this is no doubt a relief. You don’t have to be on all the time. You can ease up for a while, and when you’re ready for a booster shot, God will be right where God is supposed to be.

But for other people I think it can be a kind of long loneliness, as they suppose that the reason they feel so distant from God is because their ordinary lives are too far removed from the sacred precincts where God lives. Their jobs are too secular, their lives too dull, their thoughts too common, their concerns too worldly.

Most of us have accepted this division between the sacred and the secular so thoroughly that we can distinguish between them without even thinking. For instance, is God more present:

• At an altar or a fish market?

• In a pastor’s study or a loan office?

• During a church service or a rugby match?

• On Easter Sunday or the twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time?

Even if you hesitated with your answers (because you know I am up to something), you knew which ones were right, didn’t you?

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the right answers, either, since the goal of any religious tradition is to teach followers where they can find living water, wholesome food, trustworthy guides, saving knowledge. Why else do we teach children The Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer? We do it because we want them to know God’s way so they can follow it--and all in all, a church service seems a better place for them to learn that than a rugby match.

The risk, of course, is that we will at the same time teach them to divide the world in two: sacred on one side, secular on the other; safety on one side, danger on the other; people like us on one side, strangers on the other. If they learn this lesson very well then they will eventually stop looking for God anywhere but church, just as they will stop hearing God’s Word in any language but the Bible’s, or seeing God in any neighbor who does not look like them—and this will empty so much of the world of meaning for them that they will have to learn to walk from religious oasis to religious oasis, like children picking their ways across a fast moving stream on the backs of barely exposed rocks. They will live most of their lives in what they have learned to call ordinary time, wondering where God has gone.

The good news is that Lady Wisdom will keep an eye on them there. Even if they cannot see her, she can still see them—at the market, on the ski slope, at the rugby match, at school. No one ever taught her such places were too common for her. According to her self-description in Proverbs 8, she is much more comfortable in the public square than she is in churches. She likes being where ordinary people spend their ordinary time:

On the heights, beside the way,

at the crossroads she takes her stand;

beside the gates in front of the town,

at the entrance of the portals she cries out:

“To you, O people, I call,

and my cry is to all that live.” (vv 2-4).

Since we don’t have gates to most of our towns anymore, you will have to use your imaginations. I just came through immigration on Thursday, so that’s one possibility: Lady Wisdom takes her stand where people from all nations cross borders, wondering if their papers are in order, whether they will be admitted or refused.

The next day I sat in a café drinking tea as I watched people going to work in downtown Wellington on a blustery Friday morning—piles of them, bundled up in wet raincoats, half of them with their umbrellas turned inside out by the wind while they waited for the light to change at the intersection of Featherston and Whitmore Streets.

Those who had waited longest shifted from foot to foot waiting for the squawk that means, “You may go now,” while those just arriving bumped into their backs—because their heads were down, and they hadn’t watched where they were going. They piled up like dark sticks caught in an eddy. Then the light changed and they flowed into the street on the current of a single river.

I did not know where they were all going, but Lady Wisdom did: some of them to school and others to the courthouse, some of them to sell things and others to buy them. They flowed like a single river and then they split off into their separate streams again--very few of them, I suspect, with the getting of wisdom on their minds--yet that was what Lady Wisdom offered them, both there at the crossroads and in all the places they were going: the chance to learn prudence, to avoid crookedness, to pursue justice, to govern rightly—not in some special class taught on six consecutive Wednesday nights in a quiet room but in the midst of their ordinary lives, among all the ordinary people who filled their days—rain or shine, morning or night--a thousand chances to gain wisdom at school, in court, at the marketplace, on the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads, beside the way, beside the gates.

Those are the places she teaches her children, Lady Wisdom says. Not all of them are tuned into her. Not all of them want to be, but she goes on with her lessons anyway, just in case. She is present in every transaction, every conversation, every apparent success and every so-called failure—offering her children the choice between making things better or making them worse, pointing the way that leads to life without blocking the way that leads to death—because the children have to learn to choose between those ways for themselves, every moment of every day. She cannot give them wisdom; she can only show them where wisdom is to be found.

“I love those who love me,” she says, “and those who seek me diligently find me,” so

Take my instruction instead of silver,

and knowledge rather than choice gold;

for wisdom is better than jewels,

and all that you may desire cannot compare with her.

I think it is important to note that Lady Wisdom is not a Christian. She is not against that or anything. She just declines to make such distinctions among her children. She delights in the whole human race, she says. She is not partial to any tribe, nation, or religion. Her cry is to all that live. How could it be otherwise, since she was with God before the beginning of the earth? When there were no depths she was brought forth, she says--before the mountains had been shaped, before God had made the world’s first bits of soil. When God marked out the foundations of the earth she was there like a master worker, and was daily God’s delight.

Daily, she says. Not just the seventh day, or the first. God delighted in her every day, whether they were working or resting, deciding on the shapes of the hills or testing recipes for seawater. When God got around to making human beings, Lady Wisdom delighted in them the way God delighted in her. There was nothing twisted or crooked in her children that could not be made straight. There was nothing wicked in them that a little wisdom could not cure.

If anyone had suggested to Lady Wisdom that she restrict her lessons to certain sacred precincts—or offer them only in the most exalted language on special days of the week—well, I can only imagine what she might have said. Absolutely not. Wisdom will be available 24/7—in the whole inhabited earth, to the whole human race. What is this “ordinary time” you speak of? Did you run that by God first?

It is a very curious thing, I think, that the church appoints this reading from Proverbs 8 as one of the choices for Trinity Sunday, when Christians are called to contemplate one of the central mysteries of their faith: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—oh, and please say hello to Lady Wisdom, God’s darling girl, God’s Right Hand Woman.

What is she doing here?

Can someone bring an extra chair?

Her appearance on this most doctrinal Sunday is almost like a wink, a kick under the table, by those who have sought God diligently enough to acquire the very great wisdom that at the end of the day there is no pinning God down, no limiting of the ways in which God loves--or whom God loves, or the places God shows up--speaking in what kind of voice, wearing what kind of clothes.

“To you, O people, I call,” Lady Wisdom says, “and my cry is to all that live.” Her children know her voice, and she calls them by name. “Happy is the one who listens to me,” she says, “watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors.”

As you leave through the high and holy doors of this place tonight, may they serve to remind you that there are no doors behind which God’s presence can be kept. Both Lady Wisdom and her Lord go with you, to watch and wait for you by all the other doors of your lives: school doors, prison doors, hospital doors, shop doors, bank doors, car doors, your own front doors. Watch for her too as you pass through them, for she is always pointing the way of life, whispering Choose, choose, my beloved child…

“For whoever finds me finds life.”

May it be so. Amen.

©Barbara Brown Taylor

Wellington, New Zealand

May 30, 2010