May 30, 2010
(First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday)

(From The Lectionary Page)

Proverbs 8 and Psalm 8

Photo of The Rev. Canon Joe Behen by The Rev. Canon Joe Behen

During the last week I found myself browsing through a website dedicated to the wisdom of Mark Twain.  He was presented there as an American voice of wisdom.  I agreed with that assessment, and it seemed as if instantly, an hour of my life disappeared, and the lawn remained un-mowed for one more day.  Mark Twain’s one and two line wisdom bites are real gems not easily forgotten.

“Love seems the swiftest,” he once wrote, “yet it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”

Twain’s wisdom was especially potent when it was served up with his bone dry sense of humor. 

His wisdom stays with you, and continues to call for your attention, whether you would have it do so or not.  “Loyalty to a petrified opinion,” he wrote, “never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
Today’s lesson from Proverbs talks about the public nature of wisdom.  It is found at the crossroads, beside the gates in front of the town. In other words, it is accessible to all.  But while accessible, it tends to resist definition.  It seems to be some kind of mixture between one’s knowledge and personal experience, all melded together with careful thought, and then sifted back through other experience, until Truth is produced.  After reading the Mark Twain sayings for a while, it dawned on me that perhaps all of the people that we’ve considered wise through the ages, have this one thing in common:  They have gone beyond trying to define and to answer, and have begun to move into something deeper.  They speak to us in ways that invite reflection.  When they speak to us, their wisdom seems to move us closer to Truth than to answers.

A number of years ago I attended a retreat, in which everyone was asked to think about, and then to share their images of what God might look like.  One elderly man, the last of us all to speak, said that God must look something like dirt.  “You know,” he said, “like soil.” 

Of course, knowing that we would have to know more about this image of the divine, the man went into his reasoning process.  “Well, I’ve always been a gardener.  And I think a lot about stories in the Bible that have to do with agriculture.  There’s one about a farmer who plants a seed, and a plant grows up from it and feeds him.  He doesn’t know how, it just does.  Well, what goes into that seed but what’s around it?  What changes the seed from what it was to what it is now, if not soil?  Now, I’m not saying that the dirt actually IS God, but what if that’s as close as we can get?  He’s always around, always creating.” 

The man paused for a while, and everyone sat silently, amazed at the depth of this metaphor.  Without looking up, he went on.  “And sometimes I think about dying, about going back to God.  And I think, ‘Where do we go when we die but into the soil.’  Heck, we literally become soil ourselves, you know.  I guess I think about this stuff most when I’m working in my garden. It always just makes me feel like praying.”  A tear in his eye betrayed the depth of his identification with this truth.

I’ve thought a lot through the years about the wisdom this man shared with us that day.  There was something about him that informs me to this day about human wisdom.

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Trinity.  From the time of the early fathers of the Church down to the present, the wise have found it useful to think of God in terms of Father, Son, and Spirit.  It’s a hard doctrine to come to terms with when our goal is to define this Trinitarian nature, or to distinguish between them in our experience of God or in our prayer.  But today’s gospel leaves little room for doubt that John has a Trinitarian understanding of God.  He doesn’t even try to explain it.  For John, it just is.  When he presents Jesus as speaking about the Father and the Spirit, it is nearly always done in one of two ways:

God as Trinity, is about relationship.  And we figure into that relationship in a surprisingly significant way.  John tells us that Jesus is glorified specifically in our hearing God in him, in our seeing God in the world.  Telling this to us in this particular way, is a reflection of John’s wisdom.

Such wisdom challenges us to stretch our thinking, and to see the world with new insight.  Going back to the reading from Proverbs, I am fascinated with what this writer chooses to associate with wisdom:

We are told that Wisdom was present when God created these things.  In other words, these things testify to God’s wisdom.  God rejoices in wisdom, in creation, and in us.  “I was daily His delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”  We are made for relationship with God and with God’s creation, and wisdom in all its forms attests to this.

The psalmist concurs with this image of God’s wisdom.  When reflecting on God’s work in creation, he or she looses altogether the self-centered-ness that so easily and so silently sneaks up on us all.  “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what is man that you should be mindful of him?”  This question would be destroyed altogether with any possible answer.  The psalmist in his or her wisdom understands this, and refuses any such attempt.  And yet, the answer seems to be there.  It’s actually less of an answer than it is a response.  That response is praise.  It is not planned.  It has no particular shape or form.  It can’t be calculated.  It just happens.  It seems that the psalmist would have us to understand such a response to God, to be the most natural human action of all.  “Out of the mouths of infants and children, your majesty is praised above the heavens.”  You can almost picture this writer,

Suddenly realizing her self in God’s presence, praise for God is all that can now happen.  It couldn’t be controlled if she chose to try.  It just happens.

This is what rises from the earth, beyond the heavens to God’s very self.  This is what the human person is made to be, and to do.  The delight created in such rejoicing is matched only by God’s own delight to witness it.  This is relationship with the Trinitarian God.  It is why God made us.  It is why Jesus was willing to hang on the cross.  It is why God’s spirit hovers ever so close to us.  This very hour, God and all of God’s creation is teeming with delight, as we lose ourselves in praise for the sheer joy of Him who made us.

Amen.