Accessing God's wisdom

Sunday 26^th – Trinity 7 – Proper 12

1 Kings 3:5-12. When asked what God should give him, Solomon famously requests Wisdom – the most highly prized attribute for a near Eastern King. Although the narrative describes Solomon as a child, he may have been around twenty at the time so the description can also be seen as indicating humility as much as his actual age.

Romans 8: 26-39. The final part of chapter 8 articulates the fact that all things, meaning the longing of creation, the activity of the Spirit and even man’s inarticulate cries do not exist apart from the will of God. God can even use our weakness and turn it to the good. God, foreknew, predestined, called, justified and glorified. The point here is not to figure out who is in and who is out but to emphasise that God is the one who designs and desires our salvation. No human can secure it and no human can jeopardize it. God decides and God is love and nothing can separate us from that love.

Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52. A collection of parables including the mustard seed and the leaven emphasising how the gospel will grow from a small base and act almost imperceptibly as an agent keeping society configured towards the good, and then the parables of the treasure and the pearl which tell of the incalculable necessity and value of the gospel. We end with the dragnet which is similar to the wheat and tares parable from last week and is typically Matthean in its message of threat and punishment.

It causes a great deal of anxiety for some Christians that we are such a small percentage of society as a whole but the parable of the yeast is a powerful corrective to that view.

Now you could describe a parable as God’s wisdom distilled into story form and in the parable just as a small amount of yeast can make the whole loaf rise. In the same way a few Christians whose lives are oriented towards God can have an enormous influence on society as a whole.

Yeast isn’t obvious or even visible but its presence is unmistakable. We would only notice if it was no longer there at all. Both active and cultural Christians together contribute to keeping the orientation of society as a whole pointing towards righteousness and trying to embody God’s wisdom.

This is the central premise of author Tom Holland’s book “Dominion” that the imprint of Christian assumptions, culture and worldview lie embedded so deep within Western culture that we don’t even notice it any more.

We all play our part contributing to the fabric of society however large or small our individual contribution may be, and none of us can accurately measure how what or who we may influence.

But we do know that as part of the body of Christ all of us are needed to contribute what we can.

Those of us who do find and believe that God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself are like those who have found the pearl of great price. We have stumbled across and found the truth. The kingdom of God becomes indispensable and eternally necessary to us and we more consciously embody and advance the way of Love in our lives. When this happens the influence we have on society as a whole as the leaven, can develop but we have to use great wisdom in order to do so.

Wisdom is the greatest attribute we can exercise, and it was wisdom that Solomon asked for to enable him to carry out his God given role as leader of the Jewish people.

Wisdom is the good application of experience and knowledge, understanding and insight. Wisdom can also be a repository of the collective wisdom of groups of people like the church so we learn and grow by mining the collective wisdom of the church.

So reading great minds like Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, or Mother Theresa and many, many, others, for example, one benefits from their great learning and contemplation of the Bible and reflection on lived experience.

Wisdom has always been closely associated with God, with whole books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job being dedicated to the use and application of  Wisdom. And wisdom famously depicted as a female voice, Sophia, in the Bible describes her association with God at the dawn of creation in Proverbs and saying how she delights in the human race. This underlines how important and  fundamental is wisdom to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Also it says in proverbs that the beginning of Wisdom is the fear of the Lord, fear in this case meaning awe and respect and submission to God, so humility is closely associated with wisdom.

People often ask what is the way forward for the church in the 21^st Century. They also ask about what they themselves are to do?

In the end, as a community and as individuals we need to pray for wisdom to act wisely to be the leaven in our community and network of contacts. Through keeping close to God we will discern our way forward as it reveals itself to us. At national, local and individual level I recommend that we pray this wise and simple prayer written by Amy Carmichael that seeks to build God’s church.

“Holy Spirit, think through me till your ideas are my ideas”

Put yourself in God’s way, be open and willing to receive his promptings and His way forward will make itself apparent.

Amen.