De Profundis - Out of the Depths
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: proverbs 8.1, 22-31; Psalm 104.26-37; Colossians 1.15-20; John 1.1-14
Around Easter in 2001, I was entertaining some friends with dinner in my student bedroom when my landlord, who lived next door, knocked to say my mother was calling. A friend had called her in desperation as she’d been unable to get hold of me and we were flying together to France – at Ryan Air early – the next morning for a training week for a dream job we’d landed in Provence. Now I had forgotten. But ever flexible I packed my bag and an excellent friend agreed to drive me to the airport in a couple of hours. All was well and I arrived at the airport in plenty of time, only for my friend to arrive just 45 minutes before the flight. Her boyfriend’s van had broken down. We rushed through the easy going check-in – This was early 2001 – And ran to the gate. However, on the way Emma decided she needed a Burger King breakfast bap, so we stopped albeit briefly. But by the time we reached the gate we were told our bags had been removed and we were unable to board. We sullenly watched the take-off.
Now that was twenty years ago, and while I couldn’t tell you anything that happened more than 8 days ago, I have a very clear recollection of all those events. It’s the only time I’ve ever missed a plane, and I can never again truly enjoy a burger king breakfast. Obviously, everyone knows it’s possible to miss a flight. We’re mostly quite careful about it. But actually missing a flight changes your behaviour. It’s like losing husbands – losing one is a tragedy; Losing two would be careless. Rhiannon told me that she’s been getting life-insurance quotes this week. If anything happens to me, please do ask questions. With regards to missing planes, we can describe this as a sort of learned knowledge. To allow experience to instil more practical behaviour. And the Christian word for this kind of knowledge is wisdom.
So yes, changing energy companies every year, avoiding Hungarian wine, putting waterproof trousers on your child every time they leave the house, all counts as wisdom. And wisdom is most effective, most transformative when it comes from suffering. Those are the moments most likely to change our behaviour. Strangely, the one immunity to this, the area where wisdom is most absent, is having children. No amount of suffering with indefatigable toddlers, it seems, can dissuade you from having more children.
Which brings us neatly to this Word made flesh. The reading we heard from Proverbs, is clearly a source of inspiration for John. Wisdom is a section of the Hebrew Bible – sayings, songs and stories designed to teach us how to find the good life. The overall message is that faithfulness to God will lead to a good life, but there are enough swerve balls to put that in context. Ecclesiastes found that life is a great unhappiness and vanity, that ‘in much wisdom is much vexation’. Job found little justice in this world, but through his suffering found God. But in this section of proverbs wisdom is the master worker, working alongside God in creation. Which is to say that there is sense and meaning in creation; purpose; creation gives itself to be known and reveals its creator. John takes this up, echoing the language, ‘in the beginning’; here the Word, itself complimentary to the idealisation of Wisdom, but more directly related to God: In the beginning, not created; the Word, the divine speech, not another being; as St Paul writes ‘in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell’.
But this Word is not an abstract knowledge; it’s not the clarity of objective science; it is wisdom; the transformative knowledge of experience; and so the Word became flesh and lived among us. And what we will see as we move through Lent and the Desert, and into the Passion, is how suffering teaches; how suffering reveals; how it transforms; how it redeems.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Jesus – if you looked at his life against other religious figures – Is an absolute unity of his teaching and life. So he teaches us to love our neighbour, and through parables and kindnesses, expands on how we must forgive, and not judge; serve and not be distracted by the world; be patient in suffering, But extravagant in generosity. But all this is revealed in concrete in the story of his life and death. If wisdom is a sort of incarnate knowledge; Christ is the incarnate divinity. And as wisdom is gained through experience and reflection, through suffering and perseverance; so Christ reveals God through his kindness and teaching; then through suffering; through ‘loving them to the end’.
For various reasons I’ve been reading Oscar Wilde’s great letter De Profundis this week, written from prison; and, what’s worse, Reading prison. The train station is bad enough, and I imagine the gaol 120 years ago was quite a bit worse. Incidentally, he was held initially here in Wandsworth prison, and endured the horror of being humiliated on parade at Clapham station before jeering crowds. What Wilde is working out through this letter is how to make sense of this profound experience of suffering. Now I would preface this by saying that every person’s suffering is individual. It is not for me to explain why someone is suffering or how it is justifiable or secretly for the best. I don’t believe we can add up the good things of this world and subtract the bad, as in an equation. But Wilde find that he is able to thank God for his suffering. Suffering surprises him but gives his life new meaning. And at this point he describes that he has found ‘something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field’ and that is ‘humility.’ It’s worth remembering how completely Wilde was ruined by his experience of justice. Not only was prison physically dreadful, and permanently damaged his health, such that he died a few years later; but even afterwards he could not rejoin society. His children were taken away from him. He was impoverished. Ruined. He had to move to France.
But he can write humility ‘is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery… It could not have come before, nor later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it… Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.’ And this humility is a revelation, as suffering is a revelation, of what matters, of what is true, and the basis of how we can understand another person and love them. So he says that ‘if the world has… been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love’ and ‘Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling’.
What Wilde describes is the experience of intense suffering, that brings about a state of humility. And this gaining of wisdom teaches the soul to love. Really, what we see in John’s Gospel is the same thing from the opposite angle: Wisdom becomes incarnate in Christ. And is revealed to all in the humility and suffering that comes from love. Humility is the form of wisdom that both hides and reveals love, as it’s found among us.
The last year has shaken the world. It has shaken each of our lives. We have known sorrow. We will know more. Our faith challenges us to turn this experience, this sorrow, into wisdom. It may be that we can follow Christ and begin in humility; it may be that suffering teaches us humility; but if we are to grow through the hardships of this last year; if we are to remain true to our calling as Christians then we will choose wisdom over despair in finding meaning in creation; and not just sorrow. And we will choose love over self-protection, in bearing witness to the light that shines in the darkness. And we will be transformed by this incarnation; in coming to discover the meaning behind the universe, and its purpose in our lives. Amen.