Trinity: Wisdom

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31'; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

North of Swansea is a beautiful valley full of waterfalls, which my friends and i used to drive up to when we were teenagers in search of adventure. It’s hard to believe but when I was a teenager I wasn’t the hard-headed practical man of action I am now, but was metaphorically, and literally, especially after yesterday’s haircut – Thank you very much for noticing – a lot more blonde, with my golden locks mostly in the clouds. On the most memorable of these trips I was walking out with a cheese sandwich, lovingly made by mother, along the top of a particularly large waterfall. The water flowed gently, but dropped away thirty feet onto a narrow shelf before descending a further thirty feet on to rocks. It was a particularly attractive vista and I’ve always had a somewhat insouciant, comfortable indifference to heights so I benignly wandered along the edge eating my delicious sandwich. Waterfalls being what they are, the rocks were wet and rather slippery from having been worn down for thousands of years. Naturally, being also clumsy, I lost my footing and shot into the air, arms flailing wildly. By some miracle I landed in a crouch not three inches from the edge, beloved cheese sandwich still firmly gripped in my hand. Being seventeen I was actually rather pleased with myself and rather than learning from the experience grew none the wiser. Such fantasies of immortality only belong to youth. It’s perhaps justice that it’s now my fate to run around after Oberon preventing him from the fate I evaded. This airheadedness though was fairly characteristic behaviour for me at the time. At school I was considered most likely to be run over walking home from school in my own little world, and I frequently turned up to hockey games without shorts, shin pads or once a hockey stick. You might well say that I was lacking in wisdom.

Wisdom, as endorsed by our Old Testament lesson, hardly sounds relevant today; It’s a bit old-wives-talesy - if you remember Blackadder, being wise is one of the “two things you should know about the wise woman” (I’ll leave you to guess the other); equally wisdom sounds a little bit “Game of Thrones” where the wise king is the one who is slightly less homicidal than the other ones and talks in impressive pseudo-Shakespearean English. As Blackadder corrects the old crone though: ‘yes it is, not “that it be” ’.

In any case, as a concept, wisdom is a little dated.  But understood as practical reason, wisdom is as important a value as ever. How often does the lament go up in politics, in religion, especially in laws and regulations that they lack common sense? Political correctness, legalism, bureaucracy gone mad. Well I want to suggest two ways in which our practical wisdom can fail: where we are either too fearful to step into the river to behold the panorama, or too reckless and find ourselves close to destruction. These relate to how we understand the past and our traditions; are we frozen by them – or do we think we can leave them behind altogether?

The first way involves being tied down by the immovable weight of the past. There is nothing so exasperating when you’re trying to do something new and exciting as someone trumpeting “well this is the way we’ve always done it” –   as though that’s a justification in itself. Fear of change is hard wired into human nature and nowhere is it more felt than in churches. When you first apply for a faculty you receive an automatic response: “HOW DARE YOU.” Then you have to click 400 times on the fast moving “Oh if you really must” button. 3 years later and you can change the colour of the paint on the railings. One can see these threats of the past, both as a deadweight or as an irrelevance, in his well-known expression: ‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living’.

The second way, equally disastrous, is to suppose we’re riding the crest of a wave, seeing the world clearly for the first time. This attractive position of arrogance and ignorance, masquerading as freedom and innovation, either evaporates quickly through lack of roots and depth, or does untold, irreparable damage. A former archbishop of York, who described himself as a ‘Conservative liberal’ quoted G.K. Chesterton on this issue: ‘If democracy means that I give a man a vote despite the fact that he is my chauffeur, tradition means that I give a man a vote despite the that fact that he is my great-great-grandfather’. Presumably in Chesterton’s day only men could be chauffeurs.

Christianity has always lived in this tension. The Trinity, you may have noticed is very male, awaiting its Ghostbusters-style remake. And yet in today’s Gospel the Spirit will ‘declare to you the things that are to come’, the guide for the present; a tacit acknowledgment that the Church must rediscover the gospel in every generation, as T. S. Eliot put it, the Church must be ‘forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.’

Christ himself holds this tension within him: ‘This is he who was from the beginning, who appeared new and was found to be old, and is ever born young in the hearts of the saints’. That’s from the second-century Epistle to Diognetus; Christ is new and old, both a conservative and a reformer. And traditionally Christ is associated with the figure of Wisdom in the Old Testament. We can hear echoes of John 1, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God’ in the Old Testament lesson, ‘where wisdom calls from the beginning of creation before the springs and mountains and fields, with God like a master worker, delighting in the human race’. Wisdom, like Christ, stands between tradition and reform, conservatism and radicalism. Wisdom is the ability to discern against the weight of tradition and the levity of reform, the path for church and society.

Now you might be thinking, this is all very well, but I come to church once a year on Trinity Sunday to hear and learn about the Trinity and so far you’ve barely mentioned it. Give me more of that three in one, one and three stuff. I hear you clamour.

What I’ve been trying to articulate, though, is intended as a sort of picture of the Trinity. The Church throughout the ages has tried to talk about God as eternal and yet involved, still and still moving. If we think of the Triune God as that which is eternal and unchanging, but also that which is new and entirely unexpected, and revealed in the present moment, we have a picture of it. We should never get comfortable thinking we’ve got the measure of God. But our traditions of speaking about God, the Christian faith, represents thousands of years of accumulated wisdom, which in different ways try to sound it. Each generation discovers this afresh drawing on what has gone before but equally needing to discover who Christ is today in a world that has changed out of the imagination of the first Christians.

But at the heart of this doctrine is the principle that God is involved in creation from the beginning as wisdom. Which is to say that life is meaningful. Often in the midst of life, with its suffering, its tragedies and its losses, the meaning can seem obscured or ridiculous. Wisdom must be sought and is only discovered between the riches of the past and our present experiences. If we let either dominate we risk not having faced up to reality, or a shallow, modish engagement in the Now; like only listening to classical music through P. Diddy remixes. To achieve wisdom, to try and come to terms with the Triune God, means stepping into the river to behold the view, without allowing ourselves to be swept onto the rocks below. Being part of the tradition while looking beyond it.

Next year our church will turn 150 years old and our parish will celebrate its centenary, when it shuffled off the yoke of its mother church St Mary. Deo gratia. There has been change; but as long as we hold on to this balance, moving forward with the riches of our tradition, we will continue to worship and share in the life and wisdom of the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.