“Resolving to Increase in Wisdom”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
December 31, 2006

Luke 2:41-52

            I have difficulty imagining the Son of God being left behind his parents, but there you have it – Luke, Chapter Two. Mary and Joseph are a day’s journey out of Jerusalem, heading back home after a festival, when it hits them that it’s awfully quiet. They forgot the kid! Back they go, and when they find the 12-year old Jesus, he’s discussing the finer points of Jewish law with some rabbis in the Temple. The writer ends this singular account of Jesus’ early years by saying that Jesus “grew in wisdom” and in divine favour.

            I thought this made for a perfect New Year resolution – to grow in wisdom in the coming year. In my upcoming book - (I can’t quite get used to saying that yet) – I spend a whole chapter on Wisdom in the Bible. By way of summary, let me just say that Jesus regarded himself as “child” of Wisdom, and that the gospel writers saw him as an incarnation of the divine Sophia – the feminine personification of Wisdom.

            Wisdom is not about accumulating knowledge. You can have multiple PhD’s and still be lacking in it. Wisdom isn’t about what you know; it’s about applying what you know to living well – in right relationship with God, self, others, and the planet earth. This morning I want to outline what it is you’d be committing to if your New Year’s resolution was indeed to “grow in wisdom”. Let’s begin by making  “wisdom” into an acronym.

W. – the way of wisdom involves a spirituality of Wonder. Another word for wonder is awe – the letters stand for Awakening to Wonder Everywhere. A spirituality of awe or wonder forms the basis of every authentic spirituality – one that hasn’t hardened into an ideology of right beliefs. To grow in wisdom means to increase in one’s capacity to be amazed by life. This is not about intellectual comprehension; it’s about spiritual apprehension – the capacity to be apprehended by life’s mysteries. Wonder at the teeming miracle of life in this universe is the foundation of wisdom spirituality

The primary purpose of all education, religious and secular, is to help children and adults awaken to wonder. The manifest universe – the one we see and feel and taste and touch – is the exterior dimension of the interior life of the Spirit.  The Sufi poet, Rumi, said as much when he wrote: “the universe is the secret One slowly growing a body.” Or as Isaiah, the 8^th century Jewish prophet, put it: “the whole earth is full of God’s glory.”  Then he uttered those immortal words that are a part of every communion service. “Holy, holy, holy Lord.” Isaiah realized that the whole earth was shot through with Spirit. He awakened to wonder.

The religious life is not about believing the right things. It’s about being gob smacked by the wonder of life. The loss of wonder in the modern age led directly to the current ecological disaster. Every thing and every body, every species – including human beings are now valued according their economic utility. With this turn toward making everything a commodity, we lost the capacity for awe. Rabbi Abraham Heschel was right on the money: “forfeit awe and the world becomes a marketplace.”

I. and S. stand for Intelligent Spirituality. To grow in Wisdom is to evolve a more intelligent spirituality that consists of the following elements:

1. It is in a continual state of evolution – no single religion contains all truth (including Christianity) – we live in an evolving universe, and therefore truth evolves in lock step with our evolving perspective. Any religion or spiritual system that claims to be the exclusive repository of a timeless and unchanging truth is dangerous – period. Run, don’t walk, in the opposite direction. An intelligent spirituality is always opening to new information, new knowledge and insight, not shutting down and shutting out.
2. An intelligent spirituality celebrates that Spirit is in everything and everything is in Spirit. You don’t have to skip over the created universe to get to God. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear Spirit is the radiant presence shining out from all creation.
3. An intelligent spirituality recognizes the radical interconnectedness of all levels of reality. We are connected physically, biologically and spiritually to everything in the universe. There are differences, of course, but no absolute disconnection anywhere. This is the basis of our commitment to justice for the left-behinds, human and other-than-human. We are kin. The realization of our radical interconnectedness issues in a shift from an ethic of “us” to an ethic of “all of us.”
4. Intelligent spirituality affirms and celebrates all paths to wonder including science and all religious traditions.
5. An intelligent spirituality recognizes and celebrates the planet earth and her creatures as teachers possessing vast intelligence. Five billion years of research and development has gone into making this planet before we ever arrived. Our attitude, therefore toward the earth and her creatures should be one of profound humility – not arrogance. Planetary intelligence signifies the presence of divine Wisdom in the universe – the goddess Wisdom in our tradition.

Seventy percent of all religious faith on the planet earth is arrested at a primitive level of spiritual development. It’s stuck at a level at which believers imagine that it’s us against a hostile world that has no room for us. So we’ll hold fast to our old beliefs and fight for them if we must. This is the belief that underlies terrorism and all religious violence throughout history.  The church, along with all other religious institutions, exist at this juncture in history to act as spiritual “conveyer belts” [1], transporting the public to the next stage of spiritual development. Wisdom spirituality helps people grow in spiritual intelligence.

D is for Developmental. I’ve alluded to this already in point #1.  The universe evolves. It is a developing reality. This is relatively new information, and most religious systems have not yet incorporated it. The ancients believed that everything was just plopped down by God in the beginning – various realms were believed to be created by God all at once -  matter, life, mind, heavenly bodies, angels and soul/spirit – these realms existed in ascending order of value. The goal of life was to rise above the lowest level – matter – and ascend to spirit. With Darwin and then with the study of cosmology – (the study of the large scale structure of the universe) – we now know that it wasn’t all just set down at the beginning. Matter is not the lowest rung on the ladder of existence. It’s the exterior dimension of the interiority of Spirit, manifesting over vast amounts of time.

            We are now able to see intentionality in this unfolding of life – toward increased consciousness, diversity, beauty, and ultimately love. This is how Spirit is non-coercively moving in and through the realm of time and space. This means – and here’s the kicker for a wisdom spirituality – the point of your life is to align yourself with the evolving intention of Spirit. We are the ones who can consciously choose – or refuse – the nudging of Spirit. Wisdom spirituality incorporates an evolutionary or developmental perspective. To put it bluntly, we were meant to evolve.

O is for “One Earth Community”.  Wisdom spirituality is grounded in the intuitions of our primal peoples all over the planet; there is only one community of life and we are meant to be members of this community, not rulers. James Lovelock and Lyn Marguilis are scientists who named the planet  “Gaia” – after a Greek goddess. By personifying the planet in this way, they hoped that humans would be able to see the earth as a living organism. Decades of scientific rationalism, based in what is now an outdated scientific model, tended to see the earth as an inert object. Now we know that the earth herself has been at work for five billion years regulating the atmosphere in such a way to sustain life on the planet. For example, despite the fact that the sun is 25% hotter than it was when the planet was formed, the temperature on the surface has remained constant – otherwise all life would have come to an end long ago.

            The capacities of our planet to self-regulate are being sorely tested at this point in human history.  Our carbon emissions trap heat that is heating the planet up beyond what can sustain life. Finally, our politicians are believing that global warming is real and needs to be dealt with. Gaia needs our help if the evolutionary journey is to continue. We do not live “on” the earth, friends. We “are” the earth in a self-conscious form called the human being. Our primary identity in the 21^st century must shift from our tribe, our family, our nationality, even our religious affiliation – to being citizens of one earth.

            A Wisdom spirituality requires first that we reconnect with earth –take our place as members of one earth community– and then become actively involved in the repair of the earth. This is what Father Thomas Berry called The Great Work of the 21^st century – this is a core aspect of what it means to “grow in wisdom.”

            M is for memory. We are a forgetful lot. The list of what we’ve forgotten includes all of what I’ve been talking about. Our indigenous people were helped to remember by teaching their children legends. The details of these stories wouldn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, but what they pointed to is undeniable. Namely, at the heart of the universe is a loving, compassionate Spirit whose desire is to be manifest in each and every creature. In similar fashion, we don’t take our story of God found in Scripture literally, but we do take what this sweeping tale points toward seriously – a compassionate God who desires for us to grow in compassion and wisdom. To grow in wisdom is to inhabit these stories deeply, including the story of the Christ, to remind us of our essential identity as children of God. The first step is Biblical literacy – learning the story.

            The other story we have to help us remember is the evolutionary story of the universe. We now have the capacity to consciously reflect upon this 14 billion year old story of life as a story of Spirit unfolding. We can identify and articulate the dynamics of the universe story as well as notice that it is biased in the direction of increasing beauty, complexity, consciousness, and compassion. Through the eyes of faith, this is the non-coercive movement of Spirit in the realm of space and time. To grow in wisdom is to remember by deepening our knowledge of these two stories. It also means growing in our capacity to imaginatively set our own lives within the context of these two sacred narratives.

            In this New Year may we awaken to wonder, evolve toward an intelligent spirituality, consciously engage our evolutionary journey into Spirit, reconnect with the one earth community and work toward its healing, and remember our sacred stories – of creation and of Sacred Scripture. Next year at this time may it be said of us what Luke said of Jesus – that we grew in wisdom and divine favour.