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“Wisdom in the Inward Parts” |
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Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin |
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In this morning’s reading it is Job’s turn to be called to the witness stand. He has finished his examination of the Creator’s ways, of which he is not at all happy. After all, Job lost his wealth, children, and health. It is now the Lord’s turn to make His case. The sky darkens. Out of nowhere, a gust of wind tears off the doors of the court house. Women clutch at their skirts. The men hold on to their yarmulkes. The Lord answers Job out of a whirlwind.
The whirlwind or vortex is nature’s harbinger of a new creation. In the language of science, myth and dream symbolism, whirlwinds represent a state of balanced turbulence, the precondition of creativity. I once dreamed that a tornado picked up a bus I was in, carried it a couple of hundred yards, and flipped it a few times. I emerged shaken, but unscathed. A man approached, and told me I had been selected to name a new species of tree. In the aftermath of a whirlwind, a new creation was being called forth.
With Job in the witness stand, the Lord speaks: “Who is it that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall answer. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” It’s a great opening gambit. Job’s silence speaks volumes. God peppers Job with plenty of evidence that all of creation fits and flows together pretty darned well; the measurements of the earth are precise, the foundations are solid, the rain and the lightning obey God’s voice, and all the animals are fed. It’s a rather lengthy list by the time God is finished pointing out the elegant workings of nature. God’s case is then summarized in a single question:
At this point, all of us are called to the stand with Job. At any given moment, it can seem like the whole universe is either indifferent toward our personal predicaments or actively hostile. These experiences do have a way of narrowing our perspective. God begins his defence by broadening Job’s perspective, and our own. Start with a point of matter much smaller than the head of a pin, add 14 billion years, and here we are this morning, singing hymns, praying, listening to beautiful music, reflecting even now on the meaning of our lives. Yes, there have been cataclysms, periods of extinction, and much struggle, which all of us know a thing or two about. But the larger arc of the evolutionary tale is toward more abundant life. There’s no denying it, when you take the long view. It might not always go exactly as we planned, but the beauty and elegance of creation speaks to what God calls “wisdom in the inward parts of creation.”
At this point, God calls our best scientists to take the stand. Not a one can tell us why, after a few hundred million years of being pummelled by meteors and struck by lightning, life emerged on the planet earth in the form of bacteria. From whence this wisdom, which caused these bacteria to stop fighting each and instead decide to feed each other, thus allowing more complex forms of life to emerge? Most scientists admit that they displayed stunning intelligence. Yet they have no brains. Again, what forces were at play creating the chlorophyll molecule which figured out how to convert the sun’s light into energy for life? Because of it’s intelligence we’re sitting there this morning. Then one day life stood up on two legs, looked out at the stars and began to wonder how it all happened.
“Tell me”, demands the Lord of Job, “who has given understanding to the mind (Job 38:36)?” What is the source of our capacity to understand? What is the nature and origin of the minds by which we are able to gaze out at the stars and all of creation and wonder at the mystery of it all? Some scientists are convinced that the mind comes out of the grey matter inside our skull. While the brain is a marvellous instrument, it is not the source of intelligence in the universe. The intelligence of the brainless pond scum, often used as a metaphor for low-life humans, baffles our best cellular biologists. The human brain was constructed in the research laboratory of life, over a few billion years, by all the creatures which preceded us. It is an evolutionary marvel, to be sure, designed to receive, reflect, and transmit a pre-existing intelligence infusing all creation. But mind doesn’t come out of a brain. It comes through the brain.
The Bible has a name for this intelligence which transcends our brains - wisdom. When God asks Job, “Who has put wisdom in the inward parts?” (Job 38:37) it is allusion to this holy intelligence. Some, of course, think it’s merely the blind forces of chance and genetic mutation, organisms hell-bent on survival. But look around. Survival instincts can’t explain the lavishness beauty and diversity of this planet. An instinct for survival doesn’t do justice to be majesty of an eagle, or the magnificence of a whale. No, God has set wisdom loose in the inward parts of all creation, reaping a harvest of unspeakable beauty. This intelligence doesn’t direct creation or lay down a divinely ordained blueprint; rather all levels of creation are infused by it, setting within every being the desire for more life and more beauty.
When the human being emerged on the scene, a relative newcomer in the family of life, problems cropped up. In the 4th century, a theologian named Augustine concluded that all of nature was fallen, and that only God, seen as existing outside of nature, could redeem creation. Nature and grace were split apart, and what got lost in the process, was any sense of this “divine wisdom in the inward parts”, the presence of any natural grace. Nature was rendered godless, an inert commodity to be exploited, extracted, subdued. So we elevated our own intelligence, disconnected from the evolutionary wisdom of the last 14 billion years. This disconnected intelligence is wreaking havoc on our planet.
Case in point: two disciples, James and John, figure out that this Jesus’ movement might just have legs, and they start scheming to occupy a seat of honour for all eternity, to be Jesus’ right and left hand men in heaven. They pitch the plan to Jesus. Their impetuousness is breath-taking. “Give us whatever we ask, Jesus.” As if, he’s going to fall for that one! It’s like asking someone to promise they’re not going to be mad at us before we drop the bomb on them. Jesus, in whom the wisdom of the heavens and the earth are gathered up, concludes that they don’t know what they are asking (Mark 10:38). What they don’t get is that they are reflecting a disconnected wisdom of Caesar, empire wisdom, not the inward wisdom of God.
This conventional wisdom encourages us to seek power and status to improve our position in the world, to see how many people or nations we can get to jump to attention on our behalf. Our nation’s proposed Clean Air Act is a sham and a shame. It’s clear that the one thing driving the legislation is, in the words of our Prime Minister, Canada’s potential to be a super-power in energy production. Our life style, standard of living, personal and corporate wealth is clearly being put before the health of the whole planet. The 300 million year old sludge in Northern Alberta is our nation’s ticket to status and power. This is not the divine wisdom at work in at work in all creation. It is human folly, the product of hearts and minds who don’t get it, that our planet cannot take another 40 years of a carbon-based economy. Our planet is in deep trouble. Great Britain gets it. Europe gets it. This new legislation is based in the same mind-set which James and John brought to Jesus. This is our ticket to get to the top of the heap. It’s our chance to be number one!
We could take as our model for the alternative wisdom of Christ, the planet herself. The Gaia hypothesis, put forward by James Lovelock, is now mainstream science. It recognizes that the earth is a living organism dedicated to the work of balancing conditions on the earth to make it fit for life. For example, despite the sun giving off 25% more heat today than when the planet first came into being, Gaia has shielded us from this potentially disastrous increase in temperature. We are absolutely dependent on Gaia for life. She uses all her power for one purpose only, to enable life on earth to thrive. According to Lovelock, Gaia is at her limits. She may not be able to compensate for human folly much longer. She needs our cooperation, and this legislation is a denial of reality.
The problem with being at the top of the heap is that when the sub-structure below crumbles it’s a long way down. Humans are totally dependent on the bio-systems which came before us. When they begin to collapse, there will be an exponential collapse of all our systems, energy, health, and food production, for a start. Here’s the paradox of the inward, natural wisdom. It’s in our own self-interest to serve the needs of the whole first. Corporations and citizens in general are going to have to realize that only by putting the needs of the planet first and serving her, do we have any future at all. For three hundred years, since the Industrial Revolution began, we’ve been acting as though the earth was meant to serve us. We’ve extracted her resources, appropriated wilderness habitat, been the cause of initiating the sixth great extinction of species in the history of the earth, and then used the atmosphere, the soil, rivers, lakes, and oceans as a garbage dump for our toxic waste. Friends, we don’t live on the earth; we are embodiments of the earth. We’ve done all this because conventional wisdom was disconnected from the inward wisdom of creation, the divine intelligence that’s been at work for 14 billion years of the universe at large, and for five billion years in the evolution of the planet earth. We took the throne and made the earth our servant.
Jesus tells James
and John that it is utter foolishness what they are proposing.
God rests his case; Job’s perspective is broadened. He experiences genuine humility. He says, “I had heard of you with the hearing of my ears. But now my eye sees you. Therefore I repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:5-6) May our own eyes and the eyes of those entrusted to lead our nation, truly see, and repent. Amen. |
