“The Irrepressible Sophia”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
September 17, 2006

Proverbs 1:20-33    Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-8:1   Mark 8:27-38

             Once again, we have been shocked as a nation by the rampage of a young man in Montreal. Our hearts go out to the victims, to those hanging on for dear life, to those for whom the trauma of this event will be forever encoded in their very cells, and all those who grieve the death of Anastasia DeSousa. It seems so senseless. Another loner, bullied at school, nursing his anti-social feelings in the basement of his home. He feeds his rage with video games, his favourite apparently being, Super Columbine, the very name of another high school where a similar shooting occurred.

            Does this strike anyone else as evil? Not the young man’s behaviour, which goes without saying. No, I’m talking about society’s collusion in these slayings by not banning these violent video games. What good are they? Scott Peck tells the story of a young man who witnessed his brother commit suicide by shooting himself.  For Christmas that year his father gave him a rifle. Father saw nothing wrong in what he did. Peck concluded it was evil. We’ve all heard the rhetoric of video game-makers, that the games can’t be blamed for what happened. Of course, they aren’t to blame, not directly. Neither was the gun the father gave his son for Christmas. But in the fragile psyches of our most vulnerable, they feed the rage, and inure the user to the visceral reality of violence. At the breaking point, it’s all just a game. As the shooter wrote a couple days before he snapped. “Life is a video game. We’ve all got to go some time.”

            Have you seen the TV ads our national government is sponsoring to build up the Canadian Army? They’ve gone from using images of peace-keeping, to simulations of actual war games, using grenades, firing guns, driving armoured personnel carriers. Want some excitement kids? Join the army, get your own gun, and kill a terrorist. To their credit, they are honest. This is the new reality for Canada. This is Canada?  Our Prime Minister confirmed this past week that we are officially at war. How is it, that in the United States of America, the lid is coming off the can of lies this administration has told, and yet we seem to be intent on sidling up to them? In Iraq, 100,000’s of people have died in a war justified by lies, and three hundred billion dollars has been spent, without any discernible progress.  All this, while the world witnesses another genocide in Darfur. The shootings in Montreal were senseless to be sure, but the young man enacted this senseless act, within the context of a society and a world in which violence is spreading like a virus.   

            It is foolishness. And the Bible says the way of foolishness leads to death. Sophia, the personification of divine wisdom, stands on the busiest street corner, and warns the people,

“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? Because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, when calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you, then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but will not find me. Because they hated wisdom, and would have none of my counsel, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their ways. For waywardness kills the simple and the complacency of fools destroy them”.

            From the fourth page of the Bible through the crucifixion of Wisdom’s child, Jesus of Nazareth, the central problem of humanity goes by the name of violence. God laments of having ever created humanity because there was so much violence in their hearts. So He sends a flood, according to the legend of Noah and the ark. Then God realizes the error of His ways, and repents of His own violence as a solution to violence, sets a rainbow in the sky to remind Himself that when this simple solution tempts Him in the future, He’ll look at the rainbow and remember the promise not do try that again. It is a legend, of course, a way that the early Hebrew community made sense of a cataclysmic flood. Yet, it’s interesting that they stopped to ask themselves what they might have done to cause God to take such dramatic action. Their conclusion was that it must have been their own violence.

            We’re not even stopping to ask ourselves today about how to rid ourselves of the violence which threatens our destruction. Unlike the ancient Hebrews, we refused to accept responsibility for violence. We blame it on the terrorists, or we say it’s just a senseless act of an alienated young man. What we don’t do is make connections, talk of root causes, create policy which treats violence for children and youth on par with pornography. It’s easier to create a faceless, demonic enemy, and lay all the blame somewhere else. However, the Biblical witness is relentless in this regard. The people are always assuming that they did something to bring on calamity. Then, having taken responsibility, they collectively turn their hearts back toward the ways of wisdom.

            Thousands of years after the legend of Noah was written, and we are learning to accept violence, not develop strategies for overcoming it. The turn toward violence by our government is deeply disturbing. At a time when we should be distancing ourselves from an American regime hell-bent on violently imposing their will upon the world, we are instead choosing to mimic them. We know this much about violence. It is deeply contagious. When it does not serve to immediately quell a violent outbreak, it very quickly proliferates. There are occasions, where violence is tragically required, such as that used to stop the shooter in Montreal. But as a political solution it has a very poor track record.

            Surely, the reason governments will spend 300 billion on war, and precious little on studying strategies for peace, is that these strategies imply relinquishing domination of others as a modus operandi. The way of peace begins with a willingness to doubt that your own take on reality is the final take, as our own Kim Wright, has written about so brilliantly in a chapter she contributed to a new book on Conflict Mediation. But who wants to begin with this premise? We’re not all that interested in peace, truth be told. It might mean not getting our way.

            As a faith community, what we can do about this turn toward violence has both a political dimension and a personal dimension. We can let our local political representatives know how we feel about violent video-games, and about this militaristic turn our nation has taken. On a personal level, we can examine our own tendencies toward violence, and call upon the one known as Sophia or Wisdom.

            In today’s reading from the Wisdom of Solomon, she is “a reflection of eternal light, an image of God’s goodness,”; she can “do all things”; Sophia “renews all things; in every generation she passes into souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets”; she is “more beautiful than the sun”; “she reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well”.

            In the research I’ve done on the Wisdom Tradition, Sophia emerges as a balance to the male God, Yahweh, in Scripture. It’s as though, in the unconscious of the Jewish people, they knew that the dominance of the masculine in the tradition didn’t express the fullness of the divine. Sophia wouldn’t go away. By the time the Wisdom of Solomon was written, Sophia was on par with Yahweh Himself, creating, redeeming, and renewing the people. But She was a more relational God, more immanent in creation, more people-loving. She invites people to a banquet which She lovingly prepares, so that they can come and listen to Her teach them Her ways.

            It is clear to me that Jesus understood himself to be a teacher of Wisdom, and subsequent generations understood him to be Wisdom’s child. He was anointed by Sophia to teach Her ways. Like Her, he invited his followers to a banquet, identified himself with the bread and the wine, and said, “take and eat.”  When we come to this table, it is our way as followers of Christ of being nourished on spiritual wisdom. Our tradition affirms that God’s ultimate response to violence in the human heart was not to counter it with more violence, and not to over-power it, but rather to suffer it on a cross, and transform it through vulnerable love.  We learn that it is vulnerable love, foolishness in the eyes of world, but wisdom to those who believe, that God desires. In the resurrection, we learn that the violent ways of foolish states and the cultures they engender, will one day be transformed and renewed by the ultimate power of love.  Come to the table, friends of Sophia, and learn Her ways.