MOTHER WISDOM Sermon, Jim Burklo, Sausalito Presbyterian Church 1-8-06
Sermon 1-8-06 Jim Burklo, Sausalito Presbyterian Church Mother Wisdom
When I worked as the ecumenical Protestant campus minister at Stanford University, I shared an office with the Catholic campus ministry. Every year at this time in January, the priests would set out a basket full of chalk in front of the office, for the students to take. And you’ll find a basket of chalk waiting for you after worship today, too. It’s an old Catholic tradition to mark the letters “CMB” in chalk over the doorway of the room in which you study, to invoke the wisdom of the three wise men, whose non-biblical but traditional names are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Also without any support in the Bible, the Catholics have traditionally displayed Caspar as a white European, Melchior as a black African, and Balthazar as Asian. They represent the fact that Mother Wisdom is an equal opportunity employer – her wisdom belongs to every culture around the world. All of which, according to the beautiful mythical story of Epiphany, was concentrated into a little manger in a dusty little town in Israel, two millennia ago. This global wisdom we now invoke now in this sanctuary, which is also a place of studious reflection.
Let us invite Mother Wisdom, the Bible’s female personification of God, into our midst this morning. I’d like to reflect on what constitutes wisdom. What are the signs of a visitation from Mother Wisdom? I don’t know that I’m wise enough to tell, but here are some observations, to stimulate our conversation.
I observe that wisdom is associated with happiness. The wisest folks I’ve ever known have been the happiest. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Schafer, was to me the very embodiment of wisdom. She was about 60 years old at the time I was in her class in our small town in Ohio. And she was downright jolly, even as she challenged us to think for ourselves and inspired us to become self-motivated students. I am sure that my eagerness to pursue academics began in her class. My best friend and I awoke to our passion for writing and reading in her classroom. She was not any kind of jokester at all – not into comedy at all. But she was having fun being our teacher, and her joyful enthusiasm for learning was infectious. And the other people in my life, who have been avatars of Mother Wisdom for me, have also been fun characters with whom to hang out. You’ve heard me talk a lot about the person who was the nearest thing to being my guru – Jim Corbett, the Arizona Quaker rancher and activist and writer. Corbett had a lightness about him that was a joy to be around. He was a pretty intense guy, very focused and unflappable, but all the while he managed to avoid taking himself very seriously. He’d grin and chuckle at his own mistakes, like when he told about the time when he decided to ride on the back of a cow to get back down the mountain to his ranch. Sure enough, the cow threw him into the cactus and the rocks and he dislocated his shoulder and he was spiked with cactus spines.
I’d say that wise people know how to be wildly funny without being mean. Their humor has a purity about it – it’s wise humor that sees into the wacko reality that surrounds us, without being cutting or destructive of others. Somewhere in my youth I got too good at being sarcastic, and as I hope to get older and wiser I hope to lose that kind of humor, Mother Wisdom willing....
Wisdom also associates with equanimity. That’s a fancy word meaning spiritual or emotional balance. It means not getting carried away with any emotion or urge, remaining centered. Unperturbed by events, not swayed this way or that by the excitement around you. There is a way to have equanimity without having flat affect. A way to have a high time of life without being tossed around like on a seesaw. A way to reach a high level of enthusiasm and enjoyment, and remain there, steadily, unperturbed by negativity that comes your way. Equanimity is when you realize that the world is indeed a mess, that evil exists and you have to face it, that life is tough and suffering is inevitable – but instead of being sunk by these harsh facts, you are all the more aware of the incredible gifts that surround you – the beauty of the world, the divine possibilities of the human spirit. And this awareness of the totality gives you balance, keeps you above water, allows you to dance lightly along the tightrope that is this delicate and precarious life.
Wisdom is responsible. The wise person sees beyond his or her limits, looks beyond his or her narrow private world, and recognizes that he or she is connected to all others, and to all other things. Wisdom sees her responsibility to be a good steward of all that she is given, for her own sake and the sake of others and their posterity. Wisdom takes the long view, recognizing that every purchase is an investment for good or ill. Every meal is an investment in one or another kind of food and agricultural system, for good or ill for the health of the individual and the planet. Wisdom takes the long view, recognizing that a resource squandered today may deny sustenance to future generations of people and other living beings.
Wisdom is creative. Wisdom isn’t stuck inside the challenges she encounters. Solutions aren’t defined by the parameters of problems. Wisdom isn’t trapped by definitions or institutional boundaries. Wisdom reaches out, welcomes inspiration from all manner of disciplines and perspectives. Wisdom listens for resonances in unlikely places. Music may hold the key to a mechanical engineering problem. Sculpture may hold the key to a bioscience conundrum. Physics may model the way out of a political quandary. Wisdom is never a slave to a job description or an academic category.
Wisdom makes connections rather than creates divisions. Wisdom brings people together with good questions that invite shared inquiry, rather than isolating them with criticisms. Wisdom is leadership that makes people feel like brothers and sisters on a shared quest, rather than leadership that separates human beings into “us” and “them”. Wisdom celebrates differences. Wisdom is gentle with foolishness, because some healthy foolishness can be useful in opening the mind and heart to greater knowledge.
Some historians of Christianity believe that Jesus was a certain kind of wise man called a Cynic. Today we think of cynics as people with a bad attitude, a negative and unhopeful approach to living. But the original meaning of the word referred to a wonderful kind of people in the Greek culture around the time of Jesus – people who wandered from place to place, sort of like traveling comedians, carrying no money or belongings to speak of, poking holes in everyday assumptions by saying seemingly crazy things, and doing seemingly nutty deeds. They got people to think: is my everyday wisdom really so wise? Might I be missing something pretty basic and important in my way of living and understanding? Cynics were what we might call gentle monkey-wrenchers, people who jammed up the gears of the political and cultural machine of the time. And there was an understanding that cynics were valuable people – that their challenge to popular conceptions could make a very positive difference. So people gave food and lodging to the cynic philosophers as they wandered the country, engaging them in sometimes wild and crazy but rich and interesting conversations and encounters. If you read the parables of Jesus, if you consider the sometimes outrageous things he said and did, you begin to wonder if Jesus might have been one of these wandering cynics – a wise man whose wisdom was revealed in what people usually though of as foolishness. Consider his parable of the yeast: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” This doesn’t sound too outrageous to us, but at the time, in Israel, leaven or yeast was considered ritually unclean, a dirty thing. And women were second-class citizens. So to say that the realm of the divine was like yeast that a woman kneaded into dough – that was a strange saying. But one full of deep wisdom: the wisdom that divinity is hidden in all things, including things that we think of as unclean or unworthy, and that this hidden divinity can spread and rise up and make something as wonderful and nourishing as bread.
Epiphany is an old Greek word for “appearance” – the first appearance of the Christ to the Gentiles, in the form of the three wise men. But we might expand that definition further and say that it’s the day when we celebrate and invoke the appearance of wisdom – even the wisdom that comes through the mouths of babes and the crazy utterances of cynics and other holy fools. Half of wisdom is being willing to hear it and see it when it is uttered by those who don’t look the part. May we join the three wise men, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, and find wisdom in that crude and common manger again today. Amen!