Trinity 2022

 

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Wisdom is the overflow of God’s nature. Of that overflow, all creation springs into being, and is empowered to exist in harmony, without God’s nature being in any way diminished. And this giving-away, and its fruit, delights God. For humans to seek wisdom is not to gather and possess abstract knowledge, but to be known and to know, to respond to delight with joy, to join in rejoicing in God’s inhabited world—inhabited by every living creature—and to delight in the human race. Any learning that causes us to look down on others, or envy others, is not wisdom but to be schooled by folly.

Today, as every day, is an invitation to enter more fully into a relationship with God, our neighbour, and indeed our self-understanding, that is defined by rejoicing and delighting. By breath-taking joy, found as we look in the face of the other. This is not to deny the sorrows of life, or the wounds inflicted by folly, but to triumph over despair. To tread lightly, and in awe and wonder.

People are amazing, and what they are doing all around us today makes this world liveable, as God intended. And if you are not sure that you are amazing, all that you need to (be) know(n) is available to you, a gift given to you by God, along with the Holy Spirit. So, what aspects of human nature or endeavour are giving you joy and delight today?

For me, and my family, Jo and I have been working in our garden, trying to bring order and beauty to something that has been neglected for some time. We are no experts, but we’re learning. With our son, our last remaining child living at home fulltime, we’ve been enjoying some great tv series, displaying a vast array of skills, enormous crews of people working together to tell a story to the best of their ability. Last weekend, we joined with many others in enjoying the concert for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, everyone invited to a party, to lift our spirits.

Think of that song that never fails to put a smile on your face when it comes on the radio. Or that feat of incredible engineering, or stunning architecture, that you find yourself compelled to stop and admire, and enjoy. To delight in.

Yesterday, I was at Sunderland Pride. There was a real festival atmosphere down at Sunniside, full of joy and delight, in being human in humanity’s diversity. The Minster had a stall, giving away button badges and key rings and lollipops, reminding people that God loves them, hearing their stories, receiving their hopes and their anxieties and promising to hold them before God in prayer. Most of the people I spoke with were my children’s generation. Some from homes that had made them feel judged and rejected; some there with parents who made them feel loved. And over all the vulnerable emerging works of creation—human beings made in the image of God; and works in progress—the Spirit of God was hovering, watching, delighting, desiring to lead them into all wisdom, to know themselves and to know the God who is fully revealed in Jesus, in whom heaven and earth dwell together in harmony. What might these young people do, as they offer their lives to the world?

Perhaps the greatest folly of the past three hundred years has been the false dichotomy of the sacred and the secular. Secular refers to any human activity, however mundane, occurring within time and space. Sacred refers to the claim that God is connected to, and takes interest in, anything, everything. We’ve swallowed the lie that God is only interested in our turning up to church on a Sunday morning; or that what matters is the life beyond this one. The revelation of Wisdom held out to us in Proverbs is that every secular activity is a sacred activity. That every human activity in this world is meant to be a joyful partnership with the God who is fully revealed in the joiner—the master housebuilder—of Nazareth.

What will Jesus and you delight in together today?