St Francis and the Path of WisdomSermon preached at All Hallows by Annie Heppenstall-West on 3 October 2004Today, before I begin, I will just say a little about the scriptures which I am using today. I am drawing on books from the Apocrypha: Baruch, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach. They contain writings which address the nature of Wisdom as an expression of God: a female expression of God. Although the word ‘apocryphal’ has come to refer to something of dubious origin, it comes from a Greek word which means ‘hidden,’ and refers to the fact that these writings were reserved for those committed to genuine spiritual study: not to be taken lightly. Most of the books were available to the first Christian communities and were undoubtedly known to Jesus and influenced him and/or the gospel writers’ records of his life and work, as we can see when we put gospel tests side by side with writings from certain texts from the Apocrypha as we have done today. Because they were written in Greek and not Hebrew they eventually became marginalised, although their content is of tremendous value in shedding light on religious thought around the time of Jesus, and is accepted as ‘holy writ.’ A few Sundays ago, at the 9/11 service, when we welcomed lots of Muslim friends to join us, a passage from the Qu’ran was recited in Arabic, which in my ignorance I didn’t recognise or understand. On enquiry, it was explained to me that this passage is the opening of the Qu’ran and is recited at the outset of every act of worship. It includes a prayer that Allah will keep those present on the right path of God, rather than the other path of lostness, Godlessness. This prayer is, in the course of a day, repeated seventeen times. Islam is not alone in its use of the path as an analogy of our journey through life: Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life … ’ The earliest Christian liturgical manual we have, the Didache, opens with the statement: there are in life two paths: the way which leads to light and the way of despair and gloom. (Or words to that effect.) I mentioned this to my Islamic brother (maybe father?) and asked whether he felt we might be travelling along the same path. ‘Yes, I think perhaps we are,’ he said, ‘but using different methods of transport.’ Wise words! So. Two ways in life; our practising Muslim friends pray seventeen times a day to be kept on the path of God. What about us? How do we even know when we are on the right path? There is a quotation in the Book of Baruch, chapter 3: ‘You have forgotten the fountain of Wisdom. If you walked in the way of God you would be living in peace for ever.’ The way of God is a path to peace: shalom in Hebrew, Sala’am in Arabic. Shalom-sala’am. Not just tranquillity, not just absence of stress, not just peace and quiet. Shalom is a huge concept of fundamental importance, it’s at the heart of faith: all true faith, not just faith in Jesus. Shalom is an expression of the sense of wholeness, healing, completeness, abundance and harmony with all creation and with God. Shalom is the good earth of Jesus’s parables, where seeds of love can grow and bear fruit. Without shalom, love is tangled by thorns, and trodden underfoot. Without shalom, love’s vitality is wasted. Shalom is the nature of the kingdom or the power of God, and Jesus, the way, the truth and the life, takes us down that path. Wholeness, healing, completeness, abundance and harmony. The other way, is the way to turmoil and Godlessness. None of this middle way compromising business, there are two ways. God’s way of Wisdom which leads to true peace, and the way of godlessness, which is foolishness and leads to violence. All who seek peace, whether they call it shalom or sala’am or something else, walk the path of Wisdom, the path of God. So where does St Francis come in? St Francis is someone who changed direction half way through his life. He started off in a wealthy, secular lifestyle, living an extravagant and fairly dissolute life. He even fought as a soldier in inter city battles, and ended up being taken prisoner. While in prison he fell sick and started to reflect on his life, a process which continued after he was released until he reached the point, as his first biographer Thomas of Celano put it, ‘he wanted to possess Wisdom, which he prized more greatly than gold.’ He wanted wisdom, wisdom’s fountain of the book of Baruch: the way to God which leads to true peace. What then was the essence of St Francis’s wisdom? Two main things strike me about Francis. The first is the awe and wonder thing; how in love he was with the natural world, his capacity to see creatures, all creation as brothers and sisters. The Canticle which is attributed to him is well known:
The earth, to him, was not only good but a reflection of God’s goodness and a doorway to spiritual insight. He was full of respect-love, agape, for the life around him; full of a sense of awe and wonder. Awe and wonder, according to one of my Bible commentaries, (the one which conveniently agrees with me on this point!- it’s helpful to have a few!) is the real meaning of ‘fear of the Lord.’ An awe-struckness, the reaction of the disciples after Jesus healed a deaf man, or in the fishing boat after Jesus calmed the storm: they were utterly astounded. And in Sirach 1:12 what do we read, but that ‘to fear the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom. She is created with the faithful in the womb.’ Allowing ourselves to be astounded, filled with respect for the awesome wonder of the world and God’s goodness, is the beginning of all wisdom. But what do we read in Baruch? We have turned away from the fountain of Wisdom. Had we followed God’s way we would be living in peace for ever. There’s not enough awe, not enough sense of wonder, not enough respect-love for the earth. And where is peace? Had we followed the path of Wisdom we would be living in peace, shalom. But as a culture, (and I’m saying ‘we’ meaning society, collectively now, rather than in any way criticising the enlightened individuals amongst us … ), as a society we haven’t been walking that path. We’ve wandered off down the opposite path, where land is exploited, precious habitats destroyed, resources misused and discarded, in the name of progress, the path to prosperity. But not the abundance-prosperity of shalom, where all needs are met; this is prosperity for the privileged, at the expense of everybody else. Great to want better healthcare, but why only for us? Marvellous to improve standards in education, but what about the children who can’t even get to school because they have to go to work, down mines and in factories to make the things we want? It’s great to improve our diet –too much salt is bad for you- but what about the people who grow half of it, yet for whom five pieces of fresh fruit and veg a day is a pipe dream? It’s the path of hypocrisy. It’s the path of godlessness. It’s the path of increased productivity at all costs, of targets at the expense of workers’ stress-levels, of consumable, disposable, non-bio-degradable goods at the expense of the earth, the path of sweat-shops so we can have our cheap clothes, and of debt traps for the producers at the bottom of the pile who supply the raw goods, and are so dependant on our market forces and the success of the harvest. It’s not the path of shalom, not the path of Wisdom, not the path of God, because it is not built on compassion or respect-love or the desire for the furtherance of God’s will on earth, God’s kingdom. We are led to believe it’s the only way forwards; any other way is foolishness. Yeah, right. St Francis called himself ‘Christ’s fool.’ True holiness is in the pursuit of shalom, and shalom is about justice and equality as much as peace and prosperity. There is no shalom and no love in harvest time unless and until the labourers who work for our benefit also get a fair share of the abundance. There is no shalom in harvest time as long as the riches of the earth are taken by force, snatching, grabbing, abusing, exploiting, taking our mother Earth for granted, milking her dry, until she has no more to give. There is another way, that involves taking only what is needed, in a spirit of gratitude, with loving mindfulness of others who have an equal right to a share of the abundance, now and in the future. There is in fact a fundamental selfishness and short-sightedness about carrying on along the path of high-pressure, consumer-led superficiality. What happens one day, when there are no more trees to fell, no more oil to pump, no more minerals to mine … just lots of big holes and desert places, and landfill sites, and a climate in chaos? A sort of apocalypse of our own making. We don’t need a God of wrath to mete out judgement on the last day, we can do it ourselves. Before the Native American peoples developed their profoundly earth-centred wisdom, their own predecessors in the land had caused untold environmental damage themselves, clearing forests and wiping out whole species so that the people themselves struggled to survive; they shot themselves in the foot, destroyed their own habitats by over-hunting. They learned the hard way. If our people listened to the wisdom which grew from their experience we could by-pass a lot of suffering and waste. Call me a Prophet of doom, but this path of greed, resource-squandering and carelessness about the earth is not the path of wisdom and peace, it is the path of destruction, of Godlessness. Christians are supposed to be full of love; agape, deep, caring respect, the kind of love St Francis showed to all life. We cannot love fully, while we walk the path away from peace. There is truth in the Native American saying, ‘the earth does not belong to us, it belongs to our children.’ In our love, what kind of world are we leaving them? Children are encouraged to explore the awe and wonder of life, it’s one of the charming things about childhood. They understand something of St Francis’s attitude to life without needing to be told. Is this I wonder, a clue to the meaning of Jesus’s words, that we must become like little children if we want to enter into the kingdom of God; God’s shalom, this state of harmony and wholeness? The second thing about St Francis is related to the first. His insight into God’s peace, took him down what he described as ‘the way of simplicity and humility.’ Simplicity is the way to counteract or subvert the burden on us to produce, to achieve, to consume, to become wage-slaves in a system that is steering us like a ship of fools into deep and dangerous waters. Wage slaves who are yoked to a plough that is too big and too heavy, it cuts deeper into the earth than it needs to, and it is our Western culture, and the people we trap and pressure into working for us, who are dragging it along. We are burdened and we, or the society we buy into, burden others. Simplicity and humility. Getting rid of what we don’t need, saying no to status symbols and pointless luxuries, refusing to bow under the yoke of consumer-driven toil, but using love, awe and wonder and the desire for shalom as the ground-rules for what we eat, what we wear, what we teach our children, what we give our money and time to. The state of shalom is what we must strive for: harmony between all living things on God’s earth, shalom, the environment in which seeds of love can take root and grow and bear fruit. It’s difficult to simplify, these days. Martin Luther King said by the time we’ve had breakfast we’ve depended on half the world. Too right. But if we’re not careful we’ve exploited half the world as well, unless our coffee is fair trade and the electricity for the toaster from a green energy supplier, and the toaster is made by workers who are allowed to form trade unions, and the muesli locally grown organic and the bag it comes in bio-degradable … It’s also a lesson in humility, because the deeper we go into trying to ‘tread lightly on the earth,’ the more we realise how much further we have to go before we’ve arrived. There is no room for self-righteousness. We won’t have arrived, until everyone else arrives with us and embraces the vision of shalom together. Shalom is about relationship, you need a minim-um(!?) of two musical notes to create harmony, (or discord for that matter.) Wisdom’s path is for all, not just a select few. But St Francis showed the world that the path of simplicity, of respect-love and awe, is a path of joy and light, not a burden. It’s certainly a challenge. But it’s not a burden. It’s a joy. This brings me to the readings we heard today. The first reading is from the book of Sirach, which was probably written around 180 BC. It’s part of a collection of writings which emerged at that time in response to the culture in which Jewish people lived. Many were turning to the goddess Isis, queen of Heaven, and some were insinuating that something was missing in the Jewish religion, with its all-male language. (I’m covering ground fast today, I’ve done environmental rant, I’m heading for Feminist rant now … ) I can well imagine these character-full Jewish women, people like Martha, who gives Jesus an earful in the gospel story. I can just see them berating their liturgy and scripture-writers: ‘I’m not standing for any more of this paternalistic, patriarchal stuff. Rewrite or I’m off to Isis.’ It’s happening now. The name and the pulling power of the goddess lives on. But lo, the history of Israel was re-written, with the name of God as Sophia, Wisdom; in the book Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 10, she it was who led and inspired her people. She it is, who loves and nurtures the people of the Way. Read it for yourselves, it’s true! (And this was two thousand two hundred years ago sisters and brothers … It still needs saying –shouting- in virtually every church but this one! Why?! ‘I’m not standing for any more of this paternalistic, patriarchal stuff. Rewrite or I’m off!’ Wisdom is God. God is Wisdom, as God is love and love is God. It’s all just words. We fish around for ways of capturing the all-encompassing wonder of God’s greatness. To allow only male imagery excludes the wonder of all that is female. To use only female words, would exclude all that is wholesome and good about masculinity. The writers of these apocryphal writings knew that and they embraced every positive expression of God, male and female, a fact which still needs rediscovering today. The readings today, explore the idea of Wisdom; that which St Francis wanted more than any gold. Wisdom, the most desirable, beautiful, valuable manifestation of God. In the first reading then, we read ‘search out and seek, and she will become known to you.’ words echoed by Jesus, a century or so later: seek and you will find. Seek wisdom, find wisdom. Seek the kingdom of God, find the kingdom of God. Seek shalom, find shalom. Further on, we find an invitation to take up Wisdom’s yoke: ‘for at last you will find the rest that she gives.’ That is, the peace that she gives; the shalom, the sense of loving harmony between one another and God. Wisdom’s yoke is not a burden, not a strain, not a guilt-trip, but peace. And in the gospel reading, what do we read, but Jesus using the same image. ‘Come to me all who are weary and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you … for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ Jesus knew the apocryphal scriptures better than we do. They were the contemporary theology, subject of study and lively debate. He knew the Wisdom tradition and he identifies himself with Wisdom. He takes Wisdom as his role-model; in the gospel of Luke she is his mother, he is filled with wisdom from childhood: she if you remember, enters the faithful in the womb. He speaks her words. He is her mouthpiece, Word of God, Logos, the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus-Sophia. You have turned away from the fountain of Wisdom. Had you followed God’s way, you would be living in peace for ever. Jesus is God’s Way. In Jesus we find the one who takes up Wisdom’s path and walks it. He walks wisdom’s path, in simplicity, in humility, in respect-love and in peace; this is where St Francis went for inspiration. Peace is the gift Jesus gives to his beloved: ‘Peace I give to you, my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you, so do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.’ St Francis found the way and followed it, and to follow, in complete simplicity and humility, was a liberating experience. He didn’t have an easy life, just floating around feeling spiritual and being kind to animals, Francis suffered agonies. But it didn’t stop his inner peace. Yes there is trouble in the world, yes there is disturbance in our emotions, in our lives, yes there is pain and fear, turmoil like a storm at sea. Remember the storm on the sea of Galilee, when the disciples were so afraid of drowning that they woke Jesus and asked him to help. I wonder what they expected him to do. But he didn’t join their panic, grab a bucket and start bailing out. He stood firm in the prow of the boat, faced the storm and shouted into the wind: and what did he shout? Shalom! The way of Jesus-Sophia, the way of God, the way St Francis found to be true, is not to face turmoil with more turmoil, but to face turmoil with shalom, sala’am. Likewise, the Wisdom path is not about burdening ourselves and others in a relentless drive towards material betterment for a few, the exploitation of the majority and the destruction of the earth. It is a path of harmony, the path of the Magnificat, where the rich are brought down and the lowly raised up so that all reach a point of equality, where goodness can be shared and the harvest truly celebrated through all the earth. Simplicity, humility, awe and wonder, respect, love n’ peace. Whenever we manage that, any of us, or when we even just try, in our own imperfect ways, we are for the moment, treading the way of God. It is not a path, I think, that is exclusive to one faith; all who choose to set their foot on the right way, the way of light and life and truth and peace, are walking God’s way of wisdom, and we can walk the path together; we have to, if we want global peace, God’s will on earth. It’s a huge thing to strive for, we’ve a long way to go and it is not all easy, but it’s not a burden to walk the path of peace, it’s a joy. If we can remember the fountain of Wisdom, if we walk in the Way of God, maybe even now we can live in shalom. Shalom, sala’am, for ever, together. It’s just the transport we use to get us there that is different … maybe. Amen. Copyright © 2004 Annie Heppenstall-West This page was last updated on Tuesday, 5 October 2004home | about all hallows | what’s on | worship and prayer | discussion and reflection | action in the community | projects | an open, welcoming … | weekly bulletin | site map | search site | admin | |