The Wisdom of God: The Human Faces of Sophia Proverbs 9:6  “Lay aside simple-mindedness, live and walk in the way of insight.” “We must turn from the Love of Wisdom to the Wisdom of Love.”  Emmanuel Levinas I cannot remember how it was that they first came to my office.  Perhaps it was that he had seen me sitting inside, through the glass facing the alcove, where I was protected from the cutting knife of the early morning air one bright winter day as he hurried to class.  Perhaps someone in her research laboratory had suggested my name as some one who would consider performing marriage ceremonies for the unchurched on campus.  They phoned to make an appointment, of that much I am sure, because I had expected someone.  They introduced themselves as people who were both having “Learning Disabilities” and struggling to get through the educational system.  We talked about what marriage meant for them, and why they wanted to have a religious figure perform the ceremonies.  We agreed to meet again after they had a chance to think about all that I had said.  I was impressed by their commitment to each other and their understanding of what marriage means.  I am remembering the day he came to visit me alone.  He said he wanted to talk to me, not about marriage, or their relationship, or the ceremony, but about an experience he had while surveying in Northern Alberta.  He appeared embarrassed and uncomfortable, but obviously felt the need to talk.  He spoke of a night when he was out taking his nightly jog along a lonely gravel road.  He felt a sensation, and then heard a sound to his left in a gully that ran parallel to the road.  He looked across and saw to his fear and amazement a pack of wolves running along beside him.  At this point in the conversation, he stopped and looked up into my eyes and asked, “Others might not believe my story, but I sense that you do.”  I was not sure what I believed at that point, I was simply trying to take in the image of running with wolves.  It was the title of a book on women’s spirituality that I knew about.  Farley Mowat talked about his relationship with wolves in "Never Cry Wolf."  But the image of this man running along a lonely stretch of Northern Alberta backroad with a pack of wolves running beside him sent chills up my spine.  Did I believe him?  He asked because so much of his experience had been interrogated by educational authorities and called into question, that to have another human validate his experience carried more than a little weight.  I answered with words that left open the historical facts of the event: “I believe you had that Experience.” He then asked a question I knew I couldn’t answer: “What do you think it means?” I knew no answer that could meet the weight and the power of this experience.  For him, the experience was beyond language.  He needed to put words to the experience, to draw upon it for meaning, but the experience itself would not be confined by the meanings language might give it.  We both could point towards this with our words, but the words failed to get at the surplus of meaning, as Paul Ricouer put it, the otherness the experience presented.  The wisdom we sought moved beyond our language, or any possible language, but still he and I felt the need to express in language something of this experience. Philosophy is a word rooted in two Greek words: Philia, which means love and Sophia, which means wisdom.  To love wisdom is no bad thing, and its pursuit is one that scripture recommends.  Wisdom we are told accompanied God at creation, wisdom is with God from the origins of all life.  I tried as a philosopher to look for the meaning of this event, and as a theologian I tried to see the Spiritual significance.  But wisdom resides on the shoreline between the articulate and the unspeakable mystery.  Wisdom is before being, that is before our being and the being of our language.  Wisdom is not a text, or words we may speak.  Even the best of our words fail.  And yet in their failing, our words and language may give room enough for us to recognize and even recover that which we have failed to grasp.  Wisdom is recognizing that the failure of words may be the very place of truth beyond measure. In the original Hebrew of the reading in Proverbs (9:1-6) for Proper 15, Year B of the oecumenical lectionary, the great woman ChiKomot(h) (twmkj) Wisdom has built a house and set a table and invited even those who are simple and without sense—or perhaps especially those who are simple and without sense—to come to the banquet of bread and wine, the banquet of insight.  The words in Proverbs are at first straight forward.  We might sum it up by suggesting that they are a welcome to fools, ignorant or simple to cease being so foolish and ignorant and eat at the table of insight (hnyb hnyb).  This would hardly be a revelation or crucial insight of faith.  It is advice any impatient teacher may speak to a lazy student who just does not seem to get it, “Wake Up, Numbskulls!”  The verbal abuse is hardly profound, even if it proves to be affective. Is that all that these words in Proverbs are saying?  Get with it, wake up?  Yes and, predictably, No. Yes- they are intended as a wake up call to our ignorance, but there is more going on here. Lady Wisdom calls, or rather has her servant girls go out to call from the highest places in the town.  Wisdom is calling in the middle of human habitation. Wisdom calls to all, even if only a few respond.  Wisdom is universally available.  And yet wisdom is not to be possessed, it does not belong to us.  It comes from attending a feast to which we are invited, and entering a mansion that is not our own. These images suggest that wisdom, the Wisdom of God, is a gift given if we will allow ourselves to accept life as given to us.  This is not to stay we abandon critical thought.  Critical thinking is needed to clear away barriers to attending the feast.   Critical thinking can make us aware of the wisdom we lack, and the need for understanding that comes by attending to the other. Here is the most difficult of things for us: Attending to the other.  Although we may learn to love wisdom, philo-sophia, all our philosophy (and theology in so far as theology is but an intellectual exercise) can only bring us to the doorway of Wisdom’s house.  Thomas Aquinas spoke of the two disciplines necessary for coming to wisdom, the ratio and the intellectus.  The “ratio” is the exercise of the mind that analyzes, categorizes, and pulls apart, so that the parts are understood.  This is an important capacity, for it can bring us to be aware of what is absent by nature in our analysis.  It makes us aware, if you will, of that which is other than our own analysis, other than our categories, other than our own reason and facts.  The “intellectus”, the other discipline Aquinas argued is necessary, is the hospitality, contemplative receptivity, openness to and inner welcome extended towards the other, human and divine.  Without this discipline of the intellectus, wisdom is never found.  Without giving room in our being, the other becomes only an object, and so is reduced to yet more of the same.  Emmanuel Levinas, living through the horrors of Nazi Germany, spoke of the intellectus as the ethical demand that must ground all our love of wisdom.  This ethical demand is not a law or a rule, not simply an extension of the “ratio.”  Rather, it is the encounter with, and the phenomena and existence of a “stop” to our attempts to bring into a total system or global construction of our own making, the Other.  It is the experience of meeting the Other whose reality before us says “Do not kill.”  This is not an external law or even a moral rule, but is rather given in the very encounter with the Other itself. In theological language, the pious who search for a law to tell them how to behave, or what to believe, are like the Levite—the religiously correct fellow, who passes the dying person in the ditch.  The Samaritan, the outcast, lawless and irreligious, on encountering the other in the ditch responds to this other by caring and attempting to reach out to the other.  The action is not an attempt to possess, control, systematize or forget the other, and go on his way untouched by the reality of this other.  Whereas the pious and the philosopher may love wisdom, the Samaritan has entered the gate of Wisdom's house by acting with wisdom.  To put it as Emmanuel Levinas once did, wisdom requires that we move from love of wisdom to the wisdom of love.   This lesson in Proverbs today brings us to the doorway and even in to the feast, but we must open ourselves to receive the meal.  The text is not meant merely to waken us to knowledge, but also to point out that wisdom is beyond our knowledge and even beyond the text's capacity to communicate.  The notes of celebration and wonder that exist in the text—what a marvellous palace of seven pillars and what a wondrous meal—is the only the doorway to our reception to the wisdom of love.  We come to this wonder and celebration not in the text or on the page, but rather when we allow the voice of the other that speaks beyond the page to be heard in us.  The absence of the other in the text is precisely what Wisdom calls us towards. I recognize the leaps I am making in this sermon may appear beyond the text.  And in fact they are intended to point towards God’s Wisdom as precisely that “Other” that no text or scripture can contain.  Revelation in scripture is precisely the capacity of scripture to point beyond itself to the “Other” in our midst, God’s wisdom which is universally available if we will enter the doorway and receive the feast.  Scripture becomes the living word of God’s wisdom when we hear Wisdom as the voice of the Other who calls us to the feast of insight.  The faces of Sophia, God’s wisdom, are many.  The insight comes when we can receive these many others in an awareness of the feast of life as a gift of God.  A gift of others who are not the dame, not merely projections of our own egos. The wisdom of love is meeting God in these others, and preparing room for the feast and extended hospitality to the other, as she stands before us.  However, the other, as the wisdom love makes us aware, is never contained, never captured and never becomes the “same”.  The other always is other, and wisdom brings us to celebrate the difference.  If we hold wisdom in our hands, it is a living thing, and thereby only murder is committed if we try and make it answer to our own compulsions to control. Finally, Let me offer this story from another tradition about wisdom’s delicate life: You  know how children are—always playfully testing and pushing the boundaries, to find out what they can get away with. But for this young student at a monastery, the matter was serious. He had a grudge against his teacher, and he was determined to prove him wrong. After weeks of intense scheming, he finally concocted a devilish plan that he thought was a fool-proof way of ridiculing his master.  Early one morning, on his way to lessons, he caught a baby dove which he hid in the palm of his hands. In front of the whole class he showed his cupped hands to his teacher.  “Master, I know that you know everything, so I want you to solve this riddle that I've designed for you. I have in my hands a dove. Can you tell me if it is alive or dead?”  His plan could not fail. If the master said the dove was alive, the student would subtly break its neck within his closed palms. If the master said it was dead, the student would simply open his hands and show that it was alive. Either way, the master would be wrong.  The monk had great intuition, and knew the evil plan of his student. But his answer defeated his student. What did he say? The master simply said,  "My son, the answer is in your hands.” The Wisdom of Love, God’s Holy Wisdom is in your hands.  Let her wings beat and take to the air, wonder beyond the page.

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