Wisdom at the Gate - Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on November 12, 2023, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.

Today from the Wisdom of Solomon in the apocryphal books between Old and New Testaments, we get this curious image of Holy Wisdom sitting at the gate. I’m imagining her about 15 years old, perched up on a wooden picket gate in the front yard, hinges creaking as she swings her knees, heels tapping against peeling paint. Unlike the fence, which has seen better days, she is radiant and unfading: she waits, balanced there, with a summertime, school’s-out waiting that isn’t listless or bored but permits everything, revels in the flow of coming and going, allows it all to arrive, to find a home, and then, in its own time, to move along.

Theologians have made much of the personification of Wisdom we find in the Old Testament. Sophia, the Wisdom of God has from early days of the church been identified with the Word of God who was made flesh in the person of Jesus. The Byzantine Hagia Sophia was dedicated as the Church of the Holy Wisdom in 537. Others argued Divine Wisdom better tracks to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the church and in the world, or to the magnificent self-surrender of Mary, Mother of God. It is clear however that wisdom personified is not merely a figure of speech. She is a rendering of our personal God, who is always seeking us out. “Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known to those who desire here. One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty, for she will be found sitting at the gate.” So you can take this Biblical warrant as permission to image God as a woman. Ultimately the Divine Reality escapes all of our human constructs and categories and explodes every binary we try to impose. The infinite can’t be constrained in the finite. Better to have a multiplicity of metaphors each showcasing a facet of the diamond. Yet over and over the many diverse scriptural accounts converge on the image of God as one who desires us and pursues us, who wants very much to be in relationship with us, to win our hearts to love freely, and she is always going ahead of us to seek us out, turning up outside our homes, knocking at the gate, waiting for us with insistent and interminable patience—a bit more patient than the average 15 year old, or 50 year old for that matter.

God comes to meet us in our longing and yearning. “She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.” Desire for God is not always so sweet. Doubt can be a form of desire for God, the living God beyond childish props. A crisis of faith may be the eruption of a desire for God, coming rockily to the surface. Doubts, questions, crises of faith—when fully inhabited, not run from or pushed away, can acquaint us with our yearning and our desire for God. Resist the temptation to swallow platitudes like antacid pills as if the tug toward maturity of faith and genuine trust in the living God were merely spiritual indigestion. This is serious stuff. And it can be extremely painful, to feel the full extent of our longing for God. Many many the modes by which we try to dull that ache—sex, drugs, and rock & roll, or perhaps we choose the slower death of propriety, well-performed, succeeding in our mild consumer aspirations until we forget we ever wanted in the first place.

Yet there is an answer to our desire, if we dare to live in it: “She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.” Dare to live in that yearning, those questions, letting our seeking heart reach out in earnest longing—and we find Wisdom has been seeking for us since the beginning. Finally having ventured outside ourselves to look-- “She will be found sitting at the gate,” right there, having been waiting for us & calling to us through each moment of our lives, as becomes suddenly clear.

I remember right before I went to South Africa on an ill-fated study abroad after my sophomore year of college. That week between spring semester and summer term called a brief intermission on the great drama that was my life at 19. I was staying with an older and wiser friend. She gave me a safe place to land, and let me lean on the giant trash tree that had grown huge in her backyard. We cooked out of the co-op box, she gave me books to read and told me I was going to be okay, eventually. Walking back and forth to the coffee shop, where I was trying and failing to do my late schoolwork, I looked up from the sidewalk and tried and failed to pray. Speaking to the sky, playing divine phone tag—that was my idea of prayer, and I felt I was failing because my attempts to make an absent God present didn’t seem to be working. Walking back to Ashley’s, I had finally hit my limit. I couldn’t play that game a minute longer. I remember erupting, “I give up. I can’t do this anymore. If you’re there, you’ll have to call me.” 

In my despair at the time, I thought my giving up was faithless. Actually I understand it now as extremely gracious, marking the shift away from God as an object I anxiously attempted to control. I had to live with the longing. Eventually, I found that the living God was seeking me out, long before I ever looked. God had survived me, she didn’t depend on me. She graciously appeared to me in my paths, met me in every thought, whether I was looking or not, and that made her someone who could actually be trusted, be trusted with my desire and longing.

Establishing the trustworthiness of God is the basic foundational spiritual task. “Only an absolutely trustworthy God is worthy of our absolute surrender.” Is this God someone I can trust? As Christians we inquire into the trustworthiness of God by looking to Jesus, the image of the invisible God, who shows us the Father. Looking to the person of Jesus, what does he show us of the character of God, this man who eats with sinners and argues with authorities and heals the sick and tells such strange parables and lovingly crosses every form of no-go border patrol we human beings try to set up? The Wisdom of God, the Word of God, graciously appearing in the path of ordinary people like you and me, meeting us in every thought.

On to our parable. The kingdom of heaven is like 10 bridesmaids, Jesus says, waiting around for the party to really get going. 5 of the bridesmaids are foolish and 5 of them are wise, but leaning on the fence, not so attentive to the coming and going of things, they all fall asleep, and wake only at the sound that the time has come at last! “Look, here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!” This is their moment, to light the way for the bridal procession with their lamps, but they’ve been waiting so long they’re out of oil now. The wise maidens trim their lamps with the extra they brought, but at the pivotal time, the foolish maidens rush off to a market that closed hours ago, scurrying to make themselves acceptable as they try and fail to do their job as members of the wedding party. The wise maidens, it must be said, are somewhat snotty as they refuse to share their extra oil, leading us to speculate that this oil must be something internal that couldn’t be shared even if you wanted to. Oil as faith, and faith as relational trust, the courage to wait and wait for the bridegroom and still know him when he arrives, to trust in that one we know is coming, instead of running off in do-it-yourself fear. Another way you could say it is that the wise maidens stick with their desire for God and light their lamps by it. Their wisdom is the restraint not to dampen their desire for God in the gap, in the painful absence they experience in the bridegroom’s delay. Oil or no oil—ultimately I think the foolish maidens are foolish because they leave, just as the party is starting. The only way to miss it is to get up and walk out. The bridegroom doesn’t know them because they don’t know him. They think he cares more about throwing the right kind of flower petals and getting the sparklers just right for the Instagram-worthy send-off at the end of the night than about celebrating with his friends. (And this from a man hours late to his own wedding!)

The beginning of wisdom is simply to stay, to stay in the place of waiting, stay in the place of desire and longing, painful as it may be. And Holy Wisdom will meet you there. As the days are getting shorter and Advent starts to assert itself, it is good to remember that as we watch for the baby to born, we also watch for God’s future coming in power and great glory, and we watch for the million small ways God comes to us in the present. This Advent for which we watch is both coming soon and already here. Yes, God is coming to us in the future, and God is also coming to us in this present moment. Practicing wisdom is being faithful to these million small Advents right now, and faithfulness to our desire for God, faithfulness to stay put in longing and waiting. Our gracious God will come to you, bigger than any of your ideas about her, more lively than any concept you may struggle to wrap your mind around. The moment you turn to look for her, there she is—“She will be found sitting at the gate.”

“Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.”

Amen.