Wise up
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Readings: Proverbs 1:20-33; Mark 8:27-38
Have you ever been the only person in a cinema watching a film? It’s a slightly strange experience, and has happened to me only once, on a wet Thursday afternoon in the year 2000, in Drogheda in Ireland. I was toiling with the final chapter of my PhD, and took the afternoon off to go and see Magnolia. It’s a film of overlapping stories happening on a single day, with messed up characters struggling to deal with the burden of their pasts, damaged by addictions of various kinds. Towards the end of the film, a song by Aimee Mann comes on the soundtrack and, one by one, the characters sing the lyrics:
It’s not
What you thought
When you first began it
You got
What you want
Now you can hardly stand it though
By now you know
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up
Wise Up – it’s the name of the song which has been going round my head ever since I knew I’d be speaking today on the passage from Proverbs we heard earlier.
Sometimes the Lectionary – the list of Bible readings for every Sunday – is spot on. On this Opening Service in the Martinmas Semester, we hear about wisdom. That’s Wisdom with a capital W – wisdom personified, Wisdom as a woman. She goes out to the city, where people gather in their crowds, and she lectures them on wisdom. How appropriate today, as thousands of students embark on hundreds of modules, watching lectures, attending seminars, conducting experiments, reading, thinking, writing: leading to a degree proving knowledge gained and skills learned.
We’re in the mood perhaps for study tips – how to take lecture notes, plan an essay, nail that presentation. But Wisdom, in Proverbs 1, offers no obvious study tips – for that I suggest you’d be better off looking at the Study Skills Resources Hub on MySaint.
What Wisdom offers, in her oration throughout the city, is a litany of complaint at the ways people miss out on her wisdom.
- 22 How long, O simple ones will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
Nearly 3000 years may have passed since these words were first written down, in Hebrew. And yet to me they have a strikingly contemporary feel.
The world still loves simplistic interpretations of reality, and simplistic solutions to hugely complicated problems. We used to talk of an elevator pitch – 20-30 seconds to encapsulate an idea, the time it takes for the lift to reach the right floor. But today that seems outrageously generous. Instead, we’re down to three or four words – Because you’re worth it. Make America Great Again. Just do it. Get Brexit Done.
Albert Einstein said Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. And that’s what a University does. We take time to look at reality, eg to study its biochemistry in ever greater detail. We read widely and deeply, sifting evidence, listening to arguments, reflecting on complexity, eg on the multiple meanings of Macbeth. We write longform essays, from 1500 words to books, volumes which may take months to read and absorb. And we don’t do this to deliberately confuse matters, but by looking at them deeply and from all sides, to find out how simply we can say things without being simplistic.
So maybe we only need two words: Wise Up.
It also strikes me that Wisdom’s diatribe touches on another aspect of contemporary life – a disdain for knowledge, a scorning of those who have patiently come to learn things and carefully try to share them. One member of the British government famously said, “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.” This is much more dangerous than a gentle mocking of scholars seemingly out of touch with reality – there are just too many examples of people believing that their ignorance is as good as your knowledge. Governments that wouldn’t believe that HIV caused Aids. So-called scientists casting pernicious doubt on vaccines from measles, mumps and rubella to Covid-19. Presidents and their bases scoffing at the overwhelming and undeniable evidence for human-caused climate change.
Indeed, part of the reason we’ve already harmed this planet so deeply, polluting environments, shrinking habitats, extinguishing species, impoverishing the vulnerable – is because we’ve preferred simplistic approaches. We have feared the knowledge that scientists, ecologists and many spiritual people have been sharing for decades. Such scorning of wisdom is leading to the calamity, the storm and the whirlwind which Wisdom predicts. It’s clearly bad now. What kind of world will Gabriel and his generation inherit?
But while you are a student at this University, you will learn to be different. Not only will you learn to reflect complexity, you will come to love knowledge, and to do all you can to discern truth from its opposite. Ignorance will not be blissful for you; seven out of twenty may scrape you a pass in the module, but seven is really not heaven. You will learn to repudiate falsehood, even if that makes you partake of some pretty uncool adjectives – slow, patient, dogged, earnest, undecided.
Wise up.
All right, you may be thinking, but what’s this got to do with faith? Is Wisdom’s pep talk just the liberal twitter feed of her day? Not quite: for she says in v. 29 that knowledge is equivalent to the fear of the Lord. What’s this? The idea that wisdom does not ultimately derive from our human learning, our scientific study, our rationalistic argument – that instead it comes from beyond the human, from the divine, from – whisper it, from God? This is not – now – what the University demands of its students, scholars, masters and doctors. But it did: in 1413 the University was founded by a bishop for the better education of priests. This chapel was built 40 years later to be the heart of a new college in the University, St Salvator’s. And we still begin all graduation ceremonies with a prayer, asking that all our activities originate in God and will be completed through God.
Now I for one am glad that this University allows diversity of religious faith and philosophy of life. Though I remember one Freshers Week a new student asking if it was compulsory to attend chapel services. And, my friends, I confess I was tempted to say yes. But for me, and perhaps for you, our physicists and geographers, linguists and anthropologists, mathematicians and historians are uncovering a world, including human societies, which emerged from the gift of a loving Creator, and which continues to evolve accompanied by God’s wisdom and compassion.
Let me turn now, briefly, to the Gospel passage, in which Jesus was declared to be the Messiah by Peter. Jesus then laid out what that would mean for him: not success but suffering; not reward but rejection; not congratulation but crucifixion. Peter hated this alternative-Messiah and began to rebuke Jesus. But this seems to have touched the most fundamental nerve in Jesus – “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but human things.”
It is as if Wisdom’s insight, which she declaimed in the city streets, has been channelled through Jesus many hundreds of years later. Peter wants it to be simplistic. He’s not really doing the hard work of listening to Jesus. He’s not yet grasped the basic truth of Jesus’ life, what it means to be God’s anointed one. It means living in this mixed-up world. It means dealing with all the inherited guilt and shame. It means breaking the addictions we have – to simple answers, blissful ignorance, and the exercise of power. Trusting in God, setting our mind on divine things, following Jesus may mean the exact opposite of worldly success. As Jesus says, What will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Maybe seven is heaven after all. Wise up.
There is no sign that Aimee Mann saw her song as a hymn. Instead it’s a plea, a cry, a despairing call to let something go – to let go whatever we’re addicted to. In the film it’s alcohol, cocaine, prescription drugs, it’s sex, it’s power, it’s secrecy. In the film, Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffmann and others sing the second verse:
You’re sure
There’s a cure
And you have finally found it
You think
One drink
Will shrink you ’til you’re underground
And living down
But it’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up
It’s not a hymn but it’s deeply in tune with Wisdom’s call, and with Jesus’ conviction. And it’s one way of seeing what we are doing here as students, as scholars, as members of this University. We wean ourselves off the tempting easy fixes of the soundbite and tweet, the conventional wisdom and brisk judgment. We listen, we read, we look, we reflect, and, knowing we could be wrong, we write. We acknowledge that God’s wisdom is deeper than ours, and is trustworthy. And we do this not only for ourselves, but for all who share this fragile, beloved planet. We do it for Gabriel’s generation, and all who’ll follow him. Wise up.
END