Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 24], rcl yr b, 2021|
St. John’s celebrating the Eucharist in person
Proverbs 1:20-33; Psalm 19; Mark 8:27-38
The cry of Wisdom’s voice in the street has some real, and very uncomfortable, resonances in our time. On topics that range from abortion, to taxation and political economy, to social justice and inclusion, to vaccines and public health measures, simplicity of understanding is fast becoming a virtue. When in truth, none of these things are at all simple, and not least because disagreements run so so deep.
And so Wisdom’s cry is most certainly directed at us: “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?”
Most sobering is that Wisdom is also sounding a warning. That when we hate knowledge, and love simplicity when we should be allowing for complexity, we are in for tough times. “Because I have called and you refused,” says Wisdom, “I also will laugh at your calamity.” “Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but will not find me. […] Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord, would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices.” That is, if we don’t pursue wisdom as a practice all the time, we will not have the resources we need when times get tough. Embrace complexity, pursue knowledge, and fear the Lord, right now, says Wisdom; so that when you need wisdom, when things get hard, she will be there.
I’d like though to turn, for a moment, away from the wisdom that is present, or not so present, in political discourse. And turn to a different kind of wisdom: the kind of wisdom that we gain from our neighbours, and from the people nearest to us.
Part of Dorothy Day’s vision for the Catholic Worker—an organisation known best for its search for social justice in the cities—included living on farms outside the city. It was an attempt at rehumanizing relationships. If the city alienates us from one other, living on a farm and closer to one another might encourage the deepening of relationships.
Dorothy herself tells us that she did grow in wisdom as she came closer to a man, on one of the Worker farms, by the name of Maurice O’Connell. This is how she remembered him: “And so I firmly believe, I have faith, that Maurice O’Connell in addition to being a kind friend who built the furniture of our chapel and some barracks for our families, who sat and fed the birds and talked kindly to the children on the sunny steps before his little house, was an instrument chosen by God to make us grow in wisdom and faith and love…” So for Dorothy, coming to know O’Connell so well, was the way God helped her grow in faith and love, and wisdom.
There’s one problem, though, in learning this kind of sunny wisdom—of birds and children and building benches—from a man like Maurice O’Connell. Because Maurice O’Connell was selfish, and stubborn, and contrarian, and mean. Famously so. When he died, Dorothy said of him, “like many old men, Mr. O’Connell was a terror.” Dorothy’s granddaughter called him “hateful, venomous, [and] suspicious of men and women alike.”
He was an ex-soldier who had no time for pacifists (of which there were many, pacifism being a core value of the Catholic Worker). He despised people who weren’t like him. Ultimately, no one could work with him and he couldn’t work with anyone else. So he worked alone, and went on his drinking binges alone. He lived alone in a cabin near the entrance to the farm, harassing any visitor he considered “shabby.” He stockpiled all the tools in his cabin so no one else could use them. And he guarded those tools with a shotgun. So yes. He was hateful, venomous, suspicious, and a terror.
So what might a man like this have to do with wisdom? How can Dorothy speak of O’Connell as “an instrument chosen by God to make us grow in wisdom and faith and love…”? Well, sorry to say, it isn’t the ones we like most that are the instruments of God, chosen to make us grow in wisdom, and faith and love. It’s the ones who irritate us, the people who do things the wrong way, the people we wish would go away or at least change a bit more, and to change to our liking. Maybe people who drink more beer than we think they should, maybe people with addictions, maybe people who steal. Or maybe people whose noses sniffle in the library, or maybe people who talk too much during worship. God sends us these, for us to grow in love faith and wisdom. And you can think of your own Maurice O’Connells, I’m sure.
This is what Dorothy says about her own O’Connell: he “was an instrument chosen by God to make us grow in wisdom and faith and love… It was as though he were a scapegoat, bearing [from us] the sins of ingratitude, hatred, venom, and suspicion…” He was, perhaps strangely, like Christ. And we are called to be with the O’Connells of the world because they are the ones who would show us Jesus. And to see Jesus in these, in the rich and the poor, the liar and the truth-teller, the kind and the mean … perhaps I could add the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, and bring us back to where we started? Could that be a way to grow in wisdom? In seeing Jesus in those we might think political opponents?
I would hesitate to propose that to see Jesus in those with whom we deeply disagree, would be to solve all the political problems of our time. Hardly. But it would surely be an opportunity to grow a certain kind of wisdom: God’s wisdom seen in the foolishness of the cross, the foolish wisdom of the Lord who would undergo great suffering, be rejected, be killed, and after three days rise again; it would be to grow in the foolishness of God that surpasses human wisdom; and to grow in that foolish wisdom would be to grow the grace of the cross, and what is accomplished for us there.
The Revd Preston DS Parsons, PhD