Throughout this Season of Creation, we’ve been listening to voices from a genre of literature within scripture known as “wisdom literature,” the Book of Job, the Book of Psalms and today the Book of Proverbs. In the verses that precede those we’ve already heard this morning, Wisdom is personified as a noble lady present with God since before creation, standing at the crossroads and calling out for humanity to heed her voice. In this way, she introduces the idea of God’s own existence being inherently communal which Christianity later transformed into the doctrine of the Trinity, the second person of which we call the Christ. By faith, we claim that this Christ, the Word and Wisdom of God, present with God before the cosmos came into being, has taken on flesh and entered history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth who stood himself at the crossroads of history and spoke words of divine judgment and divine grace so that we might know salvation in a whole new way.
Wisdom literature operates by analogy and relies on metaphor. Whether the tightly crafted sayings found in proverbs, the evocative music of the psalms, or the courtroom drama of Job’s argument with God, wisdom literature works best by saying just enough to get us thinking but not enough to tell us what to think.
Here’s another kind of wisdom literature, a poem, this one by Joseph Mills titled, “Questions.”
On the Interstate, my daughter tells me
she has only two questions. I’m relieved
because she usually has two hundred.
I say, Okay, let’s have them, and she asks,
What was there before there was anything?
Stupidly, I think I can answer this:
There was grass, forests, fields, meadows, rivers.
She stops me. No, Daddy. I mean before
there was anything at all, what was there?
I say that I don’t know, so then she asks,
Where do we go when we die? I tell her
I don’t know the answer to this either.
She looks out the side, and I look forward,
then she asks if we can have some music.
“Questions” by Joseph Mills from The Miraculous Turning. (c) Press 53, 2014.
The poet presents us with another Lady Wisdom, this time a young girl who — like many children — has already intuited the limits of human knowledge and so tests her parent, wanting to know if age is enough to provide answers to the hardest questions.
Speaking as though she were already in a dialogue with the passage from Proverbs, the young girls asks, “What was there before there was anything?” The Hebrew scriptures reply, “The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.” (Prov. 8:22-23) But the girl’s father can only say, “I don’t know.”
Then she asks a question none of us can answer from direct experience because we are still living. “Where do we go when we die?” While the child’s father cannot answer this question either, John’s gospel tells us that Jesus was sent by a different Father, a cosmic Parent, a universal source whose wisdom emanates throughout creation to such a degree that no one race or religion or clan or nation can lay claim to it, but that we have all been taught by God. (John 6:45) This Jesus utters wisdom sayings of his own, speaking in poems and parables, using metaphor to describe truths as complex as theoretical physics. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” (v. 51)
Jesus calls himself the living bread that has come down from the heavens, like the manna that fell from the sky to feed the people of Israel as they escaped their slavery in Egypt. Jesus, avatar of the Christ, God’s living wisdom, present since before anything created was, comes to us as food. Can we just play with that image for a moment and consider what it might mean?
Like the breath that passes between us, each inhalation drawing our neighbor’s life into our own body, bread — like all food — carries with it vitamins and minerals, proteins and sugars, catalyzed from the soil of the earth; earth composed of elements that were ultimately birthed in the hearts of stars like our own sun. Each breath we take, each bite we consume, is an act of participation in the unity of creation. By connecting the act of eating to the story of salvation, Jesus reminds his followers that ultimate salvation comes when we realize that we are all intimately bound up in one another’s lives in ways that are sewn into the fabric of reality. As real as gravity, there is a strong attraction that binds us to one another, that makes our individual existence dependent on the actions of everyone and everything around us.
And vice versa. So that we cannot pollute our oceans, or destroy the habitats of our animal kin, or warm the atmosphere to the point of climate change that unleashes devastating storms at sea and along the coasts without killing ourselves as well. We may live inside the myth of rugged individualism but, in truth, we are all and always in this thing called life, called existence, together because all of creation, all the cosmos, are one.
There’s something poignant in the poem, as the child recognizes that her father cannot answer the questions she’s thrown at him. They look away from one another and she asks if they can have some music to fill the disappointed silence. It’s beautiful writing, acknowledging the limits of our knowing. But we do not fill our silences with song simply because we have no words to offer, but also because music and poetry and all good art allow us to tell the truth in ways that other modes of knowing cannot access as easily. While I marvel at the elegance of physics and mathematics to describe the universe, they often leave me speechless, locked outside their wisdom.
But when we gather for worship and begin to sing, when the breath leaving my body joins the breath leaving your body to vibrate at frequencies that fill the air with harmony, and together we create something that none of us could create alone, then for a moment, I remember that we are all a part of something vast and limitless, but also something that needs us, and our skin and bones and breath and questions if it is ever going to know itself at all. And in that moment, it is as though the whole creation, the whole cosmos, cries “Alleluia!”