Readings: Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
On 24 May 1543 Nicolas Copernicus was buried in an unmarked grave in the church in Frombork in Poland. He had been declared a heretic by the Catholic Church because he taught that the sun was the fixed centre of the universe and not the earth. His work was a marking point in scientific teaching and Western thought.

A week ago in the town of Frombork in Poland, the remains of Nicolas Copernicus were raised and buried with great ceremony in a splendidly-marked grave in the same church. I’m wondering does this hint at a change of thinking within the church?

The clash between Copernicus and the church showed two things:

• Firstly that in the very hierarchical society of the day, the church was seen as the pinnacle of all things, even above the monarchs of the day. Thus they spoke of the divine right of kings.

• Secondly, and consequentially, the religious world-view excluded all other world views, including the scientific one. Things were seen as either sacred or profane. Later it came to be expressed as the ‘fallen world of Adam’ and the ‘redeemed world through Christ.’
A little of this divide was seen on SBS in its INSIGHT program this week which showed a discussion on the merits of a trial ethics program in government schools in NSW that is running at the same time as special religious instruction in schools. Some church leaders are obviously quite threatened by this move. The sacred-secular debate is alive and well.

How do we see the world? Do we speak of ‘the church and the world’ as though these are opposites? Are some people less ‘something’ because they do not have God? Is genuine charity less ‘something’ because it does not arise from the strong love of God? Walter Bruggemann in his writing on the Old Testament talks about the ‘religious despisers of culture’ or we might say ‘the religious despisers of the secular’.
I am currently on a task group looking at Uniting Church schools’ constitutions. Question: Is it important to have a majority of UC members on school councils because they carry some sort of superior ‘religious’ thing that other members cannot? Of course that sounds rather arrogant and disrespectful.

Why am I saying these things on Trinity Sunday and what does all this have to do with these readings?

There are two streams of thought and faith that help us answer some of these questions, one is about wisdom and the other about Trinity.

Firstly, there is a new interest in the wisdom literature found in both the Old and New Testaments in such books as Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon and in the gospels.

Wisdom is ‘sophia’, from which we have the word ‘phil-o-sophy’ which is the love of wisdom.

According to Proverbs 8, ‘wisdom raises her voice on the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads and beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals, in the market-places.’
Strangely almost subversively, wisdom in the bible is not, ‘he who inhabits the temple and commands life from a holy place, nor merely sits in the church and the bible college’. Rather wisdom, she, sits in Forrest Place, the Perth Cultural Centre, the university and the city council or the shopping mall at Karrinyup.

And wisdom says,
‘To you O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live (not just the religious ones!). O simple ones, learn prudence; acquire intelligence, you who lack it. Hear, for I will speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right; for my mouth will utter truth; wickedness is an abomination to my lips.’ Perhaps Copernicus would say Amen.

Old Testament theologian, Walter Bruggemann wrote a book on wisdom literature in the bible, entitled ‘In Man We Trust’. He sums up some of the elements of wisdom thought:

• ‘wisdom believes that the goal and meaning of human existence is life (itself)… life in its fullness.’

• Furthermore, with wisdom, ‘authority for life is to be found in our common experience (at the gates in front of the town’; in the wise counsel of human deliberation).

• Then again, Bruggemann says, ‘Wisdom lets nobody off the hook by reference to God. Rather wisdom found in human choice shapes human destiny.’

• Also wisdom believes that humans are ‘meant for an orderly role in an orderly world’. Life is benevolent but human choices will largely determine the quality of that life.

Probably we would say ‘amen’ to most of this. Wisdom is alive and well!

But ‘wisdom’ is not some other god, as though to be worshipped beyond all else. Wisdom is not just a humanist endeavour. In fact in Proverbs, wisdom says,
‘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…… When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker.’

But Wisdom, as the first act of God, was not just a thought confined to the Old Testament. It winds its way through the New Testament.
John started the gospel with, ‘In the beginning was the word (logos or Sophia), and the word was with God and the word was God ….. And (startlingly and amazingly) the word became flesh and dwelled among us, and we have beheld his glory full of grace and truth.’ (John 1:1,14) So the ultimate appearing of Wisdom came in human form in the person of Christ – the final word from God! And aren’t the parables and sayings of Jesus an elaborate collection of wisdom which requires our choices and commitment?

So, wisdom is the ordinary thing, heard in the gates and market-places of the world; and also the most extraordinary thing, that has taken on human form to guide our way. And God is in it all. So we don’t have to be schizophrenic, nor live in some sort of exclusive God-zone, for all is the domain of God.

Quite strangely, yet wonderfully, the church has listened to the wider wisdom of God in the world and time to time adjusted its understanding and perception of faith accordingly. The Uniting Church Basis of Union states, ‘The church … will learn to sharpen its understanding of the will and purpose of God by contact with contemporary thought. (It) … stands in relation to contemporary societies in ways which will help it to understand its own nature and mission.’ The church has learned to tap into the wider wisdom that God has ordained in the earth.

In the last fifty years there have been some big shifts in human understanding and in science itself and these have impacted on the Church.

There was a time Long after Copernicus, when Western thought and science was very mechanical in style, after Isaac Newton. All the bits of the world were treated as separate parts that fitted together like a machine. We separated the bits so we could understand it all.
Bertrand Russell warned against this machine-like view of life, writing his own prayer:

‘Almighty and most merciful Machine, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost screws; we have put in those nuts which we ought not to have put in, and we have left out those nuts which we ought have put in, and there is no cogginess in us.’

Scientist and Christian, Charles Birch would agree and states, ‘the mechanical images no longer fit…. Its new images are organic and ecological. The universe turns out to be less like a machine and more like a life.’ Now we see the world as an intricate network of all things that impact on each other – animals, plants the climate and human-kind. We even have a different way of relating to our pets.
In Narrogin High School in the1960’s the science department had no text to teach ecology and some had not even heard the term. Within twenty years I was studying a text by a prominent theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, ‘God in Creation – An Ecological Doctrine of Creation’.
The central part of Moltmann’s thought is not that God is somehow external to all things but rather, ‘God is in creation and the creation in God’. Or as Sally McFague writes, ‘The earth is the body of God.’

Another writer (John Taylor) writes about the ‘Go-between God’, the Spirit of God who is the great connector between all things human and in the earth. So God is in this world and in us as part of it, not in some mechanical way but as the living and life-giving force and energy that creates and builds all things together, prompting Wisdom in her work among all things every moment.

Beyond all else we would want to say that this Spirit-of-God force in life is always expressed as the love of God for that is the essential character of God’s life in the world. For as Paul says, ‘the love of God has been spread abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us’.

We are part of this intricate tapestry of all things or better this living organism which is God world of life. By the Spirit of this life we are to exercise the wisdom of God to advance all creation, the world that is the body of Christ.