I frankly was feeling slightly overwhelmed and marginally inadequate for the task.

Suddenly my efforts at following Jesus and reflecting God`s presence in the world seemed
rather pathetic, particularly after looking at the historical Jesus of last week.

What sort of human being am I really!

I worry too much, about what I do or am not doing. Am I doing enough?

I often feel angry, at injustice but also at the boys and I yell unendingly when they are being their messy and lazy selves.

I respond in less than measured ways when someone slights me, when I feel that things have not gone the way they should. Or when people don`t agree with me!

I sometimes let my ego and my ambition get in the way of allowing others space to grow.

I regret some things I say, which often just fall out of my mouth, or when I don`t respond with humility or compassion or love to a situation that calls for it. When I have to accept that unconditional love and care is hard to give all the time.

I feel tired and when things pile up, my reaction is often one of defeat rather than taking it all on board and forging on. My optimism wanes and my hope for a future for our children and our children`s children can be dimmed.

I can be cynical, slightly jealous, get disillusioned and can be lazy myself.

Oh and on top of all that I don`t exercise enough and have got a little chubby!

Boy, what sort of revelation of the spirit am I!!!!!

Then I remember, life is not a sprint but a marathon, and God is tagging along.

We are part of a project started a long time ago, billions of years in fact, a process so sublime yet so complicated that we are still a work in progress. We are a revelation of God`s presence in the world, an outside sign of the spirit in all of life.

Yet this project has its ups and downs. And in our darker moments we sometimes forget who we belong to.

In Richard Rohr`s book, Falling Upwards, he suggests that this awakening to God`s presence takes a whole life time to achieve, if it is achieved at all.

How do we foster and promote it in our life, here and now?

As a product of the evolutionary process we can think, feel, learn and grow in so many different creative ways. We are an integrated package that has taken us from living in caves to living in enormous cities, with the technology that goes with it.

In our faith lives, we must also become an integrated package. To have both an inward and an outward journey, as Elizabeth O`Connor so famously stated. Maybe this is the getting of wisdom, to see both our awareness of God within us and our action in the world as the whole package. Not one without the other.

Wisdom according to Joan Chittester, is

`the gift of living the present to the utmost and learning from the now whatever we will need to face the future with integrity`

`the gift of living the present to the utmost and learning from the now whatever we will need to face the future with integrity`.
Wisdom is not life lived wrapped in marshmallow and indifferent from the reality within us.

Wisdom is life peeled back and cored, it is attention and consciousness lived to the hilt.

The readings today are really about this, about the getting of wisdom.

Wisdom in the Old Testament was about how to live life with God, unseen and at times incomprehensible. Often the text doesn`t mention God at all, but instead looks at how to cope with the universal human experience. Traditionally it`s found in the books of Proverbs, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes and Job and in the book of James.

The problem is, those books also reflect the times in which they were written. Proverbs reflects a tradition where wisdom has become a woman. This woman, called Sophia/Wisdom reveals the way of God and leads to life, and is contrasted to the wicked or strange woman who leads people, particularly men, to the devil and to death. In the reading today Sophia is seen as the ideal woman, both lover and wife. Proverbs was written with an understanding that God intervenes in the world rewarding the wise and faithful and punishing the evil or sinners. And written at a time when men dominated all levels of society. So a lot of the stuff in proverbs doesn`t really resonate as wisdom to us today.

Job and Ecclesiasties on the other hand challenge this notion of a God of reward and punishment. Instead they echo the God in creation as a universal presence in all of life, and the joy of living even if we can`t sometimes understand it.

They were placed in the Hebrew Scriptures as an alternative to the more traditional view of God. Thank goodness! They reveal a diversity of thought found throughout our history.

In the New Testament only James is seen as wisdom literature, and in the last few weeks we have seen why. Readings from James are about what to do in life with wisdom not a human quality but coming from God.

But rather than James maybe we should focus on Jesus himself. For he is the ultimate wisdom teacher. He reveals in his life and words and his parables, how to live with God in the world and the transforming power of love and nonviolence. What does God want from us? We know because we have seen this revealed in word and deed. We have seen this in the silence and in the action.

As John Spong has said `the unique thing about Jesus was that his real humanity came to be viewed as the vehicle through which God entered the life of this world`. Love your enemies, love your neighbour, include the stranger, it is the poor who will enter God`s kingdom, forgive one another, call for justice, the first will be last. He invites his hearers to re-imagine the world transformed, turned upside down. With God`s help.

A God that is not present one minute and gone the next but is forever present in us all. Not as some external ruler but that `mysterious reality that permeates the universe and holds everything together in connectedness and relationship`. (Michael Morewood). A presence that can be found and experienced, and in which we can grow. For Jesus was also the ultimate mystic, constantly in contact with the spirit of God, that guided and so profoundly influenced him. He reflects the ultimate relationship with the divine presence found in all of life that we aspire to.

True wisdom therefore is an integrated package. It involves connecting to God and to each other in life. It is as Rex Hunt suggests `an embracing of all of life - by growing seeds of wisdom in every encounter, always open, always learning what life is really about. And keeping the connection to the divine presence open and flowing`.

But often we fail in the first part and run out of energy on the second. And end up where I was at the beginning of this service, forgetting who I am connected to at my deepest level.

The inward journey, the journey to spiritual awareness, is essential for we cannot be transformed or empowered without it. We sometimes can arrive at that awareness through acts of service, but most often it is by acts of stillness - times when we stop, marvel at life all around us, and listen to the beating of our hearts and the call of God. Sometimes it can just happen and sometimes we need to be more intentional about it, for our lives are challenging and often the sound of competing voices is too loud.

In order to raise our awareness but then also to find a time to remember who we belong to I am proposing to trial a midweek service once a month, as much for me as anyone else.

This service was a little taste of it. Somewhere to come to down tools, reflect, and reenergise, so that the path we take every day reflects the God who we believe is present in the world. And reflects the way of Jesus. I have to say that in doing this I am drawing on the wisdom of people who have gone before me, like Nev, who ran a Wednesday service for a number of years.

The Dalai Lama has said that one of the most hopeful things about humankind is that our global awareness - our awareness of others beyond our families, friends, neighbours and communities - is growing. He believes this increased caring is the key to improving the world for everyone.

But it is also about increasing our spiritual awareness, becoming aware of the Divine within us all calling us forward towards new life with one another.

Let us join together to do both.