Listen once more today to the word of God as found in our reading from the Book of Proverbs. It begins like this:
Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out, in the gateways of the city she makes her speech: "How long will you simple ones love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge?
And it ends this way -
The waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them; but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm."
Today we are told that Wisdom ignored - leads to death, and that Wisdom heeded - leads to life.
It is not something that I believe many people care to hear. They do not care to hear it - because it is ever the human desire to do as we want to do without having to suffer any negative consequences.
Many of us believe that with regard to the promises of God that it is enough to say I believe, and to attend church from time to time - to receive the rich inheritance that God has said he will give to us.
But it is not so. God calls us to listen to him - and to follow in his way - to live by his wisdom. And his promise is that it is when we do this - that then we will find what we seek and enjoy the fullness of what a relationship with the creator of the world is meant to bestow upon us.
So what is the wisdom of God like? This wisdom that leads to life?
Well, the scriptural record is clear about it. The wisdom of God seems foolish in the eyes of men. It seems foolish because it goes against our natural tendencies - because it reverses all that the world teaches us as being wise.
The Wisdom of God teaches that we must give up our selves if we are to find ourselves, that we must acknowledge our weakness if we are to become strong, that we must die - if we are live.
The gospel today puts this in the starkest terms possible.
Jesus has just told Peter and the disciples for the first time that he must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
As you know - Peter protests against this teaching.
He takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him, and we can imagine can't we - what he might have being trying to say to Jesus before Jesus cuts him off?
Not you Lord you are good - no-one would kill you. Stop thinking negatively. You will be OK. It's not right to say that one who is meant to save Israel will be rejected by his own people, you are meant to deliver us from bondage - not to suffer and die.
But Jesus turns all this around. And he tells Peter - "Get behind me! Satan You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."
And then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said:
"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father's glory with the holy angels."
It is hard stuff to hear is it not? Hard stuff to deal with.
Especially when we are so often a people who keep our faith to ourselves for fear of ridicule, especially when we are so often a people who work day and night to build our homes and our futures, and who judge the success of a matter by how much pleasure or how much profit it affords us.
This past year has been a particularly difficult one for Carmel and I. I have been out of work since January and we have been in great financial difficulties.
When I lost my job in January, it was quite a blow, for I have been giving it my best, and yet in the end the company was too greedy and not wanted more than I could give during the short time I was with them. In our very human wisdom we want job and financial security. especially when you got a young baby. To be honest, we had a struggle with God's purposes for.
I think that it was likely a very similar gut reaction that Peter had when he took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him when he announces his coming rejection and suffering and death.
How much do we set our mind on human things rather than divine?
I am reading a novel by a Christian writer right now. It is called "The List". It concerns a non-believer by the name of Renny and Christian woman he meets by the name of Jo.
Near the beginning of their relationship Jo tells Renny "The panorama of the sky and the water is a much better sermon about freedom and the nature of God than you would hear in many churches."
Renny replies: "Is that like the guy who says he doesn't need to go to church because he can meet God in bass boat?"
Jo replies - "There is some truth to that old excuse. 'The heaven's declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.' However, you have to be looking for God to see Him."
You have to be looking for God to see Him. How similar that is to the message from the book of Proverbs this morning. And to the words of Jesus.
God may indeed be all around us. And even within us. But that is not enough.
We are called to look for that God and to listen to his word. We are called to set our minds on the way of the divine and to strive to live by it, for only by doing so can we in fact live.
We are saved by grace alone, most certainly. But it is by grace through faithfulness - the faithfulness of God towards us in Christ Jesus and our faithfulness towards him and his way.
The way of divine things does not at first appear to be an easy road. It holds some mystery. The human part of us doesn't want to deal with the hard stuff; we don't want to deal with talk of mortality - of suffering - of sacrifice and of death. Even when there is attached to it talk of resurrection and of eternal life.
Hard or not - Jesus calls us to deny ourselves, to deny our fear and our weakness and pettiness and to pick up our own cross of faith and to follow him.
He asks us to lose our lives, to give up our own little restricted imaginations in order to embrace the larger vision of God's will, God's plan.
He reminds us that none of us can "buy" our lives or stave off the inevitable, for we all die.
And he tells us, as does Wisdom in our reading from Proverbs today, that we can only choose life - that we can only live and prosper - if we embrace his way, if we take into ourselves the divine way.
The divine wisdom tells us too that we need to walk in the way of Christ and by his
power if we are to inherit with them all that has been given to them. That we must take up our crosses - that we must give up our lives to God - if God is in fact to take us up with him, if we are to receive the life that God wants to give to us.
These are things divine. To inherit them we are called to set our minds upon them, and upon the wisdom of God which leads us to them.
The apostle Paul writes in the first chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians:
For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.
In order for you to take up your cross what in your life would have to change? What are you most afraid of losing?
For many of us it is what I call our comfort margin.
Throughout the scriptures we hear stories of what God is like and how God operates in our lives. All of them point to the need for us to have a radical trust in Him - to give up our strength in favour of his.
We see it in the stories of the wars in the Old Testament - where God reduces the number of the men of Israel going into battle to the point where the odds are overwhelmingly against them - so that when they later win the battle they may not claim the victory - but rather see it as being his.
We see it in Jesus' talk of how hard it is for the rich to enter into the kingdom of heaven, and Paul's talk about how when he is weak - then is strong.
How often my friends do we look at task that we believe we may be called to perform, and rather than asking if it is truly God's will that we perform it, we ask if it is possible for us to do it?
God's wisdom is no head counting wisdom - no resource counting wisdom. Rather it is that in trusting in him - in listening to him - and then doing what he tells us to do, that all that we need to have happen will happen.
It is not a comfortable thing this kind of radical reliance upon God and God's way of doing things. It can lead us - as it led Jesus - from the familiar territory of Judea - to the city of Jerusalem - from the place where we fit in easily with those around us - to the place where the authorities may indeed plot against us and where those who oppress the people of God are indeed ready to strip us and beat us, and put us to death should we disturb their peace and their comfort, their rule over us with talk of a better way - a way that shares with all people - a way that is just and loving and merciful.
What might we lose if we are to let it be known that we value the ways of God over the ways of man? What might we have to give it up if we are to actually live according to the vows we have made to God?
What might we have to do if we are to heed God's words and desires rather than our own or those of our friends, our families, and our neighbours? Those who tell us that we will be doing the right thing - and they will care for us forever and that we will be blessed beyond all people, if only we do things the way they tell us we should be doing them?
A few years ago now, after giving an address in Melbourne, Australia, the famous Viennese psychiatrist Victor Frankl was given a boomerang as a gift.
Dr. Frankl thought for a few minutes and then said that he felt the boomerang symbolized human existence. People assume that the function of the boomerang is to return to the thrower. But this isn't true. The boomerang returns to the thrower only when it misses the target.
The same is true of in life, he said. We return to ourselves to become self-centred and self absorbed when we have failed to find meaning in life. If we live for ourselves, spend our money only on ourselves or those closest to ourselves, if we squander our time, and exert our strength only for those things that please us, we pay the price of a meaningless existence.
That analysis of life coincides with what Jesus has to say in today's Gospel.
"For those who want to save their life will lose it. And those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it."
God's wisdom is not like ours. God's thoughts are vaster than our thoughts. His ways greater than our ways. Blessed be the name of God. Amen
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