Sermon. Sinai and Wisdom

 

Sinai: Wisdom

A Sermon for friends

 

I have read, several times, that book of Eastern wisdom, the Tao Te Ching, with several commentaries. One went into all the intricacies, all the paradoxes of each term: the Way-less Way, the Ineffable Communication, and so on. I then asked a Chinese-speaking woman what the title meant. She said: “How to live, written down”. I asked: “Simple as that?” “Simple as that.”

 

There is something here, I think. We need wisdom which is complicated, or, maybe, panoramic. And we need wisdom which is simple, which tells you: Put your foot there.

 

Desert-dwellers, in Sinai or elsewhere, know this. It takes elementary skill to live, or at least to flourish in the wilderness. You have to know where to put your foot. And (I don’t say “but”) the pull, the draw of the desert is because of something which is not common-sense. It is uncommon-sense. It is the will to cut yourself not only from ready comfort, but also from all the set markers of identity. All the things that make you “you”. Your family, your job, your status, the way everyone knows you as a West Ham supporter, who loves their morning cappuccino, or whatsoever it be.

 

The Book of Proverbs famously says: “The beginning of wisdom is: Get wisdom” [Prov 4.7]. Better in the Hebrew: Reishit chokhmah: Qneh chokhmah! To be nourished by wisdom, you need to be hungry for it, perhaps even starving for it. To have to pursue it, like prey. It has to be first on your list. If it means living in the wild places, that may barely register as a cost, to those who are starving for wisdom. Reishit chokhmah: Qneh chokhmah! Surely the impulse behind the desert-dwellers. There is a place for a certain acquisitiveness, you know, and this is it: Get wisdom!

 

Is this to say that wisdom requires solitude? I think I am not saying that.

 

For desert life is not solitude, in the sense of life without other people. Around St Antony, others gathered. The House that John built may suggest this happens, again and again. And so at Sinai stands St Catherine’s monastery. A monastery is a gathered community, of course. And this monastery is the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world. This is a functional community, one which works. And more: this monastery contains the oldest continuously working library in the world. The jewel in the crown of that library is Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest complete Christian Bibles (both Testaments, in Greek).

 

This complicates things. At least, it complicates things if we think that a proper desperate driving hunger for wisdom means we go into the wilderness to be a wild woman or a cave man. No. In the desert we find (who knew?) community, and learning – a reverence for knowledge – and, yes, even biblical studies, a concern for what the text says, a concern for getting the letters of the text right. The wilderness is of course a place of strangest, all-unsettling silence. Of course it is. And it is a place of – we have to say it – words.

 

On reflection, this need not surprise us. Let us look to the other tradition that looks to Sinai, Judaism, Judaism as it is known by the Wisdom of the Sages and the Rabbis. From the Ethics of the Fathers from the Mishnah [1.6b]:

 

“Joshua the son of Perachya would say: “Make for yourself a master; get yourself a friend; and be a judge to everyone on side of merit.”

 

It’s the same word: Qneh lkhah chaver! Qneh! Get one! And I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you that the friend, the Chaver, you are to get, isn’t one with whom you share blissful agreement. At least in later tradition, what you do when you have got yourself a friend, a Chaver, is Chavruta. And Chavruta is a fierce, a loud engagement with text, a row; both parties keenly looking for the weakness of the other’s case, for the sake of the text’s deeper truth.

 

The beginning of wisdom is: Get wisdom; Get a Friend.

 

While these words are at home in the Hebrew tradition, there is universal applicability here. Wisdom can never be just a decorative addition to other acquisitions. That just gives you platitudes and slogans and “mission statements”, even if they be the world’s most pious platitudes. You need to get out from where you are. You need to bear the cost. And also: you need to spend time and give attention to those who really disagree with you. This is how wisdom is shaped; this is how, always and everywhere, humanity is shaped.

 

And (again, I don’t say “but”), and, that Hebrew tradition says:

This is not enough.

 

The Book of Proverbs also tells us that the beginning of wisdom is fear of the LORD, though the language varies [Prov 9.10a; cf 1.7a]. The place were the form is closest to the text we have considered is actually the Psalms, Psalm 111 [v.10a]: Reishit chokhmah yirat HaShem. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” is the well-known translation.

 

Here I am guessing again: I am guessing that I need not dwell on how “fear” here does not mean “the disposition of being anxious, frightened or in terror”, but rather, well, a matrix of meaning stretching from simple unemotional obedience (“fear” as getting-on-with-it, reliably) to awe (the life-giving sense of being overwhelmed by the One who is both majesty beyond measure and also on your side).

 

I guess we also know that the LORD here is capital-L-capital-O-capital-R-capital-D, and that in turn is a circumlocution for the Divine Name, in our letters, Y,H,W,H.  

 

Ah yes, the Divine Name. The Divine Name revealed to whom? To Moses. And where? At the Mount of Gd, known variously as Choreb, or Sinai. We come back to Sinai’s monastery, St Catherine’s monastery. I have not given its formal name. Formally it is the Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai. God-Trodden Mount Sinai. Of course. Of course, this refers to the giving of Torah at Sinai to the whole People and through Moses. But it also refers to Moses’ purely solitary encounter with Gd from the Burning Bush (and indeed there is a Chapel of the Burning Bush). And so this is, by tradition, the site of the revelation of the very Name of Gd, Y,H,W,H.

 

We often get this wrong. How often do we hear – do we say – that in the mystical way of wisdom, names, including names for Gd, mean less and less? That Gd is beyond all names. Gd has no name. Often, as I say. This is not quite what the Bible says. Think about it.

·        The claim that Gd has no name,

·        and the claim that Gd has a name that we cannot pronounce

·        mean radically different things.

Gd is personal, and has a personal name. As the Bible sees it, it is not the case that behind the personal Gd is an impersonal nameless One. With Gd, it’s always personal.

 

Again, we need not be surprised. How else does it make sense to believe that the full icon, character, fragrance, form, meaning, presence, Word of Gd is human being, the human being, Jesus?

 

The Word of Gd is the Word of Person. The person Jesus is the personal presence of Gd the Person. The language often gets us all knotted up, for sure. So we use the words as a ladder to knock away, once we have enough to show. Jesus is the showing of Gd, the showing of personal Gd, the showing of divinely personal Wisdom. We show it, and we who show it do not see it, so much as know ourselves seen by it.

 

So,  of course, one other thing that need not surprise us is that the end is our beginning. From the concreteness of Sinai, this Christian monastery (this one only), housing these words of Hebrew origin (these very words telling this very story), we do come back to what is authentically universal. I mean: to the way-less way. Gd, the unspoken, unspeakable Name. Gd the One we know in the word-filled silence, in the barren fertility of the wilderness.

 

Awe for Personal Gd is the beginning of wisdom.

The beginning of wisdom is: Get wisdom.  

 

Amen.