Sermon: Mining for Wisdom

 ‘Where wisdom shall be found? And where is the place of understanding?'  

1. Big ‘Buts' and Little ‘Buts'

Job 28 is all about wisdom but notice the grammar of the key question: ‘where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding. They are not when questions, or who questions but where questions. In this sermon I shall be exploring in a couple of ways what you might call the theology of place, or, if you prefer, the question of whether geography is important to God.  I will do so with reference to Job 28 and a recent lecture by John Millbank on the theology which lies behind so-called fresh expression of church.

The first 11 verses of Job 28 are a familiar passage in this Cathedral because they are read at the Miners Gala service.  They constitute a wonderfully poetic and powerful description of the lengths to which people will go to retrieve something they value.  ‘Man puts his hand to the flinty rock and overturns mountains by the roots. He cuts out channels in the rocks and his eye sees every precious thing. He binds up the streams so that they do not trickle and the thing that is hid he brings forth to light.' (Job 28 10&11)

Charming as it is to have this passage read at a service for miners to do so would raise the eyebrows of the Biblical exegete.  The problem is not within these verses but with the first word of the next verse. Verse 12 begins with the word ‘but'.  And the word ‘but' is a big word.

You can say what you like but if there is ‘but coming', as people say, then the value of what you are saying is already very limited. Indeed there is a saying which I will rephrase slightly for the pulpit as, ‘everything before the ‘but' is meaningless flattery'.  ‘That was a very well crafted sermon - but - I just wondered whether anyone was listening after the first two minutes.'  Or, ‘that was a great business plan- but - unfortunately it did not deliver the results we needed.' Or, ‘that's a wonderful dress or a great shirt, - but...'  (as soon as you have let that ‘but' slip out, you are in trouble).  In each case, the words before the ‘but' are more or less erased by what comes after. 

When we read the ‘but' at the beginning of verse 12 as a ‘big but' the meaning that emerges is that of contrast. While on the one hand people go to such lengths as these to get previous material from the ground, on the other, the process of finding wisdom is very different.  Rather like, ‘This is a method that guarantees success, but that is a sure road to failure.'  The ‘but' is there to signal contrast. Such is the big but, the contrastive but, and such is the ‘but', the commentators imply, at the beginning of verse 12. That is the way of mining, but this is the way of wisdom.

However, reading a recent theological book on wisdom which focuses on this passage I discovered a different interpretation of the ‘but' at the beginning of verse 12. The point made is that sometimes not everything before the ‘but' is irrelevant to what comes after. Rather, what goes before the ‘but' can go to set up a context for what comes after; that there is some carry-forward across the ‘but', as it were. To give an example: we might say, ‘this is the way we make an omelette, but this is the way we make a soufflé'.  The sentence only makes sense because omelette-making and soufflé-making have much I common. We do not bother to say, ‘that is the way we make cement but this is the way make candyfloss'. This sort of ‘but', the ‘little but', or, ‘comparative but' is there not so much to distinguish as to connect the two sides of the sentence or story.

Now if we read the ‘but' at the beginning of verse 12 as a ‘small but' the whole passage makes a different and, to my mind, richer kind of sense. The point of talking about mining is not to contrast it with wisdom-seeking. Rather it is to suggest that mining might have something to teach us about seeking wisdom.

2.  Different Wisdom in Different Places?

However,  before saying a couple of things about the way in which wisdom seeking really is like mining, I want to suggest that there is one important way in which it is not. If you know anything at all about mining you will appreciate that the question of where you did and what you find are inextricably connected. If it is coal you are after then Durham is a good place for you to dig. If it is tin then you'd best head off for Cornwall. If it is gold you seek, Johannesburg is your place.  

Is there, then, a simple geography of wisdom which says that you will find different wisdom in different places?  

I want to suggest that this apparently attractive idea is not only misleading but distracting because it steers us away from the deep meanings of the word ‘wisdom' and suggests that what we are talking about here is a kind of local knowledge or even, to think in terms of a university, a departmental specialisation. This is an attractive but essentially misleading idea.

If, when we hear the question ‘Where is wisdom to be found?' we think it is a question about information or knowledge we might glibly answer, ‘well, that depends on the wisdom'.  But therein lies our fundamental error. For the wisdom that we are thinking about is not the sort of stuff that can be divided into types and broken down into faculties or departments.  It is something deeper and more virtue-like than that.

The point of the analogy with mining is not to suggest that some territories are more wisdom-rich than others, nor that you can learn some kinds of wisdom in one place and some in another.  Rather it is to suggest that the pursuit of wisdom is in some real ways like mining. And I take that to mean that the pursuit of wisdom involves digging down below the surface in a dangerous and difficult exercise which involves high levels of skill, commitment and collaboration.  It is in this way that the pursuit of wisdom is like mining.  It is not that God, wisdom and justice are found different places; it is that certain kids of pursuit will help you to discover all three.

3. The Prophet Millbank

This brings me at last to the trenchant observations of the theologian John Millbank in a lecture in which he subjects the vogue for ‘fresh expressions of church' to some pretty serious drilling and blasting. The lecture is a polemic but it makes a serious point which you could summarise as being that God is interested in geography after all. This has very significant implications for the way in which the Church responds to the contemporary world, our mission context.  In particular, it means that the imperative to surf the tide of liquid modernity, which would be Milbank's interpretation of the desire to promote fresh expression of church which connect not with actual place but with social networks and peer groups, is not so much a mission strategy as a serious error about where God, wisdom and justice are to found.  If I can paraphrase him without too much parody: justice is not to be found in the endless flux of a fast-paced, ecologically-unsustainable consumerist dash. God is not to be found in the reinforcing of alienating and unhealthy boundaries and barriers between neighbours or even family members of different ages.  Wisdom is not to be found in the instrumental practices of management, or in raiding success stories from the world of business for the top tips.

Geography, particular place, matters to God not because one place is more holy than another place but because of its materiality, its solidity and its depth.  The point about a parish is not that it is a convenient slice of suburbia or quaint village or coherent market town but that it is a place where rich and poor, young and old, healthy and infirm live cheek by jowl.  Geography matters because only through engaging seriously with a place, a real place, only by mining out its truths, good and not so good, can the pursuit of wisdom lead to the finding of true wisdom; God-shaped, person-changing and community-weaving wisdom, which is inextricable from justice, truth and humility.

4.  Spiritual Mining

‘Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding?' Reading the prophets Job and Millbank leads me to suggest that it is not in abstractions, not in liquidity, not in the market, not in the isolated ego, not in consumerism  but in the geographically located community which has sufficient constancy, permanence, vitality, purpose and pain to provide a suitable context for what we might call ‘spiritual mining'.   Wisdom comes from the depths, the depths of actual, located communities. The places where real people struggle with life and death, pain and misfortune, suffering and betrayal, and yet still seek to remain faithful. We need not be romantic or nostalgic about these communities for this to be true. This is not a theology of special places or of stable communities but a theology of holistic connection of people and place. Of course communities and relationships change over time. There is always change, but change is neither bad - as the so called traditionalists believe, nor good as the so called progressives assert. Change is just another reality which may or may not be connected in with wisdom, justice and God.

Real communities are always being refreshed, challenged and enriched by those who will stay only for a while.  And those who do so have unique opportunities to grow in wisdom to the extent to which they begin to discover and share in the truthful, painful, deeper realities of a place.

Geography does matter to God, and to us. There is no wisdom which is not fundamentally, theologically and actually down to earth wisdom.  The rest of it, I fear, is the sort of stuff that, to go back to a phrase I mentioned to earlier, comes before a ‘contrastive but'. I called it ‘meaningless flattery'. There is a lot of it about, but it is a very different thing to the fear of the Lord, the loving, respectful awe of our creator, redeemer and most challenging inspiration, which is what we eventually disinter when we set about spiritual mining, wherever we are.