Second Sunday before Lent – evening
Sunday 16th February 2020
2 before Lent – evening
Proverbs 8.1, 22-31
Revelations 4
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
Sometimes it is hard to appreciate the wonders of creation and mother nature – especially when we seem to be stuck in a succession of miserable, stormy days and nights. But of course we don’t see the half of it. We don’t see the growth happening below the soil and new life is burgeoning there. Only when the spring flowers burst forth – plenty of snowdrops around at present and even the odd daffodil braving the wind and rain!
This evening’s psalm celebrates creation with a universal imagination. The Psalmist is unlikely to have experienced half of what he writes about, but he is thinking about the fullness of God’s creation. And all of God’s creatures are to look up to him – the God who gave them life and put them in order. We know that God’s power goes beyond the merely visible and with the Psalmist we appreciate that our fellow creatures and other parts of God’s creation are more numerous and varied that we may imagine.
The book of Proverbs also plays its part in celebrating God’s creation. But this time, as well as summoning praise, it invites us to wonder at God’s innovation. In the personification of Wisdom we learn of a vital component or member of the creative process. This Wisdom-person is there alongside God from the beginning. There are echoes for the Christian of the Gospel of John, where the person of Jesus is also written about as the word, the logic, the reason of God. There is a sense that even the idea of creation from nothing required a sense of teamwork and cooperation in God’s very self. That is one of the ways that the Church began to formulate the concept of the Trinity, to better understand the divine power.
It is such an attractive image, isn’t it? That Wisdom-person dancing around and alongside God, laughing, pointing, delighting in every detail of creation. What a beautiful thought that God had a partner in creation; someone to share his pleasure and joy in new things that were given life. When we go deeper beneath the surface – which is, after all, one of the special gifts of God’s wisdom – there is so much more to see.
So much of the Bible challenges us, makes us go beyond what we already know, see and experience – our surface understanding as it were. Like so many bulbs or root vegetables, nuggets of worth and value – it helps us dig out things deeper than our understanding, nutritious, life-giving, miraculous. It helps us look past what we know every day, to an imagining of what lies behind, beneath, beyond.
Revelations 4 is another example of the wonder that comes through our heart’s imagining of God. I wonder how you imagine heaven to be? Certainly here we have an amazing picture – almost psychedelic in its nature! St John the Divine wrote down his visions as best he could, but you get the sense that language – mere words – proved quite inadequate for the task he gave them.
Here utter stillness and perpetual movement seem to go hand in hand. There is the jewel-like throne and the enthroned one – like rock in the Greek – and the vast surrounding crystal. If you look at the image up there behind the altar, you will see an attempt to represent it. This too fails to capture the utter splendour that we sense John wanted to convey! Such solidity, preciousness and stability. But then we have all the elders and the creatures surrounding the throne constantly engaged in noisy worship; singing God’s name: naming his holiness and power and eternity. The stillness in the centre is surrounded by lightening, rumblings of thunder, bright flaming torches and all this movement and worship. It is, literally, other-worldly and awesome.
Getting things in the right order – the right perspective – echoes the divine creativeness. In Proverbs 8 Wisdom repeatedly emphasises that she was there ‘first’ – at the beginning. And then she witnesses God setting in stone the limits of the sea and the earth. The Hebrew word is not just about a physical boundary line, but also implies a statute or decree – lines that are not to be crossed. Wisdom was there first, and she knows the divine orders of creation.
We cannot help but wonder if – with climate change and extreme weather conditions it may be that we have – even unwittingly – breached those decrees and disturbed the natural order. Denied Wisdom’s self. Such that the seas and the earth no longer know where the limits lie?
So, first things first. Let’s make sure we have a vision of heaven as the foundation stone in our lives. A vision of perfection to which we aspire. As close to God’s intention and his original plan as we can achieve. Surely that would be the wise thing to do? Amen.