Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity
“Jesus sat down and taught the people out of the ship.”
Jesus, “seeing the multitudes went up into a mountain … sat down and opened his mouth and taught them,” saying “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Jesus, standing by the lake of Gennesaret when “the people pressed upon them to hear the word of God,” entered one of the ships, and “sat down and taught the people out of the ship.” Like the ancient philosophers of the schools of pagan antiquity, he sits in the seat of wisdom. He is the teacher. It is, I think, a wonderful image. Jesus in the seat of wisdom; Jesus as the wisdom of God. The image of sitting and teaching belongs to the great religions and philosophies of the world.
But what does Jesus teach us? All the things that belong to wisdom. What is wisdom? All the things that belong to our life with God, the eternal things that are opened out in the midst of the passing things, the temporal things, of our world and day. It is about the understanding which alone can govern and peaceably order our world. It is about the understanding which alone enables the “Church to joyfully serve [God] in all godly quietness.”
Now there’s a thought! “Godly quietness.” It seems the exact opposite of our activity-fixated age in our obsession with practicality and action and our lust for power and domination. The very things, of course, which contribute to the destruction of our world and ourselves. When wisdom is lost and gone, we are easily the victims and even the perpetrators of violence and destruction. We contemplate the horrendous loss of life in Norway by a right-wing fanatic intent, it seems, in making a statement about political policies regarding immigration, resulting in mind-numbing and indiscriminate carnage. Terrorism is always indiscriminate in the range and the rage of its destruction.
