True Wisdom and the Deepest Belonging

True Wisdom and the Deepest Belonging                 

1 Corinthians 2:1-7                                        

Series: Belonging-Part 1

August 31, 2025

Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney, First Presbyterian Church, San Rafael, CA

1 When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 3 And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. 4 My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.  6 Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. 7 But we speak God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.

 One of my favorite stories was on CBS news recently.  Steve Hartman, in his Own the Road segment, reported that at a nursing home in northwest Arkansas, he found a gem named Ruby. At 11-years-old, Ruby Chitsey likes to go to work with her mom. Her mom Amanda is a nurse who travels to several nursing homes in the area. And it was on one of those visits, that Ruby started going up to residents with her notepad, asking them if they could have any three things, what would they be.

 Amanda said.  “Ruby said she was mostly just curious what they'd say.  "I was very surprised. I thought people would say money, houses, a Lamborghini," Ruby said.

But, instead, here's what she got: electric razor, new shoes, a fresh peach, Vienna sausage, and other really basic items. "Like, that's all they wanted. And I really decided that I needed to do something," Ruby said.

So she started a charity called, "Three Wishes for Ruby's Residents." Now, while her mom is caring for patients, Ruby goes room-to-room, jots down wishes and then sets out to grant those wishes. Ruby has a GoFundMe to cover costs, but again, no one is asking for a sports car here. Her expenses are minimal, especially compared to the rewards.

 "It really lifts you, it really does," Ruby said.  “I like talking with the people.” Whether she knows it or not, Ruby is satisfying some much more basic human needs here, to be remembered, to be cherished especially by a child. That is what seniors are truly hungry for. That is what Ruby brings every time she sets foot in a nursing home.

            https://www.cbsnews.com/news/11-year-old-girl-granting-wishes-to-nursing-home-residents/

 Ruby knew that she was connected to all these people in their rooms. 

Ruby seemed to know this deep truth.

We all belong to God and we all belong to each other.

All of us. All the humans. Without exception. There is no more fundamental truth than this.

 But we forget it, and doubt it and disguise it and deny it.  We cover it up with layers of interpretation and competition and building our coalitions and hiding our true selves.

  And soon this hunger for belonging - this absolutely core, unshakable reality that we yearn to feel because we know it in our depths as the truest thing, the most real thing - soon it becomes something we commodify. We dole it out in tiny amounts, and sell to the highest bidder, we seek it relentlessly, addictively, in harmful and dehumanizing ways. And we make it probationary, limited and guarded, shutting out some in order to welcome in others.

 And whether we are conscious of it or not, we long  for this connection to God, the Holy Mystery, this belonging to the very source of life, our identity, our purpose,– that we set up rules to mediate it, to say who has this belonging, and who doesn’t, and how to earn it, and who can dispense it, and what can make you lose it or gain it. And how we try to gain or earn what already defines us.

  We forget - in that deep existential kind of forgetting - that belonging to God and belonging to each other is something hidden before the foundations of the world, utterly true and eternally unchanging. And then once in a while, like unexpectedly getting a gift, a wish granted by young Ruby, we remember.  That eternal wisdom and love are real again.

  There are two wisdoms.  Paul says.

 He calls one “the wisdom of this age.”  We call it “the ways of empire” or  “the way of fear.” This wisdom is built on power and centered on scarcity. It tells us always life is urgent and you must never let up or let down your guard. Each of us is in this alone, other people are competition or threat, and judgment and condemnation are constant companions. 

 The way of fear seeks salvation from charismatic leaders, wise investments and the careful construction. It says we can be saved by weapons, by this candidate or that party, by this act of religious piety or that specific prayer, by this way of seeing the world or that list of beliefs.  It says you can force others to respect you through violence or through moral rightness, and these also prove your worth or earn you a place at the table.

 And we put stock in that kind of wisdom, we pay money to it, and educate our children in it, and take it in through our televisions and computer screens and phones and car radios, scrolling, listening, reading, soaking in so many words: his words, her words, their words.

  Although it is like holding a dimming flashlight with waning batteries and shows a dim light,  we hold up this worldly wisdom before us, and we squint into the darkness, letting it guide us. Things are falling apart. And we are finding more ways to divide into ever smaller and more camps.

 But there is another wisdom.

 Ancient and true. Secret and Hidden. Wisdom of the Spirit. Decreed by God before the ages, running like an underground river through time.  The wisdom that spoke the world into being with a single word, the wisdom that bound it all in harmony and order, a delight to its creator, functioning in love and cooperation. The wisdom of the Word made flesh when embodied love, Jesus, Universal Christ came to dwell among us. And others of sources of this wisdom and truth from other faith traditions and mystics.

 There is no worldly wisdom in this. It is resilient, absurd and steadfast, it comes concealed in weakness to stand always with the weakest among us. 

  The writer of the letter to the church in Corinth, Paul, was a Roman citizen from a prominent Jewish family, well-established with an impressive pedigree. He studied under the most prominent rabbis of the day. Paul was educated in the wisdom of the world. He was a successful, powerful, influential figure, and a zealot.  He knew how to speak the wisdom of the age, in the language of the rulers of the age.

 But when he comes to the Corinthians, he chooses to leave all that behind. He sees it as a distraction, that might keep people from seeing the real reality. “I did not come with all the methods and the political skills of lofty words or persuasion. He says.  I came in weakness and fear, with much trembling. I wanted you to see God’s actions instead of focusing on my words -  So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.

 Paul uses this language -  “Jesus Christ …the foolishness of the cross,” again and again, as a kind of shorthand to refer to the whole of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus- was to make it clear that that the Holy One shares this life with us. Jesus died and then this mystery of resurrection, of new life, of healing and wholeness.

 Everything we thought was real about the power of death and division is exposed as utter fraud by the unquenchable light of the world, the wisdom hidden before the ages and there is nothing, nothing, that can separate us from the love of God in Christ. It’s settled and final: We belong to God, we belong to each other. This is what Jesus trusted, and embodied.

 And yet… and yet we forget. Which is to say, we choose self-protection and division and destruction and existential forgetting and ego. We choose to tear others down and to fear, fear, fear that anything, everything, could tear us down.

 But here is the free gift of grace and love.  You belong to God. You belong to all the rest of the people in this whole big world.  And they belong to God, and they belong to you. Fact. Done.

 We keep coming back to choosing this true eternal sacred wisdom day after day.  Biblical scholar Mary Hinkle Shore describes spiritual wisdom like a pair of lenses at an eye exam, where click, click, click, suddenly the fuzzy blur is sharp & clear, the chart in focus. You can see what was there all along, only obscured by the various lenses that misinterpreted it for you.

 That is the wisdom of the Spirit  - that God doesn’t swoop in and sweep away all of life’s pain and heartache. God sets a place at the table of life for each person.  The Holy One is in us, with us. We are beloved. We are not alone.  

  Having the mind of Christ helps us see this.  And it makes us brave. Brave to face the truth. Brave to tell the truth. Brave to live the truth with each other. Even when the truth is, This hurts so bad! it’s terrible and I hate everything about it! Because we know all sorrow and suffering is real.  This violence and hate – the holy one weeps. 

 Corrupt rulers of this age do not understand this true wisdom. Paul says. And why should they? Its logic is love; its awareness is transcendent.

  How do we stay open to this true wisdom? Here are short-cuts, practices that can keep us open and take us back to the true wisdom. 

 The first ones are sabbath and silence. This wisdom tells us to stop and rest every single week. To put down everything, and not do anything impressive or productive at all– it deprives us of all our devices of accumulation, our instruments of efficiency, our tools of measurement and our weapons of comparison, and forces us to just be human beings with each other. Our glorious and pitiful, nervous and intriguing selves are utterly loved by God in all our sagging, annoying, endearing and honest humanity. This regular, intentional stopping doesn’t make us fall behind or miss out; but actually restores our souls, returns us to being human and grounds us in our belonging once again. Be still and know I am God.  I experienced this on my sabbatical and continue to experience Sabbath time each week.

  Two other short-cuts back to the true wisdom are gratitude and gathering.

 Br. David Stendyl Rast asks,  “Is not gratitude a passage from suspicion to trust, from proud isolation to a humble give and take, from enslavement to false independence to self-acceptance in that dependence that liberates?” Yes. he answers. Gratitude is the great gesture of passage. Gather each week to remember.

 There lies our human task.  The task of entering into the meaning of this passage (the passage which is our whole life), of celebrating its meaning through the gesture of thanksgiving.  Sabbath and silence, gratitude and gathering can point us back to the wisdom deeper than words. 

 Moments of deep belonging…They come upon us.   From time to time, when we are unprepared and unsuspecting, we are seized by a kind of wakefulness that resonates in our depths.

 Cradling a new baby, swaddled and sleeping, warm against your chest… 

 Standing still under a vast, dark and starry sky…. 

 Pausing, breathless and still, watching a deer and her fawn go across the path ….

 Being held in someone’s strong embrace while you weep….

 Laughing so hard you with a friend,  hard to catch your breath ….

 Through the whisper of memory, the flashes of beauty, and the tastes of wonder, God keeps calling us back to the deep.

Underneath and behind and inside everything is a deeper wisdom and reality, the heartbeat that keeps the whole world alive: We belong to God; we belong to each other. Let it pulse through you. Let it bring you back to life again and again. Amen.

Resource

Rev. Kara Root, “True Wisdom,” Faith and Leadership, August 9, 2016   https://faithandleadership.com/kara-k-root-the-true-wisdom