Wisdom in the Streets

Sermon based on Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31 and John 16:12-15

Every once in awhile, a new musical comes to Broadway that changes everything.  This year, the game-changer has been Hamilton: The Musical.  The next big musical is about this nation’s’ founding father, and the current face on the ten dollar bill,  Alexander Hamilton.  

It’s the most ridiculous premise for a musical, and that’s not the only thing that makes it great.  What is powerful about this piece is what the writer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has done to distinguish the music of the revolution against the music of the establishment.  Establishment language and roadway ballad and chorus song, but the music of the revolution in Hamilton is all rap and hip-hop.  The radical ideas, arguments for justice and against slavery, are done in rap battles between Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington and Aaron Burr.   

The music of the revolution is not music that we hear in polite society.  If we think of fancy parties, we imagine a nice string quartet.  Here in church, I can’t think of a single time that I’ve heard rap or hip hop.  Our music is rich four part singing, often unaccompanied, and all of it easy on the ears.  

But the music of the revolution is what we hear outside. In my neighborhood the music of outside is rap and hiphop.  It is loud.  It is fast. Urgent.  The rhymes are creative.  The bass reverberates in our chests.  The music describes the reality of life in our country that is not the reality we present in polite society–but hip hop can be a challenge because it’s not our story, and we don’t always want to hear these words that challenge our systems and ways of living.

Does not wisdom call,

and does not understanding raise her voice?

On the heights, beside the way,

   at the crossroads she takes her stand;

beside the gates in front of the town,

   at the entrance of the portals she cries out:

“To you, O people, I call,

   and my cry is to all that live.

The wisdom of the street shows up in many different forms–

Outside the Damascus gate in Jerusalem, wisdom shows up in the form of old women selling sad looking figs and dates.  It’s young Palestinians boys being arrested and detained.  It’s the sounds of the call to prayer wafting over the city, calling Muslims (and all of us) to turn to God, to remember God’s greatness.  

This is the wisdom of the street.  This is the cry to all who live, at the gates of the city.

The wisdom of the street is at the intersections, where folks who long for home ask for something to eat.  Or, teenagers who want to play in the underfunded school marching band, hold out their boots and ask you to help their school get new uniforms.  Or the well dressed man sells mini-pies and a newspaper to make a living and to spread his truth.  

This is the wisdom of the street.  This is the cry to all who live.  

The wisdom of the street is Philadelphia high school students organizing a protest on Broad Street in Philadelphia, in front of school district headquarters.  They were protesting that their friend, Brian, was beaten and assaulted by a police officer in one of our public schools.  These children organized, publicized and spoke out against the injustice they experience in the halls of higher learning.  The cried out for their humanity to be remembered, and restored in their own schools–that they not live in prison conditions, but have the their human rights restored

This is the wisdom of the street.  This is the cry to all who live.  

So, what is this wisdom that is calling out at the city gates and at the crossroads?  

This text is specifically read today to remind us of the work of the Holy Spirit.  Today is Trinity Sunday, a Sunday when we remember the complicated theological dance of God the Creator, Jesus the sustainer, and the Holy Spirit, the life-giver.  

But, rather than laying out a theological treatise, I’m choosing to focus on the holy spirit, also known as wisdom.  

And here’s what we know about the Holy Spirit.  She is wild–she shakes things up, and blows things around.  She sets fires.

The Holy Spirit tells the truth, even when we don’t want to hear it.  The Spirit also tells us things in ways we don’t want to hear it.  

And, according to this text, Wisdom is directional.  It shows up at the gates, and crossroads of our journey–those places where we ask for directions–and she shows us the way to go.  

What we often hear and see at the gates and crossroads of our city are the stories that are unfolding in front of us.  Stories of pain.  Stories of exclusion.  Stories of desperation and last resort.  And in those stories, wisdom sits.  

There are many ways that we choose to hear or tell these stories. We can look at the Palestinian youth detained at the Damascus gate and tell the story of a young “terrorist in the making” or we can tell the story of a frustrated kid living in occupation.  Stories at the gates and the crossroads are wisdom, and they are calling out to all who live.  But they are not wisdom if they are about protection, because the holy spirit is anything but safe.

The author of Hamilton: The Musical, Lin Manuel Miranda, a second generation Puerto Rican immigrant spoke at the University of Pennsylvania’s graduation last week.  He’s a storyteller, so he talked about what he knows best.  He said this (and I think it relates directly to our text today): Every story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the larger narrative…this act of choosing will reverberate across our lives.

Stories are essential.  They are life changing.  It’s important that we tell stories, but what kinds of stories are we telling?  Who do they include and who do they omit?  

It’s so easy to tune into only the stories in this circle, to keep out wisdom’s cry for life outside these walls.  It would be easy to plug up our ears as we crossed the busy intersection of Washington Lane and Germantown Avenue.  But if we do that, we close ourselves off the wisdom, to the call to all who live.  Inside the city walls is safety, but outside the gate, at at the intersections of our journeys, there is no safety and protection.  We are open to the Spirit’s wisdom to blow us right over.  We are open to hear wisdom in the voices that we don’t ever elevate.  

The thing that has been so revolutionary about Hamilton the musical is that it elevates a different story.  It tells the story that we are so completely familiar with, the story of our founding fathers, but puts it on the edges of the city, and at the crossroads.  It tells the story from the perspective of Alexander Hamilton, a “bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman.”  It tells the story from another perspective, and gives an urgency to the message in a history that’s run cold and self-protective.  

Wisdom is at the gates of the city and at the crossroads.  And if it is wisdom we seek, if it is the holy spirit winds we long to have blow over and through us, why are we not also in the streets, listening to unfamiliar, uncomfortable  story?

Holy Spirit guide us until all truth.  Let us be changed by the stories we hear.  Because in those stories are life.  AMEN.