In America, as the Republicans, suffused with the fear-laden rhetoric of Donald Trump, begin to leave Cleveland today, as the Democrats, wrestling with the negative opinions many Americans have of Hillary Clinton, commence filing into a convention hall in Philadelphia next week and, overseas, as Turkish prime minster Recep Erdogan continues his crackdown on dissent and two human rights groups issue a report indicating that, in the Ukraine, government and rebels are equally complicit in administering torture to their opponents, we wonder about wisdom.
     Although social convention holds wisdom to be extraordinary perception or insight (and it certainly is these), much of religion sees it in an additional light.  Religion seem wisdom as order, the order the gods have set into the world, the order that undergirds and enables all things, the order about which Isaac Newton was thinking when he asserted that a divine force lay at the root of the universe, the order to which Albert Einstein loosely referred when he insisted that, "God does not play dice with the universe," the order on which modern science relies to establish the rationality of the cosmos, the order without which this world and the universe in which it moves could not exist.
     This order is not one of law or regulation.  It is an order of intelligence and moral sensibility, an order around which we can plan and structure our lives, a divinely fathomed order in which we can find purpose and meaning.  It's an order to which Jesus referred in his parable of the wise and foolish person at the close of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7).  It is the wise person, Jesus said, who builds her house on the rock, for she will be safe in storm and challenge.  And it is the foolish person, he added, who builds her house on the sand, the sand which, like the sand on every beach on the planet, is constantly shifting and moving, subject to every upheaval and vagary that comes along.
     It is to this order to which we turn in times of fear and distress, it is this order to which we turn to avoid falling prey to rhetoric and irrationality.  This order may not halt all of the violence, it may not stop all of the pain.  It may not prevent the world from turmoil and unraveling.  This order is a moral haven, a moral refuge.  It helps us to see purpose, it helps us to see reason; it enables us to see beyond the shifting sands of history, space, and time.
     This order is what Jesus had in mind when he told us to build our lives on the rock.  It's the order of the unfathomable yet, in Jesus, entirely visible and real, love and wisdom of God.  In a world of seeming "unreason," it is the most profound reason of all.
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, this time for a mountain sojourn.  I'll talk when I return.  Thanks for reading!