The Doctor teaching wisdom from the ruins of his life

An Evensong sermon for Advent III – 14 December 2025
Isaiah 5.8-end; Acts 13.13-41

With the third Sunday of Advent almost over, we find ourselves entering the last phase of the season. On 17 December, we begin the so-called Great Advent Antiphons, short but deep meditations on the nature of the coming Christ, sung on each side of the Magnificat at Evensong, beginning with O Sapientia, O Wisdom.

Wisdom is also the main concern of today’s Collect, which prays that ‘the hearts of the disobedient’ might be turned to ‘the wisdom of the just.’ The readings also foreground folly and wisdom, though not explicitly by name. The Prophet Isaiah advises against lives which foolishly forget God’s central place, warning those who turn their back on worship and justice; those who prefer strong drink and property portfolios – ‘joining house to house and field to field’ – that they will be exiled from home, before tumbling down the ever-open jaws of an all-erasing death. In Acts likewise, St Luke is clear – as is St Paul elsewhere – that it is the crucified Christ, the bruised and battered Saviour, taken down from the tree but not yet arisen, who is the first and last word of divine Wisdom.


We consider these matters tonight through the lens of a great wise giant of English Letters, Dr Samuel Johnson, who was commemorated yesterday in the C of E Calendar. Famous for his Dictionary, Johnson is of greater interest to us as a fellow Christian. Like some of us, no doubt, he wrestled with the gospel-mystery of salvation, and inhabited his faith through anguished prayer, leavened by the practice of charity. Faith was never easy for him. He found life ‘slippery and on the whole unhappy’, and he tried to raise his faith as a sort of defensive wall against his many fears: fear of illness and uselessness; of bleakness, and the end of anything he’d ever enjoyed: friendship, travel, books; conversation in the coffee house; and his accustomed chair in the tavern which he called ‘the throne of human felicity’. He relied on it all, and was terrified by the prospect of its loss.

We may be surprised by this. Dr Johnson always sounds as if he’s having such a good time. He is always being quoted; always the right answer in the quiz, when it isn’t Oscar Wilde or Mae West. But he’s much more than a quick-witted supplier of one-liners. He inherited from his father the dark scourge of melancholy. This bequeathed to him a disordered life, in which long periods of idleness gave way to bursts of fruitful activity. He had a dysfunctional marriage and a diverse array of behavioural oddities. We’re told he’d fall ‘into a reverie accompanied with strange antic gesticulations with his feet and hands.’ He’d wave cups of tea at people, or would seem to chew the cud, or cluck like a hen, or blow out his breath like a whale. He was odd, and provoked remark.

In none of this, however, did he become mean-spirited or self-serving. In bearing the wounds of his father’s fecklessness, and an early poverty that cost him his place at Oxford, Johnson did not take what he could and cling to it. Rather, he threw open his home to all manner of waifs and wanderers, ‘whole nests of people’, whose ill tempers and domestic brawling he patiently and kindly endured. And then, most touchingly, there were the children, the sleeping street-children of London, into whose tiny hands he pressed pennies as they slept, so that when they awoke they might buy themselves some bread. ‘His purse was ever open to almsgiving,’ wrote his friend Mrs Thrale. And so was his heart.


This is not to canonise the man. Johnson was fully human. A great lover of women and on terms of intimacy with several, he had to resist going backstage at the theatre lest the proximity of the actresses should excite his ‘amorous propensities’. He was also a committed eater and drinker, though in all his feasting, he felt so often very empty, experiencing a desolation like that of the cross; and asking, in one poem, ‘Must helpless Man, in Ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the Torrent of his Fate?’


Like Dr Johnson, we will always come to God in part through the fears and failings of life, and through our practice of kindness. What we do now is pray for the grace so to respond to the God we find in the manger, that we may be saved for eternity by the God who will find us, when he comes in glory to judge the living and the dead. Such is wisdom, and the Wisdom of God will save us all.


[This is a revised version of a sermon preached in Lichfield Cathedral and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 13 September 2009 as part of Dr Johnson’s 300th Birthday Celebrations.]