September 17, 2006

Proverbs 1:20-33

Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice.  At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: "How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?  How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?   Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.  Because I have called and you refused, have stretched out my hand and no one heeded, and because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when panic strikes you, when panic strikes you like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you.  Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but will not find me.  Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord, would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices.  For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but those who listen to me will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster."

Sermon  

What Wisdom Can and Can't Do

What good is wisdom?  You don't need to have wisdom in order to be saved, in order to have a relationship with God.  All you need is humility and trust, and those can exist in a person who does not have wisdom.  What do we need wisdom for?  Wisdom has to do with human experience.  People who are wise talk a lot about the accumulated human experience.  They sit at the gates of the city, this is true especially in the ancient cultures, they would sit at the gates of the cities and discuss with each other human experience and the ways of the world.  But the Bible makes it very clear that God is not terribly impressed with human wisdom; and God has no need of human wisdom to achieve his purposes.  Your ways are not my ways says the Lord.  The wisdom of God might be foolishness in the eyes of human beings says Saint Paul, and the foolishness of God is wisdom in the eyes of human beings. 

God and wisdom don't seem to line up very well together when you look in the Bible.  It would seem that wisdom is not much good to a Christian.  And yet, in our wisdom, the people of Israel and the people of the Church have preserved wisdom as part of the Bible.  It's probably the least emphasized part of the Bible; but there are certain books of the Bible that are grouped together as the "wisdom books": Psalms and Proverbs are the largest and most widely used of the books; but also the Songs of Solomon and a few others.  They are books of poetry, but it's poetry about human experience; and it's poetry that connects that human experience with God.  And so we seem to be saying that wisdom does have a place in a life of faith.  What exactly is that? Let's look at the Book of Proverbs and see if we can probe into that question a little bit.

Proverbs is a good place to start because, on the surface anyway, what this book talks about is mostly wisdom that will help one get ahead in the world; it will help you maintain your properties, it will help you keep your family relationship strong and intact.  Jesus said sometimes you have to lose everything, and sometimes you have to break relationships; so there is contrast there.   And the Book of Proverbs falls on the line of social order and social safety and doing the things that will keep you from falling into danger.  And so it seems like the kind of wisdom that is found in cultures that don't have the benefit of God's revelations, that don't have the Bible or the experience of God the way Israel experienced God.  That wisdom of Proverbs sounds a lot like the wisdom of other cultures; the Babylonians, the Egyptians.  Those different cultures, which the Bible identifies as totally outside the Light, still have a lot of the same wisdom as Jews and Christians in the Book of Proverbs. The Book of Proverbs doesn't seem to say a lot about the Christian faith.  But let's keep looking at it because wiser people than I am have said that it is important.

So what about today's passage, most of the book consists of little sayings that don't have a lot to do with each other, but this passage is one of the few that has sustained ideas that carry forward throughout the whole passage, so it's a good sermon text in terms of length and in terms of continuity.   But it sounds so negative; the voice of wisdom speaks to us, (and as we're reading along we might interpret it as someone speaking for God, this is God's voice speaking to us), the voice of wisdom speaks to us, and it spends most of this passage scolding us because we turned our back.  It's extremely negative, it seems to be telling us not so much what wisdom is as what we are if we lack it. And so this passage may not seem like a very good place to start if we want to learn about how to use wisdom in a Christian life.

But, as I was reading in preparation for today, a thought popped into my head that never had before.  This is a passage that tells us from the standpoint of wisdom, with wisdom as a being, from the standpoint of that being it tells us what it can and can't do.  What wisdom can and can't do.  What wisdom can do is give us a happy life.  A happy life in the sense that we are able to choose among the different options that experience gives us in ways that build up instead of tear down, in ways that help rather than hurt, in ways that heal rather than wound.  If we have wisdom, we can follow these ways and have a happy life; that's what wisdom can provide us.  But what it can't provide us is infinite wisdom.   So that if we turn our backs on it, if we choose not to follow wisdom, we're putting ourselves at the risk where some day we're going to need it but we won't have access to it because we did not pursue it day in, day out; week in, week out; year after year after year. 

Wisdom is that kind of thing; by it's own very nature it's something that you have to cultivate and accumulate bit by bit.   It's something you have to build over again and again and again.  Like the Bible stories the children learn in Sunday School, you keep on going over the same stories for the rest of your life; and each time you go over the story you hear what you heard before, and sometimes you hear something new.  It's cumulative like that; it builds like that.  But it builds slowly, bit by bit, and piece by piece; and it takes a long time and sometimes you can be in a dry spell of even ten years: when you hear the scripture lessons you've been listening to all your life and they seem to have lost all their meaning for you, and yet wisdom says: keep at it, keep learning from me.  That's what wisdom is; and what it's not is something you that can learn instantly, or something that you can learn at one point in your life and then stop learning and you'll be wise the rest of your life 

Wisdom is like the educational process that goes on when you're earning a college degree.  When you're earning that degree you pick up on ways of looking at the world, ways of understanding things, ways of responding to experience.   You pick up on those things when you're doing your course work in school, and then when you get your diploma, your degree, you have some initial feeling of I've done pretty good, but the point is what happened to you on the inside, through that gradual process you've acquired something that is going to keep you going from that point forward, and you're going to keep on learning more and more things; you're going to keep on acquiring new experiences and new ways of knowing things, so that you can become wiser and wiser as the years go by.  That's the potential that's created after a period of study, after you move on into your future, after getting your degree. 

Wisdom is like the educational process, it's not like the degree itself.  You can't hang out a shingle and say: Rev. Pete Agnew - Wise Man.   It doesn't work that way.  My own experiences have shown me how far I am from being able to even pretend to claim that title.  I've made so many foolish judgments, so many bone-headed decisions - in the course of my leadership of a church, in the course of which I've guided my own life.   I know how far I am from the goal of saying I've actually accomplished wisdom.  But what I hope I've acquired is not the finished product of wisdom, but a least a relationship with an environment that can give it to me, and the church is that environment. 

The wisdom that Christians need to practice is the wisdom that I think requires, maybe not 100% but at least 99%, requires a relationship with the church.  Of course, being in a church doesn't automatically give you wisdom; but it gives you access to this type of daily and ongoing growth that leads to greater and greater wisdom through the course of your life.  Growth from a beginning point on towards some sort of destiny, some sort of end, some sort of home or goal that is still lying out there ahead of us.  You might think you don't need wisdom because you don't have to have wisdom in order to be saved; and that's true; to form a relationship with God takes humility and trust. 

Life does not keep the teaching experience going. It's a misapplication to try and find experiences on an everyday basis; to try and make the next day a new meaningful experience.  I haven't had continual deep experiences in my life; I've had one teaching experience and I've continued to renew that experience and grow it day to day in my life.  What God wants us to do with these experiences is to not only use them as markers in our lives, but also to use them to settle into our everyday relationship with him.

It's a lot like marriage actually; in marriage you fall in love, and that's a deep experience.  And you get married and you start your life together and then you realize that the deep experience doesn't sustain itself; instead you need to move into a level of everyday living that can be filled with all kinds of little bubblings up of joy, but they aren't the same as that soaring passion of romantic love. 

Wisdom is like that, we don't get excited every single day, what we do is have exciting moments that help us know we're on the right track, perhaps. That's the difference, I think, between the start of a Christian life and the continuation of a Christian life.  The start is when you know you're in a relationship, through Christ, with God.  The rest of your life you grow in Christ: grow in holiness, grow in trust, grow in readiness to receive new insights, grow to be more like the love that God reflects in all his creations so that you are able to become a co-creator, in a way, with God as your life unfolds. 

And as I said, that requires a relationship with the church; at least I've been unable, individually, to sustain that level of growth in my own private setting.  I need to be with people with whom I can interact: a study group I can be a part of, where we talk about Bible stories; a congregation where I preach and people give me feedback; even at board meetings where we discuss how God would want us to respond to a particular challenge.  In all these everyday experiences in the church, even hammering nails and shampooing carpets, we are picking up bits of experience that are fashioning us and shaping us.  That relationship  with the church is the venue in which wisdom takes place, and I think it's something we have to have if we're going to be wise.  And being wise is good, it carries us onward through the totality of a Christian life, on the road to holiness, which is a part of the road to glory. 

Wisdom can take us there, but it can't take us there instantaneously.  And wisdom, if we stop listening to her, can suddenly bring us back to her.  One of the saddest experiences I have is when I get a phone call out of the blue that someone has experienced something terrible, some life-altering, bad experience.  And they've been away from the church for 2, 3, 4, or 5 decades.   And they're now coming back to the church.  It can, of course, be good when that happens; because that person can gradually fall back into the comfort.  But it doesn't come easily, I don't have the relationship with them that makes it easy to offer comfort and find ways to help when they are seeking to relieve the pain, something to make his life as good as it was before the catastrophe took place.  I don't have that prior relationship, and they may turn away and they won't darken the door of the church again.  And some people come to church waiting for the church to prove that they were right to reject the church in the first place.  Sometimes they come with their hands out and they're just waiting to be told "No".  And they stomp off in a self-righteous rage and tell themselves going to church has ever done me any good. 

That's the situation, I think, Proverbs talks about.   Wisdom can't provide what someone needs when someone hasn't been listening to wisdom.  But wisdom does provide what we need, and this is the place or someplace like it in other churches in the world, we can come to hear the Word, share the Word, and think about the Word, and also shake each other's hand and know that we experience and teach wisdom.  That's what wisdom can do; and that's enough.  Amen.

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