Wisdom: Conventional and Otherwise
August 16, 2009
August 16, 2009
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Ephesians 5:15-20; 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Solomon was one of the roughly 20 sons of King David. And now David was dead and Solomon was king. Just so you know...it wasn't that simple. There were some succession issues, and we won't go through them today – the way they ended was that Solomon was king and some other people were dead. So that's where we pick up today, and we only will be spending this week and next with Solomon....
Solomon has been renowned throughout history for his wisdom, and in today's reading, we have an explanation of how he came to be so wise – unlike the rest of us who learn through our mistakes, and only rarely through the experiences of others, Solomon had the opportunity to request something from God, and Solomon asks for wisdom, that he might govern God's people well. And God granted his request. And so for a while, at least, Solomon was known for his wisdom.
Later in this same chapter, Solomon is faced with the case that famously demonstrates his wisdom – two women came before him, each claiming to be the rightful mother of a certain baby. Both women lived in the same home, both gave birth, and one baby had died. Both women claimed that the surviving baby was theirs. Solomon listened carefully to the women, and ruled that the baby should be cut in two by a sword so that each woman could have half. The one who was the baby's rightful mother said, “No, give her the living baby, do not kill him!” The other woman said, “Go ahead and divide the baby; if I cannot have him, neither of us will.” King Solomon gave the boy to the first woman, who had volunteered to give up the babe, having discerned that her genuine love for the child put his welfare ahead of her own happiness. His wisdom wasn't in knowing the right answer about which woman was the baby's mother – his wisdom accepted the not-knowing, and then sought to use love as a guide.
We usually think of wisdom in different terms, something like the classic Roman writer Cicero who said: “The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil,” or in faith terms, wisdom recognizes what God wants and is prepared to do it.
Well, put like that, I've got to admit that wisdom sounds pretty somber and boring. It's not inspiring to me this way, and I can't imagine that it's interesting to anyone else either. It actually sounds like a multiple-choice test that God grades: see if you can pick the God-answer. When I think about faith as the God-breathed life, I think of zest and joy and boldness and love and courage. That somehow seems missing in this sense of wisdom as picking the right rule to follow. Picking the right rule doesn't sound like God-breathed at all.
There are a number of folks who describe the life of faith in more vibrant terms – Richard Foster talks about the “with-God life”. Marcus Borg talks about the heart of Christianity as a new paradigm of understanding Christianity that sees transformed living as central to the life of faith. All these descriptions have in common that they are relational and they are dynamic – unlike choosing the right rule to follow. When we understand the life of faith, or wisdom, as merely discerning the right thing to do and then doing it, it doesn't sound like there's a lot of zest or joy involved.
Looking back at the Bible, it turns out that there is a whole section called the Wisdom books – it includes Job, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs. And while Proverbs seems to be wisdom in the way most of us understand it – nice sayings that seem to be very good advice – the rest of the wisdom literature doesn't seem that way at all. Far from discerning the right answer, the books of Job, Psalms and Ecclesiastes seem to be asking a lot of questions, and often saying that the usual answers aren't working.
The book of Job, for example, isn't about a man who has the answers (although it sounds like it must be, because people often talk about the patience of Job). It's about a bet between God and Satan, in which Satan says that Job is only a faithful guy because his life is going well – that if things weren't going Job's way, Satan says, Job would curse God. God takes the bet, and allows Satan to do whatever he wants to Job. First Job's children are killed and his wealth is destroyed, then he develops painful sores all over his body. At this point, though, Job still blesses God. His friends come to visit and keep him company in his grief. And they ask some hard questions, like, what has Job done to deserve all this? It must have been very bad. He should accept the lesson, he should repent, he should accept his punishment. And then Job argues that if he knew the point of it all, he could accept it. He needs to understand. And finally God speaks and he doesn't provide answers at all. He mostly says, “Who are you to demand answers of me – were you there when I created the earth? But at least you were honest with me in your anger.” Yet in the face of this non-answer, and in the reality of the living God, Job ends up being converted from anger in the face of unknowing to trust in the presence and mystery of God.
The book of Psalms is a real mixed bag – many of them are trusting, and proclaiming the glory of God. But more than a third of them are psalms of lament, expressing anger and despair in the face of illness, or enemies, or other setbacks. A significant voice within the psalms is the voice of frustration.
We've already acknowledged that the proverbs do seem to describe the neat and tidy world in which good is rewarded and evil punished. But then we move on to Ecclesiastes, a book that mostly speaks of cynicism. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, the writer says – everything is a waste of time. Within life there is a time for everything, and that comes to everyone...so it doesn't matter what you do. Anything can happen. The writer is disillusioned. The book doesn't really end with answers – only the admonition to trust God in the midst of it all, and to understand that God will take care of everything in the end. It's not a very satisfying ending. These books, with the exception of some psalms and the proverbs, don't seem to be about wisdom so much as the failure of wisdom. Two of these books, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, are often attributed to Solomon. And that really doesn't make sense – they are so different in tone. Proverbs seems to be of a “God's in his heaven, all's right with the world” frame of mind, and Ecclesiastes is more of a “life sucks and then you die” approach. How can these books be by the same person, especially a person who has been gifted with divine wisdom?
These books do make sense, though, if you think of them as representing the way many of us experience our faith over a lifetime. When we are younger, we expect life to make sense. We expect good choices to lead to good results. And then our well-ordered, predictable world often comes apart as the years go by – we find ourselves thinking, “That's not fair. How can a good God allow suffering? Why did God permit the holocaust? Why do good people sometimes die young?” The assumption is that God is in control, making the choices, and that the world as it is looks like God wants it to look. And in that view, sometimes people come up with answers that sound like, “God must have wanted another angel in heaven” when a child dies, or using the analogy of the underside of a piece of a beautiful tapestry, which has all the knots, loose ends and discontinuities that make the right side of the weaving possible – and people then say, “this may not make sense to us from our perspective, but one day, when we're with God, it will all be clear to us” assuming that we will see, as it were, the right side of the tapestry, and we'll understand that God has actually been working for good all along – kind of an 'end justifies the means' message on a cosmic level.
And personally I think those kinds of answers are heretical, and smug, and misrepresent God pretty significantly. These answers seem to suggest that there is some goal of God's that is worth the suffering and death of millions in Nazi Germany, or that cruel and unjust people are actually doing God's will better than those of us who would treat others with love instead of with torture. These answers seem to suggest that the grief we feel at someone's death, or the outrage we feel in the face of injustice, are weak responses that we wouldn't have if we were more faithful. And Job, the lament psalms, and Ecclesiastes all seem to suggest that the “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” perspective is no longer working for them either.
Actually, as I was thinking about this sermon I thought a lot about times when life doesn't seem to work, and when the usual answers weren't working, and I kept thinking about different sayings that seemed to lead me toward what I think lies at the heart of wisdom in the biblical sense, and those sayings are:
If you always do what you've always done, then you'll always get what you've always got.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing, and expecting different results.
And the final one is usually attributed to Einstein, who said: we can't solve a problem with the same thinking that produced it.
I also remembered how hard it is to change one's mind – not so much how hard it is to change our opinion about something (although that's hard enough) but how hard it is to change the paradigm with within which we think. So, is there a different way to think about wisdom?
There is one more book among the Wisdom literature of the Bible: it is called the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs. And it's an amazing book for our Bible – it is a testimony to earthly love. I don't mean the kind of testimony to love that we read in so many weddings: love is patient, love is kind, etc. This is a testimony to love lived out physically – the first verses are Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant – the book continues with lengthy physical descriptions of the beauty of the woman from the man's perspective, and the handsomeness of the man from the woman's perspective. For an adult reader, it is hard to miss the very clear sexual references in the work. Again and again, the lovers speak of their intense, physical desire for and delight in one another.
What are we to make of this? First of all, it is a reminder of the 700 wives and 300 concubines that Solomon is supposed to have had. He really appreciated the carnal dimensions of life. But, this book is part of the canon. It is as holy and instructive as the psalms or the gospels. It is a reminder that our lives here matter, that the pleasures and pains of this world matter, that the delights of fleshly living are a gift from God, and that our lives are meant to be both potent and fruitful. In fact, all of the wisdom literature is about this-world living. What if we began to understand our present lives as the focus and substance of our life in God? I'm not saying that there is no life after death, but I am saying that the focus of discipleship in the Bible is NOT on preparing for death but on fully embracing life. What if life isn't about our waiting for what God is doing in the world, or waiting for when we are done with the world, but about God waiting for what we might be doing in the world? What if we understood our central purpose to be passionately and substantively loving life, loving the world, and loving the people we encounter, for good. What if we understand that the things that happen in the world are often NOT God's Plan A? What if God is grieving over injustice and suffering and wondering why we are letting it happen? What if we understand our own call to be to actually and not metaphorically feed the hungry, to actually and not metaphorically being peacemakers, to actually and not metaphorically seek justice? And above all, to actually and not metaphorically love one another.
To love the world in this potent, fruitful way will also be to relinquish control, because real love sets us free from controlling others. And so really loving the world, entering into zestful, engagement in the world will also be to enter into mystery, because we will be profoundly aware of how little we know, and how little we can accomplish on a grand scale. Maybe wisdom has to partially do with recognizing how small our real impact can be, and taking seriously what we can do, accepting that life is much larger than we know.
What if wisdom is dynamic because we are called to be dynamic, because prayer is supposed to be about letting God transform us, to reorder our thinking so that we can create real change, instead of prayer being our opportunity to give God a really effective to-do list? And what if we are not called to mastery – being more in charge, more in control, more certain about everything, but are called instead to mystery: to letting our questions and our desires for love and for God lead our lives instead of starting with our certainties and our satisfactions? What if the only certainties we are left with is that God is, God loves, God is with us and that in God, life is more than we can understand in any given moment? What if wisdom begins with not-knowing and grows as we rest in the mystery? What if wisdom isn't about what we know, but about how we make peace with not-knowing, about how we love in the meantime, and about trusting that in God's world, love will never be wasted? In such a world, kindness is more important than knowledge, mercy matters more than understanding, justice is what righteousness looks like, and wisdom is taking seriously our own place in the world, knowing that if we can only do a little, it's important to do that little bit with passion, with love, and with the trust that our life matters in the larger mystery of God. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Ephesians 5:15-20; 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Solomon was one of the roughly 20 sons of King David. And now David was dead and Solomon was king. Just so you know...it wasn't that simple. There were some succession issues, and we won't go through them today – the way they ended was that Solomon was king and some other people were dead. So that's where we pick up today, and we only will be spending this week and next with Solomon....
Solomon has been renowned throughout history for his wisdom, and in today's reading, we have an explanation of how he came to be so wise – unlike the rest of us who learn through our mistakes, and only rarely through the experiences of others, Solomon had the opportunity to request something from God, and Solomon asks for wisdom, that he might govern God's people well. And God granted his request. And so for a while, at least, Solomon was known for his wisdom.
Later in this same chapter, Solomon is faced with the case that famously demonstrates his wisdom – two women came before him, each claiming to be the rightful mother of a certain baby. Both women lived in the same home, both gave birth, and one baby had died. Both women claimed that the surviving baby was theirs. Solomon listened carefully to the women, and ruled that the baby should be cut in two by a sword so that each woman could have half. The one who was the baby's rightful mother said, “No, give her the living baby, do not kill him!” The other woman said, “Go ahead and divide the baby; if I cannot have him, neither of us will.” King Solomon gave the boy to the first woman, who had volunteered to give up the babe, having discerned that her genuine love for the child put his welfare ahead of her own happiness. His wisdom wasn't in knowing the right answer about which woman was the baby's mother – his wisdom accepted the not-knowing, and then sought to use love as a guide.
We usually think of wisdom in different terms, something like the classic Roman writer Cicero who said: “The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil,” or in faith terms, wisdom recognizes what God wants and is prepared to do it.
Well, put like that, I've got to admit that wisdom sounds pretty somber and boring. It's not inspiring to me this way, and I can't imagine that it's interesting to anyone else either. It actually sounds like a multiple-choice test that God grades: see if you can pick the God-answer. When I think about faith as the God-breathed life, I think of zest and joy and boldness and love and courage. That somehow seems missing in this sense of wisdom as picking the right rule to follow. Picking the right rule doesn't sound like God-breathed at all.
There are a number of folks who describe the life of faith in more vibrant terms – Richard Foster talks about the “with-God life”. Marcus Borg talks about the heart of Christianity as a new paradigm of understanding Christianity that sees transformed living as central to the life of faith. All these descriptions have in common that they are relational and they are dynamic – unlike choosing the right rule to follow. When we understand the life of faith, or wisdom, as merely discerning the right thing to do and then doing it, it doesn't sound like there's a lot of zest or joy involved.
Looking back at the Bible, it turns out that there is a whole section called the Wisdom books – it includes Job, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs. And while Proverbs seems to be wisdom in the way most of us understand it – nice sayings that seem to be very good advice – the rest of the wisdom literature doesn't seem that way at all. Far from discerning the right answer, the books of Job, Psalms and Ecclesiastes seem to be asking a lot of questions, and often saying that the usual answers aren't working.
The book of Job, for example, isn't about a man who has the answers (although it sounds like it must be, because people often talk about the patience of Job). It's about a bet between God and Satan, in which Satan says that Job is only a faithful guy because his life is going well – that if things weren't going Job's way, Satan says, Job would curse God. God takes the bet, and allows Satan to do whatever he wants to Job. First Job's children are killed and his wealth is destroyed, then he develops painful sores all over his body. At this point, though, Job still blesses God. His friends come to visit and keep him company in his grief. And they ask some hard questions, like, what has Job done to deserve all this? It must have been very bad. He should accept the lesson, he should repent, he should accept his punishment. And then Job argues that if he knew the point of it all, he could accept it. He needs to understand. And finally God speaks and he doesn't provide answers at all. He mostly says, “Who are you to demand answers of me – were you there when I created the earth? But at least you were honest with me in your anger.” Yet in the face of this non-answer, and in the reality of the living God, Job ends up being converted from anger in the face of unknowing to trust in the presence and mystery of God.
The book of Psalms is a real mixed bag – many of them are trusting, and proclaiming the glory of God. But more than a third of them are psalms of lament, expressing anger and despair in the face of illness, or enemies, or other setbacks. A significant voice within the psalms is the voice of frustration.
We've already acknowledged that the proverbs do seem to describe the neat and tidy world in which good is rewarded and evil punished. But then we move on to Ecclesiastes, a book that mostly speaks of cynicism. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, the writer says – everything is a waste of time. Within life there is a time for everything, and that comes to everyone...so it doesn't matter what you do. Anything can happen. The writer is disillusioned. The book doesn't really end with answers – only the admonition to trust God in the midst of it all, and to understand that God will take care of everything in the end. It's not a very satisfying ending. These books, with the exception of some psalms and the proverbs, don't seem to be about wisdom so much as the failure of wisdom. Two of these books, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, are often attributed to Solomon. And that really doesn't make sense – they are so different in tone. Proverbs seems to be of a “God's in his heaven, all's right with the world” frame of mind, and Ecclesiastes is more of a “life sucks and then you die” approach. How can these books be by the same person, especially a person who has been gifted with divine wisdom?
These books do make sense, though, if you think of them as representing the way many of us experience our faith over a lifetime. When we are younger, we expect life to make sense. We expect good choices to lead to good results. And then our well-ordered, predictable world often comes apart as the years go by – we find ourselves thinking, “That's not fair. How can a good God allow suffering? Why did God permit the holocaust? Why do good people sometimes die young?” The assumption is that God is in control, making the choices, and that the world as it is looks like God wants it to look. And in that view, sometimes people come up with answers that sound like, “God must have wanted another angel in heaven” when a child dies, or using the analogy of the underside of a piece of a beautiful tapestry, which has all the knots, loose ends and discontinuities that make the right side of the weaving possible – and people then say, “this may not make sense to us from our perspective, but one day, when we're with God, it will all be clear to us” assuming that we will see, as it were, the right side of the tapestry, and we'll understand that God has actually been working for good all along – kind of an 'end justifies the means' message on a cosmic level.
And personally I think those kinds of answers are heretical, and smug, and misrepresent God pretty significantly. These answers seem to suggest that there is some goal of God's that is worth the suffering and death of millions in Nazi Germany, or that cruel and unjust people are actually doing God's will better than those of us who would treat others with love instead of with torture. These answers seem to suggest that the grief we feel at someone's death, or the outrage we feel in the face of injustice, are weak responses that we wouldn't have if we were more faithful. And Job, the lament psalms, and Ecclesiastes all seem to suggest that the “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” perspective is no longer working for them either.
Actually, as I was thinking about this sermon I thought a lot about times when life doesn't seem to work, and when the usual answers weren't working, and I kept thinking about different sayings that seemed to lead me toward what I think lies at the heart of wisdom in the biblical sense, and those sayings are:
If you always do what you've always done, then you'll always get what you've always got.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing, and expecting different results.
And the final one is usually attributed to Einstein, who said: we can't solve a problem with the same thinking that produced it.
I also remembered how hard it is to change one's mind – not so much how hard it is to change our opinion about something (although that's hard enough) but how hard it is to change the paradigm with within which we think. So, is there a different way to think about wisdom?
There is one more book among the Wisdom literature of the Bible: it is called the Song of Solomon, or the Song of Songs. And it's an amazing book for our Bible – it is a testimony to earthly love. I don't mean the kind of testimony to love that we read in so many weddings: love is patient, love is kind, etc. This is a testimony to love lived out physically – the first verses are Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant – the book continues with lengthy physical descriptions of the beauty of the woman from the man's perspective, and the handsomeness of the man from the woman's perspective. For an adult reader, it is hard to miss the very clear sexual references in the work. Again and again, the lovers speak of their intense, physical desire for and delight in one another.
What are we to make of this? First of all, it is a reminder of the 700 wives and 300 concubines that Solomon is supposed to have had. He really appreciated the carnal dimensions of life. But, this book is part of the canon. It is as holy and instructive as the psalms or the gospels. It is a reminder that our lives here matter, that the pleasures and pains of this world matter, that the delights of fleshly living are a gift from God, and that our lives are meant to be both potent and fruitful. In fact, all of the wisdom literature is about this-world living. What if we began to understand our present lives as the focus and substance of our life in God? I'm not saying that there is no life after death, but I am saying that the focus of discipleship in the Bible is NOT on preparing for death but on fully embracing life. What if life isn't about our waiting for what God is doing in the world, or waiting for when we are done with the world, but about God waiting for what we might be doing in the world? What if we understood our central purpose to be passionately and substantively loving life, loving the world, and loving the people we encounter, for good. What if we understand that the things that happen in the world are often NOT God's Plan A? What if God is grieving over injustice and suffering and wondering why we are letting it happen? What if we understand our own call to be to actually and not metaphorically feed the hungry, to actually and not metaphorically being peacemakers, to actually and not metaphorically seek justice? And above all, to actually and not metaphorically love one another.
To love the world in this potent, fruitful way will also be to relinquish control, because real love sets us free from controlling others. And so really loving the world, entering into zestful, engagement in the world will also be to enter into mystery, because we will be profoundly aware of how little we know, and how little we can accomplish on a grand scale. Maybe wisdom has to partially do with recognizing how small our real impact can be, and taking seriously what we can do, accepting that life is much larger than we know.
What if wisdom is dynamic because we are called to be dynamic, because prayer is supposed to be about letting God transform us, to reorder our thinking so that we can create real change, instead of prayer being our opportunity to give God a really effective to-do list? And what if we are not called to mastery – being more in charge, more in control, more certain about everything, but are called instead to mystery: to letting our questions and our desires for love and for God lead our lives instead of starting with our certainties and our satisfactions? What if the only certainties we are left with is that God is, God loves, God is with us and that in God, life is more than we can understand in any given moment? What if wisdom begins with not-knowing and grows as we rest in the mystery? What if wisdom isn't about what we know, but about how we make peace with not-knowing, about how we love in the meantime, and about trusting that in God's world, love will never be wasted? In such a world, kindness is more important than knowledge, mercy matters more than understanding, justice is what righteousness looks like, and wisdom is taking seriously our own place in the world, knowing that if we can only do a little, it's important to do that little bit with passion, with love, and with the trust that our life matters in the larger mystery of God. Amen.