 1 Kings 3-11 (Read Bible Story Here) Maybe every Evangelical kid did this, but I specifically recall after hearing about young Solomon as a child, praying and asking God for wisdom. I did this in my bed at night for years. It seemed to me there was something special, timeless, unbreakable about wisdom, and I wanted in. A group of researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine study wisdom. They say that while “Intelligence seeks knowledge and seeks to eliminate ambiguity...wisdom…resists automatic thinking, seeks to understand ambiguity better, to grasp the deeper meaning of what is known and to understand the limits of knowledge.” (Sternberg [1]).) Wisdom is attunement to the way things are, to being itself. It is like glimpsing the inner alignment, sensing the deeper coherence underneath it all. And wisdom always moves us beyond ourselves and connects us with others. Wisdom flows from our shared belonging to God and each other, whether it speaks directly of that or not. Wisdom was brought into being before anything else, scripture tells us, watching God create time, and space, and us, and everything else. (Prov. 8:1-4,22-31) Solomon says in Proverbs, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (9:10) This phrase in English ‘fear of the Lord’ means something like deep awe, and it is linked linguistically with the word for seeing – Abraham Heschel wrote, Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing, the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe." (Heschel: God in Search of Man). Wisdom begins at awe. Wisdom listens to the silence beneath the noise. So, it necessarily recognizes the noise for what it is– it is honest about what is in front of us but knows that is not all there is. And then wisdom grows not in the simple parts of our lives, but in the most messy, complex painful, death-into-new-life experiences. Suffering births compassion, despair pushes deeper into hope, failures produce humility and resilience. And we participate—we can choose to receive and walk the paths that wisdom is carving in us. All the exemplars of wisdom studied by the University of Virginia researchers had one thing in common– they had all, at some point, made a deliberate choice to pursue something that was hard. They faced their addiction, they owned their wrongdoing, they stepped up to adversity. When hardship came, they chose to remain vulnerable and changeable instead of hardening and becoming bitter and shut down. When the researchers asked the wise people what had given them the courage to step into something difficult, their answers could be summarized in five things:
Since wisdom is from God, it doesn’t surprise me that these things sound exactly like church. The wisdom researchers describe, “…a wisdom atmosphere as one in which doubts, uncertainties and questions can be openly expressed, and ambiguities and contradictions can be tolerated, so that individuals are not forced to adopt the defensive position of…“too confident knowing”.’ They state, “When we foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness, in ourselves and in others, we are opening up the possibility for wisdom. When we foster the capacity for self-reflection in our children, or our community, we are creating the matrix for wisdom to develop. When we foster gratitude, wisdom is likely to follow. When we accept the complexity and ambiguous nature of things, and refuse to accept a simplified black and white explanation, we are increasing the likelihood of wise decisions. When young Solomon takes the throne, he asks for wisdom. And God is very pleased with this request. Because while wealth, or power, or revenge would serve Solomon, wisdom will serve the people. So God gives him wisdom, and then God gives him wealth and power as well, because wise leaders use wealth and power for the goodness of all. And at first, Solomon did. But, contrary to popular opinion, humans do not, in fact, naturally get wiser with age. If we resist the hard lessons, avoid vulnerability, shun community, pursue the noise instead of the silence, invest in the self-construction of pride instead of the deconstruction of prayer, ignore the needs of others, and disdain guidance, we lose attunement, the deeper seeing dims. We may be smart, but we will no longer be wise. Solomon, for all the wisdom he began with, lost his awe. And unlike David, he did not have a prophet Nathan to confront him when he went astray. There was no one who spoke truth to power. Who reminded him of his vulnerability and humanity? Who called him back to God when he got distracted by his own power and cleverness, or enslaved to his own desires and drives? Solomon stopped seeing God and those he was anointed by God to serve. And so, for all the good that Solomon did, he also did a catastrophically bad thing. He turned Israel into an empire, and the people of God adopted the mindset of the empire. An empire mindset is numb to imagination. It has no ability to envision a future outside of what is presented in the present. Its goal is to build and maintain stability. In all things it reinforces the authority of the king. And it keeps people accepting what may not be good for them, because that serves to keep order and ensure the longevity of the empire. (See Bruegemann: The Prophetic Imagination) Walter Bruggemann says Solomon’s reign did three things: 1- it shifted the economic focus from equality to affluence. No more everyone-in-it-together provided for by a generous God, like with the manna in the wilderness, now it was looking out for oneself and one’s own interests and building wealth at the expense of others. 2- it shifted the political focus from justice to oppression. The law of Moses in Leviticus says, “If your brother or sister becomes poor and cannot maintain themselves with you, you shall maintain them, as a stranger and a sojourner they shall live with you. Take no interest from them or increase but fear your God; that your brother or sister may live beside you…For they are my servants, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves.” (Lev.25:35-42) But Solomon built this empire with forced labor. And 3- it shifted the religious focus from God’s freedom to God’s accessibility.In the time of Moses God was available, but on God’s terms. God cared for the people but remained uncompromisingly free, saying things like, I will show mercy to whom I show mercy and you cannot see my face and live. There has always been this tension between God’s freedom and God’s accessibility –God is available to us but not ruled by us. David lived in this dynamic tension with God – both the fear of the Lord and the intimacy with the Beloved. If Moses erred on the side of God’s freedom, Solomon obliterated this tension in favor of total accessibility. Now there is no sense that God is free and can “act apart from or even against the regime.” God is on call. God is boxed in. God is used to bolter our point and back up our power. Brueggemann explains the empire mindset further, “Solomon traded the vision of freedom for the reality of security. He…banished the neighbor for the sake of reducing everyone to servants. He…replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises…were reduced to tradable commodities.” In other words, Solomon exchanged the Way of God for the Way of Fear, and Israel became a successful empire. Solomon’s reign came to be known as the “golden age” in Israel, where the Kingdom united by David reached its pinnacle in wealth, stability, power and global influence. This lasted Solomon’s lifetime, and then it all crumbled apart spectacularly. That’s what happens to empires; they rise and then they fall. They dominate, and then they collapse, or they fizzle out. Even a cursory glance of history proves this to be so- no empire lasts forever. The Egyptian Empire lasted 3000 years and is now so far in the human review mirror that most of us have no idea how much of medicine, religion, science and so many other aspects of modern life were begun by them. They’re just etchings on walls and mummies in museums. The Roman Empire lasted 1600 years and people visit the crumbling structures with their selfie sticks and make movies about dead gladiators and philosophers. Empire after empire, ruling in such dominance and power: gone – the Ottoman, the Spanish, the Mogul, the Russian, the Quing(ching) Dynasty, the British Empire, the 1000-year reign envisioned by Hitler that collapsed after 12 years (thanks be to God). All this to say, if we put our faith in empire – which is to say, in the might of our human constructs and power – we are building our house on sand. And if we live with the empire mindset, we not only close ourselves off to wisdom, we choose a life of guardedness and fear instead. “Nations are in an uproar” – our Lent text will tell us on Wednesday– “and kingdoms falter and wobble, but the earth melts when God merely raises his voice. The God of all heaven and earth and of our ancestors is with us. Our security and well-being are in this One alone. So,” we are told, “Be still and know that I am God.” (Ps. 46) I feel deeply sad about what is happening to our country and what is happening to the world because of what is happening to our country, and what will likely happen next to our country and to the world. I am listening to the noise, and I am grieving, it turns out. But I am not afraid. I am trying also to listen to the silence beneath the noise. Because if we trust in the One who has remained constant throughout history, the rise and fall of Kings, the changing earth and shifting civilizations, who has always held the hearts of human beings in love and given us to each other to encounter Christ right here, the God who came to be with us and actually is with us, who has broken the reign of even death itself, and promises wholeness for all people and this beloved earth, then we are secure. No matter what happens. I trust. Lord, help my distrust! Because of Solomon, because of what he did to Israel, they needed prophets. We are going to be spending Lent with the prophets. The prophets are the anti-empire voices that shake the façade that keeps us all quiet and content and accepting the unacceptable. The prophets criticize by speaking for justice rather than stability, and they energize by remembering the promise of another reality toward which we can move, “to live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give.” The prophetic tradition shakes us out of the numb imagination of the empire to embrace the imagination of God. Brueggemann explains, “The real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right – either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. As long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.” So, I guess it’s a prophetic act to grieve, and I will embrace that. It’s also a prophetic act to call a leader to show mercy, and it is a prophetic act to phone our leaders and remind that their power is for the goodness of the whole, not the greed of the few, and their influence is for global cooperation, not global dominance. It's also a prophetic act to rest, lest we forget that God is God. It’s prophetic to receive joy, feed connection and speak hope. It’s transformative to lift up beauty, to call out goodness, and to bolster kindness. To seek the living and active God and not an idol of accessibility, sense the ultimate in the common, and watch for the movement of transcendence is prophetic wisdom work. To live in the Kingdom of God in the midst of the empire is radical and powerful participation in something both subversive and everlasting. It not only grounds us, it calls others back to the belonging that holds us all, instead of caving to the lies of division and despair. We need a community to do this with, a ‘wisdom atmosphere’ to hold us. So we will be that for each other and for the world. Together, we will ‘assume the inner stance of least resistance’ to the presence of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit right here and now. We will foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness. We will grow our capacity for self-reflection. We’ll practice gratitude, and accept complexity, and embrace ambiguity, and refuse simplistic categories and easy explanations. We will live in the messy, hard, complex and painful places alongside one another because that is where Jesus is, and we will help each other make the hard but good choices and do the hard but good things. We’ll surrender into God’s care and calling, and trust in our belonging to God and all others, and we live accordingly. We will not fear. We will be still and know who is God. Amen. |
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