Wisdom, Empire and Prophets

 

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:  a community that held their experience  cultivating gratitude and hope some kind of quiet reflection or prayer doing something to help others, and  having some kind of spiritual grounding to help guide them as they made hard but good choices.   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 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.

The True Wisdom

Jan Richardson's The Best Supper. You can see her work at janrichardson.com, 
and register for her Advent retreat at adventdoor.org

 1 Corinthians 2:1-16

One of my favorite Thanksgiving stories pops up again every year in the news and social media because it is ongoing.  Six years ago a 64-year-old woman named Wanda Dench sent a text to her grandson inviting him to Thanksgiving dinner. But it was a wrong number, and a 17-year-old boy named Jamal Hinton received the text, and asked, “Who’s this?” She shot back boisterously, “Grandma!” After some sorting out and selfies confirmed they were, in fact, strangers, he asked, “Am I still invited?” And she answered, “Of course! It’s what Grandmas do! Feed people!” So he accepted and went to her house for Thanksgiving dinner. 

Jamal has been at Wanda and Lonnie Dench’s Thanksgiving table every year since. When Lonnie died of Covid, last year’s with Wanda was a table of shared grief.  This week Jamal and Mikeala will be back at Wanda’s table where they belong.  

We all belong to God and we all belong to each other. 

All of us. All the humans. Without exception. 

There is no more fundamental truth than this, nothing more real in all the world, actually. 

But oh, how we forget it, and doubt it and disguise it and deny it.  How we cover it up with layers of interpretation and competition and hedging our bets and building our coalitions and hiding our true selves. 

 

And soon this hunger for belonging - this absolutely core, unshakable reality that we yearn to feel because we know it in our depths as the truest thing, the most real thing - soon it becomes something we commodify. We dole it out in tiny amounts, and sell to the highest bidder, we seek it relentlessly, addictively, in harmful and dehumanizing ways. And we make it probationary or provisional, limited and guarded, shutting out some in order to welcome in others. 

 

We long so badly for this connection to God, this belonging to the very source of life, our identity, our purpose, our human-made-in-the-image-of-the-Creator-core-being –that we set up rules to mediate it, to say who has it, and who doesn’t, and how to earn it, and who can dispense it, and what can make you lose it or gain it. And oh, the contortions we twist and the energy we expend trying to gain or earn what already defines us!

 

We forget- in that deep existential kind of forgetting - that belonging to God and belonging to each other is something hidden before the foundations of the world, decreed before the ages for our glory, utterly true and eternally unchanging. And then once in a while, like unexpectedly sharing Thanksgiving with a stranger, we remember.

 

There are two wisdoms, friends. Paul says. 

There is the wisdom of this age.  At LNPC we’ve been calling it “the way of fear.” This wisdom is built on power and centered on scarcity. It tells us always life is urgent and you must never let up or let down your guard. Each of us is in this alone, other people are competition or threat, and judgment and condemnation are constant companions.  

The way of fear seeks salvation from smart leaders, wise investments and the careful construction or dismantling of isms. It says we can be saved by weapons, or by legislating against weapons, by this candidate or that party, by this act of piety or that specific prayer, by this way of seeing the world or that list of beliefs.  It says you can force others to respect you through violence or through moral rightness, and these also prove your worth or earn you a place at the table. 

And we put stock in that kind of wisdom, we pay money to it, and educate our children in it, and take it in through our televisions and computer screens and phones and car radios, scrolling, listening, reading, soaking in so many words: his words, her words, their words. 

 

And like the dingy beam of a dying flashlight, we hold up this worldly wisdom before us, and we squint into the darkness, letting it guide us. And we’re killing each other. And we’re blaming each other. And we are finding more ways to divide into ever smaller and more homogenous camps, until there will be no belonging left and it will be just me against you – all the mes and all the yous against all the other mes and all the other yous. Despairing. Alone. Afraid.

 

But there is another wisdom.

Ancient and true. Secret and Hidden. Decreed by God before the ages, running like an underground river through time.  The wisdom that spoke the world into being with a single word, the wisdom that bound it all in harmony and order, a delight to its creator, functioning in love and cooperation. The wisdom of the Word made flesh when the Creator of all came to dwell among us. Stupidly. Weakly. Foolishly, to live without power and to die alongside us, on our behalf. 

 

There is no worldly wisdom in this. It is what the Narinians call, “the deeper magic from before the dawn of time.” Unbreakable and resilient, absurd and steadfast, it comes concealed in weakness to stand always with the weakest among us.  

 

Paul was a Roman citizen from a prominent Jewish family, well-established with an impressive pedigree. He studied under the most prominent rabbis of the day, and was fluent in classical literature, philosophy and ethics. Paul was educated in the wisdom of the world. He was a successful, powerful, influential figure, and a zealot.  He knew how to speak the wisdom of the age, in the language of the rulers of the age.

 

But when he comes to the Corinthians, he chooses to leave all that behind. He sees it as a distraction, a shiny diversion that might keep people from seeing the real reality. I did not come with all the methods and the political skills of lofty words or persuasion. He says.  I came in weakness and fear, with much trembling. I wanted you to see God’s actions instead of focusing on my words -  So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.

In other words, he says, I vowed to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

 

Paul uses this language -  “Jesus Christ and him crucified,” “the cross,” “the foolishness of the cross,” again and again, as a kind of shorthand to refer to the whole of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus- that is, that the Almighty came into this world as a helpless a baby, into the arms of those he came to save, to share this life with us. And then died, taking all that separates us from God, all destruction and brokenness, even death itself, into God’s very being. 

Then Jesus rose from the dead, and everything we thought was real about the power of death and division is exposed as utter fraud by the unquenchable light of the world, the wisdom hidden before the ages shining forth, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. It’s settled and final: We belong to God, we belong to each other. This is what Jesus trusted, and embodied, what he died for and rose into and referred to again and again as ‘The Kingdom of God.’

 

And yet… and yet we choose sin. Which is to say, we choose self-protection and division and destruction and existential forgetting. We choose to tear others down and to fear, fear, fear that anything, everything, could tear us down. 

 

But here is the free gift of salvation, friends. Right here: You belong to God. You belong to all the rest of the people in this whole big world.  And they belong to God, and they belong to you. Fact. Done. All that is needed is to say yes. Yes, I accept that. Yes, I receive that.

 

And because we’re steeped in the wisdom of the age, bobbing around every day in the way of fear, this is not a once and done acceptance. It’s an, over and over, Oh yeah! That’s right! kind of remembering, a chance to return, at any moment, every day, back to the truth that holds us.

 

Biblical scholar Mary Hinkle Shore describes spiritual wisdom like a pair of lenses at an eye exam, where click, click, click, suddenly the fuzzy blur is sharp and clear, the chart in focus. You can see what was there all along, only obscured by the various lenses that misinterpreted it for you. 

 

Paul calls this having the mind of Christ. Jesus was both always connected completely to the Father and always belonging completely to the world. Always at home in God, always living in a settled state of trust. And we can enter that, too, at any moment. Christ’s faith is our faith, Christ’s mind is our shared mind now, Christ’s lens is our lens. The Holy Spirit makes us into Christ’s body here on earth so that we embody belonging to God and belonging to each other.

 

There is nothing that happens to us that God doesn’t share.  And sharing it with each other is how we see God, because that is where Jesus is. Bearing with us, already. 

That is the wisdom of the Spirit  - that God doesn’t swoop in and triumphantly sweep away all of life’s pain and heartache. God sets a place at the table of life for each person and sits down alongside us. God offers God’s very self to us, broken and given, so that we might be made whole.

 

Having the mind of Christ helps us see this.  And it makes us brave. Brave to face the truth. Brave to tell the truth. Brave to live the truth with each other. Even when the truth is, This sucks! This hurts so bad! it’s terrible and I hate everything about it! Because we know all sorrow and suffering is embraced and joined by God.  

And also, we know it’s not the end. It’s not the real, final, and true word about all of this or all of us. And right here, in the midst of whatever it is, we keep belonging to God and we keep belonging to each other. And this world is absolutely and forever loved by God, who is, at every single moment, bringing wholeness and love, healing and hope, through all the cracks and crevices in infinite and often unnoticed ways, and who is leading it all toward undiluted and unending love.  That’s the real reality.

 

A few minutes ago, when we baptized little Ohlin, we poured over him this promise and spoke into him this ancient and deep word of life, Ohlin you are held in the reality of God’s love, part of the harmony of all things, from before the foundation of the world and long after you are gone from it.  

And you, First Presbyterian Church of South St Paul, in this mystical and sacred act, promised to teach Ohlin this eternal wisdom, and when he forgets his belonging or the world’s belovedness, you are the ones who remind him. 

And you committed to Ohlin to live out your own remembering alongside him until he begins remembering for himself, and then helps you all in your remembering, and you’ll remember together. And you’ll send him into the world to remember with and for others, and to find Jesus right there where Jesus already is, to see God and join in God’s work of redemption. 

 

That this power was just bestowed upon a baby, that this act that undermines all the might and corruption and brokenness of this world just happened right here is a mystery that can hardly be grasped. 

None of the rulers of this age understand this wisdom, Paul says.

And why should they? It makes no sense. Its logic is love; its awareness is transcendent.

 

There are two short-cuts that I know of back to the true wisdom.  

The first one is sabbath. 

This wisdom tells us to stop and rest every single week. To put down everything, and not do anything impressive or productive at all– it deprives us of all our devices of accumulation, our instruments of efficiency, our tools of measurement and our weapons of comparison, and forces us to just be human beings with each other. Our glorious and pitiful, nervous and intriguing selves are utterly loved by God in all our sagging, annoying, endearing and honest humanity. This regular, intentional stopping doesn’t make us fall behind or miss out; but actually restores our souls, returns us to being human and grounds us in our belonging once again. Be still and know I am God.  

 

The second short-cut back to the true wisdom is gratitude.

 

Br. David Stendyl Rast asks, 

“Is not gratitude a passage from suspicion to trust, from proud isolation to a humble give and take, from enslavement to false independence to self-acceptance in that dependence that liberates? 

Yes. he answers. Gratitude is the great gesture of passage.

And this gesture of passage unites us. It unites us as human beings, for we realie that in this whole passing universe we humans are the ones who pass and know that we pass. There lies our human dignity.

There lies our human task.

The task of entering into the meaning of this passage (the passage which is our whole life), of celebrating its meaning through the gesture of thanksgiving.”

 

Sabbath and gratitude can point us back to the wisdom deeper than words.  

But we do not make moments of awareness and transcendence happen. 

They come upon us. 

From time to time, when we are unprepared and unsuspecting, we are seized by a kind of wakefulness that resonates in our depths. 

Cradling a new baby, swaddled and sleeping, warm against your chest…  

Standing still under a vast, dark and starry sky….  

Pausing, breathless and still, holding eye contact with a deer you’ve just startled while meandering in the woods…. 

Being held in someone’s strong embrace while you weep…. 

Rocking back and forth in violent hilarity with a friend gasping in unruly laughter beside you….

Through the whisper of memory, the glimpses of fullness, the flashes of beauty, and the tastes of wonder, God keeps calling us back to the deep.

The true wisdom will mostly show up in weak, gentle and surprising ways, but it is steady, persistent, unfailing.  Underneath and behind and inside everything is the heartbeat that keeps the whole world alive: 

We belong to God; we belong to each other. 
We belong to God; we belong to each other.
We belong to God; we belong to each other.

 

Here’s the really good news about all of this:

It remains true whether we remember it or not. 

Whether we are actively looking for it, practicing it and embodying it, or whether we’re stranded in fear or lost in exhaustion and all we can see is the next anxious moment in front of us, God’s persistent reality of love, hope, belonging and connection is already holding us all.  

The table of welcome is always set, and every one of us is endlessly invited.

This week, may we accept the invitation.

 

Amen.

 

How to live a good life

James 3:13 - 4:3, 7-8a

What is a good life?  We have ideas of what a good life is or should be. Right now especially it seems to have something to do with being on the correct side of the issue, whatever the issue may be. And just as important as being correct is being seen as being correct.  It can be about vaccines, or policing in our cities, or climate change, or racism, or it can be about how your lawn looks, and what you’re putting into your body, and how well-behaved your kids are, and what kind of effort you put into maintaining friendships.  What it looks like to others is at least as important as what it actually is.  
Modern life is primarily a performative exercise.
 
But, James asks, what’s going on in your heart?  Is this so-called good life being lived with envy, resentment, self-centeredness, bragging, or bending the truth?  If so, then there will be disorder and wickedness of every kind.  If so, it’s not a very good life.
 
What is a good life, then, and how do we know how to live it?
 
For example: Is it ok to shop at the super convenient and cheap store that pays minimum wage and doesn’t provide their employees with health insurance?
 
 What about that place that pays great, delivers health insurance, treats employees well and donates to great causes, but the owner of the company invests his personal money in a fund that, among a number of other good things, also supports a cause that dehumanizes some people?  
 
Is it actually better for the environment to buy the toilet paper that is made from sugar cane and bamboo, if it comes encased in several layers of cardboard stuffed with (recycled) paper and is delivered to your door by a large gas guzzling vehicle? 
 
Is it ok to want to have nice things or go on nice vacations when there is so much poverty and inequity?  Do you volunteer enough? Speak out enough?  Keep your house tidy enough?  Spend enough time with your kids, or grandkids, or parents? Do you stay informed enough?  Exercise enough?  Pray enough?
 
Living toward a standard of a good life that isn’t even fixed or clear is exhausting.  Measuring that against how well other people seem to be doing it in order to figure out whether I am doing it right is downrightt mind-scrambling.  
 
In fact, disorder and wickedness of every kind result from this kind of selfish ambition and envy motivation.
 
I feel disordered frequently. I feel the desire to be seen as good that, if I am honest, is sometimes greater than the desire to actually be good.  
 
I feel jealousy or resentment rise in me on a regular basis.  I feel misunderstood and I lob misunderstanding right back at the opposing party.   I am often quick to judge and quick to anger.
 
If a good life has to include with what’s in my heart along with mastering some performative actions then I can’t even delude myself that it’s possible to live a good life.  There is no way I can live a good life.  I can try all I want, but it is never enough, and I do it for all the wrong reasons, and from all the wrong motivations.  And the striving and comparing and accusing voice of judgment against myself and others will never stop howling inside my head and often out my mouth.
 
What is a good life and how do we live it?  
If this scripture is prescriptive it hasn’t yet told us what to do.  Because trying not to be selfish or jealous, or striving to have perfect motives when we perform all of our lofty and moving-target good life actions, is not only stupid and impractical, it actually is impossible.
 
This is good news actually. We can’t actually live a good life. We can’t even figure out what a good life is half the time.  
But that’s not our job. 
 
Here’s where it this passage tells us what is our job, three things:
Submit yourself to God.
Resist the devil. 
And draw near to God.
Submit. Resist. Draw near.
 
Submit yourself to God, James says because all the conflicts and disputes come from the cravings at war within ourselves.  They come from the way we try to save ourselves, advance ourselves, preserve ourselves, present ourselves. 
 
But life is not actually not about belonging to ourselves, it’s about belonging to God, and through God to each other.  And in fact, God does a much better job of unconditional love and boundless acceptance than we could ever do for ourselves. So much so that when our lives are rooted in our belonging to God, we can be brave and open and connected to others.  So we are called to submit ourselves to God, to confess our selfish desires and admit our messy motives, and lay down our flimsy defenses and repent. We ask for the connection and hope that we desire, that we are made for.  
 
Then, instead of us trying to live a good life by whatever current standards and definitions we have embraced at the moment, the wisdom from above that is God’s wisdom, not ours, will live through us.  And our lives, the words we say and the actions we take, how we treat others, how we treat ourselves, what we do with our money and our time -  these things will become a good life. They will be done with gentleness, born of God’s wisdom.  
When God moves through us God draws us into lives that are peaceable and pure James says, and “willing to yield, full of mercy, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”  But we don’t make that happen. We can’t.  We submit ourselves to God and the Holy Spirit does that work in us.  And the Holy Spirit draws us into God’s goodness already at work in the whole world, and we join in out of joy and calling, not out of urgency, pressure or guilt.
 
Second, we resist the devil – the Greek word is the accuser, the voice of condemnation and blame directed at our selves or others, the voice that that tears down our own humanity, or someone else’s.  That voice that says if we try harder and learn all the things, and avoid all the things, and do all the things, we can live a good life like those people obviously do. Or, look how awful they are, if we aren’t like them then we must be good.  That voice that tells us we are in it on our own, and we are supposed to be stronger than we are and not ask for help or admit weakness.  The voice that says we have nothing to offer someone else, nothing to give.  The voice that says that other people’s suffering or the problems in the world are not my business. The voice that says we have to carry it all and if we don’t it proves we don’t care.  We speak back to the voice of the accuser and stand up to it. We refuse to relinquish our minds and hearts to the delicious but poisonous, divisive anger of it.  When we confront the accusing voice, it will flee from us. 
 
And finally, third, we draw near to God.  We steep ourselves in what helps us seek God – meditation, walks in nature, stillness, stopping and stepping out of it all through gratitude, practicing noticing, and wonder, and cultivating silence.  We choose to spend time with those in need, and to care for each other, and we let ourselves be cared for and seen in our own need by others because right there is where we see God most.  We are human and present in our lives, because the God who became human in Christ is present to us here.  
Stop performing your life and live it, right here where God is.  Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.
 
This is a good life. 
Submit, resist, draw near.
 
I am more and more convinced that the way through this pandemic is to go deeper and simpler. Do less.  Listen more.  Turn things off and turn things down.  The noise and the conflict is a liar that tricks us into feeling alive but drains us of life. 
No matter what is happening around us or to us, we can live a good life.  God’s goodness is here for us, at any and every moment.
So submit to God and let God bring you into peace.  
Resist the accuser and it will flee. 
And draw near to God and God will draw near to you.
Amen.

How Wisdom Grows

1 Kings 3:3-28

There is something to be said for unflinching honesty that doesn’t sugar coat things.  There is a fascinating tension in this whole portion of scripture (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Chronicles and 1 and 2 Kings)– the people have been freed from Pharaoh, delivered from slavery, to be the free people of God. But it’s really hard to be free, and they have begged to have a king, like the other peoples. So God gives them a king, and they struggle after that with the political reality of having a king, as God said they would.

But God bless their honesty, the scriptures are ambivalent about their kings – on the one hand they praise their achievements- we see how powerful and wealthy, successful and wise they were, how they ruled in righteousness or built up Israel and brought prosperity and strength, but on the other hand, they also blame the kings for breaking the covenant with God, for turning away from the promises and words of God and their choices ultimately lead the people of Israel into exile. 

And throughout, for most of the kings, the prophets are continually calling them back to covenant and reminding them who is really in charge.  And the bible holds both of these things in tension – their great success and their utter failure, and in the midst of it all, God’s desire for relationship –to be their God and for them to be God’s people, a light to the nations, hope for the world.

So despite David’s murder, rape, etc. he is known for his faithfulness and his righteousness, and for his love of God.  And Solomon, who has 300 of concubines and 700 wives and builds shrines to foreign gods and builds opulence and wealth on the backs of the poor, was known for his wisdom.

So let’s just get that little bit aside here for a second – these are not clean characters or easy stories. They are messy and scandalous and frustrating, and the writers of these texts acknowledge the disappointing side of their heroes readily.  Because – and this is important to keep in mind throughout – this is God’s story. God who works in and through and in spite of the best and worst we can throw at God, and who never gives up on us – that is the story they are all telling, and they are committed to telling it right.

We left things last week with David’s household - which is a not the most peaceful one - God tells him the sword will never leave his house, and it never does.  In his old age there are several attempts by sons to take over after David, lots of bloodshed, and finally, Solomon - Bathsheba’s second son (the first one dies as punishment for his killing of her first husband, Uriah) Solomon is the one chosen by God, appointed by David, and anointed by Nathan, who ascends to the throne of David, but even he is involved in some scheming and has a potential usurper half-brother killed in the process.

So Solomon, who has already shown cunning and savvy, now begins his reign of the Israel in the most ideal way possible- at least from God’s point of view. God says to him, Ask what I should give you. And Solomon asks for wisdom.  And God is very pleased with this request.  Because while wealth or power or revenge would serve Solomon, but wisdom will serve the people.

What is wisdom?

Like love or hope or foolishness, it almost can’t be explained or explored in the abstract, it appears in circumstances and situations, in the word and actions of human beings in real life.  So wisdom researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine study people who are considered by others to be wise, and look at the kinds of experiences that make someone wise, and what it looks like in context to be wise. 

In order to illustrate Solomon’s wisdom, we are given a story, a context in which to see wisdom enacted.  It’s a horrid story, really, about two women on one of society’s lowest rungs caught in a tragic situation and at the mercy of the king, who holds the power of life and death in his hands. It’s a story of loss and despair, of what desperation and grief can do, and of what love looks like too.

In this story, Solomon peels back the curtain of wisdom for a glimpse, and shows the roomful of people not a dazzling display of his own intellect or power – though to hang a child’s life over a sword is certainly power- but a simple doorway to wisdom. He doesn’t judge or condemn either woman, and he doesn’t try to get to the bottom of anything, or figure out rationally what is right and what is wrong, and who is to blame and what their punishment should be. He taps into the deeper reality.  He starts with the love that will care for the child enough to let him go, so he might live, and exposes that.

Solomon sidesteps the drama and (albeit with considerable drama of his own) lays the truth bare.  The consequences will still be theirs – one will need to face her loss instead of denying it, and will grieve terribly, the women will have to work out their relationship and living arrangements with one living child and one childless mother. But Solomon’s actions in this moment leave open the possibility for reconciliation and forgiveness, for honesty and a way forward, without in any way simplifying or trivializing the complex reality of life and living for these women and anyone else there witnessing this moment. 

Of course, we want to know, Would he have sliced the baby in two? The absurdity of this as a solution – it’s sheer illogic and shocking non-solutionness makes me think no, of course not.  Unless it is simply to shut them both up and get the problem out of his presence, which, as a powerful king, is risk enough for them to take him seriously. A king could do what he wanted, so if he wanted to make a mockery, or cause pain, or show his might, he certainly could have.  

But that’s not where he was headed.  He offers the solution of dividing the child as a test, one that actually treats the women as participating human beings and not as problems to fix or objects in his way.  By this absurd gesture he allows reality to be exposed – the deeper truth is spoken, the one who loves the child, and would give the child up to see him safe, this is the true mother.

Wisdom is not knowledge; it connected to the way things are, to our very being. It is like glimpsing the alignment of things, sensing the deep truth underneath it all.  And it is always something that moves us beyond ourselves and connects us with others, it is always for others, never for our own personal gain.

Included on the long list of words people use to describe those who are wise are “things like compassion, ability to see the big picture, to put things in perspective, to see things from many points of view, to be able to reflect on and rise above one’s own perspective.” Dr. Margaret Plews-Ogan, who studies wisdom, explains, “Wisdom is different from intelligence. Intelligence seeks knowledge and seeks to eliminate ambiguity. Wisdom on the other hand, resists automatic thinking, seeks to understand ambiguity better, to grasp the deeper meaning of what is known and to understand the limits of knowledge.”

Where does wisdom begin?  

Solomon gives us some insight into this.  He is credited with Proverbs, (and Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes – the wisdom literature).  And we hear there this very often-repeated refrain, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (e.g., Prov. 1:7; 9:10; 10:27; 14:27, 15:33; 16:6).  This is where Solomon started.

The word for “fear” can mean being afraid or scared, but it can also mean reverence, wonder, amazement, mystery, astonishment, honor, in other words, something like 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."

The fear of the Lord, the awe and the awareness of the eternal beyond the within the ordinary, the seeing into – this is the beginning of wisdom.  Wisdom is speaking from the great truth bigger than ourselves, the silence beneath the noise, the real reality that holds us.  But, it begins with an honest assessment of yourself and the world.  Lord, How can I govern so great a people? I am but a small boy! Give me an understanding mind.  I am limited and you are beyond all – help me see with your vision, help me glimpse with your insight, that I may serve these people rightly and do what is best for them.

Solomon asked for wisdom from God and received it.  But most often wisdom is gained not from studying or listening to someone else wise, but from experience, often tragic, difficult, painful, real life experience. Where these things can cause post-traumatic stress, they can also lead to what some have called, post traumatic growth. Plews-Ogan asks, “What better teacher of compassion than one’s own experience of suffering? How better to learn humility than to make a mistake? And what better to discover the deeper meaning of one’s life than to face a circumstance that forces you to focus on that which is of most value to your life?”

And we are participants in the process, we can receive the paths wisdom carves in us.  All the exemplars of wisdom the University of Virginia researchers looked at in their Wisdom Study had one thing in common– they had all, at some point, made an intentional choice to do something that was hard.  Plews-Ogan describes it like this: “It may not have been what they really wanted to do, and certainly not something they thought would necessarily end up well. But it was something they felt they had to do to set things straight. They chose, in many cases, the harder course of action. They chose to face their circumstances face on. We say, they “stepped in”. They may have decided to apologize to a patient or family, to go into a room full of intense judgment. It might have meant that they had to face their addiction, or take control of their health. At some point they made a courageous choice to make a difference in their own lives.”

But what leads people to make hard choices in the face of adversity? To remain vulnerable and changeable instead of hardening and becoming bitter and shut down?

When researchers asked what gave those people the courage to make their hard choice – to step into something they’d rather avoid, their answers could be summarized in five things: a community to hold your experience- a place to tell your story, cultivating gratitude and hope, some kind of quiet reflection or prayer, doing something to help others, and having some kind of spiritual grounding to help guide you as you make hard but good choices.  Since wisdom is from God, it doesn’t surprise me that these things that open a place for God’s wisdom to grow in us sound exactly like church.

Solomon had the gift of wisdom from God, for the people, to see the greater truth and help others live in it, to connect him to God’s reality and bring that reality to be in his leadership, but he also had his own cleverness and intellect in spades, and it is easy to see when he relied on one and not the other. 

His rule was characterized by stability and peace within the borders of Israel’s huge territory, and political and social order. He was a prolific writer and composer, beloved for his wisdom, and he gave the people of God the Temple. 

But he also used slave labor from conquered peoples to build the temple, built shrines for the worship of foreign gods, and taxed the people heavily to support his lavish and excessive lifestyle.  He made the people work as soldiers, chief officers and commanders of his chariots and cavalry, and gave preferential treatment to the tribe of Judah, which angered and alienated the other tribes.  By the time his 40 year reign came to an end, the people were weary, burdened, frustrated and disillusioned, after his death, the kingdom he had built broke apart. 

Wisdom keeps us human and connected to others. It keeps us human and connected to God.  But, Solomon did not have a prophet. There was no Nathan for him like there was for David.  Was there anyone who spoke hard truth to power?  Who reminded him of his vulnerability?  Who called him back to God’s ways when he got distracted by his own power and ingenuity, or became enslaved to his desires and the drive to satisfy his own wants, even at the expense of those he was called to serve?  

One researcher describes, “…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”.’ (John Meachum)

Perhaps Solomon, for all his wisdom, did not have this.

These wisdom researchers were not studying church. They were not looking at the Bible or the faithful from the generations who’ve gone before us, or those of us who seek to live in wisdom in a community of Jesus Christ with and for one another. So they couldn’t have realized what it would sound like to us gathered here tonight when they said this:

“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. Wisdom does not arise out of the easy, simple parts of our lives. Wisdom lives in the most messy, hard, complex and painful of our experiences.”

This, my friends, is Church. They are talking about church.  They are talking about us. We are people called to live with one another in the messy, hard and complex experiences, called to foster gratitude, to make space to openly express doubts, and to accept ambiguity and mystery.  

We are called to hear and hold each other’s stories – stories that God works in and through and in spite of so that we can be with God.  We are to be, for each other and the world, the people who help one another step into hard things, and who remain open and soft when life wants to make us bitter and shut down. 

We make space for silence and pray together, we can be brave and trusting instead of afraid and guarded, and we can dwell together in the fear of the Lord, that place where awe and wonder well within us and open up to us a seeing that otherwise remains closed. 

And when we look at David and Solomon and all these faithful who have gone before, in all the raw ugliness and beauty of their lives, it can help us to foster compassion, empathy and forgiveness in ourselves and others.

We are the Church, the Body of Christ, the living and breathing reminders of grace, experiencers of grace, spreaders of grace amidst life’s joys and struggles.  We are the community where wisdom grows.  May we come in honesty and awe before God and “feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal." (Heschel)

Amen.