The Joy of Wisdom and the
Wisdom of Joy
Trinity
Sunday
Proverbs
8:1-4, 22-31
May
22, 2016
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
Bad
news...travels fast. Too many cooks…spoil the broth. It never
rains…but it pours. Still waters…run deep. The best things in
life…are free. A friend in need…is a friend indeed.
Practice…makes perfect. Like father…like son.
Who
know some of these? Sure. They’re called proverbs —short bits of
wisdom in a pithy, easy to remember form. We say them like they come
straight from God’s mouth, although some proverbs seem less than
divine to me. “Revenge is sweet” hardly fits with the God I have
met in Jesus.
Sometimes
proverbs collide. “Discretion is the better part of valor.” “Look
before you leap.” But “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Every
culture has proverbs, because they are an easy way of passing down
one generation’s experience to another. For us it takes place
informally, but in the ancient Near East it was a formal business.
There was a trans-national urge toward what is called “wisdom.”
There are wisdom literatures everywhere from Egypt to Babylon. There
is evidence of a good deal of borrowing back and forth.
The
Book of Proverbs is part of ancient Israel’s wisdom literature. So
are the books of Job,and Ecclesiastes. There are some wisdom psalms,
too.
The
wisdom movement, if we can call it that, looked at the world and
tried to see its patterns. Especially it tried to see what patterns
of action lead to what kinds of results. Theirs was a practical
quest: How to live a good life. The Book of Proverbs is the self-help
section in the Bible’s book store.
Their
world was different from ours in many ways, but they were pretty
bright people and some of the things they noticed have lasting value:
“Better
is a dry morsel with quiet…than a house full of feasting with
strife.”1
Maybe that’s not so familiar, but it’s insightful, isn’t it?
Some
of them are pretty obvious: “Go to the ant, you lazy bones;
consider its ways, and be wise.”2
Or “The poor are disliked even by their neighbors, but the rich
have many friends.”3
Others
are peculiar to ancient Israel and have to do with God’s passion
for justice, even if it isn’t obvious from experience that things
will work out this way: “The wicked are overthrown and are no more,
but the house of the righteous will stand.”4
The
wisdom tradition in Israel wasn’t just about gathering life wisdom.
A strange thing happened. The more that these people pursued wisdom,
the more wisdom took on a personal character. Because the Hebrew word
for wisdom, hôkmah, is feminine in grammatical gender, the
personal character it took on was feminine and Wisdom, now with a
capital “W” is figured as a woman. She remains God’s
Wisdom, not a separate god or goddess, but she acts and speaks
“sorta, kinda” on her own. She invites the readers of Proverbs to
live according to her teachings and not to follow that other
woman, Folly (which in Hebrew is also a feminine word).
Folly
offers a good time. “With much seductive speech she persuades [her
victim]; with her smooth talk she compels him.”5
But in the end “her feet go down to death; her steps follow the
path to Sheol.”6
Folly is the sort of girl that mothers warn their sons about.
Wisdom,
on the face of it, seems to be everything that Folly is not. From the
things she says, you wouldn’t think she knew anything about fun.
Certainly
the proverbs I learned never told me how to have a good time: “Strike
while the iron is hot. A stitch in time saves nine. Do as I say and
not as I do. Waste not, want not.” These aren’t directions for
throwing a party.
Wisdom
is practical, down to earth. Wisdom’s is a hard world, where there
is no time or energy to waste, where the road is narrow and it is
bounded on either side by deep ditches. Wander a few steps off the
path, stop to smell the roses, and Wisdom has passed you by. At least
that’s the impression I have gotten over the years.
But
look at the last few verses of our lesson. God’s Wisdom was engaged
in creation from the very beginning, there beside God in every step
of fashioning the world. The implication is that Wisdom had a hand in
every creative act, from God’s drawing “a circle on the face of
the deep” and making “firm the skies above” to the making of
each tiny bit of soil. Wisdom, these words imply, is deeply woven
into the fabric of the universe; Wisdom is the deep structure of the
cosmos.
Serious
stuff, this. No time for fun. No energy to spare for the frivolous.
And yet.
And
yet, here is Wisdom who describes herself as being beside God in the
creation, Wisdom who, she says,
“was beside him as a master of crafts. I was having fun, smiling
before him all the time, frolicking with his inhabited earth and
delighting in the human race.
That’s
the English translation. The Hebrew original is much more
vivid than that. The word translated “fun” is about as intense as
it gets in Hebrew. And the word translated “frolicking,” well,
frolicking barely begins to cover it. The word is used in other
places to mean “to make merry…, to engage in contests for the fun
of it…, to dance with joy…, to leap and jump like antelope in the
mountains…, to play…, to breach like a whale…, to joke…, to
celebrate homecoming from exile…” Rejoice sounds a little tame
against that list.
It
seems we really “misunderestimated” Wisdom’s capacity for
pleasure. If Wisdom’s care and prudence are built into the
creation. If human wisdom is the ability to trace the lines of that
care and prudence in the world around us and act accordingly. If
wisdom means to align ourselves with the way the universe is made. If
all that is true, then it is equally true that the only proper —that
is, the only wise—response before the universe is to
rejoice. The proper response is not just to stop and smell the
roses: it is to dance with them, celebrate them, make merry with
them, get lost in them.
As
we say in our family, “Whoda thunk it?” Who would have thought
that the same person who said, “A slack hand causes poverty, but
the hand of the diligent makes rich”7
also was God’s delight every day, rejoicing (in all ways I’ve
mentioned) before God? Who would have thought that the Wisdom who
said, “By loyalty and faithfulness iniquity is atoned for, and by
the fear of the LORD one avoids evil”8
is also one who dances and leaps like an antelope in the hills
because of the inhabited world and the mere fact of the human race?
Wisdom personifies, not just prudence, but joy as well. Whoda thunk
it?
So
Wisdom calls to us, as she calls to all of the children of Adam and
Eve, and tells us that we’re not enjoying God’s world nearly
enough, that we’re not enjoying each other nearly enough, that
we’re not enjoying God nearly enough. For the path of joy is the
path of wisdom. And the path of wisdom is the way of life.
©2016,
John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and
distribute this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and
provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included
in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without
the express written permission of the author.
1
Proverbs 17:10.
2
Proverbs 6:6.
3
Proverbs 14:20.
4
Proverbs 12:7.
5
Proverbs 7:21.
6
Proverbs 5:5.
7
Proverbs 10:4.
8
Proverbs 16:6.
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