The way of wisdom

1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

I had lunch the other day with a friend whose 18 year-old granddaughter was struck and killed by a car in June while jogging near her home in Mill Valley.  He told me about what happened, and its aftermath, and of his struggle to make sense of it.  And he said that he’d kept thinking about all the time that she wouldn’t have, all the life that she wouldn’t live, all the years she should have been in the world but wouldn’t be.  And the injustice and flat-out wrongness of it was heavy on his heart and made him angry at God.  But then, he said, something shifted in his thinking, and he stopped brooding on his granddaughter’s death, and began to remember her life.  Instead of dwelling on her absence, he began to give thanks for her presence.  And about that time she came to him in a sort of waking dream, and he knew that God had not abandoned her, had not forsaken him.

We like to think that God is wise, by which we mean that God knows the right thing to do, and does it.  And if we are good and sincere people, we might hope that God will give us wisdom, too. The biblical figure who traditionally exemplifies this wisdom is Solomon.  Solomon, who, thanks to the crafty politicking of his mother Bathsheba, won out over all his brothers and succeeded his father David on the throne of Israel.  The story says that he was young and inexperienced and overwhelmed by the responsibility of governing the nation, so he went and made sacrifices to God.  And though Solomon sacrificed in the wrong places, God answered his prayers anyway.  God came to Solomon him in a dream and asked what he could do for him, and Solomon didn’t ask for long life or riches, or to be rid of his enemies, but for understanding and discernment, so that he might make wise judgements and be a good king.

The idea that God is the source of wisdom, and desires to teach that wisdom to us, is one of the great themes in the theology of the Bible.  The scriptures not only say that God has created the world, and called Abraham and Sarah and their descendants to be his people; God has not only made a covenant with them, and liberated them from bondage; has not only brought them into a good land, and driven out other nations before them, so that they might dwell there in safety and peace; but God has also given them laws, ordinances, and commandments so that they might gain understanding and learn how to choose what is right.  

The anti-Jewish polemic in the New Testament has caused us to think of the religion of Jesus as legalistic, as if the point of the law in the Hebrew Bible was to follow the rules literally and exactly, so that in doing so, God would find you righteous and favor you.  Of course, that’s one way to interpret it, but that legalistic streak runs through all religions.  There are a lot of Christians who read the Bible as a set of laws, absolute obedience to which, is our ticket to heaven.  But if you read widely in the Bible you find a lot of places, especially in the Psalms, that speak of a very different understanding of the law. 

This is the view that the commandments are the handiwork of God, much like the created world and the great acts of salvation history.   They are not simply arbitrary requirements, but they reveal that God’s purposes are faithful and true.  The point for us is not simply to obey the letter of the law, though that is important, but to study the statutes of God, to keep them in one’s heart and meditate upon them, to delight in them and allow them to illuminate one’s path in life, so that, in time, one might gain insight into the mind that gave them.  It is the contemplation of the awesome grandeur, the sublime justice, the boundless compassion and mercy of that mind, that the Bible calls “the fear of the Lord.”  It is called “fear” not so much because of the threat of punishment for those who disobey, but because one has had first-hand experience, a little taste, has dabbled ones toes in the shallow ripples at the edge of the ultimate mystery.   This fear, the Bible says, is the beginning of wisdom, the way that leads to knowing what God wants and even who God is.

That wisdom is partly the ability to make good choices even when the rules don’t tell you what to do.  We may not have to govern a kingdom, like Solomon, but we all regularly face decisions where there is no clear-cut right-and-wrong, when there are competing principles at stake and it’s not obvious which should prevail.  It is like this for me almost every time someone comes to our parish office asking for financial assistance.  Sometimes the request is simple and I can meet it whole-heartedly without thinking about it very much.  But more often the situation is complicated and I have to weigh my choices carefully. 

I have to consider all different kinds of factors—have I helped this person before, and how recently?  Will the assistance I give have a decisive positive impact, or will it just delay the inevitable?  Is there something else this person needs more than money, and if so, what is it, and is there someone else who can meet that need more effectively than I can?  In the end I have to make the best choice I can, within the limits of my power and my knowledge, and then I have to let go.  The same goes for all kinds of choices I have to make, as a pastoral leader, as a husband and a father, as a citizen of my town and country, and a member of the human race.   I assume it goes for all of us—we make the best choice we can, within the limits of our power and our knowledge, and make the best effort we can to follow through on the consequences, but at certain point, we just have to let go. 

Because there are even more fundamental choices we have to make; we have to choose not just between different courses of action but between different basic orientations to life.  It’s like the choice my friend had to make between agonizing over his granddaughter’s death and being grateful for the gift of her life.  There are things we have no power to alter and no way to understand, realities that confront us with the choice between hope and despair, between love and hate, between peace and retribution.   The wisdom that enables us to affirm the goodness and worthiness of life in the face of these realities is indistinguishable from faith.  It is grounded in humility about the limits of our power and knowledge.  It is freedom from the burden of having to know why everything happens the way it does, or of having to find the one right course of action that will make everything turn out okay.  Wisdom is trust that there is one who will take up where we leave off, who will tie up the loose ends, and catch what falls through the cracks.  

I think our faith in Jesus is faith in this kind of wisdom.  It’s not so much that he sets us a practical example of good habits and sound decision-making.  What I mean is that Jesus lives by what he knows of the living God.  The love and goodness of God is nourishment for him, more essential than food.  And everything he says and does is for the purpose of sharing that heavenly food with us, even giving his body like bread to be broken and his blood to be spilled like wine. 

That gift, raised again and renewed by the Spirit, makes Jesus’ whole life a revelation of the wisdom of God.  In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we have an inexhaustible subject of contemplation, disclosing depths that theological theories cannot penetrate, but only the radiance of love.  Such love subverts all worldly wisdom, with truth and power that could only come from an infinite source, from the one who alone can tie up all the loose ends of our ignorance and suffering, and catch what falls through the cracks of death.  And so we give thanks at all times and in all places, because in Jesus we have the bread of eternal life, the wisdom that satisfies a hunger nothing else can fill.    

Something to do with Jesus

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

I’ve been leading a class for the past six weeks or so on a book called the Wisdom Jesus.  It puts forward an image of Jesus as a teacher of the way of inner transformation that leads to higher consciousness.   A lot of people have responded very positively to this book, and the attendance at these classes has been the highest of any I’ve done at St. John’s.   We’re now in part 3, which presents contemporary approaches to ancient wisdom practices—some things you can actually do to follow in the way that Jesus taught.   And we’ve been spending a good part of each class doing these practices—not just talking, for instance, about Centering Prayer meditation, but practicing a twenty minute period of silent meditation together, and then having a conversation about our experience.

Last Sunday we did a form of Lectio Divina, a traditional way of slowly and sensitively digesting the scriptures.   And through the week as I was preparing to teach the class, I came back a few times to the problem of which scripture to pick for us to read.  I thought in passing about some personal favorites, but I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on making this decision, so, finally, I decided the best thing would be to just go to the Lectionary Page and write down the chapter and verse numbers of the Gospel lesson for the following Sunday, and read that. 

So that’s what we did.  We sat and meditated for a few minutes and then a volunteer read aloud the same verses from John that I just read to you this morning.  Now keep in mind, this group has been buzzing with enthusiasm for weeks about a portrait of a Jesus who is not exclusive, one who teaches a wisdom that is quite compatible with that of other traditions.  This is a Jesus who does not appeal to an external, dogmatic authority, but to our own inner capacity to recognize the truth.  But here we have one of those Gospel passages that seems, on the surface at least, to defy every attempt to make it universal.  So I have to admit I was a little nervous about how this was going to go. 

As it turned out, I need not have worried.  As we listened to the reading a first and then a second time, we did hit the uncomfortable verses.  And we could have seized up, and forgotten to listen to the rest of the reading because we were stuck, back arguing with verse 18.  But we stayed with it.  We stayed still and kept breathing, and trying to hear what the passage might be trying to tell us.  And when we started sharing what we’d found, it turned out there was a lot.  There was a lot in this passage that spoke to people’s hearts, that stirred their love and their longing for God.  So it is in that spirit of the faith that if we keep working, and look deeper, we will find there is more to these texts than at first meets the eye, I want to circle back now and take another look at the things about this reading that are hard to hear and hard to understand. 

 

After all, Jesus himself introduces this saying by telling us it will be a tough one to swallow.  He does this when he brings up the serpent in the wilderness.  As we heard in the reading from Numbers, Moses makes a bronze serpent as a kind of medicine that heals by making you look at the thing you are most afraid to see.   And Jesus says things in this passage that we don’t want to look at, things that might turn and bite us with a poisonous sting.  First he gives this incredible that about the grace of God, who loved the world so much, and who sent his Son not to judge the world but to save it.  But then he starts to talk about condemnation.  “Those who believe in him are not condemned,” it says, “but those who do not believe are condemned already.”  I quoted this passage at a talk I gave last fall, at an interfaith panel on peace and nonviolence, in order to illustrate a paradox that has been at the heart of the Christian religion throughout its history, and when I read those words, the Muslim Imam who was also on the panel winced and shook his head.    

Now some might say, “who cares?”  To them this passage is simple to understand: our religion has the right beliefs, and everyone else’s has the wrong ones.  We will be saved, they will be condemned, and its just too bad for them.  But a brief look back at our history tells us all we need to know about the poisonous snakes that lie along that path—wars of conquest and wars of religion, witch trials and inquisitions, pogroms, and genocides.  In a world of religious pluralism, especially in a place like California, where Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, and Buddhists and Sikhs, Neo-pagans and Atheists all live side-by-side, this interpretation has lost its credibility—especially for the young, who have no memory of life in an ethnically and religiously homogenous community, and no desire to go back there. 

Because it’s no longer credible to say that the Christian church is in sole possession of the truth, even about religion.   We know too much about the world’s other faiths to continue to pretend that they are all false and misleading paths that take people to hell.  Even if their practices and doctrines seem alien to us, we can’t ignore the evidence of their saints.  People hear the Dalai Lama say “my religion is kindness” and they compare it with the self-righteous sectarian contempt preached in so many churches every Sunday.  Needless to say, it's not a favorable comparison.  So if we believe that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, who came into the world not to condemn it, but that the world might be saved through him (and I take my stand on the position that the world needs, more than ever, people who believe this), we have to start see how that might be true exactly because it doesn’t require that everyone convert to Christianity.

That means having a different kind of faith, one that is broader than we’ve had before, but also deeper.  It means having an imagination of what God is doing in the world in Christ that is no longer limited to what happens in churches, or with people who profess the Christian faith.   And it means embracing a new kind of Christian discipleship, one that is less defined by our belonging within the rigid boundaries an exclusive social group, where people think and act and look more or less the same.  It means being less concerned with believing the right things, and more with doing what Christ is asking of us to help him save the world.

I think that’s actually more in line with what the Gospel means by “believing,” anyway.  The Greek word that our Bibles translate as “believing in” Jesus doesn’t just mean “accepting as true certain ideas about him.”  It means to put our trust in him, to trust him enough to let him change the way we live.  Believing in Jesus means following his lead, doing the things he said to do.  And today’s text emphasizes that point very strongly.  “The light has come into the world,” it says—not into the church, you notice, or into the hearts of Christians—“and the people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”  “But those who do what is true, come to the light (they come out into the world), so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”   The truth, says the Gospel, the truth that really matters, is not something that you think, or something that you say, it’s something that you do.

Mastering fear

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28 

“The fear of the Lord,” says today’s Psalm, “is the beginning of wisdom.”  But some of us might disagree.  Sure, wisdom might have something to do with God.  Seeking God, perhaps, or loving God, or knowing God—these we might accept as starting points for wisdom.  But fear?  We like to think that God is loving and good, compassionate and generous and forgiving, and indeed the Psalm describes a God like that.  So what is there to fear? 

It’s a good question, and I think that to find the answer we have to look at what “wisdom” is.  Because wisdom, if it really is wisdom, is not abstract or theoretical.  It is always applied.  Wisdom teaches us how to live, how to find our way through the real world, with skill, equanimity, and grace.  But if we’re going to be honest I think we have to admit that we find the real world to be a fearful place.  We might reject the notion that God is someone to fear, but that doesn’t mean we are not afraid. 

The truth is we live in a world haunted by fear.  News about the economy, just to take one example, is full of fearful language.  Wall Street has “jitters,” we read, or the Federal Reserve seeks to “calm investors’ fears.”  Sometimes it even has to intervene to stave off a full-blown “panic.”  On a more personal level, my wife is fond of reminiscing about her childhood and how she and the neighborhood kids would play together outside, in and out of each others’ houses, and up and down and around the block until they were all called home to dinner.  But in our neighborhood today, though we know there are children because we catch fleeting glimpses of them from time to time, they are not out playing in the street.   And if they were, we wouldn’t let our daughter join them, at least not without adult supervision.  “Times have changed,” we say, but what exactly it is that has changed is hard to put your finger on, except that we are more afraid than our parents were.

We are afraid of things that we do not understand and cannot control, but that gives them power over us.  It doesn’t really matter if the Ebola virus, or Islamist extremists, or home invasion robbers pose a real threat to our lives—the fear of them is enough—enough to make us do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, or to not do what we otherwise would.  The fear is enough to curtail our freedom and destroy peace. 

It is when we consider this intersection of fear and power that I think we start to understand what the psalm is saying about wisdom.  Because the point is not that the God of Israel is a terrifying God, though he certainly can be when he means to, but that wisdom begins when we understand that in this world only God is to be feared, because only God has ultimate power.  We who do not fear God, and reject the very idea of fearing God, no longer believe in the power of God.  We might believe in a God who makes us feel better.  That is why we have such a need to for a “nice” God—but we don’t believe in a God with the power to save us from the things we most fear.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his ministry by walking into the synagogue at Capernaum on the Sabbath day with his four brand new disciples and beginning to teach.   Compared to the other gospels, Mark says very little about the content of his teaching.  He does summarize it right before today’s lesson, when he says,

“Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.””

That’s quite a message, but in the scene in the synagogue what is most important is the impact that the message has on Jesus’ audience.   They are astonished by its originality and by its power.  He speaks with authority, but it’s not the authority of being able to skillfully back up his arguments with quotations from scripture, which is what they are used to.  His teaching seems to come straight from the source of wisdom and truth.

Cynthia Bourgeault, whose book The Wisdom Jesus some folks at St. John’s are reading right now, speaks of the experience of hearing Jesus as a “recognition event.”  That is, his teaching isn’t about some religious beliefs or moral principles that exist “out there,” where you can hold them at arm’s length and turn them this way and that and decide what you think of them.  But it impacts people “in here,” in their own spiritual center, which stirs and comes alive, as if responding to a mother tongue once known but long-forgotten.  It is an experience of hearing the truth about oneself and about God, and recognizing what has always been known in the heart.

But the Gospel tells us there was one man in the synagogue that day whose spiritual center was not his own.  And while the others are moved by Jesus’ preaching, the spirit that has taken possession of this man recognizes Jesus’ person.  It sees who he really is.  It understands that his authority is not just a function of rhetorical genius or brilliance of insight, but of the identity and purpose given to him by God.  Jesus is on a mission, and his teaching is only one aspect of it; a mission to manifest the Kingdom of God, not only as a nice idea, but with power.  That kingdom is not going to come without a fight, and immediately, right from the start, the real enemies of God come out to do battle. 

I think it helps to understand what is at stake in this conflict if we consider why the Gospel refers to this antagonistic spirit as “unclean.”  In the Bible “clean” and “unclean,” are very important ideas, that do not mean what we might suppose.  They are not categories that pertain to hygiene, or to morality, but to religious worship.  They have to do with the way the ancient Hebrews perceived the world, and structured society, and lived their lives, so as to preserve the central place in all of it for God. 

And when they said that something was unclean it was not because they believed that it was hated by God, or outside of God.   God created everything that is, and pronounced that it is good.  But there are in our world objects and experiences that carry with them an intrinsic fascination and danger, things like blood, like the sleep and the death of the body, things like sex and childbirth. 

To the ancient Hebrew way of thinking, these things were unclean, not because they are “dirty” in some puritanical sense, but because they are powerful.  Someone or something that has been in contact with them needs to be made clean, to be purified by a religious act, to bring the numinous power of that contact back into its proper relationship with other things.  It needs to be realigned with the ordered world created by with God. 

And this was true not only of natural phenomena, and material things, but also of the spiritual world.  The Jews of Jesus’ time had a vivid sense of a world full of spirits, of unseen intelligences.  But some of these spirits refused their ordered place among the creatures of God.  Instead of worshiping before the heavenly throne, they preyed on human beings.  They fed on our fear, on our fascination with idols, with divination, sorcery, and human sacrifice, all our efforts to bend divine power to our control.  They sought to rival the angels, as if their power to dominate, to inflict insanity and sickness, to take possession of a person’s soul, were on a par with God’s power to heal, to bless, to give and preserve life.

Some people might say that modern materialistic science has made these ideas obsolete and irrelevant.  But what is at stake in Jesus’ conflict with the unclean spirit is not whether or not we believe in demons.  What is at stake is whether we believe there is anything more powerful than God.  Or let me put it a different way—of what in the world are you most afraid?  To what in the world do you turn to master the things that you fear?  How we answer those questions shows us where we still need to repent, and believe in the good news of God’s Kingdom.  It shows us where we still need Jesus to come in power.