What Is Wisdom?

Homily for Sunday, July 30, 2017   Good Shepherd and Graves Chapel

  

Lessons:

1 Kings 3: 5-12

Psalm 119: 129-136

Romans 8: 26-39

Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52

On Friday as I sat down to write this homily, a storm was on its way. We have been in much need of rain and the cooler temperatures the weather promised to bring, so I settled in to enjoy the peace before the storm.  Our sunroom is my favorite spot for prayer and meditation, and that is where I also do most of my writing. Outside the wide windows of the sunroom, I observed two birds busy with what seemed to be unusual activity. A female cardinal darted among the larger plants and shrubs, lighting precariously on a stalk of Solomon’s Seal and plucking a sprig of rosemary. She appeared to be a recent fledgling, and her activity suggests that she is building a nest in one of our giant boxwoods—even for the end of July, not out of the realm of possibility.

A small chattering wren darted about as well, tugging a choice twig from behind my clematis trellis. I wondered if the approaching storm motivated this bird activity? Whatever their motivation, they tended to the business at hand. Unlike we humans, who worry far too much, the birds of the air need no reminder to be fully engaged with the priorities of living. There is a great deal of wisdom on display in the natural order of things, as our Lord suggested in his sermon on the mount: “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them.”

Human fear and human need often drive us to worry even about things over which we have no control—the weather, for example.  So, is fear the antithesis of wisdom? Some say fear is the opposite of faith, and who among us here would say that faith is not the wise path to choose? Caught up in worry or fear, I sense that any speck of wisdom I may possess is running in the opposite direction. Caught up in fear, we can make some very unwise decisions. Remember when the prophet Elijah ran away in fear after the wicked queen Jezebel vowed to kill him? Hiding in a cave on Mt. Horeb, Elijah was instructed by God to leave the safety of the cave and stand on the mountainside. But Elijah didn’t budge from the cave. What happened then? As we are told in 1 Kings 19, “The Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake, a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire, a still, small voice.”  When Elijah heard the still small voice of God, he finally came out of the cave.

Do we hide (or simply avoid facing) the things that frighten us? We live in a complicated and dangerous world, and there are many things that reasonable people may find frightening. But if we hide ourselves away like Elijah, God will call us out of that cave and give us the quiet confidence to do what we have to do. With God’s strength supporting and guiding us, we can have the wisdom to face the most fearful things.

I believe this is the kind of wisdom God bestows on young King Solomon. When Solomon asks for “an understanding mind,” God responds, “Because you have asked this, and have NOT asked for yourself long life or riches, or for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to DISCERN what is right, I now do according to your word. Indeed, I give you a wise and discerning mind.”  

In this response, God not only grants Solomon’s request for wisdom, but he also offers a dialectic argument in which God lists some things Solomon might have requested for himself that would have been less than wise requests: for long life, for wealth, for the lives of his enemies. When God uses the phrase “for yourself,” in describing how these possible gifts would have been used by Solomon, the implication is that wisdom cannot be exercised for selfish purposes. By its very nature, wisdom is used in the service of others—in Solomon’s case, for the benefit of God’s people.

Then, a discerning mind, as God defines wisdom, is seated in the heart. Intelligence—brain power—is an entirely different (if worthy) gift.  Like me, you may have grown up hearing adults say something like this: “Well, he’s plenty smart when it comes to books, but he has no common sense at all.” In fact, if I’m being honest, my parents may very well have said that of me when I was young. I love the simplicity of the term “common sense” as one way to define wisdom.  As it suggests, wisdom is available to all and is used for the common good. Growing up I knew and loved some folks who may have lacked college degrees but were unerringly wise in their understanding of others and their generous compassion. They used their hearts to discern what was needed by those around them. They surveyed their community with the eyes of love.

The parables Jesus offers today about the kingdom of heaven illustrate how our common lives and the inherent wisdom of common sense help to build a community of love where all may reside.  Even a mustard-seed sized portion of wisdom and faith can grow into a tree-like shrub big enough to shelter many birds. Where are such mustard seeds building community in your life?  In the next illustration of how the kingdom grows, Jesus speaks of a woman making bread. Thinking of my grandmother, my mom, and my aunts, all of whom were great bakers, the parable of the woman mixing yeast “with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” certainly sounds like heaven to me. Of course, that bread won’t rise until it is kneaded with wise and loving hands. Then it can be baked, broken, and shared among all the members of the kingdom.

My dad was an avid and skilled fly fisherman.  He fished all the trout streams and rivers in Central Virginia, and he never failed to bring home enough brook, rainbow, or native trout for our whole family. In the parable of the bursting-full fishing net, how generous is God’s wide net, thrown out for all so that all can enter the kingdom of heaven! It is up to each of us to make good use of our discerning hearts and prepare ourselves to accept or reject the invitation to the kingdom.  That choice is always ours.

Sometimes, it would seem, the courage to be truly faithful requires the wisdom to Let Go and Let God—never an easy thing to do! Worry and anxiety come to us so very easily. Remember those birds of the air who have no cause to worry since a loving God cares for them? In the same passage, Jesus also said, “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”  In asking for wisdom, the young Solomon may not have fully understood what it was he sought. In granting Solomon’s request, God gave him all he would need.

We may be gifted with intelligence, but we are called to be wise. With wisdom, we can discern how best to fulfill the Lord’s great commandments, to love God and to love each other. With wisdom comes the courage necessary for faith. With wisdom, like the birds of the air, we can truly Let Go and Let God.

Wisdom, the ability to see within our hearts to discern what is right, may be our best gift from God. As philosopher and poet George Santayana put it, “It is not wisdom to be only wise,/And on the inward vision close the eyes.”

May we be blessed with the wisdom to seek God’s presence and listen for that still, small voice within our very own hearts.  AMEN.

Understanding the Things We Ought to Do

Homily for Sunday, July 16, 2017         Good Shepherd of the Hills

Lessons:

Isaiah 55: 10-13

Psalm 65: 1-14

Romans 8: 1-11

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

For those of us who come from Graves Mill, today’s words from Isaiah and Psalm 65 share images of God’s creation that we can readily understand.  The prophet Isaiah speaks of rain that falls and causes seeds to sprout and bring forth food for humans, of mountains that burst into song and trees that “clap their hands,” and of humans that shout for sheer joy at the beauty and bounty of creation. The psalmist sings of mountains girded about with might, of fields rich for grazing and hills clothed with joy. Hearing these words and witnessing the beauty of the world around us, it is easy to understand why God stood back at the close of the sixth day of creation, looked around at all that he had wrought, and decided it was all very good indeed.

Christ’s parable of the sower, the seeds, and the different kinds of ground upon which the seeds fall is also a familiar story for anyone who grew up in farming country. I had to move very far away from home in order to comprehend what it means to be truly deprived of the natural beauty we take for granted every day.

Growing up in Madison County and making my way through Madison’s public schools, I was truly blessed to receive a scholarship to attend Brown University in Providence, RI. When my parents drove me north that long-ago September to begin my college life, I had barely ever crossed the Mason-Dixon line, and I had certainly never lived in a large city. (Providence is the second largest city in New England, after only Boston.) It was a very exciting adventure!

I was fortunate to carry with me the values of my upbringing, including a sense that I was called to serve others. Two favorite aunts, one from each side of my family, were elementary school teachers, and that was a kind of service I understood and admired. So, one of the first things I did when I arrived at Brown was to sign up to be part of a group of students who tutored children in inner-city Providence.

The child assigned to me for weekly tutoring was a second grader named Lelina.  I rode a bus with the other college students once a week to Lelina’s elementary school, where I met with her and helped her with her homework. One day, Lelina shared with me a picture she had drawn and colored, a picture of the world she lived in. At the top of the sheet of paper, up above some tall, dark buildings, Lelina had colored a thin, blue strip to represent the sky. I praised her artwork, but I found myself inwardly shocked. My sense of the sky—and my childhood drawings of it—connected the sky to the earth. The deep blue of the mountains I inevitably drew shaded into the paler blue of the sky.  Sometimes, I would color the sun setting behind the mountains, and the sky was there, too, in brilliant shades of pink and orange.  Poor Lelina’s skinny little sky was unreachable and anemic. Even so, it was important to her to include it in her picture. Hers was more like a dream of a sky than a real sky, or so it seemed to me.

For the first time, I began to understand what the term deprivation truly meant. Lelina’s drawing reflected the circumstances of her life. She lived in a tall building among other tall buildings in a poor neighborhood in a big city.  She rarely if ever left the neighborhood in which she lived, so the beautiful natural world we take for granted was completely unfamiliar to Lelina. So many children in our world are equally deprived, whether they live in an American inner city or among the war-destroyed rubble of Mosul, Iraq, or Aleppo, Syria. These smallest and most vulnerable of God’s people never interact with the majesty and glory of God’s creation and are not prepared to comprehend the meaning of Jesus’s words about the sower and the seed.

Isn’t the usual interpretation of this parable that we as Christians are the seeds, and where we land when we are sown, either by chance or choice, will determine the trajectory of our lives?  Don’t we feel it is somehow our fault if we land on the rocky ground or among the thorns?  (Maybe those thorns are the badly behaving youth we used to hang out with as teenagers, to our eternal detriment.) Don’t we hear a tone of admonition in Jesus’s voice as he tells this parable, as if we poor seeds have a choice as we fall to the ground, and some of us just are compelled to dive onto the path instead of into the good soil?  I don’t know about you, but I feel a bit of envy for those lucky seeds who fall on good soil and produce “a hundredfold.”  My life doesn’t seem to have added up to that standard!

As I pondered all these things, it occurred to me that there is a different way to look at this parable. As he explains the meaning of this parable, Jesus calls it “the parable of the sower,” and we understand that by sower, he means God.  We know that God loves us and intends nothing but good for us, so imagining that the sower allows the seeds to fall in the wrong places, with bad results, doesn’t seem to match our understanding of God’s love for us and for creation.

So, what if we looked at the ground where the seeds fall in each case, the role of the earth itself? What if we see each seed as Jesus seems to see it, as a human life with potential? The seed responds to the ground on which it lands, and Jesus lets us know in his interpretation of the parable that it is this interaction of the seed with the ground on which it falls that makes the difference.  Keeping this perspective in mind, that it is the ground itself that makes the difference, listen again to Jesus’s interpretation of the parable:

“When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

If each seed represents a person sown lovingly by God, then in the first case of the seed sown on the path, the person fails due to a lack of understanding. The seed person sown on rocky ground encounters trouble and persecution, while the one sown among thorns is overcome by worldly things and led astray. When Jesus speaks of those sown on good soil, he says they have understanding and the ability to bear good fruit. Does it not sound as if it is the good soil that makes the difference for those who live worthy, productive lives? As an example, are American children born into inner cities, like Lelina, born on rocky ground? If so, do we as Christians have a responsibility to smooth a way for such children?

What if, instead of sower or bystander or even seeds, we can see ourselves as fulfilling the role of the ground? After all, if the seeds represent people who are in need of membership in Christ’s kingdom, and we as Christians consider that kingdom our home, wouldn’t we be responsible for inviting and receiving new members into the fold?  That would mean that our role as Christians is to prepare a place where everyone is welcome, where everyone can thrive, where even those who lack in understanding can learn what Christ has to offer.

Farmers and gardeners understand very well the importance of preparing the ground for the seeds we sow. Soil preparation is serious business. If a plant of mine doesn’t thrive, I understand pretty quickly that it is because I didn’t take the necessary time to prepare the ground for it. (Unfortunately, this happens more often than I would like to admit.)

Jesus reminds us in this parable that the role of committed Christians is not simply to sit back and receive the nourishment of the Word and the community.  We are not called to be passive in our faith, Sunday-morning Christians only. We are called to live our faith in such a way that our very lives represent Christ in the world, so that others who are struggling can see by the lantern we hold up what a blessing our faith can be. We are called to welcome others into the fold, to accept them as they are in Christ’s name. We are called to make the goodness of God’s creation a reality for those who are less fortunate.

I am reminded once again of the words of St. Teresa of Avila, from the 16^th Century. What was true in her day is still true in ours:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

As I think of all the ways I fall short of being God’s gardener, I need to speak Teresa’s words in the first person: Christ has no body now on earth but MINE!

AMEN.