Year B — Proper 15

The Rev. Gerald W. Keucher

I want to say a few words this morning about wisdom. All the lessons this morning are about it.

In the passage from Proverbs we see Lady Wisdom preparing her banquet and inviting all to feast at her table. In Ephesians Paul encourages us to live as wise people who understand what the will of the Lord is. Psalm 34 and Jesus' words in the Gospel to not mention the word, but they are all about the wisdom of knowing God and knowing God's ways.

Wisdom is not the same as what people where I grew up called "book-learning." The opposite of knowledge is ignorance, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness. You don't need college degrees to be wise. And indeed, wisdom is often found in people who have not had much education.

There's a great deal of wisdom in this congregation. I want you to see how much wisdom you already have so that you will eagerly desire more.

The words Proverbs uses as synonyms for wisdom are insight and understanding. The Bible doesn’t mean understanding some philosophical system. The Bible means insight into the real situations of life and understanding ourselves and the people around us. For the Bible writers, wisdom means understanding what the ways of the Lord are. Wisdom is insight into Who God is and how God acts.

It's even more than that. Wisdom is one of God's chief attributes. When we are wise, we are like God. When we are wise, we look at the world through God's eyes, and we see our relationships and our situations the way God sees them.

So right off the bat we can say that wisdom has nothing to do with being crafty or manipulative, because the first thing we know about God is that God loves righteousness and hates iniquity. That's why the Psalmist says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Those who act accordingly have a good understanding."

A wise person knows that treachery and meanness are excluded from the get-go because that's not how God is. Even when it looks as though underhanded, dishonest ways will get us what we think we want, wise people will reject those ways because they are not in accordance with God's nature. Wisdom knows that nothing we can acquire by deceit or achieve by fraud is worth anything. Wisdom means striving for God's purposes and ends, using only lawful, honest, upright means. That's how God does it in His wisdom; that's the only way we can do it with the wisdom He gives us.

Second, wisdom is about accepting reality as it actually is and conducting yourself accordingly. This is exactly what God does. Since God made it, He knows that the world is fundamentally good. Since God made us, He knows us through and through.

God would have preferred for us not to sin. He gave us freedom to choose, and He wanted us to choose the good of our own free will. We have not always made the choices and decisions God has wanted.

Very often when we are faced with a situation that has gone disastrously wrong, we want either to pretend that nothing is wrong or to walk away from it. God in His wisdom did neither of these things. He stuck with us while knowing all too well that things were not as they should be. As the Eucharistic Prayer says, "Again and again you called us into covenant with you, and through the prophets you taught us to hope for salvation."

And this brings us to the next thing about wisdom. Accepting reality as it actually is means accepting the reality and the necessity of suffering. Suffering is absolutely integral to our existence. Even the smoothest life is full of pain and loss. We separate from our parents; our childhood friendships mostly fade; our grandparents, parents, friends and relatives die, and finally so do we. No life can be lived without grief, pain and loss — not even God's life.

And God has shown us His total commitment to the world He made and His complete acceptance of the existence of sin and grief. He emptied Himself and was born to a human mother. He lived as one of us, feeling the frustrations we feel, learning the lessons we learn, suffering the same griefs we suffer, weeping at the grave of His friend. This is God's great offering of Himself to the world and for the world.

In His wisdom God has subjected Himself completely to what it means to be human, accepting all the limitations of our life. In His wisdom God has given Himself completely to the world. And, if we are wise, we will do the same. It is foolish for us to try to insulate ourselves against suffering. It is nonsense for us to try to make ourselves impregnable and invulnerable to suffering.

Because wisdom means living as God lives, it is wise to be open and generous, to give ourselves to others and for others. It is wise not to hide from our own griefs or from the pains of others, but to feel them deeply and still go on. The Virgin Mary is an example of this kind of wisdom. Luke tells us that, after the painful, strange and bewildering things that happened to her, "Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart."

And this brings me to my last point. How have we come by the wisdom we have, and how do we become wiser? Many important and useful things come to us by studying, but not wisdom. Wisdom comes from living. Wisdom comes from living a life that is fully engaged with our relationships and with the world. Wisdom comes from difficult situations and difficult relationships with difficult people and sticking with them. Wisdom comes by experiencing joy and sorrow, fulfillment and loss and then by keeping all these things, pondering them in our hearts. Wisdom comes from reflection on our experience.

Wisdom comes from being in relationships and then reflecting on our relationships. What is working? What is not working? What can I do to make this relationship better?

Wisdom comes from eating at Wisdom's table, by feeding on the very life of God that He offers to us in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. We experience the joys and griefs of life and we bring those experiences with us when we come to this Table. We reflect with others on our experiences. We share our griefs with one another, and we suffer with one another through their own sorrows.

Wisdom is not something abstract and removed from us. Wisdom has to do with how we order our lives and live our day-to-day relationships. Wisdom is about insight into ourselves and into others. It's about understanding ourselves and our experiences. When we come to Wisdom's table, we feast on the bread that came down from heaven that leads to eternal life. We learn what it means to live, not as unwise people but as wise, and we taste and see that the Lord is good.