We Too Can Be Wise

1 Corinthians 1: 18 – 25

 

I have often heard the claim from people out in the world that the church in general is a place that refuses to think, that demands blind obedience and blind faith in ideas that are quite obviously nonsense.

 

And to be fair, occasionally that is what gets preached, a deep suspicion of critical thinking in favour of what I call a gospel of stupidity, based particularly on 1 Corinthians 1. It goes something like this – God’s ways are not our ways, you will never understand, so don’t try. Don’t question, simply obey what you are told: by your priest, by your elders, by your betters.

 

But, that attitude, I think, is neither Godly nor biblical. There’s a book in the Bible called Proverbs, which collects together the sayings of some of the wisest men in Israel, including a king of Israel called Solomon, who was very, very wise indeed. And it urges us to seek out wisdom and to increase in understanding.

 

In Proverbs 2: 1 – 6 it says the following:

 

Wisdom is a good thing as far as God is concerned. He has made us able to learn new things about ourselves and our world. He has made us curious to know how things work, to understand the world around us better. My little son is two years old now, and I love to watch him when he meets something new: he gets this frown on his forehead, and he starts breathing really deeply, you know, while he gets utterly absorbed in figuring out how the lid goes on a pen. Or how to shove coins into the CD player.

 

That process of learning never stops. No matter how old or how young we are, we can still learn new things, new skills, new ideas. I remember a man I met in South Africa, at the time the oldest surviving Springbok rugby player. He played tennis well into his 70s and still beat most people he played against. One day, he told me that he had been taught something new. He was 85 years old. He had just moved to an old-age home, and at 85 years old, he had to learn to be patient with other people at the home, who were much younger but couldn’t do half the things he could do. At 85 he was still learning.

 

What is true is that the wisdom spoken of by the people recorded in the book of Proverbs, is a different kind of wisdom. In Proverbs 9, verse 10, it says:

 

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
       and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

 

Now, fear of God does not mean to cower in terror before God, although I have heard that preached too. To fear God is to understand rightly the world’s relation to him. Put differently, to become wise is to understand the meaning of the following sentence:

 

The world and everything in it belongs to God.

 

Simple to say, it takes a lifetime to fully understand. Let me re-phrase that slightly:

The world and your savings belong to God.

The world and the credit crunch belongs to God.

The world and your boss who gets your goat belongs to God.

The world and the smelly drug addict begging on Briggate belongs to God.

The world and your husband or wife or daughter, who is really irritating right now, belong to God.

 

What is also true is that this wisdom is not taught to us through a piece of brilliant philosophical writing or some document of rather obscure mystical sayings, or in God’s Big Book of Facts. With a handy pull-out guide in six primary colours for hours of learning fun. You can tell I have a two-year-old son, can’t you?

 

God reveals himself in the person Jesus Christ, a man who lived 2000 odd years ago in what is now Israel. Jesus lived out what it means to be wise, to know with every fibre of your being that the world and everything in it belongs to God.

 

Certainly, as far as the world is concerned, Jesus’ life seems foolishness. For one thing, if Jesus was serious about reaching the whole of humanity, he wouldn’t have turned up in a dusty little outpost known as Palestine in a middling sized empire conquered by some blokes called the Romans. I mean, that’s the equivalent of Jesus coming to Earth today in a little town in Tasmania. If you are wondering where on earth that is, that’s exactly my point. Surely, the very least we could expect is for Jesus to turn up in the capital of that empire, in Rome itself. Where else would you go if you wanted to cause a bit of a splash in the ancient world?

 

That Jesus didn’t turn up in Rome tells us something about what matters to him. Jesus isn’t in the business of building empires. He isn’t in the business of great achievements, in sport or science or art. Jesus is in the business of transforming the lives of every-day, ordinary people like you and me, in ways that seem impossible.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with great achievements. I think personally Jesus is a dedicated admirer of the best football team in the world – AC Milan. Though West Ham United probably get an honourable mention out of respect for Andrew Aldwinkle. And he probably thinks, “My word but that Richard Dawkins bloke is clever, isn’t he?” Though, God did make him, so he probably wasn’t all that surprised by that.

 

Great achievements just don’t matter as much as we would like to believe they do.

Now, I don’t feel like preaching this at all. Some of you will know that I applied for this really cool academic job that I really wanted to get. Birgit, my wife, had already worked out how many charities we could support with my salary. And how often we’d get to visit our parents back in South Africa, but never mind. And we prayed for it, our friends prayed for it. We believed that we would get it, and so on and so forth.

 

So, last week we found out that I didn’t get it. And I’m really quite cut up about it, I’m really disappointed. Because I would have been good at it. I would have been good at teaching. You are meant to say, “Yes, Erik”, here by the way.

 

And that has only been the most recent of series of such disappointments this year. So, really I feel like saying, “The world and everything in it, except my job, belongs to God.” Only, my feeling isn’t true. The world and everything in it, including my job, belongs to God, whether I feel like it or not.

 

And if the world does belong to God, and the best thing I can do is to learn to understand that, then it doesn’t matter all that much whether I get to be an academic or not. I mean, certainly, God has given me some gifts that are useful to teaching, and he seems to have given me a not entirely useless brain. But, for one thing, there won’t be one single less person in heaven because I didn’t get to be an academic. It is Jesus who saves us and the Holy Spirit who gives us the grace to believe.

 

More importantly, no matter how brilliant I might be as an academic, right, no matter how many amazing new facts and insights I might have found, the truth is, none of those facts is as important, or as important to understand, as the fact that the world and everyone in it belongs to God.

 

Again, don’t get me wrong, I most certainly do not think that academic or scientific knowledge is useless or the wrong. Quite frankly, I find the disparagement of scientific knowledge amongst some Christians deeply troubling. Science and medicine and the other academic disciplines have discovered a lot of knowledge that is useful and valuable, and will continue to do so. But again, that knowledge only finds its right relation to the world, it finds it right importance and value, when it is seen in the light of the truth that the world we know about belongs to God.

 

Now, Jesus wasn’t just a wise person. He didn’t just know a lot about the world and about God, though he certainly did that. Jesus also lived a wise life. He showed in his actions that he had understood that the world belonged to God. Because he understood that the world belonged to God, he chose to obey God’s two most important commands that sum up everything that God wants us to do: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your strength and all your mind, that is the first command. And the second is to love your neighbour as you love yourself. Everything Jesus did and everything that he said was shaped by his love for God, and his love for the people around him that came out of his right love for himself, his knowledge that he was the loved son of God. That made his life a very wise life.

 

The same applies to us. Wisdom is not simply to collect more knowledge about God and about the Bible, though such information is important and helps us to understand God better. The test of our wisdom is the extent to which we live a life like Jesus did, a life filled with love for God. And as a result of our love for God, we love ourselves as loved children of God, and so become able to love our neighbours like we love ourselves.

 

Incidentally, that is also the test you should apply to everything I say, or that David says. Your proof of our wisdom is how well we manage to live out in our actions and our words that we love God and that we love our neighbours, including every one of you.

 

It is pretty darn hard to love your neighbour. We have a really nice neighbour and I say hello when our paths cross outside on the street and inside my heart I pray, “God bless him, but please don’t bless him in our living room.” And I am sorry for that, God, and I need to change. And I’m going to need your help to do it. To love my neighbour as I love myself takes lots and lots of wisdom.

 

This wisdom comes to us only very, very slowly, over years and years and years of trying and failing. It also comes about as the result of our deliberate choice, our choice to fear the Lord, to seek to understand what it means that the world belongs to God.

The great news is that if you feel like me, and you feel rather overwhelmed by the thought of having to become wise, because you think you’re not really all that clever or all that holy, God gives us specific permission to ask for wisdom. In the letter that James, the younger brother of Jesus, wrote to the early Christian community, he says,

 

 

If you feel that you lack wisdom, come up and we’ll pray with you and ask God together with you to give you wisdom. God will give generously.