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Sermon - Proverbs and Wisdom - 17th September 2006
St Alban's Epping 7:00 am & 8:00am
Readings: Proverbs 1:20-23, Psalm 19, James 2: 18-26, Mark 8:27-38
The first reading last week, this week and next week come from the Old Testament book, Proverbs. Proverbs is a wisdom book. It concerns the topic of wisdom.
The people of the ancient Near East, like people today, were interested in learning how to live well in a world they found only partially understandable. They took note of successful and unsuccessful ways of coping with life, stated them memorably and handed them on to others. They also observed that life is often inexplicable and the lot of human beings are miserable and they explored such problems in complaints and conversations. It was the human task to observe carefully the world the gods had made and to record their observations. Because of this common commitment to observe the world and its rhythms and laws, there is remarkable continuity among the wisdom literatures of antiquity.
The people of Israel lived in that world and responded to it in literature similar to that of its neighbours. Belief in the sole God, Yahweh, made things different, however. The relation of wisdom to Yahweh had to be explained. The problem of evil was an especially vexing problem, because there were no demons to blame or a fate beyond God, there was only Yahweh, whom they celebrated as all-wise and all-just.
The wisdom books now appear in the Bible, which is a book of books. In the perennial discussion of the Bible, the wisdom books “speak” other books and they themselves speak to them. They are incorporated into a story, which Christians and Jews regard as still ongoing, the story of salvation. The wisdom books remind readers that one must take hold of life as both gift and task, that there are many possibilities but also profound limits and that honest observation and fidelity to one’s experience of life can put one in touch with a wondrous order whose source is God. The wisdom books’ starting point of everyday experience and honest observations create common ground for Bible readers to engage with other people just as it once did for ancient Israel and its neighbours.
Every human needs wisdom for living, and every healthy society hands its wisdom on to the next generation. Proverbs is a literary collection of Israel’s traditional wisdom, gathered from diverse spheres of life. The book’s purpose is to help people become wise and godly. We read in chapter one: (Wisdom is)
“For learning about wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight, for gaining instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice, and equity; to teach shrewdness to the simple, knowledge and prudence to the young, let the wise also hear and gain in learning, and the discerning acquire skill, to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. (1:2-7).
Yet its writers were aware of a teaching circle of living and reading, in which one needs godly wisdom to get wisdom. In traditional oral cultures, mothers and fathers, teachers and leaders pass on their own life experience and ancestral wisdom to their “children,” both real and figurative. Proverbs is a literary gathering of such diverse wisdom. Its readers are invited to walk the path of wisdom and in “the fear of the lord.”
Although many readers find Proverbs full of “common sense” with which they can connect, there are still many difficulties in a book whose world, culture and language are ancient and foreign to a twenty-first century world. We often find ourselves listening in on a fragmentary conversation intended for someone else and filled with hidden assumptions and references. In addition to the challenges faced by all readers, feminism has made us aware that women face additional barriers in appropriating the wisdom of Proverbs, because it is addressed to men and presents women in terms of their relations with men. In the Hebrew of Proverbs, the word translated “my child” or “children” (NRSV) is invariably literally “my son” or “sons”. Presumably, Israelite parents taught daughters as well as sons, but this book gives us no sign of it. Many readers today find this man centred focus objectionable. Moreover, some women declare Proverbs to be oppressive because of its ancient patriarchal worldview, because it lacks a woman’s voice and because of its portrayal of women’.
Proverbs is a challenge to all twenty-first century readers whose world and worldviews can make it difficult to connect with aspects of this ancient book. Biblical scholars have shown the error of selectively using the Bible to fit our present cultural patterns so that the Bible’s own voice is silenced, as we assume it means what we mean. Also, of attempting to transform the present society into an ancient Israel so that the particular details of the present culture and society are not taken seriously. Wisdom, however, requires that we see new situations appropriately. This means seeing not just the different or the particular in a new situation, but also recognizing in it those old fundamental patterns of life described by the sages of Proverbs. Wisdom requires a humble, earnest effort to hear what the other person says and a willingness to see our world on the other person’s terms.
Wisdom addresses the paradoxical mixture of naiveté and scorn that sometimes afflicts the young and the arrogant. When people persist in ignorance, in defiance of Wisdom’s teaching, they become guilty. It is not wrong to be young and naive; it is blameworthy, though, to want to stay that way. There is no hope for “scoffers” and “fools,” who “know it all,” yet “know what they like” and only “love what they know”! Sometimes, “I like myself just the way I am” is not a healthy statement of self-respect, but a denial that life requires growth and correction from external forces. As Paul said:
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child ... [but now] I put an end to childish ways”. (1 Cor 13:11)
The laughter of Wisdom is shocking.
“I also will laugh at your calamity.” (1:26)
It is perhaps to be understood as a response to the madness of those who wish to flaunt reality, who “spit into the wind” and are puzzled when they get wet. It is also, perhaps, a joy that the goodness of the world order and justice have been vindicated when the wicked reap what they have sown. When a tyrant falls, the people rejoice. It is important to note that Wisdom says that the persons whom calamity overcomes are themselves responsible for it. When they refuse to eat Wisdom’s fruit, they are stuffed with the “fruit of their (own) way”. Such self-induced calamities befall not just individual persons, but entire nations. Wisdom is a matter of life and death not just for individuals but also for families, corporations, universities, nations and cultures. They, too, reap what they sow.
“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels’.” (Mark 8:35-38)
This sermon composed using the New Interpreters Bible, Vol V, Abingdon, Nashville. 1997.