DUKE UNIVERSITY CHAPEL

Transcription

1 DUKE UNIVERSITY CHAPEL "THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM" Opening Sunday, September 4, 1988 William H. Willimon, Minister to the U Diversity and Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry ufor the LORD gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; he stores up sound wisdom for the upright... " (Proverbs 2:6, 7) It is my custom to take, as my text for preaching, one of the thr~e scriptural readings assigned by the ecumenical lectionary. I do this because this is an ecumenical chapel. It's good for us to be using the same scripture which the majority of the world's Christians are using on a given Sunday. Another reason for this practice is to make clear that subjects for sermons should be laid upon us by the Bible, not by the preacher's pet peeves and personal projects. (If you would like a copy of the ecumenical lectionary readings for use in your own Bible study or preparation for worship, just call the Chapel office and we'll give you one.) Use of the lectionary means that I have no control over which biblical texts are used here each Sunday. It's not a matter of my picking and choosing. It's a matter of the church's selection. Sometimes that makes my role as preacher difficult, say when the text for graduation weekend is an awfully interesting dissertation from Leviticus on the necessity of circumcision or a bit from one of Paul's letters on the dangers of witches. But on some Sundays, the fit between the biblical text and the university context couldn't be better. Take today for instance. I'm in luck. It's opening Sunday and the frrst lesson is from Proverbs: "My son, [unfortunately, only sons went to college in the 6th century B.C.], if you receive my words... making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; yes, if you cry out for insight..., then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God. For the LORD gives w1s. d om..."

2 Wisdom? Understanding? That's why we're here, right? You give us your money, agree to stay here at least four years; we give you a dormitory room and wisdom. If you don't get wisdom within the allotted time, we'll admit you to graduate school and give you a few more years to try for it. At commencement, some wag is bound to quote to you the tired old chestnut that "Universities are repositories of wisdom. The Freshmen bring so much of it in and the Seniors take so little of it out." If this is your opening week here, then this is the opening week of your acquisition of wisdom. And what an appropriate biblical text for you as you begin the path to wisdom in Botany, Physics, or Physiology. An appropriate text except for one problem: The Proverbs definition of wisdom and our conventional attitudes toward wisdom have nothing in common. There is a great gulf between the Bible's definition of a wise woman or man and contemporary standards of smart, a great gap illustrated by today's text from Proverbs. "The LORD gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding." I've always liked Cervantes' Don Quixote (I suppose it's still read in the Duke English Department)-- this account of the crazy romantic who ventured forth in a world of windmills imagined to be hostile giants, monks on mules mistaken as knights in armor, and whores who, in Quixote's warped vision, were aristocratic ladies. I did not know why I liked Don Quixote until I read Milan Kundera's literary criticism (The Art of the Novel, Grove Press, 1971). Kundera calls Quixote the first novel of the modern era, and Cervantes the first writer to recognize what it meant to live in the world of Galileo and Descartes, a onesided scientific cosmos in which we know more and more about less and less, a world in which wise people (for the first time in history) were those who knew a great deal about very little. "In this new world," says Kundera, "God slowly departed from the seat from whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning. Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era... (p. 6)." 2

3 The ancient professor of Proverbs urges his youthful seeker of wisdom, "to cry out for insight," and "raise your voice for understanding," seeking it as lustfully as we grub for gold. ''Then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God. For the LORD gives wisdom..." Like the founders of this university ("Religion and Erudition" is our motto, you know), the writer of Proverbs was convinced that all searching after knowledge finally leads us to God who is the source of wisdom. But did the founders of this university or the writer of Proverbs envision a world in which seeking after knowledge resulted in the fragmentation of the world into as many detached pieces as possible --just like the undergraduate curriculum. Now I'm doing literature. Next I'll do chemistry. Perhaps one day I'll take a little ethics. Our lives are minced into little bits and pieces where no one piece of our lives -- as a professor, or a parent, or a husband - appears to relate to any other. At its best, such education produces dilettantes who know a great deal about a very little (as you sit awaiting your name to be called at commencement, you'll enjoy reading some of the titles of the Ph. D. dissertations-- "The Foreign Policy of Albania between Mid March and Late April of 1851"). At its worst, such education creates graduates who have sampled a little bit of this, a little bit of that, whose overriding life philosophy is that there is no overriding life philosophy since everything is relative to my own opinions anyway. We're in an ethical crisis in our country-- that's not news to anybody. Investigations of PTL and by the SEC publicly reveal what lots of us have discovered in our private lives -- morally speaking, we are rudderless, cut loose, without moorings. Over 100 political appointees in the present national administration have been forced out of office because of illegal or improper conduct. This year's commencement speaker, Gary Trudeau, catalogued the evidence of contemporary.. moral collapse. "What does the Attorney General have to do to get fired?" Trudeau asked, "Knock over a liquor store?" Looking out on our 1988 graduates, Trudeau said, "My guess is that the yearning for moral commitment is as intense as it's ever been, but that the generation with no rules, the generation that grew up in the rubble of smashed idealism, fallen heroes, and broken marriages is deeply suspicious." Unfortunately, all Trudeau could finally wish for our graduates was, "Good luck." 3

4 Life, with no transcendent, objective criterion for the right and the true outside our own egos, is life guided by nothing more than the whims of good, or bad, luck. Not much room left for the big picture in our fragmented cosmos. Not much opportunity for wisdom in a world where life is just one thing after another and nothing connects. "Without God," notes the protagonist in Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov, "anything is possible." Without some outside, overall, Other who stands against our flattened, merely opportunistic and utilitarian universe, anything is possible. We can steal millions on Wall Street and shrug our shoulders saying, ''The only thing I did wrong was I got caught." We can shoot down an - ~ unarmed passenger jet and call it "human error." Two presidential candidates bit the dust, one for plagiarism, another for adultery, and claimed that they were hounded by the press. Another presidential candidate (a TV preacher like me), when questioned about false information on his resume, said, "Look, I'm a preacher. Clergy are not good on details." Finally, what difference does anything make when there's nothing there save values of our own creation? Wisdom consists in little more than how to feel good because we've quit trying to be good. "The fear of the Lord." Our text says that it's the beginning and end of wisdom. "The fear of the Lord." Its an Old Testament way of saying that God must be God, that God's ways stand against our ways, that our actions are judged by criteria other than those of our own devising. "The fear of the Lord" is that transcendent, holy, otherness of God. It's what you feel on those Sunday morning moments when -- through worship -- you sense the presence of the Ood who has said, "My ways are not your ways." Worship of this God is the very basis of any ethic which would be Christian. Have you read Habits of the Heart? If you have not, don't worry. It's required reading in at least three undergraduate courses here. In Habits of the Heart, Chapter 9, the sociologists interview a young adult named Sheila, inventor of a religion she calls Sheilaism. She says "I believe in God. I'm not a religious fanatic. I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism, just my own little voice." Do you know this person? She is us. I am the sole source of truth and wisdom. Right? Wrong? Good? Bad? It's all a matter of what feels good to me, my feelings, my conscience. I spent much of this past summer in Germany. (I promise not to tell you about Germany every Sunday). In that sad country with such sad history, I asked many people, "Why?" What happened here from ? Why? 4

5 It's a question which Germans have asked themselves over again. Why did not more people have the resources to step forward in the mid-30's and say "No!" to Hitler? As for the church, one commentator says that it was about two hundred years too late for the German church to muster the resources to resist the Nazis, indeed for the church even to know there was something there worth resisting (Karl Barth, Christian Dogmatics, II, 1 pp ). Too many compromises had been made. Too many false gods had taken the place.. Qf the true. The only church to mount real opposition to Hitler was the Confessing Church which declared, in its 1934 Barmen Declaration, "Jesus Christ, as he is attested in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could... acknowledge as a source of its proclamation... other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation." This is a theologian's way of saying, in the jaws of death, that a Christian is someone who submits to a higher power, a more adequate criterion of judgment than his or her own opinions and feelings, that we are taught to fear no government, philosophy, world view, or way of truth more than we fear God. The "fear of the Lord" gives us a means of saying yes and saying no. This won't tell you what to do in every circumstance in life, but it will give you a basis for deciding. This is the beginning of wisdom, the starting point for how to get wise. The fear of the Lord. That's what you ought to demand of me as your preacher -- not that I be entertaining, cute, or even helpful in making it through the week but that I help you to get wise, to fear God more than you fear being out of step with the status quo. Insist that I take as my text something more significant than my own opinions in order that you might base your life on something more substantial than your opinions. That's what we're here for on Sunday mornings: To hear the voice of God above the cacophany of other voices, to make what we do (ethics) more congruent with the One whom we worship, to get wise by taking God a little more seriously and ourselves a little less so. This, my sons and daughters, is the beginning of wisdom. My thanks to Duke's Dr. James Crenshaw who helped me to see the theological basis for the admonitions given in Proverbs 1-2, Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction (John Knox Press, 1981). 5