Back Roads of the Bible: Wisdom Cries Out First Baptist Richmond, September 16, 2018 The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost Proverbs 1:20-33 Wisdom cries out in the street How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? Today we resume a sermon series called Back Roads of the Bible. i We started down one of those roads two weeks ago; we stopped to refuel during ONE Sunday; and now we re on the road again the back road, that is. Over the next few weeks we will be making our way through the less-traveled books of Esther, Job, Ruth, and Proverbs, and I ll tell you why: For the first six months of the Christian Year the scripture readings suggested by the lectionary are all about Jesus. We anticipate his coming during Advent. We celebrate his birth at Christmas. We see him revealed during Epiphany. We walk with him to the cross in Lent. We celebrate his resurrection at Easter. And then we come to the Day of Pentecost, and all those Sundays that follow. Today, for example, is the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, and we have ten more Sundays to go before Advent. It s a long season, sometimes called Ordinary Time in the church. But it presents us with an extraordinary opportunity to mix things up a bit, to do something completely different, and even the lectionary committee seems to encourage that kind of change. While there are Old Testament readings for this season of the year that complement the Gospel readings, there is also a set of alternate readings thrown in to give us some options. They are called the semi-continuous readings. One year they work through the stories of Genesis and Exodus. Another year they give us the stories of David and 1
Solomon. And in the third year we get to hear about the great Old Testament prophets, like Elijah, Isaiah, and Amos. This year is that second year; we call it Year B. I decided not to preach the David stories this summer as I have in the past, but in this second half of Ordinary Time I d like to preach from what s left, and much of it has to do with the legacy of David s son, Solomon. Do you remember him? He was the son of David and Bathsheba, and by all accounts the wisest and wealthiest king who ever lived in Israel. The Queen of Sheba once came to see if he was as wise as everyone said he was. She asked him lots of hard questions, but he answered every one, leaving her breathless with admiration, batting her eyelashes and saying, Happy are your wives! (1 Kings 10:8). He once settled a dispute between two women who were fighting over the same baby by asking someone to bring a sword so he could give each woman half. That s when one of them said, Give the child to the other woman, and that s how Solomon knew she was the real mother. But he also had 700 wives and 300 concubines, which has caused some people to wonder just how wise he really was (I can t imagine adding even one wife to my household without creating some serious problems). Tradition has it that he wrote the Song of Solomon when he was a young man; the Book of Proverbs in middle age; and Ecclesiastes when he was an old man. If you read them in that order you can see how that tradition developed: The Song of Solomon is full of youthful passion; the Book of Proverbs is full of fatherly advice; and Ecclesiastes has a kind of weariness about it, as if the writer were old and tired. Scholars will argue that Solomon may not have been the actual author of every proverb (they seem to have been 2
collected over centuries), but his name has been attached to that book because of his legendary wisdom, and let s just go with that for a minute. I m picturing Solomon in middle age, trying to give some advice to his teenage son, Rehoboam. ii How s that going? Not so well. Here s a boy who has grown up in a home where his father has 40,000 stalls for his horses, 12,000 horsemen, and 1,400 chariots. These days that would be like having 40 Ferraris in the garage. You think his dad is going to be able to convince to come home before curfew, and not to drive so fast? Probably not. And when it comes to money, the weight of gold that came to Solomon each year was six hundred and sixty-six talents (1 Kgs. 10:14), which is about twentyfive tons of gold. Do you think he s going to be able to convince his son not to spend so recklessly? It seems unlikely. And finally, when it comes to women, do you think a father who has 700 wives and 300 concubines is going to be able to convince his son to wait for the girl of his dreams and give himself only to her? I doubt it. But Solomon does the best he can. In the Book of Proverbs Wisdom is often portrayed as a woman, as if Solomon were saying, Listen, son. You want to chase women? Chase this one. Catch her. Hold on to her. Don t let go. She is the best thing that could ever happen to you. And Solomon was speaking from experience. You may remember that when the Lord invited him to ask for anything he wanted he asked for wisdom, and everything else followed that. In today s reading Wisdom cries out in the street. She stands at the busiest intersection in the city shouting, How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I 3
will make my words known to you. She is offering what she has to every passerby, but they are not listening. And as a result they will suffer the consequences. She warns them. She says, Because I have called and you refused, have stretched out my hand and no one heeded, and because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when panic strikes you, when panic strikes you like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but will not find me. That makes me think of the 67-year-old woman from New Bern, North Carolina, who decided not to evacuate during Hurricane Florence because she had a doctor s appointment. iii But early on Friday morning the floodwaters started rising and she got into her rowboat and tried to row out of her neighborhood. She didn t make it. Rescued by a boat crew she later explained: The wind was so hard, the waters were so hard. We got thrown into mailboxes, houses, trees How ironic would it have been if she refused to evacuate because she had a doctor s appointment (which was eventually canceled anyway), and ended up losing her life in the flood? I have called and you refused, says Woman Wisdom. I have stretched out my hand and no one heeded. She might say to that woman in the rowboat, Because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when panic strikes you, when panic strikes you like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind. Have you ever been tempted to do that? Have you ever tried to give someone advice who wouldn t listen to you, no matter what, and then been tempted to say, I told you so? 4
I picture Solomon talking to his son Rehoboam, sharing with him all these proverbs he has collected through the years: Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding (3:5) A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold (22:1). Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall (16:8). Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm (13:20). Those who guard their mouths and their tongues keep themselves from calamity (21:23). Better a small serving of vegetables with love than a fattened calf with hatred (15:17). For wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her (8:11). And when he had to get that boy out of bed in the morning, nothing worked better than Proverbs 6:9: How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? But imagine sharing all that wisdom with your son and then watching him grow up to be just like you anyway: proud, privileged, and thinking that it s all about him. Maybe that s why Solomon repeats this verse so many times in Proverbs: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (1:7; 9:10; 14:27; 15:33). He doesn t mean that his son 5
should be afraid of the Lord. No, the word fear in this case means having profound respect for the Lord, trembling in awe and wonder before him. Solomon wants his son (and all of us who read the Book of Proverbs) to remember who is God and who is not. Because sometimes we forget. At one of my churches there was a man who came to see me because his wife was threatening to leave him. He didn t say it out loud but he may have been wondering: How could she leave me? I m so smart, so handsome, so successful! Which was true. He was all of those things. And he knew it. For whatever reason I found myself telling him the story of Copernicus, the Polish astronomer who suggested that the earth revolves around the sun, instead of the other way around. As I heard the story he worked it out mathematically, and I can almost see him putting down his pencil, stepping out into the back yard, and literally feeling the earth move under his feet. His conclusions were initially rejected by the authorities because we all want to believe we are the center of the universe, and not just one more planet revolving around the sun. But we are not the center of the universe. The earth is not the center and you and I are not the center, and the sooner we realize that the sooner we can take up our proper orbit around the Son of God. That s what I told the man who came to see me. I said, I don t mean to judge, but it seems as if everything has been revolving around you. Your wife has been only one more planet in your personal solar system. How would your life be different if you put Christ at the center, and took up your proper orbit around him? He didn t want to hear that. He ended up storming out of my office and going his own way and I wasn t surprised to hear, a few weeks later, that he and his wife had divorced. But a few years 6
after that I heard that he had been in a serious motorcycle accident. His new girlfriend, who had been on the back of his bike, had nearly been killed. When I went to see him in the hospital he was so sorrowful, so repentant, that at one point he said, You were right, Jim. I ve been putting myself first for years. And now look at me: I ve lost my wife, I ve lost my house, my career is in shambles, and I almost killed my girlfriend. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Solomon says, and he may only mean that you have to remember who is God and who is not. God is God. You are not. If you will only put him at the center and take up your proper orbit around him everything else will fall into place. That s true wisdom, but it is not the wisdom of this world, where everybody tells you that you have to look out for number one: it s divine wisdom. It s the kind Solomon pictures standing at the busiest intersection in town, lifting up her voice, begging people to listen. How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? she says. How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you. Too many people ignore her. They go their own way. They look out for number one. But it s her kind of wisdom that Jesus offers in today s Gospel lesson from Mark 8:27-38. We didn t read it this morning but on the road near Caesarea Philippi Jesus lifts up his voice and says, Whoever would come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. And let me say it another way: Whoever would come after me must deny herself, take up her cross, and follow me. Because it s not just men who put themselves at the center of their own personal solar systems; women do it, too. They do it because they are trying to save their lives. They do it because they think, If I don t 7
look out for myself nobody else is going to. But Jesus says, 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. It is unconventional wisdom. It is not the kind of thing anyone else would tell you to do. But Jesus does, and maybe it s because he knows: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Remembering who is God and who is not is how it begins. Taking up your cross and following him is how it continues, and believe it or not this is the road that leads to life abundant, overflowing, and everlasting. Jesus might say, If I could shake you and make you take this road I would, but just like a father talking to his teenage son, I can t. All I can do is give you the best advice I have to give and then hope and pray that you will have the wisdom to take it. So, just like Woman Wisdom, I lift up my voice in the busiest intersection in town. I say to anyone who will listen: Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me! Because I know in a way that no one else possibly could: This is the way that leads to life. Jim Somerville 2018 i A book by Judson Edwards inspired this title: Hidden Treasures: Traveling the Back Roads of the Bible in Search of Truth. I haven t read the book. ii While Rehoboam was probably not Solomon s only son (not with all those wives and concubines), he is the only one mentioned (see 1 Kings 11:41). iii This story is told in a longer article about Hurricane Florence which you can find by clicking HERE. 8