God As Wisdom
Sermon
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Sermons For Pentecost (Middle Third)
If someone like me were to ask someone like you, "How do you imagine God?" what would you answer? What is the first word that comes to your mind when I say God? Creator? Love? Mother? Friend? Jesus? Help? Shepherd? Defender? How do you imagine God? When you are praying, how do you experience God? As strength? As light? As comfort? All-encompassing? How do you imagine God? Is God someone with a large protective shoulder to lean on, when you are more than a little scared? Is God a strong warrior who will help you fight your way through hard times? Does your image of God give God great majesty, high and lifted up, like Christ enthroned in our Great South Window? Or is your image of God close and intimate, embracing, soothing and accepting you through it all? Some people imagine God as a place and a shelter, a cave or a river, a mountain or a harbor. Some imagine God alongside them seeking justice, among us in acts of compassion. If someone like me were to ask someone like you, "How do you imagine God." How would you answer?
This is not an easy question to answer for our images of God are often formed unconsciously. They are formed by the lullabies your mother sings, or what your father reads to you when you are still at his knee. Your image of God may be formed by your grandmother, a strong disciplinarian, you still remember, by Sunday school where you had to wear scratchy grey flannels and which you found an incredible bore, or by singing "The National Anthem" at the baseball game. Our images of God are created by bits and pieces of human experience, the good and the hard, whether the world welcomes us or seems a hostile place, the shocks we experience, the hard-knocks, the care we receive and the care we do not. Our images of God are a complex mix of unconscious material and human experience. They reflect life's most intimate moments and our hearts' deepest longings, so our images of God are often difficult to determine, to describe, to talk about.
Now I'd like to push us a little further. How has your image of God changed through the years, or has it? Sometimes, our images remain the same as the ones we receive when we are children especially if those images work, are ones that give us comfort and sustain us. It is the old proverb, "If it isn't broke, don't fix it." At other times, we have an experience that forces us to question our image of God, to question it and change it. A friend who lives in South Florida has organized hurricane relief in his area. The other night on the phone he remarked cryptically, "I don't get God, Sue Anne. This is so unfair! The people who were struck the worst by Hurricane Andrew are the ones who can afford it least. We're having trouble reaching those who are in greatest need, especially the illegal aliens, Haitians, a lot of them in Homestead. They are frightened to come forward to get food and be led to shelter. They are frightened for themselves and their families. Isn't it enough that they had to flee from the Haitian regime? Where is God for them? Isn't living through Andrew enough, for God's sake, that now they have to be frightened of help?"
Has your image of God changed over the years? The moment my own father died, God as father died for me. I didn't know it then, at least not consciously. But God as Father, giver of life, giver of love, God full of passion and pleasure, goodness and adventure, that God died when my own father did. God as father was, for me, projection, and if I couldn't have my real father, I certainly did not want some heavenly one. And in that father God's stead came Silence at first, capital S, Silence, dark, holy, vast, God as Silence. How has your image of God changed over the years through your life's experience?
Our images of God reflect who we are, where we are, and how we are. We are made in God's own image, are we not? But they also may change through study and reflection. So, on occasion, it is valuable to set time aside to consider how it is we imagine God and to give ourselves the opportunity to study and to reflect how it is God relates to us, and whether there are ways to stretch our imagination of God so that our relation to God may be deepened or strengthened, which leads me to the text appointed for today that describes God as Wisdom.
There have been a number of times in recent weeks when I have called upon God and what I thought of as God's wisdom. Balancing my checkbook after vacation, "O God, help me to be smart and wise, give me humor and perspective as I straighten out this mess, anticipate the vacation Visa bill, and keep this family from financial ruin." Disciplining an obstreperous child, wanting to slam doors, kick and scream back, (bad behavior is contagious, have you ever noticed that?) I took a deep breath and called on God to give me understanding and wisdom, the long view. Saying good-bye to a treasured colleague of many years, standing by his moving van, I asked God for the right words to sum up 11 years together, wisdom in a sentence or a moment. Then as the tears began to stream down my cheeks, I said, "I'm not much good at this part so let me just say thanks and run."
In each of these circumstances, I was pleading, hoping, praying for wisdom. I was praying for good judgment, the capacity for understanding and direction.
But that wisdom, what I call the "gentle, kind and wise, wisdom" is very different from how God is imagined as wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures, different from God as wisdom as she is portrayed in the texts for this morning. Wisdom as portrayed in the Book Of Proverbs as different an image of God as I can imagine. Let's take a look at this image to see what we might see, to learn what we might learn.
Wisdom is, to start with, feminine, the Hebrew feminine, and wisdom has a life of her own. She is strong and she is proud. And she would be impatient with my pathetic pleas for help. Wisdom cries out in the street and on the square. She shouts, "how long, O simple ones, will you be simple?" "I will laugh at your calamity." "I will mock when pain strikes you, because I have called you and you refused, because you have ignored all my counsel." Wisdom, as she is presented in the Bible, is a serious teacher, strict and harsh and she is not into second chances or forgiveness. She demands that we pay attention. She proclaims "all the words of my mouth are righteous, there is nothing twisted or crooked in them." Wisdom seems not only proud, but here she appears arrogant. Is this someone you want as a professor? Is this someone to whom you would grant tenure?
Still it is hard to turn away from her. She is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold. Even though she is sometimes angry, she is incisive, irresistible and active. She is penetrating, for she is pure, she is subtle.
Wisdom is a woman who knows her value and wants us to know her value, too. She is committed to the task of learning constantly and to seek understanding of the world in which we live. She is out on the streets and calls us to think, think hard about what is happening in Homestead and in Yugoslavia, in Trenton and in Somalia. She is relentless in her expectations, demanding, unwavering in her standards for perfection. Then, she promises that disciplined learning and attention will be rewarded.
"The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom and whatever you get, get insight. Prize her highly and she will exalt you. She will honor you if you embrace her. She will place on your head a fair garland. Get wisdom. Get insight. Do not forsake her and she will keep you. Love her and she will guard you."
In the mid '70s there was a television program called "The Paper Chase," about life at the Harvard Law School which starred John Houseman as the gruff/tender quintessential Professor Kingsfield. Many clergy had professors like Kingsfield in seminary. The syllabi for these professors' courses always overwhelmed students with their "completeness." Reading assignments were lengthy. Writing assignments were weekly. He shot questions at us during precepts, one right after the other. Preaching was a daunting task. We knew we'd never have such a harsh critic again, yet we all took his courses one after another, for as crusty and commanding as he was, we knew his heart and soul as well as his mind was in his teaching. "It is the gospel that is at stake here and you are going to know it!" God as wisdom.
If someone like me were to ask someone like you, "How do you imagine God?" how would you answer? Now, I hope we might consider wisdom as a worthy image of God for us. She is complex, independent and invaluable, illusive, coy, sometimes difficult in her demands. Yet the scriptures proclaim that she is at the heart of the learning process. With her strong sense of self and commanding sense of direction and discipline, she is at the heart of the creative process. And the promise in the text is that, commanding as she is when she tells us to fear the Lord, as she shouts at us, shakes her fist and calls us to account, those who listen to her will live securely, without dread, and will live at ease. Will you?
This is not an easy question to answer for our images of God are often formed unconsciously. They are formed by the lullabies your mother sings, or what your father reads to you when you are still at his knee. Your image of God may be formed by your grandmother, a strong disciplinarian, you still remember, by Sunday school where you had to wear scratchy grey flannels and which you found an incredible bore, or by singing "The National Anthem" at the baseball game. Our images of God are created by bits and pieces of human experience, the good and the hard, whether the world welcomes us or seems a hostile place, the shocks we experience, the hard-knocks, the care we receive and the care we do not. Our images of God are a complex mix of unconscious material and human experience. They reflect life's most intimate moments and our hearts' deepest longings, so our images of God are often difficult to determine, to describe, to talk about.
Now I'd like to push us a little further. How has your image of God changed through the years, or has it? Sometimes, our images remain the same as the ones we receive when we are children especially if those images work, are ones that give us comfort and sustain us. It is the old proverb, "If it isn't broke, don't fix it." At other times, we have an experience that forces us to question our image of God, to question it and change it. A friend who lives in South Florida has organized hurricane relief in his area. The other night on the phone he remarked cryptically, "I don't get God, Sue Anne. This is so unfair! The people who were struck the worst by Hurricane Andrew are the ones who can afford it least. We're having trouble reaching those who are in greatest need, especially the illegal aliens, Haitians, a lot of them in Homestead. They are frightened to come forward to get food and be led to shelter. They are frightened for themselves and their families. Isn't it enough that they had to flee from the Haitian regime? Where is God for them? Isn't living through Andrew enough, for God's sake, that now they have to be frightened of help?"
Has your image of God changed over the years? The moment my own father died, God as father died for me. I didn't know it then, at least not consciously. But God as Father, giver of life, giver of love, God full of passion and pleasure, goodness and adventure, that God died when my own father did. God as father was, for me, projection, and if I couldn't have my real father, I certainly did not want some heavenly one. And in that father God's stead came Silence at first, capital S, Silence, dark, holy, vast, God as Silence. How has your image of God changed over the years through your life's experience?
Our images of God reflect who we are, where we are, and how we are. We are made in God's own image, are we not? But they also may change through study and reflection. So, on occasion, it is valuable to set time aside to consider how it is we imagine God and to give ourselves the opportunity to study and to reflect how it is God relates to us, and whether there are ways to stretch our imagination of God so that our relation to God may be deepened or strengthened, which leads me to the text appointed for today that describes God as Wisdom.
There have been a number of times in recent weeks when I have called upon God and what I thought of as God's wisdom. Balancing my checkbook after vacation, "O God, help me to be smart and wise, give me humor and perspective as I straighten out this mess, anticipate the vacation Visa bill, and keep this family from financial ruin." Disciplining an obstreperous child, wanting to slam doors, kick and scream back, (bad behavior is contagious, have you ever noticed that?) I took a deep breath and called on God to give me understanding and wisdom, the long view. Saying good-bye to a treasured colleague of many years, standing by his moving van, I asked God for the right words to sum up 11 years together, wisdom in a sentence or a moment. Then as the tears began to stream down my cheeks, I said, "I'm not much good at this part so let me just say thanks and run."
In each of these circumstances, I was pleading, hoping, praying for wisdom. I was praying for good judgment, the capacity for understanding and direction.
But that wisdom, what I call the "gentle, kind and wise, wisdom" is very different from how God is imagined as wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures, different from God as wisdom as she is portrayed in the texts for this morning. Wisdom as portrayed in the Book Of Proverbs as different an image of God as I can imagine. Let's take a look at this image to see what we might see, to learn what we might learn.
Wisdom is, to start with, feminine, the Hebrew feminine, and wisdom has a life of her own. She is strong and she is proud. And she would be impatient with my pathetic pleas for help. Wisdom cries out in the street and on the square. She shouts, "how long, O simple ones, will you be simple?" "I will laugh at your calamity." "I will mock when pain strikes you, because I have called you and you refused, because you have ignored all my counsel." Wisdom, as she is presented in the Bible, is a serious teacher, strict and harsh and she is not into second chances or forgiveness. She demands that we pay attention. She proclaims "all the words of my mouth are righteous, there is nothing twisted or crooked in them." Wisdom seems not only proud, but here she appears arrogant. Is this someone you want as a professor? Is this someone to whom you would grant tenure?
Still it is hard to turn away from her. She is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold. Even though she is sometimes angry, she is incisive, irresistible and active. She is penetrating, for she is pure, she is subtle.
Wisdom is a woman who knows her value and wants us to know her value, too. She is committed to the task of learning constantly and to seek understanding of the world in which we live. She is out on the streets and calls us to think, think hard about what is happening in Homestead and in Yugoslavia, in Trenton and in Somalia. She is relentless in her expectations, demanding, unwavering in her standards for perfection. Then, she promises that disciplined learning and attention will be rewarded.
"The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom and whatever you get, get insight. Prize her highly and she will exalt you. She will honor you if you embrace her. She will place on your head a fair garland. Get wisdom. Get insight. Do not forsake her and she will keep you. Love her and she will guard you."
In the mid '70s there was a television program called "The Paper Chase," about life at the Harvard Law School which starred John Houseman as the gruff/tender quintessential Professor Kingsfield. Many clergy had professors like Kingsfield in seminary. The syllabi for these professors' courses always overwhelmed students with their "completeness." Reading assignments were lengthy. Writing assignments were weekly. He shot questions at us during precepts, one right after the other. Preaching was a daunting task. We knew we'd never have such a harsh critic again, yet we all took his courses one after another, for as crusty and commanding as he was, we knew his heart and soul as well as his mind was in his teaching. "It is the gospel that is at stake here and you are going to know it!" God as wisdom.
If someone like me were to ask someone like you, "How do you imagine God?" how would you answer? Now, I hope we might consider wisdom as a worthy image of God for us. She is complex, independent and invaluable, illusive, coy, sometimes difficult in her demands. Yet the scriptures proclaim that she is at the heart of the learning process. With her strong sense of self and commanding sense of direction and discipline, she is at the heart of the creative process. And the promise in the text is that, commanding as she is when she tells us to fear the Lord, as she shouts at us, shakes her fist and calls us to account, those who listen to her will live securely, without dread, and will live at ease. Will you?
