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The Beginning of Wisdom
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 12, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Proverbs 8:22-33 I Corinthians 2:1-13
“Reading Proverbs after reading Psalms,” writes once Jesuit Jack Miles “is rather like leaving the steamy murmur of a crowded church where hidden agonies and immoderate hopes have all been on sometimes painful display and stepping into the busy briskness of the marketplace outside the church door—close enough, to be sure, but still outside.” This observation seems not unrelated to that of a former colleague at McCormick Seminary, a New Testament professor whose brilliance in the stock market was matched only by his theologically astute analysis of baseball (the Phillie’s were, in his Summa, the Suffering Servants). David Reeves believed the Book of Proverbs fit the minds mostly of engineers and accountants. Being neither, I confess that my reading of Proverbs begins and ends with those proverbs tucked into a fortune cookie: As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled…Good luck is the result of good planning…Make two grins grow where there was only a grouch before. Proverbs is the Ann Landers of the biblical narrative! So I beg the indulgence of accountants and engineers as we begin at the beginning this morning, placing this literature from outside the church door in the larger context of the canon. Proverbs belongs to the Writings, the third of three authoritative voices in Israel. The first voice, of course, is the voice of the priest heard in Torah (Exodus through Deuteronomy prefaced by Genesis). The stories and the laws within these books formed the basis of belief and obligation among God’s people. The second voice is that of the prophet and includes both the words of the prophets as well as the prophetic take on Israel’s history (Joshua through II Kings). The Writings are the third voice, the voice of the wise sustained most powerfully and distinctly in the books of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, but also among the psalms and the Song of Solomon. The Writings are not so much concerned with institutional religion, says Old Testament scholar R.B.Y Scott, as with “life in the secular world [life in the busy briskness of the marketplace…life among engineers and accountants], and [so in] the day-to-day problems of the ordinary [person] who is content to leave traditional theology to the experts.” Moreover because these writers were not beholden to institutional religion, they were free to entertain the questions that stalk us even now on the street corner or in the middle of the night. We have already considered Job for whom “God has temporarily and incomprehensibly withdrawn into the mystery of [God’s] being.” Likewise, the author of Ecclesiastes believes “God is no more than a name for the incomprehensible power which has created the unalterable conditions of [mortal] existence and determines [our] fate.” [Scott] Ecclesiastes, the most radical of the Writings, will be our text in two weeks. Proverbs, by contrast, is the tamest of the three: “conservative, practical, didactic, optimistic and worldly wise,” says Scott. In its pithy advice we learn how to order our lives by way of norms or right values or rules resulting in a satisfying life. There is a sense in these verses that our days can be managed and the formulas for this management go something like this: “Where this is, that is”…“What a man sows he will reap”; “This is not really that”…“He who loves money never has enough money”; “As this, so that”…“Like mother, like daughter”; “Better this than that”…“Better to be poor than a liar.” Then there are taunts: “What good does it do a fool to come fee in hand to buy wisdom when he has no mind?”; and characterizations: “The simpleton believes everything he hears.” If taken as a form, every family has its own proverbs remembered and repeated from generation to generation. As I dried the last dinner dish with my grandmother, she would always say “A short horse is soon curried.” At the height of an argument about my getting in a car driven by a teenage friend, my father said in opposition “You have to make a decision before you turn the corner.” Well duh! My brother and I have trotted out this little maxim for effect ever since that day. Nevertheless I must confess, as one more into theology than sound advice, I have paid little attention to this compilation of wisdom over the years save for the 8th chapter. According to Scott, it is “the most important and subsequently influential theological contribution of the Book of Proverbs…where the writer explores the nature and origin of Wisdom as a cosmic principle and power, linking [mortals] to God.” Our text for the morning, for instance, was front and center in the fourth century Arian controversy about the nature of Christ: was he simply human or somehow divine? Begotten or made? Yet why, in these writings concerned with “life in the secular world [life in the busy briskness of the marketplace… life among engineers and accountants], life amid the day-to-day problems of the ordinary [person],” why do we find a passage so seemingly other-worldly and what are we to make of it? What has the pre-existence of Wisdom to do with these pedestrian insights? What has our daily human experience to do with the wisdom of the God who laid the foundations of the earth? In the first place, when we consider the worldly wisdom that allows us to make it through any given day, we still find ourselves lost at the end of the hardest days and the darkest days. In the light, Proverbs might be read as practical advice for living a satisfying life. But in the middle of the night, proverbial counsel against foolishness does not avail. How, then, in the dark or the deafening din of the world, can we tell the foolish from the wise? Precisely in the darkness, the 8th of Proverbs holds, where we are most alone or afraid or confused or at a distance from religion, God’s Wisdom…a Word not our own…calls to us. That this chapter on Wisdom’s origin in God is to be found amid parental advice and practical admonitions is to venture the thought that the Wisdom through which the world was created is immanent in the marketplace where we account for and engineer our lives. That is to say, ultimate things are at stake around the breakfast table, at the bank, in the boardroom or the classroom or the bedroom. How we may live, the choices we are forced to make, the voices that beckon us have in them an eternity which either was from the beginning with God or originates in a deathliness that lands our souls in a sort of living Sheol. The 8th chapter of Proverbs presumes that Wisdom [God’s Word, Light, Logos] is crying to us not from the pulpit or the holy places or the sacred texts but on the street corner. The question, in the second place, then becomes a question of discerning this voice from all of the other voices calling to us. In the marketplaces of 3rd century Israel there were many: the voice of the Egyptian cult of Isis as well as the voice of the Babylonian god Ishtar to name a few. Moreover, notes theologian F. W. Dillistone, leading Greek thinkers spoke in the marketplace “of eternal ideas immanent in the universe, or of a divine rational principle permeating the world, or of an incorporeal soul incarnate in the bodies of [mortals].” They are voices that speak still today! Given the attraction of God’s people to these new truths, Wisdom literature attempted to listen through worldly philosophies for the Word and the Wisdom that was of God from the beginning. Throughout history, in fact, both Judaism and Christianity have heard in these verses not simply the transcendent voice of a pre-existent Wisdom beyond human ken, but the immanent voice of the God who has come close. For Jews long returned from exile and toying with assimilation to a pagan culture, God’s Word and Wisdom was to be discerned through Torah. Torah was with God in the beginning when God by the Word began to create. Therefore not just any word that was shouted from the street corner would do if a person were to live in response to the voice of Wisdom. Through Torah alone, foolish voices would lose their power as God’s Word recreated God’s people. In the same way the earliest of Christian theologians, including the writer of the Gospel of John and the apostle Paul, were led by the 8th chapter of Proverbs to the Christ of God who became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God, John writes. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. Or Paul: Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. In the marketplace amid a cacophony of voices, voices that sounded very spiritual now to the Christian’s ear and voices that echoed deep into the empty places of the soul, how in the world was the wise to be distinguished from the foolish, the life-giving from the death-dealing, the truth from the lie, the path worth a life and the way leading to a deadly existence? These questions were not far from the minds of Arius and Athanasius in the fourth century when the question of Christ’s Word in the world was up. Using the 8th chapter of Proverbs to argue that Jesus was the best human being that God ever made (The Lord created me at the beginning) and a fine fellow to follow, Arius placed Jesus’ life and his teachings in the commerce of religious commodities. Pay your money, as the accountant might say, and take your choice. But according to Athanasius, the mystery that words cannot contain is just this: in Christ we have to do with God’s very Light and Life and Word and Wisdom (When there were no depths I was brought forth). He was in the beginning with God, begotten not made. Therefore in him we have to do with the God whose Wisdom walks in the marketplaces of our lives and puts flesh on the Word which was from the beginning and now is eternally with us and for us. He is the Wisdom of God. In his Light we see light. By his Light we may discern what light there is to be had and heard in the marketplace. Through his Light we can recognize light wherever it shines. And at the end of the day, because of his Light, we are those who need not wonder in darkness. “It is especially those natural wonders manifest to sight-- the changing phases of the moon or the wandering motions of the sun and planets through the zodiac—that prompt the search for wisdom” wrote Leon Kass in The Beginning of Wisdom. “Philosophy, born of wonder, seeks ultimately to know the nature and being of things, as well as the reasons or causes why things are the way they are. For the Bible, in contrast, the beginning of wisdom comes not from wonder but from awe and reverence….” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, says the Psalmist. The voice we must fear is the voice that calls to us in the marketplace, my friends, amid all the other voices saying “Fear not. Follow me.” Thanks be to God. |