“’Give your servant therefore an understanding mind .
. . .’" 1 Kings 3:9
The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Emmanuel Church
August 19, 2012
We live in
an age in which it is easy to be overwhelmed.
We are a culture both saturated with information and obsessed with
speed. The titans of technology are
growing bigger and faster by the minute, and equipping us with more tools than
we know what to do with. Take Google,
for example. Its stated corporate
mission is outlandishly bold: "to organize
the world's information and make it universally accessible and
useful". Started just a dozen years
ago by some Stanford kids, you and I and other Google users around the world
now conduct over 293 million Google searches per day. That is a lot of people looking for a lot of
answers.
Or take
Facebook, an information purveyor of a different sort; a so-called social
network on the internet. Started in 2004
by a couple of Harvard kids, just eight years later Facebook now has over a
quarter billion registered users around the world. And notwithstanding its recent fall from
grace on the stock market, Facebook still had the third largest IPO in
corporate history. It is a sprawling
cyber giant. As the company likes to
claim, if it were a country, Facebook would be the sixth largest nation in the
world. That is a lot of people reaching
out for some kind of relationship with others.
Electronic
messaging is part of this overwhelming trend too: whether we call it email, or text messages,
or gchat, or ichat, or twitter, or whatever, we increasingly bombard one
another with it. Electronic text
messaging did not even exist until the early 1980s. Today nearly a trillion electronic messages
are shot off each and every day around the world. That is a lot of people trying to be heard.
I am old
enough to have lived as a young child in a house that did not have a television
set and certainly had neither cell phones nor computers. And yet the college students I now teach and
pastor have grown up utterly immersed in all of this technology. The experts tell us that by the time a person
is 21 years old today, she has watched over 20,000 hours of television, spent
over 10,000 hours on cell phones, and sent more than 250,000 electronic messages
of one sort or another.
There is no
sign of this pace slowing down. Just the
opposite. The flow of information is
increasing exponentially. Information
technology experts say that the total volume of technical information and data
in cyberspace is doubling every two years.
And, they predict, in five years the volume of total information out
there will be doubling every 72 hours.
King Solomon
understood the difference. Though he
lived in a different time with different challenges, he appreciated that it
isn't enough to be merely clever or resourceful or knowledgeable. A good life requires more; it requires
wisdom. So, when asked by God in a dream
what one thing Solomon might want if he could have anything he wished, Solomon
replies: wisdom. Or, more specifically, he says that he wants
an “understanding mind” coupled with “the ability to discern between good and
evil.” At least that is the way that the
New Revised Standard Version translates the Hebrew. The underlying Hebrew word, however, is more
nuanced than simply an “understanding mind”; as bible scholar Eugene Peterson
points out, the word could just as easily be translated as a “God-listening
heart.” What is important in the Hebrew,
Peterson explains, is that the meaning of wisdom includes both the head and the
heart. The writer Gordon Jackson tries
to sum up ‘wisdom’ this way: “wisdom is
the art of making good out of what life throws at us.”
Definitions
of wisdom are, of course, only so helpful.
The real challenge is trying to cultivate wisdom in our lives. One of my favorite Anglican theologians is
David Ford, who teaches theology at Cambridge University in England. One of Ford's major interests is helping us
to recover the great wisdom tradition from our Bible so that we can apply it to
our everyday lives. Ford sees Christian
wisdom as a body of beliefs, practices, disciplines, and habits of heart and
mind that can help us to cope and thrive in the midst of life's many
overwhelmings.
So, where do
we start in our pursuit of wisdom? The
first and most basic point, Ford says, is to remember that true wisdom begins
by grounding ourselves in Jesus Christ who himself is the source of all
wisdom. The strange and wonderful truth of
the gospel is that we do not start the journey toward wisdom by merely deciding
to obey certain teachings, to follow our conscience, to stick to certain
principles, to do our duty, to imitate good examples, or to develop virtues and
good habits. For the Christian, there is
something more foundational than that:
it is the act of letting ourselves go so that we can be embraced by God
in faith. This is what Paul means in
today's reading from his letter to the Ephesians when he says that to live
wisely we must first let ourselves “be filled with the Spirit.” Wisdom begins when we acknowledge that we are
not in control and that our own ideas about what we should do with our lives do
not come first. What comes first is our immersion in the life of the Spirit.
Once we are
grounded in a Christ-centered life of worship, prayer, and sacrament, the
pursuit of true wisdom becomes possible.
It would be folly to suggest that there is any one path to wisdom, but
Ford suggests at least four time-honored strategies for growing in wisdom.
The first is
to become reacquainted with the wisdom literature in the Bible. Our Scripture's wisdom tradition is generally
said to reside in the Books of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and
the Psalms; but wisdom sayings and stories run throughout the historical books,
the prophets, and are constantly appearing throughout the Gospels and Paul's
letters. These books contain gems of
insight that seek to distill what has been learned from millenia of experience
and reflection. They are not so much
recipes for action that can just be mindlessly applied to our lives. Rather, the wisdom comes in wrestling with
our own situation while continuing to meditate on these sayings and
stories. Each generation finds in them
fresh and evolving learnings about giving meaningful shape to our lives before
God.
The second
strategy for seeking wisdom is to practice the traditional virtues of Christian
living. St. Paul's list of the nine
fruits of the Spirit in his letter to the Galatians (5:22) is perhaps the most
famous summary of these virtues: the
fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control. Our
schools and academies do a wonderful job of teaching skills and substantive
knowledge in traditional disciplines like math, history, English, science and
the like; but we sometimes seem reluctant to embrace the teaching of
virtue. We need to be bolder about
naming, describing, and practicing the virtues that form a good life. One of the important missions of Episcopal schools
and chaplaincies is precisely to fill this void: to offer a community of teaching and learning
that is not just about academics but where we are not embarrassed to share the
wisdom of pursuing a virtuous life.
Ford's third
recommendation is to seek out wise people and to belong to communities that are
passionate about wisdom. Wisdom is best
learned face-to-face. Many of us have
been blessed to have wise parents, teachers, and colleagues; but even if we
haven't been privileged in that way, there are opportunities in parish life, in
spiritual direction, in book clubs, and in friendships of all kinds for growing
in wisdom. Because wisdom is so much a
matter of making the deep connections in the midst of the complexities of life,
there is no substitute for seeing how someone else does it. The hard part is to be intentional about
forming and maintaining these relationships amidst the busyness of our lives.
Finally and
perhaps most importantly, Ford writes, wisdom comes from the experience of
opening ourselves up to others in empathetic care. The art of seeing and feeling and
experiencing the world not just from our own perspective, but from the vantage
point of the other, is central to Christian wisdom. The great Christian martyr, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, who suffered the fate of dying in a concentration camp because of
his willingness to stand in solidarity with his Jewish brothers and sisters in
the face of Hitler's evil, wrote a piece near the end of his life entitled “The
View From Below.” In that essay,
Bonhoeffer argued that real wisdom emerges only from experiencing the world
from the vantage point of others, most particularly those “others” in this world
who are outcast or weak or vulnerable or neglected or despised. We become a truly wiser people by living with
and caring for our poor, our sick, our elderly, our children.
One of the
great ironies that I have discovered in my ministry at Harvard is that for all
its academic riches, true wisdom is harder to find there than you might
expect. There are many, many brilliant
people on our campus, to be sure, people who are technically intelligent in one
discipline or another, and who may be creative problem-solvers; but true human
wisdom seems less valued than it once was.
Once known for producing wise people like William James, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Helen Keller, T.S. Eliot and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harvard is today
more associated with technical geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill
Gates.
One recent
exception to that trend is the late Peter Gomes. One of my personal regrets is that I never
got to know Peter before he died early last year, although I had admired his
writing and preaching for some time.
While Gomes certainly had his own eccentricities and foibles, he also
was a man of considerable wisdom who stood at the center of Harvard’s spiritual
life for four decades. Let me leave you
with this bit of biblical wisdom from the late Peter Gomes:
“You are asked in the time that you have on
this earth to use wisely
what you have been given for the kingdom of God.
That
means you must consider not only how you spend your time
but how you spend your
money, and how you use your talent as well. The gifts that you have do not
belong to you;
they are not yours to possess but rather they are yours to
improve. . . . If you give serious consideration to this use of your
talent,
your time, and your treasure, then you will have grown in wisdom, and neither
your church
nor the whole church of Jesus Christ need ever fear; and for that
let the whole church say Amen.”
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