Preached on Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-32
John 16:12-15
Dedicated to the new High School Graduates of this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
Do you remember Robert Fulghum, the Unitarian minister who wrote that book called Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten? Here is what he wrote in that essay about wisdom:
“All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. …
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.” (All I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, p 6-7)
There’s not much there to disagree with, is there? But this wisdom gets complicated. Think of Fulghum’s list in terms of big adult issues like foreign policy and war, the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, the derivatives, credit-default swaps, and bundled mortgages on Wall Street, the priorities of our nation’s budget, or the priorities of our own budgets. Wisdom seems easier to apply in kindergarten.
In a poetic section of the book of proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman who partnered with God to create all things in the world. God created wisdom first, and then she assisted God in the creation of everything else. Ever since, she has been standing at the busiest intersections of the world, calling out to all who live. This image suggests to me that our Jewish ancestors saw the world as a place governed and ordered by wisdom, and that this wisdom was a creation of God and a gift to the world. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you are wise then everything will always work out for you (see the book of Job to dispel that misguided idea). It just means that wisdom is the principle of creation, and it is available to everyone.
You don’t have to be smart to have wisdom. You don’t have to be educated, or know a lot, to be wise. This is a strange thing to say on a day when we are giving thanks for education as a gift from God. Today we celebrate our high school graduates, and we offer our support for higher education. But there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge. You can be wise without being smart or knowing a lot of things. And you be smart and educated without being wise. We value education because we want the tools of knowledge to be wielded by people who also have wisdom. Some of the best, most creative and innovative works have been done by smart, well educated people. But the most awful, destructive things have also been done by smart, well educated people. Education is not, in itself, a promise of wisdom.
The call of wisdom is a message to all who live. You don’t have to be approved to receive it; you don’t have to travel to a holy shrine, or discover ancient scriptures in a desert cave, or attend secret ceremonies to receive it. You don’t even need to belong to a certain religion to receive it.
This past Monday, the New York Times published a column written by the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who lives in exile in India. He wrote about how people of all faiths have discovered the same wisdom of living with compassion. When he was young, he used to think that Buddhism was the only religion with wisdom, but as an adult he met with people like the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, and talked about the centrality of compassion in both Christianity and Buddhism. He wrote about similar conversations with Jews and Hindus…and Muslims – Muslims who point out that in the Koran, the very name for God is the “Compassionate and Merciful.”
God’s wisdom calls out to all people. She speaks to us about what we choose to value, how we shape our relationships, and how we live in the world with compassion. Wisdom is available to everyone because it is woven right into the act of creation. And wisdom is simple enough to be distilled from what we learn in Kindergarten. So…what gives? If wisdom is so obvious, why do we so often live foolishly, rather than wisely? Why do we so often live with self-centeredness instead of compassion? Why do we live with bitterness rather than wonder? When you put the choices like that, they seem like no-brainers. No one wakes up in the morning and says “today I’d really like to be foolish, selfish, and bitter. That seems like a good way to spend the day.”
But let’s put the questions differently, and see how they sound. Why do we so often choose what is easy instead of what is difficult? Why do we so often try to fit in, instead of acting from our convictions? Why do we live in a way that makes us feel safe and secure, rather than living in a way that faces our fears and self-doubt with courage, even if we aren’t sure of the outcome?
Doesn’t it turn out that God’s wisdom takes us away from lives that are easy, comfortable, and secure? No wonder we have trouble with it.
Wisdom is not something we can learn one day in kindergarten and master over the weekend, certainly not on our own, anyway. We need help. In the gospel according to John, Jesus is speaking with his disciples on their last night together before his death, and he says to them “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” Could this mean that wisdom (what Jesus called truth) is a process, something that we aren’t ready for all at once? Could it mean that we don’t have to achieve wisdom all on our own?
As Jesus said to the disciples, so God says to us: receive the Spirit of truth, that you may hear the ongoing call of wisdom. Remember that you do not have to do it on your own. Wisdom will be challenging. It will demand all of our attention and energy, and we will need the strength of God working within us. If we were athletes, our coach would tell us that when it comes to wisdom, leave it all on the field; give wisdom everything you’ve got.
The Reverend Frederick Buechner wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Beyond Words, p 405) So, to our graduates, our scholars, pursue your interest, in science, the arts, business, religion, health, mechanics, or whatever it may be. Learn all about it, and then match your knowledge and your intelligence to a place where you find the world’s deep hunger.
Remember that our lives are like the seeds we grew in cups as children: our lives are mysterious gifts…and they don’t last forever. God has given us the wisdom we need, so “share everything. Don’t hit people. Clean up your own mess. And when you go out into the world, hold hands and stick together.”
