Today's Sermon

 

“Wisdom for Ordinary Times:  The Library is Open”

 

Wisdom for Ordinary Times:  The Library is Open

            Earlier in the summer, our family had the chance to travel to Japan. That country holds a special place in my spouse’s heart because at age 15 she was an exchange student there for a year through Rotary. In college, she was invited back to attend university for a year. For several years thereafter she worked a Japanese women’s university splitting her time between Boston and Tokyo. However, when in her mid-20s her father got sick with cancer, she moved home never to return until this summer.

            I’m still processing the trip because there is so much to reflect upon. If you were to ask my son, however, what was the best thing about Japan, he might say the incredible Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. He might talk about the public transportation or the clean, safe cities. He might name the food. He definitely picked up on how respect and social harmony are top social values. Maybe even more impressive than these things, however, were…Japan’s vending machines. Okay, I admit I’m projecting my own opinions onto him. I loved the vending machines. They’re everywhere, and offer everything—hot coffee, cold coffee, sport drinks, cold green tea! I’d find myself thinking, “Well after we’re done visiting this…maybe I can get a treat.” You just put in a few yen and out comes whatever you want.

            On the more serious side, if I had to pick one thing that impacted me the most, it was how spiritual a culture it was. It may not be spirituality as we understand it, but if you understand spirituality to be tapping into something deeper and having that deeper way shape the way you move through the world, then I can’t think of a more spiritual place I’ve been. It literally guides how people move, where they walk, where they stand, how they carry their bodies. There was an attunement to surrounding that I don’t experience here. Here, we have a lot of overt religiosity, but all too often little sinks below the surface, and even our spirituality is centered on benefits for the self. Self-help is a lucrative genre in literature, and we find no irony when it seeps in and dominates our spirituality.

            Spiritually, have you noticed how much we tend to treat God as a vending machine? This shows up in self-centered new age movements and Christianity alike. We put in a few coins in the form of good deeds, earnest prayers, or right belief and we hope to get some favor or treasure. As much as we are drawn to this way, experience reveals that sometimes what life deals us is not at all what we put in for.

            Our sacred texts and true teachers acknowledge faith does not, in fact, eliminate difficulty, injustice, even evil. Today’s reading from James, for example, challenges us to think about challenges as opportunities for growth:

James 1:2-5
2 My brothers and sisters, whenever you face various trials, consider it all joy, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance complete its work, so that you may be complete and whole, lacking in nothing.
5 If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you.

            The author of James, as is so often the case in scripture, turns what we think we know upside down. Our trials, as undesired as they may be, have the potential to bless us with endurance, and that endurance works for our wholeness. What we need in the midst of these trials is not an escape route so much as wisdom to navigate through them, and that wisdom is something we can ask for and expect to receive. We ask of God, through our challenging circumstance, what have you to teach me? What do you have to teach me about how to love? That is always the question for the person of faith.

            Wisdom has fallen out of favor in our society. We focus on knowledge. We have computers that can access it in volumes and with speed never before imagined. This is wonderful; it is not all, however. Wisdom is knowing how to differentiate truth from decorated falsehoods. Wisdom is about how to employ that knowledge for the sake of the wider community. People cry for our educational systems to prepare us for jobs so we can make good money four ourselves and families, but what happened to preparing us to be citizens so we could make a good world for all? The former is about technical knowledge, which becomes obsolete in short order; the latter is about how to think and how to think about living in a society with others, which never loses its importance.

            In Western culture, another reason we struggle with wisdom is we only want to look forward. Other cultures are better at treasuring the wisdom of their ancestors, because they know it will help them move forward, not with technical knowledge but with wisdom about the timeless questions about life. As mainline post-Enlightenment Christians, we even treat the collective wisdom of our ancestors, the collection of books we call the Bible, as an embarrassment, something to apologize for, anything but take it seriously. It’s like a vending machine that dispenses freely gives but we just walk by. How foolish in the summer heat!

            Okay, that metaphor breaks down, for getting wisdom from the Bible is not as simple as pressing a button. It’s more like a library, where one must comb the stacks, study with care, and integrate with judgment. This library is a collection of teachings, stories, poems, prayers, and letters that all speak to the heart of the human condition. It’s a catalog of the rise of consciousness, and an early exploration into what it looks like to try and create a world where love reigns. Too often, we pass by libraries, and spend our journeys stuck in tourist traps, neither authentic nor containing much wisdom. In the book of Proverbs, a literal collection of wise sayings, the author pleads for us to value wisdom more than cheap trinkets:

2 My child, if you accept my words
    and treasure up my commandments within you,
2 making your ear attentive to wisdom
    and inclining your heart to understanding,
3 if you indeed cry out for insight
    and raise your voice for understanding,
4 if you seek it like silver
    and search for it as for hidden treasures—
5 then you will understand the fear of the Lord
    and find the knowledge of God.
6 For the Lord gives wisdom;
    from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; (Proverbs 2:1-6) 

            Fear does not mean we should be scared of God, rather it is a clear recognition of this awesome wellspring of wisdom, loving presence, and way that is at the heart of existence, and always available to us. Some of this wisdom has been discerned and preserved by our ancestors, and some is there for us to experience directly.

            People sometimes lament an inability to experience God directly, but they might be able to do so more easily were they to study the notes our ancestors left for us. All too often, we leave those volumes to gather dust as shelves of an abandoned library. We hear sayings such as “An eye for an eye,” (Exodus 21:24) and quickly dismiss quoting Gandhi who said that leaves the whole world blind. Of course, Gandhi never said that. Do you understand the origin of “an eye for an eye”? Found in the Bible’s Exodus and in the Mesopotamian the Code of Hammurabi, the commandment is intended to instill proportionality and put restraints on retaliation. If a neighbor wounds one of your sheep, you don’t get to take out their entire farm.

            Take the prohibition of divorce, Matthew 5:31-32, something we don’t bring up often because we have become comfortable with the practice, and in some cases rightly so. However, the wisdom of Jesus’ teaching was never about a rule for rule’s sake; it was about protecting the vulnerable. A divorced woman in Jesus’ culture, if not taken back in by her family of origin was as good as dead, with little means for survival, certainly not with dignity. Did we dig deep enough to understand the teaching before we put it back on the return rack?

            Let’s get even more obscure, “You shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together” Deuteronomy 22:11. Surely, we’re not going to take this seriously. This is just some arbitrary statute to help the Israelites distinguish themselves from neighboring pagan cultures. Perhaps. Cultures have long defined themselves through clothing, as with food, song and ritual. But, did you know fabrics of different composition shrink at different rates and thus blending them might lead to premature failure? The ancestors were thinking of sustainability long before it came in to fashion, and we could learn a lot from how intimately they wove it into their lives.

            You must not eat or touch the carcass of a pig, Leviticus 11:7-8. I wasn’t planning on it, but please explain. Again, the pig wasn’t chosen out of some arbitrary prejudice. In a hot climate, prior to refrigeration, meats such as pork easily harbored dangerous parasites such as trichinella. Ritual purity and public health are partners in faithful communal life.

            Build a parapet, a short wall, around your roof, Deuteronomy 22:8. Mere decoration or safe building code? In ancient Israel, roofs, which were often flat, we’re used as living and working spaces. Parapets protected people from falling. So OSHA is biblical!? We’re tempted to turn to spirituality in search of what’s in it for me, when our tradition is most oriented toward the protection of all.

            We could go on and on. This collection of ancient texts is full of wisdom. Jesus was a wisdom figure, though as Cynthia Bourgeault has pointed out, we’ve discarded this understanding of him in favor of savior. Some Christianity has focused so much on getting people to accept Jesus, it has forgotten to be taught and transformed by him and the wisdom he embodied. Remember, they called him “rabbi” which means “Teacher.”

            Let’s go back to that ancient, and yet very modern, culture I mentioned at the outset. It’s easy to become enamored when experiencing a new culture, experiencing its light for the first time. Every culture also has its challenges, its shadow sides. Japan is no different. It has a measure of closedness, prejudice. Foreigners are kept out, kept from owning property for example. But, even in the darkness of shadows, what James calls trials, the light of deeply held wisdom shines.

            I want to tell you a story of sacred wisdom trumping simple prejudice. It’s about a little girl who one night found herself running from her home as the bombs rained down from above. It was during the Second World War. She was clutching only one thing, her doll. That’s all she escaped with. Think of the terror she must have experienced, and experienced at the hands of foreigners, Americans in this case. Of course, she couldn’t understand her own country’s actions, their imperialist history, or their alliances. I can only imagine after experiencing that bombing, not to mention after Hiroshima or Nagasaki, what a child such as this must have grown up thinking about us.

            Yet, this same woman years later would open her home to a 15-year-old American girl not just to visit, but to live, to share in the way and wisdom of her people who had endured so much and perhaps grown from it. Today, that one-time exchange student, no longer 15, my spouse, carries within her the wisdom of the East alongside the wisdom of the West. Complementing the strength and potential of the individual with the honor of the other, novel progress with the wisdom of the ancestors, the right to choose with the responsibility to consider the wellbeing of the whole.

            We are all called to be wisdom carriers. Jesus showed us that. When we treat God like a vending machine, seeking only treats, we pick the wrong framing, an individual transaction meant to bring only pleasure to the customer. When we recognize that instead we have access to volumes of wisdom not only to refresh us but sustain us, guide us, instruct us, form us, and transform us into the people God dreams us to be and the world needs us to be.

            Vending machines have snacks; libraries have wisdom. First, grab some volumes, then you can get a treat.

           Amen.