Wisdom from Above

Scripture is not meant to be something that is mined for the one right interpretation, but is given to us by God to guide us in our communal conversations and life on who God is and how are we to live out faithful lives as a response to that God.

One of my strong convictions that I have about faith, is that God through the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit has given us the church so that we can come together to explore his Word, and not to just shape our beliefs but our actions as well. Through out Scriptures we have stories and statements about God and God’s activity, but we also have stories about how people responded to God. Remember the Israelites after being liberated from the Egyptians and sustained in the wilderness by the manna provided by God, only to rebel against God?

In Exodus 16:4 the Lord says to Moses, “ I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day…” And Moses tells the people exactly what God told him, and sure enough they receive the manna as God said, and then we are told in verse 17: “The Israelites did as they were told…” so all looks good until verse 20 “However, some of them paid no attention to Moses, they kept part of it until morning.”

We also see this challenge in Mark 10:17-22 with the rich young man who is excited to hear the teachings and even boldly asserts that he follows these teachings. Only to have to leave dejected because he can’t follow the teachings to sell all that he has.” Once again beliefs and actions could not connect.

Now the dilemma of the Israelites in the wilderness and the young rich man is the same dilemma we share today. It is a dilemma not only of faith but of actions or ethics as well. In other words, how does what I believe shape how I live? What do I believe in God and how far am I willing to have that belief influence my life?

Is my belief in God restricted to my life in church? Or does it have implications in my daily life? Do I act one way in church and with my church friends and another way when I am out in the world?

Now some of us have got this down into an art form. We have constructed boxes that neatly hold our church identities and our worldly identities separate. We have no problem shifting from one world to the other. From one reality to the other.

But I don’t care how neatly constructed we have these boxes, there is going to be a crisis at some point. And when there is, either our faith box will collapse or our world box will collapse, or both with collapse leaving us with no meaning and no hope.

The folk singer Todd Snider captures this dilemma in a song that he sings about teenagers who end up committing some type of violence. In the song some adults wonder how kids today could get so messed up and they say it is the music they listen to. Must be satanic. But Snider thinks it is something else. He sees the problem as that we act one way at church and then another way at home and at school and in our business. In the church world, we teach peace and love, and to serve the least of these, but in our other worlds, we learn to be competitive and successful and to climb corporate ladders and to ignore or even persecute the least of these.

Now you may or may not agree with Snider, but he highlights the difficulty of navigating two ethical worlds. It often leads to a lostness or hopelessness that allows for violence and other meanings to take hold.

So much of Scriptures are stories of this human dilemma. How do we as people who believe in God, live out our faith in our daily lives? How do we connect our story with God’s story and stay connected so that our actions reflect that story? How do we not mix God’s story with worldly stories that are at odds with God’s story, but seem to nonetheless benefit us? In other words how do we live life well?

James attacks this issue straight on in his Epistle. James writing in the early years of the church, sets out to instruct its faithful how to live out their faith. In probably one of the most famous and controversial lines of James we hear, James 2:17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

Faith if confined to just our beliefs, held separate from our actions is not faith at all, but some mental exercise that we practice for probably selfish reasons. To be clearer, the only reason we would say we have faith, yet not let it permeate our actions is that this faith divorced of action must benefit us somehow, perhaps with status or club membership or something that is not Scriptural at all.

James holds back no punches. If we are going to be faithful Christ followers, then our actions must reflect our faith. And so he goes at length to give us some actions that he feels are Christian. But he never strays far as to what is the source of our actions, and that at last brings me to our Scripture reading today,

James 3:17-18 But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

James roots our ethics, the way we structure our lives, our actions, our relationships and speech in the wisdom that comes from above. In other words, from the wisdom that comes from God.

But what is this wisdom from above? If I were to ask you what is the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, what books would you list? Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Eccl. Song of Solomon and if we were using a Catholic Bible we would also have Sirach and Wisdom. What makes these books wisdom books is that they address how God’s wisdom is lived out in the world. They are teachings based on discernment and reflection about the character and mystery of life.

One way we can think about Wisdom is that it is what structures or gives form to facts. Facts are facts, but how we order facts is wisdom. In other words how we understand truth is how we bundle facts together to form a story that in turn guides our actions, emotions etc. Now this might be confusing, because some people think that facts in themselves are truths. How many of you remember or perhaps have heard the parody of Joe Friday, the detective from back in the old black and white tv days, who would whip out his detective notepad, grab his pencil from his hats and with a piercing and stern look say to the rambling witness, “Just the facts, mam!”

But, FACTS ≠ TRUTH

A fact may or may not be truth. What do I mean by that? Facts in themselves are neutral, but when collected and sorted, filtered and ordered, they are not neutral for they always are assigned some type of value according to how we perceive truth. A chair is a fact and is relatively neutral, in other words it really does not in itself have any bearing on truth. Is it here truthfully in this room? Yes, but close your eyes for a minute. What is truthfully in this room in the back right hand corner? No peeking!

Facts are those things that we have to use our senses to experience. We see a chair, we hear a bird, we touch a wall, we taste an apple, we smell a rose. But truth is that which orders facts in a way that they are understandable, in a way that makes sense to our senses. Truth both uses our senses while rising above them, therefore it is unseen, unheard, untouched, etc. Truth is a reflection on facts. Let me alter my chair example to see if I can make my point.

An electric chair is a fact. It is a chair that has electricity wired to it. That is the fact. What we do with the electric is when truth comes in. For some the truth of the electric chair is that it is an instrument of justice, for others an instrument of injustice. What is the difference? How the parties understand the truth of justice. And from this understanding of truth, actions or ethics arise. If I believe – in other words if I hold what is true that God’s justice is accomplished when we put to death a violent offender, then I will use the electric chair as an instrument of justice, I will use it to end the life of a violent offender. But if I believe that only God can end the life of someone, even a violent offender, in other words if I do not believe that God’s justice is ever accomplished in the death of another person, then it would be very strange indeed if I supported the use of the electric chair to end the life, even the life of a violent offender.

We are in need of truth in order to gather facts and then to use them in some meaningful way. Again truth is something that resides both in our senses as well as above it. And for Christians, truth also has another component. God. Truth resides not just in our constructs, in our reason and in our senses, but as James puts it, it resides above us. It is given to us from above.

Truth or Wisdom has as its ultimate source God. Wisdom, or Truth was present at creation. Psalm 104:24 O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.

In the beginning, God created out of His Wisdom and what did he say after each day of creation? It was good. In the beginning facts, in other words, all that was created had a value because it was directly created and connected to God’s wisdom. But then the fall happened. Humanity sought to have wisdom separate from God and with our broken relationship with God, we no longer had only one source of wisdom, but now we had two.

Now we would have to seek for wisdom, it would not be automatic. Facts became neutral and we had to seek Wisdom from above, or we could seek wisdom from below, in order to try to understand the facts presented to us. In order to assign a value to the facts we encounter. And this is the dilemma that James writes about.

James 3:14-16 But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.

James tells us that Wisdom not from above but earthly wisdom is also available to us. It is rampant and we have to choose between it and between the wisdom that comes from God.

Now you might ask why would I want earthly wisdom. James gives us a pretty grim picture of earthly wisdom. He tells us that it is false, and leads to disorder and wickedness of every kind. In other words that it leads to death. But he also tells us why we might seek it, for it seems to fuel envy and stimulate selfish ambition. We often seek earthly wisdom because it meets our needs, it gives us a sense of security and it gives us power.

In crisis points in our lives, when we come to a crossroads in our lives, we face the issue of what path we will take. Robert Frost so eloquently put it this way in his poem, The Road Not Taken:

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

In crises, we often are lured to the earthly wisdom’s path because it is familiar to us, because it serves us well, because it does not challenge us, because it gives us a false sense of peace, or perhaps because it makes most sense to us.

But James tells us it is a false sense of truth. It will not provide comfort, it will lead to death. Now before we think that we would never take the wrong path, let me share a story with you, how easy it is to follow an earthly path of wisdom.

My son Stephen is adopted. When we first visited him in the hospital in Russia, Stephen was one month old. As I held him for the first time in the doctor’s office I can’t even begin to describe the overpowering sense of love and joy I had. This was my boy…my beautiful child…a gift given to me and to Grady, who did not deserve such a wonderful miracle. As I held him Stephen began to cry. I tried to rock him, to sing to him. I shifted my arms, held him in different positions, but to no avail. His cries got louder and louder. The doctor came in, looked at him, and told his that he was not due for a feeding but she would see if she could get him a bottle. She came back with a half full baby bottle of milk. Stephen sucked down the milk in a matter of seconds. You see Stephen was starving. Later, we changed his diapers. I did not see it then, because I was overwhelmed, but the pictures show a starving child…extended belly, scrawny arms and legs. My heart still breaks when I look at the pictures.

When we got Stephen home, he was a happy and well fed child. All was well until we decided when he was 3 years old to move from our home in North Carolina to Florida. We carefully prepared Stephen for the move, making sure that he was at his grandmother’s during the hectic days of moving. We thought that Stephen was fine with the change. He expressed joy over his new bedroom and seemed to like the neighborhood pool and new friends. How traumatic after all could a move be for a three year old?

One day I noticed a smell in Stephen’s room, that grew worse with each day. Finally, I investigated and found that my three year old son had stockpiled food in a corner of his room. He had carefully hidden apples, bananas, cookies and cereal. The smell came from the rotting fruit. It was then I realized that Stephen was not all that comfortable with the move. And faced with trauma, he resorted back to a story that gave him comfort. He went back to food to meet his needs for stability and to help make sense of the changing world around him.

Separated from the Wisdom of God, it is very easy to seek earthly wisdom. It doesn’t have to start out as destructive or evil. It can start out as an unmet need. Or in a time of crises when we are struggling to reach out to make some kind of sense of something that to us makes no sense, so we are presented with earthly wisdom and we grab onto it like it is a only hope for life, not realizing that it is a story that will lead us on a path to death.

With Stephen, we had to spend months sharing with him a wisdom that came from God to help him understand, not just as a some kind of abstract belief system, he was after all only a child, but as a core fundamental belief system that made a difference in his life and how he coped with stress. If we had not, then false wisdom would have continued to build up in his life. He would have continued to seek wisdom from earthly things to manage stress and crises situations.

Many of us have stories that we built out of earthly wisdom to help make sense of some type of tragedy, or loss or crises in your life. I struggle with earthly wisdom each and every day of my life. I am not good enough, I am not pretty enough.

We don’t start out desiring earthly wisdom that leads to death, but we will hold onto any story that lessens the pain and helps us to make sense of what is going on in our lives.

But hear the good news. And this is the reason that I think the letter of James is included in the New Testament. James says right at the start of his letter, in verse 5:

James 1:5 If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you.

Ask and it will be given us. God does not hold his wisdom from us, but gives it to us freely and generously. He freely forgives us for seeking wisdom from elsewhere and does not begrudge us. God knows that we are separated from him and he yearns to reconnect with us.

James 3:17-18 But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

He yearns to share His peace with us. He desires that we should experience his mercy and that we should be made pure and capable of bearing fruit. God wants us to be creative. He wants us to create life, and to live life and to share life with others and with Him, and ultimately to experience the union with God that we had before the fall.

No where do I find in James that we earn this wisdom from God. It is all gift that when we seek it is given to us. In this he echoes the Old Testament.

Proverbs 3:13 Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding,

And what we receive when we seek God’s wisdom, Proverbs goes on to tell us:

Proverbs 3:14-18 for her income is better than silver, and her revenue better than gold. She is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy.

God’s wisdom leads to life! A fullness of life that is rooted in the righteousness of God! The harvest of righteousness that James mentions in 3:18 is none other than our lives lead out in faithful action that is in direct alignment with the wisdom of God. A life lead by God’s wisdom takes us on a path that leads us back to the tree of life, where we can lie down by still waters and experience what we were created to experience, the truth of God’s peace.

Robert Frost ends his Poem with the following words,

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Can we really live with two different wisdoms guiding our lives? One, the Godly wisdom from above for our church life and earthly wisdom for all the other times? I don’t think so. God is calling us to choose. He has lead us to a crossroads and we try to keep our feet on both paths. Or we hesitate wondering if we can make the commitment to take only one path. But here again we hear the words from Proverbs, one of the greatest sources of God’s holy wisdom,

Proverbs 3:5-6 Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

It is time to choose which path you will follow, which truth will guide your thoughts, actions, deeds and speech. Will you follow the false wisdom from below or will you follow God’s wisdom from above. Will you seek life or will you dance with death?

One of the ways that we as a corporate body seek God’s wisdom for our lives is through the sacrament of Holy Communion.

We gather together at the Table to pray and ask forgiveness for earthly paths taken. We receive God’s forgiveness and then share God’s peace with each other, as an action that echoes are beliefs. And then we do a remarkable thing. We give thanks and we remember, in a prayer to God that helps prepare us for receiving His wisdom. And then we ask the Holy Spirit to unite us with God and with each other. In other words we seek His wisdom, His truth to not just enter our minds, but our hearts and our whole beings in a way that it effects a change in us. We are no longer isolated from God’s wisdom, but now we are transformed by it. We claim the harvest of righteousness as being united with God and with each other. It changes us and it changes our actions. And we come forward to take the bread and juice as a sign that points to this ultimate and life giving truth. That we are God’s and He is ours.