“The Beginning of Wisdom”Proverbs 1:1-7Leanne Pearce ReedSunday, July 26, 2015

What is the good life? What make for a meaningful life, a worthwhile life? And how do we get there? There is no shortage of answers to these questions. We are bombarded with possibilities, all claiming to lead to the good life.

If I relied on the magazines I flip through in the checkout line at the grocery store, I might get the idea that that the good life has to do with expensive watches, luxury cars and the right perfume.

Whenever I go online, I see articles offering strategies to achieve a better life: “5 things successful people do before breakfast;” “8 life hacks to make you more productive;” “10 habits for happiness.”

And when my mom and sister and I went to New Orleans the other weekend, walking a block on Bourbon street revealed another philosophy about the good life -- more of the eat, drink and be merry school of thought.

We are surrounded by fiercely competing claims about the good life. How do we make sense of it all? How do we discern the right path from the false ones?

As it turns out, we are far from the first people to ask these questions. From the earliest of times, humans have wondered about the meaning of life and how to live well. These questions were asked in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, and in ancient Israel, by our ancestors in faith.

Over the coming weeks in worship, we will be exploring the wisdom literature of ancient Israel. Wisdom literature grapples with just these questions -- how ought we live? What makes for the good life? We’ll hear from a wide range of voices in this literature: -from the everyday sages of Proverbs to the prophet Isaiah; -from a suffering servant named Job to an old preacher called Ecclesiastes; -and finally, from a pair of young lovers in the Song of Songs.

We’ll engage in conversation with these ancient voices -- discovering what they learned of the good life and holding it up to our own experience. We may find that some of their insights no longer apply, across the long span of centuries and culture. But in many cases, we will find that their wisdom still holds, that they speak an enduring truth about the world and our place in it, a truth that transcends the bounds of time and place.

I’ll warn you: It’s a risky thing to ask these questions. After all, if some choices lead to the good life, then some may lead in the other direction, toward a meaningless or even destructive life. And if we learn something about the good life, there may be some

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obligation -- then we may have to do something about it. These words of wisdom may take hold of you and not let you go.

We begin this week with the book of the Proverbs. Proverbs speaks to the life of faith in ordinary times. Now, Scripture bears witness to some extraordinary encounters with the divine: Angels visiting to announce that Sarah will bear a child even in her old age; Moses encountering God in the flames of a burning bush and later bringing water from a dry rock for those wandering in the wilderness; Jesus’ disciples seeing him transfigured, shining with glory, on a mountaintop. But most of us never have such dramatic experiences of God. Scholar Ellen Davis writes, “The proverbs are spiritual guides for ordinary people, on an ordinary day, when water does not pour forth from rocks and angels do not come to lunch.” Which is to say, most days.

Proverbs is intended for ordinary, everyday life. It explores just what makes for a well-lived life. What does it mean to be a good neighbor, a loving spouse, a loyal friend? What creates a strong family, a just community? How do we understand the role of speech, of work, of money? What do we value? And how do we pass it on to our children? The book of Proverbs, along with the other wisdom literature, recognizes that wrestling with these questions is part of what it means to live a reverent life, a faithful life.

The book bears the name of King Solomon in the opening lines we heard this morning, but if you read the book you soon realize -- that attribution is honorific. Proverbs doesn’t deal with kingly concerns. It doesn’t portray wisdom as the province of a small elite, looking down from on high -- kings or scholars, gurus or monks. Rather, Proverbs is a compilation of wisdom based on the experiences of ordinary, faithful people trying to live wisely every day. These sages understood that we need wisdom in order to flourish, both as a society and as individuals. Their insights were handed down, and over time, proved resilient. Their claims have been reaffirmed generation after generation. Proverbs is time-worn, time-tested “common sense.” It is practical, everyday wisdom.

Barry Schultz is a psychologist and writer who argues that we need a resurgence of “practical wisdom” in our culture today. In a TED talk on this subject, he shared the job description of a hospital janitor.1 It listed tasks you might expect: sweep and mop the floors, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. The list of tasks was long, but not one of them involved other human beings. For all you could tell from the job description, the janitor’s job could just as well been done in a mortuary as a hospital.

And yet, Schwartz says:

...when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at [that] moment, happened to be taking a nap. And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the

21Schwartz’s TED Talk can be found here: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom?language=en

man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry.

Now, not all janitors are like this. But, Schwartz says:

...the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job. And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings. These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people. And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what "doing right" means.

That’s wisdom. Moral will combined with moral skill. Over and over, those janitors encountered situations in which their job description was not enough, the rules did not apply, and they had to choose how to respond. Whatever your profession or other roles you hold, we all face similar moments -- times when the rules or job descriptions cannot tell us what to do. A teachers navigates the assigned curriculum, with its prescribed schedule, and the various needs of the real live students in front of her. An artist weighs the value of creative freedom against the demands of the marketplace. A parent struggles to find the balance between protecting his children and supporting their independence. A friend wonders when to keep silent and when to speak a hard truth. There are no hard-and-fast rules for navigating such situations.

Perhaps that why the sages of Israel did not hand down a bunch of rules in Proverbs. The book does not contain lists of commands or laws; there’s no collection of “dos and don’ts” to guide our behavior. Instead, the sages wrote poetry -- carefully crafted verse, honed over the centuries. And like all poetry, these proverbs communicate in language aimed at the heart as well as the head. Proverbs are intended to provoke thought. They don’t have one simple meaning; their meaning is layered and might depend on the particularities of the situation. According to the book of Proverbs, becoming wise is not simply about learning proverbs. Rather, wisdom is about learning to read the world so that one might use proverbs rightly.

Consider how many of the proverbs and sayings of our own culture offer contradictory advice:

“Look before you leap.”“He who hesitates is lost.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”“Better safe than sorry.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”“Out of sight, out of mind.”

How do you know when to apply each saying? It depends on the circumstance. You have to read the situation. Wisdom is about discerning how to respond well and rightly in all the variety of circumstances that confront us in daily life. “What should I do?” The answer almost always depends on the particulars of the situation at hand. A wise person knows when and how to obey the rules or go around them; when to follow the job description to the letter, and when to ignore it in service of a higher value, as those janitors did. Learning

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the proverbs is the easy part. Learning to read the world to apply the proverbs --well, that is the work of a lifetime.

Schwartz suggests, “A wise person knows how to improvise. . . A wise person is like a jazz musician -- using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand.” Now, when jazz musicians improvise, it’s not a free-for-all. They don’t suddenly start playing classical or country music. They improvise within a certain structure, based on foundational principles that define jazz music.

In the same way, in Proverbs, we find the foundational principle, a guiding orientation to the world that gives structure to all our improvisation. It’s found in the final line of our reading this morning: “Wisdom begins with fear of the Lord.”

Many consider this verse the “motto” of the book of Proverbs, a summation of the whole book. But to our modern ears, the phrase “fear of the Lord” is a challenge. It may evoke an image of a terrified, groveling servant before a angry, vengeful master. That’s not how most of us want to think of our relationship with God. And at times in Scripture, “fear of the Lord” does seem to refer to the emotion of fear, an anxious anticipation of God’s judgement or action.

But more than that, “fear of the Lord” speaks to an orientation, a worldview. Most simply, “fear of the Lord” means understanding that God is God -- and we are not. Earlier this morning, we heard a creation story from Genesis. It’s an account of God kneeling in the soil of the earth and shaping the very first human, breathing into him the breath of life. The story isn’t a science lesson on human origins. It is a poetic affirmation about human identity -- it reminds us that we are the creatures, God is the Creator. We belong to God. We are subject to and accountable to the God who formed us, who created us to live in relationship with others, and charged with us tending the good earth.

“Fear of the Lord” is about knowing who we are. It is an orientation to the world, that helps us understand our place in it, a worldview that recognizes the sovereignty of God, and our own capacities and limitations before God.

In Proverbs, this is the foundational principle that guides all other action. It tells us that our lives are not fragmented. We are not parents on Saturday, Christians on Sunday, employees on Monday. Our lives are not distinct spheres with distinct demands, though we often try to live that way. No, we are first and foremost and always, children of God. It is this identity, this posture before God, that then shapes all the other roles and decisions in our lives.

This is the beginning of wisdom. It is this understanding that motivates and guides our conduct. It demands that we act with humility, with justice, with compassion, with grace -- even when human rules are ineffective or silent.

It is doesn’t give us easy answers and quick solutions. But it gives us a starting point. It tells us who we are and whose we are. That is the beginning of wisdom.

And like a wise janitor or gifted jazz musician, from there, we can improvise. Amen.4