The House That Wisdom Built – 9/6/09 – Proverbs 9:1-12, James 2:1-17

Proverbs 30:24-25 says: “(There are) things on earth (that) are small, yet they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people without strength, yet they provide their food in the summer.”

I have to admit I’ve never really paid much attention to ants.  I haven’t studied their living patterns as an adult and I wasn’t one of those kids who went out looking for ant hills to poke around at or try and fry one with a magnifying glass held up to the sun.  One of my more recent experiences with ants came when we were having a problem with some ants coming in our house through the side door.  We got a spray that we sprayed across the threshold that has pretty much kept them out ever since.  Usually they keep to their world and I keep to mine.  In the last few weeks I’ve come across a couple different statements about ants that have caught my attention. 

One of them came from the book Cradle to Cradle.  It’s a book about how we can shift our focus in how we design everything from buildings to cars to shoes in a way that imitates the rest of nature where waste always equals food, a nutrient to help other things live, rather than waste equals toxic garbage dumps.  The authors give the example of the ant as a creature that is well adapted to its local environment.  Wherever ants show up, in all their 8 thousand different kinds, they enrich their environment and adapt to its peculiar features.  Their food economy allows them to store food them themselves, even as they recycle nutrients and by taking them deeper into the soil so plants and microorganisms can process them.  In their transportation economy they aerate soil around plant roots which lets water better penetrate the ground, helping plant life and reducing erosion.  To the argument that ants are too small to make a negative impact on the planet while humans are a massive, industrial species, the authors point out that it is estimated that all of the ants on the planet are equal to the body mass of all the humans on the planet, and yet they not only do no harm, but improve the systems they live in.  (Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, McDonough and Braungart, 2002)

The other statement I heard included ants but was about all insects.  If all insects were to die, or disappear, within 50 years, all the rest of life would die.  Or, at least, life as we know it, the complex life of plants and animals, would utterly collapse.

And if humans were to disappear, within 50 years, all of the rest of life would flourish.  Kind of sobering. 

The Proverb says that there are things on earth that are small, yet exceedingly wise.  Among these things being the ant.

This is not a sermon about ants.  I’ve already mentioned pretty much everything I know about them.  This is a message about wisdom, and the month of September will keep this common theme.  Wisdom as the art of living well.  Wisdom in action.  Wisdom in speech.  Wisdom in thought.  Wisdom as involving, at least in its most basic form, the reality of living a balanced life in this created order, one of the most urgent issues of our time.  But also, in its exalted form, Wisdom as something that exists for itself, something that is a direct emanation of God, the first of all God’s creations as Proverbs says (8:22).  Wisdom as the radiance of God that shines in every feature of creation, if we would just pay attention and look closer.  The practical and the mystical dimensions of wisdom.  So we’ll be dwelling on some Wisdom texts and pondering Wisdom together. 

Wisdom is actually a category of biblical literature.  It includes the book of Proverbs, but also includes Ecclesiastes, and Job and the apocryphal books of Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon.  One reason for the designation of these books is that – surprise – they use the word wisdom a lot.  Of the 318 times that the Hebrew root for wisdom mkx (chakam) shows up in the Hebrew Bible, over half are in the Wisdom books.  Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the Wisdom of Solomon are associated with Solomon, the king who, when given the choice to ask God for anything in the world, chose wisdom and a discerning mind.  Solomon would not have written all of these himself, but the wisdom tradition connects itself to this one, who, at that one point in his life, chose the highest good of all, the most beautiful of God’s creations, Wisdom.                

Proverbs 9 is one of several texts where Wisdom is personified as this dynamic woman who calls out to people.  “Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars.  She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table.  She has sent out her servant girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, ‘You that are simple, turn in here!’  To those without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.  Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” 

I like here how Wisdom is portrayed as an active recruiter for her cause.  Wisdom is not just something for which we must search high and low, turn over rocks, and sniff out.  Wisdom has built a house, she has set this luxurious table of food and drink, a meal fit for a king and a queen, and she is the one who has the search party going out and searching for people who will come and feast.  Her servant girls are going to the most public, most visible areas, the highest places in the town, and are calling out multiple times, repeatedly, for people to come and sit down with Wisdom.  To learn her ways.  To make her house our house.  It sounds to me kind of like the parable that Jesus told in Luke where the master of the house has set out this great banquet, but nobody comes, so the master sends the servants out to “the highways and the hedges”, as the King James translates it, to bring in the poor and anyone, anyone who will come to this feast to fill the house of the master. 

Scholars propose that the reference to Wisdom having built her house and hewn her seven pillars is a reference to the ancient understanding of the pillars of creation that held up the universe.  Wisdom is closely linked to creation in Proverbs 8. “The Lord created me at the beginning of God’s work, the first of the acts of long ago.  Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.  When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs about with water.  Before the mountains has been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth – when God had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil.  When God established the heavens, I was there…then I was beside God, like a master worker; and I was daily God’s delight, rejoicing before God always, rejoicing in the inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” (8:22-27a, 30-31)

Wisdom has built her house, with its pillars, and it is the entire cosmos.  We’re already inside the house, and yet she calls us to wake up and take a look around and eat the feast.

Along with mentioning Wisdom a lot, there’s another feature of Wisdom literature that I find particularly interesting for what it doesn’t mention.  Unlike so much of the rest of the Bible, the books of Wisdom do not speak much of the typical salvation history of the people of Israel.  The patriarchs and matriarchs of Abraham and Sara, Isaac, and Jacob aren’t prominent.  Moses isn’t featured.  The history of the kings isn’t held up.  Covenant isn’t as prominent, or following the particular parts of the law.  The temple and the ritual system of worship isn’t there.  All of those features that we usually think of making up the religion of the Hebrew Bible, the story of the people of Israel, aren’t center stage.  Instead, Wisdom comes from a different place.  Wisdom is just out there; it’s what we get when we pay attention to things.  It even has a secular nature.  It is completely accessible to everyone, those inside the covenant, those outside the covenant, those who know the faith stories, those who don’t.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Proverbs 9 goes on to say.  So anyone who begins to have a sense of awe and wonder with Being, with that which is, has already cracked the door of the house of wisdom.  Like Jesus’ parables, which were these secular fictions, non-religious stories that pointed to a deep spiritual truth, Wisdom presents itself in all arenas of life.  In the farmer’s field.  In the marketplace.   In the business office.  In the seed of the plant.  In the classrooms of the academy, the streets of the city, the domestic chores of the home.  It’s all in the house of Wisdom.             

If we look deeply into something, whatever it may be, there is wisdom there.  We are following the trail of the tracings of the finger of God.  This is Wisdom as the mystical invitation into awe and wonder that calls out to us from everywhere.

James helps bring us back around to the practical, to the ants.  James is the closest thing we have to New Testament wisdom literature.  Like the older Wisdom texts, James doesn’t give much space to typical religious topics.  He doesn’t theologize about the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  He doesn’t talk about communion.  He only mentions the church once, right at the end.  James knows that religion and the practice and language of religion can become a self-justifying system.  The sacred shell that religion can create for us can just as easily cut us off from wisdom as connect us to wisdom.  This sacred shell can sometimes have us locked up in a closet in the house of wisdom rather than free to walk around.  More blind to God’s beauty than enlightened by it.  So James is pretty direct about these sort of things.  For James, Wisdom is wisdom in action.  Wisdom in how we speak and how we live.  1:26 says, “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.” Ouch.  “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  He also connects this to the relationship between faith and works.  “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith, but do not have works?  So faith, by itself, if it has not works, is dead.”    

If I knew more about ants, this is the place where I would tell another story or two about how they are an example of wisdom.  About how, by the very way they order their lives, by the way they relate to their own kind and their neighboring environment, they are an example of wisdom in action.  And how much we can learn from that.  And how our religion is always subject to this kind of scrutiny.  About how this helps us see that religion is in the house of wisdom, not the other way around.  Wisdom is not contained within the house of religion.  Our religious expressions are our attempt, the attempt of our tradition, to live faithfully in the house of Wisdom.  To play joyfully with all the other creatures in God’s playhouse.     

An important function of healthy religion is to unplug our ears so that we can hear the call of Wisdom coming from the little creatures and big creatures and the creation that is our home. 

But since I don’t know any more ant stories, I’ll just add this observation.  Wisdom has built her house, and unlike us and our anti-ant spray over our threshold, she apparently is totally cool with ants and bees and birds and trees and oceans and religions and all sorts of people living inside.  If fact, she’s doing all she can to convince us all to come in through her doors.  To settle in to the architecture of her ways.  To learn to live at peace with all the others she’s invited, feasting around that table.

 

The Word Became Flesh, the Flesh Became Bread – 8,27,06

If you’re like me, at some point in your life you have held the idea that our faith has to do with our souls and that our bodies are not much involved.  I don’t think anyone ever told me this directly, but I sort of picked up the idea through the way people talked about their faith.  Or maybe you’ve even thought or been taught that the body is a bad thing, something to be overcome, something to push aside as we try and be led by the spirit.         

Two weeks ago I asked that we consider this series to be a process of discovery in what Jesus would have us know about becoming bread.  This week we are reaching a bit of a climax in this conversation.  It all started with real physical bread feeding a bunch of hungry people.  Jesus’ act shows God’s desire that all people have enough to eat and be satisfied.  We were then asked to go deeper, with Jesus directing us beyond the physical back to the Source of our food, the source of our very life…Godself, which is offered as daily bread from heaven.  Elijah had experienced this God as present in the fire and destructive forces around him, but he learned that this was not where God was to be found.  God was in the silence, in the still small voice, and Jesus said that God was present in him, as bread given for the life of the whole world and that we could all be taught by this same God.  So if you’ve missed the last three weeks, there’s all the sermons packed into one paragraph.

  Now I’m usually not one for the extended metaphor.  There’s only so far you can carry a certain image before its time to move on and get another topic.  But this sixth chapter of John keeps going on and on about bread.  And there is actually something new being said this week.  After starting with real bread and moving more into a spiritual nonphysical heavenly understanding of true bread, Jesus is pointing us back to something that we can feel and touch and taste and it has to do with bodies, his body and our body.  And just so you don’t miss the point, he takes the liberty of using the graphic, somewhat disgusting language of eating flesh and drinking blood.  Initially, this whole thing had a nice G or PG rating, a story about a family gathering where a little boy shares his food and everybody ends up sharing a big meal together.  Now I think we’ve moved into the territory of R…contains disturbing and upsetting images.  Yes, coming from the mouth of our blessed Lord Jesus, v. 53 “Unless you eat the flesh of the Human One and drink his blood, you have no life in you…for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”  It’s OK to be put off by this.  That was exactly the response of the people who were listening to Jesus.  Jesus must not have been up on reading the latest church growth strategies.  If you want people to follow you, rule #1, don’t tell them to do something disgusting and confusing.  But there it is, right out of the mouth of one for whom the church exists: v. 56 “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”            I’d like to suggest that this physical, visceral language is meant to guide us toward one of the central realities of the Christian life.  A reality about how we use our bodies.  We are used to the bread and the juice as being symbols for us of Christ’s body and blood.  They represent Christ to us and we receive them as the mystery of Christ’s presence with us.  And this is true.  But the movement of the life of the church takes us beyond symbolism and actually moves in the opposite direction.    We usually think of symbols as taking something concrete, like a person, or a house, or a bike, or whatever, and making it abstract, like a picture or a word, or, in the case of communion, bread.  It moves from the actual thing to a sign for that thing.  John’s gospel moves us one step further, and it is a crucial step.  In this gospel it is the Word that became Flesh (John 1:14).  It is the abstract, the sign, the Word, that becomes actual, bodily flesh.  It is the word of Wisdom that Proverbs 9 talks about that takes on flesh and becomes a teacher and guide to the world.  It is the word bread, that takes on flesh and becomes the bread of life to the world.  It is the invisible God, who begins to look very much like a human.  God in 3-D.  Flesh and blood doing the actual work of God. 

This is why Jesus was so emphatic that his flesh was real food and his blood was real drink, as off-putting as it may sound.  This is real.  You are to actually take this flesh into your flesh. And just as Jesus has become the bread of life, you are to feast on him and become bread for others.  And all this is from the Undying God of heaven, the source of life, the giver of bread. 

This is about God alive in our bodies.  Jesus active through our living and breathing and thinking and doing.  It’s all about not just receiving the gift of bread, but receiving the very being of Christ into our being and in turn becoming that living flesh and blood.  God moving through us, reaching out to the world with our hands, embracing the stranger, speaking words of comfort and healing with our mouths.  The flesh of Jesus on our bodies, the blood of Jesus circulating through our veins. 

Its sort of like the mystical meets the practical meets the charismatic meets the social activist.  All these streams of spirituality are wrapped up in the Word becoming flesh and ourselves becoming bread.  And as grand and spectacular as this sounds, it’s a mystery that gets worked out in the ordinary world of daily living.  I read an article this week by a woman who spends a lot of time caring for people.  She said she often felt that she was doing no good.  Sometimes she would spend hours by someone’s bed, not talking much, but just being there.  She went on to say that she didn’t realize how important this was until she herself experienced a sickness that kept her in bed for several weeks.  She expressed her deep gratitude for people who came to be with her, simply to be present.  This is about as ordinary as you can get!  Just putting your body alongside another person, sometimes saying very little.            There is a bumper sticker-type slogan that friends of ours have posted above their kitchen sink.  It says “everybody wants to save the world, but nobody wants to wash the dishes.”  Eating the flesh and blood of Christ will lead us into the public arena where we act and speak for what is right, but it will also take is into the ordinary world of the kitchen and beside someone’s bed who is sick.  What’s key is that this all happens with our body, and that our body is not so much our body, but a part of the larger body of Christ in the world.  So this is ultimately where Jesus leads us in our search for bread.  Instead of constantly looking for a sign from God, we are called to BE a sign of God.  In our search for a revelation of God, we are called to BE a revelation of God.  As we look for bread to fill us, we are called to BE bread, to become bread, to nourish the world.  We consume the bread of life and we allow our lives to be bread for the sustenance of the world.  This is not a symbol as we normally think of symbols.  It is the symbol come to life, taking on flesh and blood.  And we are that symbol.  That is the call of Jesus on our life. Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship, you are a sign of God to the world.  When you offer meals to the community, you are a sign of God’s table where all are welcome and well-fed.  When you initiate and maintain the work of Ten Thousand Villages you are a sign of God’s good economy, where all give and receive in fairness and dignity.  When you gather to worship, you are a sign of the new humanity God is bringing about in the world whose unity is based on its love for the world and not its hatred for an enemy. The picture John gives us with is Jesus, with all his sisters and brothers, bridging heaven and earth, offering the bread of life to the world.  We feed on the bread and we become bread with our bodies that God has given us.    I’m going to let my words be few, because the focus here isn’t on words in themselves, but on moving from the word as symbol to the Word as flesh.  We have the chance to take communion together today.  We have bread and we have juice that represent Christ’s body and blood to us, which are on their way to becoming part of our own body and blood.  Let this be a time of reflection, a time of repentance, a time of receiving this gift and a time of allowing our own flesh and blood to be transformed by the flesh and blood of Christ.  ————-Let’s begin this time by praying together the prayer of preparation

May the body and blood of Christ
which alone can satisfy our hunger and quench our thirst

Fill us with peace

May God bless us tomorrow with daily bread for strength

  And sweet water for refreshment

Just as Christ has become bread for us,

   may we become bread for a hungry and hurting world. 

May we, together, become the body of Christ, living in hope and joy.