20B Wisdom, Proverbs 31:10-31, Psalm 1, Mark 9:30-37, St. Mark’s, September 19, 2021.
“But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.”
The disciples have knowledge, but they have not received wisdom. Knowledge is a warehouse of information we have learned, while wisdom is profoundly using that knowledge. Wisdom goes beyond learning facts. It is making sense of facts. Knowledge comes from learning. Knowledge helps you make a living./wisdom enables you to make a life. Wisdom is a way of life, a path, a journey.
Knowledge is knowing where babies come from. Wisdom knows how to care for them. Knowledge is learning the distance between here and New York City. Wisdom knows what to pack for the trip.
When asked about love, a knowledgeable person describes what happens in the mind or body when someone experiences love.
A wise person speaks to the indescribable feeling of love. A wise person who’s experienced love has lived it, touched it and learned from it./
“Today, the quest for knowledge may be pursued at higher speeds with smarter tools,” writes Arianna Huffington. “But wisdom is found no more readily than it was three thousand years ago in the court of King Solomon. In fact, ours is a generation bloated with information and starved for wisdom.” 1
Today’s readings talk about the difference between wisdom and information; the wisdom of a capable wife in Proverbs, the wisdom of trees planted by streams of water in Psalm 1, the wisdom from above in James, and Jesus’ wisdom of welcoming a child in Mark.
One of our favorite television series for seven seasons was Mad Men. It is a fictionalized story about a New York advertising agency on Madison Avenue in the nineteen sixties. My husband and I identify with the series’ historical accuracy, remembering what happened to us during the time chronicled. We glimpse a world view of the 1960s culture through the prism of this New York ad agency. But, of course, it also is a soap opera. A favorite episode is about the checkered, shadowy past life of the lead protagonist in the advertising agency, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, womanizing Don Draper. /In Korea, in the army, when he lights a cigarette (everyone constantly smokes), he dramatically causes an explosion, killing his commanding officer. He exchanges dog tags and takes the identity of the dead officer, Don Draper. His former self, Dick Whitman, is now dead. I told you it was a soap opera. Eventually, Anna, a Patricia Marquette-lookalike, a polio victim and the wife of the real Don Draper, tracks him down at a dealership selling used cars and accuses him of impersonating her husband. Anna and Don eventually become close friends as Anna becomes Don’s surrogate mother. Years later, Anna tenderly tells Draper weeks before she dies, “I know everything about you,/ more than anyone else,/ and I still love you.” This is wisdom from above. This is the wisdom Jesus is trying to teach his disciples. The journey from wisdom is so often to unconditional love. “I know everything about you,/ more than anyone else,/ and I still love you.” Thank you, Anna Draper, for teaching us the journey from knowledge/to Jesus’ wisdom,/ associated most often with unconditional love and peace (Proverbs 3:17).
Do you remember times in your life when you were given the wisdom Jesus is talking about?/ You suddenly know what to do when you have all the knowledge possible and are still struggling?/ You receive a tiny glimpse of God’s love when you feel unloved./ You are given wisdom to do something you know you could not have thought of on your own./
The first psalm carries me back to coastal Virginia to a local hospital at my dying grandfather’s bedside. /The dreaded call comes late at night. “Your grandfather is in a coma. We think he had a stroke.” I board the first plane back to my hometown in Tidewater, Virginia, to visit him in the morning.
Thoughts flood my mind on the long plane ride. My grandfather is the most significant person in my growing up years. He is a watchmaker and owns a jewelry store on Main Street in my southern hometown of fewer than 5000 people. I stop by his store every afternoon after school on my way home. He always gives me a nickel to buy an ice cream cone at Riddles’ drug store, two stores down from his. I spend every Sunday afternoon and evening with my grandparents. We eat the same Sunday dinner: fried chicken, green beans, potato salad, and Mabel’s (my grandparents’ cook) homemade pound cake for dessert. After dinner, my grandfather reads me the funny papers. Then we go to the country to his farm, walking the length of his property by the Mattaponi
River, as he teaches me about trees, plants, and snakes, occasionally shares stories about his growing-up days in the Smoky Mountains. Sometimes we visit nearby relatives and the cemetery where my grandmother’s parents are buried. Back home, we walk from his townhouse for Sunday night church, then home for 7-up floats and the Ed Sullivan show. I spend the night in what seems like the most enormous bed in their guest bedroom, and after breakfast, walk the short nine blocks to school the next day.
My grandfather is my symbol of unconditional love, always there for me, supporting and loving me in good times and bad. Unfortunately, I spend little time with him after leaving my hometown and going to college and medical school. He, however, never forgets me and sends letters every week on his 30-year-old typewriter with intermittent keys that barely print. Every other sentence ends with etc., etc., etc. Each letter is filled with stories of his experiences away from home in World War I and words of love and encouragement. Always enclosed is a dollar bill. When he suffers this stroke twenty years later, I am devastated. I cannot bear to lose the love I knew was always there, no matter what I had done.
I walk into my grandfather’s hospital room for the first time. He sits up, gasps, and there is an immediate look of astonishment on his face. I believe he knows me even though he never again shows any sign of recognition. As I sit by his bed and listen to his labored breathing, I feel helpless. What can I do? All my years of medical practice give no answers. By some miracle, I have my prayer book with me, but of course, no bible. Suddenly, I remember the joy of hearing my grandfather read the paper to me as a child after Sunday lunch. This child within tells me what to do. Read the Psalms. I hope my grandfather can forgive my reading from the Book of Common Prayer, rather than the King James Bible.
Psalm 1
“On his law, they meditate day and night.
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
Which yield their fruit in its season,
And their leaves do not wither.”
I am embarrassed when personnel come into the room, but an inner voice says this is what my grandfather wants to hear. I know he hears me. We both are totally in the moment as one lies, and the other sits reading the psalms, as we both anticipate our last moments together. This is what I want at my deathbed-- to hear the Psalms read by someone who loves me. Once more, the source of wisdom comes from my sources of unconditional love, who spoke through my inner child within.//
“Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “’Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’”
My career for over forty years was at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, where I worked with another physician whom I regarded as totally incompetent. I cannot understand her decision-making or methods of handling conflicts and problems. Then, one weekend I take over her job when she is on vacation. I am presented with the issues she daily encounters. Overnight, I become aware of why she makes the decisions she does. Overnight, I gain respect for her and her job. I walk in her shoes and am given that wisdom that now brings me back into relationship with someone I perceived as an enemy, as I glimpse the world from her perspective. Overnight God transforms my knowledge of facts to the understanding wisdom about another person. This is the wisdom of Jesus I learn in the synagogue of a Children’s Hospital.
Quaker activist Gene Knudsen Hoffman teaches us: “An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.” “An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.”
The wisdom from this story tells me that whenever I am in conflict with someone, I may not know their story. Before we resolve our difficulties, I must try to hear their story. //
God constantly sends us messages of the wisdom of Jesus from above. Wisdom comes from hearing someone else’s story. We may only hear this wisdom when we are desperate, when we are vulnerable and more open. Wisdom often comes from suffering, like the pain of birthing a child. Jesus’ wisdom often leads to unconditional love and the path to peace. //
Wisdom,/ suffering,/peace,/ and love are the words of knowledge we hear today. How do they relate to each other? Their wisdom from on high most often is a contradiction, a paradox. The peace that comes with wisdom is never the absence of struggle or suffering, but always/ comes with the presence/ of love.2
1 April Yamasaki, “Reflections on the Lectionary” in Christian Century, p. 21, August 5, 2015.
2 Frederick Buechner in Wishful Thinking (HarperOne 1973)
Joanna seibert