20B Wisdom, DOK Fall Assembly, Little Rock, AR, September 28, 2024
Proverbs 31:10-31, Psalm 1, James 3:13-4:3, 7-8, Mark 9:30-37, Christ Church, September 28, 2024.
“But the wisdom from above is pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”
We have heard so much wisdom today from Michaelene and so many of you.
All of today’s readings describe the wisdom we seek. The disciples in Mark’s gospel do not understand what Jesus is saying. They have knowledge, but they have not received wisdom. Knowledge is knowing where babies come from. Wisdom knows how to care for and love them. Knowledge is learning the distance between here and New York City. Wisdom knows what to pack for the trip and how to make the journey a pilgrimage.
Knowledge is a warehouse of information, while wisdom uses that knowledge. Wisdom is making sense of facts. Knowledge helps us make a living./Wisdom enables us to make a life.
“Today, the quest for knowledge is pursued at higher speeds with smarter tools, but wisdom is found no more readily than three thousand years ago in the court of King Solomon. Our generation is bloated with information and starved for wisdom.” 1
We hear in Proverbs the wisdom of a capable wife,/ in Psalm 1 the wisdom of trees planted by streams of water, in James the wisdom from above, and in Mark Jesus’ wisdom of welcoming a child.////
One of our favorite television series was Mad Men, a fictionalized story about a New York Madison Avenue advertising agency in the 1960s. We see a world view of the 60s culture through the prism of this agency. Of course, this is a soap opera. A favorite episode is about the checkered, shadowy past life of the lead protagonist in the agency, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, womanizing Don Draper. /In the Army in Korea, he lights a cigarette (everyone constantly smokes in the 60s) and 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 wife of the real Don Draper, finds him working at a used car dealership 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 to wisdom so often comes from and leads to unconditional love. “I know everything about you,/ more than anyone else,/ and I still love you.” (Proverbs 3:17).
Do you remember times when you were given the wisdom Jesus talks about?/ You suddenly know what to do when you have all the knowledge possible and are still struggling?/ When you feel abandoned and unloved and you hear a tiny glimpse of God’s love./ You are given wisdom to do something you know you could never 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. When I hear he has had a stroke, someone I never take advice from tells me to leave my busy medical practice and go home. /
Thoughts flood my mind on the long plane ride home. My grandfather is the most significant person in my growing up years. He owns a jewelry store in my southern hometown of fewer than 5000. 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’ Drugstore, two stores down.
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. After dinner, my grandfather reads the funny papers to me. Then we go to the country to his farm, walking the length of his property by the Mattaponi River, where he teaches me about trees, plants, snakes, and stories about his growing up in the Smoky Mountains. Sometimes, we visit 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 their seemingly enormous guest bed and, after breakfast, walk the short nine blocks to school.
My grandfather is my symbol of unconditional love, always there for me, supporting and loving me in good times and bad. Unfortunately, I see him infrequently after leaving my hometown to attend 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 contains 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 cannot bear to lose the love I knew was always there. /
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 know he recognizes me even though he never again shows any sign of recognition. Suddenly, I now feel his love and forgiveness. As I sit by his bed and listen to his labored breathing, I feel helpless. All my years of medical practice give no answers. By some miracle, I have my prayer book with me, but of course, I do not have a 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 that same inner voice tells me 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, wisdom’s source comes from my sources of unconditional love, which speaks 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.’”
God constantly sends messages of Jesus’ wisdom from above. We may best hear this wisdom when we are desperate, vulnerable, and more open. Wisdom often comes from suffering, like the pain of birthing a child or the pain of being with a dying loved one. Jesus’ wisdom most often leads to unconditional love and the path to peace. //
Wisdom from on high is often a contradiction or 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. joannaseibert.com