Wisdom calls out, and what does she call?  “Wise up!  See how things fit together!”  Wisdom is a matter of seeing how things fit together.

The lectionary rotation of readings seldom takes us into the realm of wisdom literature, so I want to concentrate on this genre today.  Proverbs 8 is found in the Hebrew Scripture, what we Christians have appropriated as our Old Testament, but probably the Book of Proverbs is not Hebrew at all but from some other Mediterranean culture, perhaps Egyptian.  The compilers of this First Testament, much to their credit, included materials that contradict the conventional wisdom of the Israelite culture, a kind of “minority report.” 

Proverbs is that, and so is the Book of Job an example of wisdom literature.  The conventional thinking of the day was that God rewarded good people and punished bad people.  So, if something bad happened, it was assumed by everyone that the person had done something terribly wrong.  In Job’s story his three “friends” are that voice of the prevailing understanding.  “Job, you sit here on a dung heap with dogs licking your open sores.  You must have done something dreadful.  You can tell us, we are your friends.”

But Job is absolutely right when he protests, “I have done nothing wrong!  I do not deserve to suffer like this!  God is being unfair, mean, vindictive.  Do not look to me for the reasons for my pathetic condition; it all is God’s doing.”

When something bad happens to us we are prone to say, “What did I do to deserve this?”  Job answers, “Nothing necessarily.  Sometimes suffering just happens to us, and when it does, it is okay to curse God.”   The role of wisdom literature is to give voice to an alternative perspective that challenges how people conventionally explain things.

Our psalm today is conventional wisdom.  It celebrates the beauty of God’s creation and expresses amazement at the lofty place God has set human life in the hierarchy of things.  “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars  that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them; mortals that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”  Psalm 8, a song enshrining God’s divine attention paid to humans.

Now, in direct contrast Job turns this psalm on its head.  When life is not going well and we have done nothing to deserve it, this is an alternative song we can sing to God: “I loathe my life; I would not live forever.  Let me alone, for my days are a breath.  What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment?  Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle?” (Job 7:16-19)  Divine attention as a curse.

Wisdom literature – a call for us to wise up and see that things are more complex than common assumptions make them out to be.

What else?  The story of Ruth is considered wisdom literature.  Ruth is willing to give up everything, even her own future, to care for Naomi after Naomi’s son, Ruth’s husband, dies.  Ruth declares, “Where you go, I will go; where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”  It is lovely, but radical.  Ruth’s allegiance to Naomi, her mother-in-law, crosses the boundaries of age, religion, ethnicity, culture, and common sense.  It is a story that calls into question all of the fences we set up in our own lives and patrol so defensively.

Ecclesiastes is wisdom literature.  When the grumpy, old philosopher laments, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” he is contradicting the prevailing claim of the Bible.  The dominant scriptural witness insists that life is meaningful, that history is going somewhere, and that God is unfolding a divine purpose before our very own eyes.  But Koheleth snorts, “It is all meaningless, all in vain!  Eat, drink, and be merry,” he says, because tomorrow you will die.

So, back to the Book of Proverbs.  It belongs to the subversive voice in the Old Testament that calls us to wise up and discern more carefully how things fit together.  Here in Chapter 8 we have a fetching character introduced, “Sophia,” her name being the Greek word for “wisdom,” feminine in grammatical gender.  She, wisdom personified, describes herself as a co-creator with God.  In verse 30, “When he marked out the foundations of the earth I was beside him like a master worker.”  If God is portrayed as a male character, God the Father, then Sophia becomes the Mother, and together they give birth to the cosmos.  Now, that is an alternative vision, much closer to the creation stories of other religions than what we have in Genesis.

But, consider carefully what we do have in Genesis.  In Chapter 1 we have an account of a magisterial God creating just by speaking the words, “Let there be light, and there was light.”  Orderly, efficient, in six days, commanded from on high.

Yet, in Chapter 2 of Genesis we have quite a different creation story, not contradictory to the first one but clearly not the same.  Here God creates not from above in heaven but from below on earth.  The creator takes the dust of the earth and creates humanity.  Recall the humbling words of Ash Wednesday, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  God consorts with Adam and Eve in the garden and enlists their help in naming the animals and ordering life. 

And now, here in Proverbs 8 we encounter what could be understood as a third creation story, one very different from either of the two in Genesis.  And, I suggest, that by the time we get to the introduction of the Gospel of John in the New Testament we have a fourth perspective on how things fit together.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  As we read the gospel story it is revealed to us that the “Word” is not something spoken from on high but rather a life lived in our midst, in all the dusty places we inhabit.  The Word is Jesus Christ himself.

So, what do we make of this entanglement?  One way is to read the texts in the spirit in which they were written, which was not to offer a scientific explanation of the world but to reveal the truth of how things fit together.  Sophia cries out to us to see things in perspective, to make sense out of life, to put the emphasis in the right place, and to take delight in the world, our lives, even the mundane days, even more, including the worst days.

Let us think of the wise people we have known.  They may not have been the smartest people in the world.  They might not have been the best informed.  They just happened to be the people who know how life works, what matters most, how to live with things in proper perspective.

One application for today’s living is based on the wisdom of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement in 18th Century England.  His wisdom is timeless, I suggest, when it comes to money.  As we talk these days about our economic woes let us listen to this voice calling out from the past to “wise up.”  We know the three basic rules outlined by him in a sermon entitled, “The Use of Money:” gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can.  But, we need to realize that this ethic grows from his basic orientation in life that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.

So, when we gain all we can that must be done in the context of loving others.  Yes, make all you can by diligence, ingenuity, and excellence, Wesley says; strive for superior quality.  But everything we accept today as necessary components of an economic system built on cutthroat competition would have been unholy in Wesley’s eyes, and unwise.  It destroys the fabric of society, the commonality of the common good.  The brutality of our way of doing business contradicts one of Wesley’s other laws, “Do no harm.”  Now, try to preach that in today’s marketplace and you will be laughed off the trading floor.  And yet, here we are, paying for our transgressions.

Save all you can.  That is not just a matter of prudent expenditures but a proper valuing of what matters.  Elective consumption was not high on Wesley’s list of things to do.  He would have been a dreadful companion on a shopping trip.  But the wisdom of knowing when enough is enough, is that not something for which we yearn?  When we are able to see how love binds all things together in perfect harmony, as Paul writes to the Colossians, we can judge the value of things as well as the cost.

Give all you can.  That needs no explanation.  If we love our neighbor as ourselves then wealth becomes an opportunity for distribution, not accumulation.  As we see the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in our country, we know that it is not the way God intends it to be.  The economic choices we make reflect the wisdom we have about how things fit together – for better or for worse.

I was surprised the other day to find a savage poem by Wendell Berry.  Wendell Berry, the gentlest of authors, also a farmer, who for over fifty years has written some of the most poignant, and often subtle, poetry, essays, and fiction about modern life.  But sometimes his gentleness is overcome by righteous indignation.  A few stanzas of his poem, “Questionnaire:” 

How much poison are you willing
      to eat for the success of the free
      market and global trade?  Please
      name your preferred poisons. 
      In the name of patriotism and
      the flag, how much of our beloved
      land are you willing to desecrate?
      List in the following spaces
      the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
      you could most readily do without. 
      State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
      the energy sources, the kinds of security,
      for which you would kill a child.
      Name, please, the children whom
      you would be willing to kill.

Seeing how things fit together – sometimes wisdom can make us ferocious in our outrage over the way things are.

Though more often, if we do not look too closely, if we choose to be unwise, we can avoid outrage.  For instance, we are told that unemployment in our country is at about 10%.  Of course, if we are without a job, it is 100%, and all perspective is lost.  But within that general statistic, 10%, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, Boston, is buried the fact that for those with incomes above $150,000 the unemployment rate is 3%. For those whose annual income is under $12,500 the rate is 31%.  Mainly young, mainly blue-collar, predominantly African-American men.  That is a population forgotten in the conventional wisdom of 10%.  The report quotes an unnamed labor secretary of the 1960’s, who, when asked, “How are workers doing ‘on average’?” answered, “When you have your head in the freezer and your feet in the oven, on average you are doing okay.”

Wisdom calls us to see things in perspective, how things fit together.  That requires taking a step back, looking at a larger horizon, seeing more people, seeing more forces at work, seeing where loving one’s neighbor challenges the conventional wisdom in our culture that the individual, the self, is all that matters.

One of my favorite laments comes from T. S. Eliot: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”  Living in this “information age” does not make us wiser.  Being well-educated does not guarantee it, either.  But wisdom calls to us, “Wise up!  See how things fit together.”  That, ultimately, is the religious task; that, simply, is what we are called to do.  Amen.