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.”
In Proverbs, God, personified as Lady Wisdom, pulls out all the stops in a desperate effort to get the“willfully ignorant” to turn in to the feast of wisdom and live. This past week I was in a high transmission part of the country, but one where almost everyone… even families with little kids… wandered the grocery store without masks. I wanted to tell Lady Wisdom to yell louder! It actually felt even more ominous to me than that, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were pushing their carts down the aisles beside them and they were completely oblivious! Times like these tend to stir up those cryptic and sometimes creepy sorts of biblical imagery.
I looked and saw a giant white horse blazing into the sky. Its rider carried immeasurable wealth and was given a victory garland. He rode off victorious, conquering right and left. Then another horse, this one red. The rider bringing violence to the earth, a 13 year old shooting another on their first day back to school. The rider carried more guns than there are people to carry them. Then I looked and saw a black horse this time. Its rider carried a globe of the earth, engulfed in wild fire, heat, and cyclones. And finally a colorless horse, sickly pale. Its rider was Covid, and the Anti-vaxers were close on its heels. Together the four were given power to destroy a fourth of the earth by way of gun violence, climate change, pandemic, and the wealthy devouring the poor.
The fact that both Proverbs and Revelation don’t seem too far off from our current news cycle doesn’t mean THE END IS NEAR. What it means that we humans continue to make the same mistakes that humans made back in the time of Proverbs and in the time of Revelation. We remain stuck as a species in a terrible, reoccurring cycle of self inflicted abuse. The imagery, the language, and the costumes change over time but the plot to this same old story just seem to go on forever in reruns.
All of which likely leaves you thinking: Thanks for the uplifting, return-from-vacation-happy and refreshed sermon, pastor! And you’d be right… if I stopped there. But that’s not where the author of Proverbs left it, nor where John of Patmos left Revelation, and it can’t be where Erik of Sheffield leaves it either. You see, people then and now write this way desperately longing for humanity to finally SEE what they are doing to themselves so that they can break out of it once and for all. Freed from this horrible merry go round, people who write this way know that the world can be what we pray for it to be each week, “God’s Kingdom come, God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” … a world where everyone has enough. Not some having too much and others having too little, but everyone, without exception, having enough. Enough food, shelter, clothing, health, love, dignity, respect, and purpose.
Which is why John of Patmos didn’t end his Revelation with the creepy horsemen and Lady Wisdom didn’t stop calling for the people to turn in and live! Instead, both offered a path forward into a new way of living. Lady Wisdom called that path following the Law… the Law which Jesus later summed up as Loving God and Loving Neighbor. “Walking in the way of insight” as Proverbs says, is just another way of saying DO what Jesus did! John of Patmos called that path the Way of the Lamb. A path of relentlessly living our lives as Jesus lived his. In both cases, it is a life of self giving love for our neighbor… with compassion and an active hands-on, all-in sort of kindness and compassion for the least, the lost and the last of our world.
So it is true. There are indeed people“without sense” as Proverbs put it. It is true. The news does often look as menacing as four scary horsemen… AND there is HOPE. Now, will OUR time be THE time humanity finally stops punching itself in the face? No idea. But there is something we can do while we watch and see. We can walk the path that Proverbs and John remind us is our hope. Live each day as if God’s Kingdom is already fully here. Live each day walking in Wisdom. Loving God. Loving neighbor, putting the needs of others before our own. That way of living does not deny the reality of our present, but it does defiantly proclaim that this present reality is not where the story ends! Because whether “those without sense” choose to “Lay aside immaturity, and live” and finally choose to “walk in the way of insight” this time or not, God WILL get God’s way in the end. God’s Kingdom WILL come. God’s will, WILL be done, on earth as it is in heaven. God WILL get God’s way with this creation. Our job is just to keep walking in that direction until God gets us there!
I don’t know about you, but I will need some help with that from time to time. Sometimes I’ll need to be taken by the hand and coaxed into taking just one next step. Sometimes I’ll have enough to fake it until I become it, and sometimes, in a glorious and inexplicable gift of the Holy Spirit I will be mystically certain that everything’s gonna be alright.
You're probably better at walking that way than I am but then maybe you have those less than mystically certain days as well from time to time. Either way, let’s pray for more days for all of us filled with the Spirit’s mystical clarity. Let us celebrate together when we’re able to at least do a decent job faking it, and let us gently take each other by the hand when that next step is anything but clear. And remember the REAL end of the story… God’s gonna get God’s way! Amen.
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