September 21, 2003 - Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
    NRSV KJV
Mark 9:30-37
    NRSV KJV CEV

“A Word to BECOME Wise”

The old proverb reads, “A word to the wise is sufficient.” So if I speak a word to the wise person that individual will immediately learn from it and reflect it in the way he or she lives. This seems to go hand-in-hand with James’ words, “Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.” The question here then must be how does one become wise? A word to the wise may be sufficient, but first there must be a word to BECOME wise.

First, what is wisdom – what does it mean to be wise? Our friend Webster tells us that wisdom is accumulated knowledge and the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships. That is, a wise person not only knows something, but is able to apply what is known in the best manner possible. Perhaps that is why elsewhere in the Bible we hear that “the fear (read awe) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The one who knows who she or he is in relationship to God and to others has laid the foundation of wisdom.

When one is willing to enter into God’s service there is an implied openness to being what God has called one to be. For some odd reason we have tended to forget this basic understanding of what it means to believe. When we think of spiritual wisdom or believing and equate it with intellectual assent to a series of theological propositions we’ve missed the point of what it’s about.  The theologian Marcus Borg has addressed this rather well in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. He points out, I think, the way of true wisdom which begins with believing in the right way. Borg says, “I want . . . [to talk] about a very familiar Christian phrase – believing in Jesus – and how it is related to the image of Christian life that has emerged. . . . For those who grew up in the church, believing in Jesus was important. For me what that phrase used to mean, in my childhood and early adulthood, was ‘believing things about Jesus.’ To believe in Jesus meant to believe what the Gospels and the church said about Jesus. That was easy when I was a child, and became more and more difficult as I grew older. But now I see that believing in Jesus can (and does) mean something different from that. The change is pointed to by the root meaning of the word believe. Believe did not originally mean believing a set of doctrines or teachings; its Greek and Latin roots mean ‘to give one’s heart to.’ The heart is the self at the deepest level. Believing, therefore, does not consist of giving one’s mental assent to something, but involves a much deeper level of one’s self. Believing in Jesus doesn’t mean believing doctrines about him. Rather it means giving one’s heart at its deepest level.” [p. 137] I think Borg is absolutely correct here, however he doesn’t take it to the next appropriate level. To give one’s heart to Jesus is to want to identify with the way of life that Jesus lived – he was the servant.

When we begin to enter into that understanding of what it means to believe – and at that point we begin to be wise – we are moving from a secondhand to a firsthand relationship with God. We are no longer talking about what others have said, or what others have experienced, or what others have known. Rather, we are living in relationship with the God who has made and sustains the world and everything within it. To be open to God in this kind of a living, breathing relationship is going to affect the way we live everyday. One cannot be in touch with the living God and not be changed in attitude, behavior, and way of thinking – it’s just impossible, unless we’re unwilling to allow the relationship to have its true effect.

Let me also digress for just a moment to remind us that Christianity is, ultimately, a mystical approach to religious faith. Now what do I mean by that? Well, contemporary Christianity has gotten into this notion that Christianity is all about “living a good life.” Well, yes, there is that element to it – but it’s entirely the natural byproduct of the mystical relationship. When we worship, when we pray, when we open our minds and hearts in reading the Bible we’re engaging in something mystical. The word ‘mystical’ simply means, “having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence.” The idea that we are in relationship with One who is the source of all being and who gives meaning and definition to our lives is an exercise in mysticism. Everyday, ordinary garden variety Christians like you and me are mystics – being a mystic isn’t about levitating or glowing in the dark. Rather, it’s about entering into relationship with the One who is beyond our senses and above our intelligence.

Wisdom is not only being able to know the truth of the mystery of God present in our lives, but then to live it. Remember that wisdom involves applying what we know. What has happened in Christianity – and this is the case for both East and West – is that we have forgotten this truth and, as a result, we have started to stress orthodoxy (right belief) over orthopraxis (right practice). If we’re engaged in a living relationship orthopraxis will show itself and orthodoxy will be there in proper proportion. What I mean when I say that is this – I’ve known a great number of people who have been pristinely orthodox in their belief, but one would never have known it without talking to them. In short, their belief didn’t show in the way they lived. As James reminds us, “the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.” So orthopraxis flows out of orthodoxy, because to have the latter without the former is hypocrisy.

I think our Puritan ancestors are a good example of the orthodoxy/orthopraxis question. While Perry Miller’s class text on the Puritans may be titled Orthodoxy in Massachusetts it is fairly clear that their first concern was orthopraxis – the Puritans wanted to live the faith. Perhaps that’s why they formed a commonwealth, because they were devoted to living out their faith for the common good? I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the concept of the common good. It’s a notion that was one of the great building blocks of the American experience and it certainly is predicated on the covenant concept that is the great continuing motif of both Testaments.

As I said, this idea of the common good was very much on the minds of our Puritan forebears as they entered on their “errand into the wilderness.” As they prepared to land on the shores of the new world the Pilgrims penned these words of their compact on board the Mayflower: “. . . in the presence of God, and one of another, [we] covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony. . .” The common good was at the core of what they undertook and they were able to see that because they had values that they shared. There was a sense of commonality that held them in community; which is why Governor Winthrop would make the biblical allusion that all would look to us as “to a city set upon a hill.”

If you read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written back in the 1830s, or at least look at Robert Bellah’s wonderful book Habits of the Heart for excerpts, you will see a pluralist America that still had shared values. Those shared values, virtues if you will, grew out of the theological virtues of faith, of hope, and of gratitude – because God had been trustworthy we could act in a trustworthy manner. So we held to the notion of individual freedom within the framework of the common good. We held to the dignity and value of human life. We valued the community enough to take the time to give of ourselves so that it would be a better place. That is the reason why there are so many fraternal and service organizations – it’s a question of gratitude, the desire to return a bit in thankfulness for what we have been given so abundantly.

At the core of those shared values was the unexpressed, but very present, openness that was made possible because of the covenant we had entered into, first on board the Mayflower, and then through documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its ‘Bill of Rights.’ The ultimate ground of that covenant concept, however, was expressed by God in saying, “I will be with you.” And it was reiterated again in the person and in the work of Jesus Christ, who brought those words into human flesh and human actions – “I will be with you.” There is that common value of being there for one another, a value that even allows us to dissent and to disagree with one another. Still, we say that we’ll be here and that we’ll stand with one another.

For some reason we keep forgetting what it is that makes us a people, I guess the same amnesia afflicts us and makes us forget what we’re to be as Christians, too. Former senator Bill Bradley is quoted in Eric Mount’s Covenant, Community, and the Common God: An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (a wonderful book that I hope we’ll have a chance to explore at some point). Bradley addresses the need to revitalize our sense of public-spiritedness that applies directly to us as a church community, especially if we hope to be what we say we are and have an effect in the life of the larger community we’re to serve. He said, “One way to encourage such responsibility is to give the distinctive moral language of civil society a more permanent place in our public conversation. The language of the marketplace says, ‘get as much as you can for yourself.’ The language of government says, ‘legislate for others what is good for them.’ But the language of community, family, and citizenship at its core is about receiving undeserved gifts. What this nation needs to promote is the spirit of giving something freely without measuring it out precisely or demanding something in return.” [p. 148] Now think about what he just said about “undeserved gifts.” Our lives are filled with them, especially our Christian lives – isn’t the common definition of grace “unmerited favor”?  How do we act on what Bradley has said? We live wisely – we live lives of service to God and others for the common good.

What about the common good here on Church Street? Every year we go through the annual stewardship pledge drive. Every year we look at budgets and haggle about what has to stay and what has to go. We talk about “living within our means” and get testy with one another because this is a “sensitive issue” because it touches our pocket books and nobody wants that. Well, beloved in the Lord, I think if our only concern in stewardship is the “bottom line” of funding the budget and not how we live our total lives, we might as well shut the doors because we’ve forgotten what it means to be God’s people, we’ve left the covenant. If we come to that point then our focus and our reliance has gone from being on God to being on ourselves – and that must surely fail.

On the other hand, if we really believe – remember what believing means, to give one’s heart at the deepest level – then we will serve and give whatever it takes to accomplish what we believe God is calling us to be. Churches never have money problems, they only have faith problems. Money is secondary to faith. As James so powerfully says, “You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” I believe that we need to ask boldly and for the right reason – that we might become the community God wants us to be, a servant community, a community imbued with spiritual wisdom.

The issue now becomes what does that community look like and how do we achieve it? We need to discern those things as the covenant community we are. So, I will ask you to take your time next Sunday afternoon and be present for the ‘visioning’ time we will have together. The goal is to emerge from that meeting with four broad goals that we want to accomplish in a four year period. If we are to be truly wise, to be the people God wants us to be then we must ask rightly and must be willing to be the servants of all.