Hilton Head Island, SC – April 28, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 90:1-17; Ecclesiastes 1:1-7, 18-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. – Psalm 90:12; For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. – Ecclesiastes 1:18 (RSV)
There is a large section of the Hebrew Bible that is called “The Wisdom Literature.” It consists of the following books: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, which is sometimes also called the Song of Songs. How the latter book even made it into the Bible, let alone into the section of Wisdom literature, only God knows. In fact, God is probably mystified how the Song of Solomon ever received the seal of Jewish canonical approval in the first place, because it is the closest thing to an X-rated book as is to be found in all of holy writ. Having told you that, you can hurry home to read it this afternoon, but you must read all of it. And when you do, I hope you’ll report your thoughts to me as to why the Jews ever allowed it into the canon of the Hebrew Bible. But there it is, for all the world to lust over.
Apart from the fifth of the five books in the Wisdom section of the Bible, the other four are well and accurately described. There is a great deal of wisdom to be found in the pages of these books. Today we are looking at the nature of wisdom, and we shall focus on particular passages from Psalm 90 and the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.
The word “philosophy” from the Greek literally means “love of wisdom.” The female name “Sophia” means “Wisdom.” There was a famous character in German literature known as Nathan der Weise: Nathan the Wise.
The surname “Wise” is fairly common, and the name “Wiseman” less so. In the Hilton Head area phone book there are a dozen listings for Wise, and three for Wiseman. Wisdom is something to which many people aspire, but it is very debatable how many actually acquire it.
Historically, and in many traditional cultures, wisdom has been associated with older people. We might generally agree that most of the people we know or know about who have wisdom also tend to be older folks. However, some people in their twenties have considerable wisdom and some people in their eighties seem altogether devoid of this highly prized trait, if we properly speak of it as a trait. I would note this: many of the advisers of many current American politicians are astonishingly young. Might that be a factor in why politics and politicians are currently held in such low esteem?
Further to carry through on that idea, for all of us there are a small number of people we would like to be President, because we believe they have great wisdom. There are others we think are very ill-suited to high office, because every indication of wisdom seems successfully to have eluded them. Likewise we would hope for wisdom in leaders of business, education, medicine, research, and every other field of human endeavor. Wisdom obviously isn’t a necessity in every occupation or profession, but it certainly is a great bonus among those who possess it.
What is the origin of wisdom? Can people set out to acquire it? Ultimately wisdom may be a gift from beyond, and ultimately every such gift is divinely-bestowed. It is God who grants wisdom to anyone who has it. And just as not everyone is a great musician or artist or singer or baseball player or whatever else, not everyone has the gift of wisdom.
Listen to some words about wisdom by the Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. “Intelligence is not enough. To move from intelligence to wisdom requires us to temper our smarts and book-learning with what life itself teaches. It is precisely this element of experience that leads us to consider older people wise; we rarely see that word applied to the young.” Mr. Dionne continues, “But once again, there is need for caution. If we frequently say that older people are wise, we also often hear the assertion that they are ‘stuck in their ways.’ Much that passes for ‘wisdom’ is actually ‘conventional wisdom,’ which John Kenneth Galbraith defines as ‘the ruling ideas of the time.’”
In all those words there is a lot of wisdom. Wisdom is not just knowledge. Rather it is what we do with the knowledge we have, or perhaps more correctly, what we conclude on the basis of that knowledge. Further, while wisdom may be affected by widespread affirmations, it is willing to take its own course regardless of what passes for “conventional wisdom.”
Essayist Kenneth Minogue also offers some thoughts about the nature of wisdom. He says, “Wisdom, like prudence, is not only a virtue in itself, but a regulator of other virtues. It consists in such judgments as to whether it is better to spend or save, to fight or flee, or whether discretion is the better part of valor. Wisdom is to be found in all cultures. And it commonly issues in a set of proverbs and epigrams to which all of us have access. But these proverbial utterances often – and rightly – contradict each other. Many hands make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth. The real secret of wisdom, then, lies in judging which rule is appropriate to which situation.”
Writer Micah Marty, the son of church historian Martin Marty, who is the smartest and one of the wisest men I ever met personally, gave a short and powerful observation about wisdom. “As to the source of wisdom,” said Micah Marty, “numerous people are credited with the phrase, ‘Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.’”
We may deduce from all this that if wisdom is to be helpful, of necessity it must be situational. That is, the wise must be able to deal with the unique circumstances of every situation. For example, should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be tried as an American citizen or as an enemy combatant? Which is the wiser course of action to follow? Should the Pope open a discussion on married and female priests, which presumably he opposes, or should he keep the question under tight wraps, which is what has happened for the past thousand years? What does wisdom suggest? It is an open, and situational, question.
Bill Clinton wrote the introduction to Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, which has just been published. In it President Clinton wrote, “I once asked (President) Mandela to describe his long walk from prison to president. ‘When you’re young and strong,’ he told me, ‘you can stay alive on your hatred. And I did, for many years.’” Mr. Clinton continues to quote Mr. Mandela, referring to his jailers, “I realized they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. Those things they could not take away….And I decided not to give them away.”
President Clinton went on in his moving summary of the life of his very good friend President Mandela, “so Mandela’s story is really the story of those two things he never gave away: his brilliant mind and his great heart.” Then he observed that “the nature of the victory over apartheid in South Africa had two essential elements: reconciling with the people who had marshaled the horrible forces of apartheid and sharing power with them. It is not hard to see that power-sharing was the product of his bright mind and reconciliation the very image of his big heart.”
Nelson Mandela is surely one of the greatest – and the wisest – people of our lifetime. Without him, South Africa would probably still be a continual hotbed of violence and racial bloodshed. It is certainly not a tranquil democracy, but it is a far better country because of its first black president than it would otherwise be. His wisdom has been essential in overcoming apartheid.
Samuel Wells is the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in London. He wrote an article about forgiveness and God’s justice in a recent issue of Christian Century. In it he said, “Forgiveness shouldn’t be the last thing Christians have to say in the face of injustice. It should be the first thing. Forgiveness says, ‘You can hurt me, but you can’t take away my allegiance to Christ. You can be cruel to me, but you can’t make me become like you. You can crush me, but you can’t put yourself outside the mercy of God.’” Then he asks, “Why do we forgive? Because forgiveness is the justice of God….That’s why a society that has forgotten how to forgive can never be truly just.”
Nelson Mandela, a very wise man, personally moved South Africa out of the hatred of apartheid and the white race into a much more just state, because he forgave those who had wronged him and his fellow black citizens. Are the American people willing to forgive Muslim extremists who attack and kill our citizens? Can we be a truly just nation if we do not truly forgive those who deliberately and cruelly wrong us? Or do we suppose that in order to be strong, we must never forgive terrorism or terrorists? And if so, is that wise? Is it?
Whoever wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes was a fascinating and complex man. He also was a very wise man, but his wisdom was unlike the wisdom of most other wise people. His was an ironic wisdom, a sardonic wisdom. He said, “I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly….For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”
Those are not cheerful words. They exhibit a highly chastened level of mental and spiritual advancement. The more we know, the more we have to make allowances for the foibles and follies of our fellow beings, as well as for own foibles and follies. It is a bit much to say that all is vanity, but lots of actions are vanity, and we must learn to overlook it. If we don’t, we will either become perpetually angry or perpetually berserk.
In the superscription before the first verse of Psalm 90, it says that this Psalm was written by Moses. It is the only Psalm to make that assertion. Its overall theme is that God is with us throughout our entire life, however short or long that may be. The great English hymnodist Isaac Watts paraphrased Psalm 90 as one of the best-known hymns in the English language, O God, our help in ages past, which we sang earlier this morning.
Moses, or whoever else might have composed the psalm, said, “The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore.” We may expect to live seventy or eighty years. “Yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” That isn’t too cheerful an observation either. This section of the psalm ends with these sober and sobering words: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” No one can be genuinely wise, the writer postulates, who is able to delude himself into believing that life goes on forever, because it doesn’t.
In the same issue of Christian Century which had the previously cited article, there was another article by Gilbert Meilaender, who teaches at Valparaiso University in Indiana. He recently wrote a book called Should We Live Forever? The Ethical Ambiguities of Aging. The article was adapted from the book, and it was called Thirst for life: Do we really want to live forever? In it he recalled a character in a Wallace Stegner novel whose “last Christmas letter contained a line that should be engraved above every geriatric door: He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man with something the matter with him.”
Written into our genetic code is something the matter with all of us. It is called death. We need for God to teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom. The older we get, the more likely we shall discover “something is the matter with us.” Thus Prof. Meilaender ends his treatise by saying, “(W)e can and should think it is a blessing that our lives are of limited duration – not because this life is not good, but because it cannot finally bring the completion needed for us truly to flourish….There is sometimes good reason, as we age, to feel that something is the matter with us. There is also good reason to feel that we are young – with the youthfulness of eternity.” In other words, this life isn’t the whole story. Eternal life is the whole story. Presumably wisdom leads us to discover that.
Finally, allow me to make four observations about the nature of wisdom. There certainly are more than four things that can be said, but I do want to verbalize these four.
One. Wisdom accepts what can’t be changed. It doesn’t waste energy by railing against what is a hope for something better that might be, but won’t be. Wisdom is the Serenity Prayer, and the Serenity Prayer is an important facet of wisdom: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the ability to change the things I can change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Two. Wisdom takes the long view, not the short view. Too often we want too much too quickly. Patience leads us to know that improvement in others, in the world, or in ourselves takes time, and we only stymie ourselves by wanting short-term results for long-term problems.
Three. Wisdom extols human virtue, and accepts human frailty. None of us is perfect, and none of us is a total failure. We are all something in between. To be wise is to acknowledge and even to affirm that reality.
Four. Wisdom always seeks to align itself with what it perceives to be God’s will. We might be mistaken in what we think God’s will is, but to the degree that we can discern it, we would be wise to try to follow it. Not to do so is inevitably to bring trouble and heartache upon ourselves, and why would any wise person want to do that?
“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” “So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom.”