The Search for Wisdom
Proverbs 8:1-31 and John 16:12-15
May 30, 2010
My confession this morning is this: I absolutely love our passage from Proverbs. Traditionally, the book of Proverbs is known for its witty quotations and wise sayings but we glimpse another side of the wisdom writers in our chapter today. Proverbs 8 expresses not concrete knowledge or specific maxims, but simply suggests that beauty exists in the search for wisdom. The paths we follow when seeking wisdom can be satisfying in themselves. The journey is the destination, as the popular saying goes.
Our passage has nice parallels with an old commercial many of us are familiar with. In it a cartoon boy holds in his hand a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop and asks a cow, “How many licks does it take to reach the Tootsie Roll center of a Toosie Pop?” “I don’t know,” says the cow, “I always bite it before I get to the center. Ask the fox he is cleverer than I!” The fox likewise is befuddled and encourages the boy to ask the turtle who is much older and more knowledgable. The turtle doesn’t know either so he sends the boy to the wise owl. The wise owl decides to test the question by taking the Tootsie Pop from the boy and counting the licks, “One…two…three...” Chomp! The owl bites right to the center of the candy. “Three!” the owl hoots, “three licks to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop.”
Even though I can’t help but feel sorry for the little boy everytime I see this commercial, it does have an instructive message that parallels our passage from Proverbs: The questions we carry on our journey in search of wisdom have a sweetness inherent in them, like the Tootsie Pop in the hand of the boy, but the answers we receive may be quite unexpected!
A completely different reason why I find Proverbs 8 to be quite inspiring is because it elevates the postion of humanity relative to other books of the Bible. Often we read the letters of Paul dealing with the depravity of humanity or hear stories that pinpoint our sinful natures—the lack of justice in Sodom and Gomorrah, the depravity that causes a worldwide flood, Adam and Eve giving in to temptation and greed.
But Proverbs and much of Wisdom literature elevates humanity. Our passage claims that we humans have the ability to gain sacred knowledge. More than God’s other creatures we have the remarkable sanction and responsibility to think deeply about the world in which we live and to find the best ways of caring for it.
The search for wisdom, we are told, is more precious than silver, more desirable than jewels or gold.
But how do we gain wisdom? To whom do we turn for insight, knowledge and help. Like the boy in the Tootsie Pop commercial, who are our wise owls, our insightful cows, our clever foxes and thoughtful turtles?
While there are innumerable forms of wisdom we as individuals and as a society may use when seeking answers in a complex world, there are only four I would like to discuss: folk wisdom, experiential wisdom, historical wisdom and spiritual/religious wisdom.
The first type is by far the most fun! Folk wisdom povides us with witty quotations and often very practical knowledge. Think back to the refrains your parents or grandparents used when you were a child. How many of you remember these sayings? Even better, let’s play a little game called complete the folk saying. Ready, here we go…
Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Honesty is the best policy.
Curiosity killed the cat.
Birds of a feather flock together.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Spare the rod, spoil the child.
And for you Forrest Gump fans…
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
Stupid is, as stupid does.
Wise folk sayings can be of comfort to us in times of difficulty. Often they provide us with the framework of our local cultures. They tell us what is expected, what the norms are, how to get by on a day-to-day basis.
However, often these traditional witticisms suffer from being too general to be taken in all circumstances and they can gloss over the complexities of life. For instance, how many times has absence not made people’s hearts grow fonder, but rather has caused people to drift apart and find other loved ones to be with?
Or what of “spare the rod, spoil the child”? It may sound good to our ears and often can lead to short term successes in controlling behavior. But according numerous scientific reports, including one from the Phoenix Children’s Hospital in Arizona, repeated spankings and corporal punishments of children “puts children at risk for negative outcomes, including increased aggression, antisocial behavior, mental health problems and physical injury.” This seems to be a case of ancient folk wisdom uneasily brushing up against our modern scientific world.
Another tye of wisdom that we often call upon to help guide us through our lives is experiential wisdom. We learn by doing, as the saying goes. As we experience the world we grapple with the old and the new—what we have been taught clashes with what we have experienced and these interactions of old and new helps us form our view of the world.
One example from my own life that immediately comes to mind is the year I spent volunteering in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Having grown up in a world of privilege and access, and then living in an impovershed area of Belfast drastically reformed my view of the world. When I experienced the lives of those in poverty, of those suffering from abusive parents, or living with drug addictions, or who were constantly seeing and feeling the affects of hatred and sectarianism, my life and my perspective on how the world works was permanently alterned. This is experiential wisdom and it often comes from taking ourselves out of our comfort zones and living in unexpected and unplanned ways.
When we live life creatively, when we open ourselves to new experiences, when we journey to new places, meet new people, and bounce around new ideas in our heads, we gain vitally important experiential wisdom. The drawback of this wisdom is also its exciting promise—nothing is ever sure or cut-and-dried. There is always the possibility for changing our perspectives, for growing in knowledge, for reforming our views of the world.
This Memorial Day weekend is a helpful reminder of a third type of wisdom—historical wisdom. In the United States often our historical wisdom is framed by great figures in our nation’s history. Generals and presidents, legislators and professors, diplomats and rabble-rousers. And what wonderful remarks and eloquent quotations we have from the past two hundred and thirty odd years of American history. Many of our historical words of wisdom probably still bring chills to our spines…
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The mouths, documents, and monuments from which these words emanate define what our country stands for, what its history has been and where it sees itself in the future.
But there is at least one problem with historical wisdom. It tends, especially in our partisan era, to be easily politicized. A perfect example in today’s world can be seen in the use of Thomas Jefferson‘s words. By some who worry about the size of government these Jeffersonian words are elevated: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild, and government to gain ground."
By others who don’t mind more government involvement and who instead fear the power and money of private corporations, these words of Jefferson are lifted up: “...the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.”
While historical wisdom provides us the wonderful opportunity to converse with the great figures of the past, it also has the disadvantage of being too easily misused and too selectively chosen. Consequently, historical wisdom must be treated with care and caution, lest we put words and beliefs in the mouths of historical persons that they never intended to be there.
A final type of wisdom which we may seek in our journeys of life is spiritual or religious wisdom. This type not only helps us live fruitful lives on earth, but also helps us maintain contact with the spiritual realm of existence. On a pop culture level, this is exemplified well by our little green friend from the Star Wars movies, Yoda. Yoda guides his young protégé Luke Skywalker on his journey to greater connection with the Force by giving him witty spiritual remarks, such as…
"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."
On a more serious note, we Presbyterians have a wonderful gift of spiritual and religious wisdom in our Book of Confessions. This document, which is part of our church constitution, contains eleven documents which explain the theological and ethical problems the church has confronted over time and how it has attempted to solve them.
The Confessions are not perfect documents, they show their age and environments all too often, but they also provide a great window into the history of our family of faith—from the initial Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds, through the turmoil of the Reformation era, to the church’s response to the threat of Nazi Germany, to the violence of the two World Wars, and to the more recent environmental awareness of humanity’s destructive power. Our confessions are documents that span time and culture, region and religion.
And on top of our Presbyterian Confessions, we also have the books of the Bible themselves that help on our religious and spiritual wisdom journeys. Like our Confessional documents, our Bible is also time-bound and culturally influenced, but nevertheless it can still guide our insights and strengthen our wisdom and faith.
It is appropriate, I believe, that we finish our discussion today by venturing once again into the beautiful passage of Proverbs 8.
Often wisdom is seen by us humans as something to be grasped, or as a way that we as individuals become smarter, more intelligent, wittier. But our passage from Proverbs hints at something entirely different. Wisdom is surely something to be sought; and it is sought so we might become stronger in mind, body and spirit. But just as important, wisdom should reflect the way we interact with other people and the world. As verse 20 puts it, “[wisdom] walks in the way of righteousness, along the paths of justice.”
The purpose of wisdom is not to win arguments. Its goal is not to be smarter than the next person. The reason God granted us the gifts of wisdom and calls us to attain even greater insight is so that we may help the world become a better place. Our various forms of wisdom—religious, spiritual, popular, folk, historical, experiential—are to be used in ways that create a more just, more righteous, fairer, more equitable society.
To be wise is to use our gifts of wisdom for the betterment of the world. To be wise is continue to search for wisdom, realizing that our journey will never be complete, that it is a relentless pursuit, an interminable chase, an eternal search. But part of the fun and most of the growth is gained not in attaining the ever-elusive perfection of Wisdom, but in the search itself. So may you search for the beauty of wisdom for…
“Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
2On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand.
Amen.
Gershoff, Elizabeth T. "Report on Physical Punishment in the United States", Columbus, OH: Center for Effective Discipline.
