August 16, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Waken Up

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 111
1 Kings 3:3–14
Ephesians 5:15–20

“Live, not as unwise people but as wise.”

Ephesians 5:15 (NRSV)

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Carl Jung

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Thus says the character Touchstone in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, an interesting paradox to frame our meditations this morning.

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Maybe it becomes particularly interesting when we remember that the character of Touchstone is a fool in the duke’s court, so perhaps there is something self-serving in the paradox for him. But it is that topic of wisdom that the scriptures we heard read this morning invite us to reflect on. The three texts in their own way speak to us about wisdom, the meaning of wisdom, our encounter with wisdom—beginning with the story of Solomon, as he follows his father, David, as king of the united kingdom of Israel and his earnest prayer to God for wisdom in his reign. He prays for an ability to discern between good and evil.

Psalm 111 is a psalm that seems to be a collection of sayings sometimes disparate, perhaps not totally connected, and yet with that complex and famous line at the end, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Then in the letter to the early church in Ephesus, we hear the exhortation by the writer to the church, “Live, not as unwise people but as wise.” As is so often the case in biblical themes, the concept of wisdom is not necessarily a unified one. It’s multilayered, but it is an important theme running through the scriptures. The case of Solomon is itself one of great complexity. Solomon, in the popular imagination, has over time become a symbol of wisdom; we speak of the wisdom of Solomon. Some scholars believe that during Solomon’s reign the wisdom literature that we have in the scripture developed, much of it even being assigned to Solomon: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon)—a whole genre of literature that we know today as wisdom literature. And yet ironically the story that is told in 1 Kings about Solomon’s rule is far from being suffused with wisdom; Solomon’s is a disastrous reign. In Solomon’s time as king are the sowing of the seeds of disunity and the eventual development of northern and southern kingdoms. But more than that, scholars believe Solomon is sowing the seeds for the eventual calamity of exile. Solomon’s wisdom, one commentator says, “is more than counterbalanced by Solomon’s foolish policies of taxation and forced labor.” “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool,” says Touchstone.

“Live, not as unwise people but as wise.” What might that mean from the writer of the letter to the Ephesians? It’s often noted that wisdom is different from knowledge or intelligence. Dietrich Bonheoffer reflected on this in one of his letters. “To understand reality,” he wrote, “is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things.” There is a shift here from knowledge as a base of wisdom to perception or seeing as the basis for wisdom. Desmond Tutu once wrote, “We need those who are wise in the ways of the Spirit who will instruct us all how to be in touch with the source of all being who will teach us how to be truly human.” So when we reflect on this theme of wisdom, we are being drawn to concepts like the essential nature of things, the source of all being, what it means to be fully human. This wisdom business seems to want to engage us in asking some of the big questions of life, the universe, and everything, as they used to say.

What is the model of wisdom that we get from Ephesians? We can find something in verse seventeen: the church is asked to “understand what the will of the Lord is.” We’ve even been given some practical advice at verse eighteen: in a bold statement, the writer says, “Do not get drunk.” Good advice, of course. I know some of you are dealing with the irony that this Scottish preacher known occasionally to like a little tipple of single malt be offered the opportunity to preach on the text “do not get drunk.” I am inclined to side with the writer Richard Ward, who asks in his reflection on this passage, “What, drunkenness? Pardon me, but is that all?” He goes on to ask, “Is the preacher’s sermon going to be about behaving ourselves at happy hour? No,” he says, “the deeper concern of the writer is that the church of Jesus Christ would be so foolish as to miss what the will of God for it is.” If that is the case—if this is about seeking to understand God’s will—then we’re in the realm of vocation, of where God calls us, not just in our own personal journey of faith, but as a community of faith, as a church. “What is wisdom, exactly?” asks the writer Douglass Burton-Christie. He offers two signposts for us: the first is that wisdom is the “experiential understanding of how to live, how to live deeply, happily, in harmony with God, self, neighbor, cosmos.” And then underlying this is the openness to “the deeper pattern and rhythm of things, the mystery at the heart of all that is.” Wisdom then is “about being open to God, present to us in the midst of life.”

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams picks up on this in his book Where God Happens, in his reflections on the life of the desert fathers. Williams says, “To be a real agent of God, to connect with the neighbor, each of us needs to know the truth about him or herself,” and so in this wisdom thing, there is something about self-knowledge that is required in order for us to be open to this understanding of how to live. Or as Jung says, it is to go “inside, then we will awake.”

Antonio Machado, a Spaniard, is a new poet to me. In one of his poems he references Jesus in this way: “All your words were one word: wake up.” Wake up. One word. Wake up to neighbor. Wake up to self. Wake up to the reality of the presence of the kingdom.

I love the writings of Esther de Waal, an Anglican religious in a Cistercian order in England. She says this about the Cistercian rule of prayer: “The daily framework of prayer starts in the dark in the hours before dawn. Its name, Vigils, is significant for it is the daily call and commitment to be vigilant, awake, aware, alert.”

I shared something of an experience of this with a group of folks connected to this congregation as we went to Guatemala on a mission trip at the end of July. We traveled to the beautiful town of Antigua, Guatemala, to partner with a program that has its headquarters in Minnesota but its campus in Antigua, a group called Common Hope. Common Hope’s mission is to use education as a way of helping people to get on the first rungs of the steps out of poverty, and so as we partnered with them, working with teachers and social workers, we built houses for people who are part of the program. We were an intergenerational group: our youngest participant was fifteen, our oldest somewhere north of seventy. Each evening after we had done our work, gone on our visits, we would gather for evening devotions led by our spiritual director, Sue Schemper. Sue invited us to reflect on what it meant to waken up, to discover the engagement between what was happening outside as we encountered poverty different from what most of us have seen before and how that related to our own sense of being and humanity.

An interesting thing happened: our devotions each evening took place on a covered balcony open to the elements. We were situated right beside a major road out of the town of Antigua. We soon discovered that as we sought to hold this sacred space for silence and prayer and reflection we were being interrupted by the sound of the chicken buses and the lorries and the cars and the motorcycles zipping up and down the road outside where we were seeking to be inner and reflective. And one night we agreed that we wouldn’t let the sound bother us, because we woke up to the realization that the people driving the buses and in the buses and on the motorcycles were the very people we had come in order to be in relationship with. We accepted the reality, and in fact that became a part of what it was to have that kind of devotional time, because wisdom—this waking up that we seek to engage in—isn’t abstract. It’s not about some fluffy warm concept of spirituality; rather it is grounded in relationship. Rowan Williams says, “We love with God only when we are the conduit for God’s reconciling presence with the person next to us, our neighbor.”

“All your words were one word: wake up.” Wake up. Live, not as unwise people but as wise. Wake up to God’s presence and God’s calling within you. Wake up to a world crying out for love and reconciliation. Wake up to your interconnectedness with the whole of creation.

A guru asked his disciples how they could tell when the night had ended and the day begun. One said, “When you see an animal in the distance and can tell whether it is a cow or a horse.”

“No,” said the guru.

“When you look at a tree in the distance and can tell if it is a neem tree or a mango tree.” “Wrong again,” said the guru.

“Well then what is it?” asked his disciples.

“When you look into the face of any man and recognize your brother in him; when you look into the face of any woman and recognize in her your sister. If you cannot do this, no matter what time it is by the sun, it is still night.”

Amen.