May 30, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Wisdom Incarnate

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
Proverbs 8:1–4, 22–36

“Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?
. . . To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.”

Proverbs 8:1, 4 (NRSV)

Wisdom is
so kind and wise
that wherever you may look
you can learn something
about God.

Why would not the omnipresent
teach that way?

Catherine of Siena

Last Sunday the church worldwide celebrated Pentecost, the day when the church received from God the gift of the Holy Spirit. We often say that the Holy Spirit, in its powerful movement, gave birth to the church. Today we celebrate Trinity Sunday. It is the day when Christians are challenged to remember that it was not only the church that the Holy Spirit called into being, but a great deal more. On this Trinity Sunday, scripture reminds us how ancient the Holy Spirit is. With the help of scripture, we can trace its history. The Spirit has been at work not from the time when the church was born, but from the beginning of time when the world was created.

We read this morning a passage from the book of Proverbs, in which we find the Spirit of God personified as what scholars call “Lady Wisdom.” Lady Wisdom says about herself, “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.” Furthermore, Lady Wisdom speaks in chapter 8 about being beside God when the mountains were shaped, the heavens established, the skies made firm, the seas formed, and the foundations of the earth marked out. Wisdom has been at God’s side, “like a master worker,” in the creation of the world.

All this is to say that the divine spirit of wisdom has been around from the beginning of time and is embedded in the world around us. Everywhere wisdom can be found: not only in nature, but in cities too; not only in the courts of kings, but also in the streets and marketplaces. Wisdom “takes her stand,” verse 2 tells us, “on the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads . . . and beside the gates.” She speaks to everyone everywhere so that no one can claim not to have heard her voice.

How frustrating, then, it must be when people do not take heed, when people do not listen to the wise counsel she offers. What an act of disrespect for one, who from the beginning of time has seen it all and been part of it all, to be ignored.

This description of Lady Wisdom, making herself accessible to everyone everywhere, is quite remarkable. If we contrast it with much of the Hebrew Bible, we find remarkably missing the kind of revelatory visions or special religious knowledge to which only prophets or priests have access. Along with the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, Proverbsfalls into the biblical genre of wisdom literature in which wisdom is ordinary knowledge derived from ordinary people. Although the book of Proverbs is attributed to King Solomon of Israel, scholars have shown that the instructions for living well that are recorded in Proverbs were formulated by countless generations of mothers and fathers over time. It is their “hard-won wisdom” about everything from “how to avoid bitter domestic quarrels to what to tell your children about sex and about God; what to do when somebody asks to borrow money; how to choose the right friends and be a good friend; how to make a living that is decent, both ethically and financially” (Ellen F. Davis, Westminster Bible Companion Commentary on Proverbs, p. 12).

These are common questions that all of us have raised or may someday raise. They are questions that I can remember my parents addressing and that, as a parent, I find myself addressing. In fact, I find myself trying to squeeze in as many of life’s important lessons as I can before my little girl begins to question my authority—an authority, for better or worse, based simply on my having lived longer than she.

In the book The Gift of Years, well-known writer Joan Chittister encourages readers to value the gift that old age can be. “In most societies,” she writes,

the elderly have been revered. In many cultures, only the elderly were considered fit to rule. They were the members of the community who were responsible for guiding everybody’s future because they had more knowledge about living, about history, about the memory of the group than all the others. More than that, they also had the benefit of years to help them show the younger members of the community how to live well after them. (p. 34)

As Chittister points out, experience seems to be less valued in our society today. We seem to neglect our “understanding that in the older generations resides insight that is lacking to the younger ones” (p. 35).

Many factors contribute to this. Perhaps the most obvious is that we live in a mobile society. Most of us have moved away from the towns and neighborhoods where our parents and their parents have lived. When we are fortunate enough to have parents to whom we can turn for some sage advice, we usually have to pick up the phone.

It is only on rare occasions anymore that all the living generations of families gather in one place. The most recent multigenerational family gathering that I have attended took place a few years ago on the occasion of my grandmother’s funeral. It had been years since our numerous family members had been together. What could have been a chaotic time for a large family was more orderly than I anticipated, because, it seemed, everyone knew their place. At the start of the funeral, my grandmother’s seven children took their seats; in the front pew sat the eldest son of my grandmother, with his family; behind them, my mother, who is the second eldest child, and her family sat; in the third pew, the third child and his family were seated; and so the order went. The same order was listed in the bulletin and was reflected again in the reception line. By the end of the funeral, everyone in attendance would have a good idea of who we were based on how we were related. In a social order in which being older than someone else matters, as in Korean society, it is quite easy to make decisions about where to sit, how to line up, how to address each other, and how to behave in relation to someone else. For that weekend, my cousins and I—all children of Korean immigrants—were more aware than ever that we were “the second daughter of the eldest daughter” or “the first son of the youngest son.” Knowing how to act required knowing how we fit into the social order, and it was the example of our parents’ generation that we followed.

There is a conservatism that characterizes a social order based on the value of respecting one’s elders. By conservatism, I mean a degree of deference and docility to the teachers of tradition. Any much-needed change in the ways people think and the values they uphold may take a long time and at times may need a prophet to speak for it. There is no doubt that such deference to tradition and conservatism permeates the book of Proverbs. Proverbs bespeaks a cautious attitude. From the outset, it states, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). The ethic of caution that Proverbs presents is very different from the passion of the prophets to overturn the status quo. By including both proverbs and prophecy, the Bible affirms the value of both.

And yet there is something quite radical about the ethic presented in Proverbs. As we noted earlier, Proverbs provides guidance that is grounded in God’s creation, and thus it is everywhere accessible to everyone. There is no mention in Proverbs of religious rites you must practice or divine revelations you must receive if you want to live wisely and well. The knowledge of Proverbs is no more extraordinary than the ordinary instruction given in homes by parents and in schools by teachers, and therein lies its radical potential. In situations where not everyone has access to privilege, wisdom is nevertheless available. Wisdom gained from life’s hardships, tried through the test of time, is the most reliable of all things. So trustworthy is such wisdom that even when everything else may be pushing down, words of the wise can lift us up, put us on the right track, and give us the power to persevere.

In an essay on what has made it possible for African American Christians to persevere, survive, and succeed despite deep racism in America, black theologian Dwight Hopkins, who not too long ago spoke here at Fourth Church, gives credit to black female theologians, womanists, for raising his consciousness of the powerful proverbial wisdom passed down by their black mothers, wisdom without which younger generations could never have survived, much less flourished. Quoting one of his elders, he writes that black mothers taught their children to believe in a God who can “take a crooked stick and hit a straight lick” and that “as long as we ‘keep on keeping on,’ spiritual and material demons would not have the last word” (Deeper Shades of Purple, p. 284). The proverbial sayings capture the essence of the wisdom these women gained when they, he writes,

picked cotton, worked as domestics, entered industrial jobs, used Vaseline as a medicinal cure-all, conjured success out of segregated schools, became the first to get college degrees, broke into politics and exclusive professions, held our churches together, stayed with some black men too long, and worked successfully with red, brown, yellow, and white brothers and sisters. Their faith in God and the future of their children helped them to hold on and forge ahead even when they thought they couldn’t hold on anymore. (p. 284)

The wisdom of generations of black mothers cannot be dismissed as insignificant or ineffectual. Through the work of womanist theology, their wisdom has been an indispensable force in empowering not just younger black women, but white women, Latina women, Asian women—women all over the world. Their lives are proof that wisdom can be eked out of every experience.

This past week the Presbyterian Church (USA) held its eleventh National Multicultural Church Conference. At this conference I had the opportunity to spend some time thinking with others about how seminary education might prepare future pastors and church leaders to do ministry in the twenty-first century. Seminaries need to train pastors for ministry not only in multicultural congregations, but also in an interfaith world. As the world seems to be shrinking, we—all of us—need to gain new insights and skills that will help us to navigate through a new interreligious landscape. To the participants in this discussion, it became apparent that a valuable resource for the church needs to be the wisdom of persons who have been able to persevere, survive, and even succeed in environments where they could not depend on privilege and power to do so. We need to be asking them about the skills they had to cultivate, about the wisdom they have both received and passed on in order that they and their children might live well. In an increasingly multicultural and interreligious world, these will be the skills that all of us may need to cultivate.

In an interreligious world, the church is challenged to remember that the divine spirit of wisdom has been at God’s side, like a master worker embedding a life-sustaining order into creation since the beginning of time. Within the grand context of creation, the church is challenged to see the spirit of God alive and well not only within the church, but before it ever existed and beyond it. So whenever Christians claim to be the only ones who possess the power of the Holy Spirit or whenever a people claim to be the privileged recipients of a special revelation direct from God, that’s when we can call upon our own biblical resources and have reason to hope that Lady Wisdom may be hard at work—perhaps slowly, conservatively, and cautiously, but no less steadfastly, trustworthily, and radically—to empower all those who heed her call to live well. For this good news, thanks be to God.