August 19, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Listening Heart

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 111
1 Kings 2:10–12, 3:3–14

“Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people,
able to discern between good and evil.”

1 Kings 3:9 (NRSV)

The idols have ears but do not hear . . .
so unlike you, for all your hearing . . .
so like us, ears but do not hear.
You have endlessly summoned us: listen . . .
We mostly do not . . .
So we pray for ears, open, unwaxed,
attentive, circumcised . . .
You speak / we listen / and comes life,
abundant
beyond all that we ask or think . . .
Our ears to hear your word of life.

Walter Brueggemann
“Ears but Do Not Hear” from Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

My mother, father, sister, and I were the only Koreans in my hometown. Except for two Chinese families, we were the only Asians in the town as well. I grew up in Richmond, Kentucky. Most of what I learned about my Korean heritage came from the stories that my parents told, and sometimes the stories that they told me went over my head. The context of their stories and my reality were so far removed that I could never be sure that I was picturing things the right way or that I was grasping what I was hearing.

One of the more difficult things for me to grasp was what it was like for my father to grow up in a clan society. My father was from the Shin clan, and from what I understood, members of this particular Shin clan were brought up to be scholars. As a child he was instructed in calligraphy, trained in the classic Confucian teachings on wisdom, including what it means to be a gentleman, a good man for society and the state. In other words, he was trained in the way of a scholarly bureaucrat. And as a member of the Shin clan, he had been warned not to mingle with members of the neighboring clan, a clan of merchants. Merchants were wealthy, much wealthier than bureaucrats, and it was because of the merchants’ wealth that bureaucrats needed to be on guard.

So this was one of the stories I grew up hearing. Its potential resonance did not register in my consciousness until years later when my husband and I were eating at a Korean restaurant in Hyde Park. Newly opened, the restaurant hadn’t yet become very popular. In fact, we were often the only diners in the restaurant. So the owners of the restaurant, a Korean couple, who seemed close in age to my parents, would often sit down at our table and talk with us. Right off the bat they asked me if I was Korean. I said that I was. They asked me what my family name was, and when I told them that I was a Shin, which is a somewhat uncommon Korean last name, there was much excitement, because the wife of the couple was also a Shin. Which Shin was I? Did I know the Chinese character from which my last name was derived? No, I did not. So when my parents came into town, I brought them to the restaurant, and the excitement continued. After a series of back-and-forth questions and answers, it became apparent that the last names of my father and the wife of the couple came from the same Chinese character. As if this weren’t surprise enough, what immediately followed was even more surprising to me. As soon as the common last name was recognized, both the woman and the man who owned the restaurant began to apologize profusely: the woman for owning a business and the man for enticing her through love and marriage to give up the scholar clan’s values and way of life.

My husband and I were dumbfounded. I could hardly believe what I was witnessing. The stories of scholar clans and merchant clans and Confucian distinctions among them, stories that had seemed so old-fashioned and alien, came to life. Hearing the knee-jerk apologies and seeing the emotion flowing forth, I became more aware of the real and potential resonances of this background in one’s life, in my life. Our backgrounds influence the choices we make about how we live our lives, how we make a living, what we value more, and what we value less. Our backgrounds color and cloud, though perhaps not to this extent, how we view wealth and how we view wisdom.

I have a feeling that each of us has a view of wealth that has been informed, colored, and clouded by the traditions of wisdom that have been passed down to us by our parents, by our elders, and by our teachers, in our homes, in our schools, in our religious institutions, and in our society. The wisdom that gets passed down from generation to generation is usually what enables a person and a people not only to survive, but also to flourish—to live as best they can. And so it is not surprising that wealth would be a topic that receives attention by every tradition of wisdom throughout history and by every tradition of wisdom in the world.

According to the wisdom tradition of ancient Israel, Solomon was the wisest man in all the world. Listen to the Bible’s description of Solomon’s wisdom in 1 Kings, chapter 4:

God gave Solomon very great wisdom, discernment, and breadth of understanding as vast as the sand on the seashore, so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt. He was wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, children of Mahol; his fame spread throughout all the surrounding nations. He composed three thousand proverbs, and his songs numbered a thousand and five. He would speak of trees, from the cedar that is in the Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall; he would speak of animals, and birds, and reptiles, and fish. People came from all the nations to hear the wisdom of Solomon; they came from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom. (1 Kings 4:29–34)

Besides being the wisest man, Solomon, it is also said, was the wealthiest man in the world. He came to possess more gold, horses, chariots, and wives than imaginable. Marrying 700 foreign princesses, his sovereignty extended far and wide. Foreign rulers brought to him tributes of gold and goods, enough in one year to weigh 666 talents. Through international commerce and treaties, King Solomon imported the labor and natural resources needed for his ambitious building projects, including the greatest of all, the building of the temple. Chapter 6 describes in great detail the temple dimensions, materials, artistry, and finery. Even all things inside the temple were made of costly stones and finest metals: the lampstands, the altar, the table, the tongs, cups, snuffers, and dishes—all were made of pure gold (1 Kings 7:48–50).

Wealth and wisdom—these are the two traits that sum up Solomon’s iconic stature. In fact, the two traits seem almost inseparable in the portrait we have of him. In the famous story about Solomon’s dream, the story I read this morning, King Solomon asks God for wisdom. God grants him wisdom, and in the same breath, God also gives him riches. Furthermore, so tied together were his reputations for wealth and wisdom that his reputation for one seemed to reinforce his reputation for the other. In chapter 10, verses 24 and 25, it is said that “the whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom” and “every one of them brought a present, objects of silver and gold, garments, weaponry, spices, horses, and mules, so much year by year” (1 Kings 10:24–25). So it was not simply the case that God rewarded Solomon with wealth because he desired to be wise, but it is also the case that Solomon’s wisdom helped him to gain wealth.

Interestingly we know that Solomon was in fact not wise all the time. So foolish was Solomon’s rule that the first recorded political event after his death was the secession of the northern tribes (1 Kings 12:1–9). Foolish policies of forced labor and taxation led to protests and the dissolution of the Davidic kingdom. Given the disastrous political consequences of these policies, it is surprising that the folklore about Solomon’s wisdom stuck. That, despite all evidence to the contrary, Solomon was held up long after his death as the wisest of all men is a testament to the strength of the association in ancient Israel between wisdom and wealth. As one scholar explains it, “Since Solomon was the wealthiest man in Israel’s history, it follows that he must have been the wisest” (James Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom, p. 54).

Wealth and wisdom—what is the relationship between them? Do they go hand in hand, or does one preclude the other? Do you tend to assume that wealth connotes wisdom, or do you tend to worry that wealth corrupts wisdom? What does living wisely have to do with living well? What does the good life have to do with a life of goods?

Throughout history these kinds of questions have received sustained attention. Every major school of philosophy, every major religion, and every tradition of wisdom has had something to say on this topic. In one of the most comprehensive studies of what makes up a good life, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle carried out a survey of the question. He received the opinions of the wise and the many. Some people identified pleasure, others identified wealth, while others identified honor as essential to living well. Some people, when sick, identified health as the essence of the good life, and, when poor, wealth, and when ignorant, some sort of greatness. Aristotle treated each of the most popular opinions, and when it came to wealth, he both noted the problem that “there are instances of men ruined by wealth” as well as concluded that as long as wealth is thought of as a means to some other end, it cannot ultimately be what the good life consists of.

Not surprisingly, the many opinions of the ancient Greeks surveyed by Aristotle did not differ much from that of the ancient Israelites, and they most likely would not differ from the majority of opinions today. It’s clear from God’s response to Solomon that God expected Solomon to name honor, long life, or wealth, for those were the things that people would most commonly desire.

Exemplified in the story of Solomon is the traditional lesson of which the teachers of ancient Israel seemed never to tire: that wisdom leads to life and folly leads to death (James Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom, p. 62). It doesn’t require much imagination to elaborate upon this formula so that one could say that living wisely leads to living well, in all its manifestations, including wealth. The iconic portrayal of Solomon is an example of this: the greatness of Solomon’s wisdom comes to be proportionally matched by the greatness of his wealth.

Ancient Israel’s conviction that wealth accompanies wisdom was passed down from one generation to the next. Seeming exceptions in life did little to shake this conviction, that is, until the story of Job and the book of Ecclesiastes waged their protests against it. The story of Job challenged the traditional teaching of wisdom correlating living wisely with living well. As a man who had feared the Lord all his life, Job was the perfect example of one who had lived wisely. When stripped of everything good in his life, including all his wealth, Job remained constant in his faithfulness to God. Job challenged the well-established notion that wealth was a sure sign of wisdom.

In its formulations and reformulations of the relationship between wealth and wisdom, the Hebrew Bible reveals a people struggling to know for what they should strive in life, what they should prioritize, what they should desire, what they should teach their children. This struggle takes place in the personal lives of individuals like Job, and it takes place in the public realm of institutions, governments, and states built up by rulers like Solomon. Under Solomon’s rule, wisdom took the form of a cultural and intellectual movement that was supported by the state. The tremendous growth of a state bureaucracy, and with it a large number of scribes, an educational system, and a centralized judiciary, made possible the institutionalization of wisdom. During Solomon’s rule, traditional wisdom sayings were rediscovered, revitalized, and recorded, as we find in the book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon.

It is a remarkable legacy, I think. It is remarkable that a state would choose to build and put to use a bureaucracy for this purpose: to record teachings of wisdom for the sake of posterity. Solomon was the first king to build up a significant bureaucracy in the kingdom of Israel. The bureaucracy for which he was known provided stability to society by transmitting wisdom from one generation to the next. While nothing else from the Solomonic kingdom survived centuries later, including the state itself, the wisdom that it preserved persists today. It continues to provide guidance not only for people to survive, but for people to flourish, to live the good life.

We are, all of us, recipients of multiple and different traditions of wisdom. Ancient Israel, the early church, our various cultural heritages, and our idiosyncratic families all pass along different traditions of wisdom, teachings intended to help us live wisely and well. Even the Bible offers us more than one consistent teaching. Sometimes they clash with each other, and sometimes they correct each other. As recipients of these traditions, we have to do our best to hold onto what is valuable and constructive and be willing to let go of what can cloud our thinking. I like to think that my father and I can let go of Confucian clan distinctions.

In an election year, when the electorate is trying to determine who will most wisely govern our nation, and when wealth has become so significant a personal and public issue, it is imperative that we view the relationship between wisdom and wealth as clearly as we can. Depending on our life histories and upbringings, we each have our own biases coloring and clouding the way we relate wisdom and wealth in our personal lives and in the public realm. Our biases make a difference in the choices we make, what we teach our children, and the way we vote. Given the different teachings of wisdom handed down to each of us, we cannot expect people to see things the same way. We can try our best to examine and discriminate among our own biases. So the next time you are tempted to say, “When I was a boy . . .” or “When I was a girl . . . ,” remember to try your best to appreciate and understand how different wisdom passed down to others have helped them to survive, flourish, and live well. Listening to and appropriating one another’s wisdom, correcting biases, whether our own or others’, with God’s grace, we might be so bold as to leave a public legacy of wisdom for generations to come.