May 18, 2003 - Eastertide 5
By Jack Price

            If you could pick just one person to be on your team, whom would you pick?  I suppose that would depend on the event, sport, or contest.  You're likely to choose the most highly skilled person or one with skills that best match or complement your own.  The wise choice is to select someone who knows how to be successful.

            Wisdom is the ability to be successful, the skill of living well.  Often, such a wise person seems particularly blessed by God.  The opposite is also implied, no success means no divine blessing!  This is called "conventional wisdom."  It is what "everybody knows," or what everyone thinks and assumes.  Conventional wisdom finds form in pithy sayings such as:  "Waste not, want not;" "You get what you pay for;" and "You only go around once."

            Every age and culture has its own conventional wisdom.   It tells people how to live and act.  "Don't chew with your mouth open!"  "Speak when spoken to."  Conventional wisdom tells us how to achieve "the good life."  The clear message is that following the rules results in success.  Society tells you who you are and what you are worth.

            We learn in school, in the workplace, and in the marketplace of life about the importance of appearance, of being attractive.  We learn acceptable career paths and how important it is to achieve in appropriate areas.  Conventional wisdom governs relationships and behaviors of all sorts.  It tells us how to act and to not "rock the [cultural] boat" of expectations, norms, and values.  We judge and are judged by these norms and values.  We tend to judge ourselves most harshly with the messages:  "Is my work up to par?"  "Do I look good?"  "Will people like me?"  Life becomes a vicious cycle of meeting group cultural expectations that have become so internalized as to feel like our own expectations.  Woe to the one who does not measure up and fit it.

            Conventional wisdom has its effects on religious practice.  We learn that it is crucial to believe the right things and to do the right things.  If we do, then God will take care of us.  Scholar and author Marcus Borg describes conventional wisdom as "a life of bondage to the dominant culture.  It is a life of anxious striving and feeling okay or not okay to the extent that we do or do not measure up."  Most ironically, he adds, "We try to be outstanding - to stand out - by conforming to the standards that our culture values most highly."

            Borg describes his own journey of faith relative to this understanding of conventional wisdom and its role in religion:

I grew up as a Lutheran, in a tradition that emphasized salvation by grace and not by "works of the law."  Indeed, "justification by grace" was the battle cry of the Lutheran Reformation.  .We all knew that we weren't saved by "works."  Rather, we were saved by "grace through faith."  Yet this strong emphasis on grace got transformed into a new system of conventional wisdom in the minds of many Lutherans and many Christians.  The emphasis was placed upon faith rather than grace, and faith insidiously became the new requirement.  Faith (most often understood as belief) is what God required, and by a lack of faith/belief one risked the peril of eternal punishment.  The requirement of faith brought with it all of the anxiety and self-preoccupation that mark life in the world of conventional wisdom.  Was one's faith/belief real enough, strong enough?  The system of conventional wisdom remained.  Only the content of the requirement had changed - from good works to faith.

            When religion reflects the conventional wisdom of our culture, we are out of step with what Jesus taught.  We find ourselves in a faith stage that is conventional-synthetic, stage 3 of James Fowler's Stages of Faith.  People whose faith is characterized as stage 3 embrace the values of their dominant culture without question.  Religious practice becomes of list of requirements.  You must believe the right things in order to be included.  To conform is to be saved.  To choose another path is to be., well, you know!           

            The Bible is filled with Wisdom literature.  Some of it is conventional wisdom.  There are thirty-one chapters of Proverbs and many Wisdom Psalms.  These provide clear guidelines for what it takes to live well and to succeed.  Biblically-speaking, wise men knew about life's important things:  astrology, magic, philosophy, rhetoric, health, and wealth.

            Moses grew up in the palace of the Pharaoh of Egypt.  He was fully indoctrinated into the conventional wisdom of Egyptian society.  He learned that, in order to maintain a high stand of living, you needed military power, cultural indoctrination, and religious authority.  Moses knew what was necessary to be successful.  But Moses heard the voice of God calling him out of Egypt across a desert wilderness to a desolate mountain, to an experience with the living God. 

Moses learned about alternative wisdom, about the subversive wisdom of the "road less traveled."  He turned away from the power of Pharaoh to the poverty of Yahweh.  Moses returned to Egypt and his message energized a slave community.  It led them out of Egyptian bondage to a new land of hope and promise.  Israel lived many years on the ideals of alternative wisdom.  Life was not without grumbling and discomfort, nor without anxiety and fear.  But through it all, Israel maintained trust in a God of freedom, a God who was dangerous and mysterious.  They maintained trust in a God of alternative wisdom who was controlled by no one, a God who valued economic justice more than economic power, and was more passionate about equality than about efficiency.

            It is difficult to live for long by alternative wisdom.  Fear of uncertainty, need for more control, and anxiety from too much freedom leads to demands for convention.  The Israelites demanded "a king like all the other nations," and that's what they got.  A semblance of the Mosaic alternative wisdom survived through King Saul and King David.  It all ended with Solomon, ironically called Solomon the Wise.  His was very much a conventional wisdom. 

            Walter Brueggemann says that Solomon "countered the counter-culture of Moses."  He trusted in strength of arms, military security, a strong monarchy, and a preference for affluence over equality.  Soldiers and servants were conscripted from the populace to support the king.  Justice understood as oppression and keeping order was preferred to "liberty and [equal] justice for all."  For a vital measure of spiritual security, God was "captured" in the temple.  The God of Israel became the private property of the priestly and ruling classes.  They controlled access to Yahweh.  They conveyed God's requirements to the people and doled out God's blessings.  A God of freedom and mystery was replaced by a God who was always available.

            Almost as soon as kings arose in Israel, prophets appeared to challenge them.   Conventional "royal" wisdom was challenges by subversive "prophetic" wisdom.  Typically, many of the prophets lost their lives.  Their voices, however, were not silenced. 

At the same time, there arose within Israel a messianic hope.  This was a growing dream in God's Messiah who would come to restore the values of justice and equality, an "anointed" leader to reject a God being kept on call in the temple.  The Messiah would restore belief in God who lives in the hearts and minds of all people.  This messianic hope grew within the hearts of people who longed to trust in a God who truly takes the side of the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast.  But even the messianic dream was co-opted by conventional wisdom.  Hopes for a messiah turned to an expectation of a new warrior king.  Such a powerful messiah would restore the kingdom and power to Israel.

Jesus was a teacher of subversive wisdom, according to Borg.  He followed in the tradition of Israel's great prophets.  His alternative wisdom was based on his intimate experience of the Spirit.  His teaching was never long or elaborate.  They were brief parables and one-liners such as "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,"  "Leave the dead to bury their dead," or "No one can serve two masters."

Jesus had a personal, intimate, and ongoing experience of the Spirit.  Through his death and resurrection, Jesus made a way for all of us to have that same experience.  This truth became so profound and so real to Christians in the generations following Jesus that, by the end of the first century, the Gospel of John was able to see the wisdom and Spirit they had known in Jesus as the very presence of the Eternal Spirit. 

            Wisdom is a gift of the risen Christ.  John's Gospel begins with a famous passage:  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."  Word is the Greek Logos and is identified with the Jewish concept of Sophia (Wisdom).  The first chapter of the Old Testament book of Proverbs depicts wisdom personified as Sophia, speaking in the streets to all who would listen.  Sophia is a feminine noun and, as living and divine wisdom, can become for us the feminine face of God.  This truth can be reflected in the prologue of John's Gospel:

In the beginning was Wisdom, And Wisdom was with God, and Wisdom was God.  She was in the beginning with God.

All things came into being through Her, and without Her not one thing came into being.  In Her was life and the life was the light of all people.

She was in the world and the world came into being through Her;

Yet the world did not know Her. 

And Wisdom became flesh and living among us.

            Wisdom is an image for Jesus, a helpful image.  Such images illuminate our understanding of the divine, but they are not the same as God.  Images should never minimize or reduce God.  The sacred at the center of existence is still the mystical presence surrounding and permeating life.  Jesus embodied alternative, subversive wisdom.

            So what would it mean for us to walk in the Wisdom Way?  What does alternative wisdom say about faith and priorities here and how?  When our culture tells us what wisdom is - how to live well and be successful - How do those messages clashes with the subversive wisdom of Jesus?  What choices do we make each day to conform to conventional wisdom?

            It was a Sunday afternoon some twenty years ago that I received a phone call telling me my parents had been in an automobile accident.  By the end of that day, I stood in a hospital room watching helplessly as my mother died.  I remember the inadequacy of any words of comfort or even of explanation.  In those hours I learned that conventional wisdom gets "blown out of the water."  There is no bargaining with God.  It just doesn't work.  You and I are not entitled to exemption from life's suffering.  I found at that point that it doesn't really matter what you believe or how you live because your loved one is gone.  Nothing changes that and nothing less than absolute honesty suffices.  Nothing less than ultimate Truth speaks to the unspeakable pain and emptiness in the middle of your life.

            When life falls apart, ironically truth often seems clear.  The truth is that God is mysterious and not at all safe.  Life is dangerous and people die.  Innocents suffer and only subversive wisdom is credible.

            Some questions come to me at this point.  Does placing trust in subversive wisdom seem risky or does it seem the greater risk to trust in faith based on conventional wisdom?  Does it seem the greater risk to trust in a God who is mysterious and cannot be controlled or in a God who belongs to any particular group?  Does it seem the greater risk to trust in a God who is radical about justice and equality or in a God who serves the powerful and ignores the poor?

            What is the alternative?  I see you options.  First, you can find faith based on conventional wisdom and hope that it carries you through times of crisis.  Second, you can find faith that works in the worst of times (alternative wisdom), embrace God who brings deep healing and wholeness in the worst of times, and adjust day to day living and conventional thinking according to faith in that God.   "Teach us, Eternal Spirit, to seek your mystery - not to understand but to be faith, not to control but to walk in your company all our lives.  Amen."