“Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” Ephesians 5:15-16
If I were to ask you to call out one adjective that you wish others would use to describe you what would it be? Don’t be shy, just shout it out. (Pretty, awesome, perfect, kind, thoughtful, compassionate, together, spiritual, Godly, loving, humble, smart, passionate, nice, considerate are just a few examples.) Did anyone say the word wise? Being wise is not something that is valued by our culture today. Being knowledgeable, smart, crafty, well-educated, even manipulative are all highly valued. But wise, not so much. Our Scriptures on the other hand place a great value on wisdom, and indeed I would say it might be one of the primary virtues that the Scriptures hold up for us—and both our Old Testament, Epistle readings and our Psalm for today focus on wisdom. So, let’s take a closer look at wisdom. What is wisdom? What would you say wisdom is?
Wisdom is not necessarily about IQ levels or academic study and degrees, is it? Instead, wisdom is insight into the meaning of life—into its conflicts, its dangers, its creative and destructive powers, and it is insight into where life comes from and to where it must return. Wisdom is insight into the true source of life, into God.
Our psalm for this morning tells us that the fear of God and the awareness of the holy are something we should want to learn, “Fear the Lord, you that are his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing.” (Psalm 34:9). Now, fear of God does not mean cowering before God in terror. Fear of God means having an encounter with the other. The fear of God is having an encounter with the divine that creates awe and shakes us out of our ordinary ways of life. When you have encountered the mystery of life you have encountered the holy. And this doesn’t have to happen in a dramatic way like a flash of light on a road in Israel, as with Paul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. Encounters with the holy are available to us all if we only have ears to hear and eyes to see. If we can only slow ourselves down enough and turn down the volume of our busy lives to let the holiness in, we will see, hear, feel, smell, and touch it all around us.
This is one of the reasons why people go on pilgrimages or take spiritual retreats. These journeys give the participants an opportunity to step out of the busyness of their everyday lives that they might learn to hear and see the holy that is always around them. But we don’t have to go on pilgrimage or go on a retreat to do this (though if you get an opportunity to take a pilgrimage or retreat of any sort you should). We just need to stop and look. A newborn baby is an encounter with the holy. Every time I have the privilege of being with a family during the very intimate time of a loved one’s death, I encounter the holy. A beautiful sunset, a hug at the right moment, the words of the Eucharist, a poignant hymn, the quiet of the morning, a beautiful painting, the laughter of children—the list could go on and on—the mystery of life and the holy are everywhere.
And when we encounter the mystery of life and the source of wisdom, and we feel the awe that this mystery elicits in us we experience the infinite distance between us and God, and we understand that we are not God. We understand that we are creatures and God is the creator. We understand that there are limits to our being. We are finite and God is infinite. This is wisdom. The unwise person rebels against the limits set by God. The fool wants to be unlimited in power and knowledge. The wise one accepts her finitude. She knows that she is not God. Wisdom is the acknowledgment of our limits. Wisdom is the understanding that God is God, and we are not.
And we can see foolishness all around us. It is good to be curious and to seek new adventures and new solutions to earthly problems, but as I watch the unrestrained development of AI and robotics, I fear that what I see is not curiosity and solution-seeking, but grandiosity, limit denying and folly. Do we truly understand the power that is being unleashed in these developments? I don’t think we do. And I wonder why we would even want some of the things that tech companies are working on and trying to give us.
A few years ago, I heard a story on NPR about a robot that was being developed to care for and give emotional support to those with dementia. All of the health care providers being interviewed were thrilled with the idea, as they were all overburdened and overworked trying to care for people the world often would rather not see or care for. I could understand their enthusiasm. But I also wondered about the wisdom of providing an even greater way for us to forget those who are painful for us to see. Is the solution really to create a reality in which those with dementia, (who by the way are also our spouses, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends, and perhaps even us someday) have little to no human contact? Is that good for them? Is it good for us? I don’t think it is. I think it is fantastically sad, and about as far from wise as we can get. And the woman who led the program that created the robot came to the same conclusion and said so in the interview. We are because others are. We exist in a web of relationships—relationships with other humans, animals, the earthly biome, and God. True wisdom is an understanding that when we remove any of these relationships, we become less than human not more so. The wise solution to the problem of an overburdened health care system and providing care for those with dementia, is, as a society, to commit to providing the resources needed to adequately care for those with dementia through human contact.
Or I look at the astronomical amounts of money that some of the wealthiest people in the world are investing in efforts to achieve human immortality. And when I say astronomical amounts of money, I mean it. Elon Musk has given at least 5 billion dollars to his company Neurolink which is working on ways to implant chips in human brains with the goal of eventually creating a human-tech hybrid that is transhuman and immortal. Jeff Bezos has invested at least 3 billion dollars in Altos Lab, a company seeking ways to rejuvenate cells in the quest for never-ending mortal life. While none of us likes to think about death, particularly our own or the deaths of those we love, can our planet really handle us here forever? And does everyone get to live forever or only those with the money to afford it? Will there be any room for anyone to be born? After all, you and I couldn’t be here if everyone before us had not died. And what about life’s purpose and life’s meaning? Living forever doesn’t solve all the existential dilemmas involved with being human. Some of the most meaningful lives ever lived were also cut short by violence or illness—Martin Luther King jr., Jesus, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, and Oscar Romero are just a few names that come to my mind. I am not saying that a premature death is the key to meaning and purpose. I am saying that meaning and purpose come from what you do with your life and how you live, not how long you live and how much money you have. Some of the wisest people I can think of were fully accepting of given human limits but not human-created limits. MLK jr. accepted that he would likely die in living out God’s call for him to seek equality for all, but he didn’t accept the world of insiders and outsiders, haves and have nots, that humans had created. From my perspective King was the wise one. King was the one who truly found life.
But I suspect this is why the contemporary world is not so keen on wisdom, because our contemporary culture likes to push the limits, not set them. Spend more, eat more, learn more, use more, work more, party more, play more. Do everything bigger and better and do anything that helps you keep at bay the deep anxiety of living with the reality that you are not God, you are a limited human being who is mortal and will someday get old and die. But it is only in living into that anxiety that we rid ourselves of that anxiety. In our encounter with the holy, facing with awe the ultimate mystery of life, we experience a dimension of life that gives us the courage and strength to accept our limits and to become wise through this acceptance. True freedom and true peace come from understanding that God is God and we are not.
The one who acquires this wisdom knows that the limits no longer matter, our finitude no longer matters, our creatureliness no longer matters, our old age and our eventual death no longer matters, because nothing will ever separate us from the one who is the source of our wisdom, the one who is the source of the holy, the one who is the source of our life, God. So, the next time you think about how you would like others to describe you, consider wisdom. In words from the book of Proverbs (9:6), “Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” And know that only God is God. Amen.
