First United Methodist Church of Reno

²⁰“Where then does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? ²¹It is hidden from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air. ²²Abaddon and Death say, ‘We have heard a rumor of it with our ears.’ ²³“God understands the way to it, and…knows its place. ²⁴For [God] looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens.

²⁵When [the Creator] gave to the wind its weight, and apportioned out the waters by measure… made a decree for the rain, and a way for the thunderbolt; ²⁷ then [God] saw it and declared it… established it, and searched it out. ²⁸And [God] said to humankind, ‘Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.’”

¹³Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. ¹⁴But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. ¹⁵Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. ¹⁶For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. ¹⁷But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. ¹⁸And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace. …^{4: 8a}Draw near to God, and [God] will draw near to you.

³³Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” ³⁴But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. ³⁵He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” ³⁶Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ³⁷“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

“Who is wise and understanding among you?” That question from The Letter of James becomes the focus for our conversation this morning. The answer that the author of that letter gives is that we show our wisdom by living a “good life.” What “living the good life” actually means, though, has led people in some truly awful directions! Am I wise if I have a well-stacked 401K, a condo in Cabo, and a BMW in my garage? On the other hand is Christian wisdom nothing more than doing good – however well-intentioned or well-performed?

The search for direction and purpose in life is, in essence, the journey of faith. This journey of the human spirit happens in response to two very basic questions: “What’s life all about?” and “Where do I fit in?” In Jennifer’s and my sermons of the past couple of weeks, that second question has been answered as we’ve responded to Mark’s focus on Jesus’ compassion for the individual soul in crisis. Mark 9:37 goes a long way toward answering that first question – telling us what life is all about: “Whoever welcomes the most vulnerable among us in my name,” Jesus is saying, “welcomes me.”

Set aside your squabbles over dogma and doctrine. Take time out from trying to figure out which spiritual gifts are the most valuable or how to administer the disciplines of community life. Celebrate the gift of Sabbath time in the midst of all of your busyness. Relax. Life is all about the least within and among us.

The image of hypocrisy behind today’s readings is particularly apt in the wake of our current war, the “winning” of which seems to have plunged our whole country backward into a vocabulary that we thought we’d outgrown with Vietnam. In another part of The Letter of James we hear:

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?^⁴

These same questions were addressed by Andrew Schmookler of Harvard’s Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age many years ago in his books Parable of the Tribes and Out of Weakness. In an interview over a decade-and-a-half ago on the N.P.R. “New Dimensions” series, Schmookler points to the fact that the roots of war lie in our desire to deny the reality of our condition. We then take on a posture of pretense, he says – i.e., of pretending we’re something we’re not.

After at least a couple of centuries of living within a patriarchal system, we’re still operating out of a warrior mentality, of a “no-chink-in-my-armor” position. This idea that the “we’re-good-and-they’re-evil” mentality may bring us some comfort, but it’s also bred a kind of self-righteousness that’s led us to the very “gates of hell” itself. What we won’t own will end up possessing us, Schmookler said; what we run away from will end up catching us from behind. Our world has become one where power is out of control. To be weak is to be victimized. To be vulnerable is to walk a certain path toward pain. Is it really necessary, Schmookler asked so long ago, for the weak to continue to be victims century after century? We need to transform the whole global arena to create structures that allow power to be controlled and shared, and for human choice to once again govern our destiny. It’s the outstretched hand of a Jesus or a Buddha, he says, that is the image of true strength: acceptance of the other.^⁵

A part of me is actually relieved at this story of the disciples arguing with each other over who’s the greatest, because if they’re that jealous, at least they’re not indifferent to Jesus and the radical nature of his message! In a way, isn’t jealousy just the underside of being passionate about something, caring, intensely alive? They are more than a little bit disturbed at exactly where Jesus says all of this is taking him – inexorably toward betrayal, crucifixion, and an incomprehensible resurrection.^⁶ Their conversation could well have been the natural consequence of their inability to accept the fact that this traveling-with-Jesus business isn’t going to be an extended backyard barbecue at Mary and Martha’s place. To deny that suffering is inseparable from discipleship is to deny the whole of who we are. As a result we tend to look at somebody else’s achievements and mistakenly think that’s what we’re supposed to be after. The answer, of course, is not to focus on who or what somebody else has done, but to become more honestly what we already are – at the deepest level of our being. Find your own passion and pursue it!

A reading from Winnie-the-Poo seems appropriate – where he tells us that wisdom is much more than just the level of our knowledge or the power of our intellect:

An Empty sort of mind is valuable for finding pearls and tails and things because it can see what’s in front of it. An Overstuffed mind is unable to. While the Clear mind listens to a bird singing, the Stuffed-Full-of-Knowledge-and-Cleverness mind wonders what kind of bird is singing. The more Stuffed Up it is, the less it can hear through its own ears and see through its own eyes. Knowledge and Cleverness tend to concern themselves with the wrong sort of things, and a mind confused by Knowledge, Cleverness, and Abstract Ideas tends to go chasing off after things that don’t matter, or that don’t even exist, instead of seeing, appreciating, and making use of what is right in front of it.^⁷

Do you really want to know what it’s like to feel what God feels, to care for those things that God cares about, to love as God loves? Receive the most vulnerable; welcome the least among us; value all of life and creation; persevere on behalf of those who’ve been delivered into your care; don’t be abusive; don’t neglect, reject or abandon those who are in need.

It’s no accident that Jesus “took a little child and put it among them.” In his day children weren’t looked upon as they are today. Instead of being the focus of most everybody’s attention, they simply were considered to be less than full human beings – without power or privilege of any kind. A closer parallel in today’s culture would be Jesus choosing a street person, someone from the HOPE Center^⁸ who’s wandered into the narthex during our worship service and worked the coffee hour panhandling his way through the post-worship crowd. This outsider, this person whom many still find offensive, who knows how to manipulate, is suddenly placed in the middle of our community. And Jesus turns to us, saying, “Whoever welcomes one such person in my name welcomes me.”^⁹

And if it is true, that the love of God is present in Jesus’ love for “the least” among us, to receive them is to receive God. Human wisdom, on the other hand, persists in describing God as the biggest and the best. Almost fifty years ago when I attended confirmation classes in the church of my childhood, the words that rang through my head were omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omni-this and omni-that. I’m not arguing one way or the other about the truth of those designations for the reality of God, but none of those words ever prepared me to listen for God in a still, small voice^¹⁰ or to receive God in a little, helpless child (I do admit, now however, that having grandchildren has helped!). Most of the time we’re so busy wanting God to be big enough to make up for our inadequacies that we don’t hear scripture telling us that the first shall be last, the last shall be first, what we think is strong is really weak, and what we think is a sign of weakness might just be a sign of great strength. We still want to see God as somehow a bigger version of us, instead of claiming our position in the image of a God who is not at all what we expect.

This hymn in praise of wisdom from the Book of Job, then, sets the tone for our story from The Gospel According to Mark. Not only does it bring to mind just how mysterious divine wisdom must be, it also shows us what strength there is in a faith that is deeply grounded and centered in God. In much the same way, classical texts on prayer urge us to be so firmly rooted in the beauty of creation and the compassion of the Holy Spirit during the good times, that we’ll be sustained by them in the dark times as well. “Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident,” sings the psalmist.^¹¹ This is the kind of faith that we found written on the wall of a World War II safe house in Poland: “I believe in the sun when it is not shining. I believe in love when I am alone. I believe in God even when God is silent.”

A parishioner came into her pastor’s office one day with a dramatic confession. She finally admitted to herself that she was just “average.” Because of the abuse that she’d suffered as a child, she’d survived by seeing herself as, somehow, “special.” Everywhere she went she placed “special” expectations upon herself and her environment. As a child, this defense against pain worked pretty well, as she created a “special” world within which her “special” self could live and thrive. But as an adult her specialness failed her, just as many men and countless jobs in her life had always failed her, because they hadn’t treated her as a “special” adult. At the age of sixty-one she was able to rejoice at last in being ordinary and average. She now believes that she no longer will fail herself nor have unrealistic expectations of the settings and people around her. She’s joined the ranks of the “least of these…”^¹² and discovered within herself the Spirit of God. She’s ordinary in the same way that the Spirit of God present in all of creation is ordinary – the same way that it’s in you and in me.

It’s worth our paying attention to the fact that Jesus continually took the lowly, the insignificant, the stranger, the weak, the marginalized, the poor and the sick to show us who God is. With the compassion of true wisdom, he invites us still to recognize the sacred in our lives and to surrender to its wisdom. It may be hard to recognize God in such ways, because it’s hard to recognize ourselves as today’s lowly, insignificant, stranger, weak, marginalized, poor and sick. Exactly like his first disciples, we want to be the greatest, the best, the first.

On the other hand, we also know people who lived much like Jesus did – the Buddha or St. Francis of Assisi, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. – who allowed themselves to become instruments of a shalom^¹³ that transforms hatred into love, injury into forgiveness, dissension into unity, doubt into faith, mistakes into truth, despair into hope, and all manner of sadness into joy.

We’ve come to worship because we want to listen for the wisdom of God, to pray for the grace to live out our lives more and more in harmony with it, and so transform the foolish symbol of the cross into a profound act of love for humanity, and to do it through the living out of our own ordinary lives.

In that same sense, is today just another ordinary Sunday? May the wisdom that you have received give you your answer.

1All of our scripture readings for this morning – at one level or another – deal with wisdom and its sometimes surprising consequences. This first reading from Job poetically describes the value but often inaccessibility of wisdom. It’s actually part of a poem that’s been inserted into this book at the end of three cycles of speeches and before Job’s final summary of his cause. The poet’s opinion here is that the place of wisdom is known only to God, who “sees” and “sustains” all of creation. This is actually the central message of the Book of Job: the wisdom of our Creator is completely incomprehensible to us mere mortals. Thankfully, though, that’s not the book’s only message. While so many of our questions about life remain unanswered – at least in most ways that human logic can grasp – we are given glimpses of our Creator every single day in the beauty, goodness and orderliness of creation itself. It’s there that we share in the vision and experience of God. It’s the only way, finally, that we human beings “know” wisdom, the only way we “know” God.

By the way, the word “Abaddon” (used next to “Death” here – in v. 22), is simply a poetic name for the “abode of the Dead” – another name for “Sheol.” Only much later, in the workings of fertile Christian imagination, has it taken on the image of a place of eternal damnation, or Hell. Whatever or wherever it is, it’s definitely a place of utter lifelessness.

2The Letter of James contrasts wisdom with foolishness, which shows itself in jealousy, hostility and selfish ambition. By stark contrast, the wisdom of God is innocent, true to nature, and full of great peace [NOTE: In the interests of saving time, this portion of the lectionary readings was not read aloud during the worship service.].

3Mark’s version of the Jesus-event consistently presents Jesus’ closest followers as a cowardly, obtuse and generally self-centered bunch. Not only do they fail to understand who Jesus is, but they don’t even trust him. They’re revealed as ambitious, preoccupied with power, but without any real sense of how to convey that power to others. Granted, they supposedly gave up everything in order to follow Jesus, but beyond that, they emerge as a pretty irascible and pretentious group. Oddly enough I find this a source of hope for the rest of us: if these guys really were the foundation upon which the church was built, then we too might still be able to find our way through all of our unfaithfulness and failures to become the people of God that we were created to be.

Our third link to wisdom, then, is in this teaching from Jesus which is represented as becoming like a child. Virtues traditionally associated with the ideal child – things like innocence, simplicity, gentleness – are those that also have come to be associated with wisdom. Here Jesus uses it to describe how members of a true community ought to treat each other.

6See Mark 9: 31-32:

…he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.

8Meeting within our own space at 1301 4TH Street, Napa, CA 94559 (707-259-8133), it is a place for homeless individuals to bathe, do laundry, find socialization, and work with homeless case managers. It is also a site for Clinic Olé – which provides medical care for people who might not otherwise afford such care.

10This, a reference to one of my favorite stories about Elijah running away from Jezebel and confronting the grandeur and majesty of God in just this way (1 Kings 19: 1-13, the verse noted is verse 12 in which “a sound of sheer silence” comes also as “a still, small voice”).

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

September 24, 2006