Back to Basics

Midweek Worship

Fifteenth Week after Pentecost

A Reading from the Book of Proverbs:

A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold. The rich and the poor have this in common: the LORD is the maker of them all.

Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity, and the rod of anger will fail. Those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor.

Do not rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate; for the LORD pleads their cause and despoils of life those who despoil them.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Before the internet,” the meme goes, “people thought that a lack of information was the cause of stupidity. Ends up it wasn’t that.”

We are each of us awash in a sea of information. We have a superabundance of knowledge, of data, of evidence. So much so that we are lost in it, drowned in it. And I’m not just talking about Google or Wikipedia. We live in an age with an embarrassment of riches. Anyone holding an Amazon account can read almost any book ever written, for a handful of dollars, shipped to you anywhere on this earth. Our libraries exceed those of any previous generation.

We have more knowledge than we could ever hope to know, more books than we could ever hope to read, more education than we could ever hope to learn, and more media content than any human being could ever hope or even want to watch. Knowledge used to be valued because it was rare. Now you can have it anywhere, anytime, on tap. And we have no idea what to do with it, no idea where to begin.

What we lack, brothers and sisters, as a society, as a people, is wisdom. Wisdom is more than knowledge, more than data. Wisdom is the ability to discern purpose and value and meaning: questions not simply of “how” or of “that” but of “why.” And this is because we are by nature attuned to transcendental values, horizons that stretch beyond the merely physical and brute fact. We seek out by nature super-natural ideals, namely: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

For all these three are in fact the same. All these three are in fact God.

In the course of our semicontinuous reading of the Hebrew Bible, we’ve come to what’s been called the Solomonic corpus: those works of wisdom literature within the Scriptures which are associated with, or attributed to, Solomon, wisest of kings. Biblical wisdom literature is contemporary with much of Greek philosophy, which itself means the “love of wisdom.” And both are concerned with the same questions: How ought one to think? How ought one to live? And how ought a community to govern itself? In short, how can all aspects of life be beautiful, good, and true?

And the heart of biblical wisdom literature, the book to which all the others appear to be responding or reacting, is the Book of Proverbs, a collection of sayings and of poems about how to live rightly, wisely, and well. It is attributed to Solomon, yet the structure of the Book of Proverbs makes it clear that it has no one single human author. It is in fact an anthology; and more than that, an anthology of anthologies; multiple voices, multiple viewpoints, often conflicting.

But honestly, that’s very Jewish. Wisdom in Jewish tradition is most often found in debate. Truth may be discerned in the back-and-forth between learned, earnest, faithful people, the way that iron sharpens iron. We can argue out the truth.

Now, legend has it that King Solomon wrote the Song of Songs—a love poem full of lust and passion for life—when he was in his twenties, full of sap. Ecclesiastes, they say, he wrote in his sixties, when he was older, more jaded, more cynical. But Proverbs he supposedly compiled right in the middle, in the prime of his forties, when the passions of youth had been sated, the struggles of aging were as yet largely held at bay, and all was right with the world and with his kingdom.

The truth is that Solomon probably didn’t write any of these. But grouping them like that has a wisdom all its own: an admission that we see life differently at different stages, different ages; that even one man contains a multiplicity of perspectives. Given how middle-of-the road Proverbs tends to be, we might be tempted to dismiss it as banal or cliché, a tedious collection of platitudes. And it can feel that way if you just plow right through it. It works better a bit at a time, as an amuse-bouche.

The gist of the book is pretty simple: do good, get good; do bad, get bad. A life lived according to simple rules—of morality, industry, discretion, and restraint—reaps a just reward for one’s labors. Work hard, save well, get wealthy. Right? Be a decent person, and happiness will follow. It’s the sort of down-to-earth basic advice that proves popular in every age. Think of the aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin from Poor Richard’s Almanack, exhorting moderation, thrift, patience, discretion, humility, simplicity, that sort of thing, with more than a bit of humor thrown in.

And we enjoy such proverbs, such bon mots, for their very wholesomeness; for their pithy, simple truths; the wisdom of the common man—or at least the common man as interpreted by folks like King Solomon and Benjamin Franklin. And there’s truth to it all. Work hard, live by moral rules, behave uprightly, deal justly, and yes, you will prosper—sometimes. I mean, that’s how it ought to work, right? That’s how we want it to work. Decent people should get a fair shake. Surely this is wisdom: surely this is beautiful and good and true.

But life doesn’t always work out that way, does it? Sometimes slimeballs get ahead. Sometimes terrible things happen to good people, who do not deserve it. Admitting this, confronting it, is too a form of wisdom. And other wisdom books indeed grapple with the problem of evil, with the injustice of a broken world.

Yet Proverbs is the basics. Proverbs is the starting point to which we must ever return. It’s the moral lodestone, the central tentpole of the wisdom tradition. A true master in any field of endeavor has the freedom to bend or even to flout the rules—but only after they have mastered those rules, internalized those rules.

Proverbs is not the whole truth. Doing good does not always equal doing well. But without it—without the simple, obvious wisdom of common, decent folk—we would have no place for our journey to begin, and no home to which we might ultimately return.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.