Wonderful World of Wisdom - When You Don't Know Nothin'

Preached on Sunday, August 26, 2018

Scriptures readings: Colossians 1:24-2:5; Proverbs 30:1-9; Luke 5:1-11

Dick and Jane's Spot, Ellensburg, WA
August 2018

There’s this guy who sounds like he’s beating himself up for how stupid he’s been. “I am the most ignorant of men. I do not have a man’s understanding.” (Proverbs 30:2)

Here’s a guy who feels really stupid. Well, that’s what I thought at first. I thought it was the bad things that make us feel small and clueless. Then again, there might be some huge, wonderful things that make us feel small and clueless.

The man who wrote the words we’ve read is someone named Agur son of Jakeh. The names here aren’t Hebrew names, but they come from a related language that was spoken by the descendants of Abraham’s second-class son Ishmael, who became the ancestor of the Arabs.

The story behind Abraham and Sarah and their treatment of Ishmael, and the ongoing influence of that bad treatment on the relationship between Israel and the Arabs is something that has come to endanger the peace of the whole world. They haven’t always fought each other, but it’s been a rough road for over three thousand years.

The wise man Agur and the publication of Proverbs takes us about seven hundred years into that long story: long enough for him to have earned a bad reputation with the wisdom school of Solomon. And yet there he is! There are a number of people, whose writings are in our Old Testament, who have nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the story of the Bible.

The same is true with Job. The whole Book of Job is the story of one of the best people in the whole human race and one of the most beloved people of God who has nothing to do with God’s people, except that his story matters to God; and God wants to hold up to us these stories of people who lived beyond our horizon and still knew something good about our God, in spite of us and without our help. God has managed to get through to them on his own.

They are part of a world where God is at work in ways we don’t understand. God’s work in other people is beyond our knowledge and our understanding. Which is exactly one of the truths that Agur knows.

You could say that I’m wrong about this. After all, Agur confesses that he doesn’t know the Holy One. He says that doesn’t know God. But he also says that his level of understanding would test out to be subhuman. And that doesn’t seem to be true, and his words form an inspired part of our inspired Bible, so he knows more than he says.

Augur has a faith very much like the faith that the Lord taught to Job. Read chapter thirty-eight in Job and see how what the Lord (speaking through questions) reveals something to Job that sounds a lot like what the Lord has told Agur.

Agur knows that God strides back and forth between the dimensions that separate Heaven and Earth. God creates the atmospheres of the planets and makes their winds blow at the tipping of his hands. God gathers the waters in his cloak, and pours them into the seas. God has defined the ends, or the borders, of the worlds; and surely much more than that.

And those are just a few of the big things. That doesn’t count all the little things God can do.

In just a few verses, Agur the Arab can write a Hebrew poem as good as anything in the Bible. What Agur knows about God is beautiful and great. He knows that the Lord communicates perfect truth and he knows that you can count on that truth if you have any desire to walk with the Lord by faith.

Agur also knows that you can royally mess with the word of God. You can adulterate or contaminate it. He calls this “adding to the words of God.”

We need to take notice of when and where these words were written. Most of the Old Testament was not written at this time. What was already written down was probably not assembled into single scrolls yet. The words of God that Agur knew were the words he passed down to us in this chapter of Proverbs.

God’s words tell us that God can create heaven and earth, the spiritual and physical universe, and the particles and the underlaying fields of energy that are the foundation of everything we can see or detect. The ends of the earth could be like the limits of nature, and the laws of physics, that define how things happen; that define what can and what cannot happen. It’s simpler if we just say that God can do anything and that we can safely, securely live accordingly by faith.

God’s words tell us that his words, his communications to us, can be trusted because God values the truth and makes his words true in such a way that they are like a shield. The shield of God’s words is strong because God has made it from the most perfectly refined and forged metal possible. His words cannot be broken, or shattered, or pierced through to cut you.

Adding to God’s word doesn’t mean rewriting it to make it say something you want it to say. It doesn’t mean scribbling words in, or crossing words out. You don’t need to do any of that in order to add to it, or subtract from it, or just mess with it in general. All you have to do is to teach it messed up. All you have to do, in order to mess with the words of God, is to preach them all messed up.

I may have messed up Agur’s poem about “God Can Do Anything”. Maybe I shouldn’t say that the ends of the earth could be the laws of physics. That’s kind of a leap of the imagination; and maybe a leap of physics, too.

To explain something strange and mysterious in such a way as to make it more rational, or (even worse) to explain something away, is a dangerous game. Preachers and Sunday School teachers might be like children playing where they shouldn’t: like my mom’s two brothers, as kids, when they would compete at jumping off the roof of their garage. Of course, those were the good old days of childhood when parents seldom gave a thought to what their children were doing out of their sight.

Trying to change the meaning of God’s words, God’s messages to us, to suit ourselves, is what it means to add to the words. Making them not so weird, or scary, or threatening is adding to the words of God. Cherry picking them in order to make us look good or, at least, better than other people is the same as adding to the words of God. Making God’s words not mean what they say, or not say what they mean, is adding to God’s words. Those are the lies and the falsehoods that scare Agur.

Agur knows that God’s words tell us reliably what God can do, what God does for us. God’s words tell us who we are as we stand before God, and how to stay right and not forget the good news of God’s word.

Agur doesn’t want to mess with this, or get in the way. Agur sees himself in God’s words: how easy falsehood is and how it can come to cover God up and make him a different God. Agur sees that we can be tempted to worship a God of our own invention. He prays that God will deliver him from his own lies.

Agur sees that possessing too much can distract us from God and his word for us. Having too much can make us breakers of the truth: promoting ourselves and demoting God.

Having too little can make us desperate, always seeking our own advantage, and worrying about our survival, and forgetting to trust God, and actually stealing, and cheating, and lying to serve ourselves, because we don’t trust that God will give us our daily bread as we need it. Agur prays, like a Christian, for his daily bread, the right amount of anything, as God knows we need it to be.

But Agur prays because he knows great things about God.

If he makes this prayer because he doesn’t trust what God has said, and because he’s afraid, then I don’t know what to do with this prayer. I believe that he prays this way because he loves God so much that he doesn’t want to fail. He knows that God won’t fail him, but he wants the help that only God can design and give to make sure that this poor ignorant believer doesn’t fall short of the love of God.

Agur says he has no knowledge of the Holy One. Knowledge, in the world of the Old Testament, means a deep level of experience. It implies intimacy with the facts, the truth, the message. In some strange way Agur says that he has no knowledge of the Holy One, and yet the very next thing he says is a poem dedicated to the knowledge that the Holy One has given to him.

The dynamic of what we see in Agur is that he possesses no wisdom, but God’s wisdom possesses him. Agur has no knowledge, but God’s self-knowledge has opened his eyes.

There are a lot of experiences that can make us say something like: “I am the most ignorant of men.” “I am the most ignorant of women.”

Something terrible could make us say this. You could lose your job, and seem to fail at finding another. You could be hit by loss or grief: the loss of a home in a flood or fire, the loss of a precious human life that is so much a part of you that you don’t know how you might still be your true self without them.

You could find yourself in the path of an accident, or an illness, or a disability, or the threat of cancer, and the uncertainty of health and life that this brings. You could be hit by a mistake or a failure of your own, or make a horrible discovery about yourself that never occurred to you until now.

It happens. You say: “I don’t know anything.” Then, again, maybe that’s not true. Maybe a word crept in long ago. It was a word of something beautiful waiting for you: something that gave you strength, and courage, and hope, and energy. Maybe the gifts in your life seemed so great and strong that you forgot that word, that message, from God: that God can do anything and make anything possible. Maybe the poverty you feel now makes it hard to hold onto what you once knew, or makes it seem hollow and far away.

Yet there can be a quiet word that tells you that you are in God’s hands. It may be true that you aren’t holding onto God’s wisdom and intimacy, but God is God, and God is holding you in his hands.

Agur was afraid of speaking falsehood, but he was also afraid of hearing it from others. Agur had heard the same message. He had received the same truth that Job heard.

There were others who knew what Agur might have felt slipping away. The wise thing to do would be to find someone who has gone through what you are going through, only that person has not forgotten or lost the perfect shield that nothing can break.

Then, again there can be experiences that aren’t terrible at all, and these can also make you feel as though you didn’t know anything.

I think being in love can make you feel wonderful and scared at the same time and also feel as though you don’t know anything. Absolutely anything might happen. There was this one girl (or woman rather) who I thought might be the one for me, and one really good point in my favor was that her parents loved me.

Well, this girl could be a tomboy and go hiking with me in the woods and cliffs of the Oregon coast, all dressed down in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Another time I took her out to a dinner theater in the county seat. She fixed herself up and she was gorgeous, and there was a friend of mine and his wife at the same dinner theater and, when they saw us together, they broke into great big grins. My friend gave me a wink, and I felt so proud and giddy at what I was doing and who I had with me. But I moved too slow and she met someone else.

In spite of this, I know something about something wonderful making me not know anything.

I know guys who report that they became serious about their relationship with Jesus when they first held their babies in their arms. They knew that they didn’t know anything, anymore, and that they needed lots of help and strength from someone else in order to become what that child of theirs needed.

Love, parenthood, the work of your dreams, a home of your own designing, a talent that comes to life: These can open your heart to words of wisdom and good news.

It’s like Peter in our gospel story. He met a man, a teacher, a man about whom people were reporting a lot of crazy stuff, a man with callouses on his hands and maybe some stray sawdust on his tunic, like a carpenter. This stranger walked up to Peter and commandeered Peter’s boat, to use as a pulpit.

Then this stranger named Jesus told Peter where the good fishing could be found, as if he were a fisherman too. Peter grumbled and then he got a word from the Lord in the form of his biggest catch ever.

Peter didn’t know anything anymore. He knew that Jesus had done something, but he didn’t know how or why. He realized that he had made a huge mistake. He had misjudged someone who knew far more that he did. Peter had scoffed at someone who could seemingly do anything. This Jesus could do anything where Peter couldn’t do anything. Jesus was like the power and truth that Agur had known.

Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid. From now on you’ll be catching men. You will fish for people.” Peter and his partners left everything and followed Jesus. Something wonderful made Simon Peter feel very small, and stupid, and clueless, and he never felt better in his life. It’s not a bad change. I recommend it to you.

Peter and his partners would come to feel the same way, sort of, when Jesus died on the cross. That was a bad thing. Now, again, they didn’t know anything anymore. That was a bad change.

Then, they were wrong again. They didn’t know anything all over again, when Jesus rose from the dead. They never felt better in their lives. And that’s not a bad change. I highly recommend it to you.

There is someone who can do anything. He can create a world, and he can save that world, and he does, and he has. What Agur knew was the wisdom that knew more than he did. In Jesus we meet the very wisdom of God in the flesh.

We may feel like we don’t know anything. We may feel like we can’t do anything. Jesus is God’s word and our shield, when our littleness comes from terrible things. Jesus is God’s word and our shield when our littleness comes from his wonderful gifts.

Wonderful World of Wisdom - For the Love of Fools

Preached on Sunday, August 19, 19-2018

  

Scripture Readings: Romans 1:8-17; Proverbs 26:1-12; Matthew 5:21-22, 43-48

Back in the seventeen-hundreds, John Wesley was a reformer in the Church of England, trying to get people to grow in their faith by training themselves in using disciplines of the heart, instead of just using the discipline of their brain and ideas. Wesley saw the Good News as a matter of the heart as well as the mind and, strangely, this made many enemies.

Walking Downtown, Ellensburg, WA
August 2018

Wesley went traveling around the country, teaching and preaching from place to place. On his way to his next appointment, he had to cross a stream that had only a narrow foot bridge to get him over. It was a one-way, one-at-a-time bridge, and one of those enemies stood on the other side, wanting to cross.

The enemy was another priest in the same church as Wesley and they both recognized each other at once. The enemy was a big, burly guy and he was going to give Wesley a bad time. He picked up his walking stick and held it cross-wise, like a gate held tight to shut Wesley off from his mission; or maybe like a stave for a fight. And he was claiming that Wesley was a fool.

They lived in the age of honor and the enemy served Wesley up with an insult.

He glared and growled at Wesley, “I never suffer a fool to pass!” He wasn’t going to let John through.

Only, he didn’t count on Wesley’s great sense of humor, or the fact that Wesley didn’t give his own honor a hoot. “You never suffer a fool to pass? Well, I always do!” And he stepped aside from the bridge and bowed for the big guy to cross and pass. Who was the fool now?

That is a picture of one of our proverbs today. “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.” (26:4)

On one hand, the solution was really simply. The enemy barred the way and the reformer got out of the way. Not answering the fool according to his folly meant not stooping to be like him. It wasn’t simply wise. It was smart.

They lived in the age of honor. It was the age of dueling. The church condemned dueling and the culture of honor as immoral and godless and foolish. The enemy was tapping into the age of honor, challenging Wesley to a duel of battle staffs in the form of their walking sticks. Again, Wesley didn’t answer the fool according to his folly.

But Wesley told the enemy (or else did he show the enemy?) that he was a fool. In Proverbs you find that the fool builds a trap to take someone else, but (in the end) they get caught in their own trap. So, Wesley used the second proverb of the pair. “Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.”

Wesley copied his enemy by putting on his own witty production on the footbridge and foiled the enemy’s threat. John’s clever doge made it impossible for the enemy to be wise in his own eyes. The big guy got caught in his own trap.

The pair of proverbs in chapter twenty-six, verses four and five, literally contradict each other. The whole Book of Proverbs almost didn’t get into the Jewish Scriptures simply on the fact that it contained this one, clear contradiction.

There was a rabbi’s council that met toward the end of the first century AD to standardize the Jewish faith. It was an emergency council, because the Romans had destroyed their country and scattered their people. The Romans had destroyed the official copies of the scriptures in the Temple that were used to standardize new copies.

The rabbis were afraid to include the book that had this pair of contradictions in plain sight. So, they claimed that the two proverbs had to be about two different kinds of fools, one kind that you could talk to and the other kind that you couldn’t talk to, but the proof wasn’t there, and no one was ever really fooled.

I would propose a lesson in the perfect and compete inspiration of the Scripture that we can learn from this pair of contradictory proverbs. I would say that the Scriptures are so inspired by the power of God that even when they contradict each other, they still work. They still teach the truth. They still give us the full wisdom, and counsel, and guidance of God.

This level of inspiration is where we have to start if we want to hear God speak to us through these two contradicting proverbs. The conflict doesn’t prove that the scriptures are merely human, and not divine. It teaches us to see that the human words and the divine words are part of one unified project that God has designed for our salvation.

The word that is both human and divine contains, at its core, the plan for God to give us the bridge from earth to heaven, and from mortal life to the born-again life in this world. God became Jesus, who is completely and perfectly both human and divine. The plan of God is to provide himself with a whole universe of sons and daughters, who will include us.

This plan is that we will be taken up into the presence, and the healing, and the joy, and the glory of God. There, in the sight of God, we will truly and perfectly be both human sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, and we will be the genuine and spiritual sons and daughters of God.

When Jesus grabs us and makes us his own, we move from seeing a contradictory, unexplainable hodgepodge that has no rhyme or reason…we go from seeing the mysterious mess, to seeing the one great mystery revealed in Jesus Christ whose perfect and complete nature as God and human bridges the gap between God and us created by sins. God and human, together in Jesus, defeated sin and death on the cross, and in the empty tomb.

Seeing Christ opens the Bible to us. It opens the secret and the nature of life, in this world, to us. Seeing and knowing Christ in his apparent contradictions opens prayer to us. It opens the puzzle of our free will, and of God’s sovereign will, just a crack. It opens the future to us.

I am very intensely interested in having reliable information on what the will of God is for me and for you. Do you understand me? You may want the exact same thing as I do. I want a direct line to the will and the mind of God.

God’s contradictory pair of proverbs teaches me about this line to the will of God. It tells me that I should never be surprised to find that God has more than one way for me to choose and do something. You can decide that what I’m saying has nothing to do with Biblical teaching and truth, but here it is. When I was in college I always had summer jobs. I also had some jobs during the school year, usually work-study jobs: but I had this pair of jobs open to me one summer and I didn’t know which one to choose. I won’t tell you what they were.

You’d figure it out right away, but I was twenty-one years old and not that bright. I wanted to do both but I could only choose one. There were good reasons for both, but I could only choose one. I prayed, read the Bible, asked for good advice.

Nothing helped. Then, during a time of prayer, I felt God say something like this, “Choose whichever job you want. I’ll bless you either way.” God had organized his own world to give me any number of choices, and I’m sure that he knew which choice I would make, but it had to be a choice generated within myself.

God had also provided me with at least two ways to make the choice that pleased him. That gift was the choice of using my chooser (otherwise known as my heart) or the choice of using my head, which had a brain hidden inside it.

Sometimes we have more than one God-blessed choice to choose from. God will bless us, whatever choice we make, but each blessing will be different, and we will never know the possible consequences of the choice not taken.

The real contradiction of our pair of proverbs has another, completely different message for us. The very contradictions almost form the message for us.

In the larger picture, we see that fools are a danger, not only to themselves, but to others as well. Their lives are about themselves. They are the people who say “Me, me, me,” all the time.

All fools are, first of all, me-me-me fools. Because of this, fools are fools because they don’t understand anything. They don’t understand the importance of God and the importance of others as being a required foundation for the importance of you. You can’t separate your love and care for yourself from your love and care for God, for others, and for the creation.

In this lack of understanding (because they won’t listen to God because they don’t trust him to let them go on straying “me-me-me” forever, and so they will not let God be God) fools stand in the way of God’s desires for others, they harm those others, they harm the creation, and they harm themselves.

Remembering this foundation, our pair of contradictions teach us that wise people can turn into fools, and that fools can lose their foolishness and begin to be wise. Foolishness never ends well unless you end your foolishness first.

“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself.” If you really are as wise as you think you are, then you may be too wise for your own good. That kind of wisdom isn’t wisdom at all. Then you are actually only wise in your own eyes. Then dealing with the foolishness of a fool can make you turn you into a fool.

“Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” The finest and most fatal form of foolishness consists of being wise in your own eyes. And we have that proverb at the end of our reading that says. “Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”

Being wise in your own eyes is the beginning and the end of foolishness. It’s the foundation and the roof of foolishness. Then you are finished and there’s more hope for a fool than for you.

This pair of contradictions contradicts all of our fondest wishes: that we can depend on being what we want to be to the end.

This is wrong for many reasons. Most of all, God has based his creation on a pattern of contradictions. Some things never change. The amount of energy in the universe is unchanging, never added to and never lost. This essence of the creation never, never, changes.

And yet change is happening all the time in things as they are or seem to be. Everything seems to always be changing. You can find that you are not what you thought you are, and what you are can change.

So, we come to another seeming contradiction. The condition of a fool seems to be hopeless and unchanging, except for the fact that it isn’t.

Looking at history and foolishly wondering how it might have been, I could say that Hitler turned out to be a fool but, if we had judged him to be a fool from the start and fought him as if he were a fool, then he would have destroyed us. Never give yourself the pleasure of judging anyone and calling them a fool. It might destroy you.

And your fool might become wise and your wisdom might look pretty foolish. If you hate the fools you may be hating yourself. If you judge them you might be judged. That sounds like something Jesus said. The wise show us the face of God by showing us the face of Jesus. Don’t hate someone because you don’t see the face of Jesus. See the face of Jesus that might become their face. Don’t be angry, and don’t call anyone a fool. You might be the fool yourself. See everyone, as well as yourself, living in the environment of the love and grace of the Father.

Paul shows this as he opens his self-referral letter to the church in Rome. Paul wrote, “I am obligated both to Greeks and to non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome.” (Romans 1:14-15) I think the readers of this letter would wonder whether Paul was saying that the Greeks were the wise and the non-Greeks were the foolish or the other way around. And, if it was important to Paul so that he felt he owed you a debt of duty to bring you the gospel, would it be because he thought you were a fool, or because he thought you were wise.

Do you want to be loved because you are wise? Or, do you want to be loved because you are a fool?

With Paul, it could be either way. But how would that make you feel? You must know that Paul tried to think in conformity to the mind of God, the mind of Christ. We tend to think that the Bible shows God hating fools when it only says that he hates what fools make happen.

Have you ever loved someone and found that they had made their lives horrifying and disgusting? That is a hatred that comes from love. The eternal thing, there, is the love, and love will pray for mercy.

God loves the wise and the foolish, even when he finds us horrifying and disgusting. Would you want it any other way?

God’s mission in Jesus was a mission of love to the wise and the foolish, and it appears that the people with a well-earned reputation for wisdom didn’t recognize God and God’s message when it came in Jesus. The Lord was recognized by the babies of the world, which means not just the youngest and the smallest physically, but some of the Hebrew words for foolish refer to people who have not developed into maturity.

As we can see, although fools are unredeemable, fools may not end up as fools. Fools may become the wise ones. And it’s the babies, the unfinished and the immature who may suddenly become wise in the presence of a God who made himself profoundly small and human for them.

This is the chasm which is only bridged by the Lord who has made a foolish looking sacrifice for those who least deserve it. Paul didn’t care who you thought you were. He would always think better of you than that.

Whether you were wise or foolish, Paul would see you as something so much more. Paul would see you as someone he was obligated to. He would see himself as indebted to you because of God in Christ who bridged the distance between God and humans, glory and a mud-ball, glory and a painful death. That is the wisdom of God. That guarantees that we should not be wise in our own eyes.

We have to live by a different wisdom than our own. So, we must die to ourselves and rise with the wisdom of God crucified for us in Jesus. We must make God’s mission our own.

We own everyone around us, and everyone in this world a God sized debt, a debt that looks like Jesus, a debt that insists on making us into Jesus for the sake of others. Only then can we be wise in his eyes. Only in the sacrificial love of Jesus for those who crucified him can we know what our life is for, and how to live it out, and thrive for others, and thrive for ourselves.

Wonderful World of Wisdom - The Strength of a Sticky Love

Preached on Sunday, August, 12, 2018

Scripture readings: Proverbs 18:9-24; John 15:9-17; Philemon 8-16

“There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. (Proverbs 18:24) In these days, we’ve learned to include the word “sister” in this friendship too.

A community of trees in Southern California
June 2018

This proverb is a part of my life because of my cousin Donny; who’s a better Christian than I am and much smarter too. Don is a couple years younger than I am and he became a Christian about the time I was starting seminary. He and I had talked before about what it meant to belong to Jesus, and he was always a good listener. He told me that a lot of people had been talking to him about Jesus. He took a while to decide and I’m not sure that I played much part in it. When he gave himself to Jesus, he grew fast. He was a fast learner.

Don soon found this verse and applied it to the two of us. When we were a lot younger, and outnumbered two to one by our sisters, we talked about being brothers. We lived just a few miles away from each other in those days. Every week, we saw each other and played together, and it meant a lot to me.

 I also always felt that Donny was my friend and my brother, and in Christ we could be the “friends that stick closer than a brother.” That’s exactly what we wanted. Only I am pretty sure that I haven’t lived up to it, which makes me sorry.

If anyone asked me about whether this proverb was really about friends or else more about brothers, my answer would have to be “Yes”. Because that’s what my cousin and I were.

The proverbs all fit together anyway, like the pieces of a puzzle. The proverb has to be about women and sisters just as much as being about brothers, because there is the other proverb in our reading: “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.” (18:22) Surely that’s about finding something even more than a friend and brother together.

Brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, friends are a gift and they are the grace and favor from the Lord. They are a kind of miracle, no matter how much work they take to maintain.

Another piece of the puzzle is the fact that two brothers are like fortress towns that stand close to each other. A fortress town was a safe place. Walls and gates were solid things that you could trust to save you from losing everything, and losing yourself, to be taken away by enemies into exile or slavery.

The problem came when the brothers, sisters, or friends fought. I truly wanted a brother when I was a kid, but as I got older I saw the way brothers fought. That could be nasty.

In the proverbs, it isn’t even about fighting, per se. It was about one brother offending the other. I think you can fight without getting hurt but this was about hurting. We read the proverb that says: “An offended brother is more unyielding than a fortified city, and disputes are like the barred gates of a citadel.” (18:19)

When the two fortresses are friends, and an enemy knocks down your strong, protecting walls, you can make a run for it to your brother fortress. If you make it to the gate, you will be safe. But, if you haven’t taken time apart for your brother-fortress and met your priority to heal each other from the wounds of your fights and offenses, then your brother-fortress might be closed against you. Having a brother-fortress, or a sister-fortress, is a miracle. A brother’s or sister’s shut gate comes when someone has been ungrateful for a miracle. Someone has been ungrateful for the relationship that makes you stronger than just being yourself.

There are friends who are companions. They are connections with whom you eat, and work, and play, and there are friends who are brothers or sisters and these are miracles, because many, many companions can never equal one sisterly friend or one brotherly friend.

“A man or woman of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother or sister.” It’s true there is strength in numbers, but Proverbs would tell us that there is greater strength in trust. There is greater safety in faithfulness.

The God of the Bible teaches us that faith and the faithful object of our faith are stronger than strength. What happens between one human and another, or between just a few faithful humans is a model that points to our relationship with God.

God is the best fortress: “The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.” (18:10) Names (even the names of the Lord) are not magic spells that work on their own if you remember to use them right. Names (in the Old Testament) were supposed to reveal what you were made of. The reason that Lord would sometimes change the name of human being whom he was calling (like changing Abram’s name to Abraham) was that the new name would reveal that God was making him into a person who was made of more than he was made of before God took charge of him.

Some people say the name of the Lord is Jehovah, but that was a misunderstanding and a mistranslation of the Hebrew alphabet that began in the Middle ages and continued for a few centuries after that. Which is why Christian hymnbooks and songbooks have the name “Jehovah” in them.

The proper pronunciation is closer to Yahweh. Yahweh is short for “I Am Who I Am” or “I Will Be Who I Will Be”. God’s name is a mystery that carries the message that God is made of bigger and greater stuff than anyone can know.

The message of the name of the Lord is more than a name. The message of the Lord’s name is that the Lord is bigger than you think, so trust him and know that you are safe in his purpose for your life. The reason why the name of the Lord is a strong tower of refuge is that he is always more than you can ever imagine him to be. “I am who I Am” and “I Will Be Who I Will Be.”

Friends, sisters, and brothers are fortresses because we are created to be fortresses for each other. We are created to be fortresses for each other because God has made us in his image, and God is the best fortress of all. God is the ultimate strength and security, and so God has created us to join him in helping, protecting, sheltering, and loving others as he does.

God is our friend. He’s doesn’t get that name in Genesis, although that is where we see God confiding in Abraham, and listening to Abraham, as a friend. Centuries later, during an invasion of the Kingdom of Judah, King Jehoshaphat, asked the Lord for help and described the relationship between the Lord and the descendants of Abraham this way: "Did You not, O our God, drive out the inhabitants of this land before Your people Israel and give it to the descendants of Abraham, Your friend forever?” (2 Chronicles 20:7)

There is a long-term plan, still in effect, and still moving forward, in which the Lord wants to insert his model of friendship back into a world that knows almost nothing of such friendship. You and I are a part of this plan to insert and spread the power of God’s friendship on a lost and alienated enemy planet called the earth.

The plan began with Adam and Eve. It took a great step forward with Abraham, Moses, and Israel.

And then God came down in Jesus, so that he and our human race could get hitched together. God hitched his friendship to us by becoming human, and offering himself as a sacrifice, as a sin-offering, and as a peace-offering, and as a Passover offering to take us out of the slavery of a life where we don’t belong. God is the Passover sacrifice that give us what we need to get to the promised land (or the Promised Life) where we can live like a fruitful vine, bearing lots of fruit in every branch; in every single one of us, pruned and prepared.

In Jesus God did this, letting the sins of humanity kill him on the cross, and then by overcoming the death created by sin, by rising from the dead. The Lord did this because he is the one to whom all models of brotherhood, and sisterhood, and friendship point. Our miracle relationships point in agreement to the greatest miracle of all.

This miracle is the Word of God becoming the action of God, made flesh in Jesus, and offering himself for us in sacrifice and power. In Jesus, God himself lay down his life for his friends: for us, and for those to come. Some of those to come will come to this friendship through us, or through other friends of Jesus who are our friends.

We will be the friends who lay down our lives for new friends, and for our oldest and dearest friend, Jesus. I say this to Jesus, every now and then. When I feel alone I speak to the Lord for comfort. I tell the Lord, “You are my oldest and dearest friend.”

Jesus lay down his life for his friends, including us, so that we can learn how to see him as our friend and lay down our lives for him. When a twelve-year-old child, in some wild part of this world, would rather be beheaded or crucified, rather than deny his oldest and dearest friend Jesus, we can see the power of this friendship. Jesus told his friends that he was doing this so that they, and we, could bear fruit, “fruit that will last.” (John 15:16)

The truth is that we know very little of this power. Christians in the western world get angry and loud at the thought of being humbled, or being pushed to the outside of things. We’re afraid of being the victims of injustice or discrimination.

Not that we should be passive in a free and democratic country. The law allows us freedom of speech, and freedom to vote and we have a duty to use those rights. And we should speak and work unafraid, as the friends of Jesus. The friends of Jesus never panic.

Knowing the model for friendship in the Book of Proverbs helps us to know what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel of John, about the costliness of friendship in the work of bearing fruit. It begins with the laying down of the life of God, in Jesus, on the cross. It continues with the laying down of our lives at the foot of his cross: then, perhaps, we will follow the friendship of Jesus through crosses of our own. We will go on to carry a cross for others so that others can bear fruit that will last.

Perhaps we can say it begins by laying down our lives, here and now, in this place. Then we won’t be, any longer, quite our own.

You don’t just lay down your life by suffering. You also lay it down by belonging. You lay yourself down to make yourself into a safe place for others; to defend and protect others.

When Jesus gave himself for his friends, his friendship took on greater and greater power. Our giving ourselves, here and now, and in the future, will do the same.

The fellowship of the Lord’s Table, here, is another model of the Lord’s friendship. It’s a model in which we participate. As we participate, we find that the friendship grows in this place as we come to the same table (the table of Jesus) together. The bread and the cup are his friendship that we take into ourselves. What we eat and drink here becomes the power that gives life to every cell in our bodies.

With Jesus’ offer to choose and receive us, and with our consent to come and receive him, Jesus himself becomes our bread of life and our cup of salvation. It courses through our blood. Jesus courses through our souls, our inner selves.

It’s a meal with friends. It’s a meal for friendship, and refuge, and mission. It’s a sister-and-brother-fortress.

Belief isn’t about ideas. It’s about trust and it’s about action based on that trust. As the unbelieving slave, Onesimus, became a believer and one who trusted Jesus, he also became like a son and a brother and a friend, at the same time, for Paul. Paul became his father and brother and friend at the same time. We become friends as close as brothers and sisters, as we come to this table, trusting Jesus.

It isn’t that easy to even come to church. It was very hard for me at one time. It was embarrassing. I had to trust Jesus more than I trusted my pride and my fears. Even walking our short aisle to the table takes more giving than you may think. You are coming to something more than you can see, or hear, or sense, and you are trusting that this mystery wants to be your friend.

Let’s receive Jesus, our oldest and dearest friend. He lay himself down for us on the cross. Let’s start by laying ourselves down for Jesus, and for each other, here, now.

Wonderful World of Wisdom - Doppelganger Effect

Preached on Sunday, August 5, 2018. 
This goes back to a series I began about the Book of Proverbs three Sundays ago.

Scripture readings: James 3:13-18; Proverbs 9:1-18; Matthew 11:25-30

A Street in the Venice District, Los Angeles.
Started in 1905 as an Italian Themed Resort. (2018)

I came home from college, one Christmas break, and I needed to shop for more presents. I drove down to the California version of Marysville, where J. C. Penny’s was downtown. At Penny’s I spotted a pretty girl in her late teens, slim and sable haired. It was my sister Kathie. I didn’t yell at her because we were in the department store, but I walked over to where she was. I wondered why she was there without me when she could have ridden into town with me.

I got within five feet of her and realized that she wasn’t Kathie at all. She looked exactly like Kathie, but she wasn’t.

Later on, my sister and I talked to our friends and found out that this had happened to them before, as well. There was this girl in our area who looked exactly like Kathie, except for the fact that she wasn’t Kathie. It was Kathie’s exact double.

Back to Santa Monica Pier for a ride on the Carousel.
June 14, 2018

She might have been what you would call a doppelganger (which means an exact double) except that a doppelganger is supposed to be a kind of ghostly double, which she wasn’t. A real doppelganger, if such a thing existed, was (according to legend) potentially dangerous. If a pair of doppelgangers meet, they both disappear without a trace.

In Proverbs, chapter nine, we’re presented with the case of real doppelgangers. There’s the woman named Folly and she’s the doppelganger of the Lady Wisdom.

When you read all of Proverbs, you find tidbits of their resemblance. They both have loud voices. They both walk the streets. They both seem to be selling their wares. You find them both in the same parts of town. We read how they both live in the same neighborhood in the high ground, the top of the town. The top of the town is the part that catches the breeze and so the air doesn’t stink as it would in the lower parts an ancient town without a proper sewer.

They both start out with the same message to the same customers. After they start, their messages have a whole different point to them. But they both start out like this: “Let all who are simple come in here!” She says to all who lack judgement. (Proverbs 9:4 and 9:16) Both have a meal ready for their customers, but their meals are different, and the fellowship at their meal has a different purpose.

It’s not really customers the two ladies are after. They’re really after students. Lady Wisdom will teach her students wisdom. Lady Folly will teach her students…death. Well, it’s the same as saying that Lady Folly will teach her students how to be fools. But foolishness is a tricky thing. Maybe wisdom can be tricky too.

Wisdom and Folly have their hard parts and their easy parts. So, there they go, being doppelgangers again. Except that Wisdom starts hard, and (perhaps) gets easier. Folly starts easy, and (definitely) turns hard in the end. At least, that’s what Proverbs seems to say.

Proverbs, remember, is one of three wisdom books from the school of Solomon. The presumption here (and it is a presumption), is that King Solomon had a royal school in

Jerusalem for training public servants and leaders. Any decent kingdom, deserving of the name, needed to have a leadership academy. The three wisdom books were the core curriculum for that school and the model for whatever ordinary schools were started in the towns and villages of the kingdom: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. Proverbs is wisdom for kids before they go out to face adult life. Song of Solomon is wisdom for young love and marriage; and wisdom for love and marriage between the Lord and Israel and, much later, love and marriage between Christ and his Church. Ecclesiastes is wisdom for summing up life, and its purpose and value, later in life.

Why would public servants and leaders and the general population need such a curriculum as this? Because Solomon knew that public servants, and leaders (and a whole nation together) need to be wise about life. It’s not good enough just to be smart.

The Book of Proverbs is full of wisdom about the incompatibility of opposites: wisdom versus foolishness, righteousness versus wickedness, good versus evil, diligence versus laziness. You would think that these opposites were as opposite as white and black.

A little bit of wisdom can see how opposite they are and how one can mess the other up. Also, a little bit of wisdom can tell you how close these opposites are to each other, and how easily we can mistake something foolish for being wisdom, or at least for being smart. For myself, I find that I’m foolish every day, even when I’m trying to be wise, or at least when I’m trying to be smart.

Our doppelgangers look a lot alike, and you find them in the same places, and their message starts out exactly the same. Here’s how they start again: ‘“Let all who are simple, come in here!” She says to those who lack judgement.’ Both wisdom and folly are attractive to those who are simple and who lack judgement.

I get a kick out of comedies about people stranded on some deserted island where one of the first wise things to do is to build a simple shelter. Something always goes wrong with their simple shelter. For a long time, I served a church where the shelters weren’t so simple. They were a hundred years old and they needed a lot of attention all over the place all the time, but there were some needs that were more basic and, if you were wise, you took care of those first.

One of those old Penny Arcade devices.
This is "The Personality Tester".
It declares me "Dreamy".

When you think about it, it’s simple. You need two things first of all: a good roof and a good foundation. Those will take care of everything in between, at least so they’ll stay in one piece until you get to them. You can hold off waiting to paint the Sunday school classrooms in the basement once every sixty years, so long as you’ve got a good foundation and a good roof.

What the doppelgangers offer you in the end is simple. We can see that Lady Wisdom promises to give you life. We can see that Lady Folly secretly plans to bury you in her basement: that’s death. That’s her promise, but you don’t hear her say it.

That’s part of the difference between wisdom and folly, but we can understand them better yet.

The response of the foolish to wisdom is hate and harm. The response of the wise to wisdom is love and learning. Love is life, the foundation and roof of wisdom. Hate is death, the roof and foundation of folly.

Those for whom the fear of the Lord is a love-word will begin to have wisdom. For those who love hating and mocking, the end is being alone and suffering. Suffering, here, is not literally about pain. It’s about loss, and grief, and ending: the ending of all the options that make life a living thing.

Wisdom has only beginnings, wherever we are in life. Even at our last breath we are still stepping into the beginning of something. There’s something in foolishness that cuts us off from others and brings possibilities to an end. Beginning is also the simple roof and foundation of wisdom. Ending is the simple roof and foundation of foolishness.

The feast in the house of Wisdom is wine and meat. Real meat would make this an expensive meal. There was an expensive meal that you could offer in the Temple and then eat with your family and friends. It could be a thank offering of a lamb and wine.

When the lamb was killed, as an offering on the altar, part of the meat was dedicated to the Temple priests, and part of it could go home with you. Some of the wine would be poured on the altar, and the rest could go home with you. The meal would be part of a prayer of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord for his gifts and faithfulness. The meal in the house of Wisdom was such a meal as that: a meal of grace, and thanks, and faithfulness. It’s the Lord’s Table. It’s the table God sets for his people.

The meal in the house of Folly was stolen. It was taken. It was not a gift to God or to anyone. It was not a meal of love.

It was delicious because it was exciting. It was exciting because it was dangerous. It was dangerous because it was a flirtation with death.

Lunch on a roof-top.
View to the north.

Folly and foolishness come from a word with special meaning in the Bible. The word points to people who have chosen a way of life that refuses to learn and it is a way of life that is both destructive to others and (in the end) it’s self-destructive. Foolishness is bad not because it’s silly. It’s bad because, in the end, self-love is not love at all. Such a love only steals its food and it has no future: no life.

Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly offer their schools to those who lack understanding as well as to the simple. The word for “understanding” here is the same as the Hebrew word for “heart”. When we are heartless we desperately need wisdom, and we are in danger of taking the road of foolishness to the bitter end.

In a way the Hebrew word for heart means the capacity to truly choose your way. You grow in understanding because you have a heart. You have a center and core values. The heart follows its center, to the place of attraction. The understanding knows its true home: the ways to home and the ways of home and kindred.

Children and the young make choices all the time, but there is a kind of innocence that serves as a protection until we choose either the school of wisdom or the school of foolishness. In some way, those who choose the school for foolishness never quite acquire a real heart. Those who choose the school of wisdom begin to have a heart, and it is a heart that learns and grows.

There are those who leave the school of folly and join the school of wisdom and they can begin to grow a heart just like any of the wise. You can see how those who choose wisdom choose life. And those who don’t choose wisdom don’t choose life.

When I was a fourth grader, I remember the day that I was walking home after school, across the playground to the back gate that was closest to home. A couple of older boys were walking faster. They caught up with me and I saw that they were holding a magazine between them and they were laughing their heads off.

I asked them what they were reading. They told me they had a Playboy magazine and they were looking at naked women. I asked them, “Can I look?” They said, “You can’t look, you’re just a little kid.” Of course, they were a lot older. Why, they must have been sixth graders. They thought that they were looking for life and that they were finding it at Playboy. What they found was a catchy disease. I almost caught it from them. I wanted to see life too. The truth is that I already carried the foolish virus. We’re all born with it into this world.

There’s real life for you: a nine-year-old looking at pictures of naked women; if the older boys had let me do it. I would have laughed my head off with them, too, but I wouldn’t have known why, not yet.

The older boys were right in the sense that I shouldn’t look. That kind of looking would not give life to a little kid.

No, that’s not life. That’s trouble. A lot of people have that trouble. It doesn’t make people more alive. It does just the opposite. It imprisons people in a dungeon of paper and computer screens. People die there.

It looks like life. It looks like wisdom. The New Testament even calls that way of life wisdom (wisdom of a sort), but it’s the wrong kind of wisdom. James calls it the wisdom that doesn’t come from above. It’s not just about sex. It’s not even about what we call ethics and morality. The wisdom of death is (at least in part) what James says it is: bitterness, envy, selfish ambition, disorder, and conflict.

It’s possible even for holy people carry these in their shrinking hearts. They mistake the sickness of their hearts for the suffering of holiness. They justify what their hearts desire.

Churches, at their best, must become hospitals of life for people with such sick hearts. Churches need to love these sick ones through protective gloves and face masks, in order to resist infection.

If we choose the school of wisdom, we have to confess that we do it under the same condition as those who choose the foolishness of death. We have the same simplicity they have. We have the same lack of judgement: the same kind of hearts the foolish do.

We can see this every day, if we want.

There’s another thing about the feast of the thank offering in the school of Wisdom. Thank offerings were sacrifices, and those were expensive. Thank offering could cost the giver dearly, but there was a great motivation that made all that cost worthwhile.

The motivation to pay the price was the joy that came from an answer to prayer. Thank offerings were thanks for God’s faithfulness in answering some life-shaking need and prayer. The motivation could even come from a heart-pounding thanks for God’s deliverance from the terrible consequences of some foolish, destructive, self-destructive choice that the thankful soul had made and regretted. The holy meal was an offering of thanks given to a saving, merciful, and gracious God.

It was an offering of thanks to a saving, merciful, and gracious God, whom we see and know much better in Jesus, who was the sacrifice for our sins and for the sins of the world.

Jesus is the correction whom the heartless holy people killed. The holy people killed Jesus in rebuke for the way his goodness reflected badly on their hypocrisy and heartlessness to others. Jesus is the wise one who came to show the way to sinners and give them forgiveness, and love, and life. He shared his wisdom with such fools, even though he knew what it would cost him. The wise often do this because wisdom has given them understanding in the form of a heart.

We enter the school of wisdom when we let Jesus make us a new heart like his own. Then we become teachable. Then we love being corrected. We love learning. We love changing.

I was telling someone a few days ago how hard it was for me to change who I am and how I think. I was using the difficulty of that kind of change as an excuse. It’s true, of course.

Let’s start at the beginning of wisdom with Jesus. Let’s learn from Jesus the path that he took in this world as the wisdom of God. His school of wisdom is the way to the cross, and the way to find resurrection and a new life, even in this old life. Let’s follow him on that road. Jesus still walks that road, and he will become our wisdom when we welcome him and walk with him.