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.