I’ve got a question for you. Who is wise and understanding among you?
The letter of James poses that question rhetorically, because the author already has an answer ready for us: “wisdom… is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” If that’s what you’re like, you are indeed wise. But since I asked the question here and you remained silent, perhaps that means you’ve been arguing among yourselves about who is the wisest?
That was supposed to be a laugh line. We disciples of Jesus are distinguished by our arguing over righteousness, then and now!
But in terms of argumentativeness, you’re not actually whom I have in mind. My heart goes out to those awkward disciples we were introduced to in the Gospel today. First we meet them misunderstanding Jesus once again—that’s a particular theme for Mark—and then they’re unable or unwilling to respond to their teacher’s simple question about what they’d been doing. They look pretty foolish, even before they are upstaged by a child.
Because all of today’s lessons, which—in one way or another—contrast wisdom and folly—this week I have found myself thinking about the wise people I am acquainted with. That’s one of the principal joys of ministering with Trinity these past five years: there is so much wisdom here! I think of our senior warden Natalie Lias, who answered God’s call to show up at Trinity eight years ago, and look at her now! I think of Jim Alexander, who writes fiction and nonfiction out of the depths of our tradition, and leads our Theological Expeditions group. I think of our choir, who channel the ancient wisdom of our faith in song. And as I myself prepare to finish up at Trinity, I am especially conscious of our newly forming young adult community. The depth of the questions they engage on the discord server—that’s an online platform that allows them to engage in theological conversation and schedule in-person and virtual gatherings—is breathtaking.
At first glance this might seem like a cool technological add-on to Trinity’s ministry, until I saw people who’d never even been to our church in person signing on and introducing themselves in very personal and vulnerable ways. And engaging the deepest of theological questions with courage. This group of young people—many of whom have felt estranged from church or have never even been part of church—have opened a door that the rest of didn’t even know was shut. “It takes a lot of courage to open up again, so seeing this discord is amazing,” said one new member. Word! And the word is… wisdom.
The Letter of James has often been described as the New Testament’s book of wisdom, which is no doubt why we’re hearing it read this morning alongside the lesson from Proverbs, which is one of the principal repositories of wisdom literature in the Old Testament. Some New Testament scholars argue that the Letter of James is in the Biblical canon in part as antidote to Paul’s letters. To the extent that James insists that faith manifests itself in good works, it complements Paul’s theology of grace. I would argue, however, that wisdom in the Biblical sense is not merely about grace nor works—what we might also call things given by God and things done by us—but rather encompasses and indeed transforms our understanding of both. To be wise is to share in the perspective of God, which is at once an unearned gift—that would be grace—and a practice we can cultivate. That would be works.
And works there are in our lesson from Proverbs, no? In Evanglical culture, the capable wife has often been held up to Christian women as that unattainable ideal of a multitasking mom who does it all… and makes her husband look great in the process. But the Bible offers another perspective. She is not so much the perfect woman—that we can never be—as she is a symbol for something of the character of God. We know this because the text in Hebrew is an acrostic: the initial letters of each verse form the complete Hebrew alphabet. Which means that the Proverbs 31 woman was intended to be a kind of “word icon” of universality; an alpha to omega summary of wisdom itself. Notice her attributes: she is generous, discerning, creative and has a gracious way with words.
“To you, O people, I call,” speaks the personified voice of wisdom in Proverbs 8, “I have insight, I have strength… My fruit is better than gold, even fine gold, and my yield than choice silver. I walk in the way of righteousness, along the paths of justice,… endowing with wealth those who love me, and filling their treasuries.”
So our lessons teach us that a socially marginal person—a woman—can be an image of God’s own Wisdom. Meanwhile Jesus, a wisdom teacher, offers a child as a model of discipleship. These unlikely archetypes suggest to me that we really need to pay attention to the wisdom that appears where and with whom we may least expect it. God gives wisdom where God will. That is how the free gift of grace works. That’s good news.
The other good news is that wisdom can actually be learned, which means that there’s hope even for we old fools who aren’t on discord and may never be. Peacefulness, gentleness and mercy are things we can practice every day. And we can listen to and learn from the wise, as was my experience this week. The lessons I’ve learned from our emerging young adult community brought to mind also the Rule of St. Benedict, a discipline for attaining wisdom if ever there were. Did you know that it actually codifies the importance of listening to the young? The rules for monks meeting in council say that “God often reveals what is better to the younger.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls his disciples—which of course include us as well—to break the patterns of our conditioned thinking about who is first and who is mature. But he is hardly alone in doing so; rather he stands in the long Biblical tradition of God upending social conventions and categories, including conventions about whom we might consider to be wise. It is costly to acknowledge the authority of the last, the youngest, or the person from the wrong social group. Which might be a child, or a woman, or a person of color or a person whose gender or sexual expression is unfamiliar to us. When God calls us to learn wisdom from the person we’d otherwise overlook, I can almost guarantee that it will feel very awkward, if not downright scary.
But then, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” as Proverbs has assured us. And while changing our assumptions can indeed be scary, the fear that the Bible speaks of here is actually something more akin to awe. It’s the kind of fear that does not so much cause us to run away as draws us closer, albeit trembling. In a way, cultivating the discipline of awe requires that we assume something of the trust, wonder, and openness of a child within ourselves. But then, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” Jesus tells us, “and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
