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When it comes to the words that inspire us, we can all think of quotes by writers, rappers, and filmmakers. Words are important, powerful, and help us construct meaning in our lives. It’s one of the best feelings in the world to read a quote that makes you think “Yes, that is how I feel!” and “Yes, that’s what I think too!”
The Book of Proverbs is a collection of ancient quotations. It belongs to the category of biblical books we call the wisdom literature. It’s found right in the middle of the Bible, but we rarely think of the words in this collection as central to the wisdom in our everyday lives. Proverbs is often overlooked, can seem pretty dusty, and when read too quickly is a blur of cliches.
Let’s take another look at Proverbs. Let’s trust that there’s something here for us in our big life questions about how to be wise in relationship with our families, our bodies, our resources, and our power. Proverbs hands us a way to find wisdom in the ordinary. It’s about the art of living and seeing the beauty of God in the grit of everyday life.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:It's good to see you today. If we haven't met, I'm Bobbie, and I'm one of the pastors here at Commons. For those of you who were not here last week, we are in a series on wisdom through the book of Proverbs and someone sent me a list of proverbs with sentences finished by grade one students. And you can find the longer list everywhere on the internet but my favorite grade one proverbs are, don't bite the hand that looks dirty. A bird in the hand is going to poop on you.
Speaker 2:A miss is as good as a mister. Happy is the bride who gets all the presents and better late than pregnant. So good. Right? So good.
Speaker 2:As I read through this list, I honestly thought there is no way a grade one class pulled this off. And sure enough, a Google search finds that this list comes from the not quite best seller inspirational wit and wisdom from the Internet. In that search, it led me to this sweet find, a book called You Are Worthless. Depressing Nuggets of Wisdom Sure to Ruin Your Day. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I must have been in a mood because this list slayed me. It's the table of contents. Chapter one, your worthless self. Chapter two, you're good for nothing friends. Chapter three, all the other idiots.
Speaker 2:Chapter four, the nightmare that is love. And chapter five, your faith, what has it ever brought you but grief? Again, I must have been in a mood this week. But both of these lists do actually have something to do with what we're talking about today. We are headed to the oldest section of Proverbs chapters 10 to 29, and this section is a pile of sayings as random as that list about birds and brides and as raging as the ranging as the cast of characters in your not so worthless life.
Speaker 2:So we're in our second week of this wisdom series and Proverbs can be a marginal book in our spiritual pursuits to know God. If Proverb is Proverbs is not a book that you have cracked open in a while, you're actually in pretty solid company. Some first century rabbis who made the call about which books to keep in the scriptures wanted to give Proverbs the boot. The rabbi said that the Proverbs were just good old common sense, but Proverbs prevailed and made the cut for the same reason. It's about ordinary, everyday, good old common sense living.
Speaker 2:Last week, we spoke about the two paths of wisdom, the path of folly or foolishness and the path of wisdom or in Hebrew. And we looked at two mesmerizing figures to flesh out these two paths and how they look in human behavior. So Proverbs gives us the figure of folly as one who seduces and tricks and leads to destruction. Meaning, to follow a path of folly is to ignore good sense, to work against the regenerative patterns in life, to end up isolated. And the mirror opposite of folly is the figure of wisdom.
Speaker 2:She seeks out and speaks to every human ear. Wisdom is right advice, more valuable than rubies. Wisdom is the life renewing patterns of the universe. Wisdom is the art of living. The Hebrew word for wisdom is and Hebrew literature personifies as a woman who was with God before any speck of dust came to be.
Speaker 2:So to follow the path of wisdom is to never stop learning in community and to honestly reflect on the landscape of our own soul. When it comes to wisdom, I actually have a collection of my own. I've been doing this thing on Instagram for a while where I collect what inspires me. There are comedians and quotes from books and of course Beyonce. I could collect Instagram posts like this until the cows come home.
Speaker 2:There is no shortage of things that inspire me in the world, and wisdom is like that. Wisdom is bottomless and inexhaustible and particular to you. And if you don't feel all that close to God or you struggle to believe in a personal God at all, but you know the feeling of something spoken or heard that hits you with the force of what you know to be true and you feel inspired to put that truth into action then you have encountered wisdom and wisdom flows from God Gathering, collecting, and living out wisdom is prayer in action. You may have a list of things that you know to be true. A book of quotes that inspires you.
Speaker 2:An Instagram collection that keeps you connected to who you are and how you wanna live. And all of these wise sayings include a cast of characters, relational settings where we live our everyday lives. So I built a bit of a structure for our time today. Get excited. It's a chiastic structure, which here just means that the first one a is like a a and b is like b b, and they center on c.
Speaker 2:That's our outline. So at the top, we'll look at proverbs about family and partnership. Then we'll look at proverbs about our own selves. The middle are proverbs about God and the hinge on which all the other proverbs swing. Then we'll look at proverbs about our close personal circles, and we'll finish with proverbs about society and the world.
Speaker 2:I'm not trying to cover everything in proverbs. You would never leave this room if I were, but I'm just trying to cover a good cross section of what makes a wise life. So today is all about wisdom versus decision making. So let's pray and dive in. God of all wisdom, you were present with the sages who in another time and place, they reached out and they found wisdom.
Speaker 2:The sages, they studied, they debated, they recorded what they knew to be from you. And the sages, they got their hands on this wisdom, not just wisdom for themselves, but wisdom that was meant to be shared. Not just wisdom for knowing, but wisdom for living. So for those of us at a crossroads of decision making, God, will you inspire us with something meaningful today? For those of us needing the energy to take a step forward or even a step backwards or maybe to just sit down and wait, will you expand our imaginations of what is possible?
Speaker 2:For those of us in need of change, will you show us the way forward for your love and your care? God, we give you thanks. Amen. So let's begin with the theological word immanence. Imminence is this idea that God is present in and close to and involved in creation.
Speaker 2:And Christian theology teaches that God is always involved with creation without ever being exhausted or diminished in any way. Imminence speaks to why these everyday proverbs matter so much. These everyday proverbs observe the connection between ordinary things and God's ordering of things. So here's how the theologian, Hans Ros von Bothesar, wrote about God's addressing us in ordinary things. And I know it's still the weekend, and this quote is dense but I believe in you so let's track through it.
Speaker 2:For this voice, meaning this voice of God, from eternity whispers and breathes right through everything that exists in the world, all intramundane values. So he means everything that's concerned with the material world. And without depriving the things of this world with their meaning and value, it, the voice, lends them a bottomless dimension exploding whatever is closed, relativizing whatever seems ultimate, sweetening the pain, and bringing reconciliation to what is tragic. And really, I could just stop speaking today right there because Balthazar just renders me speechless, except I'm gonna keep talking. Balthazar's interest was the play between the divine and the human.
Speaker 2:And the last part of the quote is important as we step into the terrain of family and ourselves and God and friendships and society. Because in all of these areas, we hold a complex set of circumstances of both sweetness and pain. So we proceed with gentleness towards our own stories of family and faith and friendship. So let's begin with family, the place where all of our stories begin. Proverbs 12 verse four reads, a wife of noble character is her husband's crown but a disgraceful wife is like decay in his bones.
Speaker 2:And what the Hebrew cleverly does with seven words, the NIV says with 19 words. So it takes extra effort to get the full meaning here. And when gender is an issue, the sages always speak from a male perspective. The proverb is from a selection of proverbs that guides a young man to choose a good wife. The focus on a woman as an object, it can be distracting, but it doesn't have to take away from the essence of the proverb.
Speaker 2:It is a common part of the human life to look for a good partner. Life is lonely and we want someone to share it with. I'm for equal opportunity in Proverbs. Women and men are capable of being both amazing and horrible partners. So for this verse, we're gonna proceed with language less gendered.
Speaker 2:In the platitude about partnership, we have antithetical parallelism. So the first line is a statement of the positive that a good partner crowns you with pride. And the second line is a statement of the negative that unhealthy relationships bring pain and stop you from standing at all. In other words, yeah, sure. Good relationships are great, but a bad relationship is the worst.
Speaker 2:And any of my single friends in the room know a little bit about this in the world of dating. Right? I was single for thirty seven years until I married Jonathan, who is the younger brother of my friends, Sarah, Nicole, and Wendy. That's right. I married my friends, s apostrophe, younger brother.
Speaker 2:And I'm honestly surprised that I got married at all. I had grown to really love my full single life. I didn't feel like I wanted to stay single but I knew that I preferred single over a relationship that wasn't truly equal. And so far, our marriage is off to a really great start. I love being married to Jonathan.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I even think, I get to be married to him. But just because I got married doesn't mean I'm no longer single. And I mean that. In fact, when I forget to take care of myself, the way I did as a single person, I put unnecessary stress on my marriage. In other words, I'm single Bobby and I'm partnered Bobby, and I need to deal with the issues of being healthy on my own just as I deal with the issues of being healthy in my marriage.
Speaker 2:This proverb is not the only proverb about partnership and parenting. Proverbs make all kinds of space for how complex those family issues are. But still, there is more to family than partnership and parenting. Jesus challenged the conventional wisdom about family long after these proverbs were collected. You remember the story.
Speaker 2:Right? Where a large crowd gathers around Jesus and the religious authorities form a theory of where his power comes from in order to entrap him. They say he's possessed. And Jesus' mother and brothers are outside the door of the house to summon him, and they try to save him from this threat. And in this moment, Jesus frankly overturns the family unit.
Speaker 2:He looks around the room and he says, here are my mother and my brothers. It's not that he didn't love his mom. It's not that he didn't love his brothers. It's that he loves us all. You can pick up wisdom on partnership and parenting from the Proverbs.
Speaker 2:And you can pick up wisdom on partnership and parenting from the world that we live in. There is such good science and great resources about why we do what we do in families. But Jesus said wisdom in family looks like the family of our shared humanity. It looks like the community of discipleship. It looks like the reorganization of the whole social structure.
Speaker 2:Look, I love forming family with Jonathan. Even without kids, we have a really cool thing going. But forming partnership with Jonathan is not my ultimate aim. I work for more, More inclusion outside of our family. More belonging outside of our family.
Speaker 2:More love outside of our family. Okay. So how do we find wisdom in the decision making we need for ourselves? In Proverbs, decision making can seem pretty black and white. Proverbs is all about the moral self, how each good and bad decision shapes your life.
Speaker 2:And the portrait of a moral life in Proverbs is sketched in physical terms. And as someone who spends a lot of time in my own head, it's invaluable for me to see in proverbs a connection between wisdom and the body. So here's a proverb about hands and work. A sluggard buries his hand in the dish. He will not even bring it back to his mouth.
Speaker 2:So this proverb, it uses ironic humor to point out the absurdity of missing opportunities that are actually within your reach. You want food? A little work will get you some. You want friendship? This room is full of great human beings.
Speaker 2:You want love? It's everywhere for the taking. Here's one about mouths and tongues. Those who guard their mouths and their tongues keep themselves from calamity. What we miss in our English translations is the way that this proverb practices what it preaches.
Speaker 2:It uses balanced lines. In Hebrew, just three words each along with the wordplay to say that by safeguarding your mouth and tongue, you protect your nefesh, your neck or your throat. And nefesh is a metonym, a word that stands in for something else. Throat or neck stands in for life or soul. You breathe to live.
Speaker 2:Nefesh is your life. And when you watch what you say, when you take care with your words, you protect your life. So we see how this physical self in Proverbs is interchanged with the moral self, but it's the proverbs about the inner self that are my favorite. They are like a good country song. They just tell it like it is.
Speaker 2:Here's one. Each heart knows its own bitterness and no one else can share its joy. By using the possessive suffixes, its own bitterness, its joy. We see the personal ownership of your own experience. No one can feel what you feel.
Speaker 2:Your feelings are your own. In the Hebrew ends this word ends this phrase with the word meaning stranger. The proverb is honest about how separate your life can feel from another life. So where heaps of proverbs say that there are basically two paths in life. There's one of folly or one of wisdom.
Speaker 2:There's one of sadness or happiness. There's still space to say, yeah. Okay. Most of the time, that's pretty true. But sometimes, life is hard and it makes no sense and your sadness is your very own.
Speaker 2:It's a way to keep it real, Proverbs. Way to keep it real. But speaking of the real, let's talk about the ultimate real. Let's talk about the presence of God. Chapter 15 holds the Yahweh Proverbs, and here's one of them.
Speaker 2:The eyes of the Lord are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good. Earlier, we talked about the theological word, immanence. Now let's talk about transcendence. Transcendence is the idea that God is separate, above, and comes to the world from beyond. Together, imminence and transcendence, they convey paradox that God is both beyond and nearby, far away and close-up, known and unknown.
Speaker 2:And in the imminence and transcendence paradox, the comfort of this short proverb is in the Hebrew verb tsapha meaning to watch. It is the same word used in the scriptures for watchmen. People who have a unique vantage point to point out when someone is in danger. So t'afaa links us up to God's transcendence. The divine watches out over the good and the wicked.
Speaker 2:God is indiscriminate with watchfulness. So the person who hurt you, in the thick of your own emotions, you may launch some very nasty names in their direction, and I get that. Your anger needs to go somewhere, but God keeps watch. And the person who made a big dent of hurt in a community that you care about, you may form a theory of where all that violence and poor behavior came from, and you may at least be partly right, but God keeps watch. In the chapters in human history where people inflict unimaginable violence against one another, You may still feel the effects of that racism and that sexism and that displacement in your own life, but God keeps watch.
Speaker 2:God is witness to the worst thing that has ever happened to you, to any of us, even to our worst enemy or the person we just don't understand. Love means God does not turn away. To keep watch is to honor your pain and the pain of the person who hurt you. In Jesus, we see God as the one who suffers with us. Not only that, but Jesus can and will transform every hurt and abuse into something that is resilient and resurrected and whole.
Speaker 2:I don't know when. I don't know how, but I have every hope because I have seen it again and again in the lives of my friends. Proverbs chapters 22 to 24, we find a change in the organization of these wise sayings. Starting in verse 17, we have 30 sayings of the wise and they move the reader through these various social roles. And biblical scholars agree that this section of wisdom is related to the 1,300 BCE Egyptian work called instruction of a Menomope.
Speaker 2:A Menomope is a collection of instructions to a young man on how to be the ideal man. We're not talking about David Beckham here. Just a man in a social space with self control and honesty and kindness. So here's how this adaptation of Amenemope worked. The sages of Israel, they got their hands on this Egyptian saying and they tweaked them to fit the Hebrew notion of Chokmah.
Speaker 2:So the sages, they engage the culture at large critically and they borrow wisdom liberally. For them, if it's true, it's wise and then it's from God. It helps to see in this borrowing a friendship between cultures, an ability for one group of people to learn from another. Perhaps this collaboration didn't always work itself out politically, but it happened poetically. Robert Alter calls this section of Proverbs, the seamless dance between Israel and foreign wisdom.
Speaker 2:Decision making in friendship asks, how you cannot just get along, but how can you actually sharpen one another with your similarities and your differences? So we read, tables turn, bridges burn, you live and learn. And I'm kidding on that one because it's actually from Drake, and I've been waiting for two weeks to drop that in on you guys. You're welcome. Proverbs says, do not make friends with a hot tempered person.
Speaker 2:Do not associate with one easily angered or you may learn their ways and get yourself ensnared. The Hebrew ends verse 25 with the word yourself making it a weighty reality check. If you choose friends that have a very short fuse, you could lose yourself. So our final Proverbs check-in is societal. We end our survey with the sages' insistence to think critically about power and government.
Speaker 2:Proverbs 28 to 29 are handbook for a ruler. So there's caution when the wicked are in power. When the wicked rise to power, people go into hiding. But when the wicked perish, the righteous thrive. And there's caution about a greedy ruler.
Speaker 2:By justice, a king gives a country stability, but those who are greedy for bribes tear it down. And there's caution to not overlook the poor or write off the oppressor's humanity. The poor and the oppressor have this in common, the Lord gives sight to the eyes of both. For many readers, this section in Proverbs is a much needed correction for the sages veneration of kings and their loyalty to a social order that they benefit from. The section opens up more compassion for the poor and more critique of the powerful.
Speaker 2:So we've got all of these proverbs, like hundreds and hundreds of proverbs, but about how to live wisely in our families and on our own path before God, in close circles, and in relationship with the powerful and the poor. And you might not love all of the proverbs in the Bible, that is totally okay. The point isn't to love them all, but to know how to find the ones that you need. The proverbs you need are so much more than a couple of lines on the page. The proverbs you need, they open you up.
Speaker 2:They open life up to the bottomless dimensions of God's presence in your everyday life. Earlier, I read a quote from Hans Urs von Balthasar. And Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Catholic priest who studied and lived as a Jesuit. And Jesuits follow in the way of Ignatius of Loyola born in 1491 and Ignatius left a great legacy when it comes to decision making. All kinds of Catholics and Protestants are into it.
Speaker 2:You don't have to be either to get a lot out of what Ignatius left us. I use parts of it. Lots of people I know use parts of it. There are books and podcasts and websites all about Ignatian practices. I recommend James Martin's The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything, a spirituality for real life.
Speaker 2:I really dug into that in the last month. But for today, I wanna simply tell you about two words from a practice called discerning the spirits that can be really helpful when it comes to decision making, both large decisions or small. So for Ignatius, mature choices are between one good thing and another good thing. We're not talking about choosing the good over the bad here. That's supposed to be easier.
Speaker 2:Proverbs tells you a lot of what to do and so does just asking the question. As soon as I ask, should I work on my marriage or just fluff it off? The answer is there in neon. But harder decisions involve what Ignatius calls consolation and desolation. I put some emojis in there just for you.
Speaker 2:Consolation is the sense of God's presence in the feelings of peace and tranquility and joy. And James Martin says, consolation leads you to feel encouraged, confident and calm in your decision. Ignatius understood that God works through our deepest desires. But desolation is anything that moves you toward hopelessness. It can be agitation, restlessness, panic, any other feeling that moves you away from a good decision.
Speaker 2:So when you feel desolation, this is key, hold off on making any big changes. Wait it out. Ask more questions. Sit with your feelings. Wisdom surfaces when we identify the source of our desolation.
Speaker 2:And desolation is not from God, but God can certainly use it. The Jesuit Guide spells out this pattern of discernment of decision making like this. This is the pattern of reflection, action, reflection that Jesuits teach their students. You reflect on a decision, act on it, see what happens, and then you reflect on that experience leading to another decision propelling you ahead. Last week, I started the wisdom series by telling you about my fortieth birthday trip to Portugal.
Speaker 2:And some of you wondered why I chose Portugal. Well, honestly, I followed a pattern of consolation and desolation. All I knew for my 30 birthday in my 30 year towards my fortieth birthday was that I wanted to go somewhere new with my husband Jonathan. So we tossed around some ideas about good destinations for us, but nothing really leapt out as the right place to go. Eventually, the destination did leap out from a set of very ordinary circumstances.
Speaker 2:After having to reschedule an Airbnb accommodation for another trip, I noticed this feature that I had not noticed on Airbnb's website before called Airbnb experiences. So I was like, what is this? And I clicked on one experience, and it was for riding vintage bikes in Lisbon. And then I clicked on another experience for a food tour through traditional Portuguese restaurants. And then I clicked on another experience that was for a street art tour in Porto, Portugal.
Speaker 2:And I knew, like Liz Lemon knows, I want to go to there. I felt these fireworks of consolation and that was it. Portugal became our destination for our trip. And all of those tiny little pretty insignificant decisions following my consolations led to this amazing picture. It's of Jonathan and I and two strangers who became fast friends.
Speaker 2:That's Tony and Wes, a couple from San Francisco whom we met on one of our Airbnb experience tours in Lisbon. And Tony and West just so happened to be in Porto exactly when we were in Porto. In fact, they were staying right across the alley from us. We had the best time. There's a whole story to that picture which involves university students and Hogwarts looking costumes except that's how they actually dress and a party like I've never seen.
Speaker 2:We weren't in it, as you can see we were on the outside of it, but it was a great time. In this moment, it means everything to me. It shows me that we can trust the wisdom of our everyday ordinary decision making. The tiny choices that you make about things that seem to hardly matter can lend themselves to moments of beauty and bottomless dimension. God's voice whispers and breathes through everything, showing you that the world can be so friendly and open and transformative.
Speaker 2:Every small decision makes a great big life. God is for you in it all. Let's pray together. All loving God, both known and unknown, will you give us wisdom to sense you in the details of our everyday lives? May our families be places of healing and shalom.
Speaker 2:May our hearts be places of clarity and conviction. May our friendships be places of challenge and joy. May our world be a place of curiosity and justice. May we live the wisdom that you give us, and may it expand into surprising places through the example of Jesus and in the flow of the holy spirit. We pray these things together.
Speaker 2:Amen.