August 18, 2024 - The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. If there are kids present, you can head out now for children’s church... my daughters are in Ohio with Abbey at an extended family reunion, so we’re at least three kids short this week. Their trip did, however, give me a little more peace and quiet around the house this weekend, and so I was able to start a new book, not something I have done often since leaving seminary in Sewanee in May. I love reading; as many of you know my office is already full of books, and so is our home... Jim Stark remarked just yesterday how many books I already had “at such a young age.” Well, I like to read.
And, I think reading might be a bit of a dying art, or practice, these days. Many of us in the twenty-first century have turned to illuminated, digital screens for most of our leisure time... either screens mounted on our walls or those in our pockets. But as Fran Lebowitz once said, “Think before you speak... and read before you think.” There’s a sense of internalizing important information that we need for the road ahead when we read nonfiction... and good fiction can do likewise, helping us slowly frame, through the drawn-out lives and stories of fictional others, how we ourselves might see and engage the real world. The Narnia books and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings were some of my earliest reads... Fredrik Backman, Khaled Hosseini, Haruki Murakami, and Brandon Sanderson are some of my more recent favorites. Though entertainment might be part of what we who read are looking for when we open a book, I’m going to suggest this morning that we are also looking for wisdom, at least, as our day and age understands it. I’ll come back to this: readers often look to books for wisdom, especially in a world in which wisdom often seems to be in short supply.
The book I opened this week was by one of my favorite authors from my college days, Brian McLaren, and it’s the first book of his I’ve picked up in probably fifteen years. If you don’t know his name, McLaren is perhaps most well-known for being one of the founders of the Emergent Church movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Without diving too far in today’s sermon into what that movement looked like, for me in my twenties and before I became an Episcopalian, identifying with the Emergent Church meant diving into narrative theology, learning about genre in scripture, attending house churches, focusing on the church’s impact on the neighborhood, and participating in the discussion of what post-modern thinking meant for a church that was often critiqued as being out-of-touch... even with the modern world, let alone the post-modern one.
McLaren’s most famous book is probably “A New Kind of Christian,” or “The Story we Find Ourselves In,” a phrase I still come back to often in my own theology. Or maybe you’ve heard of his books “Everything Must Change” or “Faith After Doubt.” I think any one of them are probably worthy of a good book-group discussion here at Epiphany, if someone wants to dive in more deeply. But McLaren’s latest book attracted me because of its title. It touches on something I haven’t been able to escape this summer, this year, or perhaps in the last four or eight years. As I have mentioned a few times from this pulpit already, it certainly fits our country through November. The title of McLaren’s latest book is this: “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart.”
Now I haven’t quite finished the book, so you can’t borrow my copy just yet, and please if you have read it, no spoilers. (Ha.) Even with the kids gone this week, there was still a Lions preseason game on TV yesterday and a sunset to sit and watch in rare, kid-free silence last night. But the beginning of “Life After Doom” essentially takes a chapter or two to spell out the doom many of us are feeling. McLaren’s main focus is on creation care, on the despair that many of us face in light of climate change and what seems like inevitable man-made problems that our descendants will face for generations. (Young climate activist Greta Thunberg famously said “How Dare You!” to world leaders a few years ago... and the author and this priest personally are both right there alongside her.) But McLaren also briefly touches on societal collapse... what happens when resources dry up, when we no longer trust in having common ground, when we have stopped debating facts (or hold strong to “alternative facts”), when we have stopped seeing the image of God in the other altogether... it’s pretty bleak stuff. I’ll let you know when the book lightens up, I think he’s going to get there soon.
The subtitle of his book though is what gives me a little bit of hope, though perhaps not in the way McLaren intended. The subtitle, again, is “Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart.”
One of the first quotes listed in the book’s introduction goes like this: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Like I said, the early tone is a bit bleak... here, more than any other time in human history, we need wisdom to choose correctly... it might surprise you, however, that his quote is not from today. It’s not about the 2024 U.S. Presidential election nor about our decision to drive electric cars to attempt to stave off environmental catastrophe. The quote is from Woody Allen, speaking to college graduates, in 1979.
A quick Google search of quotes like “more than any other time in history” results in fearful quotes from during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, World War II, World War I, the American Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and beyond... Those alive during those fraught times thought their world was falling apart too, they surely needed wisdom and courage. And that says nothing of those living during wars fought before the Declaration of Independence was signed, nor wars on different continents, nor of pandemics or plagues or famines or natural disasters... entire civilizations really have crumbled, and those people needed wisdom and courage as much as or even more than we do today. We as twenty-first century Americans might take a second to breathe and realize there is definitely “life after doom,” especially if we can take a moment to put our own edition, our own chapter of doom in the proper context.
But the question is still relevant, and yes, this is where the lectionary comes into today’s sermon: Where does a Christian go for wisdom and courage in 2024? As I’ve already suggested to you today, I personally think books are a good place to look: well-selected nonfiction works can help inform us, and good fictional works can help illuminate the real world. I’m a big fan of books, but podcasts work for some too. Ours is an information age; vet your sources and you really can find good sources of wisdom. Others think wisdom comes only from age; I would suggest to you (admittedly as one of the younger people in this room) that, sadly, age is not a guarantee of wisdom. We need only look to the world of celebrity and politics to see a lack of wisdom still abounds in some of our older cultural icons. We might instead also look to community and relationship; I think there is great wisdom and life experience in this room, and we are all blessed to get to know each other here. I’m excited to get to know more of you in the weeks and months and years to come.
And yet in our biblical text today, I think we find, though maybe not the only place, certainly the best place to look for wisdom and courage when the world seems to be falling apart.
King Solomon, who we are meeting for the first time in the lectionary this week after the death of King David... Solomon is widely known for his wisdom. He’s one of the wisest men to ever walk the earth, and he’s called wise repeatedly through the biblical text, even if sometimes he struggled to live into that wisdom in his personal life (more on that in later weeks). He is known as an archetype of the ideal king, providing justice, righteousness, and stability to the people of Israel, leading them through a time of prosperity and happiness and attracting leaders from all over the world to come and hear him speak.
And where does Solomon get his wisdom? Well, he simply asks God for it. As a young man in 1 Kings chapter 3, the Lord appears to Solomon and essentially tests him, saying, “Ask what I should give you.” Solomon humbly thanks God, praises God, and then asks God for “an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil.” He does not ask for long life or riches or success or fame or victory in battle; no, Solomon simply asks for understanding to discern what is right. He simply asks God for wisdom.
And then, of course, God gives it to him. As it says in James chapter 1 verse 5, “If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, and it will be given you.” Here, centuries before that verse was written, God gives Solomon the “wise and discerning mind” he asked for.
Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright describes this interaction as Solomon “asking for and then receiving God’s own life and mind and will, God’s second self, to live within him, clothing Solomon with God’s own thinking, decisions, and leadership.” That language, of God choosing to answer his prayer and live within Solomon, might most-closely echo the often-criticized evangelical push to ask Jesus to come and live within our hearts... but it also very closely echoes what we do with the Eucharist every week here at the table.
We talked last week about Jesus, the bread of life, that is always available and sustains and powers us to live in welcoming and abundant love. Well, in the Gospel passage this week, Jesus is still talking about being the living bread. Meanwhile in our Ephesians passage, Paul is asking the people of Ephesus to be wise, understanding what the will of the Lord is. The story of Solomon asking God for wisdom, the letter from Paul asking his fellow Christians to be wise, and Jesus describing himself once again as the very bread of life tie together wonderfully this week, and they do so in this: When we are looking for wisdom as Solomon did and as Paul asks us to do, we already have access to it: the bread of life, God’s own life made flesh in Jesus, available to us here, again, if only we choose to eat. Jesus Christ is God’s wisdom incarnate; we eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink of his blood at communion, and then we live by Christ’s example, with God’s second self living within us and clothing us with God’s own thinking, decisions, and leadership, more and more, each and every day.
As we go through our weeks, then, with some of us worrying about the doom we may find ourselves in, may we instead fix our eyes on Jesus, and may we all, like Solomon, ask God to live within us, to grant us a wise and discerning mind, to give us the wisdom and courage we desperately need to live in this not-yet-broken world as living examples of the Kingdom of God here on earth, ever sustained by the bread of life. Amen.
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