“The Ins and Outs of Wisdom”
1Kings 3:3-15
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
8/16/15
David is dead.
And in spite of his foibles, the king will still be remembered as “The Great
King David.” Apparently, our particular sins and shortcomings matter less than the
grace with which we recognize our community-damaging selfishness. What people
remember is how we turn back toward thoughts and actions that are, at the same
time, faithful to our own individuality and
faithful to God’s purposes in and for creation. It seems to me, that from the
beginning, God’s purposes have to do with creative, well-spirited
relationships.
“Then the Lord
God said, ‘it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a
helper as his partner.’” (Gen. 2:18) And God adds to the creation
“every living creature.” When dogs and cats, and birds and bees are not enough,
God adds more human beings.
The psalmist
understands this, too: “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live
together in unity…For there the Lord ordained his
blessing, life forevermore.” (Psalm 133:1, 3b)
The story of
Jesus’ temptation illustrates his commitment to a life of faithful relationships.
The Beatitudes and the entire Sermon on
the Mount are all about right relationship with God and the creation. Jesus
makes it explicit when he condenses the Torah to: Love God and Love neighbor.
And the whole
idea of the Trinity is that God is in eternal relationship with God’s own Self.
God is, by nature, relationship.
Not long after
assuming the throne, Solomon goes to sleep one night. Imagine the pressure he
feels. He is relatively young. He succeeds his “great” father, and inherits a
reunited Israel and Judah. How can he possibly rise to the occasion?
As Solomon
sleeps, his own deepest, widest, highest wholeness, his own God-shaped soul confronts
him with the unnerving question: What do
you need to become the best king that you can be? What do you need,
individually, to be a blessing for Israel and for all creation?
The question
is not about filling some void in Solomon. Like all dreams, it comes as an
invitation to give thanks for what is already true about the dreamer – even if
he or she has yet to recognize it. Solomon’s in-spired self, his own
God-breathed holiness reveals the already-given gift, the gift of wisdom. Solomon
must claim this gift not for his own benefit, but for the well-being of the
community and its relationships.
Wisdom, like a
sense of humor, like compassion, like empathy and forgiveness, is one of the
border collies of grace. These gifts are Love at work bringing people together.
Wisdom helps to create community by gathering the personal and collective
experiences of happiness and sorrow, success and failure, faith and despair,
wholeness and brokenness, and compiling them into a realistic hope based on the
understanding that every human being represents an invaluable and irreplaceable
expression of God’s joy. Not everyone sees that giftedness in himself or
herself, of course. And when we do not see it in ourselves, we usually fail to
see it in others. Accordingly, we tend to treat our mis-valued neighbors as
either disposable means to our own selfish ends. Or we treat them as
impediments to our own materialistic happiness.
Solomon’s
father, David, treats Bathsheba as a tool of personal satisfaction. And that
eventually means having to treat her husband, Uriah, as an impediment. But when
the prophet Nathan calls David to the carpet, the king hears, confesses, and
repents.
In contrast, Solomon’s brother
Absalom treats pretty much everyone as a tool or an impediment for his own mercenary
schemes. And he does so to such extremes that in his unrepentant vanity and
greed, he and his big hair become his own worst impediment.
With all these
memories playing in his head, Solomon hears God calling him toward a path of
greatness that could exceed his father’s achievements and influence. It could
dwarf his brother’s wildest and most gluttonous fantasies. And it terrifies
him.
‘Lord, help
me!’ he prays. “I do not know how to go out or come in.”
Going out and coming in are good metaphors for the spiritual life. “In and out” can
be also be expressed as ascending/descending,
moving left/moving right, submerging/floating, even going to sleep and waking
up. The movement is back and forth, between the outer/conscious world and
the inner/unconscious world. To move between the conscious and unconscious is
to occupy the otherwise invisible, but expansive space between them. The familiar
word for this is prayer.
In his very
fertile and cooperative unconscious, Solomon commits himself to lead Israel
through a life of prayer. He seems to know that he cannot lead all those
outside him without bring order to his vast, interior self, to the entire
“chosen [and] great people’ within.
As I have
mentioned before, I have done a little dream work, and one thing I learned is
that everything in a dream – every person, place, vehicle, animal, geological
feature, weather condition, everything
– represents some aspect of the dreamer. I remember sharing a dream with a
Jungian analyst, and in my dream there are all these people, folks I know in
waking life and folks I do not. We are all in a basement.
“Wow,” said my analyst. “You really
have a lot of personality, a lot of diversity and energy down in your
unconscious!”
I am convinced
that, like Solomon, we all have deep layers of holiness as part of our natural,
God-imaged humanity. Wholeness as human beings comes to us, at least in part,
through intentional relationship with all of that stuff, both the good and bad.
Within each of us lies a deeply textured landscape over which “the wind from
God” (Genesis
1:2) broods in creative, redeeming Love. From that wildly mystical
place comes the God-initiated prayer called dreaming. I think that this is
where we learn to do the formative and transformative, in and out travel that leads to spiritual gifts like wisdom.
And messianic courage.
The four
canonical gospels remember only a tiny bit of Jesus’ ministry, and far less of
his entire life. They are a very selective and subjective memory, and they do
not always agree on just what Jesus does and says, or exactly who is with him
in key moments. All four gospels do, however, remember him constantly going out and coming in. The IN
is always solitary prayer or private communion with his disciples. The OUT is
always to teach, preach, heal, or to deal lovingly and boldly with those who fear
and oppose him. Jesus’ courage for living a gracious, outer life comes from his Solomon-like commitment to creating space
for disciplined, inner experience.
We all have
spiritual gifts. I think God grants them for us to enjoy, but they are for more
than our own benefit. To discover them, and to “comprehend…the breadth and length and height and depth” (Ephesians
3:18) of these
gifts, we pray and dream our way into active, for-the-sake-of relationship with our selves, with our neighbors,
and, thus, with God. To hoard spiritual gifts for our own material benefit is
to live the violent, destructive, lonely life of an Absalom, or a Pharisee, or
a “rich young ruler.”
No one is beyond the reach of
grace. Whether we remember our dreams or not, we all receive these God-given
prayers. Through our spiritual disciplines, our intentional acts of coming in and going out we discover our own wisdom. By coming in and going out
we receive our particular gifts and bring them to bear on the creation as
well-spirited relationships lived with and for the world within and the world without.
One of my prayers is that each of
us discovers this in such a way that we look for and give thanks for the
giftedness of those around us rather than quietly assessing the relative
correctness of doctrine or what side of what issue someone holds.
One is about creating community;
the other is about erecting boundaries.
One is about forming relationships
of Love; the other is about circling wagons in fear.
One is the spiritual gift of
wisdom.
And as Solomon knows, wisdom can make
all the difference.
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