Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 11B, August 19, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.
Lectionary texts: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14; Psalm 111.1-10; Ephesians 5.15-20; John 6.51-58.
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In this morning’s OT lesson, we see a young Solomon asking God for wisdom to rule and God granting him his request—and more. Solomon would need that wisdom because his path to the throne was anything but smooth. There had been much intrigue and some bloodshed which had accompanied him becoming king, and surely now the young ruler would need everything he had (and more) to rule God’s people. Yet despite God granting Solomon great wisdom, riches, and honor without equal, Solomon fell into pagan idol worship and because of some foolish policies of his, Israel eventually divided into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. How could this possibly have happened? How could the wisest man in the world end up living and ruling so foolishly? These are the questions I want us to look at briefly this morning so that we can learn from Solomon and see what help the Bible offers us so that in the power of the Spirit we can live our lives wisely and not as fools.
We see our first clues as to why Solomon went wrong in today’s OT passage. The writer tells us that God granted Solomon the gift of wisdom provisionally. In other words, God would provide Solomon wisdom et al. provided Solomon walked in obedience to the Lord and kept his decrees and commands as his father David had done. (Did you catch the grace note here in that God made no mention of David’s great sins of adultery and murder?) But already the seeds of disobedience are in place because the writer also tells us at the beginning of our lesson that Solomon showed his love for God except that he offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places. “High places” eventually came to be associated with pagan (Baal) worship and constituted idolatry, something in which David never engaged. And while the high places in Israel were apparently not yet fully associated with idol worship in Solomon’s time, the writer is laying the groundwork for us to see how even at an early age Solomon had a proclivity toward idol worship. This would become manifest toward the end of his career when we are told that he had many foreign wives and succumbed to their idol worship, which of course was a direct violation of the first two commandments (cf. 1 Kings 11.1-13; Exodus 20.1-4).
But we are still left with a vexing question. If fear of the Lord is the beginning of all knowledge (Proverbs 1.7), and if God granted Solomon such great wisdom, why then did Solomon eventually slide into idolatry and disobedience? After all, if we are wise, we will fear the Lord and walk in his ways! So why did Solomon not follow this path? The answer is at least three-fold. First, Solomon’s path from wisdom to foolishness is another powerful example of how profoundly broken we human beings are and why we should never worship others. Like his father David, Solomon showed that he was unable to handle all of God’s blessings and as a result, lost many of them. If we are wise, surely we will not delude ourselves into thinking we are above human folly or that we are not incapable of mishandling or abusing God’s blessings.
Second, and related to the first point, Solomon asked God for wisdom in humility. He acknowledged his youth and inexperience. As we have seen, becoming king was not a straightforward transaction. There would be enemies to deal with and Solomon surely recognized that ruling God’s chosen people was no small task. And of course God was pleased with Solomon’s humility and wisdom and granted him much more than he asked. But in doing so, paradoxically the blessings likely helped Solomon lose his humility. Think about it in terms of your own life. When things are going well and we enjoy success, what happens to us? We get all fat and sassy and tend to forget everything we have comes from God (cf. Psalms 10.3-6; 73.1-28)! It is not until life smacks us in the face and brings us back to reality that we tend to realize our utter and radical dependence on God. Paul understood this well when he wrote that rather strange passage to the Corinthians that when he was the weakest he was the strongest because only then were Christ’s grace and power being made perfect in him (2 Corinthians 12.7b-10). Surely it is not unreasonable for us to conclude that it is likely Solomon let his great success go to his head and he started to believe his own press clippings, so to speak, so that his very wealth, prestige, and success made him forget Who was responsible for them. Are you letting the successes and blessings in your life turn you away from the Living God?
Last, as we have already seen, Solomon eventually married foreign wives and succumbed to their idol worship. This might be the best explanation as to why Solomon lost his wisdom because if wisdom does indeed come from God, it means that we must keep our minds and hearts focused on God. But idol worship produces the exact opposite in us. It distracts us and we focus on something entirely different and false. That is why God hates idolatry so much, especially among those of us he calls to be his people, because idol worship in whatever form takes our focus away from God and puts it on something else, and nothing except God is capable of producing wisdom and life and real prosperity.
So what is God’s remedy to this folly? The paradoxical answer is to seek wisdom because as we have seen, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. When the biblical writers, including Paul in today’s epistle lesson, talk about wisdom they mean much more than just factual knowledge. There are relational and ethical dimensions in wisdom as the Bible uses it. Being wise means that we do what it takes to have a life-giving and life-changing relationship with God in Christ. That’s why we must learn to fear God. When the Bible talks about fear of the Lord, it does not typically mean that we should be terrified of God, although there is that dimension to it. Fearing the Lord means having a reverential view of God, recognizing that he is the Creator who is the only one who holds the power of life and death in his hands. Having a real relationship with God doesn’t mean having a relationship of equals. We are God’s creatures who bear his image and God expects us to behave accordingly. When I was a teenager, my mom would always tell me to remember who I was (a Maney and all the good it represented) and God expects us to do likewise. When we behave as God’s image-bearers in Christ, the one and only true image-bearer of God, we act wisely and God uses our behavior to bring about his peace and healing. We summarize this ethical and relational mandate every week in the Summary of the Law (love the Lord with our whole being and love each other as ourselves). Don’t misunderstand. I am not talking about being saved by our works. We are only saved by God’s grace and through the blood of Christ shed for us. But acting wisely helps God restore his broken image in us and also allows God to use us as signs of his new creation and bring his healing love to bear on others.
That is why in today’s epistle lesson Paul is so insistent on us behaving wisely. As we saw last week, life is messy and full of ambiguities and contradictions, and we must navigate through its rough waters. That is what Paul means, in part, when he tells us the times are evil. It means we are fallen creatures and living life faithfully is neither easy or straightforward. That is why we must seek to live as God calls us to live in Christ. We do that by keeping our eyes on Jesus so that we can imitate him in our living and make the most of each day. That’s why worship and praise always trump booze and sleaze. The latter, among other things, don’t help us take back the time and live as God’s image-bearers. When I was a young man, I used to hate reading Paul because it seemed like he always wanted to rain on my parade. Don’t drink, don’t lust, don’t do any of the things I wanted to do. But as I got older and gained some perspective (and perhaps lost some libido), I realized that my thinking this way was really quite foolish. Paul isn’t against drinking or having a good time. He’s against drunkenness because it can lead to all kinds of foolish behavior, at least it has in my life. We can’t make the most of the day if we are drunk or hungover or involved in sleaze or debauchery. There is nothing healthy relationally in these things and they only dehumanize us and take our focus off of God.
But when we live our lives as God calls us to live in Christ, we are promised that God will bless our behavior and help it to become habitual. It’s the “use-it-or-lose-it” principle. And Scripture makes it clear that God gives us the desires of our heart, whether it is for God or for ill (cf. Psalm 37.4; Romans 1.24-25). That is why if we care at all about our relationship with God (and others), thinking and acting wisely become so important because it helps us develop the kind of desires that allow us to live our lives fully with meaning, purpose, and power under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Of course, being the profoundly broken individuals we are, we won’t always get things right or act wisely. But that doesn’t mean we are to throw our hands up in the air and give up, precisely because we have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit to help us grow to be the fully human beings God created us to be. Of course, the only way we discover whether this promise is true is to live it out so that we can see for ourselves. The proof is in the pudding.
So what do we do with this? First, because we are such a forgetful and distractible people, we must logically develop the holy habits that will help us keep our eyes on the prize of King Jesus. That means we read and study Scripture together and dare love each other enough to allow us to hold each other accountable for our actions. It means that we are to worship God regularly and together so that we remember Whose we are and from Whom all good blessings flow. It means that we also feed on our Lord each week at his Table because as Jesus reminds us in today’s gospel lesson, those who feed on him will live forever. Communing with our Lord is the best and most tangible way for us to take him into our bodies and souls so that we can keep our eyes fixed on him and remember our destiny that is assured by his blood shed for us.
Of course, none of this means that we will live a trouble-free life. It means rather that we are wise enough to want to live life as we were created to live it and to develop the character that is best suited for God to use us as agents of his healing love here on earth and for the promised new creation that is our hope and future in Christ. And when by God’s grace we are wise enough to see this truth, we will know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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