13th Sunday after Pentecost
September 7, 2003
Proverbs 9:1-18

^9:1Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn out its seven pillars. ²She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine; she has also set her table. ³She has sent out her maids, and she calls from the highest point of the city. ⁴"Let all who are simple come in here!" she says to those who lack judgment. ⁵"Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed. ⁶Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of understanding.

⁷"Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult; whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse. ⁸Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you; rebuke a wise man and he will love you. ⁹Instruct a wise man and he will be wiser still; teach a righteous man and he will add to his learning. ¹⁰"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. ¹¹For through me your days will be many, and years will be added to your life. ¹²If you are wise, your wisdom will reward you; if you are a mocker, you alone will suffer."

¹³The woman Folly is loud; she is undisciplined and without knowledge. ¹⁴She sits at the door of her house, on a seat at the highest point of the city, ¹⁵calling out to those who pass by, who go straight on their way. ¹⁶"Let all who are simple come in here!" she says to those who lack judgment. ¹⁷"Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious!" ¹⁸But little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of the grave. (NIV).

Wisdom Invites You to Eat the Bread of Life.

  Many of you just went back to school. You may not be too happy about that. You may not like school very much, perhaps because some of the things you learn in school seem useless. You don’t know what to do with them. However, when you know what to do with them, they make you wise. For example, you may not like math. Yet, when you buy something, you want to make sure that the cashier gives you the proper change. At that moment, math is very important. You need to quickly calculate how much change you’re due so that you don’t get cheated. That makes you wise. That kind of knowledge and wisdom is good. Maybe you still don’t want to go to school, but maybe it will help knowing that not everything you learn is useless!

  Wisdom can do more than save you money. In a sense, it can also save your life and your soul! Today’s Old Testament reading is from the book of Proverbs. Proverbs is a collection of wisdom sayings, a lot of practical advice for everyday life. The Proverbs teach us how to stay out of trouble and be successful. But it’s more than just good advice like counting your change, or not being lazy. Proverbs sees wisdom as a witness to God. The more one learns about the world and life, the more one sees God’s presence and the order he has created. Knowledge and wisdom point us to God, the source of wisdom, understanding and life. By bringing us to God, wisdom points us to Christ, the Bread of Life, and the Wisdom of God. Although it may be difficult even boring to learn in school, at university or on the job, what we learn makes us wise, and wisdom points to Christ.

  I said that wisdom is a witness to God. There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom but also an intimate connection. Knowledge can be just trivial pursuit, knowing a bunch of facts but not knowing what to do with them. That’s like learning all your math tables, addition, subtraction and the rest, but not knowing how to use them. It doesn’t do much good to memorize the tables if you can’t use them. Wisdom is knowing what to do with the knowledge. To use math to count your change is wisdom. To apply what you know about nutrition to care for yourself or your pet is wisdom. This weekend, you may have seen or heard some of the planes at the air show. That is knowledge properly applied to do some fantastic things! That’s wisdom!

  As your learn more, you see how complicated the world is. But you also see that there is some kind of order. Everything fits together. A fighter jet can fly the way it does because you can count on the way fuel burns, the way lift is created by airflow and many other things. That order leads you to ask the question, why the order? Why is the universe the way it is? Wisdom has an answer to the questions, the obvious one: God. Wisdom is the ability to see God’s order in the world. The main concern in the Proverbs is this ability to recognize and understand the divine order which God has built into the very structure of reality. And since God is the source of that order, since there is no complete knowledge or wisdom apart from him, the Proverbs state in unequivocal terms, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”; and, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

  When the Proverbs say that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, they don’t mean that the fear of the Lord is like kindergarten, the first stage of learning that one leaves behind for something better. Rather the sense is that the fear of the Lord is the first and foremost controlling principle. The fear of God is the fundamental truth or principle of wisdom, the key to understanding all things. Without this key, we cannot understand the universe as it really is. It’s like finding the key to a secret code. Until you find it, you understand nothing.

  What is the fear of the Lord? It is first a belief, the truth we confess in our Creed and learned in the Catechism. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. What does this mean? I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that he has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears and all my members, my reason and all my senses and still takes care of them. . . .” The fear of the Lord is also the fact that we “fear, love and trust in God above all things” as we learned from the First Commandment, “You shall have no other Gods.” In other words, the fear of the Lord is to acknowledge both him as Creator and the order that he created in the world. It is to acknowledge the fact that he sustains his creation and that we can only understand the universe with him as our reference point. He is the key to wisdom, the key to the code.

  Now an important point about wisdom is that it is not limited to the Bible. The Proverbs don’t discuss the Law of Moses. The authors are not prophets showing the people how they have broken the Sinai covenant. They are about rather ordinary wisdom. People who know nothing about Moses and the Prophets, who believe in many gods or who are complete atheists can, to a degree, attain wisdom. They can learn the same things in school as we do; they can see the order in the universe and call it the laws of nature. They too recognize that there has to be a creator, an intelligence responsible for the rational universe. Wisdom is a witness to God and, in a sense, independent of the Bible. Wisdom is international, multicultural. It is what we call in theology, the natural knowledge of God. All people recognize intuitively that there has to be a Creator. Therefore, Proverbs personifies wisdom and speaks of it as a woman who calls us to herself and to God. Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn out its seven pillars. She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine; she has also set her table. She has sent out her maids, and she calls from the highest point of the city. "Let all who are simple come in here!" she says to those who lack judgment. "Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed. Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of understanding.

  Because wisdom leads us to God, she leads us to Christ. The quest for knowledge and truth leads us to God’s word where we find Christ. Just like the eastern magi, the wise men, who followed the star until they found the baby Jesus, wisdom leads us to Jesus. You may remember some of Paul’s words to the Corinthians. Being Greeks, they were concerned with learning, with wisdom. Paul argues that human wisdom is nothing without Christ. For he is the “power of God and the wisdom of God.” Moreover, It is because of God, he says, that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God-- that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord." (1 Corinthians 1:30-31 NIV).

  In the text from Proverbs, wisdom invites us all to eat her bread and drink her wine. There is no way that we can hear that without thinking of Jesus’ words from our Gospel lesson: I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." . . . Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. Again, we see that wisdom leads us to Christ. He is the ultimate wisdom for he will judge all people on the last day. No knowledge or power will change that fact. So the wise person comes to Christ where he finds eternal life.

  We cannot know about Christ by studying math, physics, biology, astronomy or any other subject. However, those studies open our eyes to the existence of God and his order. That is the natural knowledge of God. Wisdom then seeks to understand and comply with that order and knowledge of God. In that way wisdom brings us to God’s word where we find revealed knowledge, the Gospel, that which we cannot know from nature. So knowledge and wisdom have a role to play in our salvation. And that doesn’t even touch the practical side of wisdom that helps even the unbeliever. Proverbs 18:13 says, He who answers before listening-- that is his folly and his shame. That’s true and good advice for anyone!

  Now unfortunately, besides wisdom, there is also foolishness. The Proverbs portray folly too as a woman, the opposite of wisdom: The woman Folly is loud; she is undisciplined and without knowledge. She sits at the door of her house, on a seat at the highest point of the city, calling out to those who pass by, who go straight on their way. "Let all who are simple come in here!" she says to those who lack judgment. "Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious!" But little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of the grave. Those who refuse to listen to wisdom and to their conscience become fools. They deny God and his order and seek to establish some other key to understanding the universe. Because they reject the natural knowledge of God, revealed knowledge seems like foolishness to them. In this way, they turn their backs on God and his Christ. Their just, self-inflicted end is condemnation. They did not see fit to seek wisdom and turned to folly.

  What do we learn from this? First, that education or learning is good. Knowledge about the world, about life, about anything is a witness to God and his work of creation. The amazing, intricate order observed in any discipline cries out to be understood as the work of God. So by going to school and learning, we learn something about God. Therefore, we should not despise school, university, and job training. It’s not always fun and easy, we sometimes have teachers who irritate us, but the wisdom we gain is from God.

  Second, wisdom shows us again that this is God’s world. Thus, our daily, ‘secular’ vocation is holy. Our work as student or researcher, or the proper use of any technology, is a pursuit and application of wisdom. We do not have to be full time church workers to do work that is important and pleasing to God. All work is God’s work through faith in Christ. So for example, it’s not a lack of faith to pray for healing and go see the doctor. God gave both. One scholar said that the function of wisdom in the Bible “is to put godliness into working clothes; to name business and society as spheres in which we are to acquit ourselves with credit to our Lord, and in which we are to look for His training.” Kidner, Proverbs, p. 35.

  And a third thing, as we have seen over and over, there is no middle ground. One is either wise or a fool; one either follows Christ or one fights Christ. One either enters the house of Wisdom and eats of the Bread of life, or one enters the house of Folly and falls into the trap and condemnation of the devil.

  My friends, choose wisdom! Heed her call; enter her house and eat the food she offers. Her house is the house of God and the food she offers is Christ. And he says, Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. Amen.