Psalm 111
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Okay, let’s start with the de-construction, because we are the sort of people that can handle a little complexity and messiness.
Most folks have two, maybe three things in their memory bank about King Solomon. First, and foremost is the story of the two women claiming the same infant. Second is that God asked Solomon what he wanted, and he chose wisdom. Third is that he was responsible for construction of the first Temple in Jerusalem.
But if you were paying attention to the verse numbers in our reading, you might wonder what we skipped. And what we skipped was a bloodbath.
Solomon slaughtered everyone who might challenge him for the throne or support a challenger, including an older brother. He even murdered folks who had offended his father, but that his father had pledged to spare. Joab, a general mentioned in last week’s reading, seeks sanctuary in the tent where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, for the temple hadn’t been built yet. Solomon orders hims executed right there next to the altar.
This is the stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor. The Lectionary, the rotation of readings shared by many churches, curates scripture. I am often more interested in the bits that are left out.
And as you know, I think the carefully curated Children’s Bible version of Christianity is of little use to us as we do not live in a Children’s Bible world.
Solomon did some good things.
Solomon did some bad things.
There are construction projects, several murders, and real housewives, so basically a Tuesday in New Jersey.
The creators of the Lectionary could not edit out references to Solomon sacrificing at the “high places,” incense and burnt offerings, but we Christians don’t really have the context to understand where this is going, and it sort of matters in the story of Judah, later Judea, right up until the time of Jesus.
This text was likely written while the first Temple was still standing, possibly as part of King Josiah’s reforms a century after the destruction of the Northern Kingdom. The consolidation of worship at the Temple was a big deal, especially to the priests and to the elite who benefited from centralized worship. Before construction of the Temple, the Israelites, like so many other ancient cultures, worshiped along topographical lines, which is to say God was up, so high places were closer to God. God was also with the Ark of the Covenant, which served as a sort of divine footstool.
The Temple Solomon was constructed on a high plateau in Jerusalem, the reason we call it the Temple Mount to this day, but all other high places, where the priests were no longer in control, were shunned once it was built.
In fact, this would be a primary source of conflict and shaming during the two kingdom period that followed Solomon’s death. The Northern Kingdom, called Israel or Samaria, worshiped on Mount Gerizim, while the Judahites focused on Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Since the people who survived long enough to write the story were from the south, Solomon’s Temple became the only legitimate place to worship.
The historic lens helps us with questions that remain relevant today, questions about sacred places, about imperfect leaders, and of course, about the nature of wisdom.
Wisdom plays into some key theological concepts, as I’ll explain in a moment, but I’ve never had a conceptual framework for wisdom, and that is where I hope to land this morning.
Several books in the Tanakh are classified as “Wisdom Literature.” There are additional works that did not make the Biblical Canon, though some are included in the supplemental texts known as the Apocrypha, including one called “The Wisdom of Solomon,” and one called “Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach,” not to be confused with Ecclesiastes, which is in the canon, or with Jesus, Son of Joseph.
Biblical Wisdom Literature is primarily composed of maxims for living a good life. It is less Law, which takes up more than enough of the Tanakh already, and more self-help. If we pulled the aphorisms and proverbs out of the 26 volumes of Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” we’d get something that looks loosely like these texts. You often find a tongue-in-cheek sort of wisdom in humor as well, from the writing of Mark Twain to the stand-up routines of Will Rogers.
In his commentary on the best known piece of Biblical Wisdom Literature, the Book of Proverbs, Leo Perdue thinks of wisdom as 1) knowledge, as 2) imagination, as 3) discipline, as 4) piety, as 5) order, and finally, as 6) moral instruction. We might accept that wisdom contains all of these things, though none really stands alone. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously noted, you can have guided missiles and misguided men. The Nazi Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS, had discipline, but no one would call them wise.
Wisdom is also characterized and sometimes even translated as fear, specifically fear of God. That is not especially useful to us as Progressive and Reconstructive Christians, as we lean into the goodness of God and grace. Most of us have liberated God from the stereotype of co-dependent abuser.
The word for wisdom in Biblical Hebrew was Chokmah, feminine in that gendered language. By the time of Jesus, Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, and the authors of the New Testament read the Tanakh in a Koine translation called the Septuagint. There, wisdom is also feminine, named Sophia. This matters in a couple of interesting ways.
Where wisdom in personified, as happens several times, wisdom is a woman. And wisdom, personified and feminine, is one starting point in the construction of a theology of the Holy Spirit. We are not tied to gender when it comes to God, apart from the historically male person of Jesus, but it is interesting to realize that there is biblical warrant for understanding one part of the Trinity as feminine.
Let’s make a lateral shift for a moment, and think about Buddhism. In that tradition, there is something called the Noble Eightfold Path, the practices and perceptions that lead to enlightenment. Loosely translated, they are right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right practice or meditation.
This may not be too far off from what I might call wisdom in our tradition, though the eightfold path is life wisdom, and I’d like to zoom in on the wisdom of the moment, not the third party wisdom of the guru on the mountain, but something we can use.
The first step for us might be right or proper perception. Do we have our facts straight? Are there even facts here to get straight? What if our truth is not someone else’s truth? So there isn’t just knowledge here, but a little humility, something many of us have been working on in the context of anti-racism.
The second requirement for the wisdom of the moment is right desire. We’ve spoken about the ways culture manufactures desire, the way fear plays into desire, the way late stage neo-liberal capitalism requires desire to function, requires us to feel fearful and incomplete, envious with a good dose of FOMO, fear of missing out. Jesus pretty consistently teaches us that selflessness is the key to salvation, that we are judged by what we have done for the least among us.
If we have right perception, which might just be that we admit our uncertainty, and right desire, which is to say that we are not the center of the known universe and think about the non-self, other humans, other creatures, the living planet, then and only then might we make a right decision, what the Buddhists call “right resolve.”
Though we must always be open to the idea that our perception, our understanding, might change, so we might need to change our decision.
Finally, wisdom, or at least the only measure of wisdom for us as followers of practical Christianity, is right action, which is to say that no one cares what you have decided if you don’t do anything about it.
Humble understanding, selfless desire, right decision, and certain action might be the fourfold noble path for progressive Christians.
Finally, one word of caution. Practical and faithful living can be exhausting. We are drowning in an ocean of information in a world that is incredibly complex and interconnected. Purity is not realistic.
Do your best to live with as much wisdom as you can. Then breathe. Humility and selflessness are important, but so is grace, the grace we offer one another, the grace we offer ourselves, the grace of that Holy Mystery we name as God, the architect of resilient life.
Life just keeps grinding it out. Not individual lives, finite though pretty amazing too, but life over the course of three billion years plus years, and maybe another three billion if we can stop applying our big monkey minds to destruction and start loving the planet into restoration.
Sure, the thing with pretending the baby will be cut in two is a cool story. But your story is cool too, and you have your own wisdom if you’ll just slow your roll, breathe, and love. May you do so, this day and always.
Amen.