A couple of weeks ago my wife called me from work to tell me that her rear
view mirror had become detached from the windshield and was hanging there by an
electrical cord.
This wasn’t the first time that the adhesive on our rear view mirror had melted
in the hot Wisconsin sun, causing the mirror to fall off. We actually had owned
another Pontiac Sunfire back in 2005, and the same thing happened in May of that
year too.
So being the handy kind of guy that I am (not), I went to the auto parts store
and got one of those kits for gluing the mirror back on. I followed all the
directions as best I could. I cleaned the spot and marked the windshield so I
would know where to reattach the mirror.
That part was easy. But my mirror has a little metal base about the size of a
quarter. You don’t glue on the whole mirror. You glue on the base and then
attach the mirror to the base. Well the base was attached to the mirror, and I
needed to remove it in order to glue it to the windshield.
For reasons that I didn’t understand, that little metal base would not come out
of the mirror for love or money. I used every tool I had - pliers, screwdrivers,
vise grips – but nothing I did could dislodge that metal base from the mirror.
Now I realize that mechanics and home improvement are not my fields of
specialty. So instead of doing what I normally would have done, breaking the
mirror in a vain attempt to get that metal piece out, I decided to seek wisdom
from someone who gets paid to fix things.
Hector came over the day after our vacation and dropped something off. While he
was there I brought the mirror out and asked him why I couldn’t get this metal
piece out of the mirror. I told him I tried everything. But it wouldn’t come
out.
He took a look at it, turned it over, and said, “Did you try taking out the
screw that’s holding it in?” What screw? Sure enough, there was a little screw
holding the base in place. When I unscrewed it, the metal piece popped right
out.
He didn’t laugh at me too hard, only because this is about the 10th time this
has happened to me. The bad part is that I felt like an idiot again. The good
part is that I was wise enough to recognize the limits of my own knowledge and
humble enough to ask for help. My wife sees it as a growing experience for me.
I think we all have times when we encounter a situation that we don’t understand
entirely. For those of us who are guys it’s very difficult to say, “I don’t know
how to handle this.” We pride ourselves on always knowing how to handle things.
Sometimes that pride leads us to make poor choices, something worse than simply
a busted mirror.
As people of faith we have a source of wisdom to help guide us through the tough
choices in life. God is the source of our wisdom, and we experience who God is
when we read the Bible and when we participate in this community of faith.
As Christians we revere Jesus as God’s ultimate revelation. No one else has
revealed God’s person and intentions to the world as Jesus did. But what many of
us fail to realize is that God’s wisdom was revealed to the world long before
Jesus came into the world.
What I hope to do this morning is to correct some misunderstandings about how
the authors of the New Testament understood Jesus as someone who provides divine
wisdom and guidance to people who struggle to make sense of their world.
You see, we Christians have this habit of reading the New Testament stories and
letters about Jesus and treating them as though God was doing a completely new
and unrelated thing in the world through him.
Part of what I want to do in this sermon series is show that the folks who wrote
the New Testament saw Jesus not as a new thing, but as someone who was
foreshadowed by the Old Testament. They could not talk about Jesus at all
without talking about what God had done in the past for the people of Israel.
When they talked about Jesus, sometimes they described him in terms that made
him look very much like an Old Testament prophet. At other times they described
him in terms that reminded their reader of Moses.
They also described Jesus in terms of a figure from the book of Proverbs, a
figure called Wisdom. Jesus is described in many places in the New Testament
with the very same words and images used in Proverbs of this figure of Wisdom.
SO I want us to consider this morning what this figure of wisdom teaches us, and
how we understand Jesus as a source of wisdom for our lives. Jesus’ followers
saw in Wisdom a premonition of who Jesus became. Some would say that the New
Testament authors saw Jesus as wisdom becoming human.
Proverbs is associated with King Solomon, regarded to be the wisest of the kings
of Israel. But rather than talking about Solomon as the wise one, Proverbs
describes Wisdom as a woman who offers her insights about life to anyone who
will listen.
But Wisdom is not just any woman. Wisdom appears to be a divine being, maybe an
aspect of God’s own self. Wisdom claims to have been involved in the creation of
the world, Jesus as John says about Jesus in John 1.
She claims to have worked alongside God when God was creating the world. Because
she was so foundational to the world, she is unique in her ability to guide
people toward a righteous, prosperous life.
She claims that her instruction is more valuable than gold. The success of a
king’s reign depends on whether or not that king listens to her and follows her
advice. Those who follow her don’t need to worry about whether or not they are
obeying God’s laws. She will always lead them down the right path.
Those who ignore her insights do so at their own risk. She says that all who
miss her injure themselves, and those who hate her love death. She calls to the
simple and the immature, challenging them to learn from her and take a different
pathway in life.
I know, I know – all the wives in the congregation are saying, “You know, honey,
I’ve been trying to explain this to you for how many years?” By the way, this
passage tends to be rather unpopular with the guys. This is the last thing we
want to hear, right?
Let’s be clear on what’s being said here. God isn’t saying that there was some
goddess named wisdom who helped put the world and the universe together. Verse
20 is usually translated as “The Lord created me at the beginning of this work.”
That would make wisdom God’s creation, not a part of who God is.
The problem you run into is that when the authors of the New Testament speak of
Jesus as though he is this wisdom figure, then you have God creating Jesus,
which means that Jesus is not God.
This issue caused all kinds of trouble in the early church because some church
leaders used this passage to argue that Jesus was less then God. Those folks
didn’t win the day because the church finally decided that Wisdom was part of
God’s own being, not a separate being.
So why is this important? Well, because it highlights a part of Jesus’ saving
work that we tend to ignore. We spend all kinds of time talking about Jesus
dying to save the world and coming back from the dead. We even spend a little
time talking about Jesus healing people and other miraculous acts.
What we rarely talk about is Jesus’ teachings. The New Testament contains all
kinds of teachings by Jesus that Christians barely know. Part of the reason why
many of us are unaware of Jesus’ teachings is because we’ve seen him largely as
someone who saves us, not someone who teaches us.
Paul kind of reinforces that tendency when he tells one of the churches that he
started, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him
crucified.” Paul says almost nothing in all his writings about Jesus’ teachings.
While Paul focused on Jesus’ death and resurrection, many people during Paul’s
time and the years after saw Jesus’ teaching of heavenly wisdom as the most
important thing he did.
One of the gospels that didn’t make it into the New Testament, the Gospel of
Thomas, says absolutely nothing about Jesus’ life or death. The only things it
contains are Jesus’ teachings, his proverbs, if you will, many of which appear
in the gospels we have in the New Testament.
My point is, Jesus has a lot more to offer than his death. He has wisdom. And
those who want to be his followers need to listen to what he has to say. In
Matthew, Jesus has five major speeches, most of which are teachings. Let me just
highlight some of the themes of Jesus’ teachings.
One thing Jesus emphasizes in his teachings is what we mean when we say, “Love
your neighbor as yourself.” That sounds good, but people have had and do have a
funny way of loving their neighbors, even if they believe in Jesus.
He tells his followers, “If you want to be forgiven for what you do wrong, you
have to forgive the people who wrong you. If you judge someone else harshly,
you’re going to be judged harshly in return.”
Along that same line, the people of his time didn’t see anything unloving about
getting revenge on their enemies for some kind of wrongdoing. The law God gave
to Moses said, “An eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth.” If someone did you
wrong, you had the right to do it back to them.
Jesus didn’t think that kind of revenge, even though it was legal, was really a
way to love your neighbor as yourself. He told his followers to turn the other
cheek. He told his followers to go the extra mile when someone tries to exploit
them by force.
He told his followers to love even their enemies and pray for them. These days
we tend to refer to those kinds of ideas as bad foreign policy. People who still
say we should treat our enemies like that are generally ridiculed as being soft
on crime.
Another theme Jesus emphasized was being godly, rather than just appearing to be
godly. He told his followers not to make a show of themselves when they pray or
when they give to the poor. Jesus taught his followers that what others think
about the way you practice your faith isn’t half as important as what God thinks
of it.
He taught his followers that there was supposed to be consistency in their lives
between what they said and how they lived. He wanted them to avoid the kinds of
hypocrisy that religious folks practiced all around them.
Another emphasis in Jesus’ teaching that we seem to have lost is that life is
not about what you have but about whom you honor. He constantly warns his
followers not to waste their lives trying to earn money to buy stuff. It’s
better to help out the poor than to shower luxuries on yourself.
Those who help the poor are symbolically helping Jesus himself. So when Jesus’
followers began to form the church after his death, one of the first things they
did was to distribute aid to widows and the poor. They focused on healing the
sick because sickness obviously made people poor.
These are all themes that Jesus emphasized in his teaching, and they are often
lost by Christians who are so intent on “saving souls” that they don’t really
know how to teach people to be Jesus’ followers once people come to believe in
Jesus.
One of the most famous teachings of Jesus is a parable called The Sheep and the
Goats in Matthew 25. Jesus is referring to the way people treat his followers in
his text, and he says those famous words, “When I was hungry, you fed me, when I
was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. When I was a stranger, you welcomed
me.”
As American Baptists we have an opportunity to follow those teachings of Jesus,
to respond to wisdom’s call this month as we collect the On Great Hour of
Sharing disaster relief fund. This fund has been collected every year at this
time by American Baptists and other Christians around the world and used for
help those who have suffered through a natural disaster.
One example of such a situation was the aftermath of a cyclone that hit Burma in
May of 2008. Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma, the Philippines and Samoa,
affecting 2 ¼ million people. You can just imagine the kind of suffering and
devastation in a place like Burma after a storm like that.
A Baptist pastor by the name of Thra Law Seh, a widow from the town of Bogale,
tells of how the tidal surge from the cyclone wiped out all but six houses in
the town. 137 people were killed in their community. She heads a family of six,
so you can imagine just how dire her situation was.
American Baptists followed the teachings of Jesus by giving $180,000 to the
Burmese through the One Great Hour of Sharing offering. That money enabled many
Burmese to rebuild their homes. The money was used by the Burmese Baptist
Convention to help people dig out and start over.
One mother, Naw Sah Lwe Say, was a school teacher and the wife of a pastor. She
lost her entire family in the cyclone. The money we gave was used by the Burmese
Baptist Convention to rebuild the houses for them. In a thank you note to the
American Baptists she says they also cleaned the ponds and repaired the roads
and provided relief items such as food, clothing, household items and farm
inputs from many donors and organizations.
Our gifts also enabled the Burmese Baptist convention to replace the rice seed
that was lost in the storm. Rice seed only runs about $5 a basket, but that’s a
lot of money to people who live on a couple dollars a day. They were able to
replant and re-grow food that was lost.
Although few of us have been able to welcome them personally, as Jesus taught,
we are all able to live out the spirit of Jesus’ teachings when we respond to
the kinds of suffering we’ve heard about in Burma.
Jesus didn’t just come to help us avoid eternal judgment. Jesus was actually
more focused on teaching people how to live godly lives and love each other.
God’s wisdom has always been available. It was apparent when God created the
universe. It was visible when God gave Moses the law and told the people of
Israel how to get along with one another. But it is most clearly revealed in the
person of Jesus.
He still offers us his wisdom today. The New Testament is full of his teachings
and anecdotes about how he lived his life. Jesus doesn’t just save us for the
sake of saving us. He saves us so that we can live along, happy, godly life. And
if we follow his wisdom, we’re sure to do just that.