“Wisdom in the Mix” - May 22, 2016

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

“All of its parts gleamed: the exterior lacquer, the open keyboard, the interior brightwork.  Yet it was clearly not brand new; a soft patina to the black lacquer made it less a mirror than the misted surface of a pool, with traces of matte where the finish was worn.  The keyboard was of real ivory, a prohibited material for new pianos since the 1980s, and the keys had yellowed over the years, some of them considerably.  Its strings, although far from rusty, had the steel-gray luster of worn metal, and the red felt dampers showed a softer tone of purple than the vivid scarlet felt of new pianos.  This piano had lived, had been played.”

That’s how Thad Carhart describes his first encounter with a piano that would come to live with his wife, his son, and him in a small apartment in Paris.  He continued:

“This piano, I decided, looked plucky, a Cinderella of an instrument.  Images of underdogs disenfranchised by their wicked betters, only to emerge triumphant, swam around in my head.  …In a flash I realized that I was entirely taken by the idea that this little piano was somehow good and therefore right for my family.”[1]

The rest of his book expands on that idea.

It sounds weird, I know, but have you never felt like there was something inanimate or at least non-human that was trying to tell you something?  I’m not saying that you have looked down into a bowl of Alpha Bits at breakfast and seen it spelling out, “Good morning!” or that your neighbor’s cat has been telling you to move to Florida.  If those things are happening, it’s probably something neurological that you should get checked out.  What I mean is having a sense that the world itself, or some part of it in particular for you, is trying to tell you a little bit about God.

According to Romans 1:20, “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”  Psalm 8 gives an example of nature suddenly confronting someone with God’s grandeur:

“O Lord, our Sovereign,
   how majestic is your name in all the earth! 

You have set your glory above the heavens. 
   Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
   to silence the enemy and the avenger. 

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
   the moon and the stars that you have established; 
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
   mortals that you care for them? 

Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
   and crowned them with glory and honor. 
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
   you have put all things under their feet, 
all sheep and oxen,
   and also the beasts of the field, 
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
   whatever passes along the paths of the seas. 

O Lord, our Sovereign,
   how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

            What we get from Proverbs, though, is a reminder that we humans are part of that nature, and learning God’s wisdom comes both from observing the wider world and from observing human interactions.  We have heard this morning that great, poetic depiction of the wisdom of God built into the pattern of the universe:

“Before the mountains had been shaped,
   before the hills, I was brought forth— 
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
   or the world’s first bits of soil. 
When he established the heavens, I was there,
   when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, 
when he made firm the skies above,
   when he established the fountains of the deep, 
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
   so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth, 
   then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
   rejoicing before him always,”  [Proverbs 8:25-30]

which then suddenly turns and finishes with

“rejoicing in his inhabited world
   and delighting in the human race.” [Proverbs 8:31]

In fact, God’s wisdom is so wrapped up in humanity that God himself became human that we might know what that wisdom looks like by being expressed through the thoroughly and perfectly human life of Jesus.

That serves as a corrective to our meager efforts to gain wisdom.  The world does speak to us in amazing ways, but we also have a tendency to mix things up.  We understand at best in part.  The way that we treated Jesus shows that tragically.  Yet God’s wisdom used even our greatest failure to offer us all that we need. 

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
   and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ 
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” [I Corinthians 1:18-25]

If wisdom is found in human life, it is found most clearly in the most human life of all: that of Jesus.

            Christian proclamation does not provide anyone with a cohesive philosophy and say, “Okay, let’s walk through this from first principles to conclusions.”  What we do is tell the story.  We tell the story that begins with creation and how things have somehow gone wrong, and we tell how God set about working to put it to rights again, until finally on a cross outside Jerusalem it all came together – all that is wrong with us and all that is right with God, all our foolishness and all God’s wisdom.  We tell the story of how the collision crushed the man at its center and how three days later we learned that it didn’t crush the love of God and he returned invincible.  We tell the story of how that has changed people over the years, and how it has changed us.

            We share the wisdom that we have gained, and we share it freely, as God has shared with us,

  “ rejoicing before him always, 
rejoicing in his inhabited world
   and delighting in the human race.”

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[1] Thad Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank (New York: Random House, 2000), 27-28.