I’ve got a struggle that is peculiar to the information age. I think my GPS is eating my brain cells. Are you getting that same sense? Suzanne’s parents gave us a GPS device for Christmas last year – one of those things you stick on your windshield and that tells you how to get anywhere you want to go. They are amazing devices. They tell you the best route to take, how long it will take you to get there, whether to get in the left or right lane for the next turn, where the next bathroom is, how fast you’re going, what music you ought to be listening to, what clothes you should be wearing when you get there…all kinds of stuff. Some of them even update traffic reports and reroute you based on that.
An interesting thing happens when I use the GPS, though. The thing seems so smart – especially when we let it talk in its British accent – that I don’t trust my instincts anymore. And I can’t remember how to get to places I’ve been going all my life. “I think I just have to take Bayside up to Exmore but I better put on the GPS just to be sure.” That kind of thing happens. It’s eating my brain cells, I tell you!
We are living in the information age. We have more data at our fingertips than we have ever had before. Some of you remember with me that it used to be the case that the most impressive set of books you could have in your house was an encyclopedia – 12-20 books that contained thumbnail sketches of everything you could hope to know. It was a major investment for a household. Now, all that those books contained is accessible on the internet in a click or two. We take it for granted that we can get a review about a new car or a recipe or a quote or a news story whenever we want it.
The big word in technology circles these days is “the cloud.” The cloud is where all of our information is being stored. Not in books like your old Encylopedia Brittanica. Not on floppy disks (remember those?). Not even on your hard drive. The future is storage in cyberspace so that we upload all of our information onto the web and then access it from whatever computer or cell phone we have available to us. Our information lives in a cloud that is always around us. It’s not exactly the “cloud of witnesses” that the book of Hebrews talks about where the saints who have gone before us live. But since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of megabytes, why do we need to rely on physical storage devices, or even our own memories?
This age is amazing. We have gotten astoundingly good at replicating and processing information. But knowing things is not the same as wisdom. And we are in danger of becoming foolish. The playwright Richard Foreman says that we used to value people who could not just know things but could know what to do with what they knew. “But today,” Foreman says, “I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’…[W]e all become ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”[i]
Pancake people, spread wide and thin. That is a description of far too many of us in this day. As we live with our heads in the cloud of the Information Age, what we crave, what I crave is time spent with people who are truly wise. I want to be with people who can help me know what to do with what I have…with what we have. Dori Baker, a writer and teacher who will be with us later this month to work with our youth and our staff, says that we all need people who will listen with us for what God would have us to do. In her book, Lives to Offer, she quotes the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda who asks in one of his poems, “Who will tell me what it is that I came here to do?”[ii] It will take a wise person to help us answer that question.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” [Psalm 111:10]. That’s what our psalm of the day tells us. The fear that is spoken of here is not terror, but respect and awe in the light of God’s holiness. You remember how when the Israelites were going through the desert after being released from slavery in Egypt. Moses went up on the mountain to meet with God and to receive the Ten Commandments and the Law. God said, "I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, [again a cloud!] in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after. Set limits for the people all around, saying, 'Be careful not to go up the mountain or to touch the edge of it. Anybody who touches the mountain shall be put to death” [Exodus 19:9-12].
This fear was recognition that there is a life force so powerful in the midst of the people that it could only be approached at the risk of your life. Wisdom has something to do with this awareness that there is something beyond what we know, something that transcends our own knowledge, that needs to accounted for and listened to and respected. That’s the wisdom we see in such short supply.
When we think of wisdom in biblical terms, inevitably we end up talking about Solomon. We think of that name because of the story which we've just read this morning - the scene in which the new King Solomon asks for wisdom from God.
It's an interesting passage because the Bible seems to look at Solomon with a certain amount of ambivalence. On the one hand Solomon is revered as being at the highpoint of Israel's history as a nation. Solomon picked up where his father David left off and built Jerusalem into one of the finest capital cities in the world. Solomon was the one who imported cedars from Lebanon to furnish the new Temple he built for Yahweh, the God of Israel. Solomon began many building projects, enlarged the army and even began a navy for Israel. The wonders of King Solomon's reign were numerous. He developed a reputation for wisdom and later generations would attribute the books of Proverbs and Song of Songs to him.
That’s not all there is to the story of Solomon, though. He is also remembered as the end of the glorious united kingdom of Israel. The riches and wealth and honor he attained were short-lived and the kingdom divided after his death thanks to the heavy taxes and forced labor he imposed to build up Jerusalem.
He also seems to have had some issues with women. Solomon was said to have 700 wives and 300 concubines. That by itself would have been problem enough - imagine being beholden to 1000 relationships! But the real problem was that each of these wives brought with them their own cultures and their own religions, since many of them were not Israelite. Each time a marriage with a foreign woman took place, the custom was to build a shrine in Jerusalem to her nation's god. So Solomon bore the blame for bringing in all of these idols and foreign gods.
The story tells us Solomon took over from his father, David, as king and his rule was firmly established. That's over in chapter two of 1 Kings. Of course, the rest of chapter 2, which we didn't read, shows us that Solomon's reign was not all that firmly established because he spends the rest of the chapter eliminating his rivals for the throne, including his older brother. But by the end of chapter 2, it really does look secure and we are told again that his rule was firmly established.
Chapter 3 opens with Solomon's first foreign marriage and it's a big one - to the daughter of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, the strongest nation on earth at the time. It's a shrewd move because it makes Israel more secure, but it also brings in the influence of foreign gods. And when verse 3 of chapter 3 comes around we're told that Solomon was a great king who loved Yahweh, the God of Israel, and who followed in the footsteps of David, his father, EXCEPT...and this is a pretty big except...except that he had a habit of offering sacrifices and incense on the high places - and not just in Jerusalem where all worship was supposed to take place.
In fact, Solomon is out making a sacrifice at one of these high places when God finds him. Or at least it seems that God finds him. It all happens in a dream and you know how mysterious dreams can be. They can seem so real and yet... That's how this dream was.
God appears to Solomon in a dream and doesn't chastise him for being in this strange place, God merely says, "What can I give you, Solomon?" This is a great dream, huh?
Many of us would be ticking off the new boat, the vacation home in Maui, the extreme makeover. But Solomon is very wise in his response, which makes us wonder if he really needed to be given the gift God gives him. Solomon remembers God's relationship with his father, David and then says, "You know, God, I'm really like a small child when I think about the shoes I'm trying to fill. I've got all these people to take care of and they look to me for justice. I'm going to need help, God."
Now Solomon may be overstating this just a little bit. He's already shown that he can be pretty shrewd in dealing with his enemies and negotiating with foreign powers. But he's right that we haven't seen yet how he will handle his role as the securer of justice for the people. And God recognizes this and is pleased.
God says to Solomon in this dream, "You didn't seek long life for yourself, you didn't seek riches for yourself, and you didn't ask for the life of your enemies" (though Solomon had already taken care of this himself). “Instead, you asked for wisdom, and because of this I will also give you what you didn’t ask for – riches and honor and long life.”
Then Solomon wakes up and realizes that it’s all been a dream. But as he wakes up we’re all left to wonder – was it just a dream or did it really mean something? Was God really talking in his dream? The only way to find out is to see how it is lived out in the world. Because ultimately wisdom is not something you can get in an instant or that you can study for and achieve on your own. It’s what you get when you direct your life toward God and turn all of your experiences that way. When Solomon did that, he really was wise. When he didn’t, he and his nation experienced pain and failure and he looked as foolish as any of us can.
Solomon is not a model citizen – just as all of Israel’s kings were flawed and broken people. But he did have this insight that the world and our responsibilities in it are far more complex than we can handle relying just on our own abilities. We need humility. We need elders – people we can look to help us put the world together. We need wisdom.
Pastor Heidi Husted says that we are currently living with a wisdom famine. As Pancake People we are starved for something meaningful and substantial in this world. “Information is fast, loud, superficial, numbing,” she says. “We can’t get away from it. Wisdom is slower, deeper, lasting, more elusive. We can begin to make our way toward wisdom by clearing out the data smog -- by fasting from TV, computer, cell phone and pocket planner long enough to talk with a friend face-to-face, read a book or simply sit still and listen for the way of wisdom.”[iii]
Are you tired of doing it on your own? Are you longing for something deeper, richer, fuller, more engaging? Solomon lifts up wisdom for us as the heart’s most fruitful desire. But that desire is only met in Jesus, who is God’s wisdom come to earth, come to show us how to die and how to live. Come to show us what it is we were sent here to do.
I want to close with a bit of wisdom from the poet Stephen Dobyns. Dobyns wrote a poem about a man in middle life who goes with his dog to the door of his house on a beautiful autumn night. In an imagined conversation the dog speaks for the man’s desire to do something crazy. To get in a car and just keep driving. To go downtown and get drunk. To tip over all the trash cans they can find. “This,” the poem says, “is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.”
But the man is caught up in his sense of loss and in his sense of limitation. He feels his memories slipping away and the weight of his years. The dog says, “Let’s pick up some girls. Let’s go dig holes. Let’s go down to the diner and sniff people’s legs. Let’s stuff ourselves on burgers.”
Finally, though the man doesn’t listen to the dog. He doesn’t run off. He just goes back into the house with the dog to make a sandwich. The poem ends like this:
And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept –
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.[iv]
Here’s the good news, brothers and sisters. The answers to life are not in the back of your refrigerator. You do not have to be a pancake person. The answers to what comes next have been given to us by a God who has conquered death and has called us forth to life. The adventure is not over; it has only just begun. Jesus is calling you to a journey of more than just what you know or even what you can do. Jesus is calling you a journey of wisdom. Are you going to walk with him? Thanks be to God.
1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14
Then David lay down with his ancestors and was buried in the city of David. The years which David had reigned over Israel were forty - seven years reigning in Hebron, and in Jerusalem thirty-three years. Then Solomon sat on the throne of David, his father, and his rule was firmly established...
Solomon loved YHWH by walking in the established customs of David, his father, except that in the high places he sacrificed and offered incense.
The king went to Gibeon to offer sacrifices there, for that was the greatest high place; Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. At Gibeon YHWH appeared to Solomon in a dream during the night and Elohim said, "Ask what I should give you."
Solomon said, "You made with your servant David, my father, great loyalty because he walked before you in faithfulness and rectitude and uprightness of heart toward you; you have preserved for him this great loyalty and have given him a son to sit on his throne this very day.
"Now YHWH, my God, you have made your servant king in the place of David, my father, and I am a small child and do not know even how to go out and come in. Your servant is in the midst of your people whom you chose, a great people who cannot be numbered nor counted. So give your servant a heart attentive to giving justice to your people and to distinguishing between good and evil; for who can give justice to your great people?"
This thing was good in the eyes of Adonai because Solomon asked for this thing. Elohim said to him, "Because you sought this thing and did not seek for yourself many years and did not seek for yourself riches and did not seek the life of your enemies, but sought for yourself discernment in being attentive to justice, look, I will do according to your word. Look, I will give you a wise and discerning heart so that there will not have been anyone like you before you and after you there will not arise anyone like you. Also what you have not asked for, I will give you - both riches and honor - so that no other king will be like you in your lifetime. And if you walk in my paths, obeying my commands and statutes, as David, your father, walked, then I will lengthen your years."
[i] Richard Foreman, “The Pancake People, or, ‘The Gods are Pounding My Head,’” Edge: The Third Culture, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/foreman05/foreman05_index.html.
[ii] Dori Grinenko Baker & Joyce Ann Mercer, Lives to Offer: Accompanying Youth on Their Vocational Quests, [The Pilgrim Press: Cleveland, 2007].
[iii] Heidi Husted, The Christian Century, August 2-9, 2000, p. 790, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1985.
[iv] Stephen Dobyns, "How To Like It," from Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992, (Viking, 1994).
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