Sermon on the Psalms and Proverbs by Owen Rogers, with appreciation to David Atkinson for material from his book, “The message of Proverbs”.
We’re born to sing. We have songs for every occasion and a few to spare. If we can’t think of one we’ll even make one up. The other day Mark dropped in when I was checking out music for Sunday. Because I was at the piano I kept playing, making up the tune and Mark made up some words to go with it. It was a song for the moment, not for keeping. A fleeting ditty that was never written down.
Music fills our world. What with records and cds, ipods and mp3 players, radio and television there’s no shortage of music. And if none of that is playing we tend to whistle or hum or sing our own. We have centuries of song-writing to draw from and the ones we like we sing over and over. There’s always something to suit our mood, to express our feelings, to lift us when we’re down, to tell us to do good, to stop us feeling afraid, and so on – a song for every occasion.
An example that came to mind as I wrote this is the song, “I whistle a happy tune” from the muisical, The King And I.
Does it do it for you? You weren’t feeling afraid anyway, but certainly not after singing that. Songs are like that and the ones in the Bible in the section called Psalms are very much like that – they do stuff for us, in us and to us.
The Bible has no music to sing to but many people have set the Psalms to music. We began our service by singing a Psalm. Number 23 as you all know. Then we sang it again in a different rendering. Last year we did a series of Psalms and sang several of them. The blue Presbyterian Hymn Book has all the Psalms set to music. The Psalms do all the things other songs do for us, and more – express our feelings, alter our moods, lift us when we’re down, give courage when we’re afraid, give us words with which to praise God, help us refocus on God, help us retune our lives. Thank God for the Psalms.
Our E100 Challenge had us read three Psalms: 23, 51, 103.
Psalm 23 is the most popular and best known of them all. It packs a lot of life and relationship with God into its 6 verses. In our group on Wednesday we were coming up with different images by restating the first verse. The Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my friend. The Lord is my taxi driver. The Lord is my loving mother, she takes care of me all day long. I said, the Lord is my Pastor, active in my life, leading, encouraging, strengthening, giving peace, patience, kindness. I like that because I’m an ideas person – a visionary – and he has given me what I need to also be a pastor like he is.
Psalm 51 was written by David after Nathan straightened him out and it highlights the cleansing and healing of God’s forgiveness. Our group on Tuesday figured that accumulated sins are like cholesterol in the arteries blocking and clogging the heart making one sluggish. Forgiveness is like cleaning the arteries. It gives a new lease of life. To keep your arteries clean so to speak – to keep from sin as much as possible fill your mind with good things, as in Philippians 4:8.
The book of Proverbs has lots of advice for right living. 31 chapters of wisdom, much of it written by Solomon, son of David and Bathsheba. Pithy, practical, nitty-gritty stuff.
Here’s a sample:
‘The first step in learning is bowing down to the Lord.’ Proverbs 1:7
‘The more you get the less you are.’ Proverbs 1:19
First pay attention to wisdom, then you can relax, take it easy, you’re in good hands. Proverbs 2
“Trust God from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own. Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; he’s the one who will keep you on track.” Prov 3:21-23
‘Wise living gets rewarded with honour; stupid living gets the booby prize.” Prov. 3:35.
Godly wisdom protects us against evil and its consequences (1:10-19) and it provides us with happiness and health (3:13-26). True wisdom is a heart commitment to learn and follow God’s ways (4:23).
Godliness in working clothes
We can understand the message of Proverbs in terms of the character, methods, imagination, values and examples of Wisdom. She is described as a personification of a particular aspect of the nature of God. It is God’s delight that Wisdom evokes, God’s creativity that Wisdom expresses, God’s processes in history that Wisdom governs, and God’s purposes for human life in this world that Wisdom teaches. Wisdom is that part of God’s nature which creates, orders, sheds light and gives life. And especially in the early chapters of Proverbs, this aspect of God’s nature is depicted as a woman, mysterious but powerful, speaking in the public realm but whose meanings are sometimes hidden, exploring, ordering, enthusing, celebrating, life-giving and life-enhancing.
Those who find Wisdom themselves begin to share her wise ways. Those who find Wisdom find God, life, meaning, and a way of managing in the messy complexities of day-to-day life in the world. They find a way of coping with life’s stresses and uncertainties and discover something of the art of living. To live wisely, then, is to live in God’s ways. To live in God’s ways is to discover what being human is meant to be about.
The interesting thing about Proverbs is how unreligious the book is. There is nothing about the temple, the priests or sacrifice. There is a lot about street corners, houses, rooftops, jewels and animals. There is hardly anything about religious ceremonies. There is a lot about love, justice and concern for the poor. As Derek Kidner put it in his book on Proverbs:
“It is a book which seldom takes you to church. Like its own figure of Wisdom, it calls across to you in the street about some everyday matter, or points things out at home. Its function in Scripture 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.”
In this week’s readings we have encountered some of those ‘working clothes’ in family life and marriage, in questions of health, security, food, relationships, common behaviour and even the political realm. When our faith comes up against questions of living for God in the ordinary and the everyday we have to engage in a ‘conversation’ through which we learn, and through which our characters are helped to develop. Proverbs does not very often deal in generalities. There are many situations for which no answers are given. The writers, with wonderful pictures more often than not, describe a situation at home or at work, and draw some moral conclusion from it. They then put the questions to us: “Is this like your situation? Are these your values? What does holding values like that mean in terms of how you should live now?”
Proverbs, then, is not an easy book. To read it carefully will not only educate, inform, amuse and annoy, but it should change us as well. Constantly we are faced with choices which form part of the stories our lives are telling. Proverbs constantly reminds us that some choices are the way of Folly, and diminish, weaken and destabilize individual lives and communities. Others are the way of Wisdom, developing social capital, strengthening and stabilising individual lives and communities.
Wisdom, in Proverbs, is very practical. It is generally accepted among writers and preachers that the personification of Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible is a literary device. Wisdom is not some divine being separate from God. The portrayal of wisdom in Proverbs is similar to the way St Paul refers to wisdom in his letters, although Paul likes to draw a contrast between godly wisdom and worldly wisdom. Proverbs would call the latter folly. Thus in 1 Corinthians 1:17 Paul says that Christ sent him to preach the gospel not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. Then, in verse 19 Paul quotes Isaiah 29:14, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise’ (which in Isaiah probably refers to foolish politicians), to contrast divine wisdom and the folly of the worldly-wise. We don’t have to read far to see that those who think in the world’s terms think themselves wise and the godly foolish.
Paul recognises this when in verses 20-21 he contrasts divine and human wisdom:
“Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.”
So it becomes clear that Paul believes that God’s Wisdom is not only wiser than human wisdom, but that it is something wonderfully separate altogether. A qualitative, not only a quantitative, distinction is being made. Paul seems here to be aligning himself with the wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures. There is a Wisdom which is different even from the very best of the worldly-wise. There is a wisdom from God — a Wisdom of God — which human beings of themselves cannot know. It is a Wisdom that can be received only through the gift of God himself, as it is written:
No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him — but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit (1 Cor. 2:9,10).
Paul is moving to a deeper understanding of Wisdom even than Proverbs illustrates. This deeper meaning seems to be forced on him because of his encounter with Jesus Christ ‘who has become for us wisdom from God’ (1 Cor. 1:30). So where shall Wisdom be found? St Paul would answer: in Jesus Christ our Lord. He is God’s Wisdom. He is God’s delight. Through him God made the world. In him God’s light shines. He embodies the life of God himself. As Paul argued elsewhere: ‘See to it that no-one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fulness of the Deity lives in bodily form’ (Col. 2:8-9).
He shares the life of God, creator, redeemer and giver of life. This is the basis for Paul’s argument, in place after place, that it is through coming to reverent obedience to God (‘the fear of the Lord’) through Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit, that we not only discover, but are also given strength to live out, godliness in working clothes. For what God in his Wisdom requires of us, that in Christ through his Spirit he also gives.
What are you giving your life to – following the world’s way or following God’s wisdom?