The Hebrew Scriptures: Wisdom Literature

*Preached at Grace North Church February 20th, 2000*

As many of you know, when I was in college, I converted from the Southern Baptist faith of my youth to Catholicism, specifically, Anglo-Catholicism. Besides upsetting my parents, a good number of my friends were likewise dismayed. One friend took me aside and said that if I didn't like the Baptist church, I should work to change it from within, not just jump ship. He knew that I had had great difficulty with the xenophobic attitude Southern Baptists take towards Christians of other denominations. He suggested that I might have great influence in persuading other Baptists to be more ecumenical. His words, of course, made a lot of sense, but I'm afraid it wasn't that simple.

For my attraction to Anglo-Catholicism was not just about attitudes. I needed theological breathing room, space to explore and expand. My friend suggested that I join the American Baptists, which would afford me all the theological wiggle room I would enjoy as an Episcopalian. And while that is no doubt true, I'm afraid that didn't cut to the heart of it either.

For you see, what most attracted me to the Catholic faith was not ecumenical spirit, nor theological freedom, but, oddly enough, art. Baptists, I'm afraid are arch-iconoclasts. In even the most ornate Baptist sanctuary you might have a cross and some geometric stained glass, but certainly no images. The churches I grew up in either reflected puritanical simplicity or at their most splendid, a nicely designed corporate board room. One would be hard-pressed to find a single statue, tapestry, banner, or representational stained glass panel.

I am an artist, I always have been; always will be, I reckon. So imagine the wealth of images and impressions which washed over me when I stepped into an Episcopal church: the huge gory crucifix, the tapestry of the risen Christ, the splendid vestments. The worship involved all of my senses, my nose worshipped through incense, my ears worshipped through the chanted liturgy, my body worshipped in its kneeling, and by crossing myself, and by receiving the body and blood of Christ. My senses were assaulted by beauty, and in a mystical way I have never known before, assaulted by God.

I was home, and I knew it. Vast portions of my soul which had never known God were awakened and courted by him. For the first time in my life, all of my sensibilities, my creativity, my artistry, were affirmed, supported, and encouraged by my community of faith. I was reborn, and the Spirit of God flourished in me.

As an adult, I have come around to once again appreciating the many wonderful aspects of my childhood faith, its solid grounding in the bible, and the historical Baptist openness to idiosyncratic theologies. But the Baptist faith today, at least as practiced by conservative Baptists, tends to be heavy on the legalism, and light on the freedom afforded us by the gospel.

The Jews would have perhaps understood my journey. Moses forced them to destroy their idols and images and gave them a very specific set of laws by which to conduct their civil and religious lives. Now, laws are all very well and good, but when it comes to the life of the spirit, laws tend to be, well, lacking. In fact, wherever the spiritual life of a community is governed solely by laws, there is a great tendency towards abuse.

It is out of this experience with legalism that the third division of the Hebrew scriptures arises, the Wisdom literature. For the Wisdom literature is everything that the Law is not, ambiguous, angry, joyful, confusing, exhilarating, and perhaps most importantly, beautiful. Let's take a look at each of the books that make up this literature and explore the unique gifts they afford the Hebrew legal tradition.

The first of the books in our bibles is a short novel in verse titled "Job." Now, my grandmother would swear up and down that Job was a real person, but Job has too many transparent plot devices to be taken seriously as history, especially since it has one very important point to make: the Law isn't everything. In Job we find a man who is godly in all his doings, and yet, even in spite of his righteousness, profound suffering is visited upon him. Job was the first book to ask the question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" and serves as a direct answer to those who speciously asserted that everyone who kept the Law would flourish. For Job is visited by several friends in the book, each of them trying to convince him that he must have brought the suffering upon himself, through some unconfessed sin. Job refuses to admit that he has sinned, and asserts that it is God who is being unrighteous by allowing him to suffer.

This is a very important book, for it contradicts the assertion of the Torah that anyone who keeps the Law will be blessed. Well Job kept the Law, and he was cursed, and through Job, many many Jews saw themselves reflected: hard-working, honest people of faith who for some reason did not reap the rewards promised them by their tradition; good people who had evil visited upon them, seemingly for no reason. Job was written about the sixth century before Christ, to help explain to the Jews in exile why they found themselves in such sorry straights even though they had been faithful. And just as it spoke to the Jews in exile, it still speaks to us today. Everyone here knows some wonderful person whose life has been cut short by cancer, or AIDS. Our friends did not deserve such fates, and yet they were not delivered. Job has a much happier ending than most of our friends receive, and we can only hope that their riches were regained in the life beyond.

God appears at the end of this book, basically telling Job that human beings cannot understand the mind of God, that life and death, suffering and reward are ultimately mysteries which cannot be controlled by even the most strict adherence to the Law. Job is a slap in the face of the Lawyers and legalists. It says that the Law doesn't hold all of the answers, and in fact, the answers are beyond our capacity to understand.

Just as profound is the next book of the Wisdom literature, the Psalms. These are the most familiar of all of the Hebrew scriptures to us, because Israel and later the church has used them daily in the devotional life of their peoples. The Psalms are a mixed bag, at best. They contain some of the most bloodthirsty and repugnant passages in all of ancient literature, existing side by side with passages of the most sublime beauty. Far from making the book uneven as you might expect, it is this unlikely mix that lends the Psalms their power. For the Psalms express the full range of human emotion, from rage and revenge to deepest depression, from gratitude and thanks to ecstatic praise. The Psalms hide nothing. No one can read them cover to cover and not feel at turns embarrassed, grossed out, touched, and elated.

While the Law would have you shaking in your boots before God, the Psalms show the average Jew shaking his fist at God and demanding justice. The Psalms get angry with God, they threaten God, and yet they also beg forgiveness and mercy. King David, to whose authorship so many of the Psalms are attributed, was a complicated man who could by no means be said to be a goody-two shoes. And the Psalms reflect this complexity. These were not written by pious, holier-than-thou monks far removed from any earthly pleasure or pain; they were written by intensely human souls in the thick of the messy stuff of life and death. No matter what your mood, their is a Psalm to reflect it, and that my friends makes them a very comforting and useful tool for the spiritual life. The Psalms tell us that we are not alone, that we are not that first to feel the way we do, and most importantly, that there are no feelings which are forbidden in God's presence. God knows it all, the full gamut of human experience, and it is all--all--holy.

The next book is attributed to King David's Son, King Solomon, no doubt because of his reputed wisdom. The Book of Proverbs is simply that: a collection of poems and pithy sayings that were popular at one time or another in Israel and eventually found themselves in various collections. Many of the sayings are directly borrowed from the Egyptian sage Amen-em-ope, which only serves to prove the point that wisdom is wisdom, no matter where you find it. This particular collection of sayings is aimed at a young man, imparting the necessary wisdom to help him cope with life's many vicissitudes, and to instill in him a strong sense of morality. The sayings encourage the young man to be honest, diligent, trustworthy, teachable, prudent, and polite, and many of the sayings are as true today as they were twenty-six hundred years ago when the collection was first assembled.

The most interesting aspect of the book is the first appearance of a character known as Lady Wisdom, or in the Greek translation, Sophia. The proverbs say that Wisdom was an aspect of God, God's first creation, through whose agency all other things were made. Wisdom is a demiurge of sorts, a lesser part of God whose job it was to interact with matter. The early church looks back on her as the pre-incarnate Christ, which led me to begin one ill-fated sermon with the words, "Before Jesus was born a man, he was a woman." For your own safety, I suggest you do not try this at home.

The Book of Ecclesiastes is also attributed to Solomon, but within the book itself, it says it is by "the teacher of the assembly," which is also sometimes translated as "the philosopher." This is an apt attribution, for indeed, Ecclesiastes is the most philosophical book in the Hebrew scriptures. Many people feel threatened by this book, just as many people--especially religious people--feel threatened by philosophy. For it is always the business of philosophy to ask tough questions and to challenge our understanding of the world, especially our religious understandings. Ecclesiastes pulls no punches, either. While it contains profound wisdom, such as the famous "for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven," the philosopher also laments that "vanity, vanity, all is vanity, all things are wearisome, all things will pass." The philosopher challenges the religious teachings of the day saying, "Who knows whether the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth? ...The fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same...all go to one place; all are from dust, and all turn to dust again." The philosopher also rebukes those who are too pious, saying, "be not righteous over much, neither make thyself overly wise: why should you destroy yourself like that?" It is this commonplace wisdom which so frightens the religious, and makes the book of Ecclesiastes the philosophy students' best friend. After all, questioning as a spiritual path is right here in the Bible, how can we ignore it or vilify it?

Likewise vilified in many pieties is the notion of sex, especially, god forbid, sex for pleasure. And yet, once again, the Wisdom books speak from a peculiarly human perspective, elevating the long-spit-upon genre of erotic literature to Holy Scripture. Folks have had problems with the Song of Songs for centuries. It is sexually explicit, it is romantic, it is deeply moving and even titillating. No wonder puritanical souls have ignored it and the Christian ascetics worked so hard to remythologize it as some sort of allegory about the relationship between Christ and his church. Nonsense. For the author of the Song of Songs, Christ and his church were, believe me, the furthest things from his mind. This is a book about lovers, about romance, and about sex. And it's a darn good read, too. And it's also a wakeup call to all of those anhedoniac ninnies who like to ignore their privates and wish everyone else would too. But the Song of Songs is having none of it. Instead, it contains deeply moving poetry between two lovers, not even necessarily two married lovers, which would be enough to send the Moral Majority through the roof if they ever actually READ their own scriptures. I hope you will read the Song of Songs, in fact I encourage you to read them over a bottle of cabernet to your own sweetheart, because there's nothing like a little well-chosen scripture to get you "in the mood."

Unlike the Books of Moses or the books of the Prophets, the Wisdom literature is a mixed bag, but what a tasty assortment in that bag! It is the perfect antidote to the sterility of the Law, and unlike the finger-shaking diatribes of the prophets, this literature sings, cries, aches, belly-laughs, makes love, gets mad, and sings again. These books belong not to the lawyers or the prophets, but to the artists, to those for whom the law is not enough. These are the books in which I meet God, not as a moral judge, but as a character of distinctly human dimensions. In these books we find a model for the spiritual life that embraces the full spectrum of human experience in all its rage, joy, confusion, and contradiction. These books tell us that it is okay to be human, it is okay to get angry at God, it's okay to get a little silly, that it's okay to ask the hard questions, and that it's okay to love. Let us pray.

God of Love and power, God of beauty, rage, and wisdom, we give you thanks for the sacred books which so bounteously enrich our tradition. For in giving us songs, you teach us to sing, in giving us proverbs, you teach us wisdom, in giving us philosophers you teach us to think, and in giving us poetry, you teach us to love. Help us to never get so hung up on the rules that we forget to stop and notice the roses, even the rose of Sharon. We ask this through the name of thy Holy Wisdom, even Sophia, your Christ. Amen.