2024-05-28 A Meditation on Wisdom

“27 Whoever diligently seeks good seeks favor, but evil comes to him who searches for it. 28 Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like a green leaf. 29 Whoever troubles his own household will inherit the wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise of heart. 30 The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, and whoever captures souls is wise. 31 If the righteous is repaid on earth, how much more the wicked and the sinner!” (Prov 11:27-31 ESV)

Wisdom begs a bit and marries to innocence, that is, to steps of faith. Instead of pontificating: “You, you should hear some Christian life principles”; “Hey over there, remember that God works through the Word, preaching, listening”; “While we have your attention, remember the reality of Christhood, of prophetic individuals, of caring for the loveless or suffering…” To wit: all good sentiments, but what wisdom does is prep us for a Review more All-Powerful and All-Encompassing than anything we “understand”. Wisdom makes us plaintive servants, children of a higher God, gives us the “gentle pleading of the liberal”.

To wit, again, Review comes and Review goes; the soldier’s drill master is of a caliber a bit removed or mindful compared to that fresh-faced recruit; the drill master has her or his own ideas as to what makes a man sinless, what makes a woman sinless, what makes a youth or a sage time-tested older warrior likable: all of us reach a platform eventually of being a bit “too knowing”, “lacking innocence”, “tempted”. We are tempted by our own new self-awareness: “Aha! So that is how people get by”; “I see! All is flattery”; “Oh! They must like me for x, y, and z”. Instead of letting our newfound knowledge bowl us over with God-like overarching mastery, we plead for forgiveness; we understand: sinlessness begins with lack of presumption—that is wisdom—not to try to please all comers but to hold our our innocent lessons and motives and gestures for a good and faithful Overseer. We learn of a parent’s maddening determination: I shall make pastors of these kids! Or: I shall make solid community-oriented servants of these miscreants! And: I shall teach these pups yelping at the hems, I shall teach them of a final Judgment. Yes, in all patience, in humor, in personally-matching the lesson to the tutee, our elders try and get us post-sin, post-conversion, post-humble Wisdom and some outlandish brand of Trust, wherein only those themselves at the pinnacle of their game, do even recognize who and what is before them.

That is, wisdom pleads for her children: do these babes no harm. Help to make sense of a vast puzzle over mechanistic “logic” and design: who monitors whom, who is the safeguard for whose accidental mistakes, what is the reputable or respectable Design. And we as Christians, as servants under the name of Soldier, are fresh-faced by our babe-like design: we are children, innocent and eager, getting by not by pleading to people on our same plateau, but looking upwards and in Trust, in Faith, being Wise. We are wise to let proverbs and ideas shape us, though under-appreciated by the world at large, though perhaps affrightened that we shall be taken advantage of, though worldly cynical and frustrated at just how sinful and advantageously-faulty our world is. Our world mocks the Believer’s wisdom and Trust. Our world begs, no more submission, no more trust-fall, don’t you see what it did to so-and-so? Therefore the faith is in an eternal life, earned by somehow doggedly being loyal to our beau, to our captain, to our friend. That space and room, patient listening and audience, shall be ours in the by-and-by, if it isn’t ours already now. So the Christian is honored for his or her patient oblique habits and decisions of moral nature. The Christian is Expected to be still wise even upon Ordination or Self-Discovery, new Self-Awareness so sublime yet so begging of hate-filled seclusion. We do not seclude; we believe in a Resurrection; we are holding these treasures in jars of clay, because the Prize is in the Outlay itself: our Prize is already won and winning over of our hearts.