Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: The Problem with Wisdom (Ecclesiastes 2:12-17; 7:23-24)
March 10, 2019
College holds a special place in our cultural narrative. In books, movies, and TV, it is heralded as a time for young people to go off to pursue higher learning and to grow in wisdom—a journey that cannot be completed without a great deal of experience and experimentation. And at one time, that was more true than not. Universities were generally staffed by men and women who were genuine scholars in their respective fields and were committed to shaping young minds with the knowledge and tools they were going to need in order to find success in whatever field they happened to be pursuing. Over the past generation or so, though, that classical mission has…morphed…somewhat.
The result of all of this has been the general transformation of our college and university system from a laboratory for the growth and development of wisdom and intelligence to a place where silliness is embraced with a near-religious seriousness. For example, at Reed College, you can actually take a class entitled…are you ready for it…“Underwater Basket Weaving.” Yes, that really exists…for credit. At Cornell University, you can learn the finer point of Tree Climbing. Oberlin Experimental College offers a whole load of classes whose academic value may be worth a bit of further investigation including “Breaking the Rules: An Intellectual Discussion of Fight Club,” “Video Game History: Rise of a New Medium,” “Chosen: Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “The Office: Awesome, Awkward, & Addicting,” “Calvin & Hobbes” (which, I’ll admit, sounds pretty interesting to me given that I both own and have read the entire collection), and “From Ban to Bar: The History, Politics, and Taste of Chocolate.” among others. Not to be outdone, the prestigious Princeton University offers a course called “Getting Dressed.” Personally speaking, my college P.E. credit was Kick Ball: Canadian Rules, which the professor openly acknowledged to the class was titled as such because the university wasn’t going to grant credit for a class that did little more than have their elite students play the popular school yard game that actually has its own adult amateur league and she had to come up with some kind of a title that justified a course in which she intended for students to do just that. For what it’s worth, we usually played with six bases instead of four which I don’t really think they do in Canada…or anywhere else for that matter.
Well, this morning, we are in the third part of our conversation about meaning, what it is, and where we can find it for our lives called, Finding Meaning. The big idea for this whole journey is that we are creatures designed for meaning. We all need something by which we feel like we can define our lives. We need a purpose. We need a direction. That applies to both people as individuals and as groups. Whole organizations need a clear and compelling meaning and direction or else they will eventually peter out into silliness of some sort.
The problem is, most of the places we look to in order to give our lives meaning can’t deliver on the thing they promise. As a result, two weeks ago we started this whole conversation by establishing a foundation for meaning. That foundation is Jesus Christ. Life without Christ is meaningless. It is through Jesus that we gain access to become a part of the grand story God has been writing since He first called the universe into existence, and will continue writing into eternity. This is the only story big enough to sustain the weight of our lives and in which the things we pursue each day can have an impact that goes well beyond themselves. If we don’t start on this foundation, whatever else it is that we rest our lives on will eventually collapse, leaving us falling into a sense of meaninglessness that will last until we land on the rock that cannot be moved.
With our foundation established, last week we began to look together at some of the various big categories of meaning we pursue. We started with pleasure. We pursue meaning in pleasure because it’s easy and it feels good. The problem, of course, is that pleasure can’t furnish meaning for long. When we begin looking to pleasure for meaning instead of…well…pleasure, it offers us only a receding high that demands an ever-growing investment of ourselves to achieve. In the end, pleasure may make you shout, “Oh boy!” but on its own will never bring joy.
The next place our culture often searches for meaning is in wisdom. This seems like it should be a more fruitful pursuit at first glance. I mean, what could be wrong with wisdom? That’s something nearly everyone wants to get more of. Wisdom is a good thing. Becoming a wiser person seems like it should be something we should all be striving to reach. And yet, just like pleasure, when we search for wisdom for its own sake, when we search for wisdom as a source of meaning unto itself, we are setting ourselves up to head down some pretty strange and even dangerous roads.
Still, wisdom is a good and noble thing, right? I mean, we don’t want to avoid wisdom. Even a culture increasingly defined by secularism in one form or another recognizes that. A wise person is better than a foolish one. This is a broadly understood truth. Secular folks understand this to the extent that there are whole thinktanks focused on understanding and growing in wisdom. One, a project of the University of Chicago’s philosophy department, takes the form of a website called wisdomresearch.org. Their stated purpose is “to deepen our scientific understanding of wisdom and its role in the decisions and choices that affect everyday life. We want to understand how an individual develops wisdom and the circumstances and situations in which people are most likely to make wise decisions. We hope that, by deepening our scientific understanding of wisdom, we will also begin to understand how to gain, reinforce, and apply wisdom and, in turn, become wiser as a society.” In other words, science can tell us how to be wise.
But, while projects like wisdomresearch.org treat the accumulation of wisdom very scientifically, for many, attaining wisdom is just the opposite of scientific research. It doesn’t require careful experimentation, it requires gaining broad and varied experience. The more we can experience, the better. The people we consider wise are those who can share stories about all the places they’ve been and all the people they’ve met. We also tend to look at wisdom as something that’s inherently esoteric. The more erudite and inscrutable it sounds, the more likely we are to be impressed with whatever it is. And if the fact that I used esoteric, erudite, and inscrutable in a span of two sentence impresses you at all, that just proves my point. What we find is that when we pursue wisdom as a prize unto itself, our efforts often devolve into what is from any objective point of observation on a level with the silliness of Looney Tunes.
For instance, Aston University in England released a report proving that toast tends to fall on the buttered side. It was published in the European Journal of Physics. In other words, somebody spent money to construct and carry out a research project aimed at determining whether buttered toast falls butter side up or down. As long as they observed the five-second rule it was probably a tasty project. In another project, the Institute of Food Research in the UK performed a groundbreaking analysis of…soggy cereal. They called it “A Study on the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes.” That sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it? In case you are wondering, higher water content leads to soggier cereals. My favorite is a study from the University of Bristol (England) that was published in the prestigious Nature Magazine that offered readers wisdom on the optimal way to dunk a biscuit in a cup of coffee.
While I am confident the folks who designed these research projects, performed the experiments, and wrote the respective papers took their work seriously, this is all silliness. Whether buttered toast tends to fall buttered side down may result in our being a little more careful with our bread once it’s buttered, it’s not going to have any larger impact on our lives. It won’t make us wiser people. It really won’t even make us meaningfully smarter people. This all just points us firmly in the direction of the futility and inanity of wisdom pursued for its own sake. And the thing is, none of this is new. Solomon was writing about it almost 3,000 years ago. He took a look at wisdom as a source of meaning and came away disappointed.
Listen to this starting in Ecclesiastes 2:12: “Then I turned to consider wisdom, madness, and folly, for what will the king’s successor be like?” In other words, he set out to get his mind around the nature of wisdom and foolishness in order to sort out if it would have any sort of a meaningful impact on his legacy. Is it going to position those who come after him to do any better than he had done? Come back to v. 12: “He will do what has already been done.” That is, he’s going to fall into the same mistakes and traps that the folks who came before him have encountered. So…does this mean wisdom is just pointless?
No, it doesn’t. As we’ve already said, there is still value in wisdom. Solomon recognizes this too. Verse 13 now: “And I realized that there is an advantage to wisdom over folly, like the advantage of light over darkness. The wise person has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness.” That makes sense, right? It’s better to be wise than not. Even the most secular wisdom is better to have than nothing. But…it still isn’t something that can function as a source of meaning in our lives. Why? Look at the rest of the verse there: “Yet I also knew that one fate comes to them both. So I said to myself, ‘What happens to the fool will also happen to me. Why then have I been overly wise?’ And I said to myself that this is also futile. For, just like the fool, there will be no lasting remembrance of the wise, since in the days to come both will be forgotten. How is it that the wise person dies just like the fool?”
You’ve felt that before, right? Let me get personal with you for just a minute. My grandma died this past week. Many of you already knew that and thank you for the gracious concern you’ve shown my family. We appreciate that beyond what you can imagine. But listen: Her path to the end wasn’t pretty. As she drew nearer and nearer to her homegoing—or at least, her temporary home while she waits with all the saints for the final resurrection when she will have her resurrection body and we will be reunited for eternity in the new heavens and new earth—both her body and her mind broke down. She could not care for herself and when we visited her a couple of years ago even then she didn’t know who our boys were. Sitting down on her couch with all three boys on my lap or next to me and having her seriously ask, “And who are these boys?” is not something I’ll soon forget. And yet my grandma was a good and godly woman whose heart was full of godly wisdom. She was committed to her Jesus, fervent in prayer, and a student of the Scriptures all the way to her end. Now, yes, she went to sleep last Monday night and woke up with Jesus, but her final days were not pretty. They were not peaceful. She was in miserable pain for most of the last several years of her life though you would not have known it to look at her most of the time. And what’s more, her mind gradually brought her to the place where she couldn’t easily communicate anything she was feeling such that she could get the right kind of help. What good is living that kind of a life if it ends with that kind of humiliating frailty? Shouldn’t that kind of an end be reserved for someone more…deserving? It’s no wonder that as Solomon pondered all of this he finally exclaimed, “Therefore, I hated life because the work that was done under the sun was distressing to me. For everything is futile and a pursuit of the wind.”
There’s still more than this: Try as we might, we can’t get our heads around this. We can wave the flag of God’s sovereignty, but ultimately, until we are able to ask Him face to face, we won’t know. Or as Solomon puts it over in 7:23-24: “I have tested all this by wisdom. I resolved, ‘I will be wise,’ but it was beyond me. What exists is beyond reach and very deep. Who can discover it?” It’s almost like he’s embracing a cynical despair about anyone really finding wisdom. And this from a guy who still to this day bears the distinction of being “the wisest man who ever lived.” If he finally threw up his hands and declared, “I don’t get it!” what chance do we have? As long as we pursue wisdom for its own sake, very little.
And yet, everywhere we look, we see these pursuits of wisdom for their own sake. We see pursuits of wisdom that are little more than flights of fancy. We know we need it, but like Solomon experienced, we can’t ever seem to find it in such a way that makes a difference. So, we end up with college courses in underwater basket weaving and research studies published in prestigious academic journals on the best way to dunk a donut in coffee. This is all a symptom of the very secularity that so many believed would lead more surely to a generally accessible wisdom than the supposedly narrow limitations the Christian faith offered us.
Along the way, we’ve embraced secularism in some very profound ways as a people, thinking this would make our lives better. Secularism says wisdom for its own sake is the way to go. That’s all we need to create a better world. As a part of this we have rejected God and even the divine in general. Here’s the problem: We were made for God. Taking Him out of our lives and out of our culture hasn’t solved any problems. Pursuing wisdom for its own sake along the various lines laid down by the secular worldview has not left us wiser or more fulfilled, it has left us haunted and disappointed. We are disappointed with a God-less life because as we have already talked about on this journey, a God-less life is inherently devoid of any meaning beyond what we can construct for ourselves and that’s never going to be big enough to bear the weight of our lives. Because of this continued emptiness, we are haunted with this ongoing need for significance and purpose. You see, just because we got rid of God doesn’t mean we got rid of our need for Him. The result has been an attempt to invest meaning in things that are naturally meaningless. We take the mundane and make it meaningful. More significantly, in our pursuit of some kind of wisdom that can give substance to our attempts to live a good life, we take the silly and make it sacred. We see this all over the place.
The cruelty here is that there is simply no meaning to be found in all these pursuits of “wisdom.” Wisdom has to be grounded in its source if it is going to do anything positive for our lives. Here, though, is where someone might protest: Okay, let’s forget the silliness and focus on just plain old common sense. We live in a part of the world where it’s common to hear folks of a certain generation bemoan the loss of common sense. These folks agree with us that there’s no wisdom to be found in much of the silliness that characterizes so much of our culture. “We just need common sense again,” they say. And yet, what is the standard retort to a wish for more common sense? It just isn’t that common. Even where we manage to find some common sense, as Solomon might respond, what good does that ultimately do us? Perhaps we wind up better able to handle a variety of life’s many situations in ways that leave both us and the people around us better off than when we found them, but to what end? There’s no point. Focusing on being good for this world while ignoring the big questions of life proves to be just as empty a venture as pretending the big questions of life are something other than they are or else answering them in more and more inane and esoteric ways to avoid the uncomfortable stare of reality.
This all just brings us around to the big question for the morning: What is the proper grounding for wisdom? Where does wisdom need to be rooted in order to have the beneficial impact on our lives we look to it to receive? The answer is Jesus. Real wisdom is grounded in a relationship with Jesus. Real wisdom is about seeing the world through the lens of the kingdom of God. It is about pursuing the character of God in the various circumstances and situations of our lives. It is about knowing who God is and living bolding in light of that. It is about not merely knowing the right thing to do—something that must be defined and can only be objectively defined by the character and commands of God—but being committed to pursuing that right thing in spite of how difficult that venture may be. Or to put all of this much more simply as Solomon himself does several times in the collection of Proverbs he wrote, wisdom begins in the fear of the Lord. The seed of wisdom is planted in our hearts and lives when we give ourselves over to the lordship of Christ out of our respect for who God is and what God’s done. Real wisdom is grounded in a relationship with Jesus.
So then…how do we get it? How do we grow in wisdom? Well, for starters, we can ask for it. At least, that’s what James, the brother of Jesus said. And his words carry some weight because he was Jesus’ brother. If he could be convinced Jesus was who he said he was, we should probably pay attention to what he has to say. In the letter he wrote bearing his name he said this: “Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God—who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly—and it will be given to him.” Perhaps you’re like me and have asked for wisdom in certain situations, but have you ever genuinely prayed (without any doubt in either God’s willingness or ability to give it) that God would make you a wiser person? If you want to be a wiser person, going to the source and asking Him to share isn’t a bad place to start. Real wisdom is grounded in a relationship with Jesus, and that’s a relationship that will always result in our growing in wisdom when we pursue it with the intentionality it deserves.
But do you know what He’s probably going to do when you ask that? He’s going to put a stirring in your heart to do one of a couple of things and probably both if you’re not as fully engaged with either of them as you could be. What are these? The first is to immerse yourself more fully in the Scriptures. The apostle Paul told Timothy, and through him us, that all the Scriptures are breathed out by God and are useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so we will be thoroughly equipped for every good work, in other words, to make us wise. If you want to grow in wisdom, working out your relationship with Jesus by engaging more fully with the words He spoke and inspired is the best place to start. Real wisdom is grounded in a relationship with Jesus. You need to make engaging with the Scriptures a regular part of your life’s rhythm. I’ve talked about it before, but the You Version Bible App is one of the best tools I know of to help in this venture (beyond, you know, an actual Bible).
The other thing is this: You need to be fully engaged with a community of faith that is committed to living out those Scriptures together. And here’s what I mean by engaged: You need to be actively worshiping alongside fellow followers of Jesus. You need to be studying the Scriptures alongside them. You need to be serving alongside them. And, when you’ve been around long enough for your cup to be pretty full (and if you’ve been following Jesus for more than, let’s say, ten years, either your cup is pretty full or you’ve got a leak in it somewhere you need to get plugged), you need to be actively pouring that cup in the cups of folks who aren’t quite as far along in their journey as you are. Should I be more specific about what that looks like? That means you are either actively in a teaching position particularly with the kids and youth if you are so called and gifted, or you have someone you are intentionally, if informally, mentoring or discipling in the faith. These two things more than just about anything else reflect a healthy outworking of your relationship with Jesus and real wisdom is grounded in a relationship with Jesus.
Listen to this: Wisdom, like pleasure, will not give your life any meaning on its own. Your pursuit will become first silly and then dangerous the harder you look. But, wisdom is still something worth having. It won’t give your life more meaning, but your life will be better with it than it will without. If you want to experience this life-improving blessing—and who wouldn’t—ask God for it, and then invest yourselves in the Scriptures and your church community. As you pursue those as the outworking of your relationship with Jesus, you will find what you seek. Real wisdom is grounded in a relationship with Jesus. And as an added bonus, the more fully you live out of your relationship with Jesus, the more meaning your life will have both for you and for the people around you. Real wisdom is grounded in a relationship with Jesus. So start there and be wise.