The Pursuit of Wisdom

Text: Proverbs 3.13–18

Happy are those who find wisdom,

   and those who get understanding,

for her income is better than silver,

   and her revenue better than gold.

She is more precious than jewels,

   and nothing you desire can compare with her.

Long life is in her right hand;

   in her left hand are riches and honour.

Her ways are ways of pleasantness,

   and all her paths are peace.

She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;

   those who hold her fast are called happy.

The pursuit of Wisdom

A few years ago, during one of our marathon clean-ups of the church, I was making my way round to the outside store cupboard, loaded with good and chattels.  Fumbling for the lock, I managed to drop everything I was carrying with an enormous crash.  Just then, I noticed a man of the road, sitting and watching me with a bemused smile from the bench in the churchyard.  Once I had gathered up the junk I was trying to store, and gathered up some of my dignity, I decided to sit and have a chat with the man.  

His name, it turned out, was ‘Bowler’ – no doubt because he sported a rather fine bowler hat, festooned with badges he had accumulated in his life.  Bowler told me that he enjoyed his life on the road.  Every year, he would walk from Brighton to Penzance, little by little, stopping for as long as he wished at town like Havant along the way.  His life was free of stress.  He begged a little, when he needed money, but mainly he lived out of what he could scavenge from fresh food waste in supermarket bins, or from hedgerows along the way. 

I found myself comparing my rather frantic and busy life with his. And I found myself wondering whether, in fact, Bowler may have been the wisest man I had ever met.  He had found a balance in his life which gave him an aura of real serenity.  Just as I was wondering about this, Bowler held out his hand, with some bird seed in his palm.  And a little robin hopped out of the lavender bush, and landed on Bowler’s fingers.  As they enjoyed breakfast together, the robin and Bowler, I was certain that this was indeed a very wise man.

Wisdom, of course, comes in many varieties.  In our first reading, from the book of proverbs, we heard what we presume to be King Solomon’s hymn to wisdom.  Solomon thought of wisdom as female – and he extolled her many virtues.  She is more precious than jewels, and she is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her.  The accumulation of wisdom was the highest ideal for the Jewish mind, as well as for much of the ancient world, exemplified in the great philosophers, like Plato and Socrates.  Wise people were venerated.  Their teachings were soaked up.  Their ideas for living well were followed by millions.  

How very different from our own time.  As a society, we tend to prioritise celebrity, entertainment, novelty and fashion over the pursuit of wisdom.  The word ‘philosophy’ is a Greek word meaning, simply, ‘the love of wisdom’ – and true wisdom takes years to accumulate.  

But we shovel off our wisest and more experienced politicians to the House of Lords, and give the management of our country to the new kids on the block.  We require our priests to retire at the age of 70.  We have little interest in what the elderly have to teach the young – but instead we tease and belittle them for not being able to operate the remote control, or a mobile phone.  

Now I realise, given the average age of today’s congregation, that I am undoubtedly preaching to the choir here!  You are all very wise, aren’t you? Given the amount of grey hair, you certainly should be!  But here’s the thing…

Despite the accumulation of years, and of grey hairs, some of us never do manage to accumulate wisdom along the way.  We can be too easily blinded by the very same things that blind the rest of society.  Celebrity, novelty, entertainment and fashion, the pursuit of short-lived pleasure, the attraction of wine and food and travel, these and many other things society offer us can so easily distract us from the pursuit of real wisdom.

Later in the book of Proverbs, in chapter 9, Solomon says this:  “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”.  The word ‘fear’ in that translation means something like ‘reverence’ and ‘respect’.  It’s part of the tradition, that Jesus repeated, of putting our love, reverence and respect for God at the heart of our lives.  In the words of the Hebrew Shema:  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might and with all your strength.  This, as Jesus said, is the First Commandment.  This is where our focus should be, if we are ever to aspire to be those called wise.

For it only when we bend our desires towards the things of God, and towards actively loving and seeking God, that all the other distractions of life begin to fade away.  When we put God first, we suddenly find that we become less concerned about missing an episode of Coronation Street.  Time is created, by our willingness to let go of earthly pleasures – time for thinking, for reading the wisdom of others, for studying the scriptures, and for growing in wisdom. And that is a goal worth pursuing for, in Solomon’s words: “Happy are those who find wisdom, and those who get understanding, for her income is better than silver, and her revenue is better than gold.  Amen.