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Rollins Chapel
Dartmouth College
October 18, 2007
Rev. Dr. Richard R. Crocker, College Chaplain
Scripture: Proverbs 1:20-33
Jeffrey Haidt is a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. I am
using his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, in my first year writing
course. It begins this way:
"What should I do, how should I live, and whom should I become? Many of us
ask such questions, and, modern life being what it is, we don’t have to go far
to find answers. Wisdom is now so cheap and abundant that it floods over us
from calendar pages, tea bags, bottle caps, and mass e-mail messages forwarded
from well-meaning friends. We are in a way residents of Jorge Luis Borges’s
Library of Babel – an infinite library whose books contain every
possible string of letters and, therefore, somewhere an explanation of why the
library exists and how to use it. But Borges’s librarians suspect that they
will never find that book amid the miles of nonsense."[1]
Yes. Maybe you identify. There are so many philosophers, gurus, motivational
speakers, preachers, imams, books, holy books, cute sayings, and so many ways
to receive these messages that we might well want to give up on the whole
enterprise. If your email inbox is like mine, even with the spam filters, you
are overrun with messages, many of which attach documents that the sender
apparently thought important enough to share – most of which we can not
possibly bother to read. And don’t you hate the messages from your “friends”
that implore or threaten you to send this life-changing anecdote on to ten more
of your friends, or else the fate of the world will be threatened?
So why have you come here, to yet another place, a worship service where the
theme is wisdom? I mean, most people are content getting the wisdom they need
from bumper stickers, or from the lyrics of popular music. Why have you come
here?
The answer, I imagine, is that you believe that the Christian tradition is a
place of reliable wisdom, reliable teaching, anchored in the history and
experience of many generations who have believed and testified that the
teachings of scripture are wisdom, and the teachings of Jesus are wisdom, and
that Jesus is wisdom itself. This is what the church has proclaimed for 2000
years. But, of course, it is not alone. There are other religions, other
philosophies that have their own histories and their own adherents. And though
there is sometimes overlap in what they say, they do not all say the same
thing. So your coming here is an act of faith, isn’t it, as well as an act of
hope?
The book of Proverbs describes the situation well, even though the words in
it were written at least 2500 years ago. Proverbs is a book of wisdom, part of
the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. Its explicit purpose is to teach
people how to behave in a wise way – sort of like Poor Richard’s almanac. Yet
the situation it describes is eerily contemporary. It portrays wisdom as a
woman (wisdom is often portrayed in scripture as a woman) – a woman who stands
in the city streets, at the busiest corner, and shouts out: “How long, O simple
ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their
scoffing and fools hate knowledge?”
I think that is a rhetorical question, but if an answer is expected, I think
we can say: “a very long time.” Wisdom warns against calamity. She says that
calamity comes because people spurn wisdom – because people spurn the fear of
the Lord, hate knowledge, spurn reproof, and insist upon their own way. They
will not learn.
The trouble is, of course, that we have too much wisdom and too many
warnings. We have people warning us about climate change, about smoking and
alcohol and trans fats and cholesterol and DDT and eating meat and driving cars
and using oil heat and HIV and sugary foods and divorce and abortion and
homosexuality and capitalism and government spending and our negligence of
Darfur and corruption in government and torture and the erosion of family
values and the danger of wealth and the danger of poverty and the danger of
brushing our teeth in the wrong way. You get my point.
The passage brings to mind the presidential candidate, Mr. Haynes, who has
been standing on the corner here in Hanover promoting his idiosyncratic
presidential campaign. He is frustrated that we do not heed his warnings. But
it also brings to mind my frequent experiences in New York with street
preachers – or even worse, subway preachers. There was an article in the
Dartmouth at the beginning of term deploring these preachers who very loudly
and with great conviction condemn and threaten people who do not accept their
particular gospel. I understand. I am especially sensitive to these charges,
since I am of course a preacher myself, but I cringe when these preachers, who
seem to have me especially in mind, follow me around with their warnings and
condemnations. I have the feeling that the Jesus they know and preach, and the
jesus I know and preach, are very different.
It is so easy to dismiss those who alarm us as fools, alarmists, weirdoes.
Such was the case with Al Gore and his climate warning crusade; remember that
he was reviled as “Ozone Man” in 1992, before his Nobel prize. What are we to
do? Winston Churchill warned the complacent people of Britain about the dangers
of Nazi Germany – and he was right. George Bush warned us about the weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq – and he was wrong. So much wisdom is offered. So much
of it useless or wrong. So little of it really helpful. So little of it
trustworthy. So little of it heeded.
So what are we to do, we who seek wisdom? First, I would say – take it from
people we trust. The people who first teach us what wisdom is are our families.
Often of course the things they teach us are sometimes wrong – but more often
they are right. The people who care about us most have the greatest motive for
sharing with us what they think is truly important. So probably we are here in
this chapel today because faith was taught to us. And as much as we may have to
change our faith and search and revise and test belief on our own, we still are
part of a tradition that tells us what is important. And, of course, if you are
a Christian, you do not seek wisdom chiefly in a book, but in a person – the
person of Jesus who, like the woman shouting in the street, was rejected by the
wise, but who became, for us, the wisdom of God. We may well make fun of people
who naively ask: "What would Jesus do?” in every situation. But there is for us
no more profound question, no truer way of deciding what is wise and good and
true. If we asked that question, and listened carefully for the answer, this
world would be different, wouldn’t it? There would be more sharing, less greed;
more gentleness, less brutality; more hope, less despair; more sacrifice, less
quest for success; more understanding, less condemnation; more emphasis on our
own faults, less emphasis on the faults of others; more love of God, less
fighting about God. It makes a difference where we look for wisdom. I am glad
that you are looking for it here.
[1] Jonathan Haidt,
The Happiness Hypothesis, New York: Basic Books, 2006. p. ix.
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