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Too Much Wisdom

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.