So, no, I’m not going to keep you in suspense. You’ve been laying odds on how long it would take me to talk about my new granddaughter in a sermon. Whoever had first Sunday back, first words spoken—you’re the winner, don’t you know?! Yes, Finley Caroline Vickrey has arrived and given me a privilege I didn’t know how much I wanted. Kim and I have now joined the long list of insufferable grandparents around here, and we make no apologies for our obsession.
She’s doing fine. Her parents are doing fine. And her grandparents are fine-tuning their lives to make room for her every little new thing we can share. But one thing I remembered from being a father came back to me as a grandfather last week: a baby cries for various reasons, and your job is to figure out which cry is for what. You have your basic fussy cry, which is the hardest one, because you have to figure out whether to go pick her up and soothe her or let her cry it out herself. You have your hunger cry, which generally requires a mother rather than a father. And then there’s the dirty diaper cry, which isn’t hard to figure because you just follow your nose.
The writer of Proverbs 8 says that wisdom cries out to all that live, and those who are wise heed her call and act accordingly. To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. O simple ones, learn prudence; acquire intelligence, you who lack it.
In the Bible’s wisdom literature—books like Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and others—we have a kind of bottom-up approach of God trying to get our attention. In the Law and the Prophets we have more of a top-down thing: the word comes from on high. Moses goes up to the mountain to get the word from God and brings it down. The prophets deliver the word God drops into their mouths. But the wisdom literature says that God gives us the old high/low approach at the same time. If we didn’t get it from one direction, maybe we’ll get it from another. And so wisdom is joined to word, and the two call out to us to know what is right and to do it.
Wisdom wanders about at our ankles and nips at our heels. We can’t go anywhere without hearing her cries. Listen again to the start of Proverbs 8: Does not wisdom call, does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out. …
She cries out. She cries out to all who live. But will we hear her, and will we heed her?
My mind has been swimming all week with one thing after another that tells me we are not heeding wisdom’s call. Lady Wisdom hates drama and loves quiet prosperity. She prefers prevention to cleaning up messes.
If any number of people working along the command lines of the BP deepwater oil well in the Gulf of Mexico had heeded the cry of wisdom, nature would not be suffering this disaster. Do you know what the word disaster means? It comes from the Latin root astro, meaning “star,” and the prefix dis-, which is a negative. So the concept of a disaster comes from words that mean “ill-starred.” It goes back to ancient idea of fate being tied up with the courses of the stars. But to quote Shakespeare completely out of context, The fault is not in the stars, but in ourselves.
And yet when disasters like the Gulf oil blowout happen, everybody acts as if no one is to blame, that things just happen, as if it couldn’t have been prevented. Or else they blame the government for not having enough oversight. And then the pendulum swings, and we get too much regulation in response, because we certainly don’t want our elected officials to be blamed.
Haven’t we just been through this very thing with the financial crisis? We have an amazing way of selectively blocking out any possible bad news or consequences. We think we can keep making sub-prime mortgage loans and selling the bad debt off by bundling the risk, because after all real estate values are going to go up forever, since they’ve been going up for a long time, and that’s good enough for us to gamble away America’s financial security. And then when we wake up from our stupor, we realize there were these screaming voices who were trying to tell us to watch out, to be careful, not to count on the idea of “all things being equal” because all things are never equal. There’s always a fly in the ointment. There’s always Greece going bankrupt, and the Euro losing strength, and the … and the … and the … . There’s always something. But we don’t count on that something because we would rather believe that everything is going to be fine as we add more and more risk in order to get richer faster.
Listen, prudence is not the name of a bad date. She’s not a wet blanket who doesn’t know a good time when she sees it. She’s the voice of wisdom that says that the one thing you can count on is something going wrong with your perfect plans. She wants you to prepare for that first so that you will withstand disaster when it comes.
For instance, if you are in debt, you are asking for trouble. Get out of it as fast as possible, and stop being a slave to lenders. Curb your lifestyle and pay off your debt. Begin today. As long as you owe money on credit cards, you are losing ground, and the slightest movement in the stars will spell disaster for you.
Once you’re out of debt, start saving. Make your first goal to have three to six months of your living expenses. Put the money in one of Al Gore’s lock boxes so you won’t touch it for some new this or that you think you’ve just got to have in order to be … what? Someone who can appear to others to be able to afford some new this or that? That kind of living will send you to the poorhouse and embarrass you all the more in the eyes of others. Building your financial life prudently is boring and unromantic, but it protects you against the unexpected things that will come. And by the way, let me tell you one more time— those unexpected things that come are only unexpected to the imprudent and unprepared.
Wisdom calls out to all who live. Get your house in order. Delay gratification now for security later. And that leads to another thing wisdom calls out to us: you don’t get something for nothing. You have to sacrifice for what you really want, because it doesn’t come about magically.
Look, this is Memorial Day weekend. We remember those who gave the last full measure of their lives for the sake of our country’s freedom and for all who love freedom. Those who lost their lives in World War II well illustrate this truth. But just because the moral fault lines seemed less clear in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, that doesn’t mean we should honor those fallen soldiers any less. They did their duty, yes. But they gave themselves for the sake of something more than themselves. They sacrificed their lives, and they earned the right tell us that life without sacrifice is no life at all.
At the end of the remarkable Steven Spielberg movie Saving Private Ryan, the aged Ryan kneels by the grave of Sgt. John H. Miller. He remembers Miller’s final words to him before he died on a bridge in the midst of battle. Earn this, Miller tells the young private. Earn it. Ryan tells Miller that he has remembered those words to him every day of his life and tried to be worthy of them. And when his wife comes to stand with him, he says to her: Tell me I’ve lived a good life. Tell me I am a good man.
That’s the thing, you see. That’s what made that generation great. They didn’t let the dead die in vain. They honored their sacrifices by living worthy lives.
And we must do the same. Whatever you or I may think of the politics of these wars, we are debtors to those fight them under our flag. I feel pangs of guilt every time I realize that I don’t wake up every morning in prayer for those who are in the line of fire. And then it makes me sad, and sometimes it makes me mad, to think of how we obsess over the economy and our rights and who has the upper hand in what party while we have delegated our sacrifices to a few willing and worthy men and women. How should we live here while they are there? What sacrifices should we make as a nation so that these conflicts are felt by all of us?
This too is wisdom’s cry to all who live. If something matters enough that some will die for us, we must somehow earn their sacrifices. And not just in the matter of war. Even in matters such as our public life and our church life.
We want public services without paying for them. We want our taxes kept low and our civic life strong. We can’t have it both ways. And if we try, all we do is mount up debt for our children to pay, which leaves them saddled with burdens because we wanted benefits without cost. And here in Texas there is even talk that we should pay for government shortfalls by expanding our state’s gambling interests to include casinos. We have a social contract with our neighbors that says we pay for what we agree is important. And the we is all of us.
Gambling may be benign entertainment to some who can afford it. But that’s not the whole story. The state immediately seizes the opportunity to market the games, to entice more participation in get-rich-quick schemes that disproportionately hurt those who can’t afford to be hurt by participating. The social consequences that result for families through gambling addiction and financial hardship, if not catastrophic, are terrible. For the state to nurture this is unconscionable.
The state is a moral tutor, whether we like it or not. We should want Texans to go to school and work hard to achieve, to get jobs and perform them well, and then to make decisions in the best interests of their family and neighbors. Gambling undermines the work ethic and the moral responsibility that ties families and communities together. Advocating irresponsible behavior in some in order that the rest of us don’t have to pay for what we all think is necessary ignores the cry of wisdom to all who live.
And the same is true here in the church. We continue to do more and more with less and less. Many people in this and in every church are quite content to see the church as God’s gift that costs them nothing. But a few faithful and grateful givers know the joy of heeding wisdom’s cry. They cannot not imagine enjoying the benefits of God’s grace here without doing their share and more. And they aren’t angry with those of you who aren’t; they are sad for you. They want you to know and memorialize all those who have sacrificed before us to give us this church. And they want you to join them in earning that by becoming worthy of calling ourselves Wilshire in this generation.
We could go on and on, but all God is asking is that we listen and act. Wisdom cries out to you and me. Let’s put our lives in order. Let’s put our lives on the line. Let’s earn in our day the sacrifices that have been made for us by those whom we memorialize here.
