Wisdom–Proverbs 9: 1-6

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

St. Stephen Presbyterian Church

Fort Worth, TX

Proverbs 9: 1-6

August 19, 2012

 The book of Proverbs depicts Wisdom as a respectable woman, who prepares a beautiful table and invites you to feast with her. In contrast is “the foolish woman,” who “sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in the high place of the city, to call passers-by who go their way: ‘Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”

The contrast is simple. It makes sense. Wisdom invites you. Foolishness tempts you.

Wisdom happens in public. Foolishness happens in secret.

Wisdom is shared, at a table with others, a table to which you are invited. Foolishness is stolen. It is hoarded to oneself.

The contrasts are clear and make sense. Wisdom is a choice. It isn’t forced on you. It invites you. You can choose it or not. It requires you to think carefully, to make decisions.

Foolishness is also a choice, but it’s a stacked choice, because it plays on one’s desires, one’s secret, hidden motives, the things none of us want seen in public. It tells us that it’s okay to fulfill those shameful  desires;  no one will see it, anyway!

And all these things seem to be true, except when they are not. For instance, these days people use social media to say and do things in public that once we thought best to keep secret. We’ve become less and less sensitive to shame. There was an article recently in the New York Times about people who are fired, or even simply angry at their bosses, going off on them on Facebook or Twitter or in their personal blogs. It looked like a good idea at the time; maybe it fulfilled somebody’s justified sense of righteous indignation. But these rants are often impulse decisions, made on the spur of the moment because you’re angry, and easily facilitated by a medium that lets you move from idea to action in a nanosecond. A few unwise words, and bam! You’ve informed the whole world of an opinion that, in retrospect, you may have been better off keeping to yourself or to small circle of friends.

People often justify themselves in doing this. Some folks, recently, have been fired and then done major “whistle blower” articles about the things their old company did wrong. Problem is, they’re also revealing their own sins and mistakes. A London newspaper parodied these types of articles at the beginning of the year with an article purportedly written by Darth Vader called “Why I left the Empire.”

Wise? Apparently not. These folks discover often that they can’t get a job after these social media explosions. But that’s okay, some believe: I had a right to spout off like that.

I had a right. Lady Foolishness, sitteth in the door of her house, in a seat in the high place of the city, calling out to passers-by, saying, “You have a right! By heaven, you have a right!” 

On the other hand, there’s Lady Wisdom, who has prepared her beautiful house, prepared a wonderful meal, meat and bread and wine, and prepared a beautiful table, and simply invites you in to share it with her. All you have to do is say yes.

Except that doesn’t seem to be true either!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about wisdom in a letter to his fellow conspirators in the plot to kill Hitler. “In the fullness of the concrete situation and the possibilities which it offers, the wise man at the same recognizes the impassable limits that are set to all actions by the permanent laws of human social life; and in this knowledge the wise person acts well and the good person wisely. Nonetheless, it is true that all historically important action necessarily oversteps the limits of these laws.” [1]

Essentially, Bonhoeffer is saying, sometimes Wisdom paints you into a corner. It’s neither an invitation nor a choice: it’s the only option available. 

That’s what he believed had happened to him and his co-conspirators. They’d been painted into a corner. They were loyal German patriots, and many of them faithful Christians, who’d seen the disasters and atrocities of the Nazi regime and wanted to stop them. They’d tried every reasonable option: negotiating, working through the church, working through the legal system, working through the political process. All had failed. They were left with the one choice that struck them all as in violation of both human law and God’s law: they would have to assassinate Hitler.

Nothing could strike them as more unwise, or fill them with more fear. Plenty of people would be glad to tell them they were fools to want to do it. In fact, several governments had told them exactly that: We won’t support you, because you’ll fail. And because we’d be in violation of international law.

If this is wise, Bonhoeffer is saying, Wisdom hasn’t invited us to this decision; she’s dragged us there kicking and screaming.

And that’s often the way it is with the wisest course. We are left with it because every other option is closed. But the problem is that often the wisest choice requires pain. It requires sacrifice. It requires risk. So even if to the rational mind, there appears no other choice, our natural instincts will run against it. It will hurt to do the right thing. There has to be a better way!

Bonhoeffer put a lot of thought into how we discern the wisest course. He addresses it in this letter to his co-conspirators, but also in his book Ethics. Remember how Wisdom calls out, “Whoso is simple?” Bonhoeffer reflects on that. Wisdom and simplicity, he says, go hand in hand. What is simplicity? He says it is single-mindedness. It is focusing on the Person and will of God to the exclusion of everything else. That’s hard to discern sometimes. He contrasts it to “Double-mindedness,” [2]which could be said to be wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.

I was watching “The Lord of the Rings” again recently. The most tragic figure in the story is poor Frodo, the Ring-bearer. He is charged with carrying the uber-powerful Ring of Power into Mordor, the Land of the Enemy, because only there can it be destroyed. The problem is that the Ring has the power of taking over the soul of the one who bears it, and of tempting anyone else around him to take it for himself, because it has such great power. Frodo is constantly struggling with the Ring for control, and often it tempts him so badly. “I don’t have to destroy it,” he is often tempted to think. “I can use this powerful ring for good.”

What saves him is his friend and servant, the ever-faithful Sam Gamgee. Sam is simple. He sees right and wrong. He knows there is only one thing to be done with the Ring: it must be destroyed. And when Frodo is tempted to give up, or worse, to keep the Ring for himself, it is Sam whose simplicity and courage and love and patience and focus save Frodo—and in the process, all of Middle-Earth.

That’s what Bonhoeffer means by simplicity: an ability not to let the temptations and fears and false hopes of the world distract you from what’s important. For us as Christians, that is God.

Now of course, the problem is that discerning the will of God, even if that’s all you’re focused on, isn’t that easy anyway! Bonhoeffer suggests a few ways that we can tell we’re on God’s path, not on some self-made side-road.

Sympathy: by that Bonhoeffer means that you are acting not for your own sake or your own gain, but for the sake of The Other. “The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own suffering, but by the sufferings of others, for whose sake Christ suffered.” [3]

The temptation to act, simply because I have “a right” to do something, is put in its place by this standard. It may well be that your right being violated is a symptom of others’ rights being violated. But simply acting to assert yourself, without carefully considering the suffering of others, for whom Christ died, and how your own actions might cause or relieve suffering, is not Christian, and it isn’t wise.

 

That’s a careful line. One reason that Bonhoeffer and his friends were so troubled by their decision to kill Hitler was that they were hurting someone for the sake of saving someone else. That seems pretty incredible, when you think its kill Hitler, or the world suffers. It looks like an easy decision. But it isn’t, because if you’re really taking into consideration the suffering of others, you have to think of everyone’s suffering, both your allies and your enemies—all of whom are people for whom Christ died. That’s why it’s important, so often, when we believe we know what’s right, and we’re ready to act in spite of what our opponents’ say, we need to make sure we’ve carefully considered their position, too, and taken into consideration their points of view. Are we going to cause them suffering?

Another pointer to the wisest decision: Reality. “In the fullness of the concrete situation and the possibilities which it offers, the wise man at the same recognizes the impassable limits that are set to all actions by the permanent laws of human social life,” Bonhoeffer says. What are the real problems and the real limits that are set upon us? What is that we can and can’t do?

Part of that process is the recognition that we ourselves may make a sacrifice for the sake of the larger good. We’ll lose something that we want or need. But it has to be done. We’ve looked at the reality of the situation as honestly as we can, as ethically as we can, and there seems no other choice.

Closely tied to that, though, is faith. You step out in a difficult choice, trying to make the wisest choice, with the best information and knowledge you have, and you could still be wrong. It’s important to understand the faith that Bonhoeffer is calling us to have. It’s not “pie in the sky,” “if we’ve prayed and we love Jesus it’ll turn out right” faith. What Bonhoeffer and his friends believed was that there was a good chance they were doing the wrong thing—the thing most against God’s law. It was just that they couldn’t see any other path. They also weren’t sure what the consequences would be. Would assassinating Hitler simply result in chaos, or worse, the rise of his underlings? There was no telling. They just didn’t see any other choice.

So they threw themselves on the mercy of God.

In writing to his co-conspirators, Bonhoeffer tells them to trust, not their own wisdom and insight and ability to do the right thing, but God’s redemptive power and purpose.  “I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. … I believe that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account… I believe that God is no timeless fate, but that he waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible actions.” [4]

Notice there’s nothing triumphant here. There’s no “Killing Hitler is the Will of God” or “The right and just thing to do.” On the contrary. Once again, it is only the only course of action that he and his co-conspirators, in their limited human way, can see. It’s a way, in their estimation, that may actually violate the will of God. They feel painted into a corner by reality. So they throw themselves on the mercy of God, and trust in God’s redemptive power and purpose.

This was how, Bonhoeffer said, we do our best to make a wise decision.

And they were wrong.

Well, depends on how you look at it. If you mean that the best, the wisest decision will always end up in success, Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators were way wrong. They wound up not killing Hitler, getting arrested, put in prison, and executed.

But that was a calculated risk. It was a risk they knew going in. And when the plan failed, it was Bonhoeffer’s trust in the redemptive will of God that helped sustain him during the dark months of prison and interrogation, and the final days of his life, when one of his fellow prisoners, Payne Best, spoke in awe of Bonhoeffer’s calm before his execution. Bonhoeffer pulled him aside. “This is the end,” he said, “for me, the beginning of life.”[5]

That was the wise, simple faith of a man who was single-mindedly focused on the most important thing of all: the Kingdom of God.

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