Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 14, 2007
Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
We live, we are told, in the "information age." We're all connected to "the information superhighway." Most of think that we can never have too much information about anything. We are urged at every turn to get as much information as we can about any matter whatsoever before we make any decision whatsoever. We are told, for example, to be well informed patients, getting as much information as we can about our medical condition before we make a treatment decision. That's good advice, although I imagine some of us take it so far that it drives our doctors nuts. I recently say a cartoon in a doctors office that showed a patient saying to his doctor "I've diagnosed myself on the Internet. I'm just here for a second opinion." We're told that we're fools if we buy a new car without reading up on it in Consumer Reports first, never mind that what Consumer Reports likes or dislikes about a car may have nothing to do with what we need or like or dislike in a car. I've even heard of people running background checks on potential dating or life partners just in case there's something about the person they've missed. And maybe in this day and age gathering all that information is a good and necessary thing. I certainly don't want to discourage any of you from gathering as much information as you want or think you need before making any decision you need to make.
Not only do we gather a lot of information these days, we have a lot of knowledge. Information is knowing facts pretty much for the sake of knowing facts or knowing facts just to help us make some practical, more or less superficial decision. Knowledge goes a bit deeper than mere information. Knowledge is knowing how to do something. It is having information that leads to a somewhat deeper understanding of the way the world works, the way people behave, how to get things done. I am continually amazed at how much knowledge, and how many different kinds of knowledge, we have in this growing but still small congregation. We have knowledge acquired through formal education and knowledge acquired through life and work experience. We have academic knowledge and practical knowledge. We have knowledge acquired through the work of the mind and through the work of the hands. We have knowledge technical, commercial, domestic, medical, legal, financial, administrative, pastoral, agricultural, and mechanical. And I'm sure we have lots of other kinds of knowledge that I haven't mentioned. All of these kinds of knowledge are honorable, useful, and valuable, none of them more or less so than any other of them.
We are indeed obsessed with information, with the accumulation of facts, or what we take to be facts. We have lots of knowledge, facts that help us in some deeper way. But it is important to realize that when we have all information and all knowledge something is still missing. What is still missing is wisdom. Wisdom is something more than information certainly, and it is something more than knowledge. Knowledge is deeper than information, but wisdom is deeper than knowledge. Wisdom is the ability to judge properly, to know what is true and what is right. It is possessing discernment. It is right judgment. It is the real depth dimension to our understanding. Information and knowledge can be, and indeed often are, superficial. I may know about the latest teen music sensation--keep in mind, this is a hypothetical example--and how to download her latest hit into my ipod (if I had an ipod). That would be information and knowledge. I, at least, would never call it wisdom. I may know much more complicated, valuable, and useful things than that. I, for example, know how to try personal injury lawsuits. I've tried lots of them, and I think I can say that I've tried them competently, sometimes even quite well. I know how to do it, but I would never call that knowledge wisdom. It's too superficial. It doesn't get to the depth dimension of life, to the level of right living or the level of meaning. That's the level of wisdom, the level where the most important questions are asked and the most important answers given.
If wisdom is deeper than knowledge, if wisdom indeed lies, as I contend that it does, at the deepest levels of human understanding, then the question immediately arises of how we get to that deep level. Most of the time we live on the surface of life, or at least I know I do. I'm reminded of how superficial my life is every time I pick up a book by one of history's great thinkers, on of the great philosophers or theologians. They remind me that most of the time I use maybe 10% of my mental capacity--and that's on a good day. The surface of life, where I spend so much of my time, will never yield wisdom. Knowledge yes, but never wisdom. So how do we, how do I, dig beneath the surface to where wisdom is, and how do we know we've gotten to wisdom when we get there?
The answer, or at least the beginning of an answer, lies in the Psalm we heard this morning. At verse 10 that Psalm says: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Now, it may be clear that that line has something to do with our question of how we get to wisdom, but just what it has to do with that question probably requires a good deal of unpacking. So as I've said from this pulpit before, let's get unpacking.
The first thing about this verse that is probably obscure at best and misleading at worse is the phrase "the fear of the Lord." It's a very common phrase in the Hebrew Bible. Let me say first of all that the term "the Lord" does not mean Jesus. It means Yahweh, the most common name for God in the Hebrew Bible, though by no means the only one. Next, the word "fear" doesn't mean fear. "Fear of the Lord" doesn't mean the state of being afraid of God. Psalm 111 actually tells us what it means. The phrase is shorthand for all the other things the Psalm says about how we are to relate to God. The Psalm says: Praise the Lord. Give thanks to the Lord. Study the works of the Lord. Acknowledge the honor and majesty of God's works and God's righteousness. Remember that God is gracious and merciful, that God provides food--I understand that as spiritual food--to those who relate to God in this way. Remember that God is ever faithful and just and upright, that God redeems God's people and that God's name is holy and awesome. Only after our Psalm has said all of these things does it say: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." All of these things are the fear of the Lord.
Basically then, the fear of the Lord is the life of faith. It is life with God. I seems to me that it basically comes down to remembering that God is God and we are not. God is the One to whom we owe our lives, our very being. God is the One Whose wisdom and power brings worlds into existence and Who relates to those worlds with mercy and grace. It comes down to remembering that when we study anything at all we are ultimately studying the great deeds and mighty works of God. All of that is what Psalm 111 means by the fear of the Lord.
Which is all very well and good, but what does it have to do with wisdom? How is it the beginning of wisdom as Psalm 111 assures us it is? Well, recall that I said that wisdom is the depth dimension of human understanding. God, on the other hand, is the depth dimension of all that is. Wisdom, then, lies with and comes from God. The fear of God, that is, the life of faith, connects us with God. In connecting us with God the life of faith connects us with the source of wisdom. It is the only thing that does. It is the only thing that can.
OK. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Put in more modern language the life of faith connects us with God the source of all wisdom. But we still have to ask: So what? Why should we care? What difference does it make? Let me suggest that it makes a great deal of difference indeed. Let me suggest that it is absolutely essential that knowledge be connected with wisdom. Let me suggest in fact that knowledge unconnected with wisdom is the most destructive force the world has ever seen. Lest you thank that an overstatement let me revert to my earlier persona of historian and remind you of some facts of the history of the late unlamented 20th century that illustrate my point extremely well.
Tsarist Russia, once a major area of study of mine, was hardly a model of justice and mercy; but its authoritarianism was limited in part by the limits of 19th century technology and in part by its Christian morality. Compromised Christian morality to be sure, compromised but never completely abandoned. Fast forward to the 1930s. Technological knowledge has advanced by leaps and bounds, and the now Communist regime is officially and aggressively atheistic. The result? Twenty to forty million dead before the beginning of World War II and a mechanism of terror and repression the likes of which the world had never seen before and has not seen since.
Change the scene to Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. A Christian nation has slipped its moorings and has abandoned its Christian morality in favor of a demonic ideology of hatred and extermination. It is still, however, the most technologically advanced nation on earth. The result? Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, and so many others, a parade of horrors so vast the mind can hardly comprehend it. There simply is no doubt that great human knowledge divorced from wisdom leads to horrors on an immense scale. It does it every time. It has done it in our own history. Not on the scale of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany perhaps, but it has done it. It still does.
Friends, morality is grounded in wisdom; and the only ground of wisdom is God. God is the only source of morality, the only source of values. In my own personal history the realization of that truth, which I came to during my time in officially atheist Soviet Russia in the 1970s, was an important milestone on my journey back to faith. It is what Psalm 111 means when it says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Wisdom isn't about knowledge, it's about what is right. It's about discerning the right, the good, and the true; and we can to that only when we live, as Hebrew scripture puts it, in the fear of the Lord, only, that is, when we live in faith with God, the source of all wisdom. The fear of the Lord is indeed the beginning of all wisdom. Let those with ears to hear listen. Amen.