Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 20, 2009

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot about life and death lately. Burying your faith, or another loved one, as I have just done, will do that to you. That’s why I included as one of the reading in this service that passage from the Wisdom of Solomon that Hans just read even though it isn’t in Protestant Bibles. In the Protestant tradition the Wisdom of Solomon is considered “apocryphal.” That means that it’s not in the Bible proper but is part of a sort of secondary scripture. It’s OK to read but it doesn’t quite rise to the level of the actual books of the Bible. It is Hebrew literature like the books of the Old Testament except that it was written in Greek not Hebrew, which is why the Protestant tradition doesn’t include it in its Bible. It is part of the Bible in the Catholic tradition. It raises for me in a powerful way the question of why, given the fact that we all die, there is any reason to be virtuous, to live what our faith tradition considers a good, moral life.

In that passage people identified as “the ungodly” say to themselves “Short and sorrowful is our life.” It ends in death, they say, and there is no getting around that fact. No one comes back from the land of the dead. So, the ungodly reason, let’s live it up. Let’s enjoy the good things of life. The passage doesn’t actually say “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” but it says pretty much the same thing. But the ungodly people of the passage don’t leave it at that. They lay plans to oppress the righteous and the poor. They say let us live by the rule might makes right. In particular they plan to do away with someone identified only as “the righteous man,” who, they say, “opposes our actions” and accuses us of sin. They feel that this righteous man brings judgment on them and their way of living. So they plan to torture and kill him. Our text says that these ungodly ones were blinded by their wickedness and did not understand God and God’s purposes, but it doesn’t say much more about why they are wrong.

So we ask: The passage says the ungodly are wrong, but are they? They say that the reality of death for all of us renders life essentially meaningless. We all die, whether we live for ourselves and oppress others or not, so why not live for ourselves, for our own pleasures? Why not crush those who stand in our way? Why not kill those who are a reproach to us as we live our selfish, self-centered lives? These are serious questions. At least, they’ve seemed serious to me recently. I’ve reached that time of life when death starts to become more of a reality than it was in my youth. I remember a time in my life when I didn’t know anyone who had died. Now, the death of people who have been close to me in one way or another is a common fact of my life. Most recently, of course, my father died. He was in some significant ways the most important person in my life, and now he’s gone. He’s not coming back. The same thing happens to all of us, sooner or later. It’s a very real question for me these days whether death doesn’t render everything else meaningless, as the ungodly ones in our passage from the Wisdom of Solomon claim.

Of course, in my more lucid moments, I agree with the author of the Wisdom of Solomon—who by the way isn’t Solomon—that the argument he puts in the mouths of the ungodly are specious, are false. Yet how are we to understand their falsity? What is it about them that is false? My study Bible suggests that the point of this passage is that they are wrong because they do not take into account life after death. Is that what their error really is? Well, perhaps. We certainly hope for life after death, and we hope that whatever little bit of righteousness we have managed to realize in this life will be rewarded there. We hope that, but we don’t know that. So I want to ask: Is there any other way in which the arguments of Wisdom’s ungodly ones are false? I think that there is, and that way in which they are false speaks more powerfully to me than does an appeal to an afterlife. I think that we see that answer, at least in general outline, in our other reading, the one from the Letter of James.

That reading first raises basically the same issues as does the reading from Wisdom. It says that envy and selfishness do not come from God but rather are “devilish.” It concludes by urging us to “draw near to God,” because when we do God will draw near to us. Therein lies, I think, the real answer to the earthly wisdom that says that because life always ends in death we might as well do whatever we want and live only for ourselves. The reward for virtue, the reward for living a decent, loving, compassionate life, is that that life becomes life with God. Maybe it becomes life with God after this life. We hope so. What we can know, however, that the life of virtue becomes life with God here and now, in this life. And we can know that having God come near to us in this life is a reward beyond measure.

We can know that because we have experienced it. At least, some of us have experienced it; and people of faith across faith traditions have experienced it for as long as we have records of people’s spiritual experiences. The presence of God in our lives brings, and only the presence of God in our lives can bring, rewards beyond measure. God brings us the fruits of the Spirit. Nothing earthly can do that. God’s presence in our lives brings us hope, hope in this life and beyond this life. God’s presence in our lives brings peace, a peace that passes all human understanding, a peace that is so much more than the absence of violence, a peace deep in our hearts, deep in our souls. The presence of God in our lives gives us courage, courage to do what we must do in life, courage to face the end of our lives without fear of what may lie beyond. God the ultimate reality beyond life and death is a very present reality we can cling to, we can cry with, we can scream at when it all just seems too much. God is that ultimate reality in our lives that is always there. God is not fickle, like so many of us humans are. God does not respond with embarrassed silence or turn away when we share an uncomfortable truth the way so many humans do. God may judge our sin, but God never rejects us as unworthy or undesirable as so many humans do.

God is the reward for the virtuous life. Living a virtuous life doesn’t bring God to us. God is always with everyone, virtuous or not. Rather, living a virtuous life, living the life we know God wants us to live, opens us to God’s presence. That kind of living creates the possibility of our becoming aware of God’s presence. Living a virtuous life brings the reward of our awareness of the reality of God’s presence in our lives. That’s why Wisdom’s godless are wrong. Their cynicism, their brutality, their exclusive, narrow focus on themselves, shuts them off from the presence of God. It shuts them off from the greatest pleasures and the greatest satisfaction we humans can experience in this life, the pleasures and the satisfaction of God’s presence alive in our lives. Opening ourselves to God by living the way we know God wants us to live brings those pleasures and that satisfaction alive in our lives. That’s the reward of virtue, and there is none greater. Amen.