wisdom is better than wealth
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany ● February 2, 2025
Rev. Jeff Wells © 2024
You can view the full worship video recording at:
Scripture Reading: Matthew 5:43-45; Amos 5:21, 23-24 (The Inclusive Bible)
and selected readings from Martin Luther King Jr.
The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.
My father grew up on a farm in Western Wisconsin. He learned from his father the value of working hard – first on the farm and later they built houses together. My grandfather also taught him the wisdom of treating other people fairly and without prejudice, caring for those in need, being of service to others, and holding on to faith in God. My father was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 and married my mother while he was in boot camp in North Carolina. When he was just 20 years old, he shipped off to the Pacific with the 339th Engineer Battalion. And there, his construction skills, willingness to work hard, and leadership qualities got him rapidly promoted to master sergeant. My dad’s faith was important to him, too, so when he came back from the war, he began serving as a lay preacher in Methodist churches in the rural areas and small towns around where my family lived until I was 7 years old. You won’t be surprised to hear that he became a frequent public speaker and held leadership positions in various organizations. My mother, too, instilled in me and my siblings the values of love, compassion, and caring for others. She also was active in civic and social organizations, volunteered at a local hospital, and later in life, became a public advocate for elder concerns. She served on the Governing Board of the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging Groups, did newspaper and TV interviews, and often traveled to the state capital to lobby state legislators. Neither of my parents had much formal education, but they had accumulated and they practiced a lot of practical wisdom.
What is wisdom? How do we acquire it, and how does it help us to lead meaningful, purposeful, and fulfilling lives? Sometimes, the Bible presents Wisdom as a characteristic of God. And in many passages, like the one we just heard from Proverbs, Wisdom is personified as a companion to God, who was with God from the beginning. She is identified with feminine pronouns and portrayed as a female expression of God’s divine wisdom.
That is why the image of Sophia became a representation of this personification. Sophia is a Greek word for wisdom. It is used in early Greek versions of the Bible to translate the Hebrew word Chokmah, which means wisdom acquired under the guidance and inspiration of God. Of course, the reality is a bit more complicated than that, because there are multiple words for wisdom in both Hebrew and Greek. Those words are used to distinguish Divine wisdom from human wisdom or to differentiate abstract, theoretical wisdom from practical wisdom. But for the purpose of this brief message, let’s focus on practical wisdom.
By practical wisdom, I mean developing the ability to make good decisions and exercise sound judgment, in our everyday lives, based on the interplay of our knowledge, experience, and ethical values. I believe acquiring wisdom is a life-long process – a process of deepening our openness to God’s beckoning and inspiration, as God works not only directly in us, but indirectly through other people, as well as animals, trees, music, art, books, and so on. Along with that, gaining wisdom involves learning to see beyond our own limited spheres of experience, to understanding the interconnectedness of all things, and then to practice love, compassion, and mercy toward other living beings and the living systems in nature.
In some passages, the Hebrew Bible implies that all Wisdom comes from God and we need only read the scriptures in order to grasp what is wise according to God’s desires. The Bible is certainly an important source of wisdom for me, especially the teachings and the life of Jesus. However, I am very suspicious of people who say that the Bible is the only source of wisdom. We Methodists assert that we are guided not only by the Bible, but also by tradition, reason, and experience. For me, tradition is not just what is passed down by the Christian church. It is also the tradition of practical wisdom passed down by my parents and others. And we have to use our reason to sort through and decide between varying truth claims of human philosophies, theologies, political and economic systems, and ways of being. Finally, interacting with all of these, our personal and communal experience is a profound teacher through which we can become wiser over time.
We are loved by and we strive to love in return a God who is relational to the core. And God encourages us to live in loving relationships with one another. So, it makes sense that some of our wisdom comes out of our life experiences in interaction with other beings – human and otherwise. Seeking wisdom from various sources and putting it into practice does not mean that we will always get it right or that we can ever claim all truth and all knowledge. In fact, part of wisdom is recognizing and admitting when we falter or fail. It is wise to be humble and recognize our limitations and the incompleteness of our knowledge. Part of wisdom, too, consists of taking into account one’s own location, privilege, and perspective and not assuming that everyone experiences life in the same way.
The Bible, tradition, reason, experience tell me that God is love. And if God is love, and love is inherently not coercive or controlling, then God acts through persuasion and inspiration. So God never imposes or forces Wisdom on us. Yet, God is in intimate relationship with each of us and tries to beckon us every moment to the next best possible decisions and actions. God draws us to “find Wisdom” and “develop discernment,” as Proverbs says. Therefore, we grow in wisdom as we learn to be open and listen carefully to God through many channels and sources of God’s leading. God’s beckoning and inspiration interact with our lived experience of learning, dreaming, trying new things, making mistakes, building relationships, participating in communities, and much more. So, I would say it is very wise and effective to trust God to help us acquire wisdom. Of course, we can choose to ignore or refuse to believe in God’s role in our becoming wise, and even then, we may still learn to live wisely, while pretending it is all our own doing. But I don’t recommend it. I believe that makes our journey more difficult.
I believe that one of the reasons humanity exhibits so much injustice and is now in danger of self-destruction as a species is that we have unwisely created social systems in which wealth and power and privilege are valued much more highly than wisdom, love, compassion, and justice. As the Book of Proverbs tells us, wisdom is better than wealth, more precious than gold or any gemstones. If we want our lives to be truly meaningful and worthwhile, accumulating wealth and privilege for our own benefit is not going to cut it. That is surely why Jesus once told a rich young man to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. Wisdom teaches us to work for the common good by being grounded in self-giving love.
God is not static and unchanging. Nor is wisdom a limited and unchanging set of ancient principles set in stone. We are continually growing and evolving as a species, so what we understand as wisdom grows and evolves too. As our circumstances, our knowledge, and our social organizations change, we co-create new wisdom with God. Just as we say God changes, so wisdom changes too. We need new expressions of wisdom to deal wisely with huge new challenges like the ecological crisis and developments like artificial intelligence.
Indeed, God plays a huge role in our ability to attain and exercise practical wisdom. At the same time, wisdom is infused in and arises out of the fullness of our lived experience. We can say that wisdom is both a source of and a result of learning how to live well as human beings. Preferably, we do that consciously seeking God’s guidance. Just as God is love and Divine Wisdom is grounded in love, so too for us, we show our wisdom by putting our love into practice.