Words Like Swords

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Proverbs 12:13, 18; 13:3, 14-17, 29; 15:1, 28; 18:6, 21; 19:19; 21:23; 29:22: 

It’s said that a normal preacher has one sermon that they give over and over again. A good preacher has two sermons that they over and over. And a great preacher has three sermons that they give over and over. Now I don’t know how absolutely true that is, and I like to that I’m at least a good, or maybe even great preacher, although 80% of preachers think they are above average, which makes you wonder about that other 20%, but I do find that I come back to similar themes over and over again. I don’t always know if that’s because scripture repeats these themes over and over again, or if it’s because I think we need to hear them over and over, or maybe it’s that I need to hear them over and over again. And one of the unspoken confessions of most preachers is that we preach as much to ourselves, or maybe sometimes even more to ourselves, than we do to those who are hearing this message. But today’s message is one of those themes that I keep coming back to and in this case I do think it’s because we need to hear it today maybe more than eve.

I couldn’t find a count as to exactly how many proverbs are actually contained in the book of Proverbs, nor did I take the time to count them myself, although most sources put it between 800 and 900, but there are around 150 proverbs that deal with anger and words and the mouth. Outside of the Proverbs that talk about wisdom or folly, this has to be close to the most of any theme found in Proverbs, of which we only heard a small sampling of them in this morning’s readings, but I hope it was enough to begin to give you a feel for what these proverbs sound like.

Got Wisdom?

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Proverbs 1:1-9:

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this before to anyone here, and so this is probably going to come as a surprise, but I went to Harvard. And let me just say that jokes work a lot better when there are actually people here to laugh. But, there are a lot of really smart people at Harvard, or as they say in Boston, they are wicked smaht, but just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they don’t do stupid things. They could be geniuses and also be as dumb as a pile of bricks, or we might say they don’t have any common sense. I’m sure that most people have had that experience, maybe especially in this community. There are people who have intelligence, and maybe even have lots of knowledge, but they don’t have, in the words of Proverbs, wisdom. And here’s the difference. Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato into a fruit salad. Today we begin a new series that’s going to try and teach us some of that collected wisdom that seeks to help us not only to know and practice wisdom, but by doing so to live lives of righteousness and live in God’s will for our lives and the world, and we will do so by looking at the book of Proverbs.

Proverbs is found in the Hebrew Scriptures, or the Old Testament, is a collection not just of sayings that we normally think of as proverbs, but also other forms of teaching and admonitions. The book is part of a larger collection of texts that are known as wisdom literature. Wisdom literature as a genre is an “umbrella term” as one scholar wrote, “that encompasses humanity’s quest to understand and organize reality, to find answers to basic existential questions, and to pass that information along from one generation to another.” It seeks to provide both instruction for how we are to live our lives, but also exploration or explanation about the way the world works, especially around the problem of suffering. The books of the wisdom literature include the book of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, which is also sometimes known as Quoheleth, as the name Ecclesiastes comes from the Latin name of the book, and then Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, a series of love poems that the rabbis said no one should be allowed to read until they were adults, with the age of 35 sometimes thrown around.

Do You Love Me?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 21:15-19:

New beginnings can be good things. New starts allow us to reset, to initiate a new outlook and perspective on things. To put the past behind us and maybe even pretend, or even act, as if the past didn’t exist. It didn’t happen. The playoffs for the NFL will be starting soon, and lots of teams know now they don’t stand a chance of winning it all, but just a few months ago, they all had the pretensions that they could be the last team standing. Whether that was actually true or not could be debated, but at was at least the idea. The New Year can do the same thing for us. Regardless of what we did or didn’t do in the last year we get a start to do something different. We can start to exercise, or change diet, or save more, or prepare to take that trip we always wanted, or start reading more, or relaxing more, or whatever it might be. I have to say that last year my resolution was to gain thirty pounds, and unfortunately I didn’t make that total, but I haven’t given up yet. But there is something very strong in Christianity about starting over again, of putting things in the rearview mirror and moving forward, and we do that not only in worship but in our faith itself, at least hopefully.

And so today we begin a new series, a short series, entitled Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, and for those who are younger there was a folk group from the 60’s called Peter, Paul and Mary, which you may know for either Puff the Magic Dragon or If I had a Hammer, if you know them at all. And not to date myself too much, while I didn’t see them in the 60’s or 70’s, I did see them in the 80s. But, the important part here is that that’s not whom we are talking about. And as I was thinking about this series last spring, I didn’t really think about Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene as being about new beginnings, but in many, many ways they are. And so we’re not going to really talk about who they are or what they did and for why they are famous, except for Mary Magdalene, but instead to look at a very particular episode, how they encountered God in that moment, what it meant for them, and more importantly what it means for us in our faith in the possibility of new beginnings and of God’s amazing grace.