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.
