The Beginning of Wisdom; a sermon for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

John 6:51-58

⁵¹ I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

⁵² Then the Jews debated among themselves, asking, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

⁵³ Jesus said to them, “I assure you, unless you eat the flesh of the Human One and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ⁵⁴ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. ⁵⁵ My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. ⁵⁶ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. ⁵⁷ As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me lives because of me. ⁵⁸ This is the bread that came down from heaven. It isn’t like the bread your ancestors ate, and then they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

¹⁴ Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

The Psalmist reminds us today that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”

. “Fear of the LORD is where wisdom begins”

.

That’s a little hard to read in a Christian context, knowing that God, the Three in One, three Persons in relationship as one God, calls us to relationship with Godself, to know the Parent personally, to know Jesus as friend, to be deeply and wholly inspired by the Spirit.

How do we fear someone who calls us to be so intimate?

I mean, this is the same God who says,

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them.

You don’t get much more intimate than that.

So what’s with the fear?

Does it feel like I’m nitpicking? Maybe I am, but it’s important to make an attempt to straighten out this stuff in our heads so that all the ideas that are thrown at us about God and the way God does things don’t keep slamming into each other and fighting against each other. It’s one thing to talk all our contradictory ideas about God with our neighbors who all think the way we think. But the world outside the Church thinks more critically, and we need to either have these ideas straightened out in our heads, to be able to say that this idea is right and this idea is wrong; or we need to be able to have a serious (grace-filled!) conversation about why we believe that God is one way and another.

So yeah, maybe I’m nitpicking. I’m nitpicking because I want us to be faithful, functional disciples.

Because that’s why we’re here, right?

So how do we reconcile a God who is to be feared with a God who desires to be intimately known?

I hope it’s quite clear that that’s not how our human relationships should be. Marriage or parenting or friendship should never be about fear.

But then why should fear be a part of a relationship with God?

I would submit to you that fear is a natural human reaction to the unknown.

It’s not so much that it’s part of God’s nature to be fearsome. It’s human nature to be afraid. For that matter, it’s a trait that a lot of living things have in common: that fight-or-flight reaction to a stressor. Possums play dead, ostriches stick their heads in the ground, kangaroos box, and even rhododendrons curl their thick, stiff leaves when cold threatens them.

It’s natural to be afraid of something that’s unknown. And God is the greatest unknown in all creation. God is the unknowable, the infinite, the unfathomable.

The psalmist is right to point out that natural reaction, I think. And to point that out as a good starting point. Recognizing that God isn’t just some friend we’ve known all our lives, but is, in fact, far bigger and less predictable than all of creation’s collected consciousness could ever begin to imagine.

God is big. Unimaginably big. And it’s okay to be afraid of God’s bigness.

In fact, it’s wise to fear God’s bigness. And not because fear is a mature characteristic of our faith, or that it’s particularly smart or well-informed. Just because it’s a healthy choice.

But it’s a healthy choice to start with.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

We begin by recognizing that God is unsearchable, infinite in all ways. Then we move on from there.

We don’t talk about wisdom much in the Church today. We talk about faithfulness, about discipleship sometimes. In the United Methodist Church, we talk a lot right now about vitality. But we don’t talk about wisdom.

And that’s a pity. Because Jesus calls us to a very deep and holistic kind of wisdom.

Remember that Jesus sums up all the law and the prophets into one two-fold command: love God and love neighbor as you love yourself. And in his own sometimes subtle ways, and through Peter’s rooftop vision in Acts 10 in a much more direct way, the Spirit informs us that those old laws are for a people who were called to be set apart, but we are called to something different.

We are called to the wisdom of discerning what is loving and what is not.

And that, in and of itself, is intimidating. We are wise when we realize that we won’t always make the best and the most loving choices. We are wise when we realize that sometimes the choices we have all reside outside of black and white sensitivities of right and wrong, that sometimes the only choices we have are very gray.

We are wise when we realize that because there is a new covenant, we are now more responsible for our actions, and not because we are called to higher account, but because there is more of the decision-making process in which we have to participate. We now have to decide whether a behavior or a word shared is good or evil, whether it is blessing or curse, whether it is loving or hurtful.

Paul actually gives us a good model to follow, not because it’s a set of rules, but because it sets our hearts right when we practice it:

be filled with the Spirit in the following ways: ¹⁹ speak to each other with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; sing and make music to the Lord in your hearts; ²⁰ always give thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ

Paul is suggesting that life become worship. Speak to each other in ways that are beautiful and uplifting like psalms and hymns. Instead of making monotone or discord, find a way to make your heart sing!

That is called “improved quality of life”, folks. That’s something God wants for us. It’s not all about getting to the end of the race. It’s about making the most of the time we have, making this life here and now a blessing, to us and to each other.

That’s called being satisfied, which is a gift only Jesus can give, a feast of God.

Our Old Testament readings for the next few weeks focus on Solomon, who is person on whom all our wisdom literature focuses. And it’s because of this request he makes that we share today, even though his particular request is very specific:

⁹Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?

It’s a very important and relevant request for us today, when so many of our prayers deal with what we face right now, in this instant. We seldom see the big picture and talk to God about how God is guiding us through the larger span of our lives, let alone how God is guiding our communities and the Church universal through the miracle of salvation.

So as we talk about wisdom in the coming weeks, I want to encourage you to open yourself to God’s bigger story.

Solomon asked for wisdom in his particular context, for a sense of responsibility and discernment for the leadership role he was taking on at the time.

I encourage you to seek our wisdom and discernment in your own life, in your work, in your relationships.

Begin with the recognition that God’s unsearchable wisdom isn’t something you can comprehend, and that Jesus is leading us into a wisdom beyond our sense of rules and predictability.

Because it seems to me that when we open ourselves to God’s wisdom, we’ll discover that true wisdom isn’t learning to follow the letter of the law. True wisdom is simply learning to love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.