I remember the
first time I was a part of a conversation when, as a group, we did not know the
answer to a question and one person pulled out a smart phone and through a web
search discovered the answer. I thought
I had witnessed a combination of magic and witchcraft. Today such occurrences are commonplace. Classroom students do not take notes as much
as surf the web to learn more about a particular point of interest in a
professor’s lecture. Preachers are
advised to remember sermons are being fact-checked in real time. And yes, everyone searches on-line for
information and answers.
As a part of my
copious sermon research I googled a completely random question: Who invented
the Ping-Pong ball? Here is what I
learned in a matter of seconds:
· Table Tennis was
invented in the 1860s by a group of aristocrats seeking after dinner
entertainment on a rainy English night.
Books set on end divided a table in half and cigar box lids served as
paddles to bat a champagne bottle cork back and forth.
· The name “Ping-Pong”
was coined by an English firm in the late 1890s and later trademarked by Parker
Brothers. Before this the game was
informally known by several different names, including “whiff-whaff”.
· While on a trip to
the United States in 1901, the Englishman James Goode purchased a celluloid
ball he thought would be ideal for the game.
Up until then golf balls, rubber balls, and balls of tightly wound
string were being used.
I learned all of
this and more in matter of seconds. On
an unrelated note, my computer screen is now littered with pop-up ads for
ping-pong tables!
We have come to
expect instant access to information.
The answer to any question, no matter how trivial, literally is at our
fingertips. There is a reason we call
this time the Information Age. But
information, while important, is not the same thing as knowledge and it most certainly
is not wisdom. Knowledge takes
time. It involves knowing information
and context and how each relates to the other.
Wisdom is something altogether different. In part, it recognizes the limitations of
both information and knowledge and finds a way to be at peace with not having
all the answers, especially answers to life’s deepest questions. Wisdom involves living with ambiguity, nuance,
and shades of subtlety. I define wisdom
as “learning how to live gracefully and humbly without having all the answers.”
Today’s readings from the Old Testament and Gospel are
grounded squarely in wisdom, as I define it.
The writer of Ecclesiastes (a word that means preacher or teacher or
literally the assembler, as in the one who assembles wisdom) says he
has given his life first to pleasure, then to productivity, and finally to
despair. After it all he concludes
everything he pursued is nothing but vanity – literally vapor dissipating into the air.
Jesus, in refusing to settle a financial dispute between two brothers,
tells a parable of a man who sets out to build barns big enough to accommodate
all the grain he is able to grow. Jesus
calls the man a “fool” (one of the harshest words in the bible) because
unbeknownst to him he will die that very night.
Both lessons do a great job of calling into question
some basic assumptions we make about life.
Neither lesson resolves the conflict it creates by supplying us with an
answer. We are left hanging. If we approach what the assembler and Jesus says
here as if we are googling for information what we get back is a blank screen. Today’s readings don’t supply answers. All they do is raise questions.
I suspect many preachers today are standing in the
pulpits of many churches wrestling with these same readings because so many of
us use the same common lectionary. And I
guarantee every one of us is facing the same temptation to manufacture an
answer to the questions raised in these passages. Somehow there has got to be a way to wrap all
of this up in a neat, tidy, tenable package.
Isn’t this what preachers are supposed to do? After all, don’t we point to the bible and say
all of life’s answers are in here? Well,
here is my answer: sometimes it is
important to live for a while with the questions.
The most famous passage from Ecclesiastes says,
There is a time is for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to be
silent and a time to speak.
What we read this morning falls under the category of
a time to uproot, a time to tear down, and a time to be silent.
We are so used to having answers come quickly, perhaps
dating back to math drills in early elementary school (“1+1=2” and
“2+2=4”). The faster the answers come to
us the greater our reward. Never are we
taught some questions do not have answers or for some questions the answers
come only after a long period of silence and unknowing.
I have told you before about the counseling
relationship I entered after my marriage ended in 2002. Most sessions left me with a question to
ponder. I resolved some on the way home while others took a day or two to think
through. I will never forget the
question my counselor posed at the end the very first session. He listened patiently to my litany of woes –
everything from the end of my marriage to the frustration I felt when my girls
wouldn’t keep their rooms clean. On and
on and on I went until he said, “Why do you think it is that things don’t work
out the way they are supposed to?”
I lived with this deceptively simple question for the
better part of two years, unable to come up with an answer. And then one day it came me: Why don’t things
work out the way they are supposed to?
Because they don’t! I don’t get
to control everything. And this
realization has changed my life. Maybe
the counselor knew the answer on day one.
Maybe his answer was not what my answer turned out to be. Had he told me the answer on that first day I
would not have been able to receive it.
What I needed was not information about how life works
or knowledge about how to operate better in my harsh new reality. What I needed was wisdom. I learned wisdom is not as much an
intellectual pursuit as it is an emotional one.
What the head may know the heart may not be ready to embrace. Sometimes, what the head says to accept the
heart will reject. Sometimes the only
thing that will bring the head and the heart together is time…
…and courage.
It takes a tremendous amount of courage not to run for the cover of
certainty and easy answers. I think about
the many times I have sat with a person who was in the midst of a difficult experience,
facing challenges raising deep questions about life and meaning and God and faith. More often than not, all I could say in
response was this: “You are asking all the right questions and I admire how you
are doing it. It takes a lot of courage
to hold your loss, your pain, your fear, and your anger and wait.”
And yet, in life there are times when this is exactly
what we must do. The assembler of wisdom
knew it and Jesus knew it. Through their
teaching today they tear down and leave little or nothing in its place. Life is like that sometimes. And knowing that the Holy Scripture contains
sections of pointed questioning where no answers are supplied tells us when we
are in a place like this we are in a place that must be named as faith, not
doubt. It is faith when we ground these
moments in a trust God will not lose hold of us. It is faith when we hope one day to understand
or to accept or to be strong again. It
is faith when we do not run away from uncertainty. Doubt manifests itself when we accept as safe
harbor cheap answers and false certainty.
The truly wise turn away from such things and wait. The wise wait with a peace passing all
understanding.
Brain McLaren, in his book A Generous Orthodoxy, observes there are four stages of faith
development:
· Simplicity – a time early on in life when we are
comfortable seeing everything as black and white.
· Complexity – a time when we realize everything is not
as neat and tidy as it appears.
· Perplexity – a time of deep questioning when we know
not how to make sense of it all.
· Humility – a time when we let go of it all and find our
rest in God.
Today’s readings are grounded squarely in
perplexity. The degree to which you open
up yourself to life’s big questions and the degree to which they are thrust
upon you, is the degree to which you are on the cusp of making the most important
pilgrimage of the spiritual life: letting go of what you absolutely know to be
true and letting go of what you absolutely cannot figure out in order to let
God be God… a God who loves you beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond beliefs,
but not beyond knowing. Such an
experience births wisdom beyond what I can describe, but I can assure you it is
real and it will come to you… in time.
