Today we begin a foray into the Wisdom Literature of the Bible. The Wisdom literature is a type or genre of text – like history, novel, love poem, prophesy, self-help, memoir, … 

What makes something wisdom literature? 

• Concerned with everyday life and how to live it well. Deals with the human condition, writ large. 
• Often makes playful use of metaphors from daily life. 
• Not much interest in history, politics, or, frankly, religion.  
• Focus on order and harmony – often, though not always. Wisdom literature can support or criticize the status quo… 
• Wisdom literature is descriptive, but looks for the deeper underlying truths and patterns of things, naming the things we don’t always name. 
• Wisdom literature does not appeal to revealed truth; it’s not grounded in what God has proclaimed to humanity, but in observation and reflection.
• But in the Biblical context, Wisdom is closely identified with God; it’s described as a gift from God, sometimes even an aspect or emanation of God, as in the beautiful poem we read together. And growing in wisdom is one path of faithful human response to God. Source:  https://www.crivoice.org/wisdom.html

Biblical scholar Ellen Davis, in her book on the Song of Songs, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, writes about the Wisdom literature – let me quote her at length: 

“The word ‘wisdom’ sounds slightly old-fashioned. We all know many smart people. Most of us admire people who have a good education… But stop for a moment and think: how many people do you know whom you would describe as wise? How many people can you say, without qualification, live their lives day by day, even moment by moment, in a way that glorifies God? …

For that is what ‘wisdom’ meant to the biblical writers: living in the world in such a way that God, and God’s intentions for the world, are acknowledged in all that we do. It sounds like a lofty goal, perhaps too lofty for ordinary people living busy lives. Such a goal of wisdom seems attainable only for great saints.… Yet this is not the understanding of the biblical writers… They consider wisdom within the grasp of every person who desires it wholeheartedly. Wisdom does not require any special intellectual gifts. The fruit  of wisdom, a well-ordered life and a peaceful mind, results not from a high IQ but from a [particular] disposition of the heart…

“So what is wisdom literature? It is spiritual guidance for ordinary people. Moreover, it comes from ordinary people, and this in itself makes the wisdom literature different from most of the rest of the Bible…. The sages make no claim to have received special revelation from God… Much of the instruction they offer is inherited from their fathers and mothers, both biological parents and ancestors in the faith.” 

The Wisdom literature, Davis says, offers “deep, imaginative reflection” – often in the form of poetry and extended metaphor – on the most commonplace realities of human existence: “birth and death, poverty and wealth, education and work, grief and joy, human love and love of God.” 

Another great Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggeman, writes, “Wisdom teaching contains almost nothing of salvation miracles or covenantal commandments, only the slow, steady pondering of the gifts and demands of lived life…. Wisdom literature asks about ‘what works,’ what risks may be run, what realities can be trusted, and where the practice of human choice, human freedom, and human responsibility can be exercised.” (232, Reverberations of Faith) 

These texts, says Brueggeman, contrast the wise with fools who lack wisdom and believe that life is an “anything goes” proposition… but people who follow only their own wills and impulses will not discover the hidden shape of reality, or find the path of living that is most congruent with God’s purposes for the world and our lives.

There are whole books of the Bible that really fit the bill as wisdom literature, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Job, and the letter of James.

There are other books that have sections or passages that have that quality. For example, the Psalms sometimes duck into Wisdom literature territory. And Jesus sometimes ventures into Wisdom teaching. 

Let’s cast an eye over today’s lectionary, from the perspective of the Wisdom literature… 

In our 1 Kings lesson, Solomon, Bathsheba’s son, becomes king after his father David. God offers Solomon a gift, and Solomon asks for wisdom. 

Solomon is a complex figure – more on that next week – but I sympathize with how genuinely overwhelmed he sounds here. When he says he’s a little child, he’s not speaking literally – he was probably somewhere in his 20s? – but he does not feel prepared to rule. Having him become king was his mom’s idea. 

He knows that he’s in over his head and has no idea how to do this job… a kind of wisdom in itself! 

So God gifts him with wisdom – AND with riches and honor. The text invites us to see Solomon as a king favored by God, like his father David before him. 

Note that even here, wisdom is not the same as revelation! God doesn’t just plant wisdom in Solomon’s mind and heart.

Rather, God gives him understanding and discernment, so that he will be able to look at the needs of his people, and rule wisely. 

This is not a wisdom text; this is just more Biblical history. But it gives us Solomon the Wise, an important figure for the Biblical tradition. FOUR full books of the Bible are presented as containing Solomon’s words and wisdom, in addition to what’s recorded in the chronicles of his reign in 1 Kings. 

First there’s the Song of Songs, which is not Wisdom literature; it’s more of an extended love poem.

Then there’s the book of Proverbs; we’ll duck into that in a couple of weeks. It describes itself as the proverbs of Solomon. 

There’s Ecclesiastes, which claims its author is “the son of David, king in Jerusalem,” and has a number of echoes of Solomon’s life, though it was likely written several centuries after Solomon’s time.  

Ecclesiastes is the source of a very famous snippet of Biblical wisdom: “To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven…” 

Finally, there’s the book called the Wisdom of Solomon, which was written quite late, around the time of Jesus or a little earlier! – but also presents itself as the insights of King Solomon.

So, a whole lot of Biblical wisdom is attributed to Solomon, remembered perhaps as a greater sage than he was a king. 

Our second text, the poem of faith we read together, comes from the book I just mentioned, the Wisdom of Solomon. 

This is definitely wisdom literature even as it describes Wisdom itself – as a pure and beautiful hidden reality, available to holy souls who seek God. 

I don’t have a lot to say about this text except that I really love it! “In every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets.” May we have many such among us! 

Then there’s James, the New Testament letter that we’ll be reading through over the next few weeks. James is one of my favorite epistles. The author names himself as James in the first verse. Ancient church tradition identifies the author as James, the brother of Jesus, who became the first bishop of the church in Jerusalem. And modern Biblical scholarship… says that’s not impossible. I like the idea, myself! – I really notice how much James sounds like Jesus. I like to think of him reinforcing and extending his brother’s teaching, in the decades after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. 

I love the Epistle of James because James has so many things to say that I need to hear, every time. He speaks to my heart and names my sins. He’s especially tough on the sins of superficiality and lukewarmness. It’s good to know that those were apparently struggles for first-century Christians, as well as 21st-century! 

We’ll hear from James over the next several weeks, but just in today’s short passage, we get these bangers: 

“Your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” Ouch. 

Okay. Being mad about something doesn’t mean I’m either right, or righteous… and being mad in itself does not fix anything.

“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” That image of looking at yourself in a mirror and then walking away and immediately forgetting what you look like! How many times have I named and confronted my sins, and then… just gone on my merry way? 

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” 

… Yeah. 

James sounds like Jesus in part because a lot of Jesus’ teaching and preaching springs from the Wisdom tradition, though he gives it his own distinctive spin. In Mark’s Gospel today we have Jesus doing a little Wisdom teaching! “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile… since it enters not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer! It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

That’s Wisdom teaching – playful use of a mundane reality (eating and pooping!) to talk about something more fundamental and universal: character and what makes somebody a good person. 

Notice that our Gospel reading skips a few verses. In those verses, Jesus accuses these religious leaders – the scribes and the Pharisees – of encouraging people to make big donations to the Temple instead of supporting their aging parents, even though “honor your father and mother” is one of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God. So this is a scene where Jesus is arguing that Jewish religious practice has grown beyond God’s original intentions, and become a kind of superficial piety that doesn’t change hearts or lives. That is a tendency of religion in general – not something specific to Judaism. 

And God knows that 21st century folks can certainly be weird and moralistic about food and what you should and shouldn’t eat! 

So this teaching may still have something to say to us. Eat what your body and your soul need to eat; but that’s not what makes you a good or bad person. Your behavior, that comes out from inside of you, is what reveals who you really are. 

Wisdom literature, as I’ve been describing it, is a concept from Biblical scholarship, a description of a genre of text from the ancient world. But the wisdom literature of the Bible contains some thoughts and perspectives that we might still describe as wisdom, two or three thousand years later. 

Wisdom is tricky to describe. To some extent we know it when we see or hear it… though there’s a lot of stuff out there that sounds like wisdom, but maybe isn’t really so wise.

Where do WE find wisdom? What wisdom helps ground and guide us, in our daily lives?…. 

In 1934, the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Today he might add, “Where is the information we have lost in content?”… 

It’s easy to think that Wisdom is rarer or more elusive today, amid the chaos of modern life. But one of the gifts of being in weekly conversation with an ancient text, as we are, is that we can see people thousands of years ago worrying about whether young people will make good choices, fretting about leaders who lack wisdom, and so on. 

I think maybe wisdom has always been rare and elusive.  And one of the things about wisdom is that the more you have of it, the less likely you are to put yourself out there as a font of wisdom. People who go around talking about how wise they are, often turn out to be con men or cult leaders… 

And when I think of the folks in my life to whom I turn for wisdom, I think they would quickly say, Oh, I’m not that wise. I’m just smart enough to know what I don’t know… 

We associate wisdom with age, to some extent. Life has a way of piling up experiences that can lead to a broader and deeper perspective. But it’s not a simple correlation. Everyone over 70 isn’t wise… and everyone under 20 is not foolish. I’ve learned things from my children, and our children, that have changed me. 

As we keep reading our way through some Biblical Wisdom literature in the coming weeks, I’d like to share a little parish exercise in thinking about wisdom in our lives and our time.

Below are some questions for you to consider; I invite your responses over the next few weeks. You can comment in the chat or email me. I can also send these out by email or put them up in the Facebook group, if that’s helpful…  

Let us pray – a prayer for wisdom from our Book of Common Prayer. 

O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and clarity rises up from confusion for the godly: Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what you would have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices, and that in your light we may see light, and in your straight path may not stumble; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

QUESTIONS TO PONDER… 

How would you define wisdom – or are there other words you connect with the word “wisdom”? 

Is there a person you think of as wise? (This could be someone you know, or a public figure, writer, leader, past or present…) 

Are there life experiences you think have helped you develop wisdom? 

Wisdom sometimes takes the form of proverbs or sayings that people pass around or pass down. 

Are there wise proverbs or sayings that you think of often, or that have been passed down in your family? 

You may share responses on our Google form here!

We’re in John chapter 6 – the Bread Gospels.  We’ve been reading this for a while; today I’m finally going to (sort of) preach on it. Next week we’re finally back to Mark, the Gospel we’re mostly following this year! 

I’m going to share four things that I struggle with about John 6, as we’ve been receiving it, and two things I like. 

1. The first frustrating thing is the way the lectionary spreads it over FIVE FULL WEEKS. 

It is really long – seventy verses – and detailed, and somewhat redundant! But at the same time, it is all one story. Jesus feeding the crowd leads into his preaching about bread, and the response of people who are curious… and then upset. 

John’s Gospel has several extended stories like this – the woman at the well; the young man born blind. Those are a little shorter – about forty verses each – but the lectionary gives them on one day, as one story. 

I don’t know why it breaks this one up so much. I know a lot of my fellow preachers have been really annoyed by it – have run out of things to say about bread.  Erin, our office coordinator, has been joking with me about using up all the bread hymns… ! 

2. The second frustrating thing is the way the lectionary breaks this story from the story of the woman at the well in John 4. 

In that story, Jesus meets a woman who is getting water. He tells her: ‘Everyone who drinks the water from this well will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ And the woman says to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

That sounds a lot like parts of this story, right? 

The author of this Gospel means you to read that story, then read this story, and have them build on each other. But the lectionary gives us that story in Lent of Year A; we’re in late summer of Year B. Eighteen months apart – literally as far apart as it can be, in a three year cycle of reading.  (We’ll read it next in March 2026!!!) 

3. The third frustrating thing is the way John talks about “the Jews.” Not in the script today but in the Biblical text the people who question and argue with Jesus are just called “the Jews.” 

Which is odd because Jesus and his disciples were Jews! Other Gospels name particular groups and movements within Judaism who had beef with Jesus in various ways. John is written a little later; maybe Christianity has begun to really separate from Judaism. Or maybe John’s community had their own reasons to cast Jews in general as the enemy. 

But it’s not true to the real dynamics between Jesus and the groups who opposed him, and it’s led to a lot of violence by Christians against Jews over the millennia. 

4. The fourth frustrating thing is the way Jesus talks about eating his flesh and drinking his blood is, in fact, kind of gross, right? Eugh. And he kind of goes on and on about it. 

In the other Gospels he says what he says at the last supper – we hear it every Sunday: “Take, eat, this bread is my body, broken for you… Drink this, all of you; this cup is the new Covenant in my Blood, poured out for you and for many…” 

But John’s Jesus really leans into the cannibalism thing. It’s no wonder that it turns some people off and they decide to stop following him! 

I snuck it into the script version of the text that we just read, but I want us to understand that the idea of drinking someone’s blood is EXTRA upsetting in Judaism. God’s people the Jews have special, holy food rules that they follow, that are very important for them. And one of those rules, from way back in the time of Moses, was not to eat or drink blood. The way they kill animals for food reflects that rule.  And of course Jesus knew that.  So he is saying stuff he knows will upset people – perhaps including some of us! 

But this starts to lead me into some of the things I like about this passage. 

5. I like the way there’s a kind of riddle here. 

What do we call the part of our service where I say, or we say, “Take, eat, this bread is my body, broken for you… Drink this, all of you…”

That’s the Eucharist, right? Or in our books it might say the Great Thanksgiving. Which means the same thing. Or sometimes we say Communion. 

In the Eucharist we tell the story of the Last Supper that Jesus shared with his friends, before he was arrested and executed, and how he shared bread and wine with them and gave them a new meaning that night. And he also told them, Keep sharing a special holy meal like this! Do this and remember me! 

Which is why we do it, and remember him. 

That story is really important for Christians. And it’s in three of our four Gospels – Mark, Matthew, and Luke. 

BUT IT’S NOT IN JOHN’S GOSPEL. 

John doesn’t show us Jesus creating the Eucharist. Instead, on that final evening, John’s Jesus washes the disciple’s feet.

People have wondered: Did John not know about the Last Supper and the Eucharist? Did he disagree that it should be a core practice of the church? Why isn’t it in his Gospel? 

Except… it kind of is in his Gospel! It’s just here, instead of on his last evening with his friends. 

John has Jesus talking about eating his body and blood, just like at the Last Supper. But he’s not giving people bread and wine, to say: These things become kind of a holy extension of me; you don’t actually have to eat anything upsetting. 

I think this scene makes it very clear that John knew about the Eucharist and thought it was important. 

Maybe he even thought it was so important that people should be kind of weirded out by it. 

And I think it’s interesting to wonder about why John’s Gospel tells us about Eucharist this way, instead of telling us the Last Supper story, which he knew. 

That’s an interesting riddle, to me! 

6. The last thing I want to say about this story is something I kind of like and also kind of struggle with, as a preacher and pastor. 

In this story and in the story of the woman at the well, Jesus says, basically: 

You’re drinking regular water, or eating regular bread.  

You’ll get thirsty again, and hungry again.

I am offering you water and bread that will satisfy you, forever.

That will keep you from ever being thirsty, or hungry.

That will bubble up inside you like a fresh spring…

That will sustain you so completely that you’ll live forever. 

The problem with this is it’s just not true, right? 

Not in a literal or earthly sense. 

Even the disciples, who received Eucharist from Jesus’ own hands, got hungry again and had to eat more meals. 

When we take Communion here, we’re still pretty ready for those coffee hour snacks!

There’s a really strong theme in John’s Gospel where Jesus uses something from the real world to try and talk about how things are in God’s reality. He talks about being born again.

He talks about the wind, and how that’s like God’s spirit.

He talks about water, and thirst; about bread, and hunger.

He talks about blindness, and what it means to really see. 

And much more. 

And people get confused. They don’t understand.

Some of them get curious and want to know more.

Some of them get mad and leave. 

So I understand that John’s Jesus is talking about a different kind of hunger, and thirst. 

Not the way you feel when your body really needs a drink, 

But the way you feel when the part of you that isn’t your body really feels dry and shriveled and needs to be refreshed. 

Has anybody ever felt that way?… 

Not the way you feel when your body really needs some food, 

But the way you feel when the part of you that isn’t your body just doesn’t have any fuel… any enjoyment… and really needs something that can sustain you and give you delight. 

Has anybody ever felt that way?… 

I have felt those things. I know what it’s like to have the part of me that isn’t my body be thirsty, or hungry. I know what it feels like when the part of me that isn’t my body gets that refreshing drink, or that sustaining meal. 

But it is hard to talk about, outside of those metaphors. And I know those metaphors might not make much sense to a lot of people. Just like they didn’t in Jesus’ time. 

So, I like it when Jesus says that what he’s offering people is something that will refresh and sustain the not-body parts of them. Like a cold lemonade and a delicious sandwich when you’re really hot and thirsty and hungry. 

But I don’t know how to give that to someone who’s looking for it. I don’t even know how to find it reliably myself.  It’s not as simple as handing someone a plate of cheese or cookies at coffee hour! 

All I can do as a pastor is say what Jesus says, more or less: There is something, here, that can offer relief and satisfaction to the hungry heart or the thirsty soul. 

It’s not easy to find it, for all kinds of reasons. 

But it’s there, and Jesus – who is God – wants to give it to us. 

And I think that’s good news.

Lord, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty; 

Lord, give us this bread always. 

Amen.