The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scriptures: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14, Psalm 111, John 6:51-58
So often we mistake knowledge for wisdom. We think knowing things is the same as being wise. There are a lot of things I know. I probably know much more than the average person about the history of Middle Earth. I can tell you what kind of magical immortal being Gandalf is. And no, it’s not a wizard. That’s more like his job description. I can tell you why the people of Gondor are taller and live longer than the other people of Middle Earth. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I have some fantasy reading suggestions for you.
I also probably know more than the average person about women’s soccer, making green smoothies, and Tori Amos. If you didn’t already know that I’m a lesbian, you do now.
But in our scripture today, Solomon shows that wisdom is not about all the facts you’ve stored up in your brain. It’s not about having all the state capitals memorized or your ability to recognize which kind of fungus is ruining the vegetables in your garden or knowing how to read music. Those are all very useful things to know, and we need such knowledge to live and thrive.
But knowledge is not wisdom.
Solomon shows us what wisdom looks like in his prayer to God. “And now, O Lord my God, you have made me king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child,” he says. “I do not know how to go out or come in.”
“I do not know,” he says. That statement, right there, is the beginning of wisdom.
Or as our Psalm today puts it: “The fear of you O Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” As someone who was raised in a conservative, fundamentalist church, I used to have a lot of baggage around that word “fear.” Because, according to how I was taught, I was supposed to be afraid of God. After all, if I sinned and didn’t repent, God could send me to hell for eternity. It’s not an overstatement to say that I lived in terror of God, constantly afraid of doing something wrong for my entire childhood and even into my early adulthood.
But then I went to seminary and studied the Bible. Learned some Hebrew. And I learned that while the Hebrew word used here does indeed mean to be afraid, it also means “to stand in awe of.”
Have you ever stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon and your breath caught in your chest? Have you ever looked out the window from a high floor of a skyscraper and had to step back a little? Have you ever listened to the crash of huge waves on the Oregon coast and felt both comforted and a little afraid?
Awe is the feeling of “I cannot fathom how this is possible, how this is real.” That lack of knowledge, that lack of explanation can go two ways: either to fear or to amazement. Or, as is usually the case, to both at the same time.
That’s basically what Solomon says he’s experiencing when he stands before God. “I am in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people, so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted.”
Solomon is at the brink of his Grand Canyon, the top of his skyscraper, the edge of his ocean, and he’s not asking for knowledge, he’s saying, “This task is vast and beyond my comprehension, but I am open to you O God.”
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In the gospel today, Jesus says,
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
Whenever we talk about the gospel of John, it’s always important to remember that everyone in this story is a Jew. Jesus is a Jew. The disciples he’s been talking to in this chapter are Jews. He’s talking to other Jews who are trying to figure out if what Jesus is teaching is in line with their understanding of their faith. Just like we had wars between Protestants and Roman Catholics during the Reformation, in these verses we’re getting conflict between different groups of Jews in Jesus’ time.
“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” These Jews are talking about knowledge, explanations, facts, when Jesus is talking about wisdom. Here we get our first teaching from Jesus’ mouth about communion, about the Eucharist. In other gospels, he has actually enacted communion for his disciples. “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them,” Luke tells us.
But here in John, Jesus is giving his fellow Jews, and us, a theological lesson. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Coming from a place of facts and literal understanding, this does sound pretty appalling. Both for the Jews in that time and for us in this time. But we all know that when we take communion, when Jesus instituted communion with his disciples, it isn’t with human flesh and blood. It is with bread and wine.
Now I could stand here and give you a dozen different theological explanations about what communion means. Believe me, we spent a lot of time on this in seminary. But at the end of the day, and in this passage in John, Jesus isn’t asking anyone to comprehend intellectually what’s going on. He’s not asking us to understand symbolism or transubstantiation or the method of consecration.
Jesus is asking us to step into wisdom, not knowledge. He’s asking us to recognize that there are some things we can never fully know or explain with facts. Jesus is simply asking us to stand in awe.
When we take communion, we need only stand in awe.
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I think it was Sandy Stumpf who once said to me, “The older I get, the more I know that I don’t know.” I think the same goes for our faith. The more deeply we drop into it, the more we live it out in our lives, the more it changes us, the less we need to understand how or why.
This isn’t to say that we don’t need knowledge. Just you listening to this sermon today is an intellectual exercise in knowing, ironically. I do think it’s important that we have a proactive understanding of how we read our scriptures and how that understanding informs how we live out our faith. I have derived much joy and comfort from learning that the different parts of our Bible were written for different purposes, in different literary styles, for different audiences in different times. All of that knowledge comes from factual research. I even enjoy studying the different theologies of communion which, while they aren’t necessarily explorations of facts, most of them seek to find a single, coherent understanding of the sacrament.
But I think something can be lost, as it was over and over again in the gospels for the Pharisees and even the disciples, when we put our focus on knowing, on factually understanding.
Because at the end of our walk to these rails when we hold out our hands for the bread and wine, at the end of this worship when we walk out those red doors to go in peace to love and serve the Lord, at the end of our every day that we have spent on this miraculous planet brought to life by the power of this miraculous star in the sky that we call the sun, I’m not sure there’s a wiser response than simply to stand in awe of all that God has given us.
Amen.
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