Wise Up

 

Ephesians 5:15-20

August 15, 2021

             My dad was the Executive Director of the American Lung Association in Tennessee. What that means is that I grew up surrounded by a wealth of information on the dangers of smoking. Christmas Seals and everything they represented were a fundamental part of my world.

When I was four years old, I was in a public service announcement for Christmas Seals. I remember it because my job on camera was to sit and play with two toys, while Whispering Bill Anderson, who was the state chairman that year, talked about the importance of Christmas Seals and the Lung Association and keeping children safe. I was allowed to keep the toys.

My mother will tell you about the first time the two of us took a plane trip together. This was back in the days when you could smoke anywhere, including airport terminals. I would see someone smoking, and before my mom could stop me, I would go up and tell them that the cigarette they were smoking would eventually make their lungs sick and they would die.

            Like I said, I was surrounded by information on the dangers of smoking. The knowledge that smoking was a dangerous habit was part of the air that I breathed, no pun intended. So, guess what I did when I was a teenager?

            I started smoking.

            Because even though I had all the knowledge about the dangers of smoking, that knowledge didn’t stand a chance against my desire to look cool, to be cool, and to hang out with the cool kids. It didn’t stand a chance against peer pressure, and my friends who smoked and did cool things like blow smoke rings. So, I decided to give smoking a try.

            I remember when I learned to inhale. My friend had given me some of her cigarettes on the sly. It was a warm night, and the darkness kept me hidden from eyes that might report to my parents what I was doing. I walked up and down our street, puffing on a cigarette, practicing inhaling the smoke and blowing it out again in a “cool” way. Even if I would not have had the knowledge about smoking that I did, you would think that doing something that made me so sick to my stomach and lightheaded and dizzy would have clued me in to the fact that this might not be the best habit to pick up. But, like I said, my knowledge could not stand up to the pressure I felt to be cool. I look back on it now and know that nothing about smoking was cool. But you could not have convinced me of that then. It’s been many, many years since I smoked, and it was giving up smoking that finally solidified my knowledge into wisdom. I had to finally wise up and say that starting smoking was one of the dumbest things I had ever done.

            I told my kids that message about smoking repeatedly when they were growing up, hoping against hope that they would learn from my mistake rather than make that specific mistake on their own. But that’s the thing about knowledge versus wisdom – we can have all the knowledge in the world, but wisdom comes from experience. And it seems that human nature dictates that we gain our wisdom not so much from watching the mistakes of others, but by making our own. That is, we gain wisdom if we learn from the mistakes we make.

            Wisdom is where we are today. But what is wisdom, exactly? Is it just confined to what we learn from our experiences? Is it a synonym for knowledge, or are the two different? In the passage we read from I Kings, the Lord visits the newly ascended Solomon in a dream and asks Solomon what God should give him. Unlike what other young and inexperienced kings might have asked for, Solomon does not request wealth or power. Solomon asks instead for an “understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil;”

Solomon realizes just how young and inexperienced he is, and that being the ruler of God’s people will take more than power or riches. So, Solomon requests wisdom. The Lord grants him his request. 

            In our passage from Ephesians, we continue to explore the new life we have in Christ and the new rules for living that this life requires. It seems to me that this new living and its new rules require wisdom to accomplish.

            “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is.”

            Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise.

            One commentator that I studied said that the Greek verb for live also implies walking. Be careful then how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise. How do you walk wisely? Well, when I was walking up and down my street learning to inhale a cigarette, that was some rather unwise walking. I suspect that the point Paul was trying to make to the church in Ephesus is not just about literal walking, but about spiritual walking as well. And spiritual walking is learning that life is filled with temptations and trials. We pray about those very things every week in the Lord’s prayer. But a true temptation disguise itself as good, doesn’t it? My wanting to be cool, to be liked, to be in the in crowd sounds foolish and vain to my ears now, but it didn’t when I was a teenager. If I could be liked and accepted, I thought, how much better my life would be. How easy it was to think that smoking would make me accepted, rather than realize who I was should be reason enough to be accepted. But that’s where wisdom comes in. My knowledge about the dangers of smoking should have told me that there was nothing cool about it, but it took years and living to find the wisdom to realize my knowledge was correct.

            Wisdom that came from life and learning taught me that lesson that knowledge and wisdom don’t always go together; I’m still learning that lesson. I had a lot of knowledge, but very little wisdom. And therein lies the rub. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to dismiss the necessity and the wondrousness –I mean that seriously – of gaining knowledge. The hardest and the most challenging and some of the best weeks of my life this past year have been the weeks when I have been in a seminar for my Doctor of Ministry program. I love to learn. I love being a student again. But what I learn in books does not necessarily translate into wisdom, and it certainly does not always translate into discernment. Because that is what I hear in this text.

We need to live wisely, walk wisely, following God, being filled with the Spirit and not getting filled with wine or anything that might distract us from giving thanks and praise to God. We need to walk wisely in this life, making the most of our days, and use our wisdom to discern what God is calling us to do, to be who God is calling us to be.

And in the midst of a world that is in absolute turmoil, we need wisdom more than ever. We need wisdom in our leaders – at every level. We need wisdom in our collective groups, such as our church family. We need to find the wisdom in ourselves, the wisdom that comes from our own lived experience. We need to pray for wisdom, just as Solomon did. We need to pray to find the wisdom to meet the pressing needs of our time.

As we were discussing these passages in our lectionary group this past week, someone brought up a prayer for wisdom – the Serenity Prayer.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

This is a contemporary adaptation of a prayer written by Reinhold Niehbur, and it is widely used in 12 step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. I can imagine that a huge part of dealing with addiction is admitting that we are powerless to change some things. But give us courage to change that which we can, and the final point, the wisdom to know the difference. How much of my precious energy have I wasted trying to change what I cannot change? How much grief and anguish have I caused myself trying to change people and circumstances that I was powerless to change? How much better am I – spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally –when I find the courage to change only that which I can?

I’m getting a little bit wiser in discerning between the two, but it has taken me a lot of hard knocks to achieve this wisdom. I have tried and I have failed – again and again. And when I have crawled my way out of those failures, when I have gotten some distance from them, I have seen that what pulled me through in the end was grace. Grace. Grace from other people, grace from God, grace that I finally offered to myself.

One of the things that we don’t hear often about King Solomon is that he went on to mess up. He prayed for wisdom and God granted it. He showed wisdom in many of his decisions, but he also messed up and he messed up big. So, it seems to me that gaining wisdom is an ongoing process, it is a lifelong process. So, yes, let’s pray for it. Let’s work for it. Let’s live for it. What wisdom do we need to ask for this morning? What wisdom does the world need? And, what grace and compassion and forgiveness do we need to offer one another when we fail to walk wisely, when we fail to wise up?       

            I’ll probably spend the rest of my life seeking wisdom, seeking to be wise, but I know that in those fleeting moments when I am able to emulate Jesus, and love as he loves, then I am one step closer to the wisdom I seek. 

Let all God’s children say, “Alleluia.” Amen.