Wisdom Quest
Sunday, August 19
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Focus Theme
Wisdom Quest
Weekly Prayer
Living God, you are the giver of wisdom and true discernment, guiding those who seek after your ways to choose the good. Mercifully grant that your people, feasting on the true bread of heaven, may have eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Focus Scripture
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Then David slept with his ancestors, and was buried in the city of David. The time that David reigned over Israel was forty years; he reigned seven years in Hebron, and thirty-three years in Jerusalem. So Solomon sat on the throne of his father David; and his kingdom was firmly established. Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of his father David; only, he sacrificed and offered incense at the high places. The king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the principal high place; Solomon used to offer a thousand burnt offerings on that altar.
At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, “Ask what I should give you.” And Solomon said, “You have shown great and steadfast love to your servant my father David, because he walked before you in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart toward you; and you have kept for him this great and steadfast love, and have given him a son to sit on his throne today. And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in. And your servant is in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people, so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted. Give 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 pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this. God said to him, “Because you have asked this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches, or for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, I now do according to your word. Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you. I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor all your life; no other king shall compare with you. If you will walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your life.”
All Readings For This Sunday
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 with Psalm 111 or
Proverbs 9:1-6 with Psalm 34:9-14
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58
Focus Questions
1. What gifts do you need from God in order to accomplish the tasks God has given you?
2. In Solomon’s situation, would you ask for what you need, or what you want?
3. How do you respond to the women at work between the lines of this story?
4. Do we as a culture seek knowledge and education that leave out the wisdom dimension?
5. Where, indeed, can we find wisdom?
Reflection
by Kate Huey
Most people, if asked about Israel’s famous king, Solomon, will remember him for his wisdom, a gift God gave him after he asked not for riches or wealth or long life but for help with governing the people wisely and well. (Of course, God was so pleased with his request that Solomon received all the other things, too.) As a young man (“I am only a child”–probably about 20 years old, according to The Oxford Annotated Bible), Solomon must have felt overwhelmed by both his sudden power and his weighty responsibilities. His success gave him pause rather than exultation. His father David, the greatest of Israel’s kings (there’s a lot to live up to!), had placed him on the throne rather than his brother Adonijah, the “rightful” heir. A number of enemies also had to be eliminated to establish Solomon’s firm grip on the monarchy, and ultimately, a peaceful kingdom. In fact, today’s passage is a golden moment in an otherwise bloody and certainly instructive narrative of infidelity, violence, and sin. The path to the throne wasn’t pretty for Solomon, and it was far from Israel’s finest moment.
However, Tremper Longman III focuses on the good part of Solomon’s reign and the way he fulfilled God’s will in building up the kingdom of Israel, including the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. He observes that Solomon’s very name honors “David’s kingdom work” because its root, shalom, evokes the era of peace that followed his succession. A time of peace made it possible to put energy, resources, and attention toward the building of the temple for which Solomon is also famous. However great David was, he was not the one God appointed to build this most important and sacred of structures.
Longman then pays special attention to the nature of wisdom, the gift that Solomon requested, perhaps showing he already had a degree of wisdom even before he asked. Longman points out the subtle but important distinction between intelligence (which we value highly in a technologically advanced world) and wisdom (which has often been in short supply despite our scientific progress). He calls Solomon both “perceptive and spiritually sensitive,” and asks us to consider what we would have asked for in the same situation.
Wisdom, Longman writes, is about relationship, and “Solomon clearly enjoys an intimate relationship with God.” After all, God talks with Solomon in his dreams. Perhaps because it’s relational, wisdom, Longman says, is more like our “emotional” than our “intellectual” intelligence (or IQ). Unfortunately, Solomon’s wisdom was great in many ways except when it came to women or his loyalty to God. This is another intriguing question we might ask about Solomon: How could the great king who had spoken with God go on to worship false gods? Longman says that, alas, Solomon’s love for foreign women was greater than his love for God, no matter what he might have said, and this was proved when he even worshiped their false gods: “When we think of wisdom and wish to seek it, we should not look to the man Solomon, but rather to the one he anticipates, Jesus Christ.”
Of course, there is that other thing that Solomon is known for: the building of the Temple, another glorious memory not only for Israel but for all of us who call the people of Israel our ancestors in faith. However, few of us have read carefully about Solomon’s other worship practices: “For when Solomon was old, his [foreign] wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of his father David” (11:4). In addition, Solomon’s harsh conscription of labor and his wars with various adversaries are marks of the disintegration of David’s glorious kingdom so soon after his death.
A long and sad story
In the end, commentators seem to agree that the books of 1 and 2 Kings (once united then split because of length) not only tell a story but provide a lesson in failure. According to Eugene Peterson, for example, the kings that the people demanded, over God’s objection, failed to represent God’s rule and God’s power effectively. “The Books of Kings, in that light,” Peterson says, are “a relentless five-hundred-year documentation proving that the Hebrew demand of God to ‘have a king’ was about the worst thing they could have asked for.” This long history, rather than a glorious account of the people flourishing under wise and good leadership, is a sad story of split kingdoms, rivalry, and war, leading at last to the calamity of exile in Babylon.
Our reading, the last words in God’s revelation to Solomon before he awoke from his dream, is a powerful instruction to the new ruler and to everyone (especially a leader) who seeks to follow God: “If you walk in my ways, keeping my statues and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your life.” In Chapter 9, after the magnificent temple is built, God assures Solomon again that if he is faithful, as his father was, “then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised your father David, saying, ‘There shall not fail you a successor on the throne of Israel'” (9:4-5). Looking back from exile, it must have seemed obvious to the people of Israel that their crushing defeat by Babylon was brought on by a failure to live faithfully according to God’s statutes, “with integrity of heart and uprightness.”
How much wisdom do we find today?
Today we live in a society that, unlike ancient Israel, claims to be built upon the separation of church and state but often brings religious beliefs and claims of authority into the political arena, if not our shared public life. For example, we may argue vehemently about putting the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall as a mark of our faithfulness or expect political candidates to speak fervently of their faith life. Yet so many of us fail to make sure that all of God’s children have the basic goods of life–in other words, we neglect “the widow, the poor, and the foreigner in our midst”–those most vulnerable and in need. Wasn’t this exactly what God expected in both the Old and New Testaments? Aren’t justice and compassion the “gospel” values preached and embodied by Jesus, the one whose wisdom we desire? Would Jesus have much to say about engraving Commandments in stone and putting them on display in public places when the heart of God’s law is broken all around us?
The lectionary editors have excerpted a simple narrative here, compared to the bloody and politically complicated story that is its context. If you read the narrative in I/II Samuel and I/II Kings from beginning to end (Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message, is helpful in this formidable exercise), you get a much clearer sense of the tragedy and violence that accompanied the monarchy in Israel. (No wonder God thought kings were a bad idea.) Our lectionary passage is preceded by David’s deathbed scene, in which he instructs Solomon to do away with his (David’s) enemies. In between our two lectionary segments is another passage in which Solomon takes a convenient opportunity to have his older brother Adonijah (who, it might be argued, was the rightful heir to the throne) killed. His brother’s offense: asking for King David’s late-in-life wife, Abishag (they brought the beautiful young woman to the old king, to keep him warm). Wives were property, of course, so Abishag belonged to Solomon now.
The women were in this story, too
This is another dimension of the story of Solomon’s succession to his father’s throne that is missed in the lectionary editing: the role of several women in the affairs of the kingdom. As so often happens, women like Abishag and the famous Bathsheba are behind the scenes (and in the omitted verses), but their influence is at times significant in spite of their marginalization. Like women in every age, they have to work between the lines and from below in order to participate at all in the life of the wider community. However, the role they play never feels like it moves from influence to power. The only voice they have is the quiet one, whispering in the ear of the powerful man they’re attached to. Karoline M. Lewis suggests that we might consider the role these women played, and the “ways God is seen at work in the unexpected, and perhaps unaccepted, dimensions of human relationships.”
Solomon is famous for building the greatest worship center in ancient times (in our tradition), but his heart strayed to false gods. What lessons might we learn from that story? For example, have you ever seen a church-building effort that proved to be a distraction from the core values of true religion? What kind of wisdom might help to prevent that from happening? When have we been distracted from humble trust in God’s sovereignty to overweening confidence in our ability to rule our lives individually and, communally, to rule the world so that it serves our interests and needs over the shared needs of all people? When we think about our leaders, do we, truly, hope for and expect integrity of heart and uprightness, or have we turned over “secular” issues to a kind of amoral consideration of “national interests”? What would the world look like if every leader exhibited integrity of heart and uprightness in their decisions? If we, as a people, exhibited integrity of heart and uprightness?
For further reflection
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 20th century
To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest….To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, 20th century
It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
The Talmud
The highest form of wisdom is kindness.
Isaac Asimov, 20th century
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Jimi Hendrix, 20th century
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
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Weekly Seeds is a service of the Congregational Vitality and Discipleship Ministry Team, Local Church Ministries, United Church of Christ. Bible texts are from the New Revised Standard Version, © 1989 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Prayer is from The Revised Common Lectionary ©1992 Consultation on Common Texts. Used by permission.