James C. Howell - "To Live a Fool and Die a Sage" (August 17, 1997)
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Transcript
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- | Together the prayer for Illumination. | 0:04 |
Open our hearts and minds Oh God, | 0:08 | |
by the power of your Holy Spirit | 0:11 | |
so that as the word is read and proclaimed | 0:14 | |
we may hear your message with joy this day on. | 0:17 | |
Amen. | 0:21 | |
The first lesson is from the Book of Kings, | 0:24 | |
chapters two and three. | 0:26 | |
"Then David slept with his ancestors | 0:29 | |
"and was buried in the city of David. | 0:32 | |
"The time that David reigned over Israel was 40 years. | 0:34 | |
"He reigned seven years Hebron | 0:38 | |
"and 33 in Jerusalem. | 0:41 | |
"So Solomon sat on the throne of his father David | 0:44 | |
"and his kingdom was firmly established. | 0:47 | |
"Solomon loved the Lord walking in the statutes | 0:50 | |
"of his father David only he sacrificed | 0:53 | |
"and offered incense at the high places. | 0:57 | |
"The king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there | 1:00 | |
"for that was the principal high place. | 1:02 | |
"Solomon used to offer 1000 burnt offerings on that altar. | 1:05 | |
"At Gibeon, the Lord appeared | 1:10 | |
"to Solomon in a dream by night. | 1:12 | |
"And God said, ask what I should give you. | 1:14 | |
"And Solomon said, you have shown great and steadfast love | 1:18 | |
"to your servant my father David | 1:23 | |
"because he walked before you in faithfulness | 1:26 | |
"in righteousness, and and uprightness of heart towards you. | 1:29 | |
"And you have kept him this great and steadfast love | 1:32 | |
"and have given him a son to sit on his throne today. | 1:36 | |
"And now Oh Lord, my God, you have made your servant king | 1:40 | |
"in place of my father David | 1:44 | |
"although I am only a little child. | 1:47 | |
"I do not know how to go out or come in | 1:49 | |
"and your servant is in the midst of the people | 1:53 | |
"whom you have chosen, a great people, | 1:55 | |
"so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted. | 1:58 | |
"Give your servant therefore an understanding mind | 2:02 | |
"to govern your people, | 2:05 | |
"able to discern between good and evil, | 2:07 | |
"for who can govern your great people? | 2:10 | |
"It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this. | 2:14 | |
"God said to him, because you have asked this | 2:18 | |
"and have not asked for yourself long life or riches | 2:22 | |
"or for the life of your enemies | 2:26 | |
"but have asked for yourself understanding | 2:28 | |
"to discern what is right, | 2:30 | |
"I now do according to your word. | 2:33 | |
"Indeed, I give you a wise and discerning mind, | 2:36 | |
"no one like you has been before you | 2:40 | |
"and no one like you shall arise after you. | 2:43 | |
"I give you also what you have not asked | 2:47 | |
"both riches and honor all your life. | 2:50 | |
"No other King shall compare with you. | 2:54 | |
"If you walk in my ways, keeping my statutes | 2:57 | |
"and my commandments, as your father David walked, | 3:00 | |
"then I will lengthen your life." | 3:04 | |
This is the Word of the Lord. | 3:07 | |
The second lesson is from the Gospel | 3:13 | |
according to John chapter six. | 3:16 | |
"I am a living bread that came down from heaven. | 3:19 | |
"Whoever eats of this bread will live forever" | 3:24 | |
"and the bread that I will give | 3:27 | |
"for the life of the world is my flesh. | 3:29 | |
"The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, | 3:33 | |
"how can this man give us his flesh to eat? | 3:36 | |
"So Jesus said to them, very truly I tell you, | 3:41 | |
"unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man | 3:45 | |
"and drink his blood, you have no life in you. | 3:48 | |
"Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood | 3:52 | |
"have eternal life and I will raise them up | 3:56 | |
"on the last day for my flesh is true food | 3:59 | |
"and my blood is true drink. | 4:03 | |
"Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood | 4:07 | |
"abide in me and I in them just as the living father sent me | 4:10 | |
"and I live because of the Father, | 4:15 | |
"so whoever eats me will live because of me. | 4:17 | |
"This is the bread that came down from heaven. | 4:22 | |
"Not like that which your ancestors ate and they died | 4:25 | |
"but the one who eats this bread will live forever." | 4:29 | |
This is the word of the Lord. | 4:33 | |
- | Frued said that the most important day | 4:57 |
in a man's life is the day that his father dies. | 4:59 | |
Now that day came for Solomon in the year 961 BC, | 5:05 | |
the Great King David died and was buried in a tomb | 5:10 | |
along the edge of the hill of Jerusalem | 5:14 | |
above the Kidron Valley and we can imagine that for Solomon, | 5:17 | |
his father's already long shadow grew even longer | 5:21 | |
after he was buried, daunting task to succeed King David. | 5:28 | |
Now Solomon begins rightly, he goes to Gibeon, | 5:34 | |
seven miles away and he prays for, | 5:37 | |
he does not pray for wealth, | 5:41 | |
he does not pray to vanquish his enemies | 5:43 | |
but rather he prays for wisdom. | 5:46 | |
Wisdom. | 5:53 | |
My children go back to school tomorrow | 5:56 | |
and I have got a lot to worry about | 5:58 | |
and I wanted to share it with you | 6:00 | |
kind of spread the burden around. | 6:01 | |
I'm concerned because I don't know | 6:04 | |
my children's new teachers, | 6:07 | |
they need to have a good teacher. | 6:08 | |
I don't know if they're gonna be in a trailer | 6:09 | |
or in a properly equipped room with enough computers. | 6:11 | |
I don't know what time the bus is gonna come | 6:15 | |
and how long the bus ride is. | 6:17 | |
And looking longer down the road, | 6:20 | |
I'm really worried will my children gain admission | 6:22 | |
to Duke University? | 6:25 | |
And should they gain it, | 6:28 | |
will dad be able to pay for them to go? | 6:30 | |
I got a lot to worry about | 6:35 | |
in terms of my children's education. | 6:37 | |
But really when I worry about these things, | 6:40 | |
I am really just tinkering with the mechanisms of education. | 6:42 | |
Sort of reminds me of the remark of Thoreau | 6:48 | |
who said that modern inventions | 6:51 | |
are but improved means to unimproved ends. | 6:53 | |
The question to ask is, what is the end of education? | 7:01 | |
And in my heart of hearts, what I dream | 7:07 | |
for my three children is that when they grow up | 7:09 | |
that they shall be wise. | 7:12 | |
Now, this is an elusive kind of thing. | 7:17 | |
Most of us know plenty of smart people. | 7:19 | |
I've got some smart people | 7:23 | |
in my congregation back in Davidson. | 7:24 | |
I've got one guy who can take a picture | 7:27 | |
and somehow cram it into his computer | 7:29 | |
and send it to somebody in Singapore. | 7:32 | |
And I have another friend who can take a little tiny camera | 7:36 | |
and stick it in your leg and weave it up into your body | 7:40 | |
and take a picture of the inside of your heart. | 7:43 | |
So smart. | 7:47 | |
I have a friend I play cards with | 7:50 | |
and even while he is eating potato chips | 7:51 | |
and drinking a coke and talking, | 7:54 | |
he can count every card that comes down during the game | 7:56 | |
and beat you at the end. | 7:59 | |
I mean, smart people. | 8:03 | |
But the question is, where are those who are wise? | 8:06 | |
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Harvard | 8:13 | |
had all of the branches of knowledge but none of the roots. | 8:16 | |
Duke does better than this, I might add. | 8:23 | |
We have a new associate pastor at our church, | 8:26 | |
who just graduated from Duke Divinity School | 8:28 | |
and Duke did incredibly well with the Reverend Andy Baxter. | 8:30 | |
It is as if he has been shot out of a cannon, | 8:35 | |
he learned all of his theology brilliantly | 8:38 | |
and it's all pure, he is not yet jaded | 8:41 | |
and it's just wonderful to have him around, he is wise. | 8:45 | |
Although one of my church members the other day said, | 8:51 | |
"Isn't Andy great?" | 8:54 | |
And I said, "Oh, yeah, he's great." | 8:55 | |
Much more church member said, | 8:58 | |
"Yeah, but give him a few years he'll calm down." | 9:00 | |
Solomon, calmed down. | 9:07 | |
He prayed for wisdom but then he began to engage | 9:12 | |
in all kinds of activities that frittered his wisdom away. | 9:16 | |
He married for instance the daughter of the Pharaoh, | 9:21 | |
which in terms of politics and the economy | 9:24 | |
is a brilliant move. | 9:27 | |
It puts a big power on your side and it gives you access | 9:29 | |
to all the trade routes, so that your country | 9:32 | |
can make a lot of money but the problem is, | 9:34 | |
is the little Pharaoh's daughter in her entourage | 9:37 | |
brings a priest to the Egyptian god, Osiris. | 9:41 | |
And in order to placate his bride, | 9:48 | |
Solomon has to build a little chapel in Jerusalem, | 9:51 | |
God's holy city to the god Osiris. | 9:55 | |
It is as if Solomon needed | 10:03 | |
to learn what G. K. Chesterton said, | 10:04 | |
"One thing Christians have taught | 10:08 | |
"with a sort of savage monotony and that is to be rich | 10:10 | |
"is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck." | 10:15 | |
Is a pattern that unfolds as we contemplate wisdom | 10:24 | |
and what is going on in the rest of the world | 10:27 | |
the fact is Solomon lived and we live in a world | 10:30 | |
where wisdom is neither recognized nor rewarded. | 10:34 | |
In one of his great conversation, | 10:42 | |
Socrates is badgering a young man named Callicles | 10:44 | |
and one day he cornered him and Callicles | 10:48 | |
in exasperation says this, | 10:50 | |
"Oh, Socrates, if you are serious and what you say is true, | 10:54 | |
"then surely the life of us mortals | 11:00 | |
"must be turned upside down and apparently | 11:03 | |
"we are everywhere doing the opposite of what we should." | 11:06 | |
Or those words of St. Anthony, | 11:14 | |
a time is coming when men will go mad. | 11:17 | |
And when they see someone who is not mad, | 11:21 | |
they will attack him saying, | 11:24 | |
"You are mad, you are not like us." | 11:27 | |
Who was it Flannery O'Connor who said, | 11:32 | |
"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd." | 11:34 | |
There is always this oddness about wisdom. | 11:41 | |
This is why Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth. | 11:48 | |
God has made foolish the wisdom of the world, | 11:52 | |
the word of the cross is foolishness. | 11:56 | |
Or as we just heard from John chapter six, | 12:03 | |
Jesus has 5000 followers out there | 12:06 | |
and they are hungry and he miraculously feeds them | 12:09 | |
and they are excited. | 12:12 | |
They say, "Happy days are here again the Messiah has come!" | 12:14 | |
But Jesus would not leave well enough alone. | 12:20 | |
He attached a little sermon to the feeding. | 12:24 | |
And he said, "Man shall not live by bread alone, | 12:27 | |
but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." | 12:30 | |
And they begin to head to the exits. | 12:34 | |
And then he cranks up the sermon one more gear by saying, | 12:37 | |
"The bread I give for the life of the world is my body." | 12:41 | |
Wisdom, has got something to do with death. | 12:53 | |
Mark Helprin wrote this, | 13:02 | |
"God is very clever. | 13:04 | |
"He has beaten life into a great question | 13:07 | |
"that breaks the living and is answered only in death" | 13:11 | |
Is curious when Kings tells the story of David's death, | 13:19 | |
it does not report that Solomon grieved. | 13:23 | |
And this is unusual because in the Bible | 13:29 | |
normally when someone dies, everyone weeps, | 13:31 | |
including the man. | 13:34 | |
That reminds me of when my grandfather, | 13:39 | |
who I affectionately called Papa Howell died. | 13:43 | |
Now my Papa Howell was a wise man. | 13:48 | |
He had no education, he never made any money, | 13:53 | |
he never went anywhere, he never met anybody famous, | 13:57 | |
but he was wise. | 14:04 | |
He understood God and the world and people. | 14:07 | |
When he died, I remember the day of the funeral | 14:16 | |
we were gathered in the front yard of his home | 14:20 | |
under this old oak tree and my father | 14:25 | |
and his brothers came out of the house | 14:28 | |
and this is back in the 60s up to this time, | 14:30 | |
I don't think I had ever heard a grown man cry. | 14:33 | |
But my father and his brothers came out of the house | 14:38 | |
and they cried out loud. | 14:42 | |
And they probably would have sheltered me | 14:51 | |
and my cousins from that but I'm glad they didn't | 14:53 | |
because it showed me that death | 15:00 | |
is not something to be trifled with. | 15:04 | |
And that love can be so intense. | 15:08 | |
And this is what this foolishness of God is about. | 15:17 | |
Jesus died on the cross and Paul called that wisdom. | 15:21 | |
And what that's about, I think I witnessed recently | 15:34 | |
at a hospital visit, I went to visit a woman | 15:37 | |
who was about to go into surgery. | 15:40 | |
And when I arrived at the room, | 15:42 | |
the family was doing what families often do | 15:44 | |
in this situation, they were having sort of | 15:46 | |
a mutual cheerleading session. | 15:48 | |
They were saying, "Everything's going to be fine. | 15:50 | |
"Oh, yes, everything's going to be fine. | 15:53 | |
"Everything's going to be fine." | 15:55 | |
I chimed right in, everything's going to be fine. | 15:56 | |
And then I said let us pray. | 16:00 | |
And I prayed kind of an innocuous prayer | 16:03 | |
and as I finished the prayer though, | 16:06 | |
I looked into this woman's eyes | 16:08 | |
and I realized that she had a a tear forming | 16:12 | |
and she did not let go of my hand | 16:17 | |
and instead she reached up around me | 16:21 | |
and pulled me right down | 16:24 | |
on top of her and she began just to sob. | 16:27 | |
She was saying, "I'm so afraid." | 16:34 | |
And she kept crying. | 16:41 | |
And it was getting me wet, | 16:44 | |
you know, and finally we talked and I prayed again | 16:46 | |
and encouraged her not to be afraid | 16:52 | |
and as we separated, she reached for a Kleenex | 16:54 | |
and I thought she was going to wipe her tears | 17:00 | |
but what she did was she reached up | 17:02 | |
and she wiped the tears from my face | 17:04 | |
that had been hers. | 17:09 | |
And I think in that moment, | 17:15 | |
I was looking into the face of God. | 17:18 | |
What God did in Jesus | 17:26 | |
was that he entered into our mortal condition, | 17:31 | |
he took on himself pain and suffering | 17:36 | |
and he shed tears. | 17:45 | |
And it's even strangely the case that before our tears | 17:51 | |
are our own, they are God's tears. | 17:54 | |
But at the end of the day what God does | 18:03 | |
is God reaches out and wipes our tears away. | 18:06 | |
On the cross, Jesus flung open a window | 18:17 | |
into the very heart of God. | 18:22 | |
And at the table when we come for the Lord's Supper, | 18:29 | |
we are invited to become sharers in the heart | 18:33 | |
of God which is all compassion, all wisdom. | 18:38 | |
This eludes a lot of us who are smart | 18:53 | |
and have degrees from places is like Duke. | 18:58 | |
One of the student assignments that I got | 19:02 | |
when I was in school here was, | 19:04 | |
they sent me to be a chaplain at the High-rise Prison | 19:06 | |
in Morganton, North Carolina | 19:09 | |
and they couldn't find a place to house me | 19:10 | |
and so they put me in a dormitory at Broughton Hospital. | 19:12 | |
Now if you're new to this area, Broughton Hospital, | 19:15 | |
its place for people who are very much mentally ill. | 19:20 | |
And as part of the deal for me to live there, | 19:25 | |
I had to go and conduct a weekly worship service. | 19:27 | |
So for the first one, I went there, | 19:30 | |
and I had written this wonderful sermon, | 19:32 | |
I was convinced that this sermon would change their lives | 19:34 | |
and probably all of Western Civilization as well. | 19:39 | |
And I stood up and I began to preach it | 19:44 | |
and right off the bat, a very tall man | 19:46 | |
came walking toward me. | 19:49 | |
I kept preaching and he came up right next to the pulpit | 19:52 | |
and then he laid down and went to sleep. | 19:57 | |
And I kept preaching and no one else | 20:02 | |
was paying too much attention either. | 20:05 | |
And I got very discouraged | 20:07 | |
and I decided this is a colossal waste of time. | 20:10 | |
We were supposed to have communion so I thought, | 20:16 | |
well, I'll go ahead and serve it to them. | 20:18 | |
I blessed the elements and then I came down in front | 20:21 | |
and the most wonderful thing happened. | 20:23 | |
Each person who came, held out their hands | 20:29 | |
with this incredible level of expectation | 20:36 | |
and when I handed them that piece of bread, | 20:39 | |
you would think I had handed them a huge nugget of gold. | 20:42 | |
And they received it and most of them hugged me | 20:49 | |
right there on the spot. | 20:53 | |
Thank you for this. | 20:54 | |
This eludes us who are smart and wealthy. | 21:02 | |
And I can also imagine that cross on which Jesus died, | 21:10 | |
it's made of olive wood, olive wood does not | 21:14 | |
easily plane into straight lines. | 21:17 | |
I can imagine that olive wood being somewhat gnarled | 21:20 | |
and theologically we might even think of it | 21:24 | |
as being gnarled into the form of a question mark. | 21:26 | |
This wisdom of God stands as an eternal question | 21:34 | |
to you and to me in terms of how we will live our lives. | 21:44 | |
Will we be wise | 21:54 | |
which in the world's eyes will seem foolish? | 22:01 | |
Mother Teresa said this, "At the end of life | 22:08 | |
"we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received | 22:13 | |
"by how much money we have made, | 22:17 | |
"by how many great things we have done, | 22:19 | |
"we will be judged by Jesus' words, | 22:22 | |
"I was hungry and you gave me to eat. | 22:25 | |
"I was naked and you clothed me. | 22:31 | |
"I was homeless and you took me in." | 22:35 | |
Brothers and sisters let us become wise | 22:41 | |
and learn from the saints | 22:53 | |
and from the poor | 22:59 | |
and from the odd. | 23:03 | |
At the foot of the cross, | 23:08 | |
at the table of our Lord. | 23:12 | |
So that at the end of life our epitaph | 23:18 | |
could be like that one that Cervantes | 23:21 | |
ascribe to that fool Don Quixote. | 23:24 | |
Here lies the noble fearless Knight, | 23:29 | |
whose valor rose to such a height. | 23:32 | |
When death at last had struck him down, | 23:35 | |
his was the victory and renown. | 23:38 | |
He reckoned the world of little prize | 23:43 | |
and was a bugbear in men's eyes | 23:47 | |
but had the fortune in his age | 23:52 | |
to live like a fool but die a sage. | 23:56 |
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