Ephesians 5:15-20

Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "Wise"

When I was ten-years-old my favorite TV show was The Greatest American Hero. If you’re old enough to know the show I’m talking about, you know that it was about an unlikely superhero. In some ways all superheroes are unlikely: Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, Steve Rogers. The superhero on this show taught a class of high school kids who for one reason or another didn’t fit the traditional educational mold. That may have made him a hero, but it isn’t what made him a SUPER hero. That part of the story was that he had received a special suit- complete with cape, boots and a spiffy insignia- in the middle of the California desert one night from some kind of UFO. You can start to see the appeal of the show to ten-year-old me. Superheroes, UFOs, what more could a kid want? But the charm of the show came from the fact that despite having a suit with all sorts of super powers, our hero had lost the instructions that went with it. He couldn’t quite get the hang of how the suit was supposed to work. And he couldn’t figure out why he, this lowly school teacher, had been picked to have these powers, or what exactly he was supposed to do with them. Most of the time, we find ourselves without a special suit, or the superpowers to go with them, asking the same things from our life of faith. We don’t quite have the hang of the gifts that God has given us, and we feel like we could definitely use a little more direction in how to go about using what we have been given to the glory of God. Mostly, our efforts look like going to this church, or that, reading the Bible, or simply holding a finger to the wind to see which way it’s blowing. All of it in the hope of discovering something like an answer to the questions of calling and purpose. The obstacle we often encounter in our quest to understand our own gifts and how they should be used isn’t the absence of an answer, but quite the opposite. One church says one thing, another says something else. And each of them will back up their doctrine with a whole set of scripture citations ready-made for their particular point of view. One website gives you their perspective on the world and politics, only to have those claims called into question by another website, or YouTube video, or Tik Tok influencer. There are so many answers competing with each other that most of the time the only thing that we can feel certain of is the uncertainty of it all as we stumble along trying to figure out who, or what to believe. Because we want to get it right.  

Getting it right is how we get rewarded, not just on game shows but in life. We think if we say the right thing, or do the right things that life will and should reward us. All we have to do is go to the right school, or choose the right career, marry the right person, raise our kids in the right way. We tend to think that way, too, about God. If we say the right prayer, or ask for the right things God will reward us. If we just put in the work, everything will fall into place.  

A year ago, I had a difficult conversation with a woman who was dying. She was having a hard time coming to terms with what the doctors were telling her. In the beginning, when she got her diagnosis, she made up her mind that she would beat her illness. She would take the treatments, she would change her life, she would do the work. So when the doctors told her, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing more we can do for you, your body is not responding to the treatment.” She didn’t know what to do with that information. “All my life,” she told me, “I’ve been a winner. If you’re willing to work hard, you win.” She had no place to put this information, that she had lost this particular fight. 

In our first reading we heard about God coming to Solomon in a dream. Ask for whatever you want, he’s told, and it’s yours. Solomon asks for the right thing and wouldn’t you know he gets more besides. Only not really. Take another look. Solomon was in a situation not unlike an uncertain superhero. Through the unlikeliest of political circumstances, he finds himself made king, a title that endowed him with certain powers. It also conferred upon him significant responsibility; not only for his own actions as king, but also for the people of God whom he had been given, as king, to govern. For all the power and position, Solomon knew that it wouldn’t be an easy task. There were tribal factions, divided loyalties, and any number of would-be successors ready to claim his throne for themselves. There were plenty of people with ready-made answers to the questions of how the king should rule and serve this nation of Israel. What he asked God for was what he would truly need more than anything else. Not answers, not a one-size-fits-all set of instructions, but a mind that that could understand when something was good and when something was bad for the people involved. This is the kind of wisdom that the writer of this letter to the church in Ephesus is talking about. Over the course of history, the players and the scenery may continue to change, but what many bemoan as the rise of relativism  is simply an heightened awareness of a struggle as old as the story about the Garden of Eden, how to know the difference between what is good and what is evil beyond all the rigid, pre-fabricated molds of conventional wisdom. Now most of the time conventional wisdom holds, but it does not hold God. In point of fact, God is the one who usually breaks from convention. Conventional wisdom holds that if you work hard enough you’ll win. Or that the more you have, the more you are worth. Or that there is no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right. Or that the only was to deal with an enemy is to conquer and defeat them. In other words, conventional wisdom is made up of easy answers for an uneasy world. They are the words of empty idolatry because their widely held acceptance can be deceptively dangerous; deceptive because there are no easy answers for an uneasy world. 

It pleased God that Solomon asked for an understanding mind, and not the things that conventional wisdom tells us we should want. It pleased God that instead of asking for the trappings of a good life, Solomon wanted to know how to live a good life, not just for himself but for the people that God had given him to rule. When it comes to pleasing God it isn’t so much a matte of giving the right answer, it’s about looking to guided by the unconventional wisdom of God in each and every moment of our lives.  

The novel Franny and Zoey by J.D. Salinger was first published in the late 1950s in two separate parts, two years apart in the magazine The New Yorker. As such, it lacks some of the sensitivity we’ve come to expect in talking about certain people. But in it one of the title characters, Franny Glass, is having something of an existential crisis. The youngest of seven children, Franny grew up performing with her brothers and sisters on a children’s radio quiz show entitled It’s a Wise Child. Stuck at twenty, she finds herself in a state of collapse and fed up with an accumulation of knowledge that hasn’t led to any kind of wisdom. In desperation she has fallen into a kind of fixation over a particular kind of prayer to Jesus. “Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” It’s a practice that gives her brother Zooey, in his own word, “the willies.” Finally, frustrated by what he sees as her resignation to a world of easy answers, he challenges her. “If it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing out on every single religious action going on in this house… How are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one, “he asks, “if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?” He then goes on to remind her of their days on the quiz show. “I remember about the fifth time I ever went on ‘Wise Child’,” he recalls, “…Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door… I was furious. The studio audience were morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just… wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them… I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He never did tell me who [she] was, but I shined my shoes for [that] Lady every time I ever went on the air… I’ll tell you a terrible secret- Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Lady. And don’t you know- listen to me now- don’t you know who [that] Lady really is?... It’s Christ himself, Christ himself.” 

That is what it the unconventional wisdom of God looks like, in the end. An unlikely Messiah born without wealth, a teacher of revolutionary inclusion, arrested without protest, a savior who defeats death by dying himself and who, beyond all convention, is raised from death to be the light of the world.  When we find ourselves living in that light, in the light of God’s unconventional wisdom we too begin to reflect that life ourselves. We are no longer left to spend the most of our time following conventional wisdom, but are called as children of that light to make the most of the time we have. We make the most of the time- make the most of our lives- when we shine our shoes, shine our light for the sake of the one we follow on the unconventional way of what is truly wise.