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Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Today's Frontline Devotion Enlightened |
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Frontline Devotion for Friday, February 2, 2010 by Mike Martine
Ecclesiastes 8:1 Who is like the wise man and who knows the interpretation of a matter? A man's wisdom illumines him and causes his stern face to beam.
It is said the people who are “enlightened” tend to laugh a lot.
It’s hard to know what to do with this information. In Christianity, we have largely lost the idea of “becoming wise” as many Christians have mistaken memorizing bible verses and accepting Jesus as our savior for “wisdom.”
It’s certainly a wise thing to read your bible and accept Jesus—but that alone doesn’t make you “wise.” Some of the dumbest things ever said have been said by believing Christians: prompting St. Augustine to say, “Lord, save us from your followers.”
In the days of Jesus (and earlier, when Ecclesiastes was written), wisdom was seen as the ability to interpret scripture. And this ability was usually seen as inherent upon the person’s training as a rabbi.
To become a rabbi, a young man had to serve as a student under an established rabbi for a number of years. In this time, the student read scripture and, more than memorizing, learned to interpret it. Scripture would be read allowed by the students; then, they would discuss it, argue about it, consider what it meant in their own time, and even decide whether or not it meant anything to them anymore.
This process, called “binding and loosing” meant that some parts of scripture would be seen as applying to today (binding) and some would not (loosing). Incidentally, we do the same thing, we just don’t admit it. For example, women don’t have to wear hats to church anymore, even though St. Paul says that they must.
The process also meant that students, and even rabbis, would disagree. We can see this at work even in Jesus’ day, when people ask him about divorce. The reason they ask is that other rabbis have given other answers—some say divorce is allowed, some say it is not. And this kind of disagreement among rabbis was considered normal.
Here’s the thing—wisdom was not just a matter of “knowing” the faith. It was a matter of engaging scripture, engaging life, and engaging God on a deep, deep level. A level that acknowledges that human knowledge is limited and that the mysteries of God are endless. But, in all of this, there was a great freedom—an understanding that God has called us to search, explore, and plumb the depths of wisdom with courage and abandon, recognizing God’s presence with us in the search, and recognizing that we won’t always be right. But that we should always, always love.
So…how do we get there? Most of us, even with seminary training, have not received the kind of wisdom-training Ecclesiastes is talking about.
I can’t tell you. But I can give you some ideas about how enlightened, wise people function, and if we emulate these traits, I think it brings us a little closer.
Enlightened or wise people…
• Live in compassion for others
• Are generous
• Are moral
• Laugh at themselves and at life
• Don’t like gossip
• Seek to understand, rather than judge
• Understand we are all walking the same path, and try to help others on the
way
• Never think they have it all “figured out”
• Look to the spirit for guidance
• Never confuse human will with the spirit
• Live in the moment
• Live in joy
• Recognize it is all a gift
God bless your journey on this day. Peace.