The following sermon was delivered by the Rev. Dr. Jennifer Copeland on Sunday, September 15, 2024, at New Creation United Methodist Church in Durham.
Proverbs 1:20-33; Wisdom of Solomon 7:26-8:1
When I read these pieces of scripture that talk about wisdom, I notice a few things that are always consistent. First of all, wisdom is always referred to by a feminine pronoun. Long before we started listing our pronouns — Jennifer, she/her/hers — wisdom was already doing it. “Sincerely yours, Wisdom (she/her/hers).”
It’s all over the Bible. In the reading today from Proverbs: “she cries out in the street,” and even the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon says: “she can do all things.” She/her/hers. So, clearly, wisdom is a woman. Now that we’ve established that, a whole new world of opportunity opens up before us.
We can talk about the meaning of wisdom. We can talk about who is wise. We can talk about how one becomes wise, even if you’re not a woman.
I’d venture being smart and being wise are not the same thing. Being educated and being wise are not the same thing. Even having common sense and being wise might not be the same thing, though common sense is probably closer than being smart and educated. I’m not trying to throw shade on smart people or education—believe me, I have my share of diplomas, but diplomas don’t make us wise.
Wisdom might come from something as ordinary as having lived a little—or lived a lot. Still, I know some old people that I don’t think are all that wise.
Maybe it’s not about living long enough to know some things, but it’s also about how we live while we learn those things. That gets a little more complicated since we don’t always have as much choice about how we live as we think we do. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a wide receiver. I really wanted to be Drew Pearson. Remember him? That also tells you how old I am. But girls couldn’t play football when I was in high school. They still don’t really play football, even though we have a few exceptions in a few places. Generally speaking, it’s not a girl thing. So, I played football in the backyard and on the beach. I was pretty good at catching the football.
But the point of the story is, we don’t have as many choices about how we live as we think we do. I could not choose to live as a wide receiver. Few can. Let’s consider something more common, like where we go to school. The North Carolina General Assembly would have you believe that “school choice” is real, that with an opportunity scholarship you can go to any elementary school you want. Meanwhile, the public elementary school district in which you live doesn’t have enough money to buy new books, never mind pay teachers a living wage, because all the money has gone to private school vouchers. And that voucher will get you 26% of the way toward tuition at your local private school. That’s not a choice.
Of course, wisdom does not necessarily depend on school choice. I only mean to explain that choice is not as readily available as we think it is. The question for the sake of wisdom is: does how we live have anything to do with how wise we become? And, in so far as possible, are there choices we can make to place ourselves on a path toward wisdom?
How we live while we’re learning the things that might help us be wise does make a great deal of difference. I’ve met many well-meaning people who honestly do not see the Voter ID mandate in North Carolina as a problem. These are people who’ve had a driver’s license since they were 15, three years before they were old enough to vote. What’s the problem? Everybody has a driver’s license, right?
And then I tell them the story of my grandmother who was born before women had the right to vote and never missed an election once we got it. Until she gave up her driver’s license because she thought she was too old to be driving anymore—not even to the grocery store. And then she had surgery for an aneurism and lost a lot of mobility. All to say, she didn’t have her driver’s license and she couldn’t get to the DMV or the board of elections for one of their approved voter IDs. Never mind, if she got there, she’d have to sit for hours and hours in line. Have you heard how short staffed the DMV is because the general assembly won’t allocate enough money to hire enough staff to make the place run efficiently? Do you think that’s an accident? It certainly makes getting a voter ID a little bit harder than it should be.
All of that contributes to making it hard for my grandmother to vote. My conversation partner had never thought of that because he is only 24 years old and he can’t imagine being 94. But now he is a little wiser than he was before and is asking some questions about the Voter ID law.
And since I’m talking about voter IDs, let’s be clear. These rules are not in place because there is voter fraud in N.C. There isn’t any; that’s been proven. North Carolina has some of the best voter security protocols in the country. The rules are in place to keep my grandmother from voting in case she’d vote against the lawmakers who made the silly voter ID law. And you want to know who is really left out by this law? College students and young adults who move a lot. I never stayed at one address after I left home for college for longer than three years until I was 36 years old. Every time I moved I had to register to vote, update my driver’s license, and learn the polling places. But I did it every time. Every year, it gets harder and harder to do it, disenfranchising vast numbers of our young people.
Fun fact: if young people voted at the same level as boomers, there would be 46 million more votes cast in the upcoming election. Do you think the people currently running the N.C. General Assembly and the United States Congress want 46 million more people to vote in November? Especially 46 million diverse and justice-seeking young people?
Well, I want them to vote, so I’m asking everybody here to reach out to the young people in your world. Make sure they are registered to vote, preferably in N.C., if they have that option, because we’re going to matter in this election. Make sure they have the right ID. Sometimes a college ID will work, but if you go to App State or ECU, I’m told you better double-check. I also know the current digital Duke ID will not pass, but they’re working on getting hard copies for the upper-class students like they have for the first-years.
You might be wondering by now, what this has to do with wisdom. Besides my intermittent doses of voter education, I’m making the point that where we are located determines what we know and shapes what we believe. That’s not bad, it’s just the way it is. So, when things feel like they’re not quite right and we might be the only ones who feel that things are not quite right, how do figure out what is right? How do we know the difference between information and propaganda? How do we recognize wisdom? Where do we get it for ourselves?
I will tell you this. Some things are just wrong and we shouldn’t believe them.
- The earth is not flat; don’t believe it is.
- Climate change is real; better believe it is.
- Gun violence can be prevented. I know some ways to do it.
Wisdom has some characteristics that distinguish it from propaganda. The Book of Proverbs where we started today claims to be entirely “for learning about wisdom” (1:2). And the first 19 verses, that we didn’t read today, offer us a list of how to live in order to be wise. There are no surprises. We hear about righteousness, justice, and equity (v. 3); prudence (v. 4); discerning (v. 5); understanding (v. 6). But when we get to verse seven, we learn what’s really at stake. “Fools despise wisdom” (v. 7).
And the verses we did read for today starting at verse twenty, give us an apt description of what fools look like. By the time I get to the end of the first chapter, I know one thing for sure, I don’t want to be a fool. I want to live in pursuit of wisdom.
I have spent the better part of this year thinking about wisdom. I didn’t call it that until this week when I started writing this sermon. Before this week, I was thinking and reading and writing and talking about Christian nationalism. I even helped direct two online information sessions after all the reading and thinking I had been doing. In one of them, I was a featured speaker, so I’ve spent a lot of time on this.
I’m still thinking and reading and writing and talking. The talking is probably the most important part now after a year of thinking. I’ll talk with people anywhere they want to meet, anytime they want to talk because one of the places we find wisdom is in the gathered community. No one person has a monopoly on wisdom, but when we get together to think and read and talk, we can discover it.
I’ve had the wonderful opportunity in my life to be influenced by some magnificent people, wise people. Teachers in college and seminary were great, but probably the most important were my teachers and coaches from high school. People who nurtured my quest for learning and didn’t try to control my thoughts. People who looked out for me when I was headed a little bit too far off to the left or the right. People who made sure I graduated on time.
True story; don’t tell my parents. I had cut class so many times my senior year of high school that I was in danger of failing senior English. I had an A in the class because it was mostly reading and writing and I could always do that no matter where I was and turn in my stuff on time. So, instead of going to class, I went to the gym or the library. Sometimes I didn’t bother to come back to school when I left for lunch or I went to the lake with friends who didn’t have afternoon classes. I did any manner of things besides showing up for a class that I was acing anyway.
But if I had been marked absent by my teacher one more time that year I would have failed the class through truancy. And because English was required for a high school diploma, I would not have graduated from high school that year. My English teacher pulled me aside and told me not to miss one more class. Show up get counted present and then go to the gym or go to lunch or go to the library or go wherever it is that you go, but don’t fail to show up. Those were wise words that have served me long beyond high school. There are simply some places where we must show up.
When I finished graduate school and thought back over my life about the people in my life I needed to thank, I thanked that English teacher. Not because she made sure I graduated from high school on time, but because she also taught me how to write. Other people honed my writing skills along the way, but she started it. Painstakingly, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, she taught me how to write when I would go by her room early in the morning before school or late in the day after school—clearly not during class.
And what I know after three score and a year is, wisdom depends on those kinds of people, but those people are pieces of a greater whole. They are part of the total network around us, the village, or for our purposes, the Church. In order to be on the path toward wisdom, we need a community of faith around us that struggles together to parse out the meaning of scripture and make it relevant for our lives. We need a community of faith around us that struggles together when things we’ve believed all our lives no longer make sense to us. And we need a community of faith that will listen to us even when we’re the only one asking the question.
These scripture readings today all talk about wisdom in some form or another. We are instructed to seek wisdom and avoid foolishness. Just for clarification, scripture generally understands fools to be those who ignore God’s precepts, that list we mentioned earlier from the first 19 verses of Proverbs. It’s not necessarily that they aren’t smart; they’re just not wise. How do we know the difference?
Throughout the history of the church, heresies arise. Sometimes it takes years to understand the difference between heresy and reformation. In my thinking about wisdom this week, I’ve recognized the heresy of Christian nationalism is not a different way to reach the same end; it’s a different end. Just because we hear things that sound Christian because they use the right words or put on a pious face, doesn’t mean it comes from God. It is the task of the faithful community to understand the difference and choose wisdom.
It is the task of the faithful community to know the difference between truth and lies; information and propaganda; instruction and indoctrination; wisdom and foolishness.
I have concluded we find wisdom reflected in God’s love for the world. Does what we hear reflect that love the way a mirror reflects light? Or is it swallowed by the darkness because there is no love to reflect. Look for the reflection of God’s love for the world. That’s how we know we are hearing wisdom.
And then, and this is where it gets hard, call it out when people say “Christian,” but don’t reflect God’s love. Don’t stand by while others replace God’s wisdom with their foolishness. This is a moment for the Church. We’ve had other moments. We’ve handled some better than others. But we need to handle this one. Go home and read the first chapter of Proverbs again, the whole thing. And then ask yourself, how can I be someone who reflects God’s love? How can I be wise? Thanks be to God for giving us a portion of wisdom.
