In cultures around the world, wisdom has enormous prestige. In ours? Not so much. Money, power, prestige, fame, influence, success — these are things we are supposed to clamor for. Wisdom we don’t seem to care about as much. The truth is that Wisdom has a bit of an image problem, nowadays. And perhaps you have to admit, compared to many of the stories in the Bible which are about the miraculous and wonderful, the wisdom literature of the Bible may seem a bit ho hum.

There is just one small problem. My life, at least — and I am speaking only for myself here — very rarely looks like many of the Bible stories.  I don’t know about you, but so far in my life, there have been a grand total of zero burning bushes, zero plagues of locusts, zero occasions on which I was able to walk on water, and exactly zero times that Jesus showed up at one of my dinner parties to turn the water into wine.  Ze-ro. That does not mean I don’t believe in the Bible miracle stories, by the way. It just means that they didn’t happen to me.

Ah, real life. Generally challenging and largely free of miracles — at least of the dramatic, obvious sort.

This, friends, is the moment when Lady Wisdom walks through the door. She is the woman of the hour when our lives feel totally normal — and for “normal” I mean exhausting, stressful, confusing, or even outright devastating.  Lady Wisdom is the woman you need when your young children make you want to tear your hair out, when you have lost your job, when you get a sobering medical diagnosis, when you become a caregiver for an elderly parent despite lacking the strength and means to do so … I’ll stop now.

We can’t even say that that these situations are exceptional because they are in fact what human lives are made of. Even in the best case scenario we are limited to about 80 years here “under the sun” and — spoiler alert — not a single one of them is going to be trouble free.  I’d be willing to bet that every person in this room this morning is in some situation where you feel you could use God’s wisdom — like right now. I mean, can we get some practical help down here please?

We need wisdom. We really need God’s wisdom.  We need wisdom for the gray areas of life, for really big decisions, for really tough relationships, and for the times when every deck seems stacked against us. But you know what? We need wisdom to do the apparently simple things and to do those things well, that is, in line with God’s purposes and in a spirit of gentleness and love, fairness and mercy.

In the wisdom literature, wisdom is not a mere concept but a woman who goes by the name of Lady Wisdom.  The Hebrew authors want us to know that an invitation to Wisdom is first and foremost an invitation into a relationship, to sit at wisdom’s feet and to learn from a person, and that person is our living God.

And the beauty of it is that the God beside us appears to us and speaks to us in ways that are as unique as we are. Somewhere in our busy lives, we must find some time to show up and listen. Here is the bottom line, if we cannot find the time to listen to the words of God, then our odds of acquiring God’s wisdom are slim to none.
From Proverbs 9, “For the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”

Wisdom does a lot more than enable smart choices. Wisdom changes us. She transforms us.  When God grants us wisdom, we don’t just expand our brains by a few extra cells. When we learn God’s wisdom, we are acquiring neither “street smarts” nor a PhD in Theology. We are learning to see as God sees, to love as God loves, we are learning to view our lives, including our troubles, from an eternal perspective instead of our grasshopper view. We learn wisdom in and through our God who walks with us, the God who speaks to us, the God who freely shares his holy truth with us, and this cannot leave us unchanged.

So it is in fact only when we gaze at Jesus Christ, our brother, our friend, that we see what wisdom really is — he our Christ who turned the wisdom of the world on its head, our Christ who spurned the wisdom of the learned for the simplicity of a child.

May we all be made rich in this wisdom.