Wisdom is knowing yourself--and that you're not that wise

1 Kings 3:4-28

Solomon is famous for his wisdom, so I figured on this Confirmation Sunday that I would talk a little bit about wisdom, since that’s something we could all use a bit more of.

            For Solomon, wisdom might have been a gift from on high, but for most of us, wisdom is something learned. It requires practice, discipline, and time, which is why many of our elders are so wise. They’ve had a lot of time to practice wisdom, and they’ve done a lot of listening in their lives. But age is also no guarantee of wisdom, because it doesn’t just come to us through osmosis—and it doesn’t come randomly either. Instead, the wise possess a few traits—actually, more or less the same traits that Jesus talks about on the Sermon on the Mount. He said: “Blessed are the poor… the mourners… the meek… those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers… the persecuted… the reviled… and those falsely accused.”

If you want to be wise, you have to practice being those things. Have you practiced being poor? Mourning? Being meek? Being merciful? Have you practiced any of that? Because if not, you will not learn wisdom. The opposite is also true, have you practiced richness? Haughtiness? Triumph? Have you been the persecutor? The one mocking others? Then, you can’t learn wisdom.

This might sound all well and good, but if it only lives off in the realm of theory it’s not of much use, so I am going to be explicit and specific.

If you want to be wise, you need to practice being poor? You need to learn how to deny yourself! You give things away. Jesus will tell you that you have to give everything away. That’s what it takes to be perfectly wise; that’s what it takes to earn your salvation on your own, but since you won’t do that—and since you have a promise of grace because of Jesus, dying on the cross—then at least you can practice being poor on occasion. Give stuff away without worrying about what the person is going to do with it. Be cheerleaders for those less fortunate. And, most of all, understand that the person looking back at you in the mirror is not so rich, whether he or she has money and things or not, because richness is not about how much we have but about how much we give away.

And what about mourning? How can we practice mourning? Well, for some of you that’s easy: You lose somebody. It will happen to you. You’ll lose grandparents, and parents, and siblings, but you might also lose children or grandchildren. Then, you will really practice mourning, and it won’t seem like anything that could produce wisdom, because it will be the purest kind of suffering. Grief seems like the worst of all things—like it drains the color from our universe—except you may discover wisdom, on the far side of grief, when the color seeps back into your world and, ultimately, you can see things you never had before.

Meekness is hard to practice in a world that says you’re supposed to be the best. This might be the hardest challenge of all, but let me tell you a secret: Nothing will help you put your life in perspective better than taking a giant “L” on a big stage. Be a loser. Don’t hide from it. Embrace it and grow from it. One of the things that bothers me to no end is when our high school sports teams are playing a game and in the lead-up to the game there are a thousand posts on Facebook and Twitter, and if the team wins there are a thousand posts after the game, but if we lose, you might see some “I’m proud of you” posts, but nobody will share the score. I can go on Facebook at 10:00 p.m. on a game night and tell you whether KCC has won a game not based on what people are saying but whether people are posting anything at all. It’s OK to lose. In fact, it’s the only thing that will make you wiser. Winning is fun, but losing is where you become a better person.

            I’m not going to go through all the beatitudes and tell you what it looks like, because I don’t want to preach for an hour. More than that, me telling you what wisdom looks like won’t make you wise unless you actually decide to practice it. Instead, I want to share with you what you might gain if you practice traits that lead to wisdom.

            Firstly, wisdom is foresight. It’s the ability to guess at what is coming, because you are capable of assessing things better and more objectively. A study for Pew this past week made some waves when it demonstrated that younger Americans were better than older Americans at distinguishing facts from opinions. There goes the Pew Research Center stoking a little more generational conflict! Lost in the headline was the fact that only about one-in-five people—of all ages—who took the quiz managed to correctly distinguish all the facts and opinions. One-in-five! If you can’t even tell what is a fact and what is an opinion, how are you ever going to be able to figure out what comes next?

            Next, wisdom is knowing when to act and when to defer. Many of us should be doing more action; some of us should be acting less and listening more. The problem I find is that many of those who should be acting hold back and many who are doing way too much acting keep at it. Wisdom is knowing which you are and why.

            Lastly, and I think most importantly, wisdom is knowing your self. Most of us are told overriding two messages in our lives that are in constant conflict with one another: The first thing you are told is to “Believe in yourself!” and the second is “Be realistic!” But here’s the problem: So often the people who believe in themselves have no concept of their abilities or limitations, and equally often those who try to be realistic don’t understand their strengths. At the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece there are words inscribed above the entry: “Temet Nosce.” Temet Nosce: Know thyself. I have it above the door in my office. Know yourself, or you’ll never know anything.

If you practice it, wisdom is that it will teach you some sobering lessons. One is that you aren’t that big and important. There are nearly eight billion people in the world and you are just one of them. You don’t know better than the rest of them, and you aren’t more special than the rest of them. Many of them are, in fact, a good deal wiser than you, or me, or anybody else in this room. Yet, because God has created you in his image, you are, in fact, glorious, and through Jesus you are perfected in all of your imperfections. Believe me: You’ve got warts. In spite of that, some of you will live lives that will make your funerals easy someday. Somebody will stand up and have a million good things to say about you, but you know what? None of it is anything but a hill of wet, moldy sugar beets compared to the majestic mountain where God meets us.

In the end, wisdom is understanding that you are not God. If you only take one thing away from wisdom, let it be this: You are not God. You will never be God, and God doesn’t love you because you are the special-est, most wonderful creature on the planet; no matter what the commercials in between the games of Fortnite will tell you. You aren’t the best. But. BUT. BUT you are a child of God, and that is literally the only thing that matters. Wisdom is understanding that one simple fact: You stink, but through Christ, you are glorious.