Proverbs 9
“Two Invitations”
October 13, 2019 – Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
You get two invitations to Thanksgiving dinner. A distant relative invites you for their favorite dish of liver and onions, with a side of kale-quinoa salad, and no-fat frozen yogurt for dessert. They will show slides of their recent trip to Boise, followed by an interminable game of charades. You are also asked by close friends to come enjoy a golden turkey and stuffing together with baked sweet potatoes, yeasty rolls, and three kinds of pie with real whipped cream. There will be plenty of good conversation and some football on television. Which invitation do you accept?
For Thanksgiving, you might think the answer is, as they say, a no-brainer, but when it comes to deciding between another pair of invitations pictured here in Proverbs, “no-brainer” is a more literal description of one choice.
What I just read wraps up first big section of Proverbs, nine chapters in a standard Bible which set the basic parameters of the whole book. The female figure of Wisdom personified has appeared several times. We’ve been warned against getting involved with an evil, immoral woman. Previously, she was a literal, human temptress, luring unwary men into unfaithfulness. But now here, starting on page 210 of Poets, both female figures are symbolic, allegorical images representing Wisdom on one hand, and Folly on the other.
The first and last poems of this section are invitations from those two, from Wisdom and Folly, dinner invitations to their homes. All the rest of what follows in this book is a way of asking which invitation you are going to accept. Are you going to eat the good food of Wisdom or are you sitting down to the meager fare of Folly?
Each woman has a house. Each of them invites us in. Each of them offers us a meal. Which woman, which house, which meal will we choose? Wisdom or Folly? That question sums up the previous eight chapters. And it tells us that all the little either/ors, the little choices of many proverbs still to come, are all steps in one direction or the other.
One evening a long time ago our family arrived at a little seaside village on the island of Crete. After checking into our hotel, we were hungry. We went down to a long promenade on the water. At least a dozen open-air restaurants were lined up side by side. Every establishment had a menu with specials displayed on a sandwich board out front. It was a slow night. Proprietors stood at the entrances and called to us. “We have the best souvlaki!” “Our fish is the freshest!” “We will give you a free glass of wine!” We took our time, walking the length, examining each menu, listening to each pitch, checking how clean the tables were. We went back and forth twice before we decided where to eat that night.
Proverbs asks you to consider just two invitations. Look at the menu, listen to the pitch, examine the house and what it holds before you decide. This is not just about what you will have for dinner tonight, or where you will live for a season. As we hear and see in the description of these two invitations, the choice between Wisdom and Folly is life and death, an eternal and everlasting decision.
In both cases the invitation starts out the same. In the middle of page 210 we read about Wisdom, “’Come in with me,’ she urges the simple.” It says exactly the same about Folly on page 211. They both appeal to the same sort of customer, the “simple,” the ignorant, “those who lack good judgment.” It’s not very flattering, but the first step in making a good choice here is admitting that’s a true description of you and me.
Walking along that boardwalk of eating places, our family was “simple,” to use the word Proverbs does. We had never been there before. We had no one to advise us. We couldn’t speak Greek. We were ignorant tourists. Both we and our eager hosts knew it.
In many ways we are ignorant tourists walking through life. Most major decisions we face are made without ever having done it before. Where to go to college. Whom to marry. Which job to accept. Which house to buy. How to raise a child. What church to attend. When to retire. When to give up driving. What retirement center to enter for our last few years. Many choices come only once. They have to be made for the first time, with no experience, little understanding, and not much wisdom. We are “simple” as we listen here to Wisdom and Folly giving us their best shot.
We start out ignorant when it comes to much of what matters in life, but it’s still possible to make good, reasonable choices. You can start by looking, like we looked at the décor and cleanliness of those various tavernas, at the houses where Wisdom and Folly live and at the patronesses themselves.
The first verse starts out telling us Wisdom has “built her house,” “carved its seven columns.” You might try to discern what those columns represent, maybe seven intellectual gifts of the Holy Spirit from Isaiah 11, or the seven churches of Revelation, or perhaps the seven days of creation. But in Scripture seven is also a number of completeness, of wholeness. Seven pillars means a large house, a spacious, open, beautiful place.
Wisdom is a busy woman, a woman working hard to make her house ready for guests. She built the place. She’s prepared a great banquet, mixed wine, and set the table. Then she sends out her servants to call in guests. She’s like many good hosts and hostesses I’ve ever met, bustling about making sure everything is prepared and perfect, but still there at the door ready to greet her guests with warmth and love.
Then in the middle of this section we hear a description of what it might be like to live in Wisdom’s house, beginning with a bit of reflection on “mockers,” those who reject and mock Wisdom’s invitation. Those who mock knowledge and education and constructive criticism will only hurt and hate those who try to correct them.
On the other hand, those who come to Wisdom accept correction and instruction. They grow wiser and more righteous. They keep on learning and realize that fearing God, respecting and obeying Him, is the foundation of being wise. Wisdom gives those who live in her house long life. But those who “scorn wisdom” only suffer.
In the last section, on page 211 in Poets, verse 13 in a regular Bible, we meet the other woman. Folly is “brash.” “She is ignorant and doesn’t know it.” What is she doing? Wisdom is up and about, getting things ready, but Folly “sits in her doorway.” All she does is “call out” to those “minding their own business.” There’s no hint she has prepared anything, not any mention of work. You can see the difference in the menu she offers.
Wisdom prepared a banquet, literally “meat,” and mixed wine, probably with spices to make it especially delightful. She invites us in to drink her wine and eat her food. But Folly has only water to offer. And the attraction of her water is that it’s stolen, the pleasure of taking what belongs to someone else. Instead of meat, her food is literally just “bread.” She suggests we eat it in secret, like junk food addicts sneaking off to scarf down a bag of potato chips.
The real difference between the homes of Wisdom and Folly is in the last verses of each of their descriptions, verse 6 and verse 18 in standard format. Wisdom invites us to “Leave your simple ways behind, and begin to live; learn to use good judgment.” Wisdom’s house is a house in which you learn and live. That’s her invitation. At Folly’s house we have to be told by the writer “ but little do they know that the dead are there. Her guests are in the depths of the grave.” A house of life versus a house of death. Like Folly herself, those who enter it are ignorant and don’t know it.
Wisdom in this first part of Proverbs often sounds like God, even like the Holy Spirit or Jesus Himself. Turn back to page 209, chapter 8. She was with God in the beginning. By her the world was made. Now here Wisdom offers us life. As Paul says in our reading from his second letter to Timothy, we have salvation in Jesus. “If we have died with him, we will also live with him.” As we saw in those verses in between the women’s invitations, Wisdom leads to God, to Christ, and in Him we find life.
Go back to those who mock wisdom, who are happily ignorant and uneducated. It doesn’t do any good to try and correct such a person. All you will get for your trouble is insults and hatred. Honk your horn at the crazy driver who deliberately cuts you off. At the grocery store point out where the line starts to a person who pushed in front of you. You’re likely to get a rude finger, a curse, a look of anger and hatred. They’re already mocking the rules, mocking courtesy. Don’t expect them to welcome correction.
As paradoxical as it sounds, it’s the wise who are ready to accept the wisdom of rebuke and correction. It’s those who are already trying to find the way to Wisdom’s house who are willing to ask and receive directions. The verse at the bottom of 210, verse 9, says “Instruct the wise, and they will be even wiser. Teach the righteous, and they will learn even more.”
But if those verses are true, how do we get started? If we are all simple and ignorant, how can we make a good choice? How can we find our way to Wisdom’s house before we are wise? The answer is in that middle verse, set apart by itself on page 211, which repeats the great and central theme of Proverbs, “Fear of the Lord is the foundation of wisdom.” You probably remember it as, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
We are simple. Even more, we are sinful. We may dislike those “mockers,” those people who give us and all that’s good the finger and do what they please. But the only way to be different from them is to admit we need help, we need instruction, we need the grace that only comes to us from the Lord. That admission, that acceptance of help, that willingness to be taught by God is the beginning of wisdom.
It’s a kind of dying to admit we are not already wise, not already living a good life. It’s a death of pride to admit we cannot save ourselves or make good choices on our own. That’s why Paul told us today that we need to die with Jesus in order to live, why he said that baptism is being baptized into the death of Jesus so that we can be raised into the life of Jesus. That’s also why we need to be humble enough to turn back like that Samaritan leper in the Gospel lesson and give thanks to the Lord who saves us.
Wisdom begins when we recognize that God alone holds the power of life and death. The only good house in which to eat and live is His house. Wisdom constantly invites us. Jesus is always calling and ready to receive us. But we only go through this life once. We have some time, but not forever to get it right.
Beth and I have been watching Timeless, a television series we started while in Canada this summer. We’re now finishing on DVD. It’s about time travel, a small team of people constantly going back to big moments in history to try and stop a villain from changing the past. The good guys are constantly tempted to meddle, to prevent the fire and crash of the Hindenburg or the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But they realize that to preserve reality, to keep their lives as they truly are, you can’t go back and change things. You don’t get do-overs as if life were a video game. Bad choices and events remain forever.
The book of Proverbs urges us to choose well in the one shot we get at this life. If we don’t choose wisdom it will one day be too late. If we’ve spent all our time at Folly’s house, we end up there, “in the depths of the grave.” God has given us this life we have, right now, to seek Wisdom, to find Him, the beginning of wisdom, to find the life that lasts forever.
Some of you have read Father Gregory Boyle’s book, Tatoos on the Heart. It’s about his work with gangs in Los Angeles.[1] One of his stories highlights this choice between death and life, between wisdom and folly. There were two brothers, George and Cisco, both gang members. George ended up in juvenile detention camp where he started to change, to listen to what he’d heard from Father Greg. He asked to be baptized.
George’s brother Cisco was still out on the street, still active in his gang, still living foolishly, at Folly’s house if you will. The night before George’s baptism, Cisco was gunned down in front of his eight-month pregnant girlfriend. The next morning Father Greg drove to the camp and baptized George. Then he took him aside and told him about his brother. What Boyle saw was not the usual reaction of a gang member to the death of loved one. He wrote, “There is always flailing and rage and promises to avenge things.” But newly baptized George just sat on a bench, put his head in his hands and wept. Boyle said it proved the sacrament had worked. George had begun to fear God rather than those who can kill the body. It brought him wisdom and a sad but quiet peace in his loss.
Who will we be? George or Cisco? Will we turn our steps, our hearts, our minds, our dreams toward God and the beginning of wisdom? Will we be raised up to life and help and peace? Or will we mock and doubt and distrust anyone except ourselves? Will we keep on going toward foolishness and destruction and death that lasts forever?
It’s not just big decisions like George’s choice to accept baptism and faith in Christ. As we go along in this life, our path constantly branches between the house of Wisdom and the house of Folly. As our Gospel reading shows this morning, there are all sorts of choices between wisdom and foolishness. We will be wise enough to be thankful to God rather than taking our blessings for granted? Will we be wise enough to admit we are not wise?
That’s the real danger here, you know, being what it says over on page 200, chapter 3 verse 7 of Proverbs, “impressed with you own wisdom.” The King James calls it “wise in your own eyes,” the belief that you somehow have “unmatched wisdom.” That same verse says, “Instead, fear the Lord and turn away from evil.” Believing in your own wisdom is the way to foolishness, the road to Folly’s house. Believing in your own ignorance and lack of understanding is the path to Wisdom’s house, the road to life in Christ our Lord.
So today, will you accept Wisdom’s invitation, which is Jesus’ invitation? Will you trust in Him, let Him save you? May you make that choice today if you never have before. But then, and here is where many of us are now, will you keep on living in Wisdom’s house? Old Swedish Covenant folks used to ask each other, “Are you still living in Jesus?” That’s the question for us. Are you eating His food and drinking His cup at His Table? Are you enjoying the blessing of life together with all your brothers and sisters in His kingdom? Are you leaving old foolishness behind and coming to learn His words and His truth for your life and your soul? Are you sharing His good food and your other blessings with everyone willing to receive them?
Those are the choices. Those are the two invitations always being offered us, Wisdom or Folly, Christ or the world. Which will you accept today? And then tomorrow? And then the next day? And finally forever?
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2019 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (New York: Free Press, 2010).