Intelligence. ignorance, wisdom

There is so much that we just don’t know. Put it another way, we know next to nothing. Put what we do know next to what there is to know and our knowledge simply fades into insignificance. We know next to nothing. Not that you’d guess that from our attitude and our behaviour, which if anything says simply and loudly as it can, we know it all. Oh yes, if we don’t know it, it isn’t worth knowing and probably doesn’t actually exist to know. Anyway. 

Not really true: just because you’ve never heard of something doesn’t mean it’s not a thing or it isn’t worth knowing. You’re not omniscient. You haven’t heard of pretty much, everything. You haven’t heard the stunningly beautiful melodies Stephen Duffy wrote for the Lilac Time; you don’t know what books the person three doors away has on their shelf, or if they have any books at all, or any shelves; unless your one of an, I assume, small number of people who lived in Leeds in the 1970s, you’ve never known about my Uncle Brian’s ‘adult’ shop (and don’t ask me to explain it’s stock but let’s just say it didn’t sell grown ups).  You just don’t know.

There’s so much we don’t know. If only we knew that we don’t know. Alas, we don’t. We know we’re smart, but we don’t know our limits.

When Adam had finished naming all the animals God brought before him, perhaps God held a mirror in front of the animated dust to see what he would call himself and the first human with astonishing naivety given what came shortly thereafter said  Homo sapiens: Wise ape. Right back when, Adam knew for true, we know it all.

And it’s not entirely delusion. We don’t know it all, but we are smart. As a species it’s as if, collectively, we’ve never grown out of our adolescent know it all phase, colloquially known as the Pedant’s Revolt or more locally Treble Trouble. We are smart. Boy we are smart. We are intelligent and learned and successful to the point of destroying it all with our brilliance, and so sharp we’re never far from cutting ourselves and sometimes, ofttimes, and every time we log on to Twitter we’re so convinced that we know it all that we make complete fools of ourselves. And I don’t mean bad spelling or typos or unpleasant opinions, but that point when we’re so sold on our smartness that we don’t see that we’re just speaking out of our…. ignorance. So sharp is our wit, we cut off the branch we’re sitting on.

It’s no surprise that we tend to hit the pedantic stage as a teenager, because then everything is changing; we are children no longer, our eyes are wide-opening, we have the fevered fervency of the new convert, and we are becoming, honing and shaping what we will be for a long time to come. That and hormones. Thankfully the teenage years don’t last a lifetime and time,  hard knocks and  the searing disappointments that the world serves up to us with  unseemly relish usually give us perspective and occasionally just a touch of intellectual humility,  though some of us never seem to grow out of the adolescent phase and are condemned to life as a conservative evangelical pastor.

However, if all goes well— if not to plan, not ever— if all goes well and we learn the lessons of experience then sometimes that white heat of our intelligence might just cool enough to give us something much better: wisdom. It’s not a dead cert. Most humans are intelligent, at least compared to other animals; it’s much rarer to find a member of homo sapiens who is actually wise. We acquire a lot of knowledge and remain fools.

So. Wisdom. What am I talking about? 

My apologies for resorting to dictionary definitions, never a good thing in a sermon, but then when did good things ever come in sermons? My excuse for waxing lexicographical is there’s a lot of sermons to be written before Christmas, including this one, and despite appearances when delivered, homilies do take  a little time and effort to write, things sadly in short supply once the first  lilting strain of Away in a Manger has kickstarted December into winter wonderland.

So the dictionary. First port of call, the one on my computer told me that wisdom is:

‘the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement’ 

Sounds good, but possibly a bit hen’s teeth. So I girded my loins, got off the chair and went to the bookcase, the OED told me wisdom is: 

(the) capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends.

In short, we might say Wisdom is practical or perhaps applied intelligence: knowing how to best use that big brain that God has given you, because having intelligence and knowing how to use it are not the same thing. When God offered new King Solomon whatever he wanted, Solomon had the intelligence to ask for wisdom: something, however smart he was when he asked, something he knew he did not yet possess. Solomon was given wisdom in one lump from above: most of the rest of those we call wise have to pay their dues and gain it the hard way: effort and experience. Not that having lots of experience automatically makes you wise, but you cannot have wisdom without it. Except when God given. Of which more shortly. 

But first, to the point: it’s the Epiphany. 

A drama is playing out in Judea: Jesus, though the cause of all the to-do, is very much a passive cause. The newborn child is a pebble dropped into the world-water, the effects  of that birth rippling outward. The stars of the show are Wise men from the East, though that’s not exactly what the the original Greek of the Gospel says. What Matthew has written is magoi (hence our ‘Magi’) which is a word with an amazingly niche meaning, that being ‘men of the Zoroastrian priestly caste’, people thought in the Hellenic mindset to be experts in astrology and interpretation of dreams. You can see why English translations tend to choose ‘wise men’- unlike magoi it doesn’t need extensive footnotes. However, the Magoi didn’t just appear proclaiming their wisdom: although this is the first description we have of them, in a sense it is retrospective: when they arrive they are astrologers: it is only when we see how they play their part in the drama that we can see that, actually, they are wise.

However, right now, they have just arrived, and we’re impressed by how smart they are. You might think there’s not much intelligence involved in telling people they will have a  difficult day and will receive some unwelcome news from a stranger dressed in purple, but of course back then astrology was the end point of astronomy, which is a fearsomely complex branch of mathematics. Predicting the movements of the heavenly bodies is way beyond GCSE statistics: about as complex as trying to work out if buy one get one half price is a better bargain than 3 for 2.  So the Magi arrive on the scene, clearly a collective of clever clogs and, as they are looking for a newborn king, proceed to do the obvious thing and head for the palace. Alas only an old king here. Herod directs the visitors to Bethlehem, so they pick up where they left off and follow the star. And at this point the smartypants show their wisdom. They’d already done the smart thing which was head to the palace which had turned out to be the wrong thing. When the star stopped instead over a little artisan’s house in the slums, they didn’t recheck their charts or head back to Herod to see if he could just ask his scribes if they were 100 per cent sure it was that Bethlehem. Instead, appearing to have taken leave of their senses they went into the house, and gave gifts to the carpenter’s son and paid him homage. Sheer lunacy. And pure wisdom- because that mewling infant is not the King of the Jews but their God. It is not their intelligence or learning that has made the Magi realise this;  all those years spent pouring over charts, scouring the scrolls, gazing at the heavens, count for nothing: it is their encounter with God, their coming into his presence that has made them wise.

And so when God warns them in a dream, they do both the wise and the smart thing and peg it back to Persia without a return visit to royalty.

Although experience will make us wise, it is only from God that true wisdom comes. Wisdom is from God. Not only is the fear of God the beginning of all wisdom, wisdom is an aspect, at least,  a quality, if you like of God.  Something  that emanates from him. And from the beginning of our faith Christians have identifiedJesus with the wisdom of God: something greater than Solomon is here. When God was incarnate, so the son of Mary was filled with the Holy Wisdom.We could go a lot deeper into this, but, time is short. We’ve only just come back after Christmas. Today we remember the latecomers to the celebration- the Magi- who came to greet a king and instead met God and left that encounter wise men.

The queen of the South… came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and see, something greater than Solomon is here

So. You’re smart. But there’s nowt clever about being smart: it comes with the territory. Intelligent and learned and brilliant you are. But much better and far more precious to be wise. That begins when you meet the Christ child.