I begin today a fall sermon series on the Seven Virtues. Last fall I preached on the Seven Deadly Sins, and someone said afterward, "Now that that's over, can we go to the virtues?!" So on the Seven Virtues. Next fall I am preaching on the Seven Dwarfs (Dopey, Grumpy, Doc, Happy, Bashful, Sneezy and Sleepy)!

Just as the Church picked out seven sins as the major categories for sins, it chose seven virtues. The first four were borrowed and adapted from classical culture: Wisdom, Justice, Temperance, and Courage. The last three were the biblical virtues of Faith, Hope and Love. We begin today with Wisdom.

I

We could speak of them all as growing in grace, or growing in holiness, what Fosdick called "Christlike graces."

We may shy away from the word "holiness," but the Bible tells us repeatedly that God has called us to be holy people. Do we shy away because we've seen too many poor substitutes paraded as holiness? Have we in despair lowered the bar? Buechner writes that too often we in church "settle for niceness or usefulness or busyness rather than holiness."

"Holy," Buechner writes, "is what we are going to be if God gets his way with us."¹ Holiness is the character of God, "Godness," and this can only happen as we dwell in God and God dwells in us.

The anthem for today sings a yearning for holiness, "Come Dwell in Solomon's Walls." As we dwell in God's temple holiness dwells in us - - and wisdom and justice and righteousness and strength. Let's not settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of holiness.

II

Wisdom is the perfect beginning virtue on the road to holiness. It is almost synonymous with humility and reverence, which mean, respectively, to know our human frame and to bow before God.

That is why Hebrew scripture says in various places: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). Not a cringing fear before a threatening God, but awe and reverence before a good and merciful God.

Wisdom, then, knows how much it does not know.

Scripture is candid about how scarce true wisdom is. "Where can wisdom be found?" it asks over and over. Where is its abode? We cannot buy it with gold and silver. We cannot find it in books, though books may help.

Our contemporary world has seen an explosion in knowledge and an avalanche of information available to us. But wisdom is as scarce as ever.

III

So what is wisdom? It has been defined as practical, moral knowledge. It sometimes goes by the name "prudence." C. S. Lewis writes:

Thomas Hobbes likened wisdom to the hedgerows along the side of the road that keep us from wandering into open country with no maps and full of perils: dangerous cliffs, bogs, deserts, trackless forests and robbers. He is right, but sometimes our roads have no hedgerows.

There has been a scientific investigation into the nature of wisdom the past fifty or so years. Here are some key characteristics of wisdom these studies have identified.

William James in his nineteenth-century classic, The Principles of Psychology, wrote: "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

But wisdom in the Bible probes even deeper. In Proverbs wisdom is personified as a woman, the daughter of God. Hochma is her name in the Hebrew, or, translated into the Greek, Sophia. God has given her to us. As we learn from her we grow wise. So in the beautiful words from Proverbs we hear:

Do not abandon her, and she will keep thee safe.
Love her, and she will stand guard over thee.
Cherish her, and she will lift thee up.
Proverbs 4:5-8

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that wisdom in Hebrew scriptures,

I like this. We must fearlessly face what is real, looking truth and reality directly in the face. Wendell Berry says, "There is relief and freedom in knowing what is real."⁵

And then for people of faith this knowledge of what is real is joined to a passionate trust in God. A Psalm 23-kind of trust where we trust there is a faithfulness at the heart of things, that goodness and mercy shall follow us all our days. I have seen this wisdom in some wise older people in my life who've lived long enough to have seen it all and who have also learned to trust in the goodness of God.

IV

As you enter the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, to the right side of the great front doors you see the virtues and vices arranged in sculpted stone. There is a double row of figures. On the top row the virtues are depicted by women holding shields bearing the symbols of the virtues. On the bottom row are men engaged in the corresponding vices! Women: virtue. Men: vice. The joke inscribed in stone! Perhaps the sculptor was harking back to Hagia Sophia, holy wisdom as the daughter of God. Perhaps he/she just knew what was real!

On the wisdom shield was the figure of a snake, as captured on your cover art. The serpent has from ancient times been a symbol for wisdom - - as for example in the symbol of the practice of medicine.

Jesus himself took up the image when he taught his disciples to be "wise as serpents and gentle as doves" (Matthew 10:16). He was sending them into the world where they would be as sheep among wolves. So be careful and be smart, he counsels. Keep your eyes open. "Be wise as serpents." But at the same time he adds, "be gentle as doves." Not only smart, also gentle. Gentle and kind to others and gentle and kind to yourself as well. When Marcus Borg was here he left us the beautiful words of a French Hugenot missionary. I was reminded of them recently at Jeane Benton's memorial service. She had included these words in her collection of wisdom sayings she typed and kept:

Jesus had another important word to say about wisdom: Live Torah!, the way of God, the rule of God, the law of God revealed to us through Israel. Wisdom is hearing and doing the word of God. Not just hearing. As I've said before, one great danger of coming to church is that it might tempt us to think that hearing alone is enough. So Jesus told the parable: Everyone who hears and does these words of mine will be like the wise man who built his house on rock. And when the rain fell, and floods came and winds blew, it did not fall because it was founded on rock.

Then he said, Everyone who hears these words and does not do them will be like the foolish man who built his house on sand. And when the rains and floods and wind came it fell, and great was its fall.

V

So I close the sermon with the question the Bible often asks: Where can wisdom be found? The words we say after the reading of the morning scripture point us to the answer:

For the word of God in scripture

For the word of God among us

For the word of God within us

Thanks be to God.

The wisdom of God is found in scripture; it is found within us; it is found among us as we seek wisdom together in community. These three sources are like our three branches of government each checking the other. All are important. But we tend to ignore the inner life as source of wisdom.

If we were indeed created in the image of God, this means that the wisdom of God dwells deep within. It arises from the whole self: mind, heart and body. It arises from the deepest places of the true self where mind, heart, body, spirit dwell together.

Sometimes as we go deep we know when things are true, know when things are right; we know when things are false and know when things are wrong. Our minds tell us, our hearts tell us, our bodies tell us. To use the words of spiritual teacher and friend: There is a spirit of guidance always trying to communicate to us through our minds, our bodies, our hearts, our spirit. On all these levels. And Christ is the embodiment of this spirit of guidance.

I love the words of contemporary composer David Pomeranz:

It's in everyone of us

To be wise

Find your heart

Open up both your eyes.

At my last church, a downtown church, we gave a couple hundred sack lunches out every day. Inside each sack lunch was a strip of paper with a scripture verse on it.

One day a man got his bag and sat down on a curb nearby. He rifled through his bag looking for what was inside. We thought he was looking to see what food was included for this day: Spam, vienna sausages, an apple, a cookie? He came back. We thought it was to ask about the food. He said, "Where are the words?" The scripture verse was missing. He was glad to get the food, but the "words," that was what he needed too!

And so do we who hunger for holiness, hunger for wisdom. We need the word of God, the word of Christ. In scripture, deep within us, and there among us as we seek wisdom together.

Some people go to church looking for answers. And there are some churches ready with the answers. Some people go to church looking for a place they can ask their questions. Ours is such a church. But both are really searching for something deeper. They, we, are seeking wisdom.