Psalm 111: 10, I Kings 3: 9-12, Ephesians 5: 15, 16

Clues to spiritual wisdom

It turns out there have been a lot of bikes stolen in our neighborhood lately.  Last weekend ours was the target.  We had just returned from the Bay Area and it was about midnight.  Frankly, I was kind of tired and cranky.  The garage door was still open. As I opened the laundry room door to close the garage, I saw a person in a grey sweatshirt slowly riding off our driveway on a bike. I looked at the wall where I hang my bike and it is gone.  Before I had time to think I spurted through the garage and across the street, in my boxer shorts and a shirt, to where a car is waiting. I am about a second away from opening the driver’s side door as the cars screeches into motion and the thief jumps it when it’s already moving.  I guess seeing a 59 year old barrel toward you in his boxer shorts can be a quite troubling sight when you are a clueless teenager. Then I notice the bike is still on the sidewalk.  What would have happened if I managed to open the door or if these people weren’t a bunch of misdirected teenagers. Frankly I don’t know. If I had been in a jovial mood, would I have let them drive off or responded just a second later. Instead here was just me standing on a quiet midnight street, with a bike, in my underwear, trying to commit to memory numbers and letters on a license plate.  Was I wise, you tell me?

About thirty years ago, on another warm night, in the Asian city of Yogyakarta Is saw another person, somewhat older that our local teenagers,  grab the old Dutch bike which was my form of transportation and speed off in to a cramped crowded neighborhood of small houses patched together. I chased him too, until he disappeared out sight, Minutes later I reached a throng of people curiously gathered around a local police post.  Turns out bicycle thiefs aren’t all that smart.  I walked in and announced myself as the one claiming the bike. Then my concern shifted to the thief and his safety. I could tell they weren’t going to treat him very well. It became clear he was a hapless person from the poorest region near the city, a place where I had seen people use old car tires as shoes.  So I convinced the police to let him go and I wind up riding my bike out of there, with the thief sitting behind me on the bike.  Was I wise, you tell me.

Friends, the Dutch have an expression: “he/she is a hero on socks,” meaning a pretend hero or in my case a vigilante with bare feet in his underwear. You can tell the story of the bike and say: “ that 29 year  that’s aart right there or the 59 year old, that’s him, kind of quirky. In fact the context was different.  Besides that bike in Asia wasn’t even my bike. The truth is that we are all different people and you never know what you will do from one moment to the text, when you will perform an act of kindness or decisiveness or fail to act when you should have. or say something utterly shocking or banal.  This goes for our being Christian also. None of us are full-time Christians.  Very part-time at most.  Often we are Christians in our underwear, or barefoot or on socks. We can be different people in different circumstances.  Atheists can act like Christians and Christians can act like people who scoff at the idea of God.  We have talked about levels of understanding. It’s about the way we approach the text.  Often we approach in our underwear, very mundane and not very thoughtful. Sometimes we are dressed for church and are ready to be spoken to.  This is how we approach the Biblical text: Sometimes serene and peaceful, sometimes angry and frustrated, sometimes wounded and afraid.  This affects what we will hear: at times it’s just a story to us, at times a moral lesson, at other times it lifts us to a spiritual height we had not deemed possible, again at other times it annoys us and strikes us a implausible. So is our spiritual wisdom bound to be hit and miss, the way much of our behavior is hit and miss?  Let us turn once more to the Biblical passages for insight.

In Psalm 111 we learn that wisdom and understanding starts with a sense of awe about the greatness of the power of God’s love. In I Kings we learn that wisdom, including spiritual wisdom is a gift.  In Ephesians we are told to act wisely and mindfully in time.   So what the texts call for is a sense of awe, a sense of gratitude and acceptance and a sense of the poignancy of time.  Friends, you and I feel guilty a lot about the extent of our response to God.  We are upset that it’s hit and miss. We are frustrated by our lack of spiritual accomplishment. We are exasperated by the way we slip back into our old ways. I think we need to accept that first, God’s grace is at work in our lives, at its own time, second, that spiritual wisdom is a gift we cannot force but only open ourselves up to and finally that we have a duty to try to act mindfully in the time available to us. May God give us wisdom.