Feasting on Wisdom for Nourishment

For 3 summers, I served as the Director of Summer Camp at the Episcopal camp in the Diocese of Maryland. It was a lot of fun to be outdoors with children and youth having adventures, then to come in to chapel for singing and sharing. Camp is a great place to make a mess with shaving cream and paint. However, I could not tolerate any behaviors in the dining hall that might lead to a food fight. I grew up in an agricultural community in Southern California, where every day I saw people picking vegetables, or milking cows, and washing and packing up the food, driving it into Los Angeles late each night on a truck. I have a very high regard for the labor involved in producing food, a deep respect for the work of farmers and watermen. So no food fights- because we do not waste food, it makes a mess, and someone could get hurt.

Let’s think of the BIBLE as a dining hall, a place where we gather to share food and conversation, where we honor the labor of those who collected the stories and law codes, the poetry and teachings. People throughout time have taken great risk to preserve and pass along the BIBLE to us.

We certainly know that some people want to pick up chunks of the BIBLE and start a fight, to use what is intended to draw us closer to God and one another as a weapon to annoy or harm another person. And, we know that this is not what the BIBLE is for.

It is for feasting, for sharing, for giving us strength to wrestle with the challenges and chances of this earthly life.

In January I left parish ministry after 18 years and began working in the office of our newly consecrated bishop in Maryland, the Rt. Rev, Carrie Schofield Broadbent. A part of my ministry now is traveling around the Diocese of Maryland to support ministries like summer camp, the work we do to receive and resettle refugees and asylum seekers, the ways we support the men and women who work in the Port of Baltimore through our seafarer ministry- which was especially critical this spring as the Key Bridge collapsed. I also spent time with 73 high school students from an under-resourced part of Baltimore City in a 6 week summer enrichment program (Sutton Scholars High School Enrichment Program). I joined them on a day when they visited the Junior Achievement Finance Park, an experiential learning center where each student was handed a few worksheets describing their job, their salary, and their family composition. Then, they moved about the store fronts of the Finance Park, filling in their monthly budget worksheet with figures for renting an apartment or buying a home, buying a car or a bus pass, paying for insurance, securing childcare, getting groceries, and much more.

As they completed their budgets, each young person drew a chance card:

Did they draw a fender bender and a $250 deductible?

Or a small inheritance to put in their savings?

There were many proclamations of “this isn’t fair!” (Although it was only the unlucky ones complaining.)

As I stood with the mentors watching the young people moving about, we heard things like:

"Children are expensive!"

"Do groceries really cost this much?"

One of the mentors, a man in his early 30s said to a few of us observing: “If I knew at their age what I know now, I’d be rich.”

An older mentor replied: “You can’t go back. Start now.”

We are called as Christians to be discerning and reflective about our past behavior, and then to learn how to do better in this new moment. Following Christ requires constant learning, discerning, reflecting and conversation- conversation with God, and conversation with elders or spiritual companions we trust to be honest with us. The Bible is a space for that conversation – a collection of content that allows us to pause, to discern, to talk together.

This is how we grow in wisdom – we feast on it where ever we can grasp it, finding nourishment in it, treating it with respect, sharing it with one another like the feast described in Proverbs today: 

Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, “You that are simple, turn in here!” To those without sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”

The intention of the collected works in the BIBLE is for us to engage with it and grow in wisdom, learning to flourish, starting wherever we are right now so that we mature in faith. We cannot go back- we start now.

Paul urges us to live wisely in Ephesians, to integrate the way of life modeled after Christ:

Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil (Greek po-nay-ros- calamitous, dangerous, full of labors, annoyances and hardships- like the unlucky chance cards). So do not be foolish, (Greek a-frone – senseless, without reflection, acting rashly, without reason) but understand what the will of the Lord is.

Throughout John’s Gospel- Jesus employs ancient metaphors for Wisdom, for the Abundant Life of flourishing we experience in Christ’s presence – and one of those metaphors is bread.

Bread symbolizes the wisdom at the heart of the Jesus movement: Jesus said, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.”

Jesus is the Wisdom that feeds us, Jesus is the host that invites us in to sit down and feast. There is much knowledge in the Bible, and Jesus certainly valued the practical knowledge of the people around him. However, knowledge only gets us so far.

What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?

Knowledge is when you know that a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is when you know NOT to put a tomato in your fruit salad.

Knowledge is reading the over 20 definitions of wisdom in a psychology journal.

Wisdom is sharing only one of them in your sermon:

Here it is …

“Wisdom is deep accurate insight and understanding of oneself and the central existential issues of life,

plus skillful benevolent responsiveness.”

(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-022-02816-6/tables/1 )

Like manna from heaven, wisdom is available to any of us every day – we gather it by meditating on the life and teachings of Christ. We shape it into a meal by sharing it and reflecting together, and by journaling and pondering and praying in solitude. We spread it out on a table to feed our souls, to be shared, to replace the calories lost in the calamities and chances of our lives. We eat this bread, this wisdom personified in the teachings and life of Christ, and our souls are nourished.