How Smart are You?
Proverbs 1:20-33
September 17, 2006
It seems as though, as technology advances, we are getting smarter and smarter. For just a minute, let’s talk about some of the ways that we are smarter today than we were yesterday.
I’m going to make an assumption. I am going to assume that everyone here has had something delivered to him or her from UPS. At one time or another, everyone either sends or receives a package from United Parcel Service. But there are some things about UPS that you might not know.
For example, the UPS air fleet consists of 270 aircraft and is the eleventh largest airline in the world. The company ships 13.5 million packages a day from its Worldport distribution hub adjacent to the Louisville International Airport. Much of the work there goes on during the night when packages are flown in, sorted, and flown back out again in the space of just a few hours.
As amazing as that all is, here is something that boggles my mind. If you have a Toshiba laptop computer that develops a problem during the warranty period, the folks at Toshiba will tell you to drop it off at the nearest UPS store. But UPS doesn’t deliver your computer to Toshiba. Instead, the computer is sent to the UPS hub in Louisville, where specially trained and certified UPS employees will fix it. It is now possible to ship your laptop one day, have it repaired the next, and receive it back on the third day. With the beginning of this special arrangement between UPS and Toshiba, customer complaints decreased dramatically.
UPS does more than deliver packages and repair computers. Have you ever eaten a Papa John’s pizza? Have you ever seen a Papa John’s supply truck on the way to deliver goods to a restaurant? Guess who does the scheduling…that’s right…UPS. Many companies use UPS to schedule the pickup and delivery of supplies so that they are received at just the right time that they are needed.
If you go to www.nike.com to order a pair of athletic shoes, the order is routed to UPS, and a UPS employee picks, inspects, packs, and delivers your shoes from a UPS managed warehouse.
Have you ever ordered some underwear from Jockey.com. If you have, maybe you didn’t know that a UPS employee at one of the company’s warehouses will fill your order, bag it, label it, and deliver it to you.
If you order some tropical fish for your home aquarium from Segrest Farms in Florida, you will receive them in a specially designed package, developed by UPS. The fish are even slightly sedated to help prevent injury and illness during the trip.
UPS works with the U.S. Customs service. They are able to track any of their packages at any time in any corner of the world. They can, for example, find a package sent from Cali, Columbia to someone in Miami by someone named Carlos. When that package arrives, it will automatically be slid off the conveyor belt for inspection.
We’re getting incredibly smart… or at least most of us are getting incredibly smart. There was this one fellow who was discovered by a meter maid as he was standing in front of a parking meter. He was just standing there staring at it “Can I help you?” she asked. “No,” he replied, “I’m just waiting for my gumball. I’ve got five minutes left.”
The world is getting smaller and smaller as people are getting more and more connected. We talk to our kids all the time, whether they are in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Elkhart, or traveling to St. Louis or Washington D.C. We even received a phone call from Dominique during vacation. We were on a ship in the middle of the Caribbean and still got her call. It cost her $27, but we got word of a family emergency immediately. We are constantly only a cell-phone call away.
We live in an incredibly smart world. Toni is talking about getting a new cell phone – one of those which are a phone and an IPod combined. I have a couple of shirts with our Ark logo on them. Rick Loy has that image loaded into a computer at his shop which tells the embroidery machine how to stitch the pattern. Amazing! There are some gas pumps now that are running Microsoft Windows. So now, while you pump your gas you can order a cup of coffee, download music, or check the traffic conditions. It’s an incredibly smart world in which we live.
It seems that everything is networked these days. If I want to, I can type something on my computer and send it to Christie’s printer because she’s on the office network. I know that offices have been using that technology for a long time, but for me it is still exciting stuff. I am often on the computer at home when an instant message pops up from one of my kids because I’m on their buddy network.
In the Scripture lesson for this morning, God is inviting us to be part of his network. God wants us to stay connected to his wisdom. As smart as we are getting – or as smart as we think we are getting – and as connected as we are to each other – without being linked to the wisdom of God, we might as well be bowling alone. Without being networked with God and plugged into the source of God’s wisdom, we will wander aimlessly looking for models of appropriate behavior.
The lesson is from the first chapter of Proverbs. Proverbs is part of that genre’ of biblical writings known as the Wisdom literature: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and parts of the Psalms.
Wisdom literature is primarily understood as writing which provides moral instruction. For the times in which these parts of the Bible were written, there wasn’t much new in these instructions. The people would not have been strangers to these teachings. There is not much here that would have been original. The wisdom was being repackaged and presented in new says. The people who would have been exposed to this teaching were simply being encouraged to live on the basis of what they already knew.
Here in Proverbs, wisdom challenges us. The Wisdom of God is portrayed as a woman; a flesh and blood woman who arrives on the scene to enter into human affairs in order to deliver God’s message first-hand.
She challenges us to come out of our ignorance. You know, sometimes the Bible is pretty hard to take. We all like to think that we are pretty smart and have it all together. But here, Wisdom says, “Simpletons! How long will you wallow in ignorance?” Wisdom has called, but people have turned a deaf ear. They have hated knowledge, have refused to take the God’s advice, and haven’t allowed God to train them.
The problem is not that Wisdom hasn’t been available. Wisdom, after all, goes out into the middle of the street and shouts loud enough for everyone to hear. The problem is that the people have been unwilling to learn.
It’s funny, isn’t it? Our churches are full of people with specialized knowledge. In the churches, we find skilled craftsmen. We find people with advanced degrees. We have people who teach for a living. We do everything we can to encourage our children to get a good education.
My middle son Chris was talking to me one day about college. He thought that I was disappointed in him because he had not chosen to go to college like his brother and sister. I had to remind him that I had always told all three of them that I wanted them to be well trained in something. They needed to be masters of some area. That doesn’t necessarily require college.
As it turns out, with his particular training as a skilled laborer, he will possibly always earn more than Dominique and Matthew with their college degrees. But that’s OK. We just want our kids to be well trained in some area of expertise. All parents want that.
We, as a culture, are so smart in our Monday through Friday occupations, but we are often content to graduate from Sunday School as a child, and be content for the rest of our lives with an elementary understanding of the faith.
I realize that since becoming pastor here, I have tended to sound like a broken record. But I am always pushing the need for adult Christian education. Few of us value Christian education as highly as worship, yet without it, we miss out on wonderful opportunities to grow in knowledge and faith. If I can be honest with you for a minute folks; we have two wonderful adult Sunday School opportunities around here and not enough people are taking advantage of them.
The Apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 3:2, “You’re acting like infants in relation to Christ, capable of nothing much more than nursing at the breast” In Ephesians 4:14, he said, “No prolonged infancies among us, please. We’ll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are an easy mark for impostors. God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love…” God desires that we always remain connected to his Wisdom so that we are not blown around, this way and that, by every new wind of doctrine that comes down the pike. You can’t stay connected, and you can’t learn, if you don’t show up.
God’s Wisdom is ready to teach us. Proverbs 1:23 says, “Look, I’m ready to tell you all I know.” Our job is to take God up on the offer, to be willing learners, to be eager learners, to be enthusiastic learners.
You may tell me, “Look, there really isn’t too much that’s complicated. We’ve got ten commandments – pretty well though-out, straight-forward, and clear. We’ve got nine beatitudes. There is one great commandment – with two parts. There is only one death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s not too hard to memorize that stuff.”
But we forget that the Wisdom of God must be interpreted and applied. Lady Wisdom says, “Since you laugh at my counsel and make a joke of my advice…I’ll turn the tables and joke about your troubles.”
It is in the interpretation that we learn that if we break the Ten Commandments we will end up only hurting ourselves. If we refuse to pay attention to the Beatitudes, we will never come to know the Kingdom of God. If we fail to love God and our neighbor, then we will never be able to live a distinctively Christian life.
If we refuse to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves, we will never be able to find joy and salvation.
Listening to Wisdom is a smart thing to do. Let’s remember what sort of world we live in. Every day, we are faced with incredibly complex issues: terrorism, stem-cell research, the protection of the environment, immigration reform, rising costs of health care, energy dependence and independence, the clash of the three major world religions, and others. Only by listening to God’s Wisdom, interpreting that Wisdom and then applying it to the issues of the day, will we ever be able to make sense of them.
Only by listening to God’s Wisdom will we be able to faithfully interpret the Biblical writings. Only by listening to God’s Wisdom will we be able to hear the movement of the Holy Spirit which guides, corrects, and strengthens us.
Only by listening to God’s Wisdom will we understand that Christ is the answer to all that ails us and that salvation is to be found only in him.
Wisdom tells us that carelessness in pursuit of the things of God kills. But when we pay attention to Wisdom, we can relax and take it easy, because we are in good hands. Surely, we are all smart enough to understand that.
