Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. David Williams; 06.21.2015
Scripture: Proverbs 3:13-14; 27-29; 10:4; 17; 25; 11:28; 12:1; 15; 24; 13:11; 14:31; 15:16; 16:8; 21:17; 27:12; 23-24
It’s been almost thirty years since the first time I threw a leg over a motorcycle, and over the last week and a half, I’ll admit that I’ve felt just as giddy this last week on occasion as I did way back when I was eighteen.
Of course, I’m not exactly the same person I was back then, though I carry those memories with me. On the one hand, I was twenty pounds lighter and substantially less creaky. On the other, well, let’s just say I didn’t always make the wisest of choices.
Like, say, some of the choices I made around that very first motorcycle. It was a snorting beast of a bike, a ratty old semi-maintained Honda CB750, whose swept back four-into-four exhaust had rusted out in a couple or three strategic locations. Meaning, it was waaay louder than it needed to be, which meant, as far as eighteen year old me was concerned, that it was just exactly loud enough.
Back at that age, maintenance wasn’t really front and center on my list of priorities. Giving rides to girls? Sure. Tearing around the bucolic back roads of Albemarle county horse country, or taking a beautiful late spring afternoon to go snarling around the Blue Ridge? Those were my priorities.
Paying attention to other things wasn’t a strength. Like, say, remembering to always reset the fuel petcock when I gassed up. You see, that first bike wasn’t like the Big Tan Motor Chicken I’m riding now.
Being a creature of the information age, the Motor Chicken is a font of information, with an onboard computer that tells me current fuel consumption rates to the second, average consumption for the current tank, and range to empty. It has a fuel gauge, a digital one, which has alerts that flash with increasing levels of urgency as I get closer to running out of go-juice.
But that old Honda was state of the art 1973 motorcycling, meaning that while it looked cool riding with bell bottoms and feathered back hair, it’s a little less information-driven. It didn’t even have a fuel gauge. How did you know you needed to get to the gas station? You ran out of gas. Seriously. That was the protocol. That big ol’ air cooled four would start to stumble and sputter, and that meant you--still moving--had about half a click to reach down with your left hand, fumble for the petcock, and switch it to reserve. That gave you access to the lowest portion of the tank, and meant you had about thirty miles to get gas.
Unless, of course, you’d forgotten to switch back to the main tank as you filled ‘er up. Then, well, that stumbling and sputtering meant you’d be walking soon, son.
As, in point of fact, I did on a number of occasions in Charlottesville. “Hey man,” I’d say when I arrived late and on foot. “I totally ran out of gas. Can you give me a ride?” Which I did more than once, because, well, I was a young fool, as opposed to being the older fool I am today.
It’s a characteristic of fools, and I know this from ongoing personal experience, that we tend not to take a good hard look at what it is our current actions are actually going to accomplish. Instead, we act on our impulse, on our big feely feels in the moment and the now. We assume that just because we believe it to be so, it must be true, and that somehow we’re the special one who will be the exception to the rule.
The Whitman’s Sampler of verses that we’ve just tasted our way through comes to us from the great ancient collection of Hebrew Wisdom literature, the Book of Proverbs. In Proverbs, Wisdom is seen as more than just the ability to make a lucky decision, like buying ten thousand dollars worth of bitcoin in August of 2010 and selling it all in November of 2013. Wisdom, in so far as we allow ourselves to receive it, shapes how we live in the world. It is fundamentally practical.
As it manifests in the book of Proverbs, expressed in pithy little nuggets of moral guidance, taut little sayings and maxims and aphorisms, all of which point in the general direction of how to live a life that’s less messed up. They don’t provide any guarantees, but what they do is this: they make it much more likely that you will not fail.
Within ancient Wisdom literature, there are a number of core themes, all of which play around a sane and appropriate use of the world around you. The wise do not seek wealth above all other things, because wealth is not the goal. The wise know that the hunger to possess destroys. The wise listen to criticism and concern, and adjust accordingly. The wise know that God loves the poor and the rich equally, and that when wealth is created on the suffering backs of the poor, God will hold the powerful to account.
Wisdom looks at the world, and carefully considers every action. The wise know--more than anything else--that chasing after the desire of the now can compromise the life you hope to live tomorrow. Because nothing is more foolish--in the Biblical definition of foolishness--than being so blinded by one’s own hungers and self-justification that you can’t see the harm you’re about to inflict on yourself and others.
Which, quite frankly, is why I’m so fuddled as to why any person who’s spent even a moment of time around Wisdom literature and the Proverbs in particular would feel motivated to resist doing something about our wildly out-of-control and self-destructive consumption of the earth’s resources.
We know, for instance, that remaining supplies of fossil fuels will last the world just about exactly as long as I’ve been alive. If we take the span of time between 1969 and now, and push it out into the future, that’s roughly when it’ll all run dry. It could be a few years earlier. It could be a few years later. But that’s the ballpark.
Now, one can always question those estimates. Someone out there might have an agenda. But coming as they do from the wild eyed liberal tree-huggers at British Petroleum, I think it’s safe to say that this is an...um…”conservative” estimate.
So we know, we do, that the entire energy basis of our economy will be gone in what I hope will be the last few years of my lifetime.
We also know, we do, that if we just keep blundering on down the path of endlessly increasing consumption we’ll do lasting and potentially irreparable harm to our delicate little jewel of a world. The byproducts of our endless devouring choke the landfills of the world, and are changing the entire biosphere we inhabit. We are changing the earth for the worse, altering the climate, strip-mining our seas.
And sure, there are those whose ideology prevents them from seeing this reality. To be honest, as someone who has been both, and is still on occasion, there’s no functional difference between an ideologue and a fool. Both get so lost in their dreams and their stories that they can’t see the reality they inhabit.
I read, this week, through that little essay released this last week by Pope Francis. A Papal Encyclical, it’s called, and for our Catholic sisters and brothers, it is a teaching with authority. For we Protestants, it’s not quite the same thing. It is, for me, a document written by another pastor, a brother in the faith, one with a kind heart and a church that’s just a tiny bit larger than ours.
It’s worth the read, all hundred and ninety-eight carefully footnoted pages of it. It’s a profoundly Catholic document, carefully constructed, paradoxically both progressive and deeply traditional, open to the insights of science and the ancient insights of our faith.
It’s been criticized, of course, by those who’d suggest that faith needs to focus on spiritual things. Stay out of the world, they say, and focus instead on matters of the soul.
Which, if you understand the Bible at all, is completely wrong. The Bible speaks consistently and directly to how we are to live and order our lives, right here in this world. It is the whole and entire point of prophetic literature, and it’s also the heart of Biblical wisdom.
So what do we do? Here we are, barrelling along the road, loving--as Proverbs 21:17 puts it-- both our wine and our oil. We are riding into darkness, into a wilderness we do not know. We know that it’s going to be hard, and that we’re getting close to reserve. Assuming we remembered to switch the petcock, which we may or may not have done.
Wisdom asks us to step back, and really consider our actions. Wisdom asks us not to cling to either our pleasure or our preconceived notions, and to be willing to change our actions to match reality. Wisdom asks us to be prepared, both individually and as a community, for the very real demands ahead.
We have the information we need, right in front of us. Whether we are fools on the road, or wise, will depend on how we respond to it.
Let wisdom be your guide.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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