An Understanding Mind

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams, 08.16.15

Scripture Lesson: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3::3-14

Listen to Audio Here:

Vacation.  It seems like such a simple word, such a straightforward concept.

The idea seems simple enough.  You go somewhere, far away.  What you bring with you is nothing but the most precious and important things in your life, that and five cubic yards of material possessions, packed into a dense mass in the back of your groaning vehicle, every last thing you need to have with you so that you can leave it all behind.

You get to your destination, and then spend a good half-hour unpacking.  It’s like playing minivan Jenga, each piece coming out carefully so as not to dump the entire load out of the van in a tumbling avalanche of bags and cases and boogie boards.  

Vacation is, by definition, vacatio, from the Latin meaning to be empty, as empty as your mind becomes after zenning out on a sandcastle for four hours.  The word is related to vacuum, which, hopefully, was not one of the things you felt compelled to pack.  

But as full as our vehicles are, I wonder if vacatio is something we’re even capable of any more.  Vacatio is by definition freedom, the freedom that was meant to come from setting it all aside, and rediscovering ourselves in the process.

Only now, well, it’s not.

And sure, there’ve always been ways that work intrudes onto those times we take away.  But now, the life we’ve left behind isn’t left behind.  It’s there on our laptops and our tablets and our pocket devil boxes, as we continue to text and Snapchat and message and Instagram just like we always do.

If I’m reading my way through a novel, one of the books I inhale when I’ve found a quiet little corner to hide away, I make a point of sharing my review of that book on Goodreads, because, well, hey, that’s what I always do.

If I’m going down to the beach to build some weird totemic sand sculpture, I’ll bring a large shovel, several small shovels, an array of carving tools, two large buckets to mix the precise sand/water mixture required.  And my smartphone, from which to share pictures with the entire universe of those I know via social media, after which I can check back every quarter hour to see how many likes I’ve gotten.

It’s a strange mix, because honestly, I enjoy seeing what others are doing.  But being a chronic Presbyterian overthinker, I can’t help but wonder: is this really vacation?  And then I start thinking about Latin root meanings, because that’s what overthinkers do.

It seems to open us up, it does, this new form of connection with those around us, as the images and thoughts that make up our day to day reality can be shared and offered up to those around us.  

Here, images from our life, or from the lives of others around us, and we can share those memories as immediately as we choose, with everyone we know.  It can be a good thing.  It lets us share joys and sorrows, to celebrate or lean on the collective shoulder of our friends when hard things weigh us down.

At the dawn of the internet era, this was the goal.  New media would be mean a new us.  In an era when everything was connected, mutual awareness and mutual understanding would blossom like a field of sunflowers, and as we learned more and more about one another, the petty bigotries and miseries of our isolated, separate existence would come apart.

It’d be a new and wonderful paradise, an era of mutual understanding.

Only, well, all of that connection hasn’t always worked out that way.  It can liberate, or bring anxiety.  It can help deepen understanding, or

Each of the texts that we’ve shared today sings a song of Wisdom as it expresses itself in the journey of life and faith.  Wisdom, first and foremost, is about our capacity to understand the best path for bringing life into balance, about finding our path

From the Book of Proverbs, that ancient collection of teachings about how to live a balanced, sane, and just life, we together read an homage to Wisdom itself.  Wisdom, as it’s made manifest in the writings of the Hebrew scriptures, is almost always conceptualized as a woman.  In that passage, we hear a call put out to any and all who are willing to listen, of a metaphorical meal set out for those who are willing to partake of it.

From the letter to the church at Ephesus, that call to live wisely and in balance is taken up by the early Christian church, as the author of the letter to the Ephesians encourages those first walkers of the way to resist the violent decadence of Roman society and to live in a way that reflected the Good News.  This was radically, fundamentally countercultural in the Greco-Roman world, as much so as it is today.

Roman culture was all about power and social connection, about how many people depended on you and were connected to your authority.  It was all about who knew you, who owed you, and who you owned.

What those early Christians were asked to prioritize, instead, was the sort of power that is described in 1 Kings this morning.  It’s the story of Solomon, son of David, the second...and last...of the kings of the Jewish people.  In the ancient world, where a monarch’s absolute power could make a serious mess of things, the single most desirable trait in a leader was wisdom, the ability to--in a careful, measured, and thoughtful way--discern the best possible path for a people.

Solomon has a dream, a dream in which God asks what he wants, and what Solomon replies is not that he wants armored limos and personal chefs and the trappings of wealth.  What he wants is “an understanding mind,” the capacity to know what the best course of action is under any particular circumstance.

Whether this story is literally true or hagiography is almost impossible to discern, these thousands of years later.  But it indicates that what matters to God is not a hunger for power or connection, not a desire for charm and acclaim, but instead the desire to choose rightly in whichever place we find ourselves.  

And in that choosing, about how to live rightly and in balance, social media is increasingly a factor.

Social media can make us reactive and impulsive, turning our attention to the right now and the outrage and...oh look, a puppy!   Social media encourages us to feel the big feely feels, right now.  Tears.  OMFG.  I just can't.  I am so done!  This!   

As we engage with this new form of communication, Wisdom gently requests that we be deliberative, considering our actions and our responses before we respond to something, or before we pass something along.  A wise person, as Proverbs 11:12 reminds us, keeps their peace, considering before they share.

Social media can be where you look for those who affirm what you believe, where we choose our own virtual echo chambers.  It calcifies positions, hardening social and political lines.  It can, if approached with the wrong spirit, drive us to cement our positions.  Wisdom takes criticism, listens, and changes.  

Social media goes with it, often becoming full-on virtual mobbery, just as filled with passion and destructive potential, and just as easily manipulated.  The"wisdom of crowds?"  Honey, please.  That ain't never been true, say I, with the colloquial emphatic double negative.   Social media screams wildly, stirring our fears and anxieties, creating discord and tension for the sake of drawing eyeballs, spreading outrage, an endless fractal Fibonacci sequence of manufactured umbrage and trollery.   Wisdom is wary of dangerous company, of the mob mentality and of the power that gives to the unjust and the rabble-rouser.

Wisdom, in other words, is willing to be emptied of those things.  The wise soul exists with a vacation mind.

As we engage and are engaged by this new form of media, the witness of wisdom is essential.  Because with an understanding mind, a mind willing to let itself be emptied of the anxieties and mob-panic and to consider every action, this new era

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.