Proverbs 9:1-10[i]
Munger Memorial
Chapel at the University of the Ozarks
April 10, 2013
The Rev. Dr.
Robert Wm Lowry
Wisdom hath builded her a house.
On
some level, the book of Proverbs is like being on a long road trip with your
mom. Apologies to the mothers in the
room, but you can imagine what I mean.
Taken just a verse at a time, Proverbs is a nagging little text.
The
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Trust
in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.
The
lips of the righteous feed many, but the fool starves for want.
If
Billy jumped off a cliff would you?
Don’t
forget to wear clean underwear in case you are in an accident.
I’m
not entirely sure those last two made it in the book, but you get the point!
Taken
a fortune cookie piece at a time, the book of Proverbs is little more than a
series of pithy occasionally annoying wisdom sayings.
But
taken as a whole, seen from a wider angle, a picture begins to emerge. The picture of two characters, wisdom and
folly, and their ongoing struggle to get the attention of the reader comes into
sharp relief.
Our
text today is the summation of wisdom’s argument. It is an argument so sound and so firm and in
which she has such confidence, that wisdom builds a great house of it within
which the reader is invited to dwell.
Wisdom, the image tells us, is no passing or fleeting thing, it is the
place we are called to make our home.
Now
this home that wisdom builds is not a familiar one to most of us. Its architecture goes against all the rules
and it does not fit into the well-heeled well groomed settings we so vainly
attempt to mold ourselves.
Perhaps
then it is a bit strange to take as a text in a college campus chapel this
first bit from the ninth chapter of Proverbs.
What Proverbs, hell what the whole of scripture says is wise is often
what the world declares to be foolish.
This
is, after all a place that seeks to prepare men and women for successful lives
in the world and what better way to do that than to teach the wisdom of the
world?
Except
the wisdom of the world is simply not a topic on which the wisdom of the cross
can stay silent.
The
world says look out for number one, while the gospel says look out for your
neighbor first.
The
world says the one who dies with the most toys wins, while the gospel says give
away all that you have.
The
world proclaims the myth of scarcity, while the gospel proclaims the abundance
of the love and grace of God.
The
world says death, while the gospel shouts LIFE!
The
wisdom of this world and the wisdom of God’s word are rarely if ever one in the
same.
This
house of wisdom built in the book of Proverbs would not fit well into the
neighborhood of the world today.
Still,
wisdom hath builded her a house. And this is it and we have been called to
dwell within its walls.
So
here we are in the chapel on the campus.
Campus
churches have a mixed history in American Academia. Some, like Duke Chapel and Memorial Church at
Harvard remain some of the most prestigious and influential pulpits in the
nation if not the world. They continue
to have impact on their own campuses and throughout the world- academic and
otherwise. Others, like Rockefeller
Chapel at the University of Chicago and Heinz Chapel at Pittsburgh have become
little more than popular wedding and concert venues their divine purpose as
houses of worship and wisdom long since relegated to the rubbish heap of
university politics; victims to the myth of neutrality and the wisdom of the
world.
In
each case, the chapels were built with the conviction that knowledge could not
flourish or reach its fullest potential in service of the history of humanity
absent its sister wisdom. In no case was
the chapel meant to replace the classroom.
Rather like two flying buttresses on opposite sides of a gothic
cathedral, the classroom and the chapel- knowledge and wisdom- stood in
cooperative tension one with the other, each working with the other to bear the
weight of the roof. There was, at the
time of the great American collegiate church boom of the 1930’s a sense that
what our institutions of higher learning needed was a reminder of something
higher- something nobler; a reminder that knowledge is a bridge that can take
you halfway across to tomorrow. But it
is wisdom that takes you the rest of the way.
Wisdom hath builded her a house and so, the thinking went, shall we.
Yet,
after less than a century, most of the great collegiate churches and most of
the once central campus chapels have become monuments, music halls or
mausoleums. These temples of wisdom and
the ideal of knowledge tempered by wisdom and faith tempered by knowledge have
been supplanted by a vision of knowledge that knows no ethic, no morality, no
virtue but itself.
In
a world determined to know no ethic other than its own and answer to no virtue
other than one of its own creating, the duty falls to the chapel on the campus today
more than ever to serve as the spiritual tether for the free intellectual arena
of thought and experiment; to witness to the importance of the soul as well as
the mind in the building of character and leaders. Because if history has taught us anything, it
is that knowledge unchecked by wisdom and virtue is tyranny waiting to be born.
The
dangers of knowledge untethered from wisdom and virtue are evident as early as
Pericles’ Athens. One day Alcibiades, as
a young man, was talking with Pericles, then the most powerful man in
Athens. The younger man with expansive
assurance was telling the older how Athens ought to be governed. For a while Pericles listened with a twinkle
in his eye. Then, becoming rather tired
of the self-confidence of Alcibiades, he said with ominous irony; “When I was
your age, Alcibiades, I used to talk just as you are talking now.” Without a moment’s hesitation Alcibiades
replied, “Oh, Pericles, how I should like to have known you when you were at
your best!”
Plato
took the training of Socrates and, tempered by wisdom, gave to Athens a soul.
Alcibiades,
the product of the same training, betrayed Athens and for all his intelligence
proved a fool. Knowledge became the very
instrument for wounding civilization, for stabbing friendship, for
assassinating virtue, for breaking down every noble thing in the world and all
at the hands of a man who had vast knowledge but no wisdom with which to use
it.
Knowledge
absent wisdom may all too easily be subsumed by the evil that people do. The place of the chapel on the campus is the
saving of knowledge from prostitution to evil purposes. What Alcibiades lost to his own and Athens’
detriment is what Plato maintained; a tether to the noble purposes of life, and
the fruits of a knowledge formed and tempered by wisdom.
Wisdom hath builded her a house.
It
was suggested from this very pulpit not long ago that this chapel is not the
proper venue for discussion of hot button political or social issues; that the
house of God is a place set aside solely for worship and fellowship. I wonder how wisdom herself would respond to
such an idea? For that matter, how would
Christ, whose house this is, respond to the admonition that the only province
of the church is handshakes, potlucks and a few rounds of kum-by-ya? Had Christ followed such advice, the gospel
would surely be shorter and his own life much longer, but the world would be
deprived of the greatest public voice to ever have drawn breath.
In
a way it is appropriate that we dedicate this new carillon today. This instrument that will carry the voice of
the chapel through music across the campus and into the community is a symbol
of the duty of the chapel itself; to proclaim over the treetops and rooftops
the word and wisdom of God. Because when
the chapel on the campus is silenced and tamed; when the house that Wisdom
built becomes little more than the dwelling place of benign saccharine deism,
we fail in our calling and this house of God becomes little more than a
monument to folly.
The
chapel is not only an appropriate venue for discussing the great and often
divisive issues of the day, it is an essential place for it.
The chapel on the campus is a summons to see beyond
ourselves to the world and beyond the world as it is to the world as it may one
day be. It is a place where the eternal
scope of God rather than the narrow vision of humanity defines our debates and
discernment.
There is a French proverb that tells us that to
understand earth you must have known heaven.
All that we know and all that we may learn; all the reality that we may comprehend and
all the empirical evidence that we may amass comes to consummation not in a
world purely of our own making but in the grand narrative of human history, the
ever unfolding story of God and God’s creation.
What if not the metanoic realization of the wisdom of God’s faithful
community compels us forward?
The wisdom of the Proverbs; the wisdom of the Christ; the
wisdom of this house may not be the wisdom of the world and it may not be
wisdom the world cares to hear but it is the wisdom needed in this world. It is the wisdom that lets us see beyond now
to tomorrow; it is the sense of eternity that is writ on each and every heart;
it is the hope that casts light in even the darkest shadows of despair.
Wisdom hath builded
her a house, the chapel on the campus and she has put it here, in this
place, for these people.
Not
only here in this place, but wherever in the world a Ozarks student touches the
life of another, it is my prayer that the knowledge gained in the classroom will
serve them well and the wisdom of this house lead them to serve the world
equally well. Every time a student who
has passed these doors lives into the wisdom of the cross in the face of the
world, this house will have a share in producing that consummation when love
not hate, truth not falsehood, faith not fear, justice not injustice shall rule
in the hearts and lives of all God’s children.[ii] In the meantime, may this chapel on the
campus, wisdom’s house, make its impression on the lives of the intellectual
and spiritual pilgrims who pass this way and may it speak its deepest word to a
broken and fearful world.
My God continue to bless the University of the Ozarks
with thoughtful, intelligent, curious and even skeptical students and may the
college, with a little help from Wisdom’s house, continue to turn out into the
world young men and women who are both keen of mind and wise of spirit.
Wisdom hath builded
her a house.
And this is it.
And we are called to dwell here.
Sola deo Gloria! To God alone be the glory! Amen.
[i]
This sermon stands in a long tradition of campus chapel preaching that seeks to
connect the worship of God and the nurturing of the soul with the educational
goals of the modern university. I make
no claims to breaking new ground and am indebted to the many fine campus
chaplains I have heard preach over the years.
I am particularly indebted to the late Rev. Dr. Lynn Harold Hough former
President of Northwestern University and professor of homiletics at Drew
University whose dedicatory sermon at Duke Chapel remains a classic of campus
preaching. Although entirely an
intellectual work of my own creation, this sermon takes many queues in both
form and underlying theology from Dr. Hough’s sermon.
[ii]
This line is taken nearly verbatim from Dr. Hough’s Duke sermon. Other than updating some gender exclusive
language, it is left as it was preached 8 decades ago because its truth is no
less today than it was then.
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