Proverbial Wisdom: Who Have We Forgotten?

"The LORD permits not the just to hunger, but the craving of the wicked he thwarts." -Proverbs 10:3

Hmmm..the homeless and the starving might have something to say about this...but perhaps it's the latter part of the proverb that we need to focus on?

Injustice reigns when the wicked attempt, merely attempt, to satisfy their own selfish desires. Even those who are hungry often are the ones who most take care of each other. ABC TV recently had planted a disheveled looking man who passes out on the street to see what people would do. Take a look:



While the hungry and destitute often suffer, their hunger often subsides slightly. One often gets used to eating less or not eating every day, but what one never gets used to is being ignored by their fellow human beings. The homeless often report that they learn not to ignore the needs of others who are on the street and they begin to form a type of community, a dysfunctional one at times, but like all communities, at heart they usually have the best intentions. Wicked desires never quite hold their novelty. People get bored and move on to perhaps a different wicked desire perhaps, but often they also mend their ways. Noble and just ways are what most fulfill us and bring us closer into union with each other and with God. Jesus becomes this model of looking deeply at the intention of our desires. Even the Pharisees, who were the religious authorities of the day don't always measure up by forgetting about the hungry and poor in their midst.

When everyone else forgets, God remembers the unforgettable ones. Who have we forgotten this advent? And how will we plan to remember them?

Getting Something For Nothing: The Just Do It Mentality

Today's proverb is a doozy:

Proverbs 10:2
"Ill-gotten treasures profit nothing,
but virtue saves from death."

I've been following the Tiger Woods fiasco and it never fails to amaze me how some people expect to get away with just doing whatever they feel like doing when they feel like doing it. There's no retribution for their actions that enters into possibility for them. The rules don't apply to them. They have nothing to limit their consumption be it greed, sex, food, drugs or whatever.

Nike's moniker for years was "Just Do It" and Tiger Woods seems to have taken that literally. His alleged affair is just one more note on the kind of stars that believe that the world is simply their own personal playground and they are the ones who have all the toys and don't have to share with others.

The virtues of temperance and fidelity are often checkpoints for us. Is my desire based on an unhealthy addiction that I feed all too easily. Do I keep in mind my present commitments and responsibilities? Or do I cast all of that to the wind? The latter seems to be all to easily dispensed with in a country where the divorce rate is close to 50%. Do half of the people who get married really understand the notion of commitment? Do both parties in a marriage understand that they will sacrifice for each other and that "no matter what" they need to be bound to one another working on the issues that face them?

Will both parties always have each other's back?

Or will one violate their sexual commitment and the other take a golf club and start swinging?

It seems to me that Tiger's empty virtues lead him to gain these ill-gotten treasures and if he only had a bit more humility he may not be in the headlines today.

But who am I to talk?

Often I forget my own commitments to my wife. I choose other things over spending time with her and some of those things are actually good things...like my ministry or even writing this blog. But they need to come secondarily to my marriage. And I need to remember that.

So I am off tonight to spend the weekend with my bride! In New York City for a day and then on to our family Christmas party (her side of the family). About 100 family members gather together to simply recommit ourselves to one another as family and to celebrate God's re-commitment to us at Christmas, where God embeds His commitment in human flesh, in human experience. God becomes one of us, as Joan Osbourne once wrote so we might "make our way home."

It is in that anticipation of this human God who loved us not only enough to take on our own flesh but also our own death, that we rejoice. It is not an ill-gotten treasure to be sure. But it is one that should indeed call us into virtue.

Proverbial Wisdom Returns

At a recent scripture session we decided to discuss the book of Proverbs. It was actually a challenge to find something to say about the proverbs. But I realized that I had started blogging by actually meditating on the proverbs in blog form. So for Advent I thought perhaps there might be some wisdom for me to glean from the Proverbs. So I will try to take two lines a day, a Proverbial Couplet, and see what comes to mind for me to reflect on.

Proverbs 10:1:

"A wise son brings joy to his father,
but a foolish son grief to his mother."

My mother always was more critical of me than my father was (and is--they are both still alive!). My mother was always the one who doled out punishment and my father would always be forgiving and would look for a silver lining somewhere.

I have come to realize over the year that these are really two faces of God. God can be all-forgiving to be sure but God also expects a lot of us. Often we try to favor one over the other. God is either a lover OR a judge, but actually God is both. God wants us to do well and to live up to the expectations he has for us to become all that we are, nothing more, but more importantly, nothing less.

My mother would often be the one who would challenge me and would get me involved in things that would stretch me beyond my comfort zones. My dad would be the one who would support me when I found out that perhaps I was not as gifted in say, art or music as some of my friends were. I was not expected to be perfect and my father would let me see that it was OK to fail as long as I tried my best.

And therein lies the main point: At the heart of wisdom lies effort and risk. One has to get beyond fear to make attempts to discover who who really are, to be unafraid to try new things and not to be the fool who simply makes excuses as to why they are unable to make any effort at self-discovery because of pride or fear of embarrassment.

Today we ask ourselves if we indeed became wise as we grew up? Did we really try lots of new things to search our very souls? Was it a mother who encouraged that search and was dad simply a support in that period of self-discovery?