Proper 8 Year B 2024: Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15,2:23-24

 On Youth Sunday this year, I was briskly walking through the grocery store with a dozen donuts. I had told our high school senior preacher that I was not above bribery to encourage her to preach at both services. To her credit, she said she’d do it without the bribe to which I responded, “Lara, accept the bribe. Let me bring you breakfast. What do you want?” She wanted a chocolate donut, which led me out of the bakery section that morning with enough donuts for everyone, because if there’s one thing I remember about being a teen, it's that donuts and pizza make things happen.

I noticed something, that morning: the handful of other people in the store. Not only because it was 7:00 in the morning and I couldn’t fathom why you would choose 7am as your grocery shopping hour. But I was struck with a sadness, as those people stood as stand-ins for all of the people for whom that Sunday was just another day. A day to wrap up tasks and get ready for another work week. Because as much as 8am is not my chosen hour to do, well, pretty much anything, as my family will attest to, I had the privilege of being on my way to church. Because for us, every Sunday is a Feast of Our Lord. As Episcopalians, we can worship the Lord, ask for forgiveness, and reaffirm our baptisms at the Eucharist, sometimes before the rest of the city has had their morning coffee. What a tremendous gift.

Every Sunday, we are reminded that we live in the resurrection. Every week we have something to celebrate, that “Jesus Christ our Lord, on the first day of the week overcame death and the grave, and by his glorious resurrection opened to us the way of everlasting life.” We live in the joy of the resurrection.

A friend of mine likes to tell his brother’s story from college. His brother would go out Saturday night and then, on his way home Sunday morning, go to whatever the absolute earliest Mass was at the Catholic church. So while most of the worshipers there were starting their day, my friend’s brother was ending his night. I’m sure he smelled fantastic. But when his friends would ask him why he was making this detour to Mass instead of going straight home and to bed, my friend’s brother would say, “it’s the least I can do.” We can exist in secular culture while still returning back “home” to the church to rest, to find our strength and our joy, to be reinvigorated, to spend time with our siblings in Christ. That’s the deeper point my friend’s brother was getting at with his cheeky “it’s the least I can do”. He’s getting at “I come back here to be sure I’m spending time worshiping the Lord, no matter what is going on in my life or in the world around me.”

The Wisdom of Solomon was written by a learned Jew living in Greek culture - likely in Egypt - imploring his people to not let themselves become too Greek. His style is reminiscent of Greek eloquence and at times has the light touch of Greek lyric poetry. He employs a wide array of Greek rhetorical figures. Throughout the book, the author is primarily addressing his fellow Jews in an effort to encourage them to take pride in their faith. He maintains that Jewish monotheism and morality are philosophically and ethically superior to the religious beliefs and practices of the Greeks and Egyptians.

Today’s text picks up in the middle of a thought. The gap in the middle where you can see there are 23 missing verses isn’t that bad - it’s giving voice to the argument of who the writer calls “the ungodly” - his words - and then picks up with his response to them. But I wish the whole reading started earlier, even just at chapter 1, verse 12, so here is that verse and verse 13: “Do not invite death by the error of your life, or bring on destruction by the works of your hands; because God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.” Woah. That totally changes the emotions behind this text. It’s not coming out of the void with God showing up in the midst of our distress and, as if in a cruel game of tag, “not it”. By starting at verse 12, we are reminded that the writer is giving the “creation” of death to its rightful owner…us. And, the writer is using the full range of meaning of the word death. Just as death in English can speak more richly than a literal and clinical decomposition of flesh, so too can it mean more in Greek. The writer of Wisdom of Solomon is imploring his Hellenized Jewish audience to not invite separation from God by the way in which they live their lives, but to live in right relationship with God in order that they might not invite the death that is separation from God in the world.

There’s something about what we do here, in the place, that is countercultural. We physically come together, when it’s never been more convenient to stay at home. And we come here to do liturgy together, to enact with our bodies what we believe. As liturgist Dr. James Farwell said, “liturgy does what it does by the doing.” That is, what we do in our corporate worship is shaping us. By coming together every week, by giving up our selfish or self-serving wants to take up a place as part of the body of Christ, we are living into and creating that which is bigger than our individual selves. And the act of physically coming together matters - if there’s one thing we learned during Covid, it’s that our theology that instructs the priest to literally physically touch the bread and the wine isn’t founded in clerical hubris, but in an acknowledgment that we are better, stronger, together. 

Modern theologians have made the observation that today’s Church has more similarities with the early, emerging church than it does with the church from even as recently as the 1950s. And so it’s fitting that we have this text today from a time that is estimated anywhere between 250BCE and 150CE. And what the author is exhorting “Solomon’s fellow kings”, but really all of his Jewish audience, to do is to pursue wisdom and justice. And because he is writing as if he is Solomon, we know that, like the great King Solomon, he isn’t asking for wisdom for wisdom’s sake, or to make him greater than other people, but for holy wisdom, the wisdom that comes from the Lord, so that we might better care for one another and know what is justice.

And we come together two thousand years later, on this Sunday, having promised in our baptismal covenant to do just that: to strive for justice and peace among all people. This can be difficult, painful work. But that’s why we do this work together, and all in the joy of the resurrection that we come together to remember every week. There’s a special church word for the kind of remembering we do in our liturgy: anamnesis. That is, the kind of remembrance that makes the past present. Not just nostalgia or recollection of the past, but that the past continues to live in our present. We are connected with the ages old reading, being invited to choose the life for which God created us. And in our living in the presence of our God, “the dominion of Hades is not on earth. For righteousness is immortal.” Amen.