Allegory of Divine
Wisdom, L. Giordano 1680
The Sermons At Calvary
By The Reverend Rhonda M. Lee
10 Pentecost (Proper 12), Year A
1 Kings 3:5-12
A Listening Heart
“O Lord my God, you have made your
servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I
do not know how to go out or come in.
And your servant is in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a
great people, so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted. Give your servant therefore an understanding
mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can
govern this your great people?” And God said to Solomon, “Because you have
asked this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches, or for the
life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what
is right, I now do according to your word.
Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been
before you and no one like you shall arise after you.”
As we might expect, the Bible's two
books of Kings tell the story of the exploits of various kings of Israel and
Judah. A lot of these stories are
fascinating, sort of the “People magazine” of biblical times. I know a Presbyterian pastor who preached a
sermon series on the books of Kings one summer and after the third sermon or
so, he got a note in the offering plate.
The note said: “I'm sick and tired of all this preaching about
sex!” But a lot of the other stories in
Kings are a real snore: one biblical scholar has called them “boring summaries
of the lives of incompetent kings.”
Most of the names of those kings aren’t familiar to us, and they sound
strange today: Jehoshaphat, Jehoram, Ahaziah, and so on.
We do recognize a few names: We’ve
certainly heard of Jezebel, the one queen who gets a lot of press – all of it
negative. And we've heard of King
Solomon. Solomon’s name has lived on in
history for many reasons. To start
with, he’s the son of famous parents: Bathsheba and King David, whose
relationship started under extremely dubious circumstances, to say the
least. Solomon is famous in his own
right, too, above all for his wisdom.
For example, he was wise enough to know that when two women both say
that they are the mother of the same baby, the real mother is the one who would
rather give up the child than allow him to be cut in two with a sword. Solomon is remembered for building the
temple in Jerusalem – not with his own hands, of course, but he commissioned it
– and he also had a palace built for himself.
He made Israel a bigger player
on the international scene than it ever had been before. The first book of Kings tells us that
“Solomon was sovereign over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of
the Philistines, even to the border of Egypt; they brought tribute and served
Solomon all the days of his life.” In some ways, Solomon’s name is a synonym
for good judgement, good government, and a strong nation.
Solomon sounds pretty good so far,
but sadly, he is also famous for other, more negative reasons. He made a lot of
marriages to cement his alliances with other countries; we're told that he had
at least 700 wives and many more concubines.
So much for traditional, biblical marriage... Those foreign wives apparently brought their own religions with
them, and the Bible tells us disapprovingly that Solomon allowed people in his
kingdom to make sacrifices to idols, instead of requiring worship of the one
God who had put him on the throne in the first place. Furthermore, Solomon's building projects were very expensive and
it seems that he raised taxes to pay for the new temple and the palace. And he built those buildings by forced
labour, of foreigners and maybe of his own subjects too. So if Solomon’s reign was the peak of
Israel’s political and religious success, it was also a time in which the
people’s dissatisfaction grew along with the burdens that their king put on
them. It was a time in which they paid
with the labour of their own bodies for their country’s beautiful new buildings
and higher international profile.
But I’m getting ahead of our
reading here. Today, we overhear
Solomon talking with God at the very beginning of his reign. All of his
successes and all of his betrayals still lie in the future, and he is still in
awe of the responsibility that he has received. Solomon is a grown man, but he compares himself to a little
child. He says he does not “know how to
go out or come in,” which means he has no experience in warfare, in going out
against an enemy and being able to come back home victorious. He has to figure out how to rule over a
numerous people, who have come a long way from their two ancestors Abraham and
Sarah many generations ago. At the
moment when he meets God at Gibeon, Solomon is a little bit afraid of what he’s
gotten himself into. And he has sense
enough, and humility enough, that when God tells him to ask for anything he wants, Solomon asks for
understanding.
The people who wrote the Bible use
the word “wisdom” a lot when they describe King Solomon. But that word, “wisdom,” does not appear in
today’s reading. In the translation we
read earlier, Solomon asks God for “an understanding mind to govern your
people.” Now that makes sense, since we
know that Solomon is wise, and we usually think of wisdom as a quality of the
mind. But if we look at the original
Hebrew text and translate it as literally as possible, we see that in fact
Solomon asks God for “a listening heart.”
And God promises Solomon understanding, or discernment, to “listen in
judgement.” That is, God gives Solomon
the willingness and the ability to listen carefully before he makes
decisions. That's a good thing for the
most powerful person in the kingdom to do, since his decisions affect the lives
and the well-being of thousands of people.
But to whom will Solomon listen?
That’s a good question. I think
the best answer is that he will listen both to God and to the people whose
well-being God has entrusted to him, especially to the most vulnerable of those
people, who are more often ignored than listened to.
It’s important for Solomon to
listen to God, who loves the vulnerable most of all, and to the people, because
if he listens only to himself, he will probably end up fooling himself. God praises Solomon for not asking “for long
life or riches, or for the long life of [his] enemies” – all the things that
any of us might be tempted to ask for if God came to us and said we could have
anything we wanted. Solomon could have
convinced himself that long life, or riches, or the death of his enemies,
really was the best thing, not for him,
of course, but for his country. His
enemies were probably really bad people anyway, right? So maybe it would have
been a good thing to ask God to do away with them. Solomon could have convinced himself that his interests and the
interests of his people were one and the same thing, that what was good for
Solomon was good for Israel. But he
didn’t do that. He was humble enough,
at least in the beginning, to know his limitations and the awesome size of the
job ahead of him, and so he asked for a listening heart so that he could make
good decisions. If he listens with his
heart, Solomon will use not only his reason – his mind – but also his
compassion before he makes decisions that affect other people.
So we see that the wisdom that God
gives to Solomon is different from what we often think of as intelligence, or
“smarts.” It’s certainly different from
what I saw a few weeks ago when I watched a documentary called “Enron: The
Smartest Guys in the Room.” The people
who ran Enron into the ground and who did away with thousands of people’s
retirement savings were smart in some ways.
They knew how to work the system to make themselves as much money as
possible, as quickly as possible. They
were quick, they were sharp, they saw loopholes and exploited them, they ran
circles around their slower competitors.
But they had no listening heart to guide them, to tell them that what
they were doing to benefit themselves was harmful to others, especially to
those who trusted them with their future security. Those Enron executives and traders were not the first, they were
not the only, and they won’t be the last, people to use their intelligence in
ways that harm others and betray their trust.
But their actions help us to see the difference between being smart and
being wise.
We might look at the story of
Solomon and say, “He was a king, he had lots of power over other people. Look at the way he turned out. You just can't trust the government.” And it’s true that the people who are entrusted
with the power to govern any country – or any city – would do well to learn
from this story. But it speaks to the
rest of us, too, whether we’re a business executive, or a secretary, or a
parent, or a clergyperson. Most of us
have power we can use in ways that affect other people. Certainly, some of us have more of it and
some of us have less, but most of us have some. At work, at home, on the street: every day
we have opportunities to listen to someone who needs something we're in a
position to offer, which might be as simple as a kind word or a cup of
coffee. Or the need might go deeper
than a kind word or some coffee. We
might read a newspaper story about the huge differences in resources available
to schools in poorer and richer neighbourhoods in Louisville, and feel helpless
until we realize that we have power as citizens and taxpayers to change
situations like that. When we listen
with both our hearts and our heads, when we respond with our compassion as well
as with our reason, we will be more open to the cries of our sisters and
brothers in need, we will be more attentive to the Holy Spirit guiding us, and
we will be more likely to make the kinds of choices that will build up Christ’s
kingdom in our own place and in our own time.