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At the end of my time serving as a hospital chaplain, we had a ceremony, a graduation of sorts from that unit of their program. This was presided over by the head chaplain, the Reverend Doctor So-and-So, who it would not give me any pleasure to name. This chaplain would insist on always being referred to by both titles because, in her words, she worked hard to receive both, so it is by those titles that I shall refer to her.
All of us training chaplains got to see many facets of the Reverend Doctor and her credentials. At the beginning of our unit, the Reverend Doctor wasn’t around a lot. She was busy with conferences and other things beyond the hospital, which made it feel like she was doing important work and we were in a prestigious place. We got used to working with other staff chaplains at this time who did a great job raising us up and showing us the ropes.
Then we saw another side. The Reverend Doctor would roll back in, coming in like a hurricane, creating confusing and turmoil in our work for us before heading back out and restoring a sense of calm for us again. This was the pattern for what may have been at least the 1st quarter of our time there.
Part of this whirlwind came because the Reverend Doctor employed what I would later learn was Gestalt theory. On one hand, this shows the Reverend Doctor’s credentials. On the other hand, this is a theory of psychology that has only offered one thing still in use by psychologists today because it was really seen as a troubling and immoral method. As someone who suffered from it along with my felling chaplains-in-training, I would go a step further and say it is unethical.
As someone working in a medical system, the Reverend Doctor knew the importance of looking at the data we were getting. I remember at one point where we were going over this data in the numbers from patients surveying the Spiritual Care department. They were fairly good, if memory serves, with a few dips as to be expected in any human organization. Unlike God, we are not perfect. Yet the Reverend Doctor was incredibly angry, almost trying to argue with the results right before her, as if she were right and they were wrong. It was almost as if she wouldn’t expect anything other than perfection, even when it was impossible to reach.
All this led to our end of unit ceremony. Here we were, chaplains of Spiritual Care. Here we were, those who were trying to provide prayer and a sense of God’s presence to patients visiting in the hospital. Throughout the entire ceremony, we never heard the word “God”. The closest we got was the word “Divine”, and even as it was uttered, it came out as if merely a slip of the tongue.
The Reverend Doctor may have been educated. She may have had credentials. She may have worked hard to get them. Yet she didn’t lean on was the presence of God, and it showed. It showed in what so-called wisdom she chose to lean on. It showed in how she treated others.
Intelligence is not Wisdom unless God is present. That is the lesson God is trying to teach us in our readings today. It is a lesson we would be wise to listen to.
Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in Ephesians. Wisdom, as the letter tells us, is to “understand what the will of the Lord is.” If we know that, then we are wise. If we do that, then we possess Wisdom.
This is what Jesus continues to try and share as we move through the passages of John following the feeding of the 5000. Jesus is trying to share what it is God is telling the people. He is trying to give them real wisdom. Yet they keep getting bogged down by the practical, by wanting to fill their bellies as Jesus said two weeks ago. Today too, we see that they are held down by their own understanding of what came before, an understanding that was limited, as Jesus points out by comparing the food He brings with the mana the people’s ancestors received with Moses in the wilderness.
We often think that Wisdom requires experience. Solomon proves that wrong in our reading from 1 Kings today. He might not possess his celebrated wisdom yet, but he possesses enough to know to ask for it and to ask for it from the Lord. This is what true wisdom is. It is what God, and God only, offers us.
The sad truth is that Solomon’s wisdom fails as he gets older. As with us all, he becomes bogged down by the world. He forgets to follow God solely. He allows his foreign wives, relationships forged strategically and diplomatically with other nations, to bring in their own idols and their own temples. This helps tempt the People away from the Lord. It is what causes them to fall away from God, from wisdom, from all that would keep them alive and protected from the empires around them.
We often think Wisdom is about knowledge, or work, or experience. True Wisdom is about something much greater. It is about following God and doing the Lord’s will, nothing else. If we don’t have God with us, if we don’t make God the center of everything, then what we have is a sham. What we have is hollow.
We see the consequences of following our own way with Solomon. We will unfortunately continue to see it with those listening to Jesus in the Gospel according to John.
Yet this doesn’t have to be the final tale for us. We can be different. We can be wise. We can survive even. To do so, we must first be willing to follow God’s way, not ours. We must make our own will God’s will, not anyone else’s. If we can do that, then we can truly be wise. If we do that, then we can belong to the Lord.