Sunday, July 23, 2023
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (narrative lectionary!)
watch this service online (reading starts around 25:40; children’s sermon starts around 27:25; sermon starts around 34:55)
Reading(s): Proverbs 1:1-7, 3:1-8, (Matthew 13:34-35)
I prefaced this sermon with a children’s message in which I talked about how, when life presents us with uncertain or unfamiliar situations or people, God invites us to step forward with a spirit of curiosity rather than fear. I illustrated this by bringing a mysterious box and making the children guess its contents: it was more boxes, lol – six increasingly tiny boxes all nested inside one another – to illustrate how each new thing we learn draws us in deeper, presenting us with new questions and new mysteries. When we keep our hearts and minds open to learn about others and about creation, it is an opportunity for us to grow closer to God.
When I was a kid, I had a terrible fear of spiders. Specifically spiders. Snakes, toads, mice, didn’t bother me at all – I mean, I basically became the designated snake handler for my Girl Scout troop. Anything with 0-4 legs I was fine with. But the more you started to add on legs, the less I wanted to do with it.
After I grew up and I graduated from college, I became a Peace Corps Volunteer. I ended up getting sent to the Dominican Republic, a country on this beautiful, tropical, Caribbean island. It was an amazing experience – a mostly amazing experience – because, well, how do I say this… do you know what kinds of bugs they have on beautiful, tropical, Caribbean islands? Big ones. Big ol’ bugs – bugs with legs for days!
I was assigned to a little town in a forested area of the country, up in the mountains. The house I lived in was a cinderblock house with a tin roof – pretty standard as Dominican houses go – and it was perched right at the very edge of this very deep wooded ravine.
You cannot begin to imagine the variety and sheer number of bugs I found in my house. Constantly. See, because of the hot climate, houses down there aren’t really sealed from the elements, so it’s a losing battle to try to keep the bugs out.
I tried – for a while, I tried. A couple people suggested I try this powdered insecticide you could buy down at the hardware store – they told me to sprinkle it all around the edges of the rooms in my house, and that that would do the trick. So I gave it a shot. And I started waking up every morning to what looked like an insect armageddon. It was like a mass extinction of giant cockroaches, big brown spiders with leg spans almost as big as my hand, lines of dead ants going every which way, and a whole bunch of other strange bugs that – to this day – I could not identify. I think I stuck it out maybe a week with the powder before I decided that, you know, maybe I actually don’t want to know what all bugs are coming into my house at night. I’m just gonna make sure that my mosquito net is tucked in nice and tight.
But one day, I was visiting some friends who lived up the road a ways; we were sitting on their porch drinking coffee. And all of the sudden I noticed – just a couple feet away from me – this teeny, tiny little tarantula crawling along the edge of the porch. It was actually the closest I’d probably ever been to a real, live tarantula – let alone in the wild! – and I was about a half a second away from freaking out. But my friend also noticed the tarantula, and before I could make a sound, he exclaimed, “Oh, look at that! Isn’t it beautiful?” I looked at my friend, and then I looked back at the tarantula again, with this new idea – and you know what? He was right. It really was beautiful.
This tarantula must have been a young one – it really was a tiny little thing – and I noticed that it was the most unexpected shade of powder blue! The sun was coming from behind it, so you could really see the fuzz on each of its tiny little legs – and it walked so gracefully, with such precise coordination between all eight of its legs that it almost looked like it was dancing. My friend took the opportunity to teach me all about the behavior and life cycle of tarantulas – more than I ever thought I’d have wanted to know – he explained what a rare privilege it was that we actually got to see one. Tarantulas tend to avoid humans, as I learned, and typically the only time you’ll see them is when heavy rains flood them out of their burrows.
I walked away from that conversation with a new perspective, and with a whole new appreciation for tarantulas, of all things!
It’s amazing how much our experience of something changes when we learn more about it. Whether it’s something new to us or something that we’ve been afraid of for a long time, engaging it with a spirit of curiosity instead of a spirit of fear can open us up to a whole new world of possibilities. Fear has a tendency to close our minds and to limit our thinking, while curiosity draws us out. Curiosity conditions us to see even the most challenging and fearful moments in life as opportunities for us to learn.
And that is the whole point of the book of Proverbs (which we read from today): to learn! The writer of Proverbs helpfully tells us so in this very first chapter – he writes that these are “The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel: for learning about wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight, for gaining instruction in wise dealing, righteousness, justice, and equity,” and so on and so on. And he makes clear that this isn’t just meant to be some kind of remedial Wisdom 101 for ding-dongs – he says, “let the wise, too, hear and gain in learning.” Everyone, even the people who have the best brains and the most advanced degrees, everyone always has something new to learn.
After all, even the wisest person in the world will never know as much as God knows. God is the one who made literally everything that exists, so God always has more to teach us. And God wants us to keep on learning and discovering more. Our reason and logic, our capacity for investigation and insight are all gifts from God. Through the scriptures, through poets and prophets and preachers, God invites us to draw closer, to open the box, to grow deeper in our understanding of the world, so that we may grow deeper in our relationship with God.
Now, having said all this, how do we then make sense of a verse like Proverbs 1:7 in this context? “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” I mean, we literally just talked about how fear tends to close our minds and make it harder for us to learn! Well, it helps to interrogate the translation of this a little bit. While the original Hebrew word used here can be translated to mean fear or terror, an interpretation more in line with our understanding of God is that this is a sense of awe and reverence and respect for God. God doesn’t want us to be afraid; but God’s unsurpassable wisdom and God’s awesome creative power, these things command respect.
Heh, you can take that back to the tarantula as well. I learned not to be afraid of tarantulas – because even though they may be scary-looking, tarantulas actually aren’t all that dangerous to people – I mean, no one has ever died from a tarantula encounter. However, even though a tarantula bite isn’t likely to kill you, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still hurt like heck, as my friend Jean had the misfortune to find out firsthand. Because of its ability to defend itself and its importance in the local ecosystem, the tarantula deserves a certain measure of respect.
Likewise, we should have a healthy sense of respect and wonder and awe for God. This is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge, at least in part because it reminds us where our wisdom and knowledge comes from in the first place, which helps us to keep the rest of life in perspective.
It’s a perspective that reminds us to stay humble and not to get too puffed up about our own knowledge and wisdom – not to be “wise in our own eyes” as the author of Proverbs writes. Remembering how much greater God’s wisdom is than our wisdom keeps our pride in check – so that we don’t miss out on opportunities to learn because we are too proud or too afraid
And, paradoxically, this teaching that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom is actually a perspective that can help us learn not to be afraid. What is there for us to be afraid of when we are faced with something new and unfamiliar? There is nowhere we can go, no situation, no moment of life in which God is not present. There is no corner of creation in which God is out of God’s depth. God’s got our backs wherever we go, whatever we face.
And so, when we are faced with the unknown, with uncertainty, God invites us to step forward boldly, to step forward with a spirit of joyful curiosity. God encourages us to keep our hearts open, so that we may receive everything that comes as an opportunity to learn and to grow.
I pray that we may all keep in mind this perspective, this attitude of heart, as we move into this new season together. The road ahead of us is full of the unknown. This is my first rodeo as a transitional pastor, so I expect that I’ve got all kinds of learning and growing ahead of me! And you all as a congregation are sort of rediscovering yourself and figuring out what your next chapters might hold, and discerning what kind of leader you’ll need to guide you on that journey.
And it’s perfectly natural for us to feel a bit of uncertainty, and even fear, not knowing how this all will go. But if we trust in the Lord with all of our heart – and let go of trying to figure it all out on our own, or feeling like it’s all on us to come up with the answers – I know that God will set our feet on the right path.
This is the Day 
Leave a comment