"On the Busiest Streets"
Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
September 15, 2024
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
Video from Livestream (starts at 22:21)
She calls out. Can we hear her?
In the hustle and the bustle of our daily living, amid the cacophony of the bells and pings, as our attention is pulled this way and that way, she stands in the midst of it all and calls out. Can we hear her?
Her still, small voice grows to a crescendo. It grows to a raspy shout. It cracks as it strains to cut through the noise that surrounds us. As it strains to cut through ever-present, ever-growing din to which we all, like a frog in a pot of water that slowly starts to boil, have become accustomed. Can we hear her?
There she stands, on the busiest street corner, in the middle of the public square. Lady wisdom herself, frantically jumping up and down trying to re-capture our attention—trying to re-capture our focus. As notifications chime and as alerts sound their siren call, there she stands. As distractions meant to divide and separate us from one another turn us into disciples of algorithms that cater to our basest desires and transform us into predictable, profitable, and commodifiable profiles that can be sold to advertisers to appease shareholders and add another billion or two to market cap and some founder’s net worth, there she stands. Her hands waving and her fingers snapping—hey, hey, hey! Back here, back here! Can we hear her?
Can we hear her?
For as long as we’ve been organizing ourselves into civilizations, it has always been difficult to tease out the guidance of Wisdom from everything else. Life in any social order is complex, requiring us to navigate competing claims on our attention—competing claims on our time, our talent, and our treasure.
There’s so much information to sort through.
There’s so much data to process.
How can we possibly be expected to synthesize it all? How on earth can we possibly be expected to analyze it all in any meaningful way that leaves us with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Oh sure, we have it rough now. Forget a firehose, these handheld supercomputers that we walk around with every day expose us to a constant flood of information in a way that far more resembles one of those industrial waterjet cutters—anyone else’s Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts delivering them satisfying industrial waterjet cutter content?
But it’s not like humanity has ever really had it easy in that regard either. Archeologists say that civilization, as we know and understand it, is just around 12,000 years old. And while that might seem like what historians might call “terrifyingly ancient” and what literary critics might call “eldritch as heck”, everything is just a matter of scale.
12,000 years is a fraction of Homo sapiens’ temporal range of hundreds of thousands of years.
12,000 years is a blip of our genus’ temporal range spanning back millions and millions of years.
12,000 years is statistically insignificant when sharing the grand story of life—the final period of the final sentence in a dusty footnote.
For as old as this thing we call human civilization is, everything that makes up these fearfully and wonderfully made sacks of guts, flesh, and bones is unfathomably older.
It’s like, for the past 12,000 years we’ve collectively been trying to run Mac OS Sonoma on a 1979 Apple II machine.
For as long as we’ve been around and organizing with our neighbors to accomplish feats completely beyond the realm of what any of us can accomplish alone, our biology has been playing catchup. And with each passing age of the human era, as the sum total of information grows in leaps and bounds at an exponential rate and blasts through our modest analytical firewalls, it’s gotten harder and harder to dial in to the tune of Lady Wisdom’s voice.
And yet, still she stands. Smack dab in the middle of every public square in every space and in every time. Small but mighty. Lady Wisdom herself. Her power lies not in her strength, but in weakness.
Now look, before I go any further, I want to make one thing crystal clear.
The weakness that I’m talking about here is a weakness that’s foisted upon Wisdom personified in these verses—it’s assigned to her by patriarchal systems and structures rather than an innate, essential quality.
We read and listen to this morning’s depiction of Wisdom personified bound by the particularities our contemporary context. It’s always so, so important to be cognizant of ourselves that we read any text—especially our sacred texts—through the lenses of our own culture, our own history, and our own biases.
And, while I’m certainly not suggesting that we have achieved anywhere near perfect equality among all the sexes today in the year of our Lord 2024, blatant misogyny is, generally, frowned upon today.
I say all this because, while blatant misogyny wasn’t, generally, celebrated 2,500 years or so ago (give or take a century or two) when this depiction of Wisdom personified was codified in the scroll we now know as Proverbs, it’s worth remembering who the original audience of these collections of phrases and sayings was.
Who were the ones that were first reading this depiction?
It was learned and wealthy men.
It was for the elite, upper class of the social order. The scholars and princes and priests and rulers.
Therefore, it’s noteworthy that Wisdom is personified as a woman in this scroll. Wisdom isn’t personified as a king or a scribe. Wisdom isn’t characterized as a person with social capital to spare, hidden away in a tower with the men who were reading and writing and learning from this scroll.
In her commentary on Proverbs, Dr. Christine Yoder says:
Whether bartering in the marketplaces, weaving, trading, feeding and clothing others, planting vineyards, mixing wine, or burning the midnight oil, the labor of women is here elevated, theologically legitimated, and claimed as the preferable means of moral and theological instruction of the whole community.
Wisdom is personified as a woman, shouting from the busiest streets with other women who have and are ignored by the power structures that be and are doing women’s work. She’s there with the merchants and the beggars; the barterers and the artisans all trying to scrape together enough so that they can afford their daily bread. And that is precisely the image that conveyed to and preserved by the rich and the powerful. That is what ends up being preserved as the preferable means of moral and theological instruction for the whole community. That is who we are to seek out. That is who is to be our moral compass. That is the pilot of the vessel that ferries our social order through rocky waters.
Lady Wisdom is scrappy. She’s got moxie. She doesn’t have an army to resolve her conflicts using good, old-fashioned, might-makes-right diplomacy. She doesn’t have servants waiting on her every want. She doesn’t have a treasury that exists to isolate and shield her from the truth that, at the end of the day, we’re all simply creaturely creatures, incapable of providing our basic needs in solitude with lives that are woefully finite. While those who do have the armies and the servants and the treasuries hide away in their towers, fooling themselves into thinking that can survive all on their own with their own resources, Wisdom knows better, and she’s stands right outside those towers, crying aloud good luck, babe, well good luck, babe.
Wisdom’s power does not come in a form accustomed to by the powerful. Her power lies not in her strength, but her weakness. Her wealth lies not in her riches, but her poverty. Wisdom is presented as one who is vulnerable, but nevertheless does not back down.
Her personification here exists to betray the underlying truth that we are not alone. We cannot do this thing called life alone. We need each other.
And even still, she calls out.
There, beyond these walls, she stands.
Can we hear her?
Because the noise around us has only gotten louder.
But the noise we’re surrounded by in our day and age is increasingly less the symphony of rich and beautiful harmonies made up of the diversity of our neighbors with which God has so richly blessed us—dissonance resolving to consonance; tension moving towards release in an intricate and delicate web of counterpoint.
Instead, we isolate and hide ourselves away in spaces with others who look like us and think like us and act like us and smell like us and love like us, swallowed up in an avalanche of uniformity that drives millions of tiny wedges, almost imperceptibly, between us and our neighbors and separate us from one another. Until, suddenly, we find ourselves locked away that very same tower. Only now, we’ve replaced the armies with followers and our treasuries with likes—all while, we, ourselves, are harvested and mined and reduced to a series of ones and zeroes on a balance sheet somewhere in Silicon Valley, abjectified into a product that can be bought and sold.
So where do we go from here?
Because Lady Wisdom is still out there, friends. Crying aloud to us smack dab in the middle of the busiest street, standing with everyone else who has been cast aside by our social order, and straining with all her might to help us see—really and truly see—and be in relationship with them. To be in right relationship with one another.
To live like our liberation is bound up with their liberation and that their liberation is bound up with our liberation.
How will we orient ourselves to her presence? How will we orient ourselves to her voice in a time when we most definitely need to be tuned into it?
Because we know that the next couple of months are going to be difficult. The past seven days have felt like seven months, and that doesn’t bode well for the next fifty days. We know that we’re going to have to wade through misinformation and disinformation, and we know that a lot of it will be patently absurd—100% ridiculous and probably worthy of mockery.
And look, I know how good it feels to dunk on those who traffic in blatant lies. Whenever we can make ourselves feel superior to someone else, it’s going to hit just the right spot in our emotional centers. And I’m not pretending that the lies are harmless either. Regrettably, this disinformation likely will be spread at the expense of our most marginalized neighbors—so and so are doing such and such.
Wisdom does not call us to stand idly by while our neighbors are suffering. When we see that happening, Wisdom demands us to drive a spoke straight through the wheels of injustice,
But there’s a difference between reactionary mockery and standing up for our neighbors. There’s a difference between reactionary outrage and standing up for our neighbors.
There’s a difference between a reactionary impulse and a faithful response.
We are a people who follow the way, the truth, and the life. We should combat disinformation when we encounter it, but it matters how we do it because disinformation is stubborn. It sinks its claws in the social order’s consciousness and refuses to let go. It’s the illusory truth effect. Once an association between X and Y exists, any repetition of X=Y at all only further cements that association. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous X=Y is. It doesn’t matter if the statement X=Y is clearly said in jest or to dunk on those who believe X=Y. It only further spreads the lie that we’re trying to combat in the first place.
It’s one of the bugs of living with these 1979 Apple II machines that we call our bodies in a world that requires MacOS Sonoma.
And while, unfortunately, we’re not going to be getting a hardware upgrade anytime soon, as any IT professional worth their salt will tell you, there is a workaround.
If we want to combat disinformation, we can tell the truth without restating the odious lie. We don’t have to say, “X doesn’t equal Y”. We can just say, “X equals X”.
It feels counterintuitive, I know, but there have been studies on this and everything. We just have to fight the reactionary urge and opt instead for a faithful response.
Because a reactionary urge is nothing more than a reflex. It’s something we do by ourselves, automatically, and in isolation. A faithful response requires us to go beyond ourselves.
A faithful response requires us to leave our echo chambers behind—to leave the tower.
A faithful response requires us to go out to the hustle and the bustle. It requires us to embrace the cacophony of the marketplace and the busiest streets where Wisdom personified has planted herself firmly and securely.
She stands in the midst of it all, beckoning us towards the source of life and life lived abundantly. Pleading for us to come and join her.
Can we hear her?
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