Wise Pursuits

St. Patrick Presbyterian

Wise Pursuits

July 2, 2023 • Rev. Greg Aydt • Proverbs 23:15–25

A new office meant blank walls in need of decoration. And that terrifies me. Not the blankness of the wall, but the infinite number of decorations from which to choose. Paralyzed by the options, I went with a quote wall that I could change as often as I’d like. My life after all, feels like a collection of quotes. Most of our dialogue around the house is a mixture of quotes from The Office, Parks and Rec, and Arrested Development. I considered filling my walls with some of the best: “His capa was detated from his body.” “Treat yo self!” “There’s always money in the banana stand.” But they were so deeply in my soul already that I didn’t need them on my walls. So I went with some meaningful quotes from some of the greats instead.

Hanging behind my desk is a fitting quote for this season from John Calvin: "The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice and power, but the church is the orchestra, as it were, the most conspicuous part of it." If you’ve ever enjoyed a quality musical performance, you’ve enjoyed the pit orchestra, even when you didn’t notice it. Backing every song and underscoring every important scene, the orchestra is the piece that ties everything together and elevates the performance to the sublime.

So what is Calvin getting at by calling the church the orchestra in the theater displaying God’s wisdom? Certainly God’s wisdom is evident in all of creation over (see Proverbs 8:22-31; or see tardigrades). But God has blessed His covenant community, the church, with an extra special role in displaying that wisdom to the world. Are we known for our wisdom? I think Christianity is often known for its rules. But where rules end, wisdom continues. And it is this divine wisdom that we have to offer the world. Are we displaying it?

By God’s grace and design, we are perfectly suited to display it. In our current series, “The Book of Suburbs,” Jim and Josh have described the wisdom of the Proverbs as a conversation between the Word, us, and our situations. Wisdom is found in the midst of that conversation. But no orchestra is made up of one instrument (unless you’re this guy). It is in the conversation of instruments with the script of the play and the scene on stage that the real beauty of the theater resides. This is how it is with the church. It is in the community of St Patrick, each with our own experience and gifts of wisdom, relating to the situations around us, and carrying the truth of Proverbs, that we can conspicuously display the beauty of God’s wisdom to the world.

Worship with us this Sunday as we open Proverbs together again to figure out how our church can join together in sounding the beautiful song of God’s wisdom to the suburbs.

The Feast of Wisdom

July 30, 2023 • Rev. James M. Holland • Proverbs 9

Over and over in the Bible, the idea of a great banquet or feast is used as a metaphor of the blessing, joy, and abundance of salvation. However, as we close out Proverbs, there are two feasts set before us—a feast of wisdom and a feast of folly. Both the architecture and ethos of the feasts almost immerse us in the taste, texture, and outcome of the tables we inhabit. Solomon ends his primer on wisdom with an either/or proposition: two ways, two feasts, two outcomes. It is interesting that the invitation to both is the same to the simple and unlearned. This should not surprise us—we all start out as fools and are placed in the drama of life either by the wisdom or the foolishness of others. We are needy creatures, and everyone is inviting us to a way of life that offers satisfaction. But, as Solomon points out, the paths part; and we are asked to look beyond the surface of things into the deeper meaning of reality and what it means to be human. Join us Sunday as we wrap up, The Book of Suburbs, and seek to subvert fast food values for a feast of good things!

Wise Money

July 23, 2023 • Rev. James M. Holland • Proverbs 10:22

The church culture I grew up in was of the more legalistic branch. It is not that I am ungrateful —because of that experience, there has never been a day I didn’t know the gospel. However, it had its own set of proverbs and wisdom which could be summed up like this, “We don’t drink and we don’t chew and we don’t go with girls that do.” That is representative of how we tried to defeat sin in our lives. What we did was locate evil in a thing and abstain from it. We had long lists of them. As if lists and legalism can curb desire. The logic was simple—abused things like dancing, drinking, sex, money, and certain types of dress were put on a list of things that were sinful. You can see, we had no ascetic, no view of beauty or pleasure. Heck, if it was pleasurable, it must be sinful! But that was our view of holiness. Money was on the list. If you had too much, it must be ill-gotten gain. Which brings us to our subject matter for this Sunday—wealth and all things related to wealth. There are about 150 proverbs on money in book of Proverbs. About half the time money is spoken of in the negative, which means, the other half it is spoken of as a good thing. Money in the book of Proverbs is nuanced, and thus the need for wisdom. But yes, money in the book of Proverbs is called a blessing. In fact, when wisdom is personified in chapter 8 and is speaking of her blessings, wealth is one of them. However, money is also spoken of often as a bane, filled with temptations and the ability to blind you to larger issues in life, a corrupting influence that can ruin your life. There are reasons that money is singled out as fraught with pitfalls. So how do we live in this tension? How do we give thanks for wealth and yet not worship wealth? Good question, and one we will seek to answer this Sunday. I hope to see you there.

Wise Age

July 16, 2023 • Rev. Joshua Smith • Psalm 90

As I approach my fortieth birthday at the end of this summer, I’m haunted by Moses’ observation in Psalm 90, that a man is lucky to live to eighty. In the best scenario, that calculus puts me at midlife having officially missed my opportunity to get a tattoo without people assuming I’m suffering some sort of crisis. (Which I most certainly am, but I don’t want anyone to know, so please keep that between us.) It’s really not so much the tattoo. It’s that I ran out of time to outdo John Steinbeck’s writing The Grapes of Wrath before he was this age. I’ve been asking some friends and family at the more extreme ends of the journey a few questions as I reflect on what wisdom there is for folks contemplating their mortality. “What’s the best thing about being your age?” One teen said, “freedom and no bills” and I felt the envy rise in my increasingly lactose intolerant gut. From the more seasoned, I got answers like, “Seeing my kids become adults and getting to spoil grandkids. Finally having some perspective. Financial security. Not being afraid of what people think of me.” So, those are good things to look forward to. I also asked, “What’s the hardest thing about being your age?” My own eight-year-old said, “I’m too little to be on Wheel of Fortune.” Tragic injustice, indeed: another old soul imprisoned in the third grade. The elder participants shared things like, “Losing my physical endurance and metabolism. The urgency of the finish line. Watching my parents die. Fighting cynicism. Being treated like I’m irrelevant.” A much harder set of answers for meditation. So, this Sunday we’re going on a journey together, consulting Scripture and the wise counsel of others who’ve come before us on this path. We’ll consider the ways we might experience our own age gracefully, whatever the number happens to be.