Text of the Day 1-20-17

Today’s text is from 1 Kings 3:7-15. It is about Solomon’s request from God about leading God’s people:

“Now, Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?”

The Lord was pleased that Solomon had asked for this. So God said to him, “Since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have asked for the death of your enemies but for discernment in administering justice, I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be. Moreover, I will give you what you have not asked for—both wealth and honor—so that in your lifetime you will have no equal among kings. And if you walk in obedience to me and keep my decrees and commands as David your father did, I will give you a long life.” Then Solomon awoke—and he realized it had been a dream. (Contemporary English Bible)

The thing that strikes me most about this story is that God actually invites Solomon to ask for whatever he wants in verse 4. Solomon chooses to ask not for himself, but for his community, because he understands leadership is not about him.

Proverbs says that there are steps to acquiring wisdom. The first step is fear of God (Proverbs 9:10). You can’t become wise without humility, without realizing you are not God, without acknowledging that your knowledge is frail, incomplete, and prone to error. Solomon even refers to himself as “a little child.” Another step is to desire wisdom (Proverbs 4:5). According to the author, desiring wisdom and fearing God are basically the same thing.

There is no wisdom without humility. No learning without desire.

Israel told its history as an object lesson in the character qualities that made for good and for poor leadership. Their political theology was rooted in the idea that the laws of God and society are like laws of nature. Wisdom is an appreciation and application of those laws. To be a good leader, one must be a student of human nature and one’s own character. Those leaders who did not “seek God” disparaged the poor and created chaos in the nation.

It pleased God that Solomon asked for wisdom. It was a sign that Solomon was already on the right path. Wisdom is a gift not just for ourselves, but for everyone connected to us in the web of our relationships. Whether we are wise or not is not an evaluation we can make for ourselves. It is proved by our conduct.

Pray for wisdom.

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Twice a week (usually Tuesday and Thursday) I do a short reflection on a Bible verse from a devotional and social justice perspective. You can sign up to get a prompt via SMS here: 
Text Of The Day

Happiness versus Holiness?

In order to sound profound, preachers and devotional writers will often make statements like this:

Feel-good religion is concerned with making people happy; but God is concerned with making people holy.

I suppose this is motivating for some people, but it makes me bristle inside. I understand the idea behind such statements, and I even agree up to a point: the goals of the Christian life and what Jesus preached go beyond “self-actualization” or “your best life now.” Sure.

But contrasting happiness and holiness creates at least two new problems. The first is philosophical (or theological), and the second is practical.

The philosophical problem is that it ignores about three thousand years of conversation about what “happiness” or “the good life” actually is. Epicurus, Aristotle, the author of Proverbs, all talked about the moral aspect of happiness. According to Aristotle, a life well-lived meant pursuing moral virtue. The author of Proverbs agrees:

Better to be poor and walk in integrity
than to be crooked in one’s ways even though rich. (Proverbs 28:6)

Aristotle observed that people can have lots of money and still be miserable. Happiness was not the same as comfort, pleasure, or easy living. Yet in order to pursue moral virtue, one must also have “a moderate amount of wealth.” Again, the author of Proverbs agrees:

…give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that I need,
or I shall be full, and deny you,
and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
or I shall be poor, and steal,
and profane the name of my God. (Proverbs 30:8-9)

You do not find any distinction between happiness and holiness in the Hebrew Bible. A happy life was a holy life, and vice versa. God’s holiness was to be reflected in the equality, social stability, and right living of God’s people. The Kingdom of God was supposed to be a happy place:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. (Zechariah 8:4-5)

One rabbi explained his Judaism to me this way: we want to make God happy, and God is happiest when we are fully alive. If you spend a lot of time in Proverbs, you come to see how odd the contemporary Christian distinction between happiness and holiness is. In fact, the more I hear the statement, the more sanctimonious it sounds.

Which brings me to the second, practical problem: it sounds bad. God doesn’t care about your happiness? Well, does God care about the happiness of people who can’t get enough food? Does God care about the happiness of people trapped in abusive relationships? This is not the kind of person, or God, with whom I would want to be in a relationship.

The idea that God wants us to be holy, not happy, is not only a bad sales pitch: it is lousy politics and lousy theology. It is lousy theology because it misrepresents the holiness that we see in Jesus Christ. Jesus did care about human happiness, especially those that religious people dismissed. If a human being were not concerned about other people’s happiness, we would never call that person “holy.” We would use other words.

It is bad politics because it reflects a position of privilege: people with all they want can afford to be dismissive of happiness. Justice is concerned with happiness and the freedom of all creatures to be fully alive.

I think there is still a lot of potential in talking about happiness and holiness, but it goes in a different direction: what happens to Aristotle’s notion of “a life well-lived” (which included a good death) in the shadow of the cross? In the light of Easter morning? How is God’s holiness bound up in the happiness of all of God’s creation? Should hearing the “Good News” make us happy?