CUTTING OUR WISDOM TEETH
September 6, 2026 - September 27, 2026
Our leadership discernment process calls for at least two Sundays of theological education on congregational leadership. This year we’ll approach it through the lens of wisdom as a gift from God that is necessary for communities to function – and can be attained by anyone who attends to the possibility of God’s Spirit as a guide for their life, as well as our life together.
Beyond the Jordan. “In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month...” To open Deuteronomy, Moses recounts the Israelites’ journey through a generation’s worth of wilderness. He remembers for them how he set up a leadership structure, asking them to recommend the “wise, discerning, and reputable” among them. It’s a give-and-take – the people make recommendations; Moses appoints; the people then ought to listen to the ones they’ve selected. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.)
Seek It Like Silver. Wisdom is the subject of the whole of Proverbs – not because everybody has it, but because everybody should want it. It’s a gift that only God can give, but there is a path toward it that a person has to choose and re-choose. The only problem is, there are many paths, including alluring paths that lead to whatever is the opposite of wisdom. (Proverbs often says “destruction.”) Those seductive options are personified as seductive women, like the sirens who call Odysseus to a treacherous shore.
Vindicated by Her Children. Jesus has an interesting take on wisdom – that part of the trick is recognizing it when you see it. I mean, what if Jesus himself came to your town, and you thought he was a fool (a glutton and a drunkard)? Jesus’s question to his critics: What does this way of being yield? And for us: Is our religion teaching us how to recognize wisdom, or is there danger that we could mistake truly Christian wisdom for a losing proposition?
The Wisdom from Above. This chapter begins with a serious warning about how we speak, given the violence we can do with words. (Don’t we know it!) And then it moves to describing the “gentleness born of wisdom.” The leaders we seek and revere in the church are not the ambitious or arrogant kind; they are the gentle ones who make peace – especially with the way they speak, to each other and to the rest of us.