Becoming Wise--October 21, 2020

Becoming Wise--October 21, 2020

"...We have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of the God." [Colossians 1:9-10]

I used to define being a grown-up in terms of the perks and possessions people seemed to get when they reached a certain age.  Driving--check.  Voting--check.  High school diploma--check.  Others didn't come with a fixed number of years, but still seemed like things you just got when you were finally an adult:  you get a car, or you get your first job, or you buy a house, or your find the perfect person for a romance in your life.  And add in a steady income, a couple of kids, a white-picket fence, a dog, and a favorite vacation spot, and you have arrived at grown-up-ness. Fast forward a few decades, and then the new round of perks are senior discounts and AARP memberships.  Right?

Forgive me that naivete, but honestly, that's so much of how I think a lot of us were taught to think of maturity.  It was a matter of getting things, or getting relationships, whether or not you had even the slightest clue what to do with them.  

Well, like I say, I am often slow on the uptake and late to the party, but none of that is right.  I mean, and forgive me here for being blunt, but that whole list of the cookie-cutter picture of adulting is such... a shallow and privileged picture of life, isn't it really? At least to hear the voices from the Scriptures tell it, being grown-up--at least in the sense that really matters--has almost nothing to do with what you have, whether materially or relationally, and virtually everything to do with what sort of people we are becoming.  That is to say, it is about becoming people whose lives are shaped like Jesus' life, and whose love takes the form of Jesus' kind of love--but that happens without regard for what stuff you own or even what relationships you are in.  

Jesus, after all, was notoriously homeless, jobless, perennially penniless (having to fish for coins from the actual mouths of fish from time time time), as well as spouseless and childless, too.  And yet, Jesus seems to be the gold-standard for what it looks like to be a really truly mature--or wise, in the best sense of that word--human being.  Not in the sense of shrewd or savvy or good at self-interested game playing.  I mean that Jesus is wise in the sense of really knowing how to be good at being human.  

On the flip side, I know a lot of people who check all the boxes for "stuff to have"--they've got the job in upper management, a vehicle that runs, a home they own without fear of immediate foreclosure, a dog, a romance, and even the white picket fence--and are still depressingly immature about what actually matters in life.  I'm in that spot, too, more often than I'd like to admit--I've got an awful lot of the things that childhood Me thought made you a "grown-up," and yet I've got an awful lot of immaturity in my soul to work through.

Maybe what we need to consider is that being mature, being wise, and being at last finally half-decent at being human, was never about having to get or acquire or achieve any of those things we were told as kids "made you an adult."  And maybe instead, we discover that we become better at being human the more our lives echo Jesus' life, Jesus' way, Jesus' love.  Or as the letter to the Colossians puts it, that we may "lead lives worthy of the Lord" and may be "filled with spiritual wisdom and understanding."  That's not about memorizing esoteric mantras to recite in meditative rituals, or getting a degree in abstract theology--it's about learning to train our hearts to love the way Jesus does, and our minds to see the world the way Jesus sees it.  We become wise, not when we know the answer on tonight's Final Jeopardy! clue, but when we respond to suffering like Jesus does... when we find courage to speak up to bullies like Jesus does... when we get upset over the things that break Jesus' heart... when we learn to rest in our beloved-ness entirely apart from our having or not having the job, the house, the car, or the spouse.  None of those were necessary for Jesus to be Jesus, and Jesus (for whatever else we confess about him) is the best person at being human that humanity has ever known.

And the way we get better at being like Jesus, honestly, is to live, to practice, to see and study his examples, to watch and learn from other disciples around us who are trying and stumbling and starting over again alongside us, and to be in conversation and connection with the living Jesus as we go.  We pray, trusting that Jesus speaks in the exchange, and that he is shaping us through the conversation.  We study the stories of how Jesus interacted, loved, healed, forgave, wept, and ate with people, so that we can get those moves into our fingers like a piano student practicing the notes on the page over and over until they become a part of you.  We discern and ask and talk with other disciples, other Christians, especially the ones who inspire us because they actually reflect something of Jesus into our lives.  And along the way, we discover we put less and less emphasis on having the right alignment of possessions or relationships going just the right way in our lives, and more and more on what kind of people we ourselves are becoming.

I think the writer of Colossians wants us to dare that kind of life.  I think he is convinced that we become most fully alive--and in a sense, our best at being human--the more we let our lives become shaped by the way of Jesus.  And I think that's really what it is to be wise.  Not about book knowledge or business savvy, not about having it all, owning it all, or achieving it all.  And not even about getting your life to fit a cookie cutter expectation, even though an awful lot of popular religion seems to be peddling that as God's best-selling product.  It's about learning how to be as fully human as possible--by letting ourselves be as fully like Christ as possible.  Never to earn our way into a club, but to become what we were meant to be all along, like an acorn growing into an oak.  That's what it is to be wise.  That's what it is to be grown-up in soul.  That's what's worth spending not just today on, but our whole lives.

May it be said of us that we were striving for wisdom... striving to be better at being human... striving to be like Jesus.

Lord Jesus, teach us your kind of wisdom, and make us to be like you, so that we can be fully alive.