August 16 Proper 15
We play a lot of car games and listen to a lot of music on road trips. Ardelle and I are happy to be past the phase in which Philadelphia Chickens was the CD played over and over again, ad naseum, at home and in the car. It’s a great CD. It just doesn’t quite stand up to 30 consecutive listenings.
So what struck me as something of a watershed moment occurred on our way home from Sewanee last week. From the back seat, our 10-year-old daughter said, “Will you put in ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’?”
My heart was full unto bursting. Alden is 13, and we’ve been trading songs and CDs for a while. But now our youngest child requested track number 6 from the Police’s 1978 record Outlandos d’Amour. Of which her dad also owns a vinyl copy and files next to his Zenyatta Mondatta and Ghost in the Machine LPs.
Now I realize that there’s a chance that some of you don’t find the early music of the Police terribly thrilling, and I was very tempted to take a little homiletical license and change “Can’t Stand Losing You” to one of the Brandenberg Concertos for this story. But whatever your musical tastes, you do know what it feels like to find that someone else loves or wants the same thing that you do.
You can gather information by reading a resume or learning about a person’s hometown, the details of their family history, or their occupation. But as soon as you find out that someone likes something that you like—a song, a novel, a dish—a more direct contact between souls seems to occur. You can learn something about a person when you hear what they have done. You will learn a lot more if you happen to want what they want and love what they love.
In the prevailing religion of Solomon’s time and place, what one did mattered most. Worshiping the right gods in the right way was task number one. And worshiping in the wrong way didn’t have much to do with one’s feelings or interior state. If you showed up at a particular place, before a particular statue and left your sacrifice or burned your incense, you had worshiped. No one seemed to ask whether you were sincere or what you really wanted.
Things like prosperity and long life and military victories were thought to attach themselves to people who were on good terms with the right gods. The Hebrew people, of course, were coming to believe that there weren’t countless visible gods for different geographical areas and different facets of life, but that we all are the children of one God.
But even this God still had to be pleased. The Hebrews still tied their fortunes to keeping their end of the deal. Keep the covenant, and all will be well. Break it, and well, not so much.
So Solomon’s task in his first conversation with God after he’s made king is to please God, it seems. The exchange always struck me a little like King Arthur and the keeper of the bridge in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Answer rightly—about your favorite color, or the air velocity of an unladen swallow, or whether wisdom is better than wealth—and you get to cross the keeper’s bridge, or, in this case, gain God’s favor. Solomon passes the test, saying, “Give your servant an understanding mind.” And God is pleased.
But maybe this wasn’t a test, but an intersection of Solomon’s desires and God’s. Because what God really asked was, “What do you want?” And down at the level of Solomon’s wants, God saw something pleasing. Before Solomon did anything as king, God took a look into his desires and found something good.
It would be many centuries before literature would really begin exploring the depths of the human psyche. But God’s attention to what Solomon wanted does seem different from judging him according to what he had done. In fact, the line about Solomon’s sacrificing and offering incense in the high places is an allusion to what Solomon was doing wrong with regards to worship. The high places were where people paid homage to other gods. And in spite of even that, God was pleased with what Solomon wanted.
I love the story of Solomon’s desire for wisdom because in it, he and God explore Solomon’s wants, loves, and desires. And through this story we see that wanting power or wealth or long life are not the most life-giving desires, at least not when they come first. The humbler desire for wisdom and discernment of what is right is a better place to start.
Solomon gets the other things too. But the story reminds us that we need to pay attention to our desires. Otherwise we’ll try to find meaning in our lives by satisfying ourselves with power and money, perhaps fretting away the present as we worry about how long we’ll live.
Augustine described sin as a disordering of our loves and desires, even though those loves and desires are good in and of themselves. It’s not bad to love bamboo fly rods or to really want an R. L. Winston split cane 4 weight, 8 footer. But if I care more about fly rods than the needs of a friend… well, something’s gone awry.
So in Augustine’s terms, what Solomon got right was the ordering of his desires. Wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil have to precede wealth and power, or else wealth and power will be our destruction rather than our blessing.
One description of our own era might be one of unchecked and mis-ordered desires. We’ve believed for too long that we can simply want wealth and power with all we have, and that somehow in the unbridled pursuit of these things, good and evil will sort themselves out along the way. We don’t have to be good. Markets will keep us from being too bad.
But unless we pay some attention to the state and order of our desires, won’t we just continue to obsess over our wealth and power at the expense of our happiness, our sanity, perhaps our very lives? We can’t continue living as though it makes no difference what we want or who we want or how much we want as long as we are perfectly free to want anything in the world. We have to reorder our desires to find the abundant life God intends for us.
Solomon said, “Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?” And here we may find a key to the right ordering of what we want: Solomon cared about the people around him. The wisdom and discernment he desired was for their sake first. Not his. And maybe God was pleased with his desire because the state of our own souls has everything to do with the way we live with one another.
Solomon, at least at this stage in his life, is an example to us. But God can also use the people around us to help us reorder our desires. Here’s a local example.
A few years ago a woman named Katy Elliot took a little money she’d inherited and started the Arkansas Sustainability Network. And one of her goals was to help small local farmers make a living. She told me at the end of last year that the ASN food club netted $1500 for the year. By most measures in our culture that makes the project a failure.
But come by here on a Saturday morning when people are volunteering to bag tomatoes and onions and squashes and organize the orders and tend the till. Profit wasn’t Katy’s first goal, and a community of people willing to pour themselves into a project they care about arose.
There are plenty more examples like Katy sitting in these pews: people who took a lower paying job to do something they love, or to keep them near things or people they love rather than sell their souls to the highest bidder; people who volunteer their time and talents for something they care about. We see people here, making this transformative liturgy happen, carrying candles and crosses and singing and reading and pressing linens and polishing silver. We see people giving of their wealth so that a hungry person can be fed, or someone else’s child can go to college, or the ministry of this church can continue, or just so that the faithful work of a small farmer can sustain his life and his land.
And soon we see that it’s through each other that God reorders our desires. It’s by looking at your lives that I see that the desire for wealth and power doesn’t have to drive mine. We can grow to love what God loves and want what God wants. Because God shows up to us as surely as God showed up to Solomon. God shows up to us through other lives. Through the person sitting next to you. Through the person whose life inspires the courage in you to live differently. Even through the suffering person whose own disordered desires have put them in need of our love.
God can still reorder our desires. The question for us may simply be, “To whom will we look for inspiration?”
Just to find another person who loves the same song you do, even if it’s your daughter, is a little inspiring. But it’s not about the song. It’s about the simple connection with another person in a deeper part of ourselves. The place where our loves and desires live. And when we help each other glimpse these parts of ourselves, we can learn to live and love better.
And the power of such love will change our world by changing us, one reordered love at a time. Amen.