Text:  1 Kings 3:5-12                                                                                  W 10^th Sunday after Pentecost

 On Becoming a Wise Guy

     In the name of him who is for us the Wisdom of God, dear friends in Christ:  I’m sure that everyone has heard one or more of the many jokes that start with the line, “A man finds an old brass lamp, and when he polishes it, suddenly a genie appears who tells him that he’ll grant him three wishes.”  One of my personal favorites begins a bit differently:  the man is sitting alone in his living room and is startled to see a genie hovering above a lamp on the floor in front of him.  "And what will your third wish be?" asks the genie.  The man looks at the genie and says, "Huh?  How can I be getting a third wish when I haven't had a first or second wish yet?"  "You have had two wishes already," the genie answers, "but for your second wish, you begged me to put everything back the way it was before you made your first wish.  That’s what I did.  Thus, you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.  So you now have only one wish left."  "Well, okay," says the man, ”this is pretty weird; but if that’s the way it is, there’s something I’ve always wondered about.  I've always wanted to understand women. I'd love to know what's going on inside their heads."  "Funny," says the genie as he grants the wish and disappears forever, "That was your first wish, too!"  (Incidentally, Ladies, the joke also works if you switch the genders around in the story; but if you ask me, somehow then it’s not as funny.)

            You have to be very careful what you ask for:  that’s always the moral of these genie jokes.  Still, I think one of the reasons that this particular kind of joke will always be around is that it’s fun to fanaticize about what we would ask for if given the same opportunity.  But, of course, that’s the stuff of fantasy.  In today’s Old Testament lesson we have the account of young King Solomon actually getting what every person dreams of – except it isn’t a silly joke genie from a lamp granting the wish, it’s the Lord God who created the heavens and earth and all that is in them coming to Solomon and saying, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you.”  Imagine the possibilities, can you?  It’s like the Lord handing over a blank check on which Solomon could write anything, any amount, any gift or talent, anything that God could give.  If you said, “The sky’s the limit”, you’d be wrong – because there are no limits to what God can give.

When we covered this story of King Solomon this past year over at the Lutheran School where I teach, I gave the fifteen students in the Confirmation class the assignment of writing how they would answer the Lord if given the same opportunity – and they had to write why they would ask for what they did.  But since it would have been too easy simply to say “wisdom” like Solomon did, I excluded it from the possible answers.  Besides, I told them, I doubted that any of them were wise enough to have thought of it on their own without having seen it in the book. The results of the little exercise were quite remarkable.  I’d say roughly a third asked for cars by specific make, model, and year, which says a lot about the priorities and what’s going on in the minds of most fourteen-year-olds.  I’d say another third or so of the students said they would ask for worldly wealth, most by specifying a certain dollar amount.  The figures were large, but surprisingly, not as large as I might have supposed considering who it was that was making the offer.  I don’t recall that any of the figures exceeded seven digits. And I don’t know, maybe they thought it best not to appear too greedy before the Lord.  That, or they only wanted the car they had in mind and had the foresight to ask for the funds required to operate and insure it.

The remaining less than a third of the students offered what were a little more thoughtful answers.  A couple of them would have reversed a tragedy their families had suffered, like a divorce or the death of a loved one; another, as I recall, thought that having the ability to perform healing miracles would be the thing to request of God.  And I have to say that this last answer was the only one I remember that showed some concern for humankind in general.  But I think what struck me the most about all the answers was how limited and, I don’t know how else to say it, how “here and now” they were.  I mean to be given a blank check by Almighty God and then to ask for nothing more than a car or some money is almost insulting. It certainly shows how thoroughly infected we are with the crass materialism that pervades our culture. But even those who asked for the undoing of a family tragedy were thinking pretty small.  Life in this world is full of tragedy and disappointment, and it always will be.  To waste so precious an opportunity thinking that just one less tragedy – a tragedy that God in his perfect plan and wisdom allowed to come into my life – would make me live happily ever after is still pretty foolish and shortsighted.  And the ability to perform miracles to heal people? Well, that might be all right for the first week or so, but can you imagine what life would be like after that? The mobs of people after you all the time to cure them of every ailment imaginable?  And each one coming back again and again every time they developed a new ache or pain?  And think about the anger and resentment of the families of the ones you couldn’t get to in time.  No thanks. I think it best to leave the miraculous healings in God’s hands.

And no, I’m not just sharp shooting the answers the students gave, because I doubt very seriously that any of us would have come up with answers that were a whole lot better. I’m pretty sure that whatever any of us would ask for in response to the same offer by the Lord, we’d find ourselves kicking ourselves a short time later thinking, “Ooh, I should have asked for this other thing instead.”  We all tend to think in terms that are self-serving, shortsighted, and, well, small.

And this makes Solomon’s request for wisdom that much more remarkable, because it is none of those things. It isn’t self-serving; no, Solomon specifically asks for wisdom so that he can use the gift in the service of God and his people – to rule over them judiciously and well.  He asks the Lord to make him a better servant for his people. His request isn’t shortsighted, because the kind of wisdom that the Lord gives endures forever.  Nor is Solomon’s request small.  The opposite is true.  You’ve probably heard the saying that, “If I had the power of God, things would be a lot different than they are; but if I had the power and the wisdom of God, things would be exactly the same.”  That’s true. You see, any request to radically change things in the world is really an accusation saying that God isn’t doing a very good job running his Creation.  What Solomon asks for is to be in tune with God’s wisdom, to see things from the Lord’s broader perspective, to be able to see past the immediate circumstances and present sufferings of day to day life to the big picture of God’s perfect and wise plan for all things.  It’s really an amazing request.

So amazing, that I’m reasonably sure that Solomon did not think of it himself.  You’ll note that it was in a dream that the Lord came to Solomon, which necessarily means that he was asleep – and therefore that he dreamed the answer he gave.  And I don’t know about you, but I do and say a lot of things in my dreams that I would never think of otherwise (and maybe we’d better not go there …).  No, what I’m saying is that since God gave him the dream, it’s most probable that God also gave him the wise request he gave in reply.  And even if that’s not exactly the way it happened, it’s still true that God gave Solomon the wise response he made.  As I said before, it takes wisdom to ask for wisdom. It’s the fool who thinks he is wise. A truly wise person always seeks more wisdom because he’s aware of how foolish, shortsighted, and blind he is compared to the Lord who is the fount and source of all wisdom.  And this kind of true wisdom is always a gift of God. So, whether Solomon’s reply was something he came up with on his own or something he watched himself say in a dream, either way, God gave him the wisdom of his answer – and the additional wisdom that he requested of the Lord.

            Which was just great for Solomon – what a lucky guy, huh?  But at this point you may be wondering what any of this has to do with you.  I’m willing to bet that the Lord has not shown up in any of your dreams lately making the offer, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you.”  Am I wrong?  No?  I didn’t think so.  Ah, but then maybe he doesn’t have to.  Look, we’ve already seen that asking for wisdom from God would be the wisest and best possible answer to the offer were the Lord to make it to you.  It’s certainly the divinely approved “textbook” answer.  And while the Lord is not standing before you offering to give you anything your heart may desire, we have this promise of God recorded for us by St. James:  “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him.”  So, while the Lord is not offering you a blank check – which you’d probably blow on something stupid anyway – he is offering to give you the same gift Solomon was wise enough to ask for.  The real question is:  Do you have the faith and wisdom to ask it of him?  Do you really want to be a wise guy (or gal)?

            Assuming that the answer is “yes”, all you need do is ask it of the Lord. And he will grant it because he wants you to be wise.  But I feel compelled to warn you that the wisdom God gives is not the kind that’s so popular in this world.  The wisdom he gives may not qualify you to rule a nation or to sit and write majestic proverbs that you can make into a book and sell.  The Scriptures are explicit on this:  the wisdom of God appears as foolishness to the world.

            This is demonstrated by the story that comes immediately after this episode in which the Lord grants Solomon his great wisdom.  It’s a story you are probably familiar with.  It’s the one about the two young mothers who each have an infant baby boy.  (Actually, the Scripture says the women were prostitutes, which explains why they’re rooming together and why neither one of them seems to have a husband.)  Anyway, during the night, one of the women accidentally rolls over and suffocates her baby who was sleeping with her in the bed. Awaking and finding her child dead, she sneaks over and switches her baby with the other woman’s live baby. In the morning, the other woman finds the dead baby in her arms, which sends her into a panic; but then she recognizes that it isn’t hers.  Well, as you can imagine, the situation soon degenerates into a shouting match of accusation and counter accusation.  The legal authorities are brought in, but they are unable to find the truth because each woman insists that the living child is her own and that the dead child belongs to the other.  So they bring the case to Solomon, who listens attentively and says, “Bring me a sword.  I’ll cut the living child in two and each woman can have half.”  Now, on the surface, it seems to be an extremely foolish solution, because this is definitely a situation in which two halves do not make a whole.  And if you had been standing there and heard Solomon say it, you’d be thinking that he was out of his mind.  The wisdom of the King is soon revealed, however, as one of the women readily agrees to this grisly decree of justice while the other begs him, “No, let her have the child; only let him live!”  Solomon says, “Give the child to her.  She is the mother.”  So, what appears at first to be very foolish turns out to be very wise.

            That’s the way God’s wisdom is; and what I want you to see is that Solomon’s solution in that case is really what we would call a Law and Gospel solution. You have on one hand the absolute justice of cold, hard Law.  With unfeeling detachment, it renders a decision that is fair – but one in which nobody wins.  The way out of the predicament is found in a mother’s self-sacrificial love for her child. That’s the Gospel.  She is willing to surrender her claim – she is willing to suffer herself – if it means that the child she loves will live.

            Do you see how this is a foreshadowing of the Gospel itself?  How the justice of the Law demanded that all of us die for our sins and be eternally damned – nobody wins; but how, God in his infinite wisdom and love, sent his own Son to suffer and die in our place?  It didn’t look like wisdom at the time.  The Son of God dying horribly on a cross looked like a great defeat, a terrible miscarriage of justice; but it was in fact the triumph of God’s love for sinful man. But this is the wisdom that God gives, for there is no greater wisdom than knowing Jesus Christ as Savior, and seeing that he is the sum and substance of the entire Scripture.

            And those who have been given this profound wisdom are then able to see and apply it every situation.  For example, we heard in today’s Epistle lesson that “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.”  That’s a rock solid promise of God – but it sure doesn’t look like it sometimes.  As we plow through our lives we experience ups and downs, and sometimes suffering and hardship.  At such times, the Lord’s direction of our lives doesn’t look to us like the right answer; and the world encourages us to give it up and stop being so foolish as to believe and trust in him.  But with the wisdom that God gives we trust that he has a good purpose for us in all things.  The truly wise recognize how little they know compared to him who is all wise, and they trust in him despite whatever hardships or sorrows they face.

            Or again, another example:  today we witnessed the Baptism of an infant.  The world (and sadly much of the Christian Church) calls it a foolish, unnecessary, and meaningless ceremony.  They would say that nothing happened here because they didn’t see anything happen.  It doesn’t make sense to them.  But God in his wisdom gave us the Sacrament of Baptism.  And we, who trust in his wisdom and believe his promises, though we saw nothing spectacular with our eyes, know that the miracle of spiritual rebirth took place.

            You have to be careful what you ask for – that’s the moral when we rely on ourselves and on our own understanding.  But we’ve seen today that there’s a better answer.  Yes, it’s foolishness the world around us; but if we ask it of him, the Lord has promised, as he did for Solomon, to make us truly wise.  So let’s do ask it of him; and recognizing how much more we have to learn, continue to seek him and his wisdom for us in Christ Jesus our Lord.  In his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!