What Makes the Lady Laugh

Proverbs 1:20-33

September 16, 2018

William G. Carter

Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice.
At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:

“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?
Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.
Because I have called and you refused, have stretched out my hand and no one heeded,
and because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof,
I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when panic strikes you,

when panic strikes you like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,
when distress and anguish come upon you.
Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but will not find me.
Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord,
would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof, 
therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices.

For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them;
but those who listen to me will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster.”

On the western coast of Scotland, in the port city of Oban, there is a tower at the top of the hill. If you look closely, it is the shell of a tower at the top of the hill. It’s called “McCaig’s Tower,” although it was never finished.

The story goes that a rich banker named McCaig decided to build a big, round structure overlooking the port city. Nobody is sure why he did it. Some figure he wanted to honor his family. Others believe it might have been a noble effort to employ the stone masons who had no other work. From the sight of it, you can see the size of his dream – a huge tower with a great view.

Unfortunately McCaig began the project when he was 72 and he died when he was 78. His family thought it was a silly idea and preferred to take the inheritance money rather than spend it on a tower. This would be a sad story, except that old McCaig never thought gave much about the thinness of the tower walls. The walls were so thin they would never have supported a roof.[1] So the locals call it “McCaig’s Folly,” folly as in foolishness.

In the opening chapter of the book of Proverbs, we are introduced to a lady. Her Greek name is Sophia, which means wisdom. Wisdom is a lady, says the book of Proverbs. She stands in the center of all our human activity. She raises her voice, and waits for anybody who might listen to her.

This is the way Proverbs prompts us to think our lives. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is it really a good idea?

Say, for instance, you want to save some money. So you buy the cheapest laptop computer you can find, get the basic warranty, and then you wonder why it wears out nine months after you charge it up for the first time. Why did I do that? Was that a good idea? Did I just hear somebody laugh?

Sometimes it is comical: we touch the wall with the sign “Wet Paint” just to be sure. Other times it’s a good bit more dangerous: we touch the electrical wires to see if there’s a current.

And sometimes, people reveal who they are by what they do. Most of the time, in fact. Like the guy who dug a big hole in his back yard. He always wanted to have a swimming pool, so he got a swimming pool. Nobody in his family knew how to swim, but he got his swimming pool. It was silly.

Or there is the lady who spent $75,000 on a new Steinway piano. That’s what the little ones are going for these days. She had the perfect spot in her living room. Do you play the piano? No. Are you going to begin lessons? No. Does anybody in your family play the piano? No. Do you plan on having parties and hiring somebody to play the piano? No, I’m not the party kind of person. Why did you buy the piano? It’s such a beautiful piece of furniture.

I hope I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes when I say that Lady Sophia laughs. She says, “You have ignored all my counsel and would take none of my advice. How long will you love being a fool?”

This is not a matter of intelligence. Smart people do foolish things all the time. I realize we may call them “stupid decisions,” but these decisions have nothing to do with being “smart” or “stupid.” The Bible speaks in the language of wise and foolish. Within those categories, there are affirmations and promises. They go like this: if you are wise, you will flourish. If you are foolish, you will be exposed.

I think of the man with a rusty old car in his front yard. It was a Chevy Bel Air, shiny blue, with fins on the hood. That car used to be on the driveway, but now it’s on display in front of his house. I asked about the car and he said, “When that car was running, it was running great. There’s just one thing – that car took me where I needed to go, not where I wanted to go.” Lady Sophia had a chuckle about that.

Or there is that pastor friend who loved to go fishing. Whenever he went on vacation, he went fishing. If his family wanted to fish, he enjoyed spending time with them. One time, I was covering for him and did a funeral for one of his church members. All went well. At the graveside, we said our prayers and the family departed. Then two other church members approached me and said, “Thank you. We appreciate your service.” I said, “It’s my privilege. I am glad to cover for your pastor. Is he on a fishing trip?”

These two guys looked at one another, looked back at me. And one of them said, “We’ve been telling him for years he might actually catch something if he put a worm on the hook.” Somewhere in the city, I heard Lady Sophia laugh.

Do you hear the wisdom? There is no heavy theology here, just accumulated insight into how we shall live. The choice is clear: we can live in a way that allows us to flourish, and allows our neighbor to flourish. Or we can get distracted like a fool and throw it all away.

Ttake a good look at that high-functioning professional as he climbs to the top of his career. He has a dream job and makes a generous salary. One day he leaves behind the beautiful spouse and the children with straight teeth, and he chases after the young blonde in the accounting department. He had it all and threw it away. Was that a good idea?

Lady Wisdom is ruthless about this sort of thing. “I will laugh at your calamity,” she says with sarcasm. “I will mock when panic strikes you like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. They will call out for help, but I will not answer. They will seek me, but not find me.” What Wisdom offers is a warning: there are occasions when it’s too late to correct a situation and you must endure the consequences.

They told the woman to get out of her house before the hurricane came. She ignored them. Pretty soon, she was surrounded by water and her cat floated away. The rescue team pulls her out of the flood, and she says, “Not going to do that again.” It’s a sad situation – because it should have never happened in the first place.

Lady Sophia calls out, “I will make my words known to you. I will pour out my thoughts to you. Give heed to my reproof. Listen to my wisdom.” Yet people ignore her and look at what they do. The folly makes her laugh.

Sounds rather heartless, but we know this to be true. My brother, the engineer, called up one day. I think it was him on the phone, but he was laughing so hard. Dave, is that you? “Yes,” he said, “ever hear the Darwin Awards?” I started to reply, but he was laughing so hard that he couldn’t talk, and he hung up the phone.

So I looked them up. The Darwin Awards are named after the scientist who came up with the theory of evolution. They are given to the human beings who never evolved very much. The award committee describes this as the annual attempt to “chlorinate the gene pool.” The situations aren’t very funny, except in a sad sort of way.

·         Like the lady in Australia who checked to make sure that she really did put the grocery bags in the back of her Mazda. She left the car running while she was on a hill. Unfortunately she got out, walked behind the car, and it was then that she discovered the parking brake was not set.

·         Or King Louis III, who ruled France over a thousand years ago. One day, he saw a gorgeous woman lady and decided to woo her. So he jumped on a horse and sped off in pursuit. Unfortunately he wasn’t watching where he was going, and he whacked the royal skull on an innocent door frame. Meanwhile his brother kept his head and then got a crown on it.

·         Or how about the four geo-cache explorers who went hunting for hidden treasure in the city of Prague. They climbed down into an underground waterway, really a drainage tunnel. They were certain they were on the way to find the next clue. And they were so excited about this that none of them paid attention that it was raining, and that it had been raining a lot.[2] Down there in that tunnel, all their hopes were washed away. So were they.

You and I face life-and-death choices every day. Big choices, little decisions, it doesn’t matter. If we pay attention, we see the deadliest choices are very attractive. We might not even realize it. So Lady Wisdom’s invitation is to step out of the closed loop of our own voice, listen to her accumulated experience, and pay attention to what might be at stake.

You go to the doctor with aches and pains. She prescribes pills to make you feel better. So you pick up the pills, and you take one, and you feel better. Then you take another one, and you feel better. So you take another one, and start to think, “Maybe I need these pills. If one makes me feel good, two might make me feel better.” And if you’re not paying attention, you might find yourself chained to a fire-breathing dragon. They will tell you at the rehab facility that this is a terrible chain to break.

Lady Wisdom stands in the middle of a city. She invites us to live healthy and productive lives. And her voice is only one among many. Like every other voice, she calls out for our attention, our commitment, our devotion, and our money. Every day we choose between wise and foolish. This is a moral decision, because our decisions reveal whether we are honoring God or merely chasing after our own appetites.

What the theologian contributes is a deeper understanding of what is going on beneath all of this. These days, I know there are some people who grumble whenever we sing “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” They grumble because they have struggled for fifty years by countering, “I’m not a wretch. I’m a child of God. God made me good. I am a beautiful creation.” And that’s true, that’s true enough.

Yet let’s take stock of what that means to be made in the image of God: it means God made us with the capacity for making choices. And be alert – for there is something in our DNA that causes us to lean in our own direction, something potentially toxic that bubbles up even in our best decisions. Wisdom calls us to pay attention, to look past the façade and see what really is going on.  

Frederick Buechner, the author, tells of being on a dreary commuter train somewhere between New Brunswick and Newark. The clickety-clack along the tracks bored him, the bumps on the track made it difficult to read the New York Times. As he gazed around, first out the smudged window, then across the aisle, his eyes fell on a bright photograph, large and colorful, across from him on the wall of the train car. Here’s what he says:

It was a cigarette ad, and I forget what it was in it exactly, but there was a pretty girl in it and a good-looking boy, and they were sitting together somewhere—by a mountain stream .. with a blue sky overhead, green trees. It was a crisp, sunlit scene full of beauty, of youth, full of life more than anything else, and thus as different as it could have been from the drabness I'd been looking at through the window … And then down in the lower left-hand corner of the picture, in letters large enough to read from where I was sitting, was the Surgeon General's familiar warning about how cigarette smoking can be hazardous to your health, or whatever the words are that they use for saying that cigarette smoking can cause lung cancer and kill you dead as a doornail. (from “Secrets in the Dark”)

The irony was bracing, he says, that pretty picture, that fatal message. It was another voice calling out, “Buy this; it will kill you.” Buechner says, “I’m not picking on the cigarette industry, per se; what I’m noticing that the world is its own worst enemy.” If we are not careful, we will fall in love with our own destruction.

This is why Lady Wisdom calls out – she warns us, to save us from ourselves. The voices of destruction are always around us, and some give in. The alcoholic says, “I’ll quit tomorrow.” The diabetic says, “Another piece of pie won’t hurt.” The spendthrift looks at every catalog. The chronic liar deceives himself one more time. The lady with heart disease always orders French fries.

Ah, Lady Wisdom calls out one more time: “Waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but those who listen to me will be secure and will live without dread of disaster.”

What a wonderful gift! God puts the Wisdom of Sophia, right in the middle of our lives, ready to offer guidance so that all who hear her voice and follow her instruction would flourish.

What I wonder is if anybody is listening.

 (c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

---

[1] Learn more at https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/oban/mccaigstower/index.html

[2] See the annual listings at https://darwinawards.com/darwin/