Tuesday morning

I had time to think about what I was going to preach about and decided to look at what I did 3 years ago. Can you believe that I preached on the same scriptures and used some of the same call to worship and prayers. Needless to say I revamped what I was thinking. I still wanted to preach on Wisdom and particularly focusing on leadership. I have been preaching on what it means to be church and spent time Sunday talking about Pentecost and how that can inform us about what church might mean for us. I thought Wisdom would be a great follow up to that. So instead of Proverbs 8, I am going to use scripture from the Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-25.

If you are wondering where in the Bible is the Wisdom of Solomon, you will have to have either a bible with the Apocrypha or a Roman Catholic bible. The book was not written by Solomon and appears to have been written close to the time that Jesus was born in the 1st century BCE. There is a great deal of Greek influence in the writing that differs from most of the Hebrew Testament. If you have the time, the entire book is interesting as is Sirach another book in the Apocrypha that speaks of Wisdom.

I have been reading Walter Bruegemann's newest book about Journey to the Common Good. He presents Solomon not as a person who truly desired Wisdom for the common good but rather desired wealth and power by exploiting workers to build the temple. Often conscripting forced labor much like the Pharaoh did to the Israelites in Egypt. So to speak of Wisdom and Leadership King Solomon would not be the example that we would want to follow.