In the Bible, the pursuit of wisdom is a tree of life (Prov. 3:18). It’s a tree that keeps giving. It does not dry up because it is an unending gift from above (James 1:5). When we ask for it, God offers it fully and unadulterated for the taking. The tree is ours, but yet our hunger for another tempts us to despise wisdom. We would rather chase after the wisdom of scientism and expertise-ism rather than rely solely on the wisdom from above.
When the COVID-esteria began, leaders in our church and many other churches prayed that God would give us wisdom; that we would not take the most desirable tree. We prayed that God would give us the wisdom to see the problems of today (Matt. 6:34), rather than concern ourselves with tomorrow. We prayed that our hermeneutical lens would not be fear, but faith and fortitude. Thus, we carefully thought-through decisions about closing our doors to worship for a temporary time, or whether we could navigate one Sunday at a time with open doors. We decided on the latter and never once shut down our doors.
This decision does not entitle us to some divine peek into celestial rivers, but it does grant us a healthy dose of wisdom for dealing with hard times in the future and just how much we can handle. We are grateful for God’s good gifts and for how he answered us during that season and our congregation has seen very closely what a loving neighbor actually looks like.
Not to minimize the season. In fact, there were sick saints, set-up adjustments, hospital visits, and even the death of loved ones related to congregational members. We give thanks to God that he sustained our people through these 22 months. There is no pride, but sheer gratitude. We know that many things could have been different whether we had kept our gates open or not.
This is all good and gooder and full of glad-tidings, but it does lead to one overarching principle that I touched upon in the beginning. As an illustration, there is a video making the rounds about a United Methodist pastor who sits down in contentment and professionalism and explains why his congregation will now start requiring vaccine passports or a negative result in the last 72 hours as a way of having access to the sanctuary of God on Sunday morning. To this display of Adamic naivete, I argued that the United Methodist Church should stop ordaining women because most of their male pastors do just fine playing the role of a weak woman from the pulpit. That’s my subtle argument for male-priesthood only in case you were wondering. The strong women know that their role is a different one in the body, but these cowardly voices playing the role of men continue to add more barriers to the house of God. Since I know a couple of faithful Methodist ministers, I leave a modicum of decency in their bodies.
If you are following the score so far, it’s Tree of Life -73 and the pursuit of immaturity far ahead in our day. But there are still those lingering voices out there–like mine and many others–whose congregations are living quiet and peaceable lives doing our cultural, theological, and liturgical thing outside of the scope of visibility. But, I suspect we are content with this and gladly will stay away from any spotlight unless we are driven to opine, and opine we will should we be forced.
Eating from the Tree of Life is not a very attractive, applaud-seeking technique, but it is the way of wisdom, and those who get a taste of it, develop an appetite for it when it is popular or when it is not. Pursuing the Tree of Life gives us an insight into the times, and it allows us to see the times for what it is. Time-tyrants wish to take our capacity to eat from this tree, and they will tempt us with serpentine pleasure to skip the tree and eat from the shiny one down the road. The Church should refuse such offers and crush a few ideological heads when it creeps in our territory enticing us to more scientific ways of looking at the world.
