Embrace Sagehood!

Caspar Luiken
"The Wise Woman of Tekoa"
Hosts: Pitts Theology Library,
Digital Image Archive
(Candler School of Theology, Emory University

If you’ve been around church much you’ve heard of the major players in the history of the Bible. You’ve heard about the prophets, you’ve heard about the priests and you’ve heard about the kings. But we don’t talk much about the fourth group of major influences in religious history. The sages. A sage, of course, is a wise person, an elder in the community, one who brings deep knowledge and experience to bear on the problems of today. Even though the sages wrote a major part of the Old Testament and even some of the New Testament, we’ve forgotten them.


Who are these sages? The most famous one was Solomon, of course, who was also a king. Many of the wisdom books are attributed to him because he asked only for wisdom when he became king.

The sages were advisers or counselors, not just to rulers but also to families and whole communities. They were the teachers of the young, and much of the wisdom literature is the lessons they taught and wrote down. And we know they were both women and men (like the wise woman of Tekoa, 1 Samuel 24:13). Sages drew from the order and demands of God’s creation (systems, process) recognized the enigmas and dailiness of life (an ironic worldview), and knew God through deep mystical experiences, often beyond and beneath the law and the temple. We also know that their wisdom was not just based on the commandments and the Torah, but also drew from the wisdom of the cultures around them, such as Egyptian and Babylonian cultures who also had sages.

But it seems to me in our own time and culture, with all the emphasis on youth and celebrity and the goofy shallowness of reality TV, it would be good to acknowledge the importance of wisdom and to encourage us to embrace our own inner “sage.”

A contemporary sage is a great southern writer who just died last week, Reynolds Price. He is famous for his novels and his poems, and for his teaching other writers at Duke University for a long time. His stories are drawn from the depth of human nature and help make sense of the world around us. But his real sage-hood was shown in how he approached a major catastrophe of his life. In his mid-fifties he was stricken with a tumor that wrapped itself around his spinal cord. The surgeries that successfully removed the tumor also left him paralyzed from the waist down and in constant, unbearable, fiery pain. The way he worked through that catastrophe is what makes him a sage in my mind. He tells the story of that journey in his little book A Whole New Life (Scribner, 1993). Before his illness he had written 12 novels in 30 years of work. In the ten years after his ordeal he wrote 13 books. The wisdom that allowed him to rework and reframe his life has about three things in common with the sages of the Bible. First, he had a deep and abiding sense of the presence of a loving God. He had experienced down through the years moments of mystical clarity that convinced him of God’s positive regard for himself and all creatures, and that carried him through a lot. Second, he had studied the world and human nature enough to know the practical wisdom of how things work and how to adapt what he already knew of himself and others to his life in a wheelchair. And third, he accepted the reality of community, the combined wisdom of good physicians, wonderful friends, helpful colleagues and invaluable care-givers. Overall he counted himself blessed and his fans have called him wise. Describing his experience, he wrote:

"If I were called on to value honestly my present life beside my past—the years from 1933 till ’84 against eh years after—I’d have to say that, despite an enjoyable fifty-year start, these recent years since full catastrophe have gone still better. They’ve brought more in and sent more out—more live and care, more knowledge and patience, more work in less time. (p. 179)"

So I would challenge everyone here to aim to be a sage in your own unique way. Gather your years of experience, your storehouse of faith, your knowledge of how the world works, your own sense of yourself as a worthy child of God, and work out this present chapter of your life. A sage, a wise woman, a wise man, an elder of the community, can apply her or his knowledge and experience to your own life and make it a life of blessing. Be blessed yourself with your own confidence in your wisdom and goodness. Bless others with your wise and calm perspective to see what is not but what could come into being with enough practical faith and hope to make it so.