Knowing What                 1 Kings 3:3-14

We Don't Know                 17 August 2003

Solomon was wise from the very beginning. The wisest thing he ever said as king was the first thing he said as king which was: And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in. In other words, he was saying I don't know anything but in fact he already knew something very important. He knew what he didn't know. As the story goes this was the right answer. God was pleased to hear that at least one human being with the responsibility of leading other human beings was not afraid to admit the truth about what he didn't know. The old-fashioned word for this is humility. When one searches the scriptures carefully this word keeps coming up. It is in fact one of the essential things that God requires of us.

For some reason we human beings are not very good at humility. Humility is defined by Anthony DeMello this way:

To a visitor who described

himself as a seeker after

Truth the Master said, "If

what you seek is Truth,

there is one thing you must

have above all else."

"I know. An overwhelming

passion for it."

"No. An unremitting readiness

to admit you may be wrong."

This is one of the reasons we don't do humility very well because we not only want to be right every time we need to be right every time because (this is just one theory; it may not apply to you of course) we are afraid if we are not right about everything, if we do not know everything, then we lose control of our lives and go spinning wildly into chaos. We are afraid of the unknown and so we deny the fact that we don't know what we don't know. We don't dare admit even to ourselves in secret that we could be wrong because once we open that door we are face to face with our weakness, even helplessness, and the reality that we will need something more than self-reliance to see us through. We will have to count on something that we cannot control to keep us safe. The word for this is faith. Faith is not about knowing something. It is about trusting the what we don't know. I am not making this up. The writer of the book of Hebrews in our New Testament said the same thing long ago when it was written: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.  Faith is not what you know already, it is what you will know when you really know what you don't know.

Knowledge is often misunderstood. Will Durant wrote with much insight when he wrote these words: As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious. In other words the more we know (and we do know something, indeed we can accumulate knowledge if we want to) in other words the more we know the more we know what we don't know. The misunderstanding is that knowledge is such that we can some day know everything. Even the great Socrates knew what he didn't know. He said: I know nothing but the fact of my ignorance. This is another way of saying what Solomon said when he learned that he was to be king. Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear one of our leaders admit as much?  Maybe Yogi Berra should run for President. It is reported that a reporter said to him one time: "Yogi, I've got a lot of questions to ask you. And Yogi's response would be a welcome addition to the political debates of our world, he is reported to have said: "Ok, but if you ask me anything I don't know, I'm not going to answer."

 I think Solomon's ability to know what he didn't know came directly from his relationship with God. He trusted God to know what he didn't know and because he trusted God to be right he didn't need to be right himself. He didn't have to have all the answers because he believed God did have the answers. In short, because he believed in God he didn't need to be God. In this sense humility is simply knowing who we are and who we are not. Humility is not self-denigration but self-awareness. Righteousness does not mean always being right. It means being in the right place before God which simply means having a healthy respect for God and for the distinction between the human and the divine which involves at the deepest level our absolute dependence on God for life. When the psalmist wrote the famous line, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding, this is precisely what was meant. Because Solomon knew he was not God he could be human which is to be unfinished, incomplete, with so much to learn if only we knew that we don't know what we don't know. This will probably sound foolish to those who think they have to know everything because they will want to know God before they can trust God. The irony and the tragedy of that is that we can't know God until we trust God. And furthermore being unfinished and incomplete and not knowing but seeking to know more is what makes human life worth doing. This is the glory of humankind, to become, to move in love and humility toward the God who calls us into being.

Solomon was famous for his wisdom but he didn't do everything right. Neither did his father the great King David yet God's final word in today's reading says if you walk in my ways, keeping my statues and my commandments as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your life which seems to indicate that God does not require that we never be wrong but rather that we always be faithful to confess our failings depending on God to show us a better way. And God's mercy will hold us all whether we are the king of Israel or not.  

For once, Lucy was right when she said: You know what the whole trouble with you is Charlie Brown? And Charlie Brown says: No; and I don't want to know! Leave me alone!  Charlie Brown begins to walk away with Lucy calling after him: The whole trouble with you is you won't listen to what the whole trouble with you is!

The trouble with us is not that we don't know everything but that we think we do know everything. Most of us are not even conscious of thinking this but in fact we have made our minds up about a great many things, most if not all of the things that matter to us, that we base our lives on. Sometimes this means that it is harder and harder to hope for more from the world we have inherited and are responsible for because we assume (unconsciously perhaps) that we have seen it all. If God is to give us understanding to discern between good and evil as Solomon asked, it will because we still want to understand and we have not already decided that we do understand what in fact we don't understand and we are open to the answers that we don't have yet and to where God is leading us. It may very well be someplace very different than we expect or know already.

Such is the adventure of faith which really begins for all of us when we know what we don't know.