Don’t Be a Fool

Dr. D. William McIvor

July 30, 2006

Presbyterian Church in Sudbury

Introduction to the Morning Lesson

I’m preaching from the Book of Psalms this summer and to help me prepare these sermons I’ve been reading a bit of John Calvin (1509-1564), the father of Presbyterianism. In the preface to his commentary on the psalms, Calvin called the Book of Psalms “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” He added, “There is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit has here pictured exactly all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated.”[1] In other words, Calvin is saying that the psalms are true to all the complex realities of life.

Today we are looking into Psalm 14 and the mirror it holds before us reflects back what human foolishness looks like. According to this psalm, a fool denies the existence of God. This does not mean that foolish people are atheists — people who assert there is no divine being — or agnostics — people who think we can’t know if there is a God or gods. No, Psalm 14 speaks about fools as those who may well believe in God but forget that God has any interest in how they live. In other words, fools are forgetful of God and Calvin says, “There is no stupidity more brutish than forgetfulness of God.”[2] Let’s read it in Psalm 14.

Psalm 14.1-7 (NRSV)

Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;
there is no one who does good.

The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind
to see if there are any who are wise,
who seek after God.

They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;
there is no one who does good,
no, not one.

Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers
who eat up my people as they eat bread,
and do not call upon the Lord?

There they shall be in great terror,
for God is with the company of the righteous.

You would confound the plans of the poor,
but the Lord is their refuge.

O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!
When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people,
Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.

Introduction

As a context for understanding this psalm, it might help to recall a rabbi’s observation that every person should carry in a pocket or purse two inscribed stones. One inscription reads “For my sake the world was created.” The other says “I am but dust and ashes.” Each stone should be pulled out, as the occasion requires, to remind us of who we are in God’s creation.[3]

This theme of either/or — “on the one hand”/”on the other hand” — predominates throughout the psalter. In fact, the Book of Psalms begins with this either/or in Psalm 1 which is clearly intended to set the theme for the entire collection of psalms.[4]

“Happy are those who … delight … in the law of the Lord …
They are like trees planted by streams of water …
and their leaves do not wither.

The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.” (Psalm 1.1a, 2a, 3a, 3c, 4)

Human life stands or falls on obedience to God and in the psalms there is no ambiguity about that.

Similarly, humans are either exalted — Psalm 8 says God made humans “a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor” (8.5) — or humans are wretched — today’s text says all have “gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.” (14.3)

Either/or. On the one hand/on the other hand. What makes the difference for humans between exaltation or perversity? Psalm 14 answers very simply. The difference is whether or not one is a fool, a fool who says in his or her heart, “There is no God.” Let’s think about what that means for us today.

ONE: Forgetting that God cares about what we do

I don’t think I know anyone personally who would claim to be a true atheist, someone who says absolutely that there is no god or divine being of any sort. I don’t know anyone like that. I have known people who might call themselves agnostics. They are not sure about a god or gods existing. In the agnostic way of thinking there may be a god or gods but we can’t really know for sure.

Psalm 14 describes neither agnostics nor atheists. When it talks about fools Psalm 14 means people who live as if God has no concern about what they do. Perhaps the greatest example of such a fool in the Bible is King David. That may surprise us because David is one of the great heroes of the Bible. Certainly he believed in God. In fact, the Bible says that David was a man after God’s own heart.[5] But at times he was a fool in exactly the way Psalm 14 describes.

You remember the story (and if you don’t, read about it this afternoon in 2 Samuel 11-12). One afternoon David woke up from his afternoon nap. His house was bigger and higher than every other house in the city. So as he was looking down at other homes he saw a naked woman bathing. Her name was Bathsheba and she was very beautiful. David wanted her even though she was married to a soldier in David’s army, a man named Uriah. But David was the king and he could have anything he wanted. So he sent for Bathsheba. They had intercourse and she became pregnant.

You might imagine that a man after God’s own heart would think enough foolishness. Ah, but not King David. He had committed adultery. Then he tried to hide his sin. He sent a message to have Bathsheba’s husband Uriah sent home from the battlefield. David assumed that after Uriah reported to him, he would go to his home and be with his wife. That would provide plausible cover for Bathsheba’s pregnancy. But Uriah was an honorable man and a loyal soldier. “Out of loyalty to you, my lord,” he said to David, “as long as my comrades are still in battle and harm’s way, I will not go to my house to eat and drink and lie with my wife.” (2 Samuel 11.11) David even got him drunk thinking that would diminish Uriah’s resolve. But still the loyal soldier would only sleep with the servants of the king on a cot outside the door of the royal palace.

Enough foolishness for David? No. David sent Uriah back to the front lines and he had Uriah carry a message for the commander of the army. The message instructed the commander to put Uriah at the very front of the battle and then to withdraw his other troops so that Uriah would be killed. In other words, David was so vile that he had one of his most loyal soldiers deliver what amounted to his own death sentence.

Lust, adultery, deception, duplicity, conspiracy, and finally what amounted to murder, all from the great King David, a man after God’s own heart. Did David ever once think “There is no God”? No, of course not. He was neither atheist nor agnostic but always a nonbeliever. He just acted like God and God’s law didn’t matter. I am the King, his unconscious thinking went, so I can do what I want. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says or thinks.

But it does matter. David’s sordid behavior is the very definition of foolishness. To be a fool is to live as if God doesn’t care what we do and Psalm 14, in that either/or way of the psalms, says everyone is a fool. “There is no one who does good, no, not one.” (14.3b)

TWO: Dangerous autonomy

Almost instinctively we resist Psalm 14’s analysis. None of us denies we do wrong things bus surely we are not like David. Lust, adultery, deception, duplicity, conspiracy, murder. We may not like everything about ourselves when we look in the mirror but certainly we don’t see all of David’s foolishness in ourselves. The either/or of this psalm and many psalms feels a little over the top for us. I agree. But let us not slip away from church today thinking Psalm 14 has nothing to say to us.

We may not be a sordid as King David but here’s our dilemma. What Psalm 14 identifies as foolishness tends to be what our North American culture elevates as the highest good: autonomy. In our western culture, maturity is equated with self-sufficiency. Wanting or needing help, from others or from God, is taken as a sign of weakness and instability.[6]

We don’t like to be needy. We think neediness is weakness. It goes against everything our culture teaches us. We are taught both explicitly and implicitly to not want or need help. In one sense this is right because being mature means being less self-centered. But a subtle shift takes place, mostly in an unconscious way. If we don’t need anything, we begin to feel we don’t need anybody and ultimately that translates into feeling we don’t even need God. That is foolishness says the psalmist.

Even though she died more than 40 years ago, Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) remains an important voice in American literature. She wrote in what is often called the Southern Gothic style. She was a deeply religious woman, a life-long Roman Catholic and her stories and novels can grab hold and shake you into new ways of looking at things.[7]

In a short story called “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” O’Connor portrays a character named the Misfit, a murderer who has escaped from prison and has just abducted a grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law, and their two children. The grandmother realizes what is about to happen to them. She pleads with the Misfit to ask God for help to keep from doing what he is going to do.

“If you would pray,” the old lady said, “Jesus would help you.”

“That’s right,” The Misfit said.

“Well then, why don’t you pray?” she asked …

“I don’t want no hep,” he said. “I’m doing all right by myself.”[8]

The story ends with the Misfit murdering the two children and their parents and their grandmother. It’s a gut-wrenching story and O’Connor seems to be saying that this is the extreme but logical outcome of not needing any help, of not needing anything or anybody, of thinking we can do all right just by ourselves. A good man is hard to find because it’s hard to find a man who admits his neediness. Or a woman.

Psalm 14 provides a clue about people becoming so dangerously foolish. The clue is that they don’t care about others. Verse 4 says, “Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon the Lord?” The truly foolish live so much in themselves that they can abuse and oppress and hurt and kill because they believe they are accountable to no one.[9] They “eat up” others with no more thought than eating a piece of bread.

Well, the Misfit is just fiction, of course, and an extreme example at that. Nonetheless, I think there is danger here because autonomy and self-absorption may be in the very air that we breath in our culture today. We certainly can’t blame him for everything but one of the greatest luminaries to have ever lived in our neck of the woods wrote famously about autonomy. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) lived just up the road in Concord and one of his most famous writings was an essay called “Self Reliance.” I don’t know if they still read or teach this in school the way they used to. I had not read it in a very long time and frankly I was quite shocked when I read Emerson’s words again last week.

“Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”[10]

Emerson’s self reliance is nigh on to Psalm 14’s foolishness.

Conclusion

Dear friends, I hope that you and I never have the so-called manhood or womanhood to withhold the dollar. To withhold the dollar is a sign of foolishness. We give and never stop giving because we know there is need. And we know there is need in the other because there is need in us. And to know there is need in us is to draw close to God.

“For my sake the world was created.”

“I am but dust and ashes.”

When we acknowledge our need for God, we begin to know the exaltation for which God created us. Amen

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