If you could wish for anything – what would you wish for?
Did you ever think about this? I did when I was a child. I remember thinking that of course I would wish for more wishes… and a horse! I really wanted a horse!
And I loved the story of Aladdin. I had this beautiful book that went missing at some point in my family’s missionary travels, but thanks to the wonder of the world wide web I have found it again – Dean’s Gift Book of Fairy Tales, published in 1967,illustrated by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone. I have a childhood memory of sneaking out of bed, into the long dark cavern of our loungeroom, long after bedtime, to look at my beautiful new book and being found by dad who read me a story, then shooed me back to bed.
There’s something common to all stories about wishes however…whether you’ve rubbed a magic lamp or caught a fairy or a magic fish… things do not turn out as you planned!
According to Wikipedia, a story centering on a wish is a morality tale. Be wary, the stories warn, of wishes! Be careful what you wish for! Wishes have a way of exposing us – revealing our inner selves – our deepest desires – and they have a waywardness of their own! In asking for a wish we find – to borrow again from Aladdin – we are taken on a wild magic carpet ride – we are in a whole new world!
So, what does Solomon’s wish reveal about him?
The text gives us a rather contradictory description of King Solomon. We’re told, firstly, in verse 3, that, ‘Solomon loved the Lord,’ and secondly, ’only, he sacrificed and offered incense at the high places’. In other words, Solomon worshipped Yahweh, the God of Israel, alongside the traditional Canaanite deities; Baal, Molech and Astarte. And yet, God comes to him in a dream offering him anything he desires. “Ask what I should give you”.
And Solomon asks for ‘an understanding mind’ so he can govern the people and provide them with justice. And God is pleased.
So, who is Solomon? Is he a bad guy who comes good? Or a good guy who goes bad? Perhaps the wonderful thing about this text is that it doesn’t make this call. It doesn’t try to simplify reality. As writer Debie Thomas puts it. Like his father before him, and like every one of us, “the Solomon of the Bible is a human being. Which is to say, he is a paradox. Blessed with wisdom and cursed with foolishness. Devoted to God and attracted to idols. Committed to his intellect and shackled to his appetites.”
But what should ring alarm bells for Solomon is that God still comes to him – that God wants to be in relationship with him – and God makes this offer of ongoing blessing. Who is this God who lavishes such wild generosity on weak and wavering human beings?
And what Solomon should have realised – and perhaps he had an inkling of this – was that this dream of God’s grace and favour on him was a glimpse of a bigger dream – God’s dream for all God’s people and all God’s world – a dream in which wisdom is not monopolised for one’s own social and political purposes, monetised for one’s own economic and technological gain… but where attentiveness to the socially and economically vulnerable is the basis of good and wise and godly governance. A dream where wisdom is pictured as a woman carefully planning a feast!
Lady Wisdom starts with the building itself. It is a building with seven pillars – the number of completeness -and then she moves on to the menu. All of it prepared by hand, rich food, fine wine, freshly baked bread. And the invitations go out, but this isn’t good enough! Lady Wisdom, herself, goes out into the streets and calls anyone, everyone, to come, “Come and share this feast. Come and live.”
We hear the invitation again – we see the dream again – in the life and ministry of Jesus; healing the sick, freeing the captives, feeding the hungry; tearing down the walls that isolate and keep people apart. As he says, this feast-making is so integral to who he is that he, himself, is the feast. “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” As we share his life, his feast, we also share in the feast-making – the dream of life for all people.
In verse 15, it says, Solomon awoke; it had been a dream. Just a dream. And in the years to come he dismisses God’s dream and the dream fades. 1 Kings 11:11 pronounces the final word on this morality tale, “Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, ‘Since this has been your mind and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you…’” Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “Thus the wisdom that Solomon did not learn is attentiveness to those for whom God has special attentiveness. There are all kinds of dreams – of power and money and prestige and control. But the dream of justice for widows, orphans, and immigrants is the deep wisdom of Torah obedience.”
This is a morality tale because it resonates with our own struggles – personal and corporate – to share the good things God has blessed us with. It resonates with our preference for a lighter version of Torah obedience – a cheap (but not so cheerful) feast for humanity, a resignation to the way things are – the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer – rather than the dream God has for God’s world.
There’s a story in my family about old lamps and things you wish for. My brother-in-law’s best mate, a guy he taught with – I’ll call him Bill – collected antique lamps, and when he heard that their principal – I’ll call him Eric because it is his name – was going to India, he asked him if he could pick up an old lamp for him. “You go to this section of Delhi,” he said, “Where there’s antique markets and you can pick up these beautiful old English oil lamps. They’re worth a couple of thousand here – sometimes more – but there you can pick them up for a song. They’ll probably ask for a $1000 but they’re expecting to be bargained down to a couple of hundred.”
When Eric came back, he carried into the staffroom an antique oil lamp for Bill. “How much did you pay?” said Bill, “What do I owe you?” “Well,” said Eric. “I went to markets, and I met the lamp seller. And he asked for $850 for this lamp. “That’s fantastic!” said Bill, “What did you bid him down to?” “Well,” said Eric. “I sat and had tea with the man, and I met his family, and we talked about his children and his dreams for them and the cost of educating each one…and I thought you and how this was just another lamp for your collection and how much you said they were worth and so I bid him up. Basically, I doubled the price. The lamp cost you $1700.”
There was something about Eric that Bill hadn’t considered when he asked him to find a bargain for him overseas. Eric was a member of the Salvation Army. I don’t know about you, but I think of the Salvation Army as, perhaps more than any other denomination, having clung to God’s dream of all people being invited to share in God’s goodness. Don’t send a Salvationist to do your shopping but send a Salvationist if you want to see God’s salvation shared.
What about us? If God came to us this morning and said, “Ask what I should give you.” What would we wish for our lives?What would we wish for this church?
This is what we have been exploring over this year – as we’ve visited churches in Canberra and Melbourne and, this week, Sydney – looking at the different ways they are responding to God’s bigger dream of justice and care and life for all people. And it struck me several times on the Sydney trip how smaller dreams became bigger dreams. You’ll hear more about this in a couple of weeks, but let me just mention Northside Baptist wanting to respond to domestic violence so rather than just doing some church based initiative, working with different agencies to come up with a suburb wide response to dv, and Karina sent into Surry Hills to plant a church and her realising that rather than focus on creating a church with services and programs, she was being called to be a minister to the whole area, to work alongside anyone who wanted to help people’s lives thrive.
What do we wish for? Let us be careful what we wish for. Care-full in the same way that God is care-full – dreaming bigger dreams than we could ever dream for ourselves and our community – for others and for other’s lives – for a whole new world.
Let me close with these words from Walter Brueggemann:
God’s power for life is not a religious fantasy. It is a fresh lease on keeping our baptism in the face of injustice and poverty and alienation. It affirms to us that God had not yet quit and God will have God’s way. We are on our way with God rejoicing, praising, surrendering and obeying. We will then address this age with care and compassion, knowing that the age to come is quite safe in God’s mercy.