But David was not a perfect man. One afternoon, David was out on the roof of his palace and he sees a woman named Bathsheba bathing. David immediately decides he wants this woman for himself, except there is only one little problem—Bathsheba is already married. But David decides to sleep with her anyways, which results in her getting pregnant. This causes David to essentially murder Bathsheba’s husband. With her husband out of the way, David takes Bathsheba in as one of his wives.

God punishes David for killing Bathsheba’s husband by taking away their first child, but their second child, Solomon lives. Upon the death of David, Solomon takes over as king of Israel for his father. The only problem with Solomon ascending to the throne is that he is 12 years old. This is when Solomon asks God for wisdom and this is God’s response:

“God gave Solomon very great wisdom, discernment, and breadth of understanding as vast as the sand on the seashore…People came from all the nations to hear the wisdom of Solomon; they came from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.” So Solomon becomes this man who is revered for his wisdom and intelligence. Solomon’s name was synonymous with genius. He was like the Einstein of his day and time.

I think that Solomon represents something that all of us desire on some level—we want the people in our lives to respect us for our wisdom. How good does it feel when someone compliments your intelligence? I mean, truthfully, it feels great. I know for me personally, I have always yearned to be thought of as intelligent because, as we talked about last week, when I was young, I certainly didn’t feel intelligent.

I want to continue that story this morning because it is going to lay the foundation for where we are going today. So as I mentioned last week, I went school with a lot of people who were very smart. In terms of doing well at school, everyone in my class was crushing it. By the time we got to high school, although I was in advanced classes, I was always had the lowest grades of my peers. I was kind of the worst of the best in our grade.

Whereas everyone else seemed to finish their homework in a reasonable amount of time, I would spend hours every night on my homework and do it half as well as they did. It seemed like no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t keep up. But that all changed one auspicious day during my sophomore year of high school. I was in third year Latin and we were studying the works of Cicero (who I talked about this summer during our Sans Pariel series as one of the best orators of all time).

The second half of the year, we began reading Cicero’s philosophy. This was my first exposure to philosophy and I absolutely loved it because we got to talk about life and the problems we face as human beings. This was like the polar opposite of the rest of my high school education, which felt like it had very little to do with anything I would face later on in life.

Well, at one point, we come to this section on education and learning and Cicero is talking about why do we learn, what’s the point of learning? A lot of times people see learning as a means to an end. So you go to school to get an education so you can get a job and earn money to support your lifestyle. In this way of thinking, the point of education is simply to gain a skill set so you can become a productive contributing member of the economy.

But Cicero argues that the reward of learning is the knowledge itself. Whether that knowledge provides you with any economic benefit is not the point. This is when my Latin teacher turned to all the smart kids in the class and said, “You all are very good at studying for the tests and getting A’s, but you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons. You study to get an A so you can go to a good college. You’re missing out on everything that matters because you don’t really care about the material itself.”

It was the first time I had ever heard any teacher speak negatively to the smart people in my class about being smart. Then my Latin teacher said, “If you care about the knowledge first, then the grades will come.” That really stuck with me and, in that moment, something clicked in my mind. I realized I was doing the same thing as everyone else. I was focused on the grade, not on the knowledge. So the beginning of my junior year of high school, I made a decision—I was no longer going to be focused on grades. Instead, I was going to focus on the knowledge and enjoy learning for the sake of learning.

My mind became like a vacuum cleaner for information. Whereas I previously had an adversarial relationship with my textbooks, now I looked forward to reading them. My GPA my sophomore year was a 3.2, a B average. My GPA my junior year was a 4.3 A+. All of a sudden, the possibility of going to a highly ranked academic institution was no longer a pipedream. Indeed, this approach is what enabled me to get into Rice University, Oxford University and Princeton Theological Seminary.

Now I wish I could end the story there and tell you I lived happily ever after, but that wouldn’t be honest. The truth is that even though I had degrees from a number of elite schools, I still felt like an imposter. Those degrees were a means to mask my own insecurities about my intelligence. Moreover, although people are impressed by the names, what I have found is that the degrees themselves did little to convince anyone that I was smart.

What you don’t realize when you are young is that the label of intelligence is not something that is automatically given, rather, it is earned. Just because somebody went to a fancy school doesn’t mean they are necessarily intelligent. I’ve been to those fancy schools and, trust me, I was shocked at just how unintelligent many of those people were. What I realized is that people prove their wisdom and intelligence to you over time.

Solomon didn’t just get the label of being intelligent overnight. It took him years to cultivate that reputation. And one of the ways he was able to do this is very paradoxical—he would often talk about how little he actually knows. For instance in Ecclesiastes, Solomon says, “When I applied my mind to know wisdom…However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out; even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out.”

Socrates has a famous quote that says the same thing, but more succinctly: “The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.” The more you learn about the world, the more it becomes clear how little we know. What makes someone truly intelligent is when they acknowledge how little they know. The smartest people I have ever met are the very same people who are willing to admit the limitations of their knowledge. They are also wise enough to understand that nothing in this world is certain.

And I think that’s very hard for a lot people. We crave certainty in our lives. We want to know that what we believe or what we think is the right way to approach life will lead to the best possible outcomes. Indeed, this is a big reason why people come to church—they want certainty. In a world where everything feels up for grabs, when the earth is shifting under our feet, I want to know that if I believe the exact right things, they will save me in the end.

But what our scripture from John demonstrates to us is that we can think we know all the right things and yet, at the same time, understand none of it. This is one of the more famous stories in the Bible where Jesus has a discussion with a man named Nicodemus about the concept of being born again. Jesus tells Nicodemus, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  Nicodemus misunderstands what Jesus is saying, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”

Jesus is not talking about a literal second birth. Jesus “clarifies” by saying that if a person wants to be part of the kingdom of God, they have to be born of water and the spirit. Now we all understand the water part of it, which is baptism. The spirit part is where things get a little more complicated. Obviously, Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit, but what does it mean to be born of the spirit? The most common interpretation by modern Christians is that being born of the spirit is to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Essentially, you believe in Jesus and you will go to heaven.

But another interpretation, the one that I subscribe to, is that Jesus is referring to a very mystical idea. Being born of the Holy Spirit is to completely change your life orientation. When we are first born, our focus is on achieving success for ourselves. Initially, we are motivated by our need for survival and the desire for upward mobility. This success often comes at the expense of others and reinforces our own selfish inclinations.

When you are born of the spirit, your focus is on serving others rather than serving yourself. Your motivation is the wellbeing of your neighbors who are struggling to survive. You are willing to sacrifice your success so they can achieve upward mobility. And through this action of continual sacrifice, you are able to achieve spiritual oneness with God as you come to embody God’s unconditional love.

Now this way of approaching being reborn in the spirit is much harder for us to achieve than simply accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. In the first version, you don’t have to change anything about yourself. You simply have to believe the right things. This is very reassuring for our sense of certainty—you believe X and Y will happen.

In the second version, Jesus is asking you to go through a full transformation, killing off that old version of yourself and becoming someone completely new and different. This is very unmooring to our sense of certainty because it’s nebulous. There are no strict parameters that determine when I’ve completed my transformation in the spirit. How do I know when I have done enough? Or is the idea that I can never do enough? Am I always in the process of transforming and I will never fully become this new creation?

The appeal of option 1 is that you have certainty. The beauty of option 2 is that you don’t. And as we discussed earlier, the more you learn about the world, the less certain you become of what you know. I really believe that Christianity, at its best, is a religion that lives in the tension of life’s uncertainty. Turning the other cheek, loving your enemy, praying for those who persecute you, welcoming the stranger, forgiving those who have harmed you, standing up for the poor and the oppressed—these are all things that feel risky because they leave us vulnerable. These actions can open us to harm, but these actions also have the potential to dramatically transform the world.

So the paradox of Christianity is that we are all certain of our uncertainty. We are all united in what we don’t know. So rather than pontificate about how sure we are of our future, let’s talk about what we hope is true: We hope that our understanding of a truly unconditionally loving and forgiving God is correct. We hope that by following Jesus, we are living our lives in a way that is pleasing to God. We hope that we have the wisdom to understand when we are making a mistake as individuals and as a community so we can do better.

When we approach the Christian faith with this lack of certainty, what we will discover is that we will find ourselves in good company. There may be a lot of people who want answers, but there are more who want honesty. And the honest answer is that when you live in the tension of the uncertainty of life that is when you can get the most out of life. So as we march forward towards the celebration of Jesus’ birth, the birth of a man who would teach us to live in the tension of the unknown, I hope you will let go of your need for certainty. This is what faith is all about: I don’t know God, but I’m going to let you lead me.

When you revel in what you don’t know that is what opens the door for you to be born from above, for you to be reborn in the spirit. That’s what allows you to shift from serving yourself to serving others and embodying the wisdom that a life well-lived is a life dedicated making the world a better place for all of God’s children. Amen.