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WUMFSA Devotionals for Advent to Epiphany, 2003 - 2004 Wednesday, December 31, 2003 We live in the a time of a great knowledge explosion, but what we need much more than that is a wisdom implosion! We should know by now that knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing. Knowledge tells us how to make a hydrogen bomb, Wisdom deals with whether we should or not. We have an overwhelming excess of the former and a tremendous lack of the latter. The Egyptians and the Babylonians had separate gods for Wisdom and they honored Wisdom highly. We ridicule or imprison or even crucify people who seek to impart wisdom to us. Last October I was on a river cruise ship sailing through the Three Gorges of the Yangtze (Chang Jiang) River in central China. After four days in the fantastically beautiful river canyon and a trip up the side canyon of the Lesser Gorges, we emerged to sail through the last remaining opening in the Three Gorges Dam. It is still under construction but the great river is now filling up behind the dam. For over 365 miles upstream, the river will initially rise 135 meters (over 400 feet) and will eventually submerge 175 meters of the canyon, one third of the depth of the gorges. When we disembarked to see certain sites, our buses made their way through the now empty cities on the river being torn down that now look like pictures I've seen of postwar Berlin or Dresden. Over 1.2 million people have been moved out of the lower third of the gorge. Many have been moved to a better life, but many more have not. The most viable part of the river community has been destroyed and the people's tie to their ancestral land has been broken. China set out to do a few good things for the Common Good with this largest structure on earth (not counting the Great Wall). This dam will provide irrigation water, which will make it unnecessary to build twelve or more coal-burning utility plants like the ones that now poison the air; they are making lots of money and jobs; and most importantly, they hope to control the worst of the downstream flooding on the great agricultural plain below. The folly of the Great Wall may be repeated in this dam. Science and technology thrive on knowledge. It's the correct role of science to "think the world to pieces," in order to understand how it works in all of those pieces. Technology uses that knowledge in practical ways in order to apply and magnify our energy. The result is both benefit when it succeeds and destruction when it doesn't. Or more likely, we can never do only one thing. Every achievement also brings ten unanticipated results and over half of them are likely to be negative or destructive. Wisdom is about making choices. Ecology "thinks the world whole." Ecology seeks to understand how it all fits together and works as a system. Wisdom can learn from ecology. The whole earth is one single organism called Gaia in this holistic sense. Both Samuel and Jesus already had a lot of
knowledge. They both could navigate the intellectual complexities
of the Temple at a young age. It is written, however, that they
grew in Wisdom. Knowledge was assumed. It is from Wisdom
that they gained their stature. They grew in seeing the whole
picture and imparting that wisdom to others. |