As most of you may know, I was blessed last weekend to have several special guests with me. My friend Sajeeve, who lives in Singapore, spent two nights here in the middle of a multi-stop trip to the United States. My friend Mary, who lives in Japan, came for about a week. And I was also blessed to have my parents and grandmother here for a few days.

It was only a few days, and a lot was going on, but . . . well, . . . It doesn't take long for people to fall into old patterns. You know, to say some of the same kind of things they have always said, to use the same tone of voice, etc.

"You don't really want to leave that there, do you?" my mother says.

Or, "You know, you really need to remember to water these plants more often. The fact that they are turning brown is not a good sign."

Or "When is the last time you dusted? Dust isn't good for your allergies, you know."

"You don't seem to have many fresh vegetables in your refrigerator. Are you eating healthily?"

I don't remember all the things she said, but you get the idea. She gives me these little pieces of advice. I say she, because it seems to be my mother more so than my father. I could say that she gives the advice freely, but sometimes it feels more like they are nails that she is hammering in. By and large the advice that she gives is good advice -- yes, I know I should be more attentive to the plants, and I do need to dust again -- but sometimes I don't want to hear it, sometimes it is like the spice in a Thai restaurant, I can tell you from experience, a little goes a long way.

Do you ever have that kind of experience with your mother, do you have that kind of relationship? I am sure there is more to the relationship than that, but, does your mother ever give you advice, little tidbits of lessons learned from experience? Or maybe you have known someone else, someone who often if not always seems to relate in the lecture, advice-giving mode. I've known a few of these in my time. I've even learned a lot from them, though they aren't necessarily the people I would invite first to a night out on the town.

I was thinking about my mother and her advice this week as I was pondering the Scripture lesson from Proverbs, indeed, as I was pondering the book of Proverbs as a whole. Although it doesn't say so explicitly, it isn't too hard to imagine that throughout much of the book of Proverbs, we have an older woman giving advice to her child. It says in the first two verses from our Scripture lesson, "My child, if you accept my words and treasure up my commandments within you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding;" -- that isn't too far from my mother saying, "If you would only listen to what I tell you!"

As a side point, it is interesting to note that what is translated in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible that we are using as "my child," is in the original Hebrew, "my son." Of course that might be because of the patriarchal bias of ancient Israel, or could it be that young men such as myself are just inherently more clueless, more in need of basic reminders to eat vegetables and water the plants, than young women? I'll leave that for you to debate amongst yourselves.

In any case, as a book of advice, a book of wisdom, Proverbs doesn't get much press. It doesn't exactly pop off the page. Maybe that is why the lectionary committee left most of it out of the lectionary. For one thing, there aren't any stories here. No characters, no plot. No exciting David-and-Goliath or Jesus-and-the-Pharisees confrontations. There are some allusions to sex here, our passage mentions the loose woman and the adulteress, for example, but as far as that goes, it is really rather PG13, or maybe these days PG, and since we live in a largely rated R world, Proverbs and its PG rating seems a bit tame. Finally, it isn't the kind of book that really lends itself to being read in big chunks. After all, how many of these proverbs can you take at once?

I am reminded of what the Methodist preacher William Willimon said about Proverbs a few weeks ago at the conference I attended in Nashville. I don't remember his exact words, but he basically said that Proverbs is like going on a long, never-ending, cross-country road trip with your mother. I would add to that comparison by saying that she is in charge of navigation and yet she has lost the map. So instead she just gives little pieces of advice that don't always fit together. For example, it says in Proverbs 26:4, "Do not answer fools according to their folly, or you will be a fool yourself." Then in the very next verse, it says, "Answer fools according to their folly, or they will be wise in their own eyes." Make up your mind, mom! What are we supposed to make of that?!

Sometimes I wonder if a long-distance road trip with your mother isn't how many people experience church, if that isn't how a lot of churches are. We don't know where we are going. The churches don't know what exactly they are doing. We have different ideas, different programs, but we don't know how exactly they fit together.

Unfortunately, as Willimon also noted, a lot of sermons seem like that too. The sermon wanders all over the place, you don't know exactly where it is going, it doesn't seem to fit together. Like this sermon, perhaps. Many sermons seem to treat Scripture passages as though there is a word of advice, a proverb, hidden in each passage, or perhaps each verse. The preacher becomes the wise mother, the proverb-giver, that dispenses advice.

But I think there is more to Scripture than that, it isn't just about some lessons for life. And despite my playful joking about the book of Proverbs, I think there is more to Proverbs than that too.

For one thing, the book of Proverbs makes value judgments. It holds up different choices, different paths, and it isn't ashamed to say that one is better than another. In our Scripture text from the second chapter of Proverbs, the words "path" or "way" occur over a dozen times. For example, "You will be saved from the loose woman, from the adulteress with her smooth words, who forsakes the partner of her youth, and forgets her sacred covenant; for her way leads down to death, and her paths to the shades; those who go to her never come back, nor do they regain the paths of life. Therefore walk in the way of the good, and keep to the paths of the just. For the upright will abide in the land, and the innocent will remain in it; but the wicked will be cut off from the land, and the treacherous will be rooted out of it."

There are paths and decisions that lead to life, and paths and decisions that lead to death. Sometimes we need to be reminded of this in a culture that is often afraid of making value judgments. In a society that emulates Donald Trump, Proverbs says, "Those who trust in their riches will wither, but the righteous will flourish like green leaves." In a culture that emulates figures such as Paris Hilton, and Martha Stewart, we need to hear the voice of Proverbs that reminds us that there things such as character.

By making such value judgments, the book of Proverbs offers a critique to the free market system on which the global economy is based. One of the messages of global capitalism is that the ability to choose is an end in and of itself. Choice is assumed to be good, you want to keep your options open. The goal is to get rich, to have more money, to have more of the options that come with money. The system avoids the question, What is the economy for, what is choice for, what do we have money for, because to answer that question in one way would be to make a value judgment that would shut down other possible answers. The paradox is that when you keep all options open, you end up losing. The goal for Proverbs is not choice, it is life.

Having spent three years of my life in East Asia, I am reminded of certain contrasts between its societies and ours. As Washington Post reporter T. R. Reid writes in his book, "Confucius Lives Next Door," these societies are not afraid of making value judgments. They consider moral values too important to be left to individuals and families, so they are taught in companies, in schools, and even in slogans on subway stations. Some countries put up quotes from Confucius in public spaces. Perhaps it all sounds a bit strange to us, a bit Big Brother-ish, but the fact that their per capita rates of violent crime are one-tenth to one-hundredth of ours, their rates of drug use are a fraction of ours, about 16 percent of marriages in Japan end in divorce as opposed to 50 percent here, about one percent of babies in East Asia are born to single mothers compared to about 35 percent here, and 90 percent of the Japanese consider themselves middle class -- well, statistics like that should make us pause. We may not like it, we may not want it, but maybe what our society needs is a really long road trip with our mother, maybe Proverbs is just what we need.

But as important as that is, there is more to our chapter, more to the book of Proverbs, more to the wisdom literature of the Bible of which Proverbs is a part, than just that. You see, Proverbs takes different pieces of experience, different pieces of advice and puts them together. Sometimes it is fragmented, sometimes it seems contradictory, but isn't that how life is? Proverbs isn't about absolute truths, it is about relative truths. Maybe sometimes it is better to answer fools according to their folly, and other times maybe it is not. The advice that it gives is real, but in the fragmentary, sometimes almost contradictory way in which it is given, there is an implicit respect for the reader, for the child, for the son. Proverbs doesn't give an Answer with a capital "A", it gives answers, and it is up to us to use those answers as we see fit, it is up to us to make them our own. To try to shove all the different answers, all the different proverbs into one unified lesson is to do violence to the book of Proverbs, and to our experience as human beings. Maybe that is why preaching on Proverbs is so difficult and rare.

And yet our passage says that this wisdom is from God, which is to say that there is something holy about these proverbs, there is something holy about our experience, as fragmentary and seemingly contradictory as it may be. In the attempt to learn and pass on wisdom, in the attempt to discern, in the attempt to live a righteous life, God is there. The book of Proverbs represents God's baptism of our experience, it is God's, "yes," to the ordinary stuff of our lives.

The book of Proverbs, and the wisdom literature as a whole, is different from the rest of the Old Testament. Perhaps what makes it most different is that it doesn't start with the Torah and its law, it doesn't start with "Thus saith the Lord," it doesn't start with what Jesus did, its starting point is human experience. To quote from Dr. Seow, a professor of Old Testament at Princeton Seminary, "Here in the wisdom tradition of the Bible is scriptural authority for human beings to make ethical decisions by paying attention to science and human experiences. We must not say, as we often hear in the debate about homosexuality, that "experience has nothing to do with it" or that "only scripture matters." It is scriptural to take human observations and experience seriously. This does not mean that we should reject the authoritative traditions and turn only to the sciences and human experience. My point, rather, is that we may not be faithful when we simply hold on to dogmatic statements when the realities of life contradict dogma. . . The Bible does not take human experience lightly. Neither should we. Moreover, it is not only the experience of a particular people or a faith-community that matters. To be sure, those are the concerns of most of the Bible. In the wisdom tradition [of which Proverbs is a part], however, the concern is with the experience of the ordinary human being. Sometimes the realities of life contradict what we have always known to be true and, in the face of that contraction, we can only admit that we do not understand all of creation."

This is good news, for it means that the God who gave us the law, the God who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, that God is still revealing truth to us today, all around us, in our human experience.

Dr. Seow reflects on his experience at the end of his article. "I also used to believe that homosexual acts are always wrong. . . Seeing how some gay and lesbian couples relate to one another in loving partnerships, observing how much joy they find in one another, and seeing that some of them are better parents that most of us ever will be, I have reconsidered my views. I was wrong. . . [in the debate about homosexuality and the Christian community] [f]or me there is nothing less than the gospel at stake. I have no choice but to take the testimonies of gays and lesbians seriously. I do so with some comfort, however, for the scriptures themselves give me the warrant to trust that human beings can know truths apart from divine revelation."