One night this past week, I had a bad dream – that particular kind of bad dream that replays an actual memory you have…something that really happened. 

It was from the spring of my sophomore year in high school, in my Algebra II class.  

I think I’ve mentioned before that math was never my thing—well, this happened a week or so after the math department at my high school decided that they agreed with me about that and assigned me a peer tutor.   

We’d been meeting regularly.  Taking it seriously. 

And now, on this particular morning in my math class, we were taking a test.  

I was good.  I was loose.  I’d had breakfast.  The night before, my tutor and I had worked from dinner to check in.  

I was ready. 

None of that was in the dream, though.  I just remember it.  

The dream kicked in without any backstory, but it didn’t need any.  

I knew exactly where I was.  

It was right at the moment when the teacher said, “You may begin,” and we turned over the test, and I looked it over and realized that I knew absolutely nothing.  

That despite my best efforts, my heroic efforts, I was not ready.^[1]

Why it was I had this dream – this memory – this week is something I have not yet worked out.  I’ll have to get back to you on that.  

But I relived that awful, sinking feeling…that particular kind of sudden, horrible dread that I haven’t thought about in ages, but that I don’t think I could everforget.  

Has this ever happened to you? 

If it hasn’t, the only thing I can compare it to was the time, more than ten years later, when I was living in a not so great neighborhood, and I was woken up in the middle of the night by this weird squeaking noise.  

I got up to investigate, and it turned out that my front door and, as it happened, the street door downstairs, were both wide open, and just sort of waggling in the breeze, each one softly squeaking back and forth.  

(Max: face)

That’s what it felt like being not-ready for that Algebra test: a swift journey from the land of unpleasant surprise into the territory of existential danger.  

I know I’m exaggerating.  

Or, I should say, now I know that I’m exaggerating.  

In the moment, it is not so easy to know.  

The other thing about that moment is that you feel so alone. 

II.

Our reading this morning finds King Solomon at a similar moment, although the particular way it’s excerpted does not make that entirely clear.  

He’s given the chance to ask God for anything, and he asks for wisdom, which, coming from a king, is refreshingly humble. 

Even God seems to think so. 

But it helps to know that Solomon wasn’t David’s only son.  

It helps to know that he wasn’t the eldest. 

It helps to know that David lost one son, Absolom, to civil war, and that as David is entering his final days, another son has been lining up supporters and getting ready to make his own move for the throne.  

Some are already calling him king. 

So when David declares Solomon as the one true heir to the throne, the only rightful king, it isn’t just that Solomon suddenly has big shoes to fill, or simply that he’s young (though indeed, he does, and indeed, he is).  

He isn’t cut out to be a general—he knows it. 

But how can you be a king without being a general, or at least a warrior?  

He doesn’t know how to be a king in those terms or any other. 

All he knows is that he is not ready. 

He’s not ready for what the moment requires, much less whatever the future may hold.

Although he has friends and supporters, in a deeper sense he has nobody—nobody to guide him into being the man he will need to be. He is all by himself.  Except for God. 

And it’s here that Solomon does a remarkable thing. 

He prays for wisdom.  

Not for power.  Not for money. Not for more friends. Not for a copy of “Warfare for Dummies.”  

He prays for wisdom, which is the capacity to see things as God sees them, to the extent that any human can. 

It was particularly wise to do that, of course, which may be the Bible’s way of signaling that much of what he needed was actually in him all along. 

But whether it was there before or just sort of washes over him now, it changes him definitively from then on. 

Wisdom offers a sense of what actually matters and what really doesn’t…an eye for what is permanent and what is temporary.

And that awareness shapes him into a very different kind of king—one who will turn out to be just the man they need for an hour that nobody could have anticipated.  

III.

The Bible has great faith in wisdom.  

It argues that any of us can learn to see something as God sees. 

Even in the moments when our lives seem to shift between unpleasant surprise and existential danger, we are never alone.  

When I was a student, I didn’t have a sense for the way in which doors open and close in our lives—that sometimes, God says yes; other times, God says no; and also – and this is the crucial part – that with God, there are a lot more possible answers in between.  

So much of the weight and loneliness of not being ready is that feeling of being smushed by what seems like God’s immediate and irrevocable “no.” 

Wisdom reminds us of how relatively rare that “no” really is. 

God takes way too much delight in the “not yet,” and in the “well, not this way” for any verdict of “no” to have much force. 

God is forever attuned to even greater life and possibility still to come than we can imagine, and if we can give God a little time and room to work, what follows is almost always a blessing in some way. 

Wisdom reflects God’s own patience when it comes to deciding what events really mean, remembering well that the moment itself often cannot tell us.  

But it also means that if God does the divine part, we have to do ours.  

It’s no good to let the blessings fan out before us, like a hallway of doors unopened, while we sit there “waiting for God to do something.”

Wisdom also means seeing clearly just how much God is doing.   

Solomon could have sat tight—or consoled himself in comfort—until God got around to saving the kingdom and finding a way to bail out its king.  

He doesn’t.  

Solomon asks for the capacity for good judgment so he can take part in his own life and become someone that others can depend on.

Let’s not forget that.  

We know that our lives hold many moments for which we may not be ready, and that these can be far more serious and lingering than a failed algebra test.  

God’s promise to us is the same one made to Solomon. 

“I now do according to your word,” God says to him.  

May we learn to promise God the very same.  

Amen.

---

^[1] The germ of this sermon comes from a key moment in a much better one, “Skills and Gills,” by Rev. Dr. Tim Boggess, delivered August 16, 2015 for Day1 Radio.  https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003ca9/skills_and_gills