A couple of summers ago, we were up with my parents near New Haven and got socked in by a rainy day.  

Fortunately, Liz was not without a backup plan, and we ended up taking the girls to one of those “Escape the Room” places.  

Do you know about these? 

They’ve been around for a while now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s been on your particular radar, so no points deducted if you’re not familiar with them. 

The basic idea is that you and your friends are locked in a room.  There is a countdown clock above the door which is set for one hour.  

You have an hour to solve the puzzle of how to get out, which requires sorting through a million different little things that turn out to be clues.  

A number on the wall written in graffiti turns out to be the combination to a lock, which opens a box which has a key which opens a door which has a rabbit’s foot hanging on a rope…and the rabbit’s foot makes no sense, until suddenly it turns out you need the rope, but not the rabbit’s foot.  Except then later on down the line, you realize you actually do need the rabbit’s foot, but it’s for something else, entirely.

You get the idea.  

It’s all very clever.  

And for the first ten minutes, it’s really really fun. 

Then comes minute eleven. 

Minute eleven is when everyone starts getting driven completely berserk by the way everybody else is trying to solve the puzzle.   

Have you ever tried to put together Ikea furniture with a loved one? 

It’s like that.  

Because there are two kinds of people in the world: the people who dutifully read and then carefully keep the owner’s manual for each of their appliances so they’ll know what to do when something breaks…the people who think things through patiently and sequentially…and then there are those of us who just sort of eyeball it.  

So how do these two great tribes of humanity approach the task of escaping a room?

This is what comes to a head in minute eleven, when suddenly it’s as if everyone is in everyone else’s way.  

You’ve got to figure that the people who work in these places are just living for that moment, right? 

They’re in some other room nearby, following each group on a closed-circuit monitor, watching as suddenly the rules of polite society and the courtesies of love just collapse before their very eyes like sandcastles, and everyone turns on everyone else.  

And yet, even they do not want you to be stuck there, fuming, for the next 49 minutes.  

They have ways of passing along hints from afar to get you back on track, to help you realize how, in fact, each person in their own way probably is ontosomething—how each one is coming up with some important piece of the puzzle—and that there is a way forward if you can manage to work out a joint way of proceeding, learning as a couple or a group the give and take of life together.  

In our Scripture this morning, we’re invited to imagine another scene in which tempers appear to be flaring and nerves seem particularly raw. 

The words come from the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, as a scene in which wisdom is imagined as a character, almost a person with all the answers not watching from afar, but instead locked in a room with us, watching helplessly while we try to dope out how to escape.  

“Wisdom cries out in the street,” it says. “In the squares, she raises her voice.  At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates, she speaks. ‘How long, O simple ones [she cries], will you love being simple?” (1:20-22)

She is enough like us to experience some of our own exasperation, and yet mostly, the thing that is getting to her is not our ignorance, but really our complacency—at how unwilling we are to act differently, to change our approach to lives that we have managed to make into a kind of prison for ourselves.  

“I have been dropping clues left and right,” she says, “I have been trying to throw you a line…hand you a map…but whatever I offer doesn’t seem to matter, because you won’t take it.” 

The situation has finally reduced her to stark raving in the middle of the village.

This is a different way of imagining God—or imagining the activity that flows from the will of God—than we may be used to.  

At face value, it is a hard vision to square with the church’s more familiar ways of talking, particularly about Jesus, who mostly seems to put loving way ahead of judging.  (Though it’s not quite so simple, still….) 

So many people have left and are leaving the church as they struggle with its – our – tendency toward judgmentalism. 

Surely focusing our effort on love and acceptance is a long overdue corrective. 

Indeed, in many ways, it is.  

And yet I wonder if this passage doesn’t speak to something else—namely, that God does not want any of his children sentenced to life in a prison of their own devising.  

The sin of judgmentalism is by no means unique to the church.  

But wherever our diminishments and heartbreaks come from at first, the thing about them is how they don’t just linger, but manage to get heavier and heavier, until without realizing it, we have locked ourselves in rooms (circumstances) we can’t escape, at least not by ourselves. 

There are the prisons of our fears and phobias, our rants and rages, our vulnerabilities and insecurities, not to mention our addictions and misplaced desires.  

Meanwhile, all around us are the signs, the clues we need in order to do what comes next, or to do whatever it may be that moves us one step closer to the great lock falling open at last.  

And yet, if we are not careful, we can spend our lives stuck at minute eleven, with everyone in everyone else’s way, and nobody learning the give and take of life together, or the ways that God’s love and the human love (that points to God) continually unlock us, if we let them. 

 As for my family, we did not end up escaping the room that day in New Haven.    

I think if there had been another ten minutes on the clock, we might have.  

But it took us awhile to listen to the clues and learn the give and take we needed to follow where they tried to lead us.  

As for Lady Wisdom, she is sure of where all that must be pointing.  

Her frustration and her urgency are her way of insisting that joy and freedom remain possible. 

With each cherished clue, we get closer, until the moment when we realize that the door was open all along, and we walk through. 

Amen.