Doves & Serpents

A man is stranded on a desert island, with no tools, food or communications equipment. The situation is bleak. However, the man knows God. So he prays, and feels God say, ‘I’m going to rescue you.’ The man is really pleased. He sits back and waits for God to show up.

Amazingly, an hour doesn’t go by before a gleaming speedboat skims past, notices the man, and pulls up. ‘Come aboard’, cries the woman at the wheel. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ replies the man. ‘God will be along to rescue me in a minute.’ So the speedboat speeds away.

A couple of days later, a coastguard vessel appears. ‘Are you alright there? Come aboard!’ ‘Don’t worry about me,’ the man says again. ‘I’m waiting for God to rescue me.’

The man has been on the island for nearly a week when a helicopter buzzed overhead, and lowers down a rope. ‘Tie yourself on!’ they shout down, over the roar of the rota blades. ‘I’m not coming,’ says the man, quite weak now for lack of food. ‘God has told me he’s going to rescue me.’ So the helicopter flies away.

The man starves to death.

When he comes face to face with Jesus, the man cannot hold his tongue. ‘Jesus, you said you’d come and rescue me. Why didn’t you?’ Jesus looks at the man for a moment, and then says, ‘I sent you two boats and a helicopter – what more rescue do you want?’

I hope you’ve heard that one before. It occurred to me this morning, as I munched my muesli (and questionable milk), that common sense is not exactly trumpeted in my experience of church. I’ve heard a lot more preaches on faith!

Jesus teaches us to ‘be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves’ – to continually grow in faith and wisdom. My observation is that all of us tend to be better at one than the other. I’m much better at the wisdom bit, and probably a majority of you who read this will be the same, because you’ll come from a western culture, which prizes wisdom over faith (English culture is especially bad for this). Therefore it is really important to encourage faith to make up the balance. However, not everyone is a serpent.

This is a live issue for me because several vulnerable people I work with are extremely weak on wisdom, such that it is very difficult to get them to see what seems obvious, ‘common sense’, to me.

So I guess my question today is, ‘how can we effectively communicate the value of wisdom from a Christian point of view?’ We’ve developed lots of inspiring ways of selling faith to people, but wisdom doesn’t seem such an appealing, saleable idea. I’m sure that’s only because we haven’t worked enough at how to communicate it. We need to, to protect our well-meaning but vulnerable brothers and sisters.

Any ideas?