Kelly - Proverbs 10

I am so glad that Ecclesiastes lies in the canon along with Proverbs!

So much of today's reading is tough to bear - it reads as a basic "good things happen to good people and bad things happen to the wicked". Which is comforting, but very much unlike my personal experience in this world. The lines that Proverbs draws around righteousness, wickedness, and their consequences are clear and clean. The lines I see in our world are less certain - righteousness and wickedness may be clear (but not always) - but the consequences of each rarely follow neat lines. Wickedness does prosper - and the audience of Proverbs undoubtedly knew that as much as I do. Which is why Ecclesiastes is written - to me that book is a little more "wisdom for the real world."

Of course, it's not like we as a culture have fully grasped this concept. We're pretty strongly wedded to the "good things happen to good people" doctrine - it fed the Calvinists and the American Protestant Work Ethic for centuries and still does. When I was younger everyone I knew was passing around Rabbi Harold Kushner's work "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People" and today we pass around a Christian version of the same thing: Wm. Paul Young's "The Shack."

This good begets good/bad begets bad idea is as old as Proverbs. But it doesn't stand alone in our scriptures. We can't let it stand alone in our theology. It leads us to be cruel to each other - judging others' lives by their visible results alone. It leads us into deep guilt - trying to figure out what we have done wrong when our lives are generally stinky.