2026.08.02 | The Way Home: In An Age of Sirens

 “The Way Home: In An Age of Sirens”
Job 28:12–15, 20–28
Preached by 
Rev. Dr. Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ  
Cherryland, CA 
02 Aug 2026

Show of hands this morning. How many of you have seen Christopher Nolan's new film, The Odyssey? Okay, and how many of you are planning to see it? And how many of you are thinking, "Pastor, I have no idea what you're talking about—I thought this was church!" Don't worry. You don't need to have seen the movie to understand today's sermon. 

Nearly three thousand years ago, someone in the Greek world started telling a story about a soldier trying to get home. And we have never stopped telling it. The Greek poem is attributed to the poet Homer. It would be written down centuries after him. Today, Tennyson’s echo still reverberates, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” James Joyce moved the whole Odyssey into one ordinary Thursday in Dublin. Tolkien, who loved Homer, quietly refused him—his hero is not a clever king but Samwise Gamgee, an ordinary gardener who keeps walking no matter what. Now there’s an Face of Faith! And the Coen brothers set the story in Depression-era Mississippi with a bluegrass soundtrack and a river baptism. The epic fits nicely into Nolan’s filmography as he is beholden to what happens when extraordinary human ability collides with profound moral complexity.

We keep telling this story because every generation knows what it is to feel lost. The story has endured because every generation recognizes something of itself in it. It's the story of a long journey home. Of storms and temptations. Of voices that lure us off course. Of trying to discern the right path when the world offers so many others. Some of us have crossed oceans. Some have crossed borders. Some have crossed grief, illness, divorce, disappointment, or seasons we never imagined we'd have to endure. The details are different, but the longing is the same. We all know what it is to wonder if we're still headed in the right direction.

It turns out, that's not just Homer's story. It's ours. And long before Homer’s Mediterranean epic, another epic, Mesopotamian in origin, asked perhaps an even deeper question. Not simply, "How do we find our way home?" but "How do we become wise enough to know which way leads home?" Listen again to the words of Job: "But where shall wisdom be found?"

Para comenzar, reflexionamos sobre La Odisea, una historia que ha inspirado a generaciones porque habla de una experiencia profundamente humana: el largo camino de regreso a casa. Todos conocemos lo que significa enfrentar tormentas, tentaciones y momentos de incertidumbre, preguntándonos si seguimos el camino correcto. Mucho antes de Homero, el libro de Job planteó una pregunta aún más profunda: no solo ¿cómo encontramos el camino a casa?, sino ¿dónde se encuentra la verdadera sabiduría para reconocer ese camino? Esa es la pregunta que guía nuestro mensaje de hoy.

Human achievement is not the same as wisdom

Job 28 does not begin with wisdom. It begins with a hymn to human capability. There is a mine for silver, the poet says, and a place where gold is refined. Human beings put an end to darkness. They overturn mountains by their roots. They cut channels through rock and bring hidden things to light.

Job marvels at us. We tunnel through mountains. We pull precious things out of the ground. We bend creation to our purposes. Update the list and it reads: modern medicine. Nuclear power. Space exploration. Machines that write, diagnose, and persuade, and are now beginning to design their own successors. We may be on the cusp of artificial intelligence singularity.

Every civilization eventually asks the same question: Can we become powerful enough to save ourselves? The Greeks asked it. The Romans asked it. The Manhattan Project asked it. Which brings Nolan’s other film, Oppenheimer into the conversation. Humanity learned how to split the atom before it learned how to live wisely with what it had made. Which elucidates a biblical variation of the previous question: Can humanity become wise?

Job's poem, after all of its admiration for humanity’s achievements, in verse 12, takes the floor out from under all of it: “But where shall wisdom be found?”

Homer feared breaking the sacred order. Oppenheimer feared human power. Scripture fears something more precise: pride. Because pride is what breaks the sacred order while convincing us that we are saving the world.History suggests that civilizations rarely collapse because they become less intelligent. More often, they collapse because they forget what is sacred. Pride convinces us that because we can do something, we therefore should. Scripture has a different concern. It asks whether our character has grown as quickly as our capabilities.

Job habla de la extraordinaria capacidad humana para descubrir, construir y transformar el mundo. Hoy vemos esos logros en la medicina, la exploración espacial y la inteligencia artificial. Sin embargo, después de admirar todo lo que la humanidad puede hacer, Job plantea una pregunta importante: “¿Dónde se hallará la sabiduría?” El verdadero peligro no es el conocimiento ni el poder, sino el orgullo que nos hace creer que, porque podemos hacer algo, debemos hacerlo. La Escritura nos recuerda que una sociedad no prospera solo por sus avances, sino por su sabiduría y por no olvidar lo que es sagrado.

Wisdom is listening beyond the sirens

Back to Homer. Homer gives us one of the most enduring images in all of literature. Odysseus is warned that he will pass an island where voices sing so beautifully that sailors steer straight into the rocks to hear more. And here is what I want you to notice. The Sirens do not force anyone. They carry no weapons. They do not chase the ship. They simply sing.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic who lived at the same time as Jesus, read the Odyssey as a moral allegory. The Sirens, he said, are whatever captivates the soul and diverts it from its true destination.

So what sings on our coastline? Productivity. Success. Consumerism. 

They are not always evil. They are simply loud. And they promise fulfillment. In fact, many of them are good things. That is precisely what makes them so dangerous. The voices that draw us away from God rarely sound evil. They sound reasonable, enticing. That is what makes them sirens rather than monsters. That’s how temptation works. They promise security, success, certainty, comfort, recognition. They whisper that our worth is measured by what we produce, what we own, how busy we are, or how admired we become. They are penultimate things singing dulcet tones in a key just flat of divinity. Then they become ultimate things, supplanting our true purpose.

Odysseus knows something about himself. He knows that when he hears the song of the Sirens, he will want to follow it. He knows that good intentions will not be enough. So before his ship ever reaches the island, he asks his companions to tie him to the mast. And then he gives them one more instruction: no matter what he says later, no matter how much he begs or pleads, they are not to untie him.

Seneca called that wisdom: the wise person prepares for temptation before it arrives, cultivating virtue. I would call it spiritual discipline. Our ropes are Sabbath, prayer, Scripture, the table, this community, generosity—covenant commitments we make while we are still thinking clearly, so that they can hold us when we are not. 

These are not religious obligations that earn God's approval. They are the practices that keep us anchored when the currents of our culture begin to pull us away. They are the ropes that hold us to the mast when the songs around us become louder than the voice of God. Because sooner or later, every one of us will sail past the Sirens.

There will be seasons when success sounds more convincing than faithfulness. When fear sounds wiser than hope. When anger feels easier than forgiveness. When isolation feels safer than community. When despair sounds more believable than grace. The question is not whether the songs will come. The question is whether we have learned whose voice to trust.

Which is exactly why, next week we will turn to Sacred Rest and spiritual practices. Rest is not a pause in the journey—far from it. Rest is a practice that “binds us to the mast.” It is how we learn to hear God again, amid the sirens of our age that seek to call us away from God’s wisdom. “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” must be tempered with “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.”

Las Sirenas de La Odisea,  no obligaban a nadie ni usaban la fuerza, sino que atraían con un canto hermoso que desviaba a los viajeros de su destino. Así también existen hoy las “sirenas” de nuestra cultura: el éxito, el consumismo, la productividad y la búsqueda de reconocimiento. No siempre son malas, pero pueden ocupar el lugar que solo le corresponde a Dios. Necesitamos disciplinas espirituales que nos mantengan firmes—la oración, el descanso, la Escritura, la comunión y la comunidad—para escuchar la voz de Dios por encima de las muchas voces que compiten por nuestra atención. Por eso, la próxima semana iniciaremos nuestra nueva serie, Descanso Sagrado, aprendiendo a encontrar descanso y sabiduría en Dios.

The Way of Wisdom

So what does that wisdom actually look like? Job finally answers the question he has been asking all along. Where, then, is wisdom found?

"It cannot be gotten for gold, and silver cannot be weighed out as its price."

It cannot be bought. It cannot be mined. It cannot be engineered. Everything else in Job 28 can be extracted. Wisdom can only be received. So what does received wisdom actually look like on an ordinary Tuesday?

Genesis 18. The hottest part of the day, and Abraham is sitting in the shade at the oaks of Mamre when three strangers appear. He runs to meet them. He hurries Sarah into baking. He kills a calf, and then he stands there while they eat, the way a host stands, ready to meet any need. 

He does not know who they are. The story never lets him figure it out in advance. Only afterward do we learn that in welcoming the stranger, he has welcomed God. Hospitality is not a warm-up for the encounter with the divine. Hospitality is the encounter. 

Homer's world knew a version of this. At the center of it stood Zeus Xenios, the god of the stranger, and in the Odyssey how you treat the guest at your door is the load-bearing beam of the whole civilization, Zeus’ law. And as Odysseus feared, a society that treats the stranger as threat is cutting its own cable, as Odysseus stated, “the clearest view of a man is from below.” This is Chrostopher Nolan’s warning to a society that flirts yet again with our original sin, xenophobia. Deuteronomy goes even further. God, it says, "loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." In Scripture, wisdom is not primarily something you know. It is something you become. And it shows up most at the door and table.

La sabiduría no puede comprarse, extraerse ni fabricarse; solo puede recibirse como un don de Dios. Esa sabiduría se hace visible en la manera en que tratamos a los demás. En Génesis 18, Abraham recibe con hospitalidad a tres desconocidos y, sin saberlo, recibe a Dios mismo. Mientras la cultura griega valoraba la hospitalidad como fundamento de una sociedad sana, la Biblia va aún más lejos: Dios ama al extranjero y llama a su pueblo a hacer lo mismo. Así, la verdadera sabiduría no consiste solo en lo que sabemos, sino en la clase de personas que llegamos a ser, especialmente en cómo abrimos nuestra mesa y nuestro corazón a los demás.

Job's great poem ends with an answer that sounds almost anticlimactic until you sit with it:

"Truly, the fear of the LORD, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."

Not terror. Reverence. Awe. The settled knowledge that you are not the center of the universe — which is to say, the exact opposite of pride.

The Apostle Paul takes that ancient wisdom one step further. Writing to a church in Corinth that admired intelligence, eloquence, and philosophical sophistication, he tells them that the wisdom of God did not arrive as an idea to be mastered, but as a person to be followed. "Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God." Not Zeus's thunderbolt. Not the mine shaft, not the reactor, not the data center. But the One who welcomes strangers, washes feet, forgives his enemies, and gives himself away.

Job asks where wisdom can be found. Paul answers that wisdom has a face. Jesus does not simply teach the way home. He is the Way.

Here is the deepest turn of all. Scripture is not finally the story of humanity finding its way to God. It is the story of God finding God's way to us. The gospel begins with God leaving home. "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." God became the stranger at the door. Thank God Mary opened the door. 

La verdadera sabiduría nace de vivir con reverencia y humildad delante de Dios. El apóstol Pablo nos dice que esa sabiduría tiene un rostro: Jesucristo, quien no solo nos muestra el camino, sino que es el Camino. El Evangelio nos recuerda que no se trata solo de que nosotros encontremos a Dios, sino de que Dios vino primero a nuestro encuentro en Jesús. Al igual que en La Odisea, todos anhelamos un hogar, pero para la fe cristiana nuestro verdadero hogar se encuentra en una relación con Dios, quien nos llama a vivir con sabiduría, misericordia y hospitalidad hacia los demás.

We end, where we started. The Odyssey—though it has taken us maybe twenty minutes, not twenty years. Every generation longs for home. Homer imagined home as a place—an island, a hall, a wife at the loom, an old dog who still knows your voice. The Gospel imagines home as a relationship. Home is where God's love shapes us into people who welcome strangers, practice mercy, and walk together in wisdom.

We have learned to do extraordinary things. The question before every generation is whether we will also learn to become wise.  So this week, when the Sirens begin to sing, may you remember the voice that first called your name. May you hold fast to the practices that anchor you. May you listen for the still, small voice that speaks with truth, mercy, and grace. And may that voice lead you, again and again, on the way home. As Augustine’s famous confession states: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Amen.