Whose Invitation Will You Accept? Proverbs 9 Sermon
Scripture: Proverbs 9:1–18
Series: Proverbs Advance
Preacher: Russell Smith
Date: July 12, 2026
Church: Madeira-Silverwood Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, Ohio
Theme verses: Proverbs 9:5–6, 10
Is mockery harmless?
No. Mockery feels smart. It is a self-protective way of saying, “I won’t be taken in. I know better.” But mockery is not a neutral stance. To adopt the posture of a mocker is to accept Folly’s invitation. The prophets could wield mockery like a surgeon’s scalpel, but as a default posture it mutilates the soul. Wisdom begins instead in reverent relationship with the living God.
Explore the Sermon Slideshow
Sermon Manuscript
This month our focus is on the Proverbs. We are calling it Advance: taking a step with the Spirit. Many of you are working your way through the devotional, reading a chapter of Proverbs a day, and I’ve asked you to bring a question, a problem, a puzzle, something you are seeking God’s wisdom on. We believe that Jesus is God’s living wisdom, and that Jesus will apply the truths of Proverbs to our lives. So as we work our way through Proverbs, we stay open to the particular verses that Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is calling to our attention.
Chapters 1 through 9 are largely an extended introduction, characterized by long poems and dramatic poetic pictures. Chapter 9 is the last of them, and the most interesting. Beginning in chapter 10 you get what I call the “fortune cookie” proverbs: short, pithy sayings, one verse at a time, almost to the end of the book.
There Are Two Invitations Offered to Us
What we get in chapter 9 is a poetic depiction of two invitations: one from Lady Wisdom and the other from Dame Folly. It frames two invitations to hospitality. You have two tables, and you are being invited to both.
The first thing I want you to notice is that the invitations are actually quite similar. On the surface, it’s really hard to tell them apart. Here is Lady Wisdom’s invitation: “She has sent out her servants, and she calls from the highest point of the city, ‘Let all who are simple come to my house!’” Meanwhile, Dame Folly “sits at the door of her house, on a seat at the highest point of the city, calling out to those who pass by, who go straight on their way, ‘Let all who are simple come to my house!’”
See that? The highest point of the city for both of them, and exactly the same words of invitation. I think this is a very intentional literary device from the author, presumably Solomon or one of Solomon’s court scribes. It tells us that the initial invitations are so similar that we have to be paying attention, or we may unwittingly blunder into the house of Folly.
We have to have our wits about us. If we just mindlessly accept any invitation that comes along, if we just go with the flow, we stand a very good chance of getting swept into the banquet of Dame Folly and accepting a destructive invitation.
So understand this: we are always being invited to a banquet. That was true in the ancient days, and it is even more true now, in our era of accelerated communication. The invitation is always being issued. Which one are you going to accept? Whose hospitality are you going to receive? Will it be wisdom, or will it be folly?
The Dwellings Reveal the Disposition of the Hostess
The passage goes on to give us some indications of the difference between these two invitations. First, the dwellings themselves, the households as they are depicted, reveal something about the disposition of each hostess.
“Wisdom has built her house; she has set up its seven pillars.” Let’s pause there for a moment. You can get into some deep soup with the seven pillars. In the Middle Ages and in other eras of church history, interpreters took an allegorical reading: surely these are seven virtues that Wisdom’s house is built on. I tend not to be allegorical. My best take is that the author is simply showing orderliness and stability. A household with seven pillars, seven columns out front, is a large, well-constructed, stable place, built to last. It is firm and grounded. There was planning and design that went into it. This is an orderly, well-established, well-run household, prepared for hospitality.
The picture continues: “She has prepared her meat and mixed her wine; she has also set her table.” It seems blisteringly obvious, but sometimes it bears leaning into the obvious. This is a depiction of activity. She is at work. She is preparing things in advance. She is getting ready to be hospitable. She is a hostess, putting thought and care and preparation into receiving her guests.
Now contrast that with Dame Folly: “Folly is an unruly woman; she is simple and knows nothing. She sits at the door of her house.” Lady Wisdom is active, preparing, making things happen. Dame Folly is just sitting. That is often the contrast in Hebrew literature. Psalm 1 is an example: blessed is the one who does not walk in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. Becoming seated means becoming inactive. Folly is seated at the door of her house, unruly and undisciplined, simply going with the flow.
Where Wisdom is diligent, Folly is seated. Where Wisdom has built with seven pillars, Folly is simply “unruly.” Wisdom is active; Folly is passive. Wisdom is involved in constructing something; Folly is mainly interested in consuming. You get two contrasting pictures: planning, activity, and preparation for receiving and hosting, and disorder and inactivity.
The Invitations Reveal the Intentions
The other thing we see in this passage is that the invitations reveal the intentions of these hostesses. Listen again to Lady Wisdom: “To those who have no sense she says, ‘Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed. Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of insight.’”
Wisdom offers something she has prepared. She offers an invitation to a meal that is nourishing, a meal that will make you stronger and wiser, a meal that will equip you to live skillfully in the world, something that builds you up and grows you. “Leave your simple ways and you will live.” She offers vibrant, meaningful, purposeful, enriched life. Her intention is to make you more fully human, more fully alert, more fully aware, more fully engaged, more fully alive.
Contrast that with Dame Folly: “To those who have no sense she says, ‘Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious!’” In just a short little picture, it’s “take whatever you want.” It’s like the pirates’ motto in Pirates of the Caribbean: “Take what you can, give nothing back.” Steal. Take what you did not prepare. Just consume. Be shady. It is delicious. Folly offers stolen goods. This is about consumption and indulgence. It doesn’t care about the impact on those around us. It is selfish indulgence.
But what Dame Folly doesn’t tell you is that this selfishness, this self-serving behavior, leads to death. Verse 18: “But little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are deep in the realm of the dead.” That is the picture of where folly leads us. A life of self-indulgence, a life of thoughtlessness, a life of purely indulging your senses ultimately leads to a meaningless life. It is indulgence that leads to forgetfulness and numbness.
Death doesn’t have to be a physical thing. I think every single one of us can think of people we know whose metabolic processes continue, but they are zombies. Perhaps you’ve been there yourself at some time or season in your life: shuffling through, just marking the days. You get up, you have no idea what you have done, you shuffle through and get back into bed, and the next day you wake up and repeat. You’re not really feeling much of anything, or perhaps you’re giving yourself over to some destructive form of medication, an addiction, a distraction, anything to keep the troubling thoughts at bay. They are shackled in the prisons of little appetites, little resentments, little indulgences that make their world small and ingrown and focused only on numbing the feelings of the day. That is a form of living death. That is the house of Folly.
Every person dies; not every person truly lives. What is at stake in these two invitations is truly life and death.
Jesus, God’s Living Wisdom, Came That We Might Have Life
Jesus, God’s living wisdom, came that we might have life and have it abundantly. He tells us this in the Gospel of John: “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.” He came to set the captives free. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.
Proverbs leads us toward that understanding in its refrain: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. For through wisdom your days will be many, and years will be added to your life.” That verse is a refrain throughout Scripture. You find it in Proverbs 1:7, in Psalm 111:10, and in Job 28:28.
For those of you who have been with us for a while, you know I frame fear not as abject terror (“Oh no, God’s going to smite me”), but as reverential awe. I am in relationship with the God who created the cosmos, the God who is infinitely more powerful than I am, and yet I have nothing to fear, because I am in relationship with him. The word “Lord” here is the divine name, Yahweh, the covenant name, the name God gives to the people he is in covenant with. When you are in a reverential, loving relationship in which you entrust yourself to the God who created the cosmos, that is the beginning of wisdom. Proverbs lays that out, and the Gospel of John tells us that living wisdom is Jesus.
Right there we get a little foretaste of what Jesus means when he says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Life in a vital, living relationship with the living God: It is not just a “get out of hell free” card. It is so much more than that: it frees us not only from the guilt of sin, but from the meaninglessness of a materialistic life. Jesus came that we might experience a life that is enriching and full and abundant and meaningful and purposeful, and that we may live into his love for eternity.
Notice the structure of chapter 9. It begins with Wisdom’s invitation and ends with Dame Folly’s invitation, but nestled right there in the middle is the statement that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It points us to that covenantal relationship.
Mockery Mutilates the Soul
But we also get this curious little excursus, in verses 7 through 9 and verse 12, about mockery: “Whoever corrects a mocker invites insults; whoever rebukes the wicked incurs abuse. Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you. Instruct the wise and they will be wiser still; teach the righteous and they will add to their learning. … If you are wise, your wisdom will reward you; if you are a mocker, you alone will suffer.”
What is this doing nestled here between the two invitations? My best crack at it, at least at this point in my life, is this. I suspect that what is true today was also true in the ancient world: mockery is a self-defensive mechanism, a form of self-protective cynicism. It is a way of saying, “I’m not going to be taken in. I’m not going to be fooled. I’m going to poke holes in the pretenders to wisdom, in the pretenders to knowing the right way.”
The mocker is the person who says, “Wisdom, Folly, both of you: you’re not worth my time. I know better. I’m not going to be taken in by either of your invitations.” I suggest to you that mockery is a posture evident all throughout our world. All you have to do is fire up the social media of your choice, and it is littered with mockery, with people trying to take down this influencer or that one. Any given influencer can carve out an empire by mocking other people. And mockery tastes good, because it feels like, “I’m smarter than those people. I know the holes in their arguments.”
This is complicated by the fact that the biblical prophets sometimes use mockery. Elijah on Mount Carmel uses mockery. Paul uses mockery; read the book of Galatians. So as a pastor and a theologian, I have to say, “Mockery is clearly a bad thing, and yet here we have prophets using it.” The best sense I can make of it is that mockery is a sharp scalpel. In the hands of a skillful surgeon, a sharp scalpel can be insightful. Put in the hands of a fool, it becomes a very dangerous instrument that hurts a lot of people.
There is a difference between mockery as a rhetorical tool and mockery as a life posture through which we see the world. One is the careful wielding of something you know to be dangerous. It’s like the difference between the fireworks professionals at Rozzi’s putting on a carefully planned show and the guys who buy a bunch of pyrotechnics and say, “Hey, y’all, watch this.” One group makes something spectacular; the other ends up in the hospital. Paul and Elijah used mockery as a tool in their toolbox, but a mocker is someone who sits in mockery until it becomes their default position.
What are we growing into? I think this is here because the mocker says, “I’m not going to accept either invitation.” But mockery is not a neutral stance. The reality is that if you adopt the posture of a mocker, you have, de facto, accepted Dame Folly’s invitation. You are, de facto, at Dame Folly’s banquet. Are we being trained in mockery by the media we consume? That is a powerful question for us as we think about these two invitations.
So chapter 9 offers us two invitations. Are you going to accept the invitation of Lady Wisdom? Are you going to accept that wisdom begins in relationship with the living God? Are you going to accept instruction? Or are you going to go through life full of self-indulgence and selfishness, thinking, “I know best. I know better than anyone else,” and ultimately wind up at the table of Folly? You will accept an invitation to dine somewhere: in the house of Wisdom or in the house of Folly. That is the question set before us in chapter 9.
Invitation to Reflection
Take a few moments to sit with the Lord and ponder the two invitations before you. Ask him which invitation you are receiving, and whose table you are learning at.
Questions for Reflection
Which invitations am I accepting without paying attention: in what I consume, what I scroll, and whom I listen to?
Where have I settled into the seat of the mocker, telling myself, “I know better,” instead of receiving instruction?
What would it look like for me to sit at Wisdom’s table this week and let Jesus make me more fully alive?
This sermon is part of the Digital Discipleship Resources of Madeira-Silverwood Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. We create resources to help people take their next step of faith with Jesus.
Comments