The Proverbs run closes with thanks to the volunteers who put on most of the service, and an invitation to be part of the family rather than an audience for it — wisdom literature applied to the question of how a person actually spends a year.

The third message takes up friendship, and Proverbs is strikingly unsentimental about it — the friend who sticks closer than a brother, wounds from a friend against the kisses of an enemy, and the danger of the company a person keeps.

Proverbs does not generally promise or command — it observes, and the observations hold most of the time rather than always. Reading it as guarantee produces disappointment; reading it as accumulated pattern produces something usable.

The Sunday after Christmas opens with Sinatra, and a stated purpose: wisdom to set 2022 on a different trajectory than the two years before it. Proverbs suits that — wisdom literature is a distinct genre, accumulated observation rather than promise or command.