“God’s Folly” ¹

As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Almighty God, you have power so great that we can’t begin to comprehend it, grace so abundant that we can’t measure it, and love so bountiful and determined that nothing can stop it. Grant unto us now the ability to go beyond our limits, so that we might experience you more fully. Speak Lord, your servants are listening. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, Thou who art our Rock and Redeemer, Amen.

Hear now God’s Word for you today. Listen.

I Corinthians 1.18-25.

 ¹⁸ For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  ¹⁹For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” ²⁰Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

On 15 March, 44 b.c.e., Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome, this past Thursday marking the 2,050 anniversary of the event, if my math works. 2006 + 44. I’m not sure how to carry the 0, cause our dating doesn’t include a year zero. His killers were a group of conservative Republicans, their term millennia before it was ours. His killers thought, with good reason, that Caesar was planning to make himself king of Rome, something the people of that city had been against for hundreds of years.

Numbers of people who know little ancient history know about this incident because of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar and its famous lines, beware the ides of March, and et tu Brute. The pivotal scene in the play is one of its most famous. After the murder the leading conspirator, Marcus Brutus, steps forward to explain to the anxious crowd why it was necessary and good for the state that Caesar should have been killed. He speaks in flat, straightforward, simple prose. His sentences plod forward with the grace of a good grocery list. They are clear enough in their purpose, but without life, energy or passion. The crowd is mostly convinced, but in no way excited.

Then steps forward a different man, Mark Antony. Mark Antony was a friend of Caesars, and begins by saying he’s come to bury Caesar, not to praise him; he isn’t trying, he says, to argue against Brutus and what they have done, just to do the decent thing by his friend. But, in Shakespeare’s magic lines, Antony’s speech begins to move the reader. It is not flat prose, it is moving poetry. It dances, casts a spell, entrances the crowd. Anthony, well aware of what he is doing, disclaims such artistry: ‘I am no orator, as Brutus is,’ he protests, even while charming birds out of the trees in a way that poor, pedestrian Brutus could not have imagined. By the end of the speech the crowd has been pulled right round, ready to do whatever Anthony suggests. It is the turning point in the play, and, in some measure, in the actual history of Rome.

There are two moments in Paul’s writings where, though with different intent, he plays the same trick as Mark Antony. One is in 2 Corinthians, the 11^th chapter, where he writes an interesting list of his ‘achievements’ and only mentions his failures. The other is the section of 1^st Corinthians which is before us today.

Paul is contrasting the so called wisdom of the world with the wisdom of God. Paul originally came into a pagan city called Corinth that prided itself on its intellectual and cultural life, all the people were in vogue and civility was at an all time high. Paul stood up to speak about Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified by the Romans but raised from the dead by God, and who was consequently shown as ruler of the world, and was summoning people to faith. Paul knew what people would think. This was, and is, the craziest message anyone could imagine. It wasn’t an appeal to high culture. It wasn’t proper. It wasn’t dignified. It was news of an executed criminal from a despised (by the Corinthians) race.

Certainly Jewish people would not enjoy the message either. As Paul would write, it was something that tripped them up. No Jew of the time was expecting a Messiah who would be executed by Rome; a Messiah ought to be defeating the pagans, not being killed by them. Paul knew that by making this scandalous announcement, he was inviting people to mock.

So when he announced it, when he stood up in the synagogue or the market-place or the debating-chamber, he didn’t use clever words to trick people into thinking they believed it because they enjoyed his speaking style. But, writing his letters, he could look back on his initial announcement, and is afforded the ability to spin some eloquent sentences together, to tease them into seeing the point. He didn’t do that during the original proclamation. The cross has to do its own work. Simply telling the story released power of quite a different sort from any power that human speech could have: God’s power, beside which all human power looks weak; God’s wisdom, beside which all human learning looks like folly.

Now Paul writes it the other way around, to make the point rhetorical effect. God’s folly is wiser than humans, and God’s weakness is stronger than humans! Of course, it’s very easy for humans, when they believe the gospel, to turn it into a way of inflating their own personal or political power, or showing off how clever they are. “See, I’m with God now, so I’m smarter than any mere human.” But to do so is to undermine the very point of the message. The Christian good news is all about God dying on a rubbish-heap at the wrong end of the Empire. It’s all about God babbling nonsense to a room full of philosophers. It’s all about the true God confronting the world of posturing, power and prestige, and overthrowing it in order to set up his own kingdom, a kingdom in which the weak and the foolish find themselves just as welcome as the strong and the wise, if not more so. Think back to Jesus himself, and the people he befriended, and ask yourself whether Paul is not being utterly loyal to his Lord.

In other words, as he writes in Romans 1.16, the gospel, the royal announcement that Jesus is Lord, that God reigns because through Jesus, God has defeated death and shown that death has less power than God’s weakness, that announcement is true to the core. When the announcement is made, people discover to their astonishment that things change. Lives change. Hearts change. Situations change. Conservatives and liberals worship and work together with a new bond, their citizenship in God’s kingdom. New communities come into being, consisting of people grasped by the message, believing it’s true despite everything, falling in love with the God they find to be alive in this Jesus, giving Jesus their supreme loyalty. That is the evidence Paul has in mind. ‘To us who are being saved, it is God’s power.’ That is as true in the 21^st Century as it was in the 1^st, no matter how many people defend, exactly as they did then, their own power and prestige by declaring that it’s all folly.

And this is not simply a message for them. You know, them. Them that aren’t here, them that don’t come to church. This is a message for you, and it is a message for me. Listen up conservatives. Pay attention liberals. This is a message for all the Christians in the congregation. You think you can figure it out? Do you think if you put your mind to it, and read and study this thing (the Bible) that you can know the mind of God? So many Christians get lost in the issues. They are sure that God stands on this side of whatever issue, or that side of whichever issue. And, you know as well as I do, it is always that God stands on their side of said issue. And anyone who sees it differently is wrong, and anyone who does not take up their fight is the enemy. And these are well meaning Christians. They are folks in the pews every Sunday. They serve on boards and sessions. They are members and elders and pastors. They are you, and they are me.

What I want to say to them, and by them I mean us, is this. If God’s weakness is stronger than human strength, or to put it in other terms, if God has more strength in God’s pinky than we do in 1000 Arnold’s; if God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, or in other terms, if God can out-think 1000 Albert’s even when God is asleep, then why do we think we know. I’m saddened when Christians put forth their so called wisdom without any humility, without any ability to listen, without the simple acknowledgement that no human possible can have the wisdom of God, can know what God wants.

Even as I was writing this sermon, the AJC emailed. In the Gwinnett Religion section they run a column every Saturday where they ask hundreds of pastors the same question and then print it. The question that came into my email inbox was this, “When people of different faiths engage in a dispute -- or even fight a war -- whose side is God on?” You may have seen it in the paper last Saturday, March 11. I responded this, “It depends on who you ask. You ask one side, they are certain that God is with them. Ask the other, they are equally assured that God has led them to their position, and that God is with them. But the real answer is this; there is no way to know whose side God is on. God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. I think God is pleased when people approach issues with humility, understanding that God does enjoy diversity. I like oatmeal. But I don’t want oatmeal and only oatmeal for 3 meals a day for the rest of time. I enjoy diversity too. And God is on my side on that one.”

As smart as you are, and you all are a collection of really smart folk, the only way to get to be smarter is to realize that you aren’t even capable of getting to the level of foolish on God’s scale. Loosen up, children of God, you weren’t meant to have the answers to what God wants and doesn’t want. Amen.