Sermon, 1 Corinthians 1: HPMF Lent 3, 2015 March 8, 2015 Title: The foolishness of Christ 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 (The Message) 18-21 The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hell-bent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It s written, I ll turn conventional wisdom on its head, I ll expose so-called experts as crackpots. So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb preaching, of all things! to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation. 22-25 While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself both Jews and Greeks Christ is God s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. For God s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God s weakness is stronger than human strength.
For God s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God s weakness is stronger than human strength. Let s pray together. I met a professor while I was living in West Virginia who taught at a Church of the Brethren College. He used to be a physics professor, and from what I am told, he loved physics this does not so much connect with me, but I understand that for some people physics is quite exciting. But despite his love for physics, when I met him he was an English professor. I later learned that he had been a physics professor, but he noticed how almost all of his students were graduating and then going on to work for the U.S. military or companies who supplied the U.S. military. And he was a pacifist, he believed that Christ called us to be a people of peace. And so, he quit. He stopped teaching physics and went back and got a Ph.D. in English. I would say that in our career-oriented world, this is someone trying to live into the foolishness of God. This is one who understands the upside-down logic of Christ. I have found myself again reading with fascination about the civil rights movement, perhaps it was seeing the movie Selma, I don t know. But this week I read some of Martin Luther King, Jr. s personal reflections on the Montgomery bus boycotts. It was during these boycotts that King and his family started to receive death threats for the first time daily calls with threats of horrific violence. And these threats began to get to him, to tear away at his resolve and conviction. The fear began to get to him fear for his own life and fear for his young family. He writes about being awaken by the phone in the middle of the night, another death threat, after which he couldn t go back to sleep. He got out of bed and began to pace the hallways of his home.
Finally, he writes, I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way out of the picture without appearing a coward. A way to step aside and out of harms way. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to more for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I ve come to the point where I can t face it alone. At that moment he continues, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quite assurance of an inner voice saying: Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. Three days later, while Martin was away at a meeting, someone threw a bomb through his front window while his wife Coretta and their daughter Yoki were at home. In a culture where we will do almost anything to avoid pain and suffering, continuing to pursue justice in the face of death threats and your home being bombed is someone trying to live into the foolishness of God; someone who understands the upside-down logic of Christ. Henri Nouwen, was a Catholic Priest and one of the great theological minds of our lifetime, he was author of more than 40 books that have sold millions of copies worldwide. Nouwen was a professor at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. Yale and Harvard. Teaching at these most
prestigious of schools did not seem to fulfill Nouwen. In search of that deeper fulfillment he met John Vanier, a Frechman who had established L Arche communities all around the world. L Arche are communities in which adults with developmental disabilities live together with community with community members. Those with developmental disabilities are called core members because they are the core around which these communities are formed. That is all. People living together in this community. Not in group homes or institutions but in community. And in 1986 one of these small L Arche communities wrote to Harvard Professor Henri Nouwen and invited him to come and be the pastor of their community. And so Nouwen left his teaching position at Harvard and spent the last ten years of his life living in community as the priest of this community. He left teaching theology at Harvard to be part of community that would teach him about God s great love. In a culture that values climbing the ladder of success, this is someone trying to live into the foolishness of God; someone who understands the upside-down logic of Christ. But for those of us who have spent a lot of time in church, we often forget how odd and peculiar our message is we forget how foolish it is. Particularly in this country in which a majority of people still claim some type of Christianity; where we, as a cultural, celebrate Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, and where we have Christian symbolism all around us monuments of the Ten Commandments in parks and public buildings, crosses on hilltops. Because we almost never have to explain our Christian story to someone who has never heard it, or heard some part of it, we forget how odd and crazy it sounds. When we hear about Islam or Mormonism or Hinduism for the first time, we think those stories sound a little far-fetched, a little crazy. But
we neglect to realize how odd our story sounds to someone who has never heard it God s son born as a child of peasants, God living among us to teach us, God dying by the shame of Capitol Punishment and rising again. In this blending of culture and Christianity we forget that how truly odd and strange our story actually is, we forget how peculiar our lives should actually be if we are striving to follow faithfully follow the God we meet in Jesus Christ. The cross is probably the most recognizable symbol of any world faith. There is a cross on top of our town. But when we see it, we hardly notice it, or we think, oh yes, the cross, well, that makes sense. But it actually makes zero sense. The equivalent of this in our day would be like having the electric chair or the hangman s noose or the water-boarding table as the great symbol of our faith. Such a thing would shock us, to look up on table rock and see a giant glowing electric chair, that would remind us what an odd story we have. But the cross, it has become fairly tame. It seems reasonable. And, as Will Willimon puts it, It's when the absurd starts to sound reasonable that we should begin to worry. When the upside-down seems normal, we should begin to worry. And the way of Christ, the logic of God, it truly is absurd. It truly is foolishness in our world. Christ was not logical by world standard, he did dumb things: a. He touched lepers and risked not only ritual/religious contamination, but getting sick himself. b. His Super for Several group included IRS auditors and prostitutes. c. He spent time with children, loving people not even old enough to vote not just to kiss them so he could win over their parents, but to welcome them and bless them just because. Because all people, no matter how small or powerless are created with the Spark of the Divine. d. He regularly broke the laws of his society Sabbath rules, cleanliness rules, the rules of the church. e. He called out Herod, the man who beheaded his cousin John the Baptist and had his own children killed. He publically called him a fox.
f. He openly challenged and criticized religious teachers in a world where there was no first amendment rights protecting free speech. In a world where enemies to the state were imprisoned, brutally punished and killed. This is the wisdom of the Cross. The foolishness of God. But in the way that the Christian story and the American story have been fused, we forget how odd and foolish these things were. And I think that one of the ways we do this is to remember that the cross is not the only symbol of our Christian story. Donald Kraybill, author of The Upside Down Kingdom reminds us that there are three key symbols in the Christian story. Not one, but three. The basin, the cross, and the empty tomb. And these symbols go together. They only make sense together. Individually these symbols only tell part of the story. Together, in three symbols, we can tell the whole story together they interpret one another together they make meaning. The cross did not just happen, and we forget this in Western Christianity where all we emphasize is the atoning sacrifice of the cross. Before the cross we must first tell the story of the basin and the towel. It is because of the basin that we ever got to the cross. Because Jesus came to love and serve all people. Because Christ was a servant leader, because Christ refused to take up arms and try and overthrow the government. Because Christ refused to set-up an earthly kingdom; because Christ did not take over the temple; because Christ came to love and give dignity to ALL people, this is how we got to the cross. The basin represents these elements of Christ s life his loving service for all of humanity. Because of all of those seemingly dumb things that Christ did represented by the basin because of those things he was put to death on a cross. And so the symbol of the cross only truly makes sense in light of the basin when we forget to tell the story of the basin than we are not telling the true story of the cross.
When we use the basin and the cross as our lens, when we hold the wisdom of Jesus up as a lens, than so much looks like foolishness. And so, this is our call, to try and faithfully follow the God we meet in Jesus Christ. The one who loved and served, the one who got on his knees to was his disciples feet. And of course trying to be faithful to the God we meet in Jesus will make us look foolish at times it will make us look quite peculiar. And that is why we need one another because it is too hard to do alone. It is too hard to look foolish and peculiar by yourself. But looking foolish together, it is not so bad. May we be so foolish as to be faithful to the one who came to love and serve. May we together be so foolish as to follow behind the one who stooped low to wash the feet of his disciples that we may never adjust to the wisdom of the world, but instead lean into the foolishness of God; living by the upside-down logic of Christ. Amen.