A Foolish God -- March 15/09

For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:25)

I wonder if, when writing those words so many years ago St Paul had the slightest idea what was to happen to the church that he helped build.

Amid persecution early Christians gathered. They took in abandoned babies, fed the poor, tended to the sick and to the lame and to the suffering. To widows they gave hope and sustenance and to young women the early Christian community offered a way of life that didn’t mean marriage, childbearing, and early death. They valued the life that could be found through Jesus Christ. They lived on the hope that because they were baptized with Christ into a death like his they would be united with him in a resurrection like his.

But in 312 AD the Emperor Constantine faced his rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. He ordered his soldiers to paint the sign of the cross on their shields and they won. And the cross of Christ turned from a symbol of God’s kerygmatic – his self-emptying – love for the world into a symbol of human strength and might. The power of God became synonymous with the old human categories of wisdom through dominance and strength through military might.

In the succeeding years the church went from being persecuted to being the persecutor; from priding itself on being powerless to being at the center of the most vicious and bloody power struggles of the time. Instead of a symbol of faith, the icon of the cross became the source of power : vampires, demons, witches, and all manner of things that go bump in the night were said to recoil at the mere sight of a cross, so great was the power of God in that object.

Crosses became jewelery; fashion statements made from the most brutal instrument of torture shameful death ever devised. Diamonds and gold symbolized the power that the bearers held in the world: money. Power. Authority.

And human wisdom – Greek philosophy, rhetoric, theology – began to come to define God’s wisdom. Ideas became more important than community; the right kind of thought became more important than a right relationship with God. Humanity’s neverending pursuit of power – embodied in ideals of wisdom and strength – became confused with the divine. Weakness became something to be exploited, to be condemned, not held sacred or protected.

That’s Darwin and Malthus, basically, I think. Human wisdom, left to its own devices, serves only ourselves. Survival of the fittest, the strongest survive. There are textbooks that explain the rise of Christianity that way – that because it could adapt faster to different cultural contexts, Christianity outgrew other pagan religions. No need for Christ. Nature, red in tooth and claw. Religion, grown in sword and cannon without the need for faith, or grace. Human wisdom – reason and logic – win because so-called human ‘strength’ hates weakness, even the weakness of God.

I have a number of books by Bishop John Shelby Spong, the Episcopalian Bishop who writes to ‘de-mythologize’ the Christian story to make it more palatable to reportedly rational people. He’s not the first;the urge to de-mythologize the Christian story is what led President Thomas Jefferson (note: thanks to those who caught that and corrected me) to cut out all the parts of his bible he didn’t believe could have happened. So all the miracles of Jesus -- the conception of Mary, the Resurrection, Jesus’ ascension into heaven – were cut, along with other select parts of the Old and New Testaments. What was left was a completely rational book that told people how to live a good life.

After all, many people argue, that’s the point. Miracles, though flashy and clever writing, don’t matter. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross at Golgotha doesn’t matter. The societal ideal is to be a good person – preferably by how your own reading of Scripture lays it out, by and large ignoring most of the bits about giving money or service to your neighbour and altering that Golden Rule: from “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” to “do nothing, as you want nothing done to you.”

Those miracles are good for a show, aren’t they? One person surviving a car accident is lucky; two is fate; three is good engineering; three hundred surviving is a miracle. If those same three hundred died someone is going to call it God’s will, or God’s punishment.

Because, after all, it’s what you do that matters. If you’re good, God will love you. If you’re bad, God will punish you. That’s human wisdom. That God loves our strength. That’s what our brains are hardwired and culturally influenced to understand. That what we do matters. Pity the cripple, who can’t do something for his or her self; but for those of us who are able, we’d better get cracking.

Is that really what it is, though? That doesn’t seem to be the case in John’s gospel for today. Tear down this Temple, Jesus says, and I will build it again in three days. The Temple authorities want a sign. But this? No way can any prophet build in three days what had taken more than forty years to complete.

But eventually, after the resurrection, the disciples realize that Jesus was talking about the Temple of his body. That human strength would lose to God’s dying weakness. That human wisdom would crumble in the folly of a God willing to perish for his creation.

This is what Paul spends countless pages writing about. Jesus died on the cross. Jesus is Risen. The cross stands as testament to the power of God to give justification to all humankind through grace alone; not through works that complete some kind of law. And people didn’t get it in Paul’s time, and by and large we don’t get it now.

What would happen if we really and truly believed that God alone comes down to us, down to our own sin-infested, selfish, helpless lives and takes on flesh and lives and walks and sweats and bleeds and screams and dies – and then on the third day rises again in glory to bring us all to everlasting life?

It would change everything. Our lives, instead of living in pursuit of bigger and better, more and more, would turn to living instead for our neighbor, for all of God’s creation. Instead of pretending that we can live to please God, we would please God to live.

But really, we don’t think that will happen. We think that’s nuts.

How many messages to you see every day that tell you that you need to be somebody, act in a certain way, do a certain action to meet God? We see it on TV, in movies, in books, in magazines, newspapers, every form of media imaginable conveys that message. That humans can encounter God through their own machinations, their own actions, and then leave God when they desire.

That scraping sound you hear is St Paul rolling over in his grave.

But we still proclaim that in the cross, God has bypassed our own attempts to set the agenda regarding the who and the how of our getting to God. That, instead of leaving another 10 Commandments, so twisted by so many generations from a testament of divine love and relationship into a means to pluck up and tear down, God instead through a single act of divine grace institutes the ultimate end and sows the seeds for a New Creation in which the cross has central place.

What that means, beloved, is that no more are distinctions made between godly and ungodly, between the elect and the reprobate. It means that in this time of reflection and repentance – and the Greek word for repentance literally means ‘turning around’ – we have a chance, a reason, an excuse to try a different way.

To see God with the wounded and the hurting instead of in the proud and the strong. To actually embrace God’s foolishness and become fools our selves. Why don’t we, being conscious of our own weakness, stop despising it in others. To try understanding, rather than demanding to be understood. To try giving, instead of expecting solely to receive from others. To act righteously, instead of seeking our own advantage even if it means losing something ourselves.

For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Human wisdom informs us that we need to be right and perfect before we go up to meet God.

God’s foolishness is coming down to frail humanity and taking upon himself human flesh. God’s foolishness is saying to each and every one of us “I love you, I have always loved you, I will always love you.” God’s foolishness is loving all of us even we are judged and condemned by our own sin as unloveable and worthy of eternal damnation.

Human strength tells us that we can pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps and change the way we are.

God’s weakness brings God down to us in the midst of our despair, our brokenness, and lifts us up. To healing. To wholeness.

The weakness of God is love of humanity. The so-called ‘strength’ of humanity is hatred of weakness.

But in our deepest, darkest, most shameful moments even the proudest of us admits that we are nothing without Christ. When we see that, when we truly own that believe that, we will be truly free. Because the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are dying in their souls – but to those who seek God’s face and believe God is with us, it is pure and unadulterated grace. Not reason. Not logic. Just grace.

And by that we are saved and freed to be weak, to be foolish, and to love others as we have first been loved.

May this be so among us.

Amen.