11 March 2012

“Calling all fools”
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
3 Lent B
11 March 2012


Once again, ‘real life’ and our Scripture readings for today … in particular, those words from Paul in First Corinthians … merge and mesh this week.
Wednesday was National “Spread the Word to End the Word” day … sponsored by the Special Olympics, this is a national effort to end the use of the word “retarded” in referring to people with who have mental or physical handicaps that prevent them from full life-functioning.
The thinking behind this switch-of-language is that that word has so much negative baggage attached to it … sometimes, as an insult … that some new word or term needs to be used to describe these “differently abled” brothers and sisters.
Of course, some of us can remember when “the R-word” was the least offensive label used for mentally disabled people. Forty, fifty years ago, the legal terms were far, far worse … “idiot,” “imbecile,” “moron” and “fool,” used by physicians and the government to describe someone with a mental handicap or deficiency. Literary characters such as William Faulkner’s Benjy in “The Sound and the Fury” lived into the stereotype well … big adult-children who might hurt someone so they should be protected, fenced off, kept away from the rest of society because they could be dangerous, to themselves or others.
Those who wish us to stop using the “R” word say that it’s all about power … calling someone “retarded” takes power away from them, it implies that they must be dependent on another … and in many ways, words can create reality, a reality which, these linguistic revisers rightly point out, doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.
Words shape opinions and attitudes and beliefs and behaviors.
Which brings us to our Scripture reading from First Corinthians for today.
This is one of the more well-known readings from Paul’s letters … if you’ve been part of a worshipping community for any length of time, you’ve most likely heard it, in worship, as the subject of a sermon.
It’s Paul’s clearest word on what Martin Luther and his followers call “The theology of the Cross,” a Word, a way of living that seeks, sees, and finds God in many of the places we would guess would be the most opposite from God … weakness, humiliation, suffering, and death.
But what does this brief passage of Scripture have in common with the “word to end the word” … with which we began this Word this morning?
Like that debate, it’s all about power.
And we know this because of the word Paul uses for “foolishness.” It’s moria … yes, the same word which we say today as “moron.”
For the message about the Cross of Jesus Christ is moronic …
… moronic to those who are perishing …
The perishing … those who are living (and dying) outside the Word of Jesus Christ …
These … they see anyone speaking, worshipping, living in the Word of Jesus Christ, his suffering and death on the Cross … these see the followers of Jesus as morons … people who should be disempowered in the world … people who should have a legal custodian placed in charge of them … because they worship a dead peasant from Nazareth who was put to death for sedition … crimes against the state.
Talk of peasants dying was, at that time, no talk for people who wanted to “get ahead” in this life. Talk of the methods the state used to put seditious, treasonous peasants to death … torture and death on a cross … that was awful, a scandal. Obviously … so went the conventional thinking of the day … anyone who held to these ridiculous views, who spoke of them publicly … they had some kind of a mental defect, one which should keep them powerless and “in their place.”
And that was the way that the surrounding Greek/Roman culture thought of, and treated, Christians in that place and time in which, to which Paul was writing them.
Though it would get worse, far worse, for Christians in the Roman Empire later. Paul was most likely writing this letter to the Corinthian church sometime in the early 50s of this era; about ten years before the first Christian persecutions, economic boycotts and imprisonments began in earnest, during the reign of Emperor Nero in the mid 60s. But in the time of the original Corinthian readers of this letter … being labeled a “moron for Jesus” … this was certainly bad enough.
Bad enough … that at least some of them started to take on or return to the ways of the surrounding culture.
Thus the occasion of Paul’s letter to these Corinthians, to encourage them to stay in the Way of the Cross.
For the message about the cross is foolishness … moronic … disempowering … to those who are perishing … but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
And here Paul starts this wonderfully crafted text of reversal, topsy-turvy, things are the opposite of what they seem-ness.
Hey Jesus-followers! … says Paul … although “they” may call you morons, foolish, not worthy of having any power, authority or influence in the world … you, the ones who are being saved, you are the ones who truly have the power of God on your side.
Words shape opinions and attitudes and beliefs and behaviors.
From here Paul goes on to do some more word-play, but now instead of focusing on power language, he chooses to look at wisdom.
That word wisdom … this would also ring some bells for those Corinthians. Wisdom in the later books of the Hebrew Scriptures … some of these books, not even written in Hebrew, but in the Greek language of the “rest of the world” at that time … wisdom took on an almost personal characteristic for the Jews, nearly god-like, almost divine in its nature.
They got some of this attitude from the Greeks themselves, who elevated wisdom … the knowledge, the intelligence, the “head religion” to “know” God, God’s mind, God’s works and ways … the Greeks made wisdom fine art. When in the book of Acts Paul enters Athens, he soon finds that the people there loved nothing better than arguing over some new point of wisdom … thus there was a city full of temples and altars of all kinds, to every god and divine being one could imagine.
But here in these later verses of our reading, like in the first couple sentences, Paul is about God’s great reversal of things.

Has not God made foolish … moronic … the wisdom of the world? For 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.

People have tried, Paul says, people have tried to find God through the ages through “head religion,” logic, formulae … human wisdom. But God wouldn’t be found in this way, because the way people think leads to God … more and better, ever improving … is really the way to the opposite of God … emptiness, and nothingness.
Andrew Root is a professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul who thinks and writes about the theology of the Cross, with a uniquely North American perspective. Here’s his take on where “the wisdom of the world” leads us:

[In the post-modern world] authority has died. The practice of looking back to tradition has been overcome by modernity’s future orientation. Like an ambitious prince modernity has killed the king of authority [tradition] with the weapon of doubt, only to realize in shock that its own weapon has been turned against itself, destroying the new authority it has constructed.
Now as I walk the dangerous terrain of the future without any authority, the more knowledge, information, and examples I have the better off I am. That is why the Internet is the greatest tool for those living with the death of authority. Those who can acquire the most information [notes, rules, data, survey results, polls, etc.] will be the most successful.
[Yet in the overwhelming flood of information we find ourselves incapable of clinging even to it … thus the rise of addictions, fundamentalism (liberal or conservative), minimization of risk, lack of trust, shift of faith from communities to institutions, focus on our bodies, and creating our identities from consumption and intimacy … all of these, temporal, temporary … all of these, leading to, ending in, the death they all try so hard to avoid.]

“The wisdom of the world” is yet another permutation of “straight line” or “linear time” … time with a beginning, a middle, and an end … and that end is always, always, death of some kind … whether it’s the end of a smartphone or a job, a lifestyle or an economy, the wearing out of our bodies or the end of a relationship built solely on intimacy … all ends, all deaths, in their own way … pointing the way to The End to which each of us are headed.
And yet … and yet … “the wisdom of the world” continues to hang on and harangue on, sucking us in to its death-long slide. So how shall God’s wisdom … circular time … “Jesus time” … break in?
Through the foolishness of our proclamation.
Words shape opinions and attitudes and beliefs and behaviors.
God decided, through the foolishness of Paul’s proclamation, to break in and move into the death-bound slide of the Corinthians, “to save those who believe” through their hearing of the Word … God’s Word, what the world called foolish and powerless was really the all-powerful wisdom of God, the life-changing Spirit of God, coming to them through Paul’s proclamation of Christ crucified … God present to and for the world in precisely the last places “the wisdom of the world” would go looking for him … God present in weakness, humiliation, suffering, and death.
The Gentiles – Greeks, mostly – heard this proclamation as powerless moronic gibberish … while the Jews heard it as scandal (for why would the all-powerful God choose to become the emptiest of human beings, a dead peasant on a cross?)
And yet … and yet … he did … he was, re-presented into the hearts of those who believed when the Spirit of God moved upon them through Paul’s proclamation.
And God still decides, through the foolishness of Spirit-empowered proclamation, to break through the “wisdom of the world” and into the hearts of those who hear that word and believe.
The proclamation we have heard … which has brought us to this place.
And the proclamation we utter as we … God’s fools, speak God’s foolishness of a crucified God … a God who takes weakness, suffering, humiliation and death into his very heart, and becomes them, for our sake.
Now, those who are weak for God’s sake, are weak WITH God, in Jesus.
Those who are humiliated for God’s sake, are humiliated WITH God, in Jesus.
Those who suffer, suffer WITH God, in Jesus.
Those who die, die WITH God, in Jesus.
This is God’s foolishness, which is the only truth which brings real comfort, hope, peace … and from death itself, life.
And so this passage from First Corinthians, these “foolish” words of Paul … they are really about the repulsing of human arrogance … human arrogance, claiming … time is ours, earth is ours, life itself is ours … human arrogance which is really foolish … human arrogance which is really weak … human arrogance which is not a word about life, but a word about death.
Paul wrote these words to his friends, the church of Corinth, because he fretted that the Corinthians were buying into the “wisdom of the world” … the culture around them, which said that only by head-religion (self help, avoidance of suffering, and so on) could one “get to God.” In writing these words, Paul was issuing a call … “calling all fools” … fools by worldly standards, but who by God were truly wise … calling them to persevere in their proclamation of the Christ of the Cross.
And so for us too … as we also live in a world full of “wisdom” … “worldly wisdom” which tells us that “only the strong survive” … “suffering is God-forsaken” … “those who have the money and the power are obviously the ones who are closest to God” … in a world full of that sham wisdom, Paul’s word, God’s word of proclamation through Paul, continues to come to us, to remind us that the church can, should, will be a place where suffering and pain, weakness and humiliation and death are discussed, openly, without fear or embarrassment, because in that Word, God is truly present, for us.
As Andrew Root … he who I quoted earlier … writes …

The church should be a weird community in a world that hides from death. The church should be a community of people that talk about despair, that confront it, knowing that when they do God is present, working life out of experiences of death.

Calling all fools!
ATTENTION! Here, we proclaim Christ crucified … we do not shun the despairing, reject the hopeless, scorn the sad, mock the mourning, denigrate the dying. No, we welcome you … and your word of real Truth about life. For where you are, where we are with you, that time, that place, this is Holy Ground … for where you are, where we are, in the midst of suffering, pain, and loss … THERE is Christ … God For Us.
And where we are together … there we are together, with Christ … and through the power of his proclamation, even as it comes through us … there is nothing Christ cannot do.
NOTHING HE CANNOT DO.
Even rising from the dead.

Amen.