Foolishness

1 Corinthians 1:18-31; Matthew 5:1-12

How many of you consider yourself to be a fool? 

Or do you generally try to avoid being silly, dumb, idiotic, etc.?

Paul has bad news for those of us who try to avoid being foolish. 

“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;” Paul says. “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”

God chose the good for nothing, lousy, stupid stuff, so that we have nothing to be proud of. 

Ouch.

I mean, humility is a good thing; a Christian virtue. I know that. 

But foolishness? idiocy? That’s not what I signed up for. I don’t like to look stupid.

But apparently God does.

The “word of the cross,” Paul says, is foolishness. 

And no matter how comfortable you and I have gotten with the cross as a symbol of salvation, Paul is right about how foolish it is. 

The idea that one man’s spectacular failure to get his message of peace and justice and abundance through to the authorities could actually relieve you and me of sin? Brand new Christians in Paul’s day really did look stupid – probably Paul himself looked stupid – telling that to everyone.

In fact, it was pretty stupid to brag about knowing a crucified guy. It could get you in trouble, too. Today, it might be like announcing that you’re good friends with a convicted terrorist because God sent him to reveal the truth to us and save us from ourselves. While a lot of your friends and acquaintances would just block you on Facebook and avoid conversations with you; somebody would call the CIA and bring you to the attention of the authorities.

In our day and place, you and I generally don’t have to worry about getting reported to the CIA for knowing Jesus, but if we are anything like normal Episcopalians or mainline Christians, many of us do feel a bit, well, embarrassed or foolish talking about our personal relationship with Jesus, or explaining just how Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection save me and you from Satan.

We believe it; we may love to talk about it with one another in the church. But I will bet that I am not the only one less inclined, say, to bring it up with strangers.

How many of us would feel uncomfortable talking about Jesus and salvation and conversion to co-workers, neighbors, or acquaintances this week? Especially if you don’t know they’re Christian?
You don’t have to put your hands up, but I’m going to bet it’s more than half of us here this morning.

But do raise your hand – be honest – if you would generally prefer that someone smarter, holier, wiser – in some way better qualified than you – was responsible for proclaiming the gospel to the nations and the neighbors.

Yep. Me too.

A few years ago, I was leading a study group on sharing our faith (in a nice, gentle, Episcopalian way, of course) when one of the strongest leaders in my congregation told me why she couldn’t.

“I just don’t know enough,” she said.

I don’t know enough about the Bible, or theology, or religion, to talk about it. How can I explain it if I don’t know enough?

Does that feel familiar to anyone?
Do you feel like a fool trying to explain something you’re not sure you really understand yourself?

We do know the stories we tell in church. We proclaim – every week – that we believe in Jesus’ death and resurrection and await his coming, and that all that has something to do with our salvation. But it can be hard to say exactly how it all works, or why.

I went to seminary, so I know a whole bunch of different theories about how salvation works, and how to critique them.

Paul would call that wisdom: scholarship; an expert understanding and discussion about just how it’s supposed to work.

But Paul says that wisdom is useless.
Paul says it’s better to proclaim the foolishness.  

To proclaim what we don’t really understand - but what we do believe, and have experienced - even if we can’t make sense of it or explain it. Paul says that God chooses foolish proclamation – our inexpert, under-educated, don’t-know-how-it-works stories – to save the nations and our neighbors.

I hate that, because I like to know what I’m talking about.
I like to be right, and smart, and wise.

But Paul made me think, this week, and I realized I actually spend quite a bit of time proclaiming things I don’t know much about.

I’m quite passionate about many things I don’t really understand. And I’ll tell you about them.

I took a couple days of improv comedy class last summer. For months afterward, I told anyone who asked - and most people who didn’t! - about how the one or two truths I picked up at the workshop were going to change the world if we’d all get on board. 

(Not that I was any good at improv comedy, mind, or could really tell you how it worked. But I’d tell you.)

I’m not a Constitutional scholar, but I have some passionate opinions about Supreme Court decisions, and I don’t hesitate to share them - and to share my beliefs about how these things can change lives and transform the world.

So I would bet that every one of us here has been transformatively passionate – even evangelical – about a subject in which you are not well educated, or particularly wise.

It’s that foolishness that God chooses in us.

As a way to save the world, God chooses our willingness to commit ourselves before we can really explain what we’re talking about. God chooses not our pursuit of the perfect argument, but our passion for a discovery or an experience we don’t truly understand. God chooses the risks we take in love, not sensible, cautious study.

To be Christian at all, to be a follower of Jesus, whether two thousand years ago in the Roman Empire, or right now in 2017 in South Jersey, means risking not just being a fool, but letting people see you as foolish or out of your depth.

Jesus preaches this, too, telling his disciples that those who were fools or weak by the standards of his time were the blessed ones. Blessed are the fools who can’t manage cynicism, and are continually shocked by how bad the world can be;

he might be saying today.

Blessed are those who somehow expect the world to be fair;

blessed are those who let their pain show; 

blessed are those who are mocked and bullied as fools for God.

Blessed are all those who are vulnerable and open - who are fools in a society where the wise protect themselves - because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Not bad things now and good things later, but the blessing of being wide open and exposed to heaven right in the middle of the distinctly unheavenly experiences we have every day.

That’s foolishness worth embracing.

Worth proclaiming, even.

The word of the cross is foolish, Paul says. It’s just going to be foolish. 

So you don’t actually need to be able to explain crucifixion. You just need to know – and to proclaim – how God has made a difference in your suffering, or in your failures.

You don’t have to know how resurrection works. You just need to know – and to say out loud, despite how silly it may seem – that God fills you with life – with joy, or health, or energy in the face of death.

You don’t need to understand theology, or explain incarnation. God would ever so much rather use your ability to fall foolishly in love, and let that change your life and the story you tell.

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

Thanks be to God!

Revealed

Matthew 3:13-17

One of the first things you find out when you sit down to systematically study the stories of Jesus’ life is that everybody’s got an angle. In other words, each gospel writer tells the same story a little differently. It’s like reading a news story told by People magazine, Business Week, and Scientific American: every publication has a different audience and a different agenda about what’s important in that event.

All four gospel writers, for example, tell us about a meeting between John the Baptist and his cousin Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Only three of them tell us that John baptized Jesus, and only one of them – the one we heard this morning – tells us that John objected.

Matthew is worried about what people will think of Jesus going through this repentance ritual: The Son of God isn’t sinful and in need of cleansing, is he? Or is he a lesser prophet than John – I mean, he went to John for baptism…?

Matthew doesn’t want us to believe any of that for even a minute, so he shows us this little vignette, where “John would have prevented [Jesus], saying ‘I need to be baptized by you…’” and Jesus has to persuade John into upsetting the heavenly hierarchy.

Then John baptizes Jesus, pushing him down into the flowing Jordan River, all the way under, and pulling him back up, in a single ritual that combines metaphors for washing with crossing from death to life, and from slavery to freedom in the fulfillment of God’s promises.

And as Jesus rises from the water, God’s Spirit rests on him, and God’s voice announces, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

This ritual of baptism doesn’t “cleanse” Jesus, it reveals him.

Reveals him as God’s own the way the star does at his birth, and reveals him anew as God’s Beloved, as one in whom God delights. It sets that belovedness free in the world, propelling Jesus into the public ministry that yielded so much miracle and wonder.

Years ago, at some stage deep in the thickets of the ordination process, I got yet another set of questions about academic and spiritual preparation to answer and return to the Commission on Ministry. I dutifully filled them out, until I got to the bottom of the page: In a short paragraph, what will your ordination mean to the church?

I was stumped.

I mean, I knew what it would mean to me to complete this long and arduous process and become a priest, but what could one person’s ordination mean to the Whole Church? Globally, universally??

I phoned my friends (this was before Facebook). I struggled. I wrote terrible drafts. I felt sort of arrogant even asking if my ordination would impact the whole church.

But struggling with that question finally brought me around to the realization that sacraments – like ordination, like marriage, baptism, eucharist – are not meant only, or primarily, to benefit us with privilege, nourishment, blessing. They do, of course, but primarily, these sacraments are meant to set God’s gifts free within us for the sake of God’s whole beloved world.

When I talk to families who bring infants or children to the church for baptism, very few of them (none, to date) suggest that they’ve come to send forth their children as ambassadors for God, to preach and serve and change the world, as vessels of God’s Holy Spirit.

But that’s exactly what we promise and pray for in baptism. It’s what we all promise when we – all of us together – renew our own baptismal covenant at every baptism in the Episcopal church.

Baptism most certainly brings a new person – infant, child or adult – into a new life among the family of God, embraces the person in God’s protection, and promises welcome and forgiveness that we depend on throughout our lives.

But more than that, baptism is meant to set us free; to unleash and enhance our gifts of love and service for the sake of the world, to reveal and release God’s gifts within us,

to reveal and release our most holy selves: our selves as God’s beloved.

Think about that for a moment.

Do you think of yourself primarily as God’s beloved?

Is that how you introduce yourself?

What you think of when someone asks you to describe yourself, wonders who you are?

Because you are.

Proclaimed and revealed to the world at your baptism as God’s delight, God’s deeply, dearly loved child.

What does it mean, in your heart, to be so utterly beloved?   For that to be the first thing you know about yourself?

What limits might be released in you, if you trust in that true and real love, no matter what?
What fear might hold you less tightly, or even let you go?
Most of us experience – in small ways or great – some fear of embarrassment, failure, shame, regret, loss. Can those fears stand up to being so deeply, wholly beloved?

Consider your doubts – reasonable, real doubts about yourself, or theology, or your fellow humans – and remember that God – knowing those doubts – trusts you beyond all doubt and reason.

Are there hidden griefs, old pains, regrets and offenses that you can’t love in yourself? What does it mean to be – in the midst of that – thoroughly loved by God?

What might this belovedness set free, in you?

The church has a few ideas about what God might set free in us, through our baptism; about what God might reveal in us, as God’s beloved. And the church reminds us of that, asking us to renew our baptismal covenant - proclaiming our call to serve and preach and change the world - as we remember Jesus’ baptism today; as we join with Maris and Jackson who come for baptism today.

The church reminds us, God reminds us, through the stories of the gospel, through the objections of John, through the words of our prayers, that like Jesus’ baptism, our own baptism is not a simple act of repentance – not even as simple as inclusion, or blessing, though it is all of that – but an act of revelation, meant to wash us free of the fears and doubts and burdens and limits that guide us into the things we come to regret,

free us to be our most holy selves,

revealed to the world as God’s beloved.

My brothers and sisters, children of God, beloved of God,

what do you suppose God is ready, today, to release, and reveal in you?