Spouting Nonesense

God’s folly is wiser than humans, you see, and God’s weakness is stronger than humans. Think back to your own call, my brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise in human terms. Not many of you were powerful. Not many were nobly born. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong; God chose the insignificant and despised things of the world—yes, even things that don’t exist!—to abolish the power of the things that do exist (1 Cor 1:25-28, NT Wright).

This passage, from the first chapter of First Corinthians, is the first passage of the Bible I ever remember encountering outside of church. I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I was reading Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. It has been my favorite passage of Scripture ever since. L’Engle was an atheist who became an Episcopalian with a daily practice of reading Scripture and praying. She wrote more than 60 books, many of them theological or spiritual, eventually becoming writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. This quotation from Corinthians comes near the end of A Wrinkle in Time, when the hero Meg is sent back to rescue her brother, Charles Wallace, from the all-controlling being named “IT.” She is sent back with St. Paul’s words, and with the important message that she possesses something that IT does not have and cannot understand that will allow her to rescue Charles Wallace. IT rules everything and everyone through power and control and hate, and in confronting IT, Meg realizes that the one thing IT will never understand is love. It is Meg’s self-sacrificing love that frees Charles Wallace, and her, from IT.

This redeeming love is, of course, the theme of the Gospels in the guise of a children’s book. A foolish children’s book, perhaps, but St. Paul would have us know that “the message about the cross is foolishness” (1 Cor 1:18a). As comfortable, well-fed Christians in a nominally Christian society, I think we’ve come to overlook just how foolish the story of Jesus is, how foolish Christianity is, how foolish we are—or should seem—to the world. As a culture that has turned the cross into a piece of ubiquitous cheap jewelry, I wonder if we’ve cheapened, normalized away, the shocking foolishness of its reality. Theologian Frederick Beuchner says:

The message that a convicted felon was the bearer of God's forgiving and transforming love was hard enough for anybody to swallow and for some especially so. For Hellenized sophisticates [like the Corinthians]—the Greeks, as Paul puts it—it could only seem absurd. What uglier, more supremely inappropriate symbol of, say, Plato's Beautiful and Good could there be than a crucified Jew? And for the devout Jew, what more scandalous image of the Davidic king messiah, [the conquering hero] before whose majesty all the nations were at last to come to heel?

Or, as NT Wright says:

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.

To make this scandal more tangible for us: it is, my friends, as if, rather than wearing shiny gold crosses around our necks, we wore little rusty electric chairs. The Cross is, or should be, our constant reminder that The Savior we worship was executed as a criminal in the most public, demeaning, and horrific way, as a demonstration of political and religious power. As a symbol of authority and power, according to the wisdom of the world—the world of Rome in the 1st century and the world of the United States today—Jesus utterly failed. 

“We proclaim Christ crucified…We herald out, loudly and publicly and widely, Christ crucified,” St. Paul says. Later, in 1st Corinthians chapter eleven, in the instructions we use for celebrating the Eucharist, St. Paul says, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” That’s just weird—or maybe…foolish. You’d think Paul would say we’re proclaiming the Lord’s Resurrection until he comes…but no, we are proclaiming Jesus’ death. It’s Jesus’ Resurrection that has the power to drive our imaginations, after all—that’s the Jesus we want—He rules!

Paul uses the word foolishness six times in this short passage. It might be better translated as ridiculous speech, nonsense. He is trying to get us to understand the absurdity—according to the world’s standards—of the Gospel Good News. We are obsessed with wealth; Jesus died in poverty, homeless. We are possessed with the desire for power; Jesus died refusing to condemn his vile persecutors in non-violent, self-giving sacrifice. We know the importance of punishment for wrongs; Jesus forgave all who came to him. We are seduced by lies and half-truths that reinforce our tightly-held prejudices; Jesus said the way we treat outcasts is the way we are treating him.  We are energized by easy, self-righteous indignancy; Jesus preached and lived self-aware humility.

At the time of Paul’s letter, Corinth was a chief city of Greece both commercially and politically. I’m afraid that if St. Paul were around today, he'd be writing this Epistle to us, not to the Corinthians. We like to think of ourselves as the most privileged people in the most advanced and powerful society on earth. And we like to think of ourselves as Christian leaders in a Christian nation. My prayer for us all this week is that we consider just how true or untrue this thinking is. That is, if we don’t sound like fools—if we aren’t spouting raving nonsense about forgiveness and gentleness and humility and sacrifice in the face of a world possessed and drunk with just the opposite—then I’m not sure we’re saying the right things. 

The strength of God is found in sacrificial love that risks everything, even death; the wisdom of God is found in forgiveness and in humility and in hope and in refusing to see reality through the cynical eyes of the majority opinion. I hope this week you will hear Jesus’ voice, and take the chance of spouting Jesus' nonsense.