Sermon for Sunday, March 3, 2024 || Lent 3B || 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

In today’s sermon, we’re going to indulge in a bit of foolishness. Now, I’m aware that no one – myself included – likes to feel foolish. Feeling foolish quickly spirals into embarrassment, into red cheeks and hot faces, and we get the urge to escape as soon as possible. We all know the awful feeling of being laughed at instead of laughing with. (Though I have always loved Robin Williams’s line in the movie Dead Poets Society: “We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing near you.”) We go to great lengths not to feel foolish, going so far as not to learn new skills in adulthood because we really don’t want to be bad at them when we’re starting out. This is why I can’t ice skate or hit my driver.

But stick with me, because the kind of foolishness we’re going to talk about today is God’s foolishness, which is of a wholly – and holy – different sort than ours. The idea of God’s foolishness comes from our reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Church in Corinth. Corinth was a Greek city known for its philosophers, and Paul was keenly aware that the Gospel message he was proclaiming did not make sense to those scholars. They called it “foolish.” So instead of trying to go toe to toe with them philosophically, Paul realigns his message away from the rigors of systematic proofs and leans into the opinion the scholars already have. But Paul puts his own spin on it. Foolishness is not a reason to dismiss the Gospel; rather, the mystery of “God’s foolishness” is the whole point of the Gospel!

Paul says: “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” A few verses later, he continues: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

So, what is God’s foolishness? And why would we want to follow a God with the trait “foolish” on God’s performance review? It all comes down to the contrast of God’s foolishness against the “wisdom of the world.” For the New Testament writers, “the world” is short-hand for all the ways humanity has reshaped existence in ways that run counter to God’s original vision for the flourishing of all creation. The world’s so-called “wisdom” includes the systems of domination of all types that have dealt death and limited opportunity across history. So-called “wisdom” includes the human practices of separating us and them, of allowing extreme disparity, of hoarding resources, of destroying the environment to keep the economy strong. So-called “wisdom” creates hierarchies and power structures and cultural norms that embrace zero-sum thinking and scarcity mindsets. The “wisdom of the world” certainly looks foolish if you’ve ever imagined what the world could be if we decided to reconstruct the world without all our violent historical baggage.

St. Paul flips the concepts of wisdom and foolishness, essentially saying, “If this is what the world considers wise, then I’d rather be foolish.” Mary does the same thing in her song that we call the Magnificat: “[God] hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away” (Luke 1:52-53, Evensong version). Jesus flips things around too, and not just the tables of the moneychangers we heard about in today’s Gospel. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes through a series of statements which follow the form, “You have heard that it was said…But I say to you.” “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44).

When we recognize God’s foolishness as a reorientation of the world’s priorities, we see this foolishness throughout Holy Scripture. God’s foolishness urged Abraham and Sarah to risk venturing into the desert, trusting that they would find God even in the wilderness. God’s foolishness allowed Joseph to rise from prisoner to Pharaoh’s second-in-command and to save Egypt and his own family from starvation. God’s foolishness made Gideon cut his army way down so they would know it was God’s power, and not their own strength of arms, that brought victory. God’s foolishness prompted Ruth not to abandon her mother-in-law Noami, but to return home with her as an immigrant. God’s foolishness chose Hannah – a woman unable to conceive (one of many such women in scripture) – to bear the Prophet Samuel. God’s foolishness picked Samuel out when he was just a boy to be a bearer of God’s Word. God’s foolishness chose the youngest son of a sheep herder to be the king of Israel.

Throughout scripture, God chooses people the world would not choose, God lifts up those who are poor and oppressed, God makes God’s self known in ways that the powerful least expect. And the story of the Gospel is the most foolish of all: the savior of the world is born in the humblest circumstances, he gathers a group of uneducated tradesmen to be his followers, he touches those deemed untouchable, he preaches nonviolent resistance, he shares until scarcity becomes abundance, he lives his mission of healing to the point of death, he forgives those who nail him to a cross, and he rises again so we can embrace the promise of eternal love from our eternally loving God.

And in God’s most recent act of foolishness, God chose us to be the current bearers of God’s story. When we embrace this foolishness, we reject the so-called wisdom of the world. We find freedom from the world’s bent priorities. We live into Paul’s next words to the Corinthians that were, for some reason, left out of our reading: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters,” Paul says. “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” We become like the fools in Shakespeare plays, who always seem to tell the truth. We become fools for Christ because the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.

When we look out at a world ground down by so many different sorts of suffering, we must remember that the world’s so-called wisdom leads to this pain. And the world’s so-called wisdom has no idea how to stop it. Only the loving, just, and merciful foolishness of the God who calls all people back into right relationship with God, with one another, and with all of creation  – only that sort of foolishness can bring healing. And if that’s foolish, then I don’t want to be wise.