But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.
Lent is a remarkably foolish season. Think about it with me for a moment. It usually begins on a Tuesday evening eating pancakes and setting old palm branches on fire. Then we set aside the palm ashes and bless them during an elaborate ceremony the next day. These ashes are then pressed into our foreheads in a bizarre ritual of self-mortification where we are told to remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return. By the time we reach Sunday they've taken away our Alleluias and all of our beautiful music; our preludes at the beginning and our postludes at the end. Then just when you think it can't get any more depressing your clergy have the nerve to ask you to pray more, spend more time together, study harder and find more opportunities to serve each other and those in the deepest of need. It doesn't make much sense to an early 21st Century American capitalist like me. The Church asks you for more and then gives you less than you had to begin with...Lent is a remarkably foolish season.
But Lent isn't the only foolish thing about Christianity...Oh no! Lent's really just the tip of an iceberg of foolishness marked by incomprehensibilities and insanities. Very little of this Church thing really makes any sense at all. Let's start at the beginning shall we? Last week we heard the story of Abraham and Sarah; not the richest people in the land, not the youngest, and probably not the most attractive. God comes to these Bedouins and promises to not only build a nation through them, but a nation that all other nations will bow down to.
Then there's Moses...the stuttering murderer who God used to set the people of Israel free from slavery in Egypt. Remember King David of David and Goliath fame? He started as a shepherd boy, they anointed him king of Israel, and then he murdered a woman's husband so that she could be his wife. Don't even get me started about the antics of the prophets. Why would God choose such foolish people to do such remarkable things? It makes it all sounds pretty foolish to me.
My well-honed sense of right and wrong tells me that God is way off track. If God wanted so badly to show the world how much God loves it why not choose things that make more sense? Why create Israel? Why not start with a strong nation like the Egyptians, the Assyrians or the Romans? Why not choose Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero? Why choose such foolish things when there were so many wiser choices to choose from? Certainly there were better parents for Israel than Abraham and Sarah. Certainly there were better qualified leaders than Moses or David. Not to mention the most foolish one of all that one called Jesus; a poor day laborer from occupied Palestine. There wasn't a better Messiah than Jesus? Blessed are the poor? Blessed are the meek? Love your neighbor as yourself? Who was he trying to kid? Our world has always been a violent and dangerous place. Platitudes and Beatitudes don't put bread on the table or keep us safe at night. I don't too often see miracles, and I'm pretty sure the dead don't rise again. Welcome to the real world God. It all sounds pretty foolish to me.
And so this morning the bible delivers up the most foolish of them all. Paul of Tarsus; "Saint" Paul; the travelling evangelist. Paul left a good job as a Pharisee to go door to door to spread the word about Jesus. Nevermind that this was the same man who spent years hunting down Christians making martyrs everywhere he went. Paul claimed he had had a vision; a vision of Jesus alive after death. And somehow this vision of the risen Jesus changed him and gave him mystical authority to take the message of Jesus to the world and make new Christians. And this vision of his set him on a road to his own martyrdom. So Paul traveled the world telling the story of Jesus and founded churches everywhere. And he wrote letters to these churches to teach and encourage. And so this morning we heard just a few lines from Paul's letter to the church in a city called Corinth.
For me Corinth is the first thing in this whole story that makes sense. Corinth was a town not unlike Boston. It was a thriving port that brought all sorts of people from throughout the world; Rich and poor, slaves and free, Jew and Gentile. It was a town of great luxury and dire poverty, a place to make your mark or lose your fortune; craftsmen, bankers, sailors, doctors, politicians and merchants all plying their trades in good * logical * fashion. Corinth was a city of great learning and religious diversity. You might meet philosophers, soldiers or poets; holy men or charlatans. It attracted the successful and it beat down the down and out. Not too terribly different from any big city really. I might not be too off base if I said the Corinthians would have thought of their fair city as the "hub of the universe." Corinth made sense.
And so Saint Paul brings his foolish message about a crucified Christ to a city that makes sense. He writes, "We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Non-Jews." Christ crucified...a crucified Christ ...a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Non-Jews, what does he mean?
We've grown so accustomed to the death and resurrection of Jesus that we might not understand how foolish it sounded to the good upstanding citizens of Corinth. So let's unpack it for a moment.
What is a Christ? A Christ is an anointed one, the Jews would have used the term Messiah one who has oil poured on his head to mark him as a king. A Christ is a KING. A king is royal. A king has station, power and deserves the respect of all people. For a Corinthian Jew the word Christ would conjure up the return of Israel's glory and power; the days of David and Solomon and most of all freedom from Rome. For the Non-Jew it would mean Rome, Caesar, the Senate, the legions and the power of life over death. And Paul says that unlike these other christs his Christ is crucified, executed. We begin to understand the foolishness.
For the Jews a crucified Christ would be a terrible stumbling block. The Law of Moses is clear. Anyone hanged on a tree is cursed by God. How could the Christ be hanged on a tree? How could God curse God's own Christ? A stumbling block to say the least.
For the non-Jew only criminals are crucified, and only the worst kind of criminals at that. An executed Jewish criminal as Christ? An executed Christ to take the place of Caesar? Not in this life or in your life to come. And yet Paul could say, "We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles...but to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God..."
How can it be that Christ crucified is God's true power and true wisdom? It doesn't make sense. It all seems so foolish.
My friends a Christ crucified isn't supposed to make sense. A crucified Christ sounds foolish because it is foolish. This world in which you and I live is chaotic and dangerous. In the midst of the mess human beings have devised ways of making sense of the world. Things that make sense hold back the danger. We've built cities and societies, economies, and social strata. We've learned to wield power and wage war. And in the midst of all of these man made systems that make sense we lose sight of any God that might be beyond them. Man made things that make sense become self-referential and self-aggrandizing. If God had chosen to use the wisdom of this world that "makes sense" how soon would these man made systems have succumbed to the human will to power? Think of how many of us have been deeply wounded by institutional churches that have corralled the crucified Christ for the sake of their own power. Suddenly the things that seemed to make so much sense seem so foolish.
A crucified Christ means that you and I have nothing to boast about. All of our status, all of our wealth, all of our education, all of our power are fictions of our world's making. The Christ of God laid all of it aside so that we would understand that our salvation has nothing to do with the things we do or the things that make sense. Our salvation comes in the form of a crucified Christ because God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength. Thanks God for the foolishness of a crucified Christ. Thank God for the foolishness of Lent.
AMEN
