Holy Foolishness

 

This week, we are exploring, experimenting, and hopefully encountering moments of holy foolishness.  It is important to name and claim, we don’t like feeling foolish.  We don’t want to be the punchline to someone else’s joke, we don’t want to feel our face turn the six shades of red with the warmth of embarrassment.  We would rather be seen as intelligent, brave, and the hero of the story, rather than the comedic sidekick with the one-liners to relieve/release the tension.  Maybe you are thinking, “Wes, this was a nice little morning meditation because of April Fool’s Day.  And the joke yesterday was okay.  But, come on now, life is way too serious for us to be foolish.  There are problems to be solved, bills to be paid, and jokes don’t fold the laundry!”

 

You are right.  The world is a beautifully broken place.  Life will lead us to repeat and replay the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday dramas/realities/stories of a week ago, time and time again.  We know all too well friends who say things that are like a thousand paper cuts.  We know all too well grief that weighs us down.  We know all too well the pain that aches and we can’t seem to shake.  In some ways, this is not a new phenomenon.  Alexis de Tocqueville wrote,

 

“In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men (sic) placed in the happiest condition that exists in the world; it seemed to me that a sort of cloud habitually covered their features; they appeared to me grave and almost sad even in their pleasures.”

 

That was written in 1835, almost two hundred years ago.  Maybe it is in the air we breathe, or the DNA passed down to us from our ancestors, or the cultural sea we swim in that wants to resist and reject seeing life as anything other than a seriously somber march of time.  Yet, God has moments of joy.  God makes the platypus and manatee and the puteketeke bird in New Zealand (you really need to Google this bird to bring a marvelous laugh to your face and how John Oliver conspired to have people vote the puteketeke to be the bird of the century!).  God has moments of laughter with Sarah on her being pregnant when her AARP card was tattered and torn ~ God is never finished with us.  God has moments of foolishness calling people who are very human-size (just read King David’s story or Zacchaeus the wee-little man to climb a tree).  The Bible has a talking donkey and a fish be an Uber for Jonah and cows wearing sack clothes of repentance ~ not sure what the cow needed forgiveness for in the first place!?! 

Maybe, friends, we need to let the Holy Foolishness of Easter disrupt the narratives we too easily claim as gospel.  Maybe, friends, we need the gospel medicine and prayer practices of holding the hurt and holy humor of life ~ that it isn’t either/or but a beyond binary choice.  Yes, there will be times we don’t read the room and laugh at the wrong moment.  Yes, there will be times we frown while others have tears of laughter.  But maybe those experiences can help us continually explore what it means to live as an Eastering people.  The call to keep opening to God’s sacred serendipity.  Or maybe we prefer to just keep shaking our heads with the disciples saying, “It is all an idle tale.”  May God’s holy foolishness keep showing up in your life and my life in these days.  Amen.