Holy Foolishness

 

This week we are wading in the waters of holy foolishness that is faithfulness.  Yesterday, we shined a light on the cultural narrative that is the American way of seeming “sad even in our pleasure” (de Tocqueville).  That phrase not only breaks my heart, but it also breaks open my soul because I have embodied those words.  I can’t laugh, I tell myself, “Bombs are being dropped and kids are going to bed hungry and people in our own community are homeless.”  Yes, all that is very true.  And there are moments of joy that sit right alongside the heartbreak.  It is not either or, emotions can co-exist and contradict and be complicated.  Perhaps, it is just easier to go around like we just ate a bag full of sour patch kids candy whilst sucking on a lemon and sipping on vinegar.  Maybe it is more socially acceptable to look depressed than delighted.  The deep truth is that it is hard to embrace the everything-ness of this holy chaos called, “Life”.  I would love to talk to you more about this tension we all try to sort through!

 

It is important to recognize that such a choice of how to be in a beautifully broken world is not new.  In Jesus’ day, Rome ruled with an iron fist, there was taxation without representation, Caesar claimed to be son of a god, and many people lost the family farm ~ then had to hire themselves out to work on that same land as servants (talk about pain).  Jesus told a story about Lazarus ~ a name that meant, “God helps” and whose life didn’t even begin to look anything like that ~ whose life looked a lot like Job’s in the Bible.  All of this puzzling paradox is part of the foolishness of faith from the very beginning. 

 

And one of the earliest, most prolific authors of the New Testament, is Paul.  Many of you know that his original name was Saul.  He was a religious person ~ a Pharisee ~ who thought and taught you had to follow the laws to be a good person.  Saul persecuted early Christians, until he was blinded by the light of God’s love, changed his heart, and started following Jesus’ wayless way.  Can you imagine the membership class when Saul walked in?  Talk about awkward…and hilarious.  Can you imagine him telling this story about how he has seen the light and changed the errors of his ways ~ and people in that membership class are thinking, “Sure you have Saul…or Paul…or whatever you call yourself”.  Can you imagine that this would be the guy whose writing occupies over half of our New Testament?  This guy?  And maybe he is thinking, “What you are still reading, First Corinthians?  You should see the nineth letter I wrote them that is the best!” 

 

It is Paul who writes in 1^st Corinthians, “We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are sensible people in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are honored, but we are dishonored” (1 Cor. 4:10).

 

Notice that even among the earliest followers of the wayless way of Jesus, there was a deep desire to be seen as sensible and credible and honorable.  We love the pedestal and the thumbs up and shares on social media.  We crave the spotlight and roses thrown to thunderous applause.  But the wayless way of Jesus is not upward mobility, but downward.  The wayless way won’t look like success and can’t be measured by balance sheets or membership numbers.  The wayless way feels like we are going backwards or even stuck in the muckiness muddiness of the pigsty of life (see Morning Meditations on the Prodigal family from March). 

 

I invite you to keep holding the theology of Holy Foolishness and what it is provoking and evoking in you.  Where do you sense resistance?  What logical dissertation is being written in response to all this?  I would love to talk more about this, because I certainly get it wrong more than I get it right.  I am certainly foolish and boneheaded and human size.  I laugh at that prayerfully and hopefully trusting that in those moments when I see my own less-than-perfectness that even this part of me is being shaped in the image of God for the shape of the other.  Amen.