Lent 3 2009: Top-to-Bottom

1 Corinthians 1:18-31
18For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 20Where 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? 21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

I suspect there are Sundays when you have a hard time convincing yourself to actually get up in enough time to get dressed and out the door for church. Perhaps some of you have a hard time (as I do) getting up and out the door any day that there is somewhere to be before lunch. And even though we try to make it easy for folks by starting worship at 5 minutes to 11 am, I suspect there are still those days when either it feels like getting up at the crack of dawn the way you do for 5 of the other days of the week to get to work on time or there are just a lot of other things you can think of that you’d rather be doing with your morning and early afternoon since it is your time, not work time. We are trained by a society that says that the weekdays belong to the boss and the weekends belong to us. It’s our time to do with what we choose. And fewer Americans than ever report now that they choose to attend any kind of worship on those weekend or other free hours. 100 years ago, this building housed the largest Methodist congregation in the state of Georgia. The place was regularly packed, as I imagine were the many other church buildings in Grant Park. It was just what you did with Sunday morning. Its not like that anymore, is it? Today we often suffer the grief of time we feel we’ve lost by coming to church for an hour or 2 or 3 on Sunday mornings. Children’s sports find it ridiculous that we would want to be anywhere else but a baseball or soccer field on Sunday mornings. The gods of television are making it easier and easier for us to just stay in and watch movies or any one of our top 50 favorite TV shows on Sunday morning instead of coming to church. Or forget any of that: we don’t have to settle for our own coffee or our own kitchens anymore; we can go take our pick of any local or chain coffee house and blend along with a newspaper or a friend and relax on Sunday mornings. Doesn’t it seem almost ridiculous that we would choose anything else?

And yet, we are all gathered here in this sacred space, expecting to meet the Spirit of God here and to go away changed in some little or big way because we were here to sing and pray. The world calls, urges, even pushes us in the other direction, but we all find ourselves here today at another spot along the journeys of faith we travel singularly and as a body. What seems foolish to the world watching us gather here has the power to save us because we have been here. Why in the world does God work like that?

It’s what Paul is saying to the church in Corinth: the church, the body of Christ, the community of faith doesn’t work the way the rest of the world works. You see, they were fighting among themselves in the Corinthian church. There were folks in that community who believed they had “special wisdom” and knowledge about the faith given to them by Paul himself. Divisions had come up among them, and they had sent word to Paul asking for his own wisdom to settle their disputes, sure he would know since he had introduced this faith to them in the first place. Surely he could offer them wise answers to their questions of authority and call one another’s foolishness out in order to settle the hard feelings and get them back on track for being a unified body of Christ.

Only he doesn’t give them the answers they might have been looking for. I have sometimes imagined that they sought justification for their self-created hierarchy of spiritual gifts and human wisdom, and Paul offers them a world and world order turned upside down. Remember that our God is not one who conforms to our standards, he says. Our God is one who, instead, has created God’s own world order—one that, by the way, doesn’t make any sense to us whatsoever.

Has Christian faith ever seemed foolish to you? Sometimes we get so caught up in setting and trying to live by the rules for how to be Christians that we forget how God has already set things up to be: completely the opposite of how we think they should be! Divine foolishness and weakness are on display in Christ’s cross. Fully human, fully divine: was God crazy to make this possible among our power-hungry species? No, not crazy. FOOLISH!!!! We worship a God who, by the standards of our world, is foolish and weak.

So why do we keep at it? Because the foolishness of God is what has saved us.
• This foolish God is always allowing the Hebrew people to repent in the stories of the OT after they stray time and time again.
• This foolish God makes it possible for Abraham and Sarah to have a baby when they are approaching 100 years old!
• This foolish God picked David to become the most beloved king of Israel even though he would go on to use his position of power to have the husband of the woman he desired to be killed in battle.
• This foolish God produces the savior of the world by using Mary: an unwed pregnant teenager
• This foolish God in Jesus appears to women first at the empty tomb
• This foolish God chose Peter, the one whose lack of faith caused him to sink in the water when called by Jesus, to be the foundation of the church we have committed ourselves to today.
• This foolish God calls Paul to preach the good news of the gospel after he has lived most of his life persecuting followers of Christ. Paul, who had spent his life hunting down followers of Jesus and putting them in jail or ordering their execution. Paul, who was quickly rising to the top of his game and in the eyes of the leaders of the synagogue when Christ met him in a journey across the desert and turned every idea he had about how life was supposed to be on its head.

Foolishness, indeed.

We go through life collecting a lot of things that we think will save us: save us from boredom, loneliness, being second-best, those dark places that contain our biggest fears and hurts. We put others down so we can lift ourselves up. We search and fight for status, promotions, high appointments, and round-the-clock entertainment while flying through this life at warp speed so we don’t have to notice our disappointments. If we get to the top fast enough, we won’t have to look down anymore, right?

Only that’s not the way life is. Not real life. Not life lived in the way of Christ. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We don’t look down on each other; we help each other up. The way of Christ leads us not to fight each other for the top spot but to race each other in goodness to the bottom, or as Paul says in his letter to the Romans, outdo one another in showing love. To this world in which we live, it’s as crazy an idea of success as choosing to go to church on Sunday mornings rather than all the places we could be right now. The way of Christ is upside down from how we think things ought to be.

There’s an old Catholic brother named Kilian McDonnell who, late in his life, began writing beautiful poetry based on his life and his life’s understanding of God and Holy Scripture. In one of his collections of poetry is a piece called “A Manual for Climbers”+ that reads as follows:

Surely, this is right.
One begins at the bottom,
like ascending the ladder
to conquer the fire.

One foot up, then the other.
No parachutes to the top,
no express elevator.
The faint need not apply.

God wrestled with primeval
darkness in the waters
of chaos. After seven days,
God rested. Not I.

To build muscle
I keep pumping iron.
If I stop to breathe,
I am back at the bottom.

After decades of climbing
I’m still on ground floor.
I had it all wrong.
You start at the top.

How could your life be different if you lived it top-to-bottom, not bottom-to-top?

Think about your work, your family, your relationships. Where are you headed? What are you building toward every day?

Think about your faith: where do you see yourself in this faith down the road? What do you hope will happen? How do you hope and expect to change?

Friends, I believe that the good word for us today is that it is foolishness that we practice together here. We get together every week and proclaim Christ crucified and risen. We believe that the Son of Man is also the Son of God. We know Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and because our ancestors in faith gave up the bottom-to-top lives that were set up for them by society—Abraham and his comfortable end of life; Peter and the family fishing business; Paul, the rising star of the synagogue—and started living lives headed toward the bottom, toward the ones never intended to hear the gospel, toward us. And perhaps the most foolish thing of all—that God would go so far to save us!

If you turned your life around, if it started going top-to-bottom, if you start climbing your journey of faith at the top with God, you’ll be headed out into the world that still needs ancestors of faith to share the news that God loves this world and everyone and everything in it.

Good for you for crossing society and getting yourself to worship today. It’s all downhill from here—where will your top-to-bottom faith journey take you next?





+ From Swift, Lord, You are Not. The Order of St. Benedict. Collegeville, Minnesota. 2003.