Sunday: 3rd Sunday in Lent
Reading: Ephesians 1:18-25
Preacher: Peter C. Lane

I hate being the fool. I never want to be overdressed. I try never to sound pompous. I would rather be too little than "too much." To accomplish that, I have adopted something that I call the "White Man Can't Jump" fool avoidance strategy. I don't know how many of you or if any of you remember this 1992 movie starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as basketball hustlers. Forget the plot of the movie; I want to point out the attire. Harrelson's character would show up at the basketball courts looking like he knew nothing about basketball: random shoes, backwards baseball hat, ratty clothes. He made a calculated decision to lower expectations. I learned a lot from him. I would not be "that guy," the one who shows up for a pick-up basketball game wearing brand new Air Jordans and a complete Chicago Bulls jersey. If you're sporting that, you better be awesome. I would show up wearing blue dress socks and running shorts. When I ended up not being totally horrible, I had exceeded everyone's expectations and avoided looking foolish. The White Men Can't Jump Fool Avoidance Strategy. I have taken this strategy to other parts of my life by doing things like wearing clothing purchased from Lands' End. Low fashion reward, but almost no risk of looking the fool. I fear I have even taken this approach to my Christianity. I'm not too conservative so that I can appear cosmopolitan and urbane, but not too liberal so I can feel fair minded, judicious. I think my brand of Christianity would look quite reasonable, perhaps attractive to a writer from Harper's or The New Yorker.

So perhaps you realize why I was made uncomfortable reading this week's epistle. God has made foolish the wisdom of the world? God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom? It appears that Paul here in 1st Corinthians is suggesting that one metric for judging whether one is living out the gospel is how foolish one is perceived to be, by let's say, writers from Harper's or The New Yorker.

Paul says that God is known in something foolish and weak: the cross. A guy hanging limply from the cross, apparently forsaken by God, is the divine messenger. That is foolish. God really has exploded common sense. If that could be true-if we worship a crucified God-what else could be true?! Crucifixion was supposed to be a gruesome punishment used by the Romans to ‘make an example' out of disturbers of the peace. It was supposed to be a particularly horrible form of public torture and execution. The guy hanging on it is the revelation of God? Ya, any bridges for sale? As Scholar Richard Hays points out, Jews, who suffered under foreign rule for a long time, were looking for someone with a little more power. And the Greeks were looking for a little more wisdom. You know, "reasonable accounts of the order of things presented in a logically compelling and aesthetically pleasing manner." [1] Not this, not a God who dies on the cross. The cross from the perspective of many 1st century Jews? Foolish. The cross from the Greek perspective? Foolish.

Not everyone thought it was nonsense. Paul was writing to somebody. Actually Paul was holding up the cross to his beloved Church in Corinth. There were maybe 200 Christians in Corinth, a bustling port city ideally situated on a narrow Isthmus used as a short cut by traders to avoid the dangerous trip around the Peloponnesian peninsula when going from Italy to Asia. The city had been destroyed by the Roman army in 146 BC but was re-inhabited by mostly freedmen in 44 BC. The resulting free wheeling climate allowed former slaves to become quite wealthy and participate in political life.
Paul took Christianity to this thriving, coursing Corinth himself. According to Acts (18:1-11) Paul spent 18 months there around the year 51. Paul wrote this letter to the people he had gotten to know well later while he was staying in Ephesus. The challenge Paul faced in the letter was the challenge of helping to craft a people shaped by the new message of a crucified and risen Lord and not by the prevailing cultural cues of the Roman Empire, or of the merchants or of the sexually charged atmosphere so common to port cities. Paul had to reshape people through encouraging practices. He had to reshape their moral imaginations. We get to open the Corinthians' mail and read along to see if Paul's letter still has something to say. "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart."

Paul's mission is to convert the imagination. He sees the cross as an apocalyptic event in which God breaks in, redefines, and overturns. Paul wants the Christian community to build on that shocking intervention, to define itself using those radical terms. Paul argues that the famous of that day "philosophers, Torah scholars and ...popular orators...fail[ed] to understand what [was] really going on in the world." [2] They might have had knowledge and the ability to communicate that knowledge beautifully, but their discernment would be thwarted, their wisdom destroyed. So, the Church must take its cues from the cross and not from the accepted wisdom.

It makes me, a lover of Hyde Park and passionate about the Episcopal Church, awfully nervous. The Episcopal Church has striven to be relevant, to be respected in the halls of government and commerce and entertainment. Our parish seeks to be accepted in the heady world of Hyde Park, not disparaged by the braniacs at the U of C or seen as a backwater to the multi-cultural, urban elite. How can we have our imaginations converted when steeped in our own wisdom?

If God chooses to save the world through the cross, through a shameful and powerless death, what else could be true? Could a heroine addict shooting up underneath a maze of overpasses know more about God than a promising priest? Could the schizophrenic wandering around down at 63rd and Woodlawn know something that an Ivy League grad from 51st and Greenwood doesn't? In a place that prides itself on fostering the growth of knowledge, that is scary. That would take a conversion of the imagination.

We are going out on a limb worshipping here today. We are opening ourselves to the charge of being not with it. This way of life can only make sense through the lens of the cross; it can only make sense with converted imaginations. I will have to get used to being the fool.

[1] Richard B. Hays, 1st Corinthians, (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997), 31.
[2] Hays, 30.