"Easter: Fools for Christ"
A sermon by The Rev. Keenan Kelsey
Noe Valley Ministry, Presbyterian Church (USA)
Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005
- 1 Corinthians 3:18,19; 4:10-13
- 18 Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. 19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’, 10 We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honour, but we in disrepute. 11 To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless, 12 and we grow weary from the work of our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; 13 when slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day.
FOR ALL FOUR YEARS of my college life, I used to see a huge billboard about a mile from the campus entrance. It pictured a happy family looming above the caption “The family that prays together stays together.”
They were the archetypal family: an attractive, modestly dressed, white couple; a husband with close cropped hair; a wife with a blond bob tucked beneath a demure hat; a boy and a girl, aged about 8 and 12, neatly dressed; all four with hands folded and faces raised to gaze off into some distant spiritual realm.
You just knew without being told that the mother was a stay-at-home Mom, the son was a leader in his scout troop, the daughter loved kittens and puppies, and the hardworking Dad spent his weekends fixing bicycles.
They were churchgoers -- respectable citizens -- clean-cut and honest -- hardworking -- law abiding -- trustworthy --
For many years, That’s what I thought it meant to be a Christian. My own family of origin actually looked a little like that, at least on Christmas and at Easter!
I think I carried that image with me all the way to Seminary. I carried it despite the fact that I knew Jesus to be a rather radical rebel-rouser, someone who cared not for superficialities or formalities, some one who did the impossible over and over, from feeding 5000 people with no food, to walking on water to calm the sea, to presumptuously driving demons out of people.
My first inkling that this image might be somehow lacking came from Annie Dillard, Christian essayist and poet. In Teaching Stones to Talk, I read, “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offence, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” Annie Dillard took this religion stuff quite seriously.
And then I began reading Paul. And Paul has a startling term for the Christian faith. He calls it foolishness! Truthfully, Paul has an unusual way of selling the gospel. It is not slick persuasive advertising. It contains no appeal to human pride, no compliments for human achievement, no eulogies to human wisdom, no promises of economic or political gain. Instead, insult is piled upon insult. Those whom God calls are not only foolish but, in the eyes of the world, weak, low, despised, rubbish.
Then he says, “For the message about the cross—of Resurrection -- is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” It is the wisdom of the world that is nonsense. It is our reliance on what is unbelievable that is astute and lasting truth.
Several years ago –well, 15 or more years ago -- I had a rather delightful reawakening of my own, an important lesson about what it can mean to be a Fool for Christ. My children and I had joined my sister and her family and several friends for Easter brunch in one of the big hotels. We were part of the last seating of the afternoon, and we were just finishing as the banquet service was ending. “Take these flowers!” urged the waiters. “They will just be thrown away! Take the centerpieces, the chocolate sculptures, anything you want!” Astonished, we greedily gathered up the free goodies. We staggered to the car, arms overflowing with daffodils and freesias and daisies and roses. Suddenly I looked at all these cut flowers, already wilting in the sun, and wondered, “What in the world will we do with these? Why did we take all this?” A friend of my daughters, a young teenager, said, “Let’s give them away!” We looked at her sort of shocked, but she scampered up to a passerby, “Happy Easter, Have a daffodil!” We got into the car and drove all over the city, down to the Tenderloin and out to the Castro, up to Noe Valley and across pacific Heights, happily giving away flowers. “Happy Easter. Christ has risen! Have a flower! “ It was tremendous fun! Frankly, I wish I’d thought of it. I’d forgotten. A child reminded me about the reckless abandon of generosity. Reaching out with joy, in the name of Christ.
Could it be that when it comes to God, being foolish is being faithful?
Paul says there is no human intelligence that will explain Christianity. Christianity is more about the fire of the spirit, the song of the heart, the magic of the mystery. Foolishness reverses the conventional wisdom, the conventional order . . . which is just what Jesus’ teachings do, from the Beatitudes to the Last Supper. “This is my body.” How foolish.
When we continue to think things through, to insist on rationality and logic, to choose order over ardor, Paul suggests we are missing something. Foolish means childlike. Silly. Impulsive. Open. Accepting. Trusting. Believing in the future and in goodness. When Jesus said, you must become like a child to enter the kingdom, I think this is what he means.
Today we are celebrating nothing less than the power of God -- the power of God to make a difference in our lives! A power we do not have to understand, we simply have to live.
Not that this is so easy. Matthew reminds us that believing the unbelievable, and then choosing to live under its spell, is no small thing. It requires a willingness to be stretched beyond our safe and self-imposed limits. It requires a confidence that we might find joy in ways we never imagined. It requires us to give up old ways of living -- but too often, we like our lives, thank you very much, as boring, difficult, neurotic, pathetic, impossible as they are. You've heard the saying " It’s easier to deal with the devil we do know than the devil we don’t. If you truly open yourself to the promise of transformation, you will agree with the poet Rilke when he cries: "Who is this Christ, who interferes in everything?"
No wonder Matthew describes an earthquake -- earth rattling, ground-trembling upheaval similar to the one described when Jesus was crucified. Joann read how the women arrive at the tomb, to be greeted by an angel who rolls back the stone --and they feel the shaking of the familiar comfortable ground beneath their feet, the shattering of expectations and the invitation to see things a new way.
It’s the same maneuver used by sheep dogs in the field. You expect the dogs to use flanking maneuvers to get the sheep moving. Instead they head full-speed into the center of the herd. Sheep go everywhere. But within a few moments the dogs have the sheep rounded up and going in the desired direction. They just had to shake them up first and get them moving.
The artist Pablo Picasso once said, "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction." In other words, one thing must die in order for another to be born. Jesus asks us to let our fear die, let our stereotypic images of Christianity die, let go of what is safe and expected, and embrace life anew, held and informed by the promise of resurrection, life anew.
The eloquence of the Easter story is that it lacks reason almost entirely. It’s a difficult story to meet halfway. One either rejects it outright on the basis of unlikely facts, or accepts it viscerally on the basis of faith. But then, the same could be said of the entire life story of Jesus.
From the first whispered angelic invitation to the young woman Mary, to a star lighting a path to his birthplace, to refugee status in Egypt, to the sweep of the descending dove as he and John stood in the muddy waters of the Jordan; all of these are part of the greatest story ever told. Or, as I’m sure many of you have been told, the greatest hoax.
Jesus, son of Joseph, a boy raised amid wood-shavings in Nazareth, lived a remarkable and unlikely life. His life and ministry, with its wonders, its miracles, and its capacity to turn the world upside down, carries with it a holy absurdity. But that is precisely why I believe it. Faith is not rooted in half measures of reasoned conclusions. Faith is the most audacious human activity I can think of.
Paul’s view was that it is hopeless to try and get in touch with the reality of God by philosophy. One might as well approach a rose from the angle of relativity, or the sheer beauty of Yosemite Halfdome from the latest theory of physics.
So many of us search for clear-cut definitions. But definitions must be translated into living experiences that move the heart, give direction to the will, and transform the human spirit. The reality of falling in love can only be revealed by falling in love.
Christ is risen, Christ is alive! Resurrection faith is not belief in a tragic story that ends in a gruesome death and burial. Resurrection faith is not belief that a tomb filled three days earlier is now empty. Resurrection faith is not the belief in a dead body brought back to life. Resurrection faith is the sure knowledge that god acts, that God is faithful, that God has not and does not abandon the weak, the captive, and the sorrowful. Resurrecting faith knows that because Christ lives, we live. Resurrection faith compels us into a world that has lost hope, misplaced hope, defeated hope. Resurrection faith compels us to bear witness that the present world of violence and sin in which we live is not the last word. Resurrection faith knows that God is acting today to create a world of justice and righteousness.
You can’t look directly at the resurrection any more than you would look directly at the sun. You know what will happen. Besides, if you were capable of explaining it you would have so diminished the resurrection that it would no longer explain you.
As you might have guessed, I have replaced my image of what a Christian looks like these days, instead of the archetypal family looking heavenward, I see St. Francis of Assisi. Born into affluence, he confounded his aristocratic parents by giving up all his possessions. He moved into a hut, went barefoot, identified with lepers and beggars and enjoyed a wild rapport with all living things. For Francis, perfect joy, perfect discipleship was found in wild abandon. I see Mother Teresa, bent over on the streets of India, so certain that her faithful efforts might make a difference. I see Julian of Norwich. In the 1300’s she received a series of visions or showings, of our Lord; and for the next 20 years, she locked herself into a solitary cell and meditated, prayed and wrote.
Or how about Martin Luther who dared to suggest that the rituals of religion, the trappings of religion, could not bring grace. Or Martin Luther King Jr. – Desmond Tutu -- Nelson Mandela– Each one dared to believe in the impossible, to foolishly live as though miracles could happen.
This is Resurrection: Being a fool in the name of a loving, faithful, transforming God. It’s living in such faithful abundance and confidence that you can say, as my very dear friend always answers when someone asks for his help, “The answer is yes, now what is the question.”
Take a risk. Try something new. And remember, never doubt, God is with you. Jesus lived and died and returned to give you the power to transform your life, to transform the world.
How are you going to live into the resurrection?
How might you be a fool for Christ?