Fourth Sunday After Epiphany (A) – 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
In what the world calls foolishness, there is godly power and wisdom.
I remember a certain homebound member visit I made back when I was on internship in Omaha. Her name was Betty, an older woman who had just moved into one of those institutional settings for people who don’t have a lot of resources, the kind that looks shabby and is staffed with too few nurses and aides who are too busy to really provide the care their patients need. I walked down the hall to the wing of the building in which she lived, and found I had to pass through locked doors. This was the memory loss unit, something my internship supervisor hadn’t told me when she asked me to go. I’d expected to sit down with a beloved member of the congregation and her all her stories about growing up in Omaha. And now, I had no idea what to expect.
I went up to the nurse’s station, and said I was here to visit Betty, and the nurse looked around and said, “Huh, where IS Betty? Oh! She’s right behind you.” And it was like she’d suddenly stepped in from a parallel dimension, which was a hint to me how this whole visit was going to feel. I turned around and there she was, standing far closer to me than anyone would be comfortable with. I said, “Hi Betty, I’m Vicar Aaron, from First Lutheran Church, and I’m here to see you!” Betty smiled, and took my hand, and walked me over to an empty chair next to a man sitting in a wheelchair, and sat me down, and walked away, so that I could talk to him. It took me a few more minutes before I figured out what was going on. Betty thought she was one of the nurses, and so obviously if I was here to see a patient, it would have to be someone who wasn’t her.
A few minutes later I had coaxed her into her room, after assuring her several times that I was a pastor and, look, see here is my communion kit, when she got up and muttered something I couldn’t make out, and she tooled off down the hallway toward the nurse’s desk again. And that man in the wheelchair. Whom she proceeded to bring down the hall, to her room, so that I could sit and visit with him. She was very insistent. This strange man, Carl was his name, told me that Betty was very kind, and very sweet, and a very strong woman, and did I know that there was a train going up the mountain, and it was going to have to be repaired so it would run again? I must have been absent from class that day in seminary when we learned how to sit and visit with people who don’t make sense.
I honestly had no idea what to say or do in this situation. I felt completely foolish, stuck sitting with two people whose expectations of me I was totally incapable of meeting. We talked for a while, a very strange little conversation that made absolutely no sense, and when I decided I just couldn’t take any more, I did what I do when I’m ready to bring a visit to a close: I opened up my little box, and brought out the bread and the wine. The three of us shared communion. Betty wasn’t entirely certain what to do with these things I’d handed her, and Carl—I mean, who knows if he was even Christian, though I’m betting he was, because when I gave him the bread, he cried. And then he dropped the wafer on his pants, and immediately forgot it was there, but I think the point got across anyway. I, for one, was surprised to feel the presence of God, tangibly and viscerally, in that communion in a way I hadn’t for a long time. And I saw clearly that this visit wasn’t really about what I could do or say with these children of God. I was totally inadequate to the task. We sat there, three foolish people, doing something utterly foolish, sharing the simplest of food, proclaiming Jesus Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. In what the world calls foolishness, there is godly power and wisdom.
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul is writing to a community of people who are deeply divided. In the sections of this letter that we’ve heard the last two weeks, he calls them to “Get serious about Christ,” as Pastor Dan said last Sunday. They had separated themselves on a variety of base-ees, including which church leader they owed their allegiance to. Paul urges them to give their allegiance to Christ, through whom and in whom all things have their being. Today, he talks about how foolish this allegiance is, because by all rational measures, connecting ourselves to Jesus Christ makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
It’s strange to think about Jesus that way, but it’s true. When he was an infant, his parents traveled to Egypt on the advice of an apparition, becoming refugees so that their baby wouldn’t be killed. As an adult, Jesus drew to himself a group of people who would become his most faithful followers: Simple fishermen, tax collectors, revolutionary zealots, sinners all. Not exactly the sort of people you should call to begin a movement, if you want that movement to last. He proclaimed wisdom to large crowds—if you can call it wisdom, the sort of things he said: Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account—though I suspect you won’t feel very blessed with all that. Utter foolishness, that teaching. After a triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he passed bread and wine to his disciples and told them they were eating his flesh and blood. He was arrested, on charges as terrible as “disturbing the peace,” convicted and sentenced, and sent to the cross, a humiliating, painful, disgraceful death. Who would follow such folly, such foolishness?
This is the story we tell, sisters and brothers. It’s an absurd tale, of the short-lived rise and eventual execution of a nobody in an unimportant corner of the world. And yet somehow, generations and generations of people have seen in this Jesus neither stumbling block nor foolishness but the power of God and the wisdom of God. In what the world calls foolishness, there is godly power and wisdom.
There is an old blessing that says, “May you live in interesting times.” Personally, I’m starting to feel like the times we live in are a little too interesting. Our nation and our world is gripped by fear, and that fear has become the motivating factor in our approach to the challenges of our day. We create divisions among ourselves in a way that is even more polarized than that ancient community of Corinthians. They belonged to Apollo or Cephas or Paul; we belong to one political movement or another, to one ideology or another, and indeed to one president or candidate or politician or visionary or another, just as truly. We forget that we belong to Christ.
But how can we trust in Christ when we need to protect ourselves from the fear of unemployment, the fear of our children’s future, the fear of such evils as terrorism in our world? We have the right to protect our borders and our lives by enacting policies that subject those wanting to enter our country to increased scrutiny. It would be the height of foolishness to allow Mexican drug cartels, or the fundamentalist perversion of a peace-loving religion like Islam, to continue to rule the world in the way they have these last fifteen years. We must respond to power with power.
Or what about our own politicians? Should we not protect ourselves from their abuses of power, too? If we allow them to take away healthcare, to put restrictions on the people entering our country, to resurrect evils like the Berlin wall in our own backyard, are we not participating ourselves in this perversion of justice? It would be the height of foolishness to allow our political system to go unchecked, to do whatever they want, to unravel all of the progress we’ve made over the last decade. We must respond to power with power.
Or must we? Either of these two options ultimately come to the same conclusion: The worldly wisdom that true justice is expressed in the exercise of power. We forget that these issues are not political issues. They are faith issues. They are biblical issues. The authors of Exodus and Leviticus and Ruth were writing about immigration and refugees several thousand years before our politicians took them up. And the instructions of these works are clear. How do we respond to power? We respond not with more power, either for or against, but with love. Jesus was God’s ultimate affordable care act. And what does a faith community like ours do when our nation places a ban on accepting refugees from Somalia? The answer is the same, whether you think that ban is a good idea or not. We adopt a family of Somalian refugees, perhaps a mother with six beautiful children, and treat them with dignity and love, finding them clothing and furniture and food, carrying them to doctor’s appointments, inviting them to our church picnic, making them to no longer be “them” but part of “us” instead. This is what Christians do. We take action to love our neighbor, to love the stranger, to love even those we fear might be our enemies. We not only trust Jesus’ promise that the poor are blessed; we go out and bless the poor, because we know how much God has already blessed us.
I’ll be honest. This isn’t a very satisfying solution to the situations we’ve gotten ourselves into. It doesn’t take away my fear and worry. Maybe I just don’t have enough faith to trust that God’s love will transform the world the way he promises. Because it seems like utter foolishness to me. But then, it was foolish for God to create this crazy world in the first place, and it was foolish for God to defeat the power of death by dying on a cross, and it continues to be foolish for God to show up in the most unexpected god-sightings, like when three people share communion in a nursing home ward. And in what the world calls foolishness, there is godly power and wisdom. Amen.