Absolute Foolishness

"Absolute Foolishness"
1 Corinthians 1:18-31

I was disappointed with my seminary experience.  I'm not sure what I was expecting seminary would be like, looking back at that time in my life.  Because, as I said in another sermon, I felt the call to go into the ministry when I was in 7th grade, I never entertained any other possibility for my future.  I was going to be a Pastor.  That was that.  Which meant I had to finish college, then go on to seminary.

I watched what the three pastors of my home church in Seattle did.  The senior pastor seemed to sit in his office during the week and preach on Sunday.  The Christian Education minister was in charge of a huge Sunday School program.  And the Youth Minister, who I got to know best of the three, was like an energizer bunny building the youth groups from just a handful to over 50 every week.

But I was getting to know them so I could see what a minister did, not what their seminary training was all about.  I felt the calling, so I kept the three men under observation, so I could see what I was getting myself into.  I knew they had gone to seminary—that I was going to have to go to seminary.  I had no idea what happened there.

All I could picture were a bunch of monks sitting at their desks, with the stub of a burning candle shining a spare light, copying ancient texts by hand.  Chanting the Psalms, while unrolling dusty scrolls from ancient shelves in some archive room of the seminary.  Which is what seminary was, way back in the good old days of the 1600's.  I wondered if, at seminary, they still made you shave the crown of your head into a round bald spot.

But I think that's what I pictured when I thought of seminary:  a contemplative retreat where students walked the idyllic grounds talking about the wonders of scripture.  And praying together for long hours at a time.

But it wasn't like that at all.  It's one of the hardest Master's Degree programs you can attend.  The academics are rigorous.  It's a three year degree program, that usually takes four if you include an internship—which is what I did.  We also, in addition to our studies, had to work in a church in the community 20 hours a week.  No other Master's Degree program takes that long and is that demanding.

We had a prayer room off the chapel, but it was the least used room on campus, so they turned it into a janitor closet.  So much for spending long hours in prayer.  One of the first worship services I attended at seminary, lead by a student, closed with the song, "The Ants Go Marching Two-By-Two," and we all recessed out of the church together.  It was the mid-1970's and the church was really struggling with being relevant.  In seminary, being relevant was taken to the extreme, to the detriment of worship.

So, to say I was disappointed with my seminary experience is a serious understatement.  Half of our entering class quit some time during our first year.  I was almost one of them, but my sense of calling kept me going.

What was hardest was that seminary was just like any other Master's program of study, only harder.  Seminary trained us to be theologians, not Pastors.  We were trained in the wisdom of the world—psychology and philosophy—not the wisdom of God.  And what seminaries don't get is that congregations don't give a rats whisker for us being intellectual theologians.  Congregations want to know if we as Pastor's love them and if we love the Lord.

I've only had one guy in one congregation who wanted to do some intellectual, theological sparring with me.  He read theology as a hobby.  He probably knew more than I did about theology.  But he didn't know about prayer, or God, or relationship, or worship, which is what it's all about.

Needless to say, I was very confused when I got out of seminary.  I wasn't sure what I had to preach.  What they actually did to us in seminary was rip us apart with this philosophical theology, and never really put us back together again.  We were a bunch of Humpty Dumpty's who had had a great fall, and all the kings men and all the king's horses couldn't put us back together again.  But we were supposed to be leading a church!

I had to throw myself on the mercy of God.  And figure out, with the help of a couple of great mentors, what it really meant to be a Pastor.

You'd think, at seminary, they'd get the message of the Gospel and the Cross, right.  Looking at all that Paul was upset about concerning the Corinthian Church, in terms of the "wisdom of the world" vs. "the message of the Cross" were the same things I was upset about in seminary.  Paul wrote the message of the Cross doesn't make sense to lost people, so what did that say about most of my seminary professors?  Paul wrote that God saves only those who believe in this "foolish" message of the Cross, so what does that say about most of my seminary professors who didn't?  Paul wrote that we can't learn about God through the wisdom of the world, so why did most of my seminary professors teach the wisdom of the world rather than the message of the Cross?  Paul wrote that God will turn the wisdom of the world into confusion.  It sure happened to me.  Why did confusion have to be the result of my going to seminary?  You'd think it would be the opposite.

(I'm just making these comments about the seminary I attended.  Not all seminaries are like that.  Just wanted to make that clear.)

I think there are a lot of people who are confused about the message of the Cross.  That message makes no sense to maybe most people.

Like college students.  It just seems to be a normal occurrence that you get away from home for the first time and you get to decide a lot of things away from parental control and guidance.  You enter the realm of a totally different "group think."  You get "alternate facts" and "fake news" thrown at you from day one, and your faith and beliefs about the gospel are the first things to go into the blender of your confusion.

Or suburbanites, who I think are the toughest mission field.  Missionaries go to central Africa or rural China and find people are ready to embrace the message of the Cross.  But suburbia is throwing the message of the Cross, and church in general, out with the baptismal water.  Has been, for decades.  They are more concerned about what's causing the erosion of the American Dream than they are about holding on to the Gospel Dream.

Or large corporate headquarters.  See if you can get your way into a board room of a multinational company and tell them about the message of the Cross.  See how long it takes for you to be ushered, unceremoniously, out the front door.  The bottom line, and the welfare of stockholders is way more important than the message of the Cross.

Or politics.  A fatal misreading of the Constitutional amendment about the freedom of religion has killed the informing of politics by religion.  Instead we have the oft quoted line, "Religion and politics… (don't mix)."  Some of the best prayers I have read are in a collection by Peter Marshall, the Presbyterian Pastor who was Chaplain of the Senate in the late 1940's.  He would open up each session of the Senate with a prayer, and those prayers were incisive, and prophetic, and sermonic.  But not anymore.  Now, because of political correctness, you will never hear a prayer about the message of the Cross on the floor of the U.S. Senate.  You may not even hear a prayer anymore.

Our country has gone the way of the Corinthians.

So, what are we supposed to do when we are faced with a world that doesn't care about one of our most fundamental beliefs:  "Christ, the Crucified?"  How are we supposed to find our place in a culture, even our religious culture, that is attempting to cut the legs out from under our "way of salvation"?  How will our faith survive when our cherished "Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness" to most people?  Even in the training ground of novice pastors.


One of the questions that seems to be driving Paul, in the opening of this letter to the Corinthians is, What really proves the power of your personal beliefs?  Then Paul writes about three different answers to that question, based on three different belief sets.

The first belief set is that of the Jews.  Paul wrote that the power of Jewish faith is their "clamor for miraculous demonstrations."  Remember one of the questions the Jews kept asking Jesus:  "Show us a sign.  Show us a miracle to prove who you are."

The flavor of the Jewish hunger for the miraculous was caught in a humorous way in the musical, "Jesus Christ, Superstar."  Jesus has been arrested and is being questioned by Herod.  In the song Herod sings to Jesus, one of the verses is:


So if you are the Christ
You're the great Jesus Christ
Prove to me that You're no fool
Walk across my swimming pool.
If You do that for me
Then I'll let you go free.
C'mon, King of the Jews!

The whole song is a daring of Jesus to do the miraculous.  To prove his power by doing something flashy.

Think of all the miracles associated with the major salvation story in the history of the Jews—the Exodus.  I've been creating my children's stories, of late, out of this freedom story of the Hebrew slaves.  Stories of miraculous plagues, and a miraculous walking stick, and the miracle man, Moses, who is backed by a miracle God.  It is the miraculous that drives the power of Jewish spirituality, says Paul.  It's the way of most of the Old Testament stories.  Christ, the Crucified doesn't seem very miraculous.  It seemed to them to be absolute foolishness.

For the Greeks, it's altogether something different.   Paul calls it, "philosophical wisdom."  Something that sounds wise.  Something that's intellectually stimulating.  Some new idea.  Something that struggles with the big questions of, What is life?  What is the good?  Why are we human's here?  What is truth?  Christ, the Crucified doesn't seem to be an adequate answer to any of these so-called great philosophical questions.  Instead it seemed to the Greeks to be absolute foolishness.

But, for we Christians, Christ, the Crucified is the message of God's power and wisdom.  Notice, I said the Cross is the message of God's power.  My original question was, What really proves the power of your personal beliefs?   What really gives you the power of your personal beliefs isn't you—it is God.  It isn't your wisdom.  It isn't your ability to pull of a Moses-like miracle.  It is God, and God only.

The main problem with the Corinthian church, and with today's church, is that people make the assumption that God must think like we do.  That some of our best thinkers must be at least close to what God thinks.  That our definition of miracle is the same as it is with God.  Or that the answers to the big, philosophical, life questions we come up with will match right up, word-for-word with God's.

Not so, writes Paul.  God's wisdom is based on that which is so different from ours, most don't get it.  God's action of the miraculous is so much broader than ours, we miss most of what God is doing right under our noses every day.  Especially in terms of those Cross-shaped experiences of life and death that we face every day, that most people refuse to see or understand.