Called to Foolishness

A sermon on Matthew 4:12-23 and 1 Corinthians 1:10-18. [Photo by Sven Pieren on Unsplash]

In our denomination (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), the process for becoming a pastor is called Candidacy. It involves a variety of requirements, including both formal schooling and practical training, psychological testing, a number of writing submissions, and three separate meetings in which the candidate sits in a room full of more experienced pastors and synod leaders who ask you questions in order to judge your fitness for the Ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Those meetings are definitely intimidating, although they also give us a chance to talk about theology, and mission, and calling… the kinds of things that pastor-type people like to talk about, so it’s not all bad.

But, of all the questions I answered over the course of those meetings, I only remember one in detail: Our former Bishop, Tracie Bartholomew, asked me to tell the committee a story of a mistake I had made in ministry.

I remember that question because it threw me a bit.

Not because I couldn’t think of any mistakes. We all make mistakes. I just wasn’t prepared to talk about them in that context.

To be clear, I am a big fan of introspection and self-awareness in general, but I was in interview mode. I wanted to demonstrate the depth of my calling and impress the committee with my pastoral skills. I wanted to showcase stories of my wisdom, not of my foolishness.

Of course, Bishop Tracie was wise in her question. She understood how much we can learn from how someone handles failures.

And she also knew that pastors need to be comfortable looking a bit foolish, if we are going to preach the message of the cross.

The Apostle Paul says as much in today’s reading from 1 Corinthians, admitting that “the message about the cross is foolishness to whose who are perishing,” even though those who have been touched by it know its saving power.

And viewed from an outsider’s perspective, the cross IS foolish.

The cross represents powerlessness and death; humiliation and torture. It is an execution reserved for the despised or defeated.

Who hitches their wagon to that star?!

Well, Paul does.

Which is pretty shocking considering both his background and his personality.

His writings, as a whole, reveal a pattern of authoritative, proclamatory argument that can sometimes lean into self-righteous territory.

His training was in rhetoric, which in Greco-Roman culture was all about winning the argument.

And his commitment to religious purity made him an infamous persecutor of the church before his dramatic conversion.

Paul is the kind of person who always wants to be RIGHT, not the kind of person who is willing to look FOOLISH. (I can recognize it because I can relate.)

But in his letter to the Corinthian church, Paul lets all of that go… and I think I know why.

The Corinthian church is tearing itself apart because of divisions, but more specifically the church is divided over egos.

They have created a delusional and contentious hierarchy of apostolic authority and used it to draw lines in the sand.

This division is not about theology, not really; this is about status. It’s about feeling better-than as a way to prove importance.

So, in response, Paul models for this struggling community how to lean in the opposite direction.

He starts with direct confrontation, pointing out the heretical theological consequences of the argument, but then goes on this scatterbrained tangent about how he hasn’t baptized people so they can’t use that in their argument, oh except, maybe I have baptized a few more than I was thinking. Actually, I can’t really remember, that’s not the point.

Except, I think it is at least a little bit the point.

He is illustrating the point that presenting yourself as having all the answers is not the point because the gospel is the point.

And Paul is willing to make a fool of himself to bring the conversation back around to where it is supposed to stay.

Not on “eloquent wisdom,” but on the gospel of Jesus.

On the good news of a God who was willing to be despised, not to mention tortured and murdered, in order to break through the web of sin that had people trapped in the very kinds of futile searches for meaning and security that the Corinthian church was caught in.

He doesn’t want their argument over ego to “empty the cross of its power.”

Today’s gospel, of course, comes on the other end of the story: at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, not at the cross.

But even so, there is a common thread of revelation.

In this account of Jesus calling his first disciples we hear Jesus say two things.

This first is a call to repentance.

Jesus’s invitation starts with the need for confession… with the willingness to admit mistakes and long for change.

The second is his invitation to “follow me,” with the promise to make the new disciples “fishers of people.”

Now, that promise – on its own –  could have the potential to go in the Corinthian direction:

The disciples could view their first-comers identity and their commission to gather others in as a sign of superiority.

Or, they could get competitive about it, seeing who among the twelve could pull in the biggest catch.

Except, the call to follow comes only after the call to repent.

And it’s a call to follow, not lead.

Even from the beginning of his ministry, Jesus knows that he is heading toward the cross.

This is not a path of glory.

It is not a path that will feed inflated ego needs (despite how many Christians ever since have tried to twist the faith to that purpose).

It is a path that from the very beginning requires admitting our foolishness and our need to be changed by God’s way of doing things.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

“The kingdom of God,” God’s way of doing things, is different from the ways of the world, of course.

Where the world values power, God values self-giving love.

Where the world values authority, God values unity.

Where the world values the wisdom of “winning”, God values the foolishness of repentance.

And if the world has ever needed the foolishness of repentance, it is now.

The world we are living in is a world of power and ego run amok and it is doing incalculable harm.

Harm to our climate; harm to truth; harm to peace; harm to our basic humanity.

The Corinthian church was tearing itself apart over problematic allegiances, but they were the picture of unity compared to our country, and the church has not been as loud as we need to be about how deeply our society has run away from the way of God.

We are a church, and a country in deep need of embracing the foolishness of repentance.

And I know that a call for repentance when government agents are shooting people in the streets with apparent and promised immunity DOES sound foolish.

It’s really hard to believe that we can come back from this brink through calls to conscience.

But Jesus calls his disciples to follow the way of the cross.

The way not of power over, but of foolishness for the sake of a salvation that goes deeper than power, or ego, or loyalty ever can.

Because power can never save us from the evil that power creates.

For that, we need to look to Jesus, and his self-giving way of love.

Thanks be to God.