Foolish Christianity (before Lent Begins)

Think about Jesus’ most distinctive teachings. What does he teach that is undeniably unique? Isn’t there something humorous, playful, ironic, joyous in what he teaches?

• if someone strikes you, turn the other cheek.
• if someone forces you to go a mile with them, go two.
• if someone compels you to give up your shirt, offer your jacket as well.
• love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you and bless them.

All of those were in the Sermon on the Mount, and they sounded as foolish then as they do now. Only a foolish, little person would believe and practice such things! Only a fool for Christ would try to live them out! But there’s more!

• give your life away for God’s sake, then you will gain it.
• the greatest among you is the servant of all.
• find the greatest freedom in obedience.
• discover that Christ is to be found in the poor, in “the least of these.”
• trust that your redemption comes from a man who died in a state execution.

I read recently about a fellow who went on a college class trip into New York City. He saw his first Street Preacher working the sidewalks. The Preacher had on a sandwich message board. One side read, “I am a fool for Christ.” The other side said, “Who are you a fool for?” I guess that’s the point. We are always going to spend our time being a fool for somebody. What’s your choice? The gospel calls us to be “Fools for Christ.” We could try it out. But what would it be like?

We could fight against all our Midwestern Reasonableness and do something foolish for Christ. We could try to:

• forgive someone who doesn’t even ask for forgiveness.
• be kind to someone who doesn’t really deserve it.
• stop being just nice and tolerant and start being deeply compassionate.
• love our enemy, instead of fighting fire with fire.
• resolve to let someone “begin again” in our affections, in spite of all the ways they have disappointed or betrayed us.
• give to someone who cannot repay us.
• pray for someone’s healing or their deeper spiritual conversion to God and neighbor, against all the odds that we can see.
• give thanks for the foolishness of the little man, Jesus.

On the public radio program, “Speaking of Faith,” Krista Tippett interviewed the FBI whistle-blower from Minneapolis, Colleen Rowley. Now, if there was ever a foolish person, Colleen Rowley was one. There she was with a perfectly safe and stable career with the FBI, and she chose to jeopardize all of that by challenging her bosses about their performance in analyzing clues that came to them before the 9/11 terrorism incident. In fact, Rowley voluntarily took a cut in grade and pay because her own colleagues refused to work with her. Colleen talked about what motivated her to challenge the quality of the work done by the FBI, in spite of the personal risks she was taking. She concluded her remarks by referring to a statement that has become important to her. It is based on the “Ten Paradoxical Commandments,” written by Kent Keith. It’s a strangely foolish statement, yet it seems to capture the attitude we need to have if we are to even begin to be the fools for Christ that Paul imagined in 1 Corinthians. There are several versions of it, but here is one for you to consider:

The Paradoxical Commandments

1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
   Love them anyway.
2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
   Do good anyway.
3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
   Succeed anyway.
4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
   Do good anyway.
5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
   Be honest and frank anyway.
6. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
   Think big anyway.
7. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
   Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
   Build anyway.
9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
   Help people anyway.
10. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
    Give the world the best you have anyway.

Foolish, foolish advice, but it is the wisdom of God. It is the way of the little man whom we often call “Lord and Savior.”

At the Threshold of Light

A close friend died on December 22, just past the winter solstice--as the longest night's darkness turns toward increasing light. The date would have meant something to him. He was a practicing Buddhist, and he saw his death as a threshold to something further, some new illumination that was now pending and opening to him.

When his family contacted his friends, they asked that all would pray for white Light to guide Andy. When they contacted us later, it was to let us know when he died. At the time I was hiking a trail near Lutsen, and the thought that was repeating itself in my mind as I stepped along the trail was just a question, "How would Andy's soul find me here if he were dying now?" Somehow he did come to find me on the day that light begins to increase.

In a rather different way, the Christ child has also come to find us, all of us--as the longest darkness recedes and gives way to increasing light. "He was the true light that enlightens everyone, coming into the world" (John 1:9). We ask ourselves, how will he find us; well, he knows us. He loves us, and he comes to find us wherever we are. He is a true friend.

"The Word Became Flesh" and the Body Became Wise

A Jewish poet remarked that we must “unscroll the Torah of our bodies.” The poet meant, I think, that our living bodies are continuous discoveries and marvels for us; only gradually opening, only revealing little by little, the beauty, the truth and the wisdom donated to us by God through the gift of our personal bodily being.

People say they don’t like their bodies. Too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too wide, too narrow. Paagh! What a blunder! What a mistake! What incomprehension! For this third week in Advent, reflecting upon the ways “the Word became flesh”, we recognize the incredible persistence with which the human body seeks healing and life and meaning. This human body, in its wisdom and perhaps in its homesickness for the divine, hungrily and accurately reaches for the image and healing of the enfleshed Wisdom of God.

Look at Mark 5. A woman with a 12-year chronic illness hears about Jesus. She sees him in her town. She follows him. In the middle of a crowd of people, she inches up to him, closer and closer. As he slows to talk with others, she drops to her knees and humbly, invisibly, out of the depths of her suffering body, reaches out toward his body, toward only the hem of his clothing, as toward healing, toward light, toward life, toward incarnate love. The cure comes. At the same time, Jesus notices communication: he receives a pleading touch; he gives a restorative energy.

It was a cure by incarnation: the incarnation of divine compassion in Jesus, and the incarnation of human yearning, suffering and need in the woman.

In Christian terms, the wisdom or Logos of God, having accepted human life with its limitations and sorrows, will impart the easing and the ending of human suffering. The human body recognizes in the Christ, in his life and in “his wounds”, our hope and our healing. The exilic Isaiah says, and the early Christian community heard, that the Suffering body, the wise Servant, was “pierced for our transgressions…by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5, NIV). By his divine Wisdom and compassion, we recognize our own potential to impart ease or to end the suffering of others.

Conversion

We visited the town of Pollenzo, Italy a couple of weeks ago. There are remnants of a Roman town underlying everything there. We did not realize how these ruins still shaped the city until we learned that the "circle" of homes at the center of town actually rested upon the old foundations of a 10,000 seat colliseum. Mysteriously, the enclosed arena of one era's violent and brutal entertainments, gladiator fights and so on, had now become the flower beds and fruit trees of another epoch. The "conversion" of the arena into peaceful gardens may be a sign of true hope.

The Mystery of Orange

“There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.” --John Calvin

When the sun set the other evening, there was a precious, short time when it shone between the cold cloud-line and the treed-horizon. The sun made the most of its single moment that day, setting as a thin, bright orange wall of color between grey clouds and darkening trees. As my wife and I walked, we became burnished, and every plant, sign, and house shone with the influence of the sunset. We were glorified by the incident of nature's timing.

Later, I think, how surprising that I cannot find "orange" in the NRSV translation of the Bible. Something of beauty, truth and goodness exceed our Scripture's expressions. As John Calvin once wrote, “Man with all his shrewdness is as stupid about understanding...the mysteries of God, as an ass is incapable of understanding musical harmony.” The mystery of Orange--and of much, much else from God will be unknown to us. Thank heaven!

The Beginning of Love: Listening

One of the greatest treasures of life is the person who understands you. I opened a phone conversation the other day with the confidence-building words, "Please let me be neurotic for a minute." My friend was completely open to that, listened for the requisite time needed, then brought me back to the normal planet we usually inhabit. Some day, I will do the same for my friend. I know this. We have been through it before. My turn, your turn. It's like the old house rule: "Only one person gets to be crazy at a time." Another way to put it: you'll get your turn. I'll get mine. It will be all right. Bonhoeffer wrote, "The beginning of love for the (brothers and sisters) is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that He not only gives us His Word but lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him.”

Do No Harm

On a recent road-trip to Kentucky my son, Nate, and I visited a Civil War site, the Mill Springs Battlefield, where Nate’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Hendricks, fought with the 10th Indiana Infantry. Some of what went on there involved hand-to-hand fighting. One story that came from that battlefield was told by a Union private who remembered long after the battle that as his company pursued their retreating enemy with bayonets fixed, he came across a Rebel soldier hiding behind a tree. He clubbed the man down with the butt of his rifle. His enemy looked at him and begged, “Don’t kill me.” The Union soldier told this enemy, “It is too late for talk.”


The story struck home. In many ways our public speech, societal and international relations are embattled, fearful and disturbed. We may feel pressured and anxious to get control over this. It’s common to say, for example, of our politics today that we “take no prisoners”. The problem with that is that it ends discussion and the prospect of reconciliation or agreement while it is actually not too late to achieve them. A Christian is called to something different from anxious provocation; a Christian is at least called to refrain from making things worse. John Wesley’s first simple rule is, “Do no harm…Avoid evil…” And Jesus counsels, “Love your enemies…Pray for those who persecute you…” (Matthew 5:44).


Harming others can certainly tempt us. As Henri Nouwen wrote, “When we have been deeply hurt by another person, it is nearly impossible not to have hostile thoughts, feelings of anger or hatred, and even a desire to take revenge.... Still, whenever we move beyond our wounded selves and claim our God-given selves, we give life not just to ourselves but also to the ones who have offended us.”


There is time for talk—and for mercy; it is never too late. What if we practiced Wesley’s rule, and Jesus’ sacred directives, to set aside the metaphorical bayonets of hostility in our stressful conflicts? A brief pause in the brutality of the Crusades occurred in August 1219, when St. Francis of Assisi called directly on Al-Kamil, the Sultan of Egypt, and spent several days in discussion with him, attempting to restore peace. I understand he also appealed to the Pope to do the same. As far as I know, neither of these discussions reduced the hostilities of that Crusade, but I don’t think that matters as much as his decision to keep praying for his enemy and to keep seeking paths of reconciliation. Francis showed us a Christian’s way, even in conflicted situations, when he prayed, Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace…