For Fools Only

by Alexandra Coe

July 21st is the feast day of St Simeon the Holy Fool, the patron saint of Ship of Fools. In celebration, Alexandra Coe gives a sermon on the cross, which is for fools only.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved. For as it is written: I destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the knowledge of those who are in the know I do away with.

Where is the smart-aleck? Where is the intellectual? Where is the president of the world's debating club? Hasn't God made foolish the so-called "wisdom" of the world? For since in God's wisdom, wisdom was not the way the world could come to know God, it was pleasing to God to save believers through the foolishness of the preaching (1 Corinthians 1:18-22).

IF THERE'S A kind of person nobody likes, it's a know-it-all. I have to admit that as a child, I was a know-it-all. My mother once accused me rightly of being a spoiled brat – and in my usual smart-alecky way, I replied, "Well, you spoiled me!"

The church in Corinth was a know-it-all church. Now there are know-it-alls in every church, but the church at Corinth had more than its share. To use the fancy name for them, they were "gnostics". Gnostics claimed to have the "true religion" – whatever that means – and tended to look down on simpler Christians who weren't in the know. The really bad thing was that this was dividing the church. This so-called wisdom, in fact, turned out to be not so wise after all, as far as the church's life was concerned.

In interpreting this passage about the wisdom of the world, we have to be careful. Paul is not denouncing all wisdom and expertise as inherently evil. No, when Paul mocks the "wisdom of the world", what he is talking about is any wisdom that sets itself up as autonomous in its relation to God, as the be-all and end-all and answer to all things, without a humble recognition of its own limits – a wisdom which unwittingly becomes an idol to those who espouse it.

This "wisdom of the world" is the wisdom that Adam and Eve appropriated for themselves; they wanted by themselves to "know good and evil" – a Hebrew euphemism for "everything". They wanted not to need God. That is the wisdom of the world which Paul condemns – a wisdom that pretends self-sufficiency and all-embracing scope, that sets itself over against God. Any wisdom that does so, any wisdom that pretends to be a panacea, turns out to be foolishness, just as the gnostics' wisdom was foolishness as far as the well-being of their church was concerned.

Such wisdom can be science or it can be a political system. My grandfather, Paul Scherer, a Lutheran preacher, wrote:

Who is left now to champion democracy as the panacea of all the ills that flesh is heir to? We shall hardly do again what one author did [in the 1920s] – set down "Kingdom of Heaven" in the index, and under it, "See Democracy".

We need not be anti-scientific or anti-technological to agree with this. Science and technology are beneficial insofar as they advance and enrich the common life of people. But we all know what happens when they are pursued for their own sake, when through a kind of hubris and titanism they become ends in themselves, rather than means to the end of the well-being of society and the world. The A-bomb was one possible result of this attitude.

ANY FORM OF wisdom that does not see itself in perspective is a dead-end street. It is as Scherer wrote, "man exalting himself and thus becoming the puppet and the pawn of his own success". Of this kind of wisdom, Milton Mayer wrote:

The civilization which stemmed in Greek philosophy, and towered high in medieval cathedrals, has flowered in department stores. The ends of life have become the goods of the body. Existence has been turned into a continuous bank-run; and the bank is now closing.

Such wisdom culminated in the 60s with such pearls as "down with absolutes", and more recently in a New York Times Magazine article by Jack Miles on the Christmas story which located the value of that story in the fact that it "rings true psychologically".

Even religion can become the damnable wisdom of the world: if it sets itself up as autonomous, over against God, and pretends to be impervious to God and God's Holy Spirit – like the Pope's pronouncement that the prohibition against ordaining women is infallible; like any church that calls itself a church but in reality is always one way or another trying to distance itself from the ridiculous foolishness of the doctrine of Christ crucified and risen. Even religion can become seduced, because sin is sin and people are people, and they can use anything, any so-called wisdom, even religion, to set a wall between themselves and God.

FOR THE MESSAGE of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. It was indeed foolishness to those steeped in Jewish tradition and in Greco-Roman thought – to whom a suffering God was a contradiction in terms, to whom a blessed life was a happy and prosperous life and not one that could end up shamed on a cross. Minucius Felix, a Roman writer who ridiculed Christianity, wrote:

To say that a man put to death for a crime and the lethal wooden cross are objects of veneration is to assign altars suitable for abandoned and impious men, the only kind of worship they deserve.

Against the wisdom of Minucius Felix Paul sets foolishness – the ridiculous doctrine of the cross. That God became equivalent to a particular human being alone stretches credibility; but that God should die and his presumably decaying body be raised up in three days: how could intelligent people believe such a thing?

I certainly never believed it, when I was at that arrogant age of 16 when the only things that mattered were the things I could touch and taste and see, and my own intellect and my own pain were the most truly real things in the world. It's a teaching, surely, for fools only. Or so I believed, until many years and many tears later.

And just as surely, it's a faith which, in the 1990s, is dangerous and stupid to espouse. I know of no surer, quicker way to end a casual conversation than by telling someone next to me on a bus or a train that I'm an ordained minister. The wisdom of the world reacts in polite but contemptuous silence to the news that someone who at first seems reasonably intelligent could identify herself with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and the Eyelash Queen, Tammy Faye Bakker.

Fools for Christ! Indeed we are, who sit in sanctuaries with their numbers that have steadily dwindled over the years, fueled by sheer determination and love in the name of that foolish doctrine, the preposterous cross of Jesus Christ. That surely is no wisdom worthy of the name.

IT IS IN FACT foolishness – but it is a foolishness that has power. Note Paul's strange figure of speech. "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is" – and you would expect him here to say "wisdom" in apposition to "foolishness", but he does not. Instead, he says it is "power – to those who are being saved."

What is this power that belongs to the foolishness of the cross? The Greek word here translated as "power" means something akin to "energy" – something with vast reserves that radiate like electricity and enables things to be done. It is the word from which we get our word "dynamic".

From the foolishness of the cross there radiates power. The true test of the cross is what the cross has done. Paul Scherer said that the cross is not a symbol, it is an act – it is God's conquering presence in the world that God has made. Think of the power generated by that act on Calvary! Think of what it has done for so many lives, in so many different places. It has accomplished things that no human being could ever accomplish alone. It has brought people who were as good as dead back to life – no, not even back to life, but to a real life such as they had never known.

It has broken down prejudice. It has brought forgiveness where there had been grudges cherished for years and years. It has brought spirit back into the most weary and hope to the most hopeless and comfort to the most grieving. That is the power that the foolishness of the cross radiates. If that is foolishness, then please God, let me be a fool!

LET US, let Christianity, rename and reclaim this power, the power of the cross. For a gospel without a cross becomes as Scherer wrote...

... a mere wraith of God's purpose, wandering absent-mindedly from room to room of humanity's tragic house, wringing its hands, mumbling its creeds, its best wishes and kindest regards – stroking a cross, but never getting itself crucified, because it is not worth crucifying.

What we need is a Christianity with power; and the only power worth having is the power of the cross: forgiving, self-emptying, self-forgetting power; the power to live truly and to love freely; the power to die and die again to our old selves, that we might truly live.

It is foolish, no doubt, to those who are perishing – or, as we might translate, "those who are in the process of dying inside". Perhaps we will never convince them otherwise. They may never be persuaded by the foolishness of our preaching. But let us continue to be fools, and let them continue to watch us with unbelieving eyes. Maybe sometime they'll see something that will make then look twice; and maybe then, foolishness will become as it is for us – their hearts' desire, their true power, their glory, their joy and their crown.

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? God has; and wisdom's tragedy is that it does not see that it has been made a fool of. And the tragedy will go on, until every system of knowledge has overarched itself to its own destruction; and every piece of so-called wisdom sees that the only hope it can offer humankind is to bow itself in subjection and humility to the foolishness of the cross, so that it may be free to die to itself, and thus to live. May that day come – and this world's wisdom pass away.

Rev Alexandra Coe is pastor of the Blooming Grove United Church of Christ, an Open and Affirming Congregation of the United Church of Christ in Blooming Grove, New York. She is a PhD candidate in Religion at Columbia University and is presently completing a dissertation on the patristic interpretation of the Lord's Prayer. She also writes and performs theological cabaret at various conferences of the United Church of Christ.

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