Unconventional Wisdom--March 5, 2024

Unconventional Wisdom--March 5, 2024

"For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength." [1 Corinthians 1:22-25]

Let me rattle off a few of the basic tenets of "common sense" that I regularly hear tossed around. There are plenty of variations, but I bet you've heard enough of these that you could sing along, too, if you like. The "pearls" of convention wisdom that we've all heard before go something like this:

"You have to look out for Number One--yourself!--in this life."

"You have to get THEM before they get YOU in this dog-eat-dog world."

"The only people who really matter are the 'winners' of life, and you can tell who the winners are, because they have more money, more influence, more power, more fans or followers, more muscle, and more stuff."

"If you're a winner, they let you do anything you want and get away with it. Rules are for losers, and losers are forgettable."

If that isn't conventional wisdom, I'll eat my hat. And it is that kind of conventional wisdom that leads the world into interminable wars, looping cycles of animosity between strangers, and what feels like our endless fear of one another. It's the rationale for always wanting to have a bigger stick... or sword... or rifle... or cannon... or nuclear missile, so that you can get the other guy before he gets you. We are drowning in the sea of conventional wisdom.

So it shouldn't surprise us that when God sends us a life-preserver on those billowing waves, the watching world thinks that God's way looks weak and stupid. God knows that's what the world thinks. God just doesn't care. And even more significant, God won't get lured into a petty shouting match with the world that thinks God's way of saving the world (the cross) looks like losing. God is big enough not to need to answer every childish taunt or idiotic comment from the world, and God won't be baited into sinking to that level. (This by itself should make it clear that God's way is NOT the prevailing conventional wisdom of the world's so-called powerful and expert classes.)

Now, to hear Saint Paul tell it in this passage that many of us heard read this past Sunday in worship, that is exactly what the cross is all about--God has chosen to rescue a world full of powerless nobodies and unschooled anybodies whom the world labels "weak" and "losers," precisely by becoming one of those "weak losers" too. The cross looks like utter defeat, and it sounds like nonsense to say that the way to save anybody (much less the world) is by getting killed by your angry enemies. The world, both the sophisticated minds of the intellectual crowd, and the folks who want shows of power and greatness, sees a man getting executed and says, "That's a terrible shame--if God had wanted to mount a rescue operation, God should have consulted us for advice and muscle." The world's assumption is that the way to get things done is by having more force, more power, more guns, more missiles, or more money--possibly all of the above. It looks at the cross and figures that Rome must be the hero of the story because it killed a troublemaker who was foolish enough to let himself get called "king" without bringing an army to back him up. Jesus, the crucified one, must be the defeated opponent.

But Paul teaches us to see just the opposite. Yes, it's true: the cross of Jesus doesn't look ANYTHING like what the world calls "greatness." But that's not a design flaw on God's part--it's actually the whole point of everything! It's the world that's got it all wrong and bass-ackwards, as they say. It's the loud yellers of conventional wisdom who bark about "winning" who are really so pathetically out of touch. God's way of saving the world is decidedly NOT to play by the world's rules--those rules about winning and losing, about "greatness" and "weakness," they are at the root of the problem with us all in the first place! Of course God doesn't redeem the world at gunpoint with an army or a team of lawyers and a pile of money--those things have never worked to solve things. That would be like telling the drowning man that what he really needs is a lead weight tied around his ankle and a tank of water dumped over his head. God refuses to use the expected methods of "conventional wisdom" because conventional wisdom is really so often just our way of defending our own sinful selfishness. What we need--and what God does at the cross--is to rescue us from the terrible death-dealing morass of what the world calls "conventional wisdom" and "greatness."

That's what I think these days when I hear someone make a remark like, "Why would we go out of our way to help someone who isn't in OUR group?" It's what I think any time I hear someone say, "We have to put ourselves and our own interests FIRST--that's just common sense!" It's what comes to mind when I hear parents teach their kids to 'punch the other kid before he punches you' to avoid looking weak." And it's what I need to remind myself of, too, every time I catch that same voice in my head that wants to judge the success of congregations by who has more people or more money or more followers of Facebook. All of those, from the need to have more missiles to blow up the world than your enemy, to the worry over whether your neighbor will think your kids are "weak," they are all evidence of the conventional wisdom of the world, which is the very thing we need rescuing FROM in the first place.

So of course, the way God mounts a rescue operation will look different from the world's standard operating procedures--they're the thing that's killing us in the first place. That's why it makes its own kind of perfectly upside-down sense that God's way of saving us is through death, through weakness, and through loss: because the un-ending race to "win" and look "strong" has really been killing us with a slow, terrible death.  God's un-conventional wisdom is exactly what we have needed all along!

Now, if we dare to take the message about the cross seriously, it is going to dramatically change how we see everything else--including our own lives. It will mean we care less and less about looking tough or impressing our neighbors. It will mean we no longer need to rely on having more sticks or sabers or shotguns or surface-to-air missiles to feel secure or keep us safe. It will mean we no longer have to call attention to our titles, our degrees on the wall, our professional status, our tax bracket, or our kids' varsity jackets to make us feel acceptable. In fact, we won't need to seek our own advantage anymore, because we will see that God's way of saving the world frees us from that tired old rat race once and for all.

Taking the upside-down perspective of the cross is going to mean serious revision to how we evaluate our lives, and that will take work. Maybe a lifetime of rethinking what has mattered all along. So maybe for today it is enough to begin to ask the question: what things have we accepted as "the way the world works" that are actually killing us? What things have we assumed to be true because we were told they were "common sense" but are really at the root of our pain as humans? And what might it do to the day in front of us to let the Crucified Christ turn our old picture of victory upside down?

What if we just didn't have to care anymore what the world thought "success" or "greatness" or "winning" looked like... and what if instead we could simply look to the cross for a new vision? What if we dared to be immersed in God's cross-shaped foolishness?

Let's dare it today.

Lord Jesus, turn our old vision of the world upside down in the light of your way of saving that same world through the self-giving love of a cross.