Outlandish and Unreasonable--September 18, 2025

Outlandish and Unreasonable--September 18, 2025

The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

 “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

  and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews ask for 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 the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:18-24)

The one thing you can't say about Christianity is that it's reasonable.  And I say that as someone who is not only committed to the Gospel as my vocation but centered in the Christian faith 24/7 (that is, not just because it's my day job).  But precisely because I am convinced of the truth of the Gospel and compelled by the love and way of Jesus, I will be the first in line to say it: it all sounds preposterous.  

At least, to hear the Apostle Paul tell it, the Gospel should sound like nonsense if you're telling it right.  It should sound like something so out-there, so unpredictable and unconventional, that you'd never even dream it up. As these words that many of us heard on Sunday remind us, all our attempts to make Christianity fit inside our categories and expectations of what is "logical" or "practical" fall apart at the foot of the cross.  The notion of a Crucified God--which is precisely what the Gospel insists on--blows apart any attempt to make Christianity sound sensible.  We keep wanting to domesticate and tame the Gospel into something that is respectable, successful, well-thought-out, and meant for "winners," and the Gospel itself keeps slipping from our grasp. Every time we try to prod the Gospel into the center ring limelight and make it parade around according to our scripted routines of rationality and success, it shakes out of our leash like a wild animal, insisting on returning its own natural habitat among the "losers," the "weak," the and the "foolish."  In other words, the Gospel is not a synonym for "religious common sense" or "what we would expect a reasonable god to do." The Gospel is all about the extreme action that a very particular God has gone to for the sake of all of us, including people on the furthest edges of the mainstream, people far out of the centers of power, influence, importance, and smarts.  And it's about how that God deliberately chooses things that look weak, dumb, and crazy as the means of saving us, precisely to show us how futile it is to pin our hopes on what we usually call strength, wisdom, and success.  Like Robert Farrar Capon put it, "Grace cannot come to the world through respectability. Respectability regards only life, success, and winning; it will have no truck with the grace that works by death and losing--which is the only kind of grace there is."

Paul's point is that the world assumes certain things about how you get things done in life. You use force or coercion, like the Romans.  You use knowledge and philosophy, like the Greeks.  Or maybe you count on heavenly pyrotechnics like a burning bush or a parted Red Sea to prove the power behind your claims.  In other words, "Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom," but on the contrary, the Gospel isn't selling any of that. "We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles."  The conventional wisdom of both Paul's day and our own is that you show you are right by dominating someone else: either you defeat them on the battlefield with armies like Rome did, or you crush them on the debate stage by out-performing them with your rhetoric.  Either way, it's a contest of winners and losers, according to the conventional wisdom, and you prove that you are right by winning.  Paul, on the other hand, says that God has done precisely the opposite: at the cross, God not only didn't defeat the Romans or the Religious Leaders by crucifying them, but in fact God chooses to be crucified at their hands, all the way to a shameful death as a "loser," and for that to be the way of saving the whole world--including the belligerent ones holding the hammer and the nails.  God didn't leave a rational proof of why it makes sense to have a crucified messiah, either.  God just owns that it sounds nonsensical, and never once tries to make the Gospel sound reasonable on a debate stage.  

And I think in Paul's mind, that's actually part of the point.  A faith that has to be argued or proven in debate, much less fought for on a battlefield or coerced through law enforcement, misses the point of a God who gets nailed to a cross. That sort of theologizing is still trying to win by dominating somebody else, which is simply not how God operates.  That kind of religion requires "losers" who are wrong (and therefore, do not belong) and "winners" who are right (and who belong by virtue of their rightness), and Paul is instead convinced that God chose instead to save the world in a way that looks undeniably like defeat and foolishness, for the sake of redeeming all of us, including the arrogant and overconfident as well as the lowly nobodies.

Taking that seriously will change how we present ourselves to the world.  Instead of needing to cast Christians as glowing examples of success, prosperity, power, and influence, we can be honest about our ordinariness--and maybe even deliberately seek, as Jesus did, to go hang out especially with the folks who lack status, credentials, and leverage.  Instead of trying to prove the rightness and reasonableness of our religion, we will share the news that God has loved us precisely when we've got it all wrong and don't have any of the answers correct, because the Gospel is about God's seeking us rather than our finding out the right answers about God.  Basically, it means we will stop trying to hit people with Bible verses or theological propositions like they are weapons in order to get other people to submit to us (that's still the dominating language of winners and losers, of course), but we will offer the impossibly foolish sounding news of grace out there for the taking like it is a free gift for anybody--because that is exactly what it is.  Like Madeleine L'Engle said it so beautifully, "We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it."

In other words, trying to argue another person into Christianity by pontificating about its logic and rightness is not just a bad idea; it is unfaithful to the Gospel itself.  Trying to debate someone into accepting the truth of the Gospel distorts the Gospel itself by turning it into a battle rather than an embrace. It is like screaming a lullaby and wondering why the baby won't settle down to sleep, or writing a love letter in blood and not understanding why you don't get a first date. The medium makes it impossible for the message to get through.  By contrast, Paul advises us to abandon the attempt to argue with someone into accepting how "reasonable" Christianity is, and instead to own, joyfully, at just how outlandish and unreasonable the claims of the Gospel really are.  Let's stop pretending that the notion of a Crucified Savior is the plan we would have come up with if we were in charge.  Let's surrender all pretense that we would have dared to allow a love so wide as to include enemies like persecutor Paul and a mercy so strong it can welcome back in denier Peter.  Let's instead be honest: the news about the cross sounds like utter fringe nonsense, a ridiculous-sounding claim about a God who goes to the margins, dies on the margins, rises when nobody is looking, and chooses all the people on the margins that no other respectable group would have accepted.

When we are at last ready to stop pretending that the gospel is like a geometric proof you can deduce with a matter of logical axioms and postulates, we can at last let the good news be as wild and free, as outlandish and unreasonable, as the New Testament actually says it is.  We would never have invented a story about a God who takes on fragile human flesh and bones, dies a criminal's death, and doesn't take out revenge on his executioners but prays for their forgiveness before rising to life again.  But that's the God we actually have--which, it turns out, is good news, since the outlandish and unreasonable God of the cross is precisely the One we need.

You don't have to yell that angrily at anyone or stage the message like it is a debate to share it.  In fact, it's better if it is just offered as a spoken invitation from one messy ordinary human to another.  That's how it came to each of us, after all.

Lord Jesus, free us from the need to look like winners over somebody else, so that we are freed as well to speak your impossible-sounding news of the cross.