Blessings
Tripartite Blessing
May God who has made you strong, teach you to be weak; may God who has made you wise, teach you to be a fool; may God, who has cast down the mighty from their thrones, grace you with a poor heart; that the blessing of our Saviour, who died as a fool and rose as a king, may be with you this and every day.
Simple Blessing
You are fools for Christ; go forth into the world and proclaim the folly of God!
Really Simple Blessing
THBPBPTHPT!
Meanders
For the last several years, we've had plenty of opportunities to preach about the 'cleansing of the temple,' to talk about the injustice of the wealthy profiting rapaciously from the needs of the poor. Not all of us might agree with Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, who suggested that the solution to the current economic woes would be to “hang a banker a week until the others improve,” but many can understand where that anger and violent imagination comes from. The economic divide between rich and poor was at least as great in Jesus' time -- perhaps the last time the division was quite so extreme -- and in Jerusalmen, it was perhaps even worse as the violence imposed by the Roman Empire was passed along by the religious elites to the most vulnerable of their people under occupation.
But what kind of meander would this be if I went for the big target? There's a great straight-up sermon already set for us by the lectionary, Jesus' zeal and the 10 commandments, and the way that the idolatry of wealth tempts us away from the justice of God's law. Straight-forward call to worship God alone, and to have purged from our heart ("Cleanse me of my secret faults," pleads the psalmist) every sort of idolatry -- the worship of wealth, the worship of power over others, the worship of strength.
The fear of the LORD is clean
and endures for ever; *
the judgments of the LORD are true
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
more than much fine gold, *
sweeter far than honey,
than honey in the comb.
By the way, it's another excellent psalm this week -- another lovely path to wander down for the sermon. "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart..."
So let's leave that sermon there for now -- you can pick it up on your way back -- and take a walk away from the big red bull's eye for a moment and look at foolishness.
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.No one likes feeling foolish. None of God's creatures; I love the affronted dignity my cat puts on when he's failed to make the leap from couch to couch and lands in a heap on the floor. My children love to be silly when they choose to be, but as a parent I would never laugh at them. At least not until after they've gone to bed. But Paul knew, contrary to his own terribly serious character, that there is holiness in foolishness.
Holy Fools are found in pretty much every religious tradition. It is, however, fundamental to Christianity -- most religious traditions have a trickster, a fool, but Christians are unique in worshiping him -- which is perhaps why so much of the Church has run as far away from foolishness as possible.
But the truth is, we follow a fool, a messiah who did crazy things, told terrible jokes, upset the high and mighty and tweaked the noses of the powerful. Peter couldn't stand that foolishness -- remember how he condemned Jesus in last week's reading? Paul struggled with it, writing letters that strove to sound wise even while he recognized that his faith was built upon the foolishness of the cross.
Paul made a great Episcopalian, uncomfortable with the depth of his own faith; if you're not somehow embarrassed about your faith then you're obviously missing something.
One of the things that makes me so sad about my fundamentalist co-religionists is how drearily, cheerfully serious they are. The bible is something akin to a cookbook, a set of literal instructions that can go toe-to-toe with the wisdom of the world: Which is why evolution, climate change, the rights of women and of LGBT folks, are all so threatening -- they are truths that challenge a literal bible. But the Gospel of Fools snickers at the wisdom of the world and mocks the social rules of order that say 'here is where women should stand, here is where the poor can and cannot live, here is where people must die because they cannot afford healthcare.'
What if for Lent we gave up seriousness? Not for self-congratulatory joy, but for the disruptive foolishness of the cross.
It would be chaos -- it's a terrifying way to run a Sunday service, much less a life, I suppose, and perhaps not everyone is called to become a Holy Fool. And yet, and yet, and yet....
My father was a terribly serious lawyer, who worked on complicated contracts, utilities, assets and acquisitions, all very serious stuff. And I think he know, deep down, that this serious stuff was actually terribly silly -- so the carried a bright pink umbrella and wore a Mickey Mouse watch. He needed a touchstone of foolishness to stay sane in a world that took silly things so seriously.
Become a fool. Perhaps, like the servants in Luke 16, you first need to let God trust you with a little foolishness. Invest that talent of foolishness, and let it grow with interest until the Cross and the wildness of Jesus are wiser than all the puffed up self-importance, wealth, and pride of the world.
Thplthhhhhhhhh.
