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A Grain of Wheat

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A Grain of Wheat

 
 
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Sermon — March 17, 2024

Michael Fenn

Lectionary Readings

In the Gospel today, there is a small rhetorical device used that carries a lot of weight. I don’t know if it is easy to miss, because I am such an avid fan of plants and ecology that it jumped out at me immediately. Jesus says that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”. I think naturally many of us intuitively know that this is how plants work, seeds in general must fall and be put into soil and die in order to grow again. But there is a beauty and majesty to the fact that one seed from an apple can grow into a tree that then produces thousands of apples, one ear of corn can seed a field of corn, one kernel of wheat grows an entire stalk of wheat, or even how a caterpillar can metamorphosize into the splendor of a butterfly. 

However, I am skipping ahead within the rhetorical device. Before we get to the new apples, the rolling field of corn, the strong stalk of wheat, or the butterfly. We must go somewhere darker–we must fall to the ground. In a very classic kindergarten project, kids will get caterpillars, watch them as they turn into cocoons, and then patiently wait until what were once caterpillars emerge as butterflies. However, what is not talked about nearly as much is that all holometabolous insects–including all butterflies and moths–dissolve and digest the vast majority of their own body in the darkness of the cocoon; leaving only the essential plans of butterfly-ness and making everything else into a kind of bug-slime. Similarly, essentially any seed of any kind of plant will experience its dark moment; for many seeds inside fruits this occurs by being actually physically eaten, humans and animals eat countless seeds that then germinate in our byproducts. Or if not that, then many seeds will experience the fruit that once housed them rotting around them as it decomposes. And like Jesus says, many other seeds will fall to the ground into the darkness of the soil and “die”. If this has been a bit gross for you, my apologies, the biologist that lives inside me got the better of me when writing this sermon, but I hope I have invigorated the notion of the darkness attending to this metaphor. There is a moment of true darkness when the seed falls away, when the seed is planted, as it waits to germinate and grow into something beautiful again. The moment of the seed “dying”. 

Importantly, Jesus seems to use this rhetorical device to qualify the surrounding statements in the Gospel reading today. Just before this metaphor he talks about how the time has come for he himself to be glorified, just after he gives the direction to the disciples that they must “lose their life”, and in the next chunk he tells the disciples how his soul is troubled even as he is going to be glorified. 

Jesus uses this metaphor to anticipate both the crucifixion and the resurrection and to help understand what is going to happen. He is indeed greatly troubled by the idea of the crucifixion, but the troubled nature passes through the understanding of the kernel of wheat metaphor. Which helps us to understand that the crucifixion is in some way necessary, but that it is also not a permanent state. It is scary, but one moment on the path to something truly greater. Like the kernel of wheat that falls, the crucifixion is one moment on the journey, not the final destination. The resurrection is anticipated in this metaphor, the kernel of wheat will naturally grow into a stalk that produces many kernels of wheat, and that is its final point on its particular journey. 

It also points Jesus into a direction of relationship and trust. Jesus even asks rhetorically if he ought to ask God to spare him this endeavor, this fear, the hardship he must endure. Ultimately, though, Jesus says that he cannot do that, and will not do that. First because it is necessary–a kernel of wheat cannot grow into a stalk if it remains on the stalk. Second, because there is trust. There is a trust in Jesus’s relationship to God that God will glorify Jesus again. Jesus trusts in the fact that in his moment of falling to the ground that God will indeed lift him up again. When Jesus finds himself heading into the fearful darkness of the soil, he does not flinch away from it, does not ask God to spare him from the moment of trial, instead he moves deeper into a relationship of trust with God. 

Returning back to our gospel story, Jesus, ever the teacher, gives his followers some direction after he says something scary and ominous. Right after he gives the metaphor of the kernel of wheat, he tells his followers that those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life will keep it forever. It does feel like a “heads I win, tails you lose” kind of scenario. With either option, I either lose the life I love or keep the life I hate forever. So personally, I think understanding the confusion of this statement requires the understanding we get from the kernel of wheat metaphor. 

To love our life in the sense of this story would mean to cling onto the stalk of wheat, to demand that God give us the easiest straight path to follow, to always do what is easy instead of what is right, to do what is efficient over what is just, to do what is profitable instead of what is loving. In this sense, to love our life as it is is not a natural thing, it would be unnatural for the kernel of wheat to remain stuck forever onto the stalk–even though that is the most secure and safe place for it to be. To love our life means to be unwilling to undergo transformation, unwilling to leave the stalk, to be unwilling to do what is just, right, and necessary. To lose our life would mean to lose ourselves to pursue love in all its forms: justice, joy, community building, mercy, and so on. 

To lose our life means to embrace the fact that there will be times where our pursuit of this love will take us off of the stalk of wheat and into the dark soil on the ground, buried and waiting for what will come next. It will almost certainly get difficult, and strange, and inconvenient, and unpleasant. It may be the wisdom behind the pessimistic adage that “no good deed goes unpunished”–following Jesus, doing good, is hard. Unlike the adage though, we have the promise that when we inevitably find ourselves in the darkness of the soil, after falling off the stalk of wheat, we have a trust in God that we will not remain there in the soil forever.

I will say with almost certainty that everyone in this church has already experienced what I am talking about. The pursuit of love is, for example, what led all of us to isolate ourselves in our houses for months on end during the various stages of COVID, an anxious and dark time where love meant separation and boredom. 

However, it is also maybe not always that large and looming. Most of the time, we live quite ordinary lives with quite mundane problems. What of the dark soil then? I also think the pursuit of this love, and the subsequent darkness of soil, manifests in smaller ways throughout our lives. Maybe not in grand gestures of dark times, but in the small inconveniences we take upon ourselves to make our community better. I see this kind of thing acutely in my life when college students give up their entire summer to get paid a few hundred bucks to sleep in cabins and care for people’s kids——when they could easily make ten times that doing almost anything else; I see it when people regularly take hours out of their week to attend building committee meetings, vestry meetings, and such things——when they could easily say “no thanks”; I see it when tiny little churches devote days and dollars to welcome dozens of people into their parish house for a free weekly meals——when simply surviving another year as a church would be considered a success. 

As we move through Lent this time around, I am reminded through the darkness that Lent entails, that we understand that a Christian life, in its pursuit of love, is not always easy. Whether it is an everyday darkness in soil–losing your life bit by bit; or a more profound darkness in the soil, and losing your life feels much bigger. BREAK As we approach Easter, I am reminded that a Christian life, through the action of Jesus, also promises a profound and powerful resurrection in return. And like Jesus did, we can place our full trust in God for this resurrection. In the name of the one who loved us first. 

Patricius

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Some time around four hundred years after the birth of Jesus, as the Roman Empire began to dissolve and the legions that had defended it retreated back towards Rome, a sixteen-year-old man named Patricius, son of Calpornius, was kidnapped by raiders from a neighboring tribe, enslaved, and brought to work in their land. He spent the next six years tending sheep, and—like many people going through hard times, but with plenty of time on his hands—he began to pray. “More and more the love of God increased,” he later wrote, “and my sense of awe before God. Faith grew, and my spirit was moved, so that in one day I would pray up to one hundred times, and at night perhaps the same… I never felt the worse for it, and I never felt lazy – as I realise now, the spirit was burning in me at that time.”

After six years, he ran away, following a voice that came to him in a dream. Years later, he was enslaved again, and escaped again. But his faith continued to grow, and soon he would choose to return, to the land in which he’d been enslaved, to share the faith he’d found, and to walk among them once again.

And so we drink to him this Sunday with green beer.

Saint Patrick the Enlightener of Ireland, Bishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, is bound to be popular in a place where the flag of the Republic of Ireland flies at the Bunker Hill Mall. As a symbol of Irishness, he is beloved in a neighborhood whose identity is one part Irish immigrant and one part anti-colonial resistance, where his feast day is secularly celebrated as Evacuation Day, as well.

But Saint Patrick wasn’t Irish. And his story is even more inspiring for it.

He wasn’t English, either, to be clear. There were no English yet. Or rather, during the years when Patrick was alive, the first Angles and Saxons were just beginning to raid and migrate into Britain from the east, just as the Irish raided it from the north and from the west. He wasn’t quite a Roman, either, despite the Latin name; today we’d probably call his culture “Welsh,” although this is really just a Germanic name for “those guys over there who aren’t like us.”*

Trying to pin down ethnic origins in fifth-century Europe is a fool’s errand, of course. And in fact, to claim that Patrick was really Welsh or really British, and not Irish, is to completely miss the point.

We often wonder about the “stakes” of the Christian faith. What would it mean truly to forgive as we have been forgiven; to love, as we have been loved by God.

Look no further than Saint Patrick’s tale: captured, enslaved, escaped; living in a world of turmoil and violence, living under threat, he had every right to write the Irish off. And yet he found his heart full of love for the people who had once been his enemies, and so loved them that they became his dearest friends, and more: they soon enough gave up their raiding ways, and began to produce medieval Europe’s most shining examples of scholarship, mission, and Christian love.

Saint Patrick is not a symbol of ethnic identity or national particularity. He’s a symbol of what it means to love our neighbors across the lines that divide us. He embodied the parable of the Good Samaritan, who cared for and tended the enemy of his people, whose commitment to love transcended borders and extended beyond the circle of his own nation.

What would the world look like if we were all filled with Patrick’s faith? What would the world look like if we all practiced Patrick’s love? How different would things be if each one of us could learn to forgive one another for our much smaller sins, as he forgave those who sinned against him?

To close with some of Patrick’s own words, from his Confession:

And there I saw in the night the vision of a man, whose name was Victoricus, coming as it were from Ireland, with countless letters. And he gave me one of them, and I read the opening words of the letter, which were, ‘The voice of the Irish’; and as I read the beginning of the letter I thought that at the same moment I heard their voice—they were those beside the Wood of Foclut, which is near the Western Sea—and thus did they cry out as with one mouth: ‘We ask you, boy, come and walk among us once more.’

And I was quite broken in heart, and could read no further, and so I woke up. Thanks be to God, after many years the Lord gave to them according to their cry.

Thanks be to God, indeed!

* An etymological aside, because your Rector is a nerd—I’ve always loved this fact: The words “Wales” or “Welsh” come from an old Germanic/Anglo-Saxon word Walh, which basically means “someone who doesn’t speak a Germanic language.” As Germanic tribes migrated from their home areas in northern Germany/Scandinavia throughout Europe in the late phase of the Roman Empire, they spread the term, so that the Celtic- and Latin-speaking inhabitants of western Wales and Cornwall** were called such by the Angles and Saxons, the Latin speakers of Walloonia were called the same by the Flemings to their north, and the Slavic speakers of the east even inherited the term when they called the Latin-speaking Romanians Wallachians, which became the name of one of the medieval Romanian principalities!

** They lived in a kingdom called Kernow, hence Cornwall, Kernow-wales.

To See and Be Seen

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To See and Be Seen

 
 
00:00 / 11:45
 
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Sermon — March 10, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I want to start this morning with a poll about a common English phrase. Show of hands: If you heard the news headline, “New facts have come to light in the case of the priest accused of embezzling from a local church”—this is a hypothetical situation, to be clear—How many of you would guess that the “new facts” revealed that he actually hadn’t done anything wrong? How many would think it was much worse than you’d imagined?    

Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I’d always assume it meant things were so much worse.

And maybe that makes sense. Because—as shocking as it is to hear me say it—maybe Jesus is right. When “new facts come to light” it’s because they’ve been hidden in darkness before. But who would want to cover up something that makes them look good? Maybe it’s true what Jesus says, that people who do evil deeds want to hide themselves in darkness, while people who do good are happy to have what they’ve done brought to light. But on the other hand: Does anyone really want to be scrutinized, even if they’ve done nothing wrong? I’m a pretty upstanding person, but even I still get pretty nervous when tax season rolls around: am I sure I’m really filling all those boxes out right?

“This is the judgment,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John: “that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19) This is the judgment: Not some day of judgment in the future, when Jesus will decide whether your acts are right or wrong. But this, right now. This moment when you decide whether you’re willing to be seen. If your deeds are good, Jesus says, you come to the light. You want the things you’ve done to be seen and known. (3:21) But if they’re not so good, you love the darkness instead, because in the darkness, you are hidden from view. In the darkness, no one can see what you are doing.

There’s a special edge to his words that requires a little extra context to understand. Jesus isn’t just talking to the disciples or to Christians today. These words are the second half of a conversation with a particular disciple, a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is afraid to follow Jesus, afraid to be seen with him in the light of day, so he “comes to Jesus by night” instead. (3:2) Jesus’ words here are for him: Is wanting to be my disciple such an evil act that you need to sneak around, Nicodemus, coming to meet me in the dark of night? The Gospel doesn’t record how Nicodemus responds. But Jesus’ words are for us, too. As is often the case in the Gospel of John, Jesus starts with a concrete situation and kind of wanders off into making a more general point. He goes from the specific to the general. He concludes that not just Nicodemus but “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light… but those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (John 3:20–21)

I’m not sure that this is as easy as Jesus makes it out to be. We are not all good or all bad, after all. We’re all mixed, and sometimes, we’re not even sure which is which. One of the universal facts of human life is that sometimes, we actually just can’t know yet whether the choices we’re making are right or wrong. At different levels, from career choices to parenting decisions to foreign policy, we often find ourselves trying to judge between two less-than-perfect paths. And even if we mostly do the right things, our inner lives are often wrapped in a layer of some amount of shame. Who in this world is so confident that their deeds are good that they would publish their diary so that it could be seen in the full light of day? How confident are you that if “new facts come to light” about you, you’re going to feel good about it? Most of us are not so confident, and so we respond to this uncertainty by hiding parts of ourselves away, creeping around like Nicodemus under the cover of darkness lest we be judged for the decisions we have made.

And Jesus seems to respond with this: To be seen as we truly are is one of our great fears; but to see God as God truly is is our only hope.

In other words: It’s time to talk about the thing with the snakes.

There are whole papers that have been written about the development and the meaning of this story in Numbers: the relationship between the poisonous serpents and the seraphim we’re much more used to hearing about; the idol of a bronze serpent that was used in the Temple before the religious reforms of King Hezekiah; traditions of “apotropaic magic,” in which the poison of the serpent can only be defeated by a picture of a serpent. These are just scholarly ways of saying it’s a very odd story.

We read this story today because Jesus alludes to it in what he says. He puts himself in the place of the serpent of bronze, which is set on a pole and lifted in the air. And you can easily imagine why early Christians would have used this as an image of the Cross. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” (John 3:14)

The serpents afflict the people with poisonous bites—as a punishment from God for their grumbling, by the way—and God provides a solution Godself. Put the figure of a serpent on a piece of wood, and raise it up, and anyone who sees it will be healed. So, what’s the analogy here? The human condition afflicts us all with the feeling of shame and the reality of death—as a punishment from God? as the reality of our fall from grace?—and God provides a solution: Godself. Put the human being who is God on a piece of wood, and lift him up, and anyone who believes in him will be healed.

But when Jesus says “lifted up,” it means more than just this. Is Jesus “lifted up” on the cross? Yes. Is he “lifted up” from the tomb? Yes. Is he “lifted up” in his ascension into heaven? Also yes, and Jesus seems to mean all three of them: by the process of his death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus “raised us up with him,” as Paul writes to the Ephesians, lifting us out of the poisonous darkness of this world to the true light of heavenly life. And there’s something visual, almost magnetic, here: later in the Gospel Jesus says, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” (12:32)

So the two halves of this strange passage are linked by the theme of sight: to be seen in the light or to hide ourselves in darkness is judgment; but to see God crucified, risen, and ascending into heaven, doesn’t only provide us an example of how we ought to live—it actually draws us up with him.

But what on earth does that mean?

The similarities between the bronze serpent and Christ takes us about three quarters of the way. But it’s actually the difference that offers us some hope. Because the Crucifixion is not an ancient magical ritual, as if simply seeing the snake on the pole could cure us. It’s a matter of belief: not belief in the theoretical or cognitive sense of accepting certain statements of truth about the world, but belief in the sense of trust: trust in who God is and what God is like.

“This is the judgment,” that light has come into the world, and we have hidden in the darkness—not so much because we’re evil as because we are ashamed or unsure, because we often don’t believe that we really are good, or because we’re just trying to make ourselves a little more perfect first. And this is the solution: to see what God is really like, to see God offering God’s own self for us in love, to see Jesus laying down his own life because what Paul says is true: because God is “rich in mercy,” because if God loved us with “great love” even when we were “dead through our trespasses,” how much more will God love us now, as we just muddle along. We can try pretending to have it all figured out, we may think that we are hiding our flaws successfully in the dark mood lighting of this world, but Jesus’ light has come into the world, and God has seen us all as we are, exactly as we are, and God has chosen to “make us alive together with Christ.” (Ephesians 2:4) “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (2:7)

God has given you the gift of light: A light in which you see God as God really is, and God can see you as you really are. Whoever you are, whatever you have achieved, wherever you have failed; whatever you have done or left undone, God is inviting you to step into the light. To know that you are forgiven. To accept that you are loved. To live in the light as a child of the light, “for we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before all time for us to be our way of life.” (Eph. 2:10)

Amen.

Examining Antisemitism this Lent

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The Church’s emphasis during Lent on repentance and self-examination can sometimes feel individualistic. But Lent is about more than admitting our individual faults and being forgiven by God: it is a call to be reconciled to one another. In our Confession of Sin every Sunday, we confess “that we have sinned” against God, “in thought, word, and deed.” This “we” does mean the collection of individuals: and it also means the collective, the whole community. There are many ways in which the Church has sinned over time, and for which we need to repent: of all these, the sin of antisemitism has been one of the most deadly.

This Sunday we read the well-known story of the Cleansing of the Temple, when Jesus drives people and animals alike out of the Temple. In a few weeks, on Good Friday, we’ll hear again the Passion According to Saint John. In our state, and across our country, antisemitic incidents are on the rise. There’s an opportunity here to connect the dots, and to ask the question: How do the ways we read and mis-read our own Bible perpetuate antisemitism?

I want to share brief thoughts on three areas where we, even as well-intentioned Christians, can verge into antisemitic or anti-Jewish readings.

Accidentally reading later stereotypes into the New Testament. I think of this one every year, when we read John’s story of the Cleansing of the Temple in church, in which Jesus went to the Temple and “found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.” (John 2:14) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this accidentally misremembered as “Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the Temple.” Do you see the difference? “Money changers” carried out an important function, allowing pilgrims traveling to the Temple to exchange foreign coins for the half-shekel coin used to make an offering for the Temple tax. Likewise, the animals are sold to be used in sacrificial worship, by worshipers coming from too far to bring animals or who don’t raise them themselves! The accidental “money lenders” here comes from a thousand years later, when Christian rulers forbid their Jewish subjects from working in many trades other than finance, and encouraged violence against them by Christians unhappy with economic conditions. When Jesus “cleanses the Temple,” he’s not making an anachronistic and antisemitic attack on a corrupt financial system by throwing out “money lenders”; he’s putting a stop to the ordinary course of worship by kicking out “money changers,” perhaps as a symbol of the way in which he himself is the Temple of God on earth.

Confusing ethnic/regional/religious terminology. This comes up most frequently in the Gospel of John, and especially in the Passion narrative. John customarily refers to Jesus’ rivals, opponents, and critics as “the Jews”: in Greek, hoi Ioudaioi. For example, when Jesus heals a man in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, John writes, “so the Jews said to the man who had been cured, ‘It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.’” (John 3:10) This is inherently an odd way to put it: everyone in this story is a Jew, from the critics of Jesus’ actions, to the man who’s been healed, to Jesus himself! Some scholars propose that the best way to translate or interpret John’s Ioudaioi is as “the Judeans,” since he clearly means a specific set of critics of Jesus in Judea, but never uses the term for Jesus or his Galilean Jewish disciples. Others say this is a kind of whitewashing or attempt to hide the legacy of Christian antisemitism and anti-Judaism. Whatever we choose, we need to reckon with and repent for the fact that Good Friday sermons and the Passion Gospel associated with them were used to whip up antisemitic mobs for centuries, and to remember that “the Jews” were not uniformly opposed to Jesus, nor were “the Jews” responsible for Jesus’ death; only the Roman authorities had the power to execute someone.

Jesus, and all his disciples, were Jews. This simple fact can be the easiest to forget. Jesus was not “born a Jew,” or “raised a Jew.” Jesus was—depending on how you understand the Resurrection, perhaps it’s even best to say that Jesus is—a Jew. Jesus, and every one of his disciples and apostles, was Jewish. Modern Christianity and modern Judaism exist as something like cousins, but the story of early Christianity is one of the expansion of the people of God, not of replacement: we believe that Christ was the one through whom the promises of salvation God made to the Jewish people came to encompass us Gentiles, all the other people of the world.

When we forget these simple facts, it’s easy to verge into theology that is anti-Jewish or antisemitic. Remembering them allows us to appreciate Jesus in a new way: as Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, would say, even though she’s not a Christian, she loves studying Jesus and finds him inspiring precisely because he was such a good Jew, precisely because he embodied the love and faithfulness that are at the heart of the Torah, and helped spread that very Jewish message of the love of God and of our neighbors throughout the world.

This year, our diocese is hosting workshops for our clergy on avoiding anti-Judaism in our liturgy and theology by Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, an Episcopal priest and Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College. I’ll look forward to sharing more with you after that session! In the meantime, I hope some of this might be helpful for your reflection as we approach Holy Week.

The Foolishness of the Cross

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Sermon — March 3, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

The Cross is a symbol so familiar that it’s easy to forget what it means. For baseball players, the sign of the cross is a good-luck charm before stepping up to the plate. For Christian nationalists from the Crusades to the present day, the Cross is a sign of Christian identity and Western culture. Our own Episcopal Church logo turns the Cross into an allegory of our church’s history: it includes both the cross of St. George from the English flag and the cross of St. Andrew from the Scottish flag to symbolize our church’s original roots in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church of Scotland, and the Scottish flag is made up of nine smaller crosses, one for each of our original dioceses.

But if we treat the Cross as just a symbol of our church’s history, a recognizable sign we can paint in red, white, and blue, then we can’t make any sense of Paul’s claim that the crucifixion is a “stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (1 Cor. 1:23) If we treat the Cross as a symbol of Western culture and heritage, then we’ve got things the wrong way around: the Cross is a symbol of the cruelty of the Roman Empire, of Western culture as a brutal occupying force. And the Cross is not, in any sense, a symbol of good luck. In fact, it’s a symbol of the worst luck. It’s a sign of failure, not success; of weakness, not strength. The Cross isn’t an abstract religious emblem: It’s an instrument of torture and death, a horrifying sign of the humiliating failure that awaits anyone who challenges the power of the Empire.

This is what Paul means when he writes that the message about the Cross is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Paul’s message is absurd. To say that “we proclaim Christ crucified” is a paradox. Paul’s fellow Jews were waiting for a Messiah who would deliver them from Roman rule and usher in a new era of world peace. And to them, Paul proclaims that the Messiah has come, and h he’s done wonderful things! Has he thrown the Romans out of Judea? Well, no, not quite. Is he ruling over the people in peace? Not so much. In fact, he’s dead, Paul tells them, crucified on a cross like many failed insurrectionists before him. And the Romans are still there. But I promise you, Paul says, despite the objective reality: he’s the real thing! A stumbling block, indeed, for all those awaiting the Messiah’s liberating reign.

And it’s even worse for those who aren’t waiting for the Messiah, for the Greeks, the Gentiles Paul is trying to convince. You know the gods you worship, Paul says, the ones who do great and heroic deeds in all the pagan myths, the ones you pray to for success in this world and immortality in the next? Those gods are trash, Paul says. I’ve got a much better god for you. “What did your god do?” they ask, intrigued. “Oh,” Paul says, “he died.” Yeah, the Romans killed him with a couple of bandits on either side.

This is what foolishness is.

But it’s the foolishness of Jesus himself, who stood on the grounds of the Temple Mount, the glorious monument of God’s presence in the Holy City, restored just years before by King Herod the Great, rebuilt and expanded to form the largest religious sanctuary in the entire ancient world, stories tall and covered in gold leaf, and said: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The people want a sign, and Jesus says he’ll give them one, but they’re too wise to understand. “We’ve been working on this thing for forty-six years—you’re gonna raise it up in three days?” Yeah, right. This Jesus is a fool, for sure.

Of course, he doesn’t mean that Temple, the building containing the Holy of Holies, the place on earth where God was believed most fully to dwell. He means the Temple of his body, the Word of God made flesh, the one in whom God really does dwell, who will be destroyed on the cross and then, miraculously, rebuilt. And it’s only through that destruction that the Holy Spirit of God comes to dwell fully in us, and we become the Temple, the place where God dwells on earth.

The world in which the message of the Cross makes sense is a world turned upside down. It is a world in which true success comes only through failure, true strength comes only through weakness; a world in which the cross of shame is transformed into the throne of glory. It is a world in which victory is not won by the edge of the sword or the barrel of a gun, but by self-sacrifice and surrender, a world in which only the eyes of faith can see God working in and through a situation that seems hopeless. In the eyes of the world, the message of the cross is foolishness, full stop.

And so we live in a world full of crosses, but the message of the cross goes unheard. We human beings continue to serve ourselves and betray one another, in small ways and in large ones. And it’s not as if the sign of the Cross alone can fix it: Jews fight Muslims in Gaza, and Muslims fight Muslims in Sudan, but in Ukraine, Russian Orthodox Christians attack Ukrainian Orthodox Christians, egged on by their religious leaders, and they could not be further from the message of the Cross, no matter how many crosses they might wear. And the same is true of every Christian church: our pews are as full of imperfect people as the world outside, and sometimes even more.

But there is another way. Hope is not lost. We can embrace the foolishness of the Cross. We can accept that in Jesus, we are invited to live in a world turned upside down, a world in which greatness and excellence and success pale in comparison to goodness and humility and love.

Toward the end of C. S. Lewis’s novel The Great Divorce, the narrator—who’s been journeying through a vision of heaven and hell—sees a procession approaching through the woods. The leaves begin to shimmer with light cast by innumerable spirits, who dance and scatter flowers through the forest, singing more beautifully than any human being ever has. A procession of heavenly musicians surrounds the lady at the center of it all, in whose honor all this is being done. The purity and beauty of her spirit shine out through her, wrapping her in a gown of goodness and joy that flows out behind her like a long train. All the light of heaven radiates from her face.

The narrator turns to his guide, and whispers: “Is it…? is it…?”

(We’re left to fill in the rest. Is it some great Queen or princess of the past? Is it some blessed saint, perhaps Mary herself?)

“Not at all,” says the guide. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.”

He goes on to tell her story. She was not great, but she was good. No journalist or scholar ever knew her name, but every animal and every child had felt her love. The narrator is astounded by the pomp with which so simple a person is surrounded in heaven. But as the heavenly guide points out, “Fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” “For the message about the cross,” we might add, “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. 1:18)

Don’t take this the wrong way, okay? But sitting in this church, right now, you are surrounded by fools. Right now, you are surrounded by potential Sarah Smiths. You are surrounded by people who have chosen to spend their time worshiping a crucified God with an eccentric crew of children old and young. You are surrounded by people who have chosen to try to give their hearts to love, however foolish it may be. And there’s a chance, just a chance, that you may even be one of them.

And you can be one of them. You cannot cause all war to cease on earth. You cannot fix every one of society’s ills. But you can be one of the nameless Sarah Smiths of the world, who look like fools on earth and shine like saints in heaven. It may be harder if you are wise in this world, if you are a scribe, if you are one of the “debaters of this age”! You may have to try, really try, to be a fool. But you can do it. I believe in you. You can treat the weak and the foolish and the small like they are just as good as you. You can give up your own self-interest, to help those in need. You can follow the way of the Cross on the path through failure and defeat, and find that God will lead you through it all, to something even better than success in this world: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:25)