No Nonsense about God 5: The Foolishness of God

1 Corinthians 1.23: The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

Those of you who have watched Monty Python in your time may remember a sketch in which a courting couple come and sit down on a park bench, but as they start their canoodling, a very vicarish vicar comes and sits nervously next to them, saying “Am I disturbing you?”. They reassure him, and he sits down, but after a few seconds he says again “Are you sure I’m not disturbing you?” “No, really”, they say; and after more reassurance he suddenly produces all sorts of ridiculous hooters and other such instruments, and makes various absurd noises next to them, still very apologetic about disturbing them. At which point a voiceover says “That day we met the Reverend Cyril Creamcake (or whatever it was) changed our lives: from then on we went every Sunday to his little church of St Loony-up-the-Cream-bun…” and the picture switches to the said little church, brightly lit up and with the same sorts of silly noises blaring out from it.

During Lent I’ve been preaching a series of sermons which I entitled “No nonsense about God”; but actually, by the world’s standards, it is all nonsense, because the very idea of God is nonsense: by the world’s standards, what we get up to in church seems just as ridiculous as what went on at St Loony-up-the-Cream-bun. And of course the world is right about this: to the world, as St Paul says, it is all foolishness, it is all nonsense: you can never get to God by being reasonable or sensible. God is beyond reason, beyond sense; God hides in the gaps between the straight lines of reason, in the faultlines between the interstices of good sense. For the world, God is a clown.

Like Father, like Son. Jesus in his turn refused to live by sensible human standards, only by foolish divine ones, so he ended up doing all sorts of things that just didn’t make sense: adding 5 and 2 to make 5000; turning water into wine; walking on water; raising the dead. He also said a lot of foolish things: that sinners mattered more than the righteous, and children more than adults; that harlots would get into heaven before the respectable and the religious. And this did not go down well: the sensible people did not like it. In fact they would not stand for it. Do you know Edward Lear’s sad limerick about the

….. Old Man of Whitehaven
who danced a quadrille with a raven.
But they said “It’s absurd
to encourage this bird”,
so they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

And for just the same kind of reason the anonymous “They” also smashed the Son of God. If you won’t be sensible we’ll make you sensible, whatever that may take. We’ll nail you down! (and they did). We’ll shut you up and put a huge stone over you! (and they did). Bang! crash! and silence at last.

But, unfortunately for Them, Paul was right. The foolishness of God was after all wiser than human wisdom, the weakness of God was stronger than human strength; and along came the craziest thing of all in the anarchic story of Jesus: the Resurrection! when the wild exuberant reality of the living God burst out more strongly than ever, breaking out not just, as before, into Galilee or Jerusalem, but all over the world, uncontainably! here! and here! and there! and at this time! and at that time! and again! when you least expected it. Into the drab grey sensible world burst the bright colours of Easter; of an Easter world where the impossible is true: where prayer works; where there is no barrier between the living and the dead; where 1 + 1 + 1 = 1, where human = divine, where a piece of bread is reverenced as the Body of Christ. Where values are upside down, and not just values but the very laws of life: in the words of Archbishop Tutu

goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate,
light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death;
or, as Mary put it,
God has put down the mighty from their seat,
and has exalted the humble and meek.

And it is this crazy Easter world which the Church is called to represent and make real in its life and its liturgy, and never more than in this Holy Week which we have just lived through. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream the character Bottom, who has just lived through several scenes with an ass’s head on his shoulders, finally wakes up and tries to come to terms with what has happened: “Methought I was…. no!…… methought I had….. no!”; and I feel rather like him at the end of Holy Week: “Methought I was walking along the pavement singing hymns – no! methought I was washing people’s feet in the middle of Mass – no! methought I was kissing a bit of wood! methought I was letting off party poppers in the middle of the Gloria! all impossible! all absurd!” But all, as it happens, true…..

And it is this same, crazy, Easter world, which bursts in today upon Miranda, Katherine, and Verity – with more liturgical craziness of course: pouring oil over people, sprinkling water around the place, giving candles to babies; inviting people to turn away from the ruling forces of the world, from its harshness and its inexorable good sense, and instead to believe in the impossible Trinity, to promise to be light and to bear forgiveness in a dark and unforgiving world. Is this possible? well, two thousand years of witness to the risen Christ have shown that it is: may it be true for you also.

Oh, and one more thing: along with our nonsense God and our nonsense religion there comes also a nonsense word, which we tucked away forty days ago and have been trying to suppress all through Lent. But it won’t stay down any longer, so let’s release the Alleluias once again:

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed! alleluia!

(balloons whizz about the church, party poppers are fired, blowers are blown, helium balloons rise gracefully to the roof, etc etc …..)