THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

The Foolishness of it All

March 14, 1999

John M. Buchanan

Jesus is the face of God who is encountered in everyday life, wherever the
brokenness of the world can no longer be ignored. He is the incomprehensible love
of God come to live among the poor and despicable, the Lord who cannot show them
the human side of his divinity without showing them the divine side of their own
humanity. He is the wounded healer who turns the expectations of the world upside

down, making glory out of humiliation, making victory out of defeat, making life out
of death.

Barbara Brown Taylor
God in Pain

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, 1. 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

THE FOOLISHNESS OF IT ALL

March 14, 1999
JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
John 9:1-12
1Corinthians 1:18-25

“, , .God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. . .” 1Corinthians1:25

Dear God, we follow our Lord through these days of Lent, and as his obedience to you
deepens and he walks toward the city of his destiny, we find our hearts and spirits
suddenly open and vulnerable. Touch us this day with your spirit, and give us faith to
hear the old story of his love once again and to know that the story is about us. Amen,

A small plane took off from a runway on an island in Puget Sound, cleared the tree tops,
and suddenly the single engine sputtered and failed. The plane dropped, a wing clipped a
tree, and the plane crashed to the ground. It carried two passengers: seven year old Julie
Norwich and the pilot, her father Jesse. He pulled his daughter from the plane just as the
fuel exploded: a glob of burning kerosene hit Julie’s face and burned her severely and
deeply. No one else was burned or hurt in any way.

One of the people in the nearest village was Annie Dillard, a good, strong writer whe grew
up Presbyterian and who continues to deal with questions of theology and the mystery of
nature and the holy in life. Dillard never backs away from anything human. So she wrote
a remarkable little book, Holy the Firm. It’s almost poetry. Frederick Buechner called it
“a rare and precious book.”

After describing the accident in her lean and powerful prose, Dillard writes, “The joke of
the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step
on, foot to forehead. It ali comes together in a twinkling. You have to admire the gag for
its symmetry. . ...Has he no power? .. .The one great god abandoned us to... time’s
tumult of occasions. ...” p.43

Dillard probes the issue of God, God’s will, God’s power in this dreadful incident, and

recalls the incident described in the Gospel lesson this morning.
“His disciples asked Christ about a roadside beggar who had been blind since birth,
“Who did sin, this man or his parents that he was born blind? And Christ, who spat
on the ground, made a mud of spittle and clay, plastered mud over the man’s eyes
and gave him sight, answered, ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but
that the works of God be made manifest in him.’ ‘Really?’ asks Dillard. ‘Blindness
to manifest the works of God? What (in the world) is going on here?’”(p.60).

It is, of course, the oldest question in human history; a question we all asked last week as
we read about three little children in Naperville, and the very next day a fine young
Chicago police officer, whose new wife, through her tears, called him “my sweetie,” killed
in a routine investigation. Why, dear God, is this necessary? Is there some purpose here
which we are missing? Is there meaning here that we cannot see? Dear God, are you

In the play he asks:
“If God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer so much?... What possible point
can there be to such tragedy? Isn’t God supposed to be good?”

A clergyman friend tries to comfort Lewis. “We have to have faith that God knows.” Lewis
responds, “God knows. Yes, God knows. I don’t doubt that. But does God care? Did God
care about Joy?”

The question of suffering, particularly innocent suffering, takes us immediately into very
deep water theologically. It seems like you can’t think about suffering without thinking
about God, and God's relationship to suffering. Does God cause it, allow it, use it, or
endure it like we do? Does God care? Does Ged exist?

And it is precisely at this point—this poignantly human plea for understanding, for mercy,
which one day everyone of us will utter—it is precisely here that the Gospel of Jesus Christ
makes a bold and provocative assertion—about God and about us. “We proclaim Christ
crucified,” St. Paul put it,

In his letter to the early Christian church in Corinth, St. Paul almost playfully describes it
as foolishness, and that it was in contrast to the alternatives,

The Greek culture in which St. Paul and the early Christian church lived had no objection
to the notion of monotheism. Plato had taught that goodness was one—that there was one
absolute good, one god. The Greeks rather liked the idea. Their philosophers reasoned
that if god was one, god must be perfect. God must need nothing. God must want nothing.
It’s very logical. There is even a word for it in Greek—apatheia—from which we get the
word apathy. It means the absolute, metaphysical perfection of God.

We preach Christ crucified, Paul said—foolishness to Greek thinkers who want a god of
perfection, and a god who transcends human life, its messiness, its pain and suffering, and
also its passion and ecstasy.

The other alternative was expressed by the Judaism of the day, though not the faith
described in Hebrew scripture. That is our faith too. The God of the Old Testament, the
Jewish god, is the God we worship, This alternative is a theology shaped by the
experience of the Hebrew people at that point in time, the first century; the experience of
military defeat, oppression, weakness in the face of the overwhelming power of Rome. So

God, and God’s messiah, are seen in powerful, military, monarchical categories. God will
come and drive out the oppressors and restore the throne of David. God’s messiah will
reign, truly reign, in the place of Caesar. He will be the King of the Jews, literally. And so
Christ crucified was indeed a stumbling block. A crucified messiah was a contradiction in
terms, an insult. A suffering God was an oxymoron. God doesn’t suffer.

“For the message about the cross is foolishness... a stumbling block. . . .but God’s
foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than
human strength.”

Christian faith is about a God who is not perfect in the Greek philosophic sense of the
word, but a God who has wants and desires, a God who laughs and weeps, who rejoices
and grieves, a God capable of anger and remorse and profound love, a God who, because
of love, suffers.

So when we talk about suffering and God, we begin with this God, the God who
experiences suffering for the sake of love; the God who is vulnerable.

Does God cause suffering? Does God send tragedy and sickness to teach us something? Did
God cause Julie’s airplane engine to fail? I cannot personally believe that God is
responsible for human suffering. Sometimes I think we attribute suffering to God’s will
because we don’t know what else to say or believe. “It was God’s will” is at least
something.

William Sloane Coffin’s son, Alex, died in a tragic accident when, after drinking a few too
many beers, he missed a turn and drove his car into Boston Harbor. At the funeral a
woman shook Coffin’s hand and said something about accepting God’s will. Coffin
remembers “I wanted to jump out of my chair and say “Lady—no—this is not God’s will.
God did not will my son’s death. In fact, God’s heart was the first to break when Alex’s
car went down.”

That, in simplest terms, is what we believe. Not that God causes suffering, but that God
stands with us, shares our suffering, weeps with us, tastes our bitterness.

Could God prevent innocent suffering? It’s tempting to answer that question too quickly,
and I’m happy te leave it to the philosophers. Playwright Archibald Macleish said, “If
God can and doesn’t, Ged is not good. If God can’t, God is not God.” What I do know is
that love involves risk and vulnerability. What I do know is that the very essence of
human parenting is knowing the limitation of your love and power and influence. You
cannot ultimately protect your child from all harm. One day you have to let go of the bike
and allow them to pedal alone. You feed them and dress them warmly and warn them to
look both ways before crossing the street, but if you love them there comes a day when you
do not and cannot protect them from all risks and all harm. Love means vulnerability.
God is love. God is most like a nursing mother, a waiting father. God gives freedom
because God loves and when tragedy results, God shares it, and stands beside us, and
holds us up in the midst of it.

In our time no one event so provokes the question of God and suffering as the Holocaust;

and no one has struggled with it more eloquently and profoundly than Jewish philosopher
and author, Elie Wiesel.

In one of the most dramatic incidents in his book Night, the author remembers the day at
Auschwitz when the SS hanged two Jewish men and a boy in front of the entire camp:

“ ‘Where is God: Where is he’ someone asked behind me. ‘Where is God now?’
And I heard a voice in myself answer, ‘Where is he? He is here. He is hanging
there on the gallows.’” (p.75)

And you’re not sure whether Wiesel means that God is dead, that the traditional idea ofan
all powerful and loving God is now dead, or whether he means that the vulnerable God of
scripture, the God of the exile, the Good Shepherd who walks through the valley of the
shadow with his flock, the God of the cross, enters into human suffering so profoundly as
to be there—even there—in that place of human obscenity and sin.

Wiesel has struggled with the issue ever since. But last fall he wrote a prayer for Rosh
Hashanah—

“Master of the universe, let us make up ....I have written harsh words, burning
words about your role in our tragedy....Where were you, God of kindness, in
Auschwitz? What was going on in heaven while your children were marked for
humiliation, isolation and death only because they were Jewish?

... These questions have been haunting me for more than five decades... At one
point, I began wondering whether I was not unfair with you. ... Ought we not to
think of your pain, too? Watching your children suffer at the hands of your other
children, haven’t you also suffered?”

That, it seems to me, is very close to what St. Paul wrote two thousand years ago...We
proclaim Christ crucified.

There is a lot about our cultural situation that is not particularly amenable to our theology
of the cross. There is a lot about our culture that wants religion to be therapeutically
helpful, uplifting, and positive. William Willimon tells about a church which put a
realistic, rough cross in front and merchants asked that it be removed. It was unpleasant,
not good for business, they said. There is a lot about the culture that celebrates
accumulating, earning, winning, succeeding, building financial security; not vulnerability,
sacrifice, suffering, dying.

But in Lent, as we approach once again a week we call Holy because it ends on a hill
outside the city where Jesus is crucified, we Christians are called to ponder the cross, to
wrestle with the most difficult questions and to stand for a while, as the hymn puts it,
beneath the cross of Jesus. .

The critical claim of Christian faith is that the death of Jesus of Nazareth was for us, that it
has to do with ultimate issues—our salvation. Christian faith makes the radical proposal
that the goal of life is not to protect yourself from suffering, but to make yourself
vulnerable, to expose yourself to suffering for the sake of love. The goal is not, that is to

say, to save your life, but to find some way to give it away. The claim is that the cross is
more than a symbol of tragedy but, because it is God’s own son on the cross, it is
supremely, mysteriously, but profoundly a symbol of love.

In the elegant motion picture The Thin Red Line, about the battle of Guadacanal in 1942,
an American patrol, scouting for a battalion, confronts a large force of enemy troops
advancing through the jungle. The battalion has to be warned. One GI steps forward,
sends the others down stream to warn their friends. Alone he holds off the enemy until
ultimately he is surrounded. In one final act of defiant courage and sacrifice and deepest
love, he fires his rifle and of course is killed while his friends escape.

Foolishness—God’s love—wiser than human wisdom—weakness stronger than human
strength.

It was a turning point for me when I finally saw the mystery and majesty of it. I was a first
year divinity school student, a little skeptical, cynical even, just about convinced that the
cross of Jesus was proof that suffering, tragedy, injustice were the final realities in life and
the death of that good man was the final evidence of the futility of it all. A friend, a little
older and wiser said, “Just remember John, what happened on the cross is not simply
something people did to Jesus, it is also something God has done for us, for the world, for
you. ”

So that is what I remember every year at this time.
“Beneath the cross of Jesus
Two wonders I confess
The wonder of redeeming love

And my unworthiness.

Amen