4th Sunday after Epiphany
1 Corinthians 1:18-30
For 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 scribe? 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 our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand 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. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. God is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
Being Right
When I was in elementary school, we had to do standardized testing every year, so the government could figure out how well we were all doing. The results of these tests determine what kinds of funding a school has access too, meaning the better the students do, the more funding they can get. Teachers and principals are incentivized to get students to test as well as they possibly can, because better tests mean more money for the school. It seems a little wrongheaded to me now, looking back on it all of these years later. You would think that the schools that were falling behind would need the funding more.
But, this is how our human wisdom works. We often create incentives and deterrents based on our opinions, on how we think things should be, rather than on how they actually are. The more the standardized tests gain political and financial influence, the more they determine what we teach in our schools. And, rather than having a well-rounded education that includes P.E., and music, and art, our kids’ days are filled with classes designed to help them pass the standardized tests.
This is a system that teaches us to value provable facts. We’re taught the scientific method from a young age: form a hypothesis, create an experiment, draw a conclusion. It’s the basis of so much of our knowledge, from biology and medicine, to physics and technology. We’ve been trained to accept some kinds of knowledge as more worthy of our attention than others, as more beneficial to the human race. This way of learning pushes story and tradition, intuition, aesthetics and spirituality to the side, because we can’t create experiments to determine whether or not our hypotheses about them are correct. It’s because we have been taught this way that so many people often feel that factual truth is the highest ideal we can strive for, even if that ideal blinds us to a greater wisdom that might be right in front of us.
I have to admit that I have a tendency to correct people when they say something that I think is factually wrong. I don’t do this to show off or to seem more intelligent, I do this because it’s what I would want someone to do for me if I was saying something that was factually wrong. It the equivalent of telling your friend that they have spinach stuck in their teeth. The idea that I would go around confidently saying the wrong thing fills me with so much anxiety, that I am constantly fact-checking myself before saying things, even when I’m fairly confident that I know what I’m talking about. Of course, this doesn’t stop me from saying the wrong thing sometimes, I am only human after all, but when I figure it out later, I get embarrassed, and it only makes me strive harder to not do it again in the future.
Luckily, not everyone sees the world in the same way that I do, and this has been pointed out to me multiple times. I remember correcting a friend in seminary once, and she just smiled and shook her head, and very dismissively said, “You always do that.” And, I remember the judgement and disappointment in her voice when she said it, so I vowed from that day forward to never correct her again. I thought, if she would rather go around saying the wrong thing and look like an idiot than have someone correct her, then that was her decision, and I was going to respect that.
A few months later, we were walking in Muir Woods, a forest of redwood trees in Northern California. It’s a stunningly beautiful place; if you’ve never seen redwood trees before and you get the chance, I would strongly encourage that you to visit. Redwoods are the tallest trees in the world, growing as high as 370 feet tall, which isn’t even really comprehensible until you’re standing underneath one of them, looking straight up, trying to see the top of it. Redwood trees are so tall, that they can only really survive in areas with heavy fog. It’s too difficult for them to transport water from their roots all the way up to the top, so they need to be able to pull in moisture from the air.
Because of this, the forest floor where redwood trees naturally occur is often dense with vegetation. As my friend and I were walking down one of the paths, she pointed at some feathery plants growing at the base of one of the trees, and she said, “Look at the baby redwoods!” They weren’t baby redwoods; they were horsetail plants, but I just smiled and nodded, because she didn’t like it when I corrected her, so I wasn’t going to say anything. And, as she got closer to them so she could take a picture, I found myself losing a little respect for her, because she would rather be wrong than let anyone tell her that she was wrong. It felt like the absolute height of arrogance.
It wasn’t until years later, when another friend pointed out my tendency to do this, that I got a more a little bit more of a nuanced understanding of what was happening. She told me that I was focusing on the wrong thing, that the point of most conversations is not to be factually correct, but to build relationship. When my friend was pointing out the “baby redwood” trees to me, she was trying to share a moment, to experience something together, and it went right over my head, because all I could focus on was how wrong that statement was.
Human wisdom makes us do such strange things. We don’t allow people to get close to us because of our past. We make assumptions about people because of what they look like or where they come from. We allow ourselves to be treated badly because we think that’s all we deserve. We focus on the factual accuracy of what our friends say, instead of sharing a moment together.
It’s hard to be human. It’s hard to know that we are constantly making mistakes. But, we don’t have to rely on our own limited understanding. God’s wisdom transcends all of that. Like our epistle reading says, God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Jesus came to us and told us stories and riddles in order to unlock the wiser and more understanding depths of our souls. And, the more that we pray about it, the more that we orient ourselves toward God, the more we can understand what God is saying to us.
We can rely on the foolishness and the weakness of God. The foolishness of giving things away. The weakness of being vulnerable and honest. The foolishness that says that love and generosity can triumph over all. The weakness of forgiving someone 7 times 70 times. The foolishness of sending a baby into a cold and hostile world to change everything that people believe. The weakness of being arrested and killed, instead of overpowering those upholding a corrupt and unjust system.
God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get this whole being human thing right, but I know God is going to be with me the entire time, while I try. And, if we ever find ourselves being judgmental or less than generous, whether it’s towards other people or ourselves, we just have to ask, is that our human wisdom talking? Is there perhaps a more loving, more generous way of looking at that. Perhaps a more foolish way, or a way that we might think of as weak? Human wisdom will trick us into saying or doing things that we might regret later. So we stick close to God, and we pay attention to God’s foolishness, and we pay attention to God’s weakness, and maybe try a little foolishness and weakness of our own. Amen.
~ Rev. Charles Wei
