For the first time in quite a while I recently attended a local clergy meeting. It was a monthly gathering with no real agenda besides sharing news, stories, and mutual support. At the end, we discussed a sermon our host had provided copies of ahead of time. Our conversation was brief because we ran out of time but for me it was yet another example of how out-of-touch the church has become.

The sermon had been given at the end of a preaching conference by Ken Jones, a Lutheran pastor and retired professor of church history. It was intended as a word of encouragement for the gathered clergy, recognizing the difficulty of their task. His message was based on was 1 Corinthians 1:18-25.

¹⁸ 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. ¹⁹ For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

²⁰ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹ For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe. ²² For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³ but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

With humor, and probably more story telling than necessary, the preacher explained to the listening preachers the foolishness of their task. In most people’s eyes, he said, they were still worthless snake oil salesmen. But it was actually even worse than that. Their message wasn’t just useless, but dangerous.

It’s not snake oil, but the poison itself. It is a threat to all that we children of Adam and Eve hold dear and that the world sees as most holy: autonomy, control, free will, and just desserts.

Referring specifically to the reading’s author, Pastor Jones said:

As Paul deals with the wayward Corinthians, he knows the risen word who accosted him on the way to Damascus was contrary to the wisdom that sinners welcome with open arms. He knows the gospel is utterly foolish. No one, no one wants a Lord who prefers losers and who seeks them out as customers. No one wants a Lord who has neither comeliness nor any proclivities toward prosperity.

But doubling down on the uselessness of this message, Jones asserted it is nonetheless what preachers need to preach.

The gospel of Jesus Christ, you see, is never relevant to sinners. It helps no one self-actualize. It doesn’t look good on a spreadsheet, and it doesn’t fix those voters in that other party. The foolish snake oil we purvey presents instead a guy in the building trades who got executed.

It asserts that all of history suffered a tectonic shift at his last breath. It says the blood and Golgotha gore happened because human beings, including you and me, are too weak-willed to balance their karmic wheels. It proclaims the illogic of mere words, a splash of water, a chunk of bread, and a swallow of wine as having the capacity to hold the infinite presence, being, and will of God in wonderless wonders, it declares that the way God chooses to bear out the divine will for the world and create the kingdom of heaven is to go all eschatologically “delulu” [slang: crazy] and appear through means such as you.

This preacher certainly has a way with words. Jones concludes:

My beloved fellow sinners, fools, and preachers, what an honor it is to know Jesus has created this space, this calling, this life for us, and to find myself in your company. We get to do this together.

I have heard sermons like this before, delivered specifically to clergy or to church leadership gatherings. They are meant to give encouragement in a time of church decline. Yes, most people think what we are doing and saying makes no sense. But the illogic of the gospel is its power. As Paul says, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Hang in there. People don’t realize it but they really need and want our nonsensical message. Eventually they’ll figure that out.

Clergy are modestly uplifted by such events, I suppose. But that only lasts until their next council or finance committee meeting, or even Bible study. And the notion that the “foolishness of the gospel” is an especially modern problem is dismissed by the quoted text. That idea was Paul’s shtick twenty centuries ago.

In his sermon, as happens so often in preaching now, Pastor Jones never actually explains what this gospel is. What is this good news that is so foolish? It has something to do with Jesus’ crucifixion, when “all of history suffered a tectonic shift at his last breath.” Bold language, but what does it mean? Such rhetoric tries to hide that the church’s creedal story, “was crucified, died, and was buried, and on the third day rose again,” has become a house of cards which can’t possibly bear the weight of the world’s 21^st century distress.

Today, outside the church’s walls, it is increasingly recognized that this 4^th century, imperially-approved drama has always been a religious Potemkin village. That dying was the most important thing Jesus did is now seen as a notion of Paul’s that somehow found an audience among gentiles outside of Palestine. Soon, and with Rome’s blessing, passing the supposed benefits of Jesus’ sacrificial death to the penitent became the church’s raison d’être, and that presumably remains the church’s purpose to this day.

Except that people just don’t buy it anymore. The carrot-and stick of heaven and hell lost their potency long ago. Pastor Jones tells the preachers that the gospel is better than snake oil because “you don’t have to sell anything. Just give it away: the freedom and forgiveness and deliverance and life first given to you by Jesus….” Ah yes, radical grace. But not only won’t people buy it, they won’t even take it as a giveaway.

The mistake all along has been the notion that the church has some thing that people want and need. Call it grace, salvation, forgiveness, eternal life, keys of the kingdom, or whatever you like. And this despite the fact that you’d be hard pressed to find such a notion in the teachings or behavior of Jesus himself.

Mark, the earliest gospel, gives the game away (perhaps unwittingly) in the first chapter. Jesus begins his ministry and summarizes his message by saying (v. 15), “The time is right: the kingdom of God is at hand. Change the way you’ve been thinking, and believe this good news.” (This passage has been obscured by mistranslating metanoia as “repent”, which is not what it means, but rather literally, “go beyond your mind.”)

In Luke 17, Jesus is asked about the coming of God’s kingdom. He replies

The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”

And in the gospel of Thomas, which some believe is as old as Mark, the earliest canonical gospel, Jesus says,

“[The kingdom] will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

Again and again, Jesus’ “good news” is not about something distant in time and space but something here and now. And that something is nothing less than the very being, the “I AM-ness”, of God. This, of course, is the truth known and taught by the Christian mystical tradition from the start. But it was kept under wraps in monastic cloisters or persecuted into silence. Until now, for it is spilling out in countless ways and places, joined by the mystics of past and present of other religious and spiritual traditions, as well.

Paul and Pastor Jones are right that there is a foolishness to this “good news.” But it’s not about some event long ago. Rather, it is that God, or whatever word or image you want to use for our and the universe’s origin and essential nature, has been hiding in plain sight all along. God is, as Augustine and Meister Eckhart both say, nearer to us than we are to ourselves. All we have to do is wake up and open our eyes to discover that we are all already living in God’s Eternal Now.

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