“Can We Imagine What God Is Doing? Third Sunday of Lent March 15, 2008

(First read the text for this sermon: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25)

In 1991, before we moved to Wilmington, Delaware, Patty and I were looking at houses with a realtor. We were in an old city neighborhood, about 15 blocks from the church building where I would be working. So the houses were quirky. Each one was different from the others. Each one was wonderful!

Some of the houses also had not been updated for, oh, 60 or 70 years. I remember the realtor peering through the window in the front door of one house and, as she unlocked the door to let us in, she turned to us and said, “Now, just to warn you: this one is going to take a great deal of imagination.”

That comes to my mind, as I think about the Sunday morning passages we’ve been reading during these weeks of Lent. You and I are missionaries to this old, unrenovated world of ours, and the passages are urging us to use our imaginations! Can we imagine what God is doing?

You may remember that, two weeks ago, the gospel passage included the keynote of Mark’s story: Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."

I wonder about those words: “The kingdom of God has come near.” Later in Mark, Jesus speaks similar words to a scribe who knows all the right answers. (Mark 12:34? Jesus says, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Many of us are using the Book of Faith Lenten Journey for our prayer and journaling during this season, and author Henry French offers this interpretation: “Not far? Why not in? Perhaps because Jesus saw a difference between knowing the right answers and living the right answers. The distance between ‘not far’ and ‘in’ is the distance between talking about love and loving.”

Could it be that moving beyond talk about love – and actually loving – is a sign of repentance? Of turning towards God? Or – more accurately – is it a sign of the daily re-turning to God? That was what Jesus was teaching with his harsh words in last Sunday’s reading from Mark. Jesus said to Peter, “For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." The theme, again, is repentance.

To repent means to re-turn to God. Living in God, then, our imaginations are Spirit-filled! We see our way clear to carry our crosses (that’s from last Sunday’s reading in Mark), which means to live as citizens of the kingdom of God. We pray for that, each time we gather: “Your kingdom come.” Luther teaches: “In fact, God’s kingdom comes on its own without our prayer, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come to us.” (Small Catechism) Our prayer, then, is to be Spirit-filled in our imaginations, so that the kingdom will not simply be near to us, but that the kingdom will be here, in us!

You need to know that all of this is foolishness. (At least, others think so.) None other than St. Paul tells us that – in his first letter to the congregation he founded in the city of Corinth. Paul writes: 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. Then he writes: 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.

Do you have the imagination to see how foolish it is, that God has worked redemption through the cross? That God has won victory through the cross?

Do you see this to be foolishness? I ask that because I wonder: Has the cross lost its ability to be scandalous? Let me try this. What if I were to say that, instead of adorning ourselves with beautiful and expensive crosses, as jewelry, you and I should wear lethal injection syringes around our necks?! Would that be scandalous? After all, a lethal injection syringe is the 21st century equivalent to the cross. That’s the method the state uses, today, to execute criminals.

The first century Roman empire executed criminals by hanging them on crosses. It happened all the time. (Pontius Pilate was especially cruel and bloodthirsty.) In fact, this method of execution happened to be especially useful when it came to killing the purported “king of the Jews” – because, according to Jewish teaching itself, hanging someone on a cross indicated that the criminal had been cursed by God! (Deuteronomy 21:23) How could Jesus have been the messiah, then? How could such a thing be said about Jesus, who died under the most vile death sentence, condemned as a criminal according to Roman law and cursed by God according to Jewish law? It takes a lot of imagination to claim Jesus to be the Christ!

Here is what we prayed, in the first sentence of the Prayer of the Day last Sunday morning: “O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life.” That claim is utter foolishness! It is scandalous – to both Jews and non-Jews!

That is still true, today – when we consider what it means for us to respond to Jesus’ call, to carry our crosses. That means to do the work that God gives us to do – to be servants to those who are in need, which means we don’t have much time to feather our own nests. Carrying our crosses means living according to the virtues of the kingdom of God: love, hope, faith, presence, patience, humility. When we carry our crosses, we exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, as Paul describes that in Galatians (5:22-23): love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Carrying our crosses means to refuse to take on the trappings of worldly power. Instead, we are servants. Carrying our crosses means to touch lepers; in other words, to advocate for those considered to be unclean, according to the wisdom of the world. As citizens of the kingdom, we work on behalf of the powerless, rather than the powerful. We live in humility, rather than in self-promotion. We live by grace, rather than worrying about what we’ve earned, or what’s “fair.” And we give witness, through our cross-carrying, that this is a better way to live.

There’s one other thing about carrying the cross. You and I receive from the Spirit the radical courage that we need to resist the "wisdom" of the world. Because, according to that “wisdom,” we are to win! We are to out-vote! We are to overpower, if necessary! We are to judge! We are to be more forceful than our opponents, to coerce them to see things our way; not to let them speak; not to listen to them or to consider whether they might be right, because we’re right and they are wrong, and God is on our side! (You want proof that that is the wisdom of the world? Watch any of the political debate shows on TV.)

What is the result of this violence, this way of creating winners and losers who are then immediately preparing for the next fight? Bryan Stone puts it this way: “We live in a world that is increasingly cynical, pessimistic, and calloused – a world that has learned not to trust, expect, or hope.” (Evangelism After Christendom, page 56)

Where is the wisdom in that?

Paul asks the same thing! 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.

It is impossible to understand these words without Spirit-filled imaginations.
Can we imagine what God is doing? Can we imagine what God is calling us to? As Bryan Stone describes it: “[T]o speak of God’s reign breaking into history is to speak also of a people called into being by that reign and in whom that reign is embodied in habits, practices, disciplines, and patterns that are intrinsically social, practical, and public. Moreover; it is through this people that God’s reign, by being displayed, is offered to the world.” (Do you have the imagination to see us, as church, offering that?)

”The reign of God, therefore, was nothing abstract or ethereal for Jesus and for those who heard him. The inbreaking of God’s reign both demanded and made possible an altered set of allegiances in which obedience to God relativizes one’s family and national identities while calling into question customary patterns with regard to the status of women, children, the poor, and those otherwise ostracized or considered strange (tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, Samaritans).”

Through the “tangible practices of eating, sharing, meeting, and service[,] Jesus’ evangelism is not just the preaching of a message but the gathering together of a new family, a new household.” (pages 78-79)

In other words, the Holy Spirit constitutes the church, a community, so that people can live foolishly together – at least, according to the wisdom of the world.

Why does God the Holy Spirit create in us such community? It is so you and I can demonstrate by our way of living what it looks like to live according to the kingdom that Jesus embodied – because now we are the body of Christ in the world, and God uses the church to save the world!

As Paul puts it: 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.

Do we have the imagination to see what God is doing? Do we have the imagination to live today as citizens of the kingdom?

If so, then what fools we are (according to the wisdom of the world)!

What joyous fools we are!

In the name of God, who is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pastor Andy Ballentine
St. Stephen Lutheran Church
Williamsburg, Virginia