Centered

I Corinthians 1:18-19

Robert M Watkins

September 30, 2007

Conventional wisdom is the stuff most of us can agree on. For example, it is conventional wisdom to believe that as soon as the final car payment is in the mail, the car will immediately break down. The same applies to the relationship between major repairs and warranty expirations. It is conventional wisdom to believe that anything fried tastes really good, but is really, really bad for you. It is conventional wisdom to believe that the New York Yankees will always find a way into the Major League playoffs. Conventional wisdom is the simple knowledge and acceptance of the way the world operates most of the time. All of us live by conventional wisdom everyday. It is the simple art of getting by.

Then comes something that completely disrupts conventional wisdom--the unexpected exception to everything we assume about the world.

The Chicago Cubs are seven wins away from the World Series. Just a couple of years ago, they scared us silly by standing four outs away from the World Series. It was assumed that the Riders of the Apocalypse were on West Addison Street in Chicago. Fortunately, conventional wisdom prevailed--a fan got in the way of a fly ball, the Cubs lost the game, then the playoffs, and the world was spared. Are we witnessing the second trumpet?

Even though it tends to be rather dull and mundane, most of us hope that conventional wisdom remains firmly in place as the world’s operating system. It makes things manageable. Those scares throw things off kilter. They challenge normalcy and reveal that the veneer of stability is actually fairly thin. We don’t like that. We need to be able to trust the ground beneath our feet.

Somewhat strangely, this carries over into matters of faith. By nature, faith is different from the ways of the ordinary. Faith is, as scripture says, belief in things unseen and hope in things unproven. Faith deals with our souls and our spirits, neither of which we believe mired in the ordinariness of the material or governed by the rules of physicality. For most believers, this is a good thing. It is a way to find hope within the malleability and brokenness of human existence. Yet--and here is the strange thing--we also want faith to be reasonable. We want and need it to make sense.

For example, if I took a survey of the folks in the pews this morning and asked for the dominant working image of God, the answer would be an old man in a robe with amazing powers. The roof of the Sistine Chapel depicts creation and for Michelangelo Adam was formed by an older, muscular version of himself. And the same is true in old Far Side comics, as well--there’s an old man in a cosmic kitchen cooking up the earth. That is conventional wisdom.

But of course, most of us acknowledge that God is nothing like that. The God encountered within the Bible is no old man, a divine extension of you and me. God is nearly indescribable. In the Old Testament, what is stated about God definitively is simply that God is. In the New Testament, it gets fleshed out with one word--God is love. Otherwise, God is beyond comprehension. God is free from all human assumptions and confines. God is wholly other. Simply stated, God is unmanageable and God is beyond reason.

For some, that leads to too many questions that cannot be answered and life to be lived without trying to find God within it. We again and again run into the eternal conundrum--if God is God, why is the world as it is? Find God within these frightening realities--

1. The Federal Government is moving to shut down an immensely profitable website. Its merchandise? Stories about children being murdered, violated, and otherwise destroyed.

2. Buddhist monks, some of the most peaceful religious persons in the world, are now at the center of one of the bloodiest incidences of civil violence in the world at the moment in Myanmar.

3. Horrible stories of genocide still flow from Darfur with no end in sight.

There is no way to fit a loving God within conventional wisdom with regard to the world. So, why bother?

Here is where the Apostle Paul intervenes. In his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul is critiquing the conventional wisdom at work within the community. One of the great questions they were asking was how to make sense of Christ in the face of the world’s assumptions about power and success. By all counts, Jesus appears to be an extraordinary failure--he claimed to be the Messiah, yet his own people killed him. How can this be? Conventional wisdom interprets the event as being fairly simply--Jesus of Nazareth is not who he claims to be. Paul intervenes with his stunning statement--God chose what is foolish to shame the wise, what is weak to shame the strong, what is lowly to shame the proud.

What Paul is saying is that in order to fully understand what Jesus Christ means for us, we have to set aside conventional wisdom and delve more deeply into the mysterious being of God.

Put into startling terms, we have to lose our minds to find Christ.

Conventional wisdom works at the level of generalities. In other words, conventional wisdom works in accepting what happens in nine out of ten cases--a car slams into a brick wall at ninety miles an hour, someone will get hurt.

Paul is asking us to look at what happened in the one case out of ten--the one time when a car slammed into a brick wall at ninety miles an hour, and the driver stepped free without even a bruise. Paul indicates that this is where we find God at work.

Christ is the one man who died but who lived again. Christ is the one man who laid down his life for others and resurrected the whole world. Christ is the one man who redefines all expectations and outcomes for all eternity.

The world is broken. There is no question of it. Suffering covers the earth. Innocence is no guarantee for freedom from suffering. But that in no way removes God from the world. God is present, but it will take the eyes of faith--belief in things unseen--to find God’s presence.

One of the most remarkable books I have ever read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, his philosophical reflection on his time within a Nazi death camp. He survived. But as a Jew, he was left with the deepest questions about his faith and his own relationship to the basic meaning of human life. Ironically, what he discovered as he delved deeply into his experience was not a negation of God’s presence, but a deep affirmation of it. Everything about his experience should have erased hope, meaning, and definitely God from his mind, but it didn’t. Instead, the further he fell from ordinary human life, the more his captors sought to rob him of his identity as a human being, the more strongly he felt it.

How?

God works in the darkness. God enters the darkness we create. God enters the darkness of human suffering. God enters it and reworks it. God does so through the cross. An instrument of torture and death becomes the mechanism for redeeming grace. God enters the nothingness of human wastelands and recreates them.

Viktor Frankl endured because he gradually began to feel God’s presence in the hole that was his existence. When we strike bottom, we realize we’ve hit the palm of a hand.

It makes no sense. It is utter foolishness. Yet it is the very center of our being.

Conventional wisdom works in most every conventional circumstance. However, the truth is that our world and our lives within it are anything but conventional. Most of us live in the exceptions--those moments that define our lives and our choices and our options. The good news is that God is there. God is not conventional. God is and God is love.