God’s Folly | preaching farewell to the saint ben’s community

A sermon by Jamie Howison on 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 John 3:13-1

Tonight we have transferred a feast day known as Holy Cross day, from Thursday September 14 back to this evening, September 10. Shifting a feast day like this is something I haven’t often done, so I’ll get to the reason why it made a good deal of sense for tonight, but first of all… what exactly is Holy Cross Day? Where did it come from, and how ancient is this feast day?

When the Roman Emperor Constantine shifted the Empire’s understanding of Christianity in 313 with the Edict of Milan—a legal mandate to call for the cessation of persecuting Christians within the Empire—a massive shift in the life of the church was made.

Constantine’s mother Helena seems to have become a Christian around this same time, and during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was widely believed to have discovered the empty tomb and true cross of Christ. According to tradition, the discovery was made on September 14th in the year 330, though of course whether she had discovered the actual tomb or—even more curiously—the “true cross” is rather unlikely. Still, the story became important in the life of the quickly expanding church, and from as early as the seventh century, the church was commemorating September 14th as the Feast of the Holy Cross.

So it is an ancient feast, and all the legendary bits aside, “this major feast of the Church reminds us to boast in nothing ‘except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’” (Galatians 6:14), as an article in the international magazine The Anglican Compass phrases it.

But quite honestly, the reason I decided to mark this feast day tonight is on account of the reading from Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, which is fittingly accompanied by the brief gospel reading from the third chapter of John. On this evening when I have the privilege of preaching one final sermon in my 20 years with this community, I can think of no more fitting text.

Listen again to some of what we heard in tonight’s reading from that letter to the Corinthians:

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.

Because human wisdom—our sort of wisdom—on its own couldn’t batter its way through to God, God determined, “through the foolishness of our proclamation” to build that bridge. This is Paul calling his own proclamation “foolishness”, because at heart he is preaching Christ crucified, which is a stumbling block to the Jewish mind—surely a messiah can’t be killed—and sheer folly to Gentile thought, specifically Greek philosophical thought. But—and this is an absolutely crucial word in Paul’s position—“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.”

God’s folly; that’s the point I want to make, and to make it with the help of a thinker who has deeply impacted my own thought, my own theology, and most of all my own preaching. Anyone who has sat in these pews over the years will know of whom I speak: Robert Farrar Capon. “For my money,” Capon writes,

For my money, the root of preaching for our time remains what it was for Paul: a passion for the Passion. Like him, those who stand up to preach in the church must decide to “forget everything except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). However macabre it may seem to hold up death and not life as the instrument of salvation, any other proclamation than that is rootless and withered. However foolish or weak such preaching may sound, it celebrates the only wisdom or power that has anything to do with the desperate case of the human race. (Capon, The Foolishness of Preaching)

And isn’t that quite a statement!

Now I have been ordained for over thirty-six years and have been preaching in this context of saint benedict’s table for the last twenty. My very first sermon was actually preached in a wee little Anglican parish in Ear Falls, Ontario in Advent 1982, where a good friend of mine had just begun to serve as parish priest, so when you roll that in with the various sermons I was called to preach during my theological studies and field placements, that means I’ve been entrusted with this task for over forty years. And I do hope I’ve done it well… or at least foolishly as Robert Capon—and St Paul with him—would have it.

Some thirty years ago after hearing me preach, my colleague David Widdicombe commented that at some point any preacher worth his or her salt has to decide whether they preach justification or sanctification. Sanctification preaching concentrates on holiness; on being transformed by the Spirit of God, which is certainly not an iniquitous place to put one’s attention. Justification preaching, on the other hand, is where I have landed, and that’s all about the audacity of grace; about God’s foolishness as being wiser than anything we can generate, and God’s weakness being stronger than anything we can muster. It is a surrender to the wonder and splendour of what St Paul dares to write in the opening section of his epistle to that rather troubled and splintered Corinthian church community. That’s a community that he will press very firmly to clean up its messes, its prejudices, and its divisions, and to do that in the light of God’s grand folly. You are the beloved of God, he keeps saying to them. You have a freedom that you’d never dreamed of before you were swept up in Christ. You are being formed and shaped by that which your neighbours in Corinth imagine as being sheer foolishness. You are meant to be one Body, a unified people, fueled by a grace freely given you… and for the love of God and the sake of Christ, will you get on with it already!

It would seem that from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians as well as from the Letter of Clement to the Church of Corinth written some forty years later that the little Corinthian Church never quite got it together. Yet we are left with Paul’s legacy of those letters, and very particularly with this stunning opening section from 1st Corinthians, and maybe that’s finally the gift of that broken community in Corinth to all of us.

And it is what I now leave with you. God’s folly, the cross of Christ, the life that transcends death and defeat, if only we open ourselves to it. There is really nothing greater for me to have offered over these decades, because I am a justification preacher who is in awe of grace.

Now just a brief post-script before I bring this to a completion. In 2004 I spent three days on Shelter Island, New York, in conversation with Robert Capon and enjoying the hospitality that he and his wife Valerie offered to me. He was coming off a rough year that had landed him in the hospital for the first time in his adult life. He was then 78 years old, and for the first time in his life really feeling his age. A renowned food writer and cook, he had lost much of his sense of smell and taste, which is a kind of heartbreak. And in the midst of our conversations—all of which I dutifully recorded on a little cassette recorder—he said to me,

This has been a year for me to realize that I am not getting this, I am not called upon to get this, I am not called upon to improve, I am not called upon to get better. And in the toils of the medical establishment, you are always told that you will get better, you must get better, you can get better and so on. And I don’t have to. I know I’m not going to get better permanently; nobody is. I’m going to end up dead permanently.

But his death, he told me, was to be held utterly safe in the death and resurrection of Jesus. “I had to ask myself,” he said, “after a rough year like the one I’ve just been through, do I believe all of this stuff I’ve been preaching and writing about for all of these years? And yes, I decided that I do.”

And yes, I say to all of you. I have decided that I do. And I thank you for giving me the opportunity to keep affirming that with you these past twenty years. May you all be deeply blessed by God’s folly, and continue to be nurtured by the foolishness of preaching.

Amen.