The Irrationality of Faith

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"The Irrationality Of Faith"

1 Corinthians 2:1-13
February 6, 2011

1-2You'll remember, friends, that when I first came to you to let you in on God's master
stroke, I didn't try to impress you with polished speeches and the latest philosophy. I
deliberately kept it plain and simple: first Jesus and who he is; then Jesus and what he
did—Jesus crucified.

3-5I was unsure of how to go about this, and felt totally inadequate—I was scared to
death, if you want the truth of it—and so nothing I said could have impressed you or
anyone else. But the Message came through anyway. God's Spirit and God's power did
it, which made it clear that your life of faith is a response to God's power, not to some
fancy mental or emotional footwork by me or anyone else.

6-10We, of course, have plenty of wisdom to pass on to you once you get your feet on
firm spiritual ground, but it's not popular wisdom, the fashionable wisdom of high-priced
experts that will be out-of-date in a year or so. God's wisdom is something mysterious
that goes deep into the interior of his purposes. You don't find it lying around on the
surface. It's not the latest message, but more like the oldest—what God determined as
the way to bring out his best in us, long before we ever arrived on the scene. The
experts of our day haven't a clue about what this eternal plan is. If they had, they
wouldn't have killed the Master of the God-designed life on a cross. That's why we have
this Scripture text:

No one's ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much as imagined anything quite like it—
What God has arranged for those who love him.

But you've seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the
open before you.

10-13The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God,
and brings out what God planned all along. Who ever knows what you're thinking and
planning except you yourself? The same with God—except that he not only knows what
he's thinking, but he lets us in on it. God offers a full report on the gifts of life and
salvation that he is giving us. We don't have to rely on the world's guesses and
opinions. We didn't learn this by reading books or going to school; we learned it from
God, who taught us person-to-person through Jesus, and we're passing it on to you in
the same firsthand, personal way.

This past week something big happened on Wednesday, something that caused a lot
of us to spend a lot of time on our computers, trying to figure out what was going on—
some of us even stayed home so we could have full access to the TV to get the latest
updates. Like me, I’m sure many of you were glued to your couch on Wednesday,
watching ESPN’s coverage of the College Football’s National Signing Day, where the
best of the nation’s high school players sign and fax in their letter of intent to attend the
colleges of their choice. And of course, there was a lot of drama, with my own alma
mater and our arms/recruiting race with the school across the state, Auburn, with a
recruit who had initially committed to Alabama, and then switched his commitment to
Auburn, and then, on signing day, this past Wednesday, switched back to Alabama.
Another recruit, one of the best offensive lineman in the country, whom Alabama had
been after for awhile, committed to Auburn, and then didn’t sign his letter of intent,
saying that he had big doubts that he had made the right decision—eventually, he
made the “right” decision, and signed with Alabama. And just to keep you regionally
updated, which is certainly part of my job as your pastor—Notre Dame had the tenth
best recruiting class, while Michigan had the 21st best class, and Michigan State had
the 31st best recruiting classes in the country.

Now, I think that all of this drama with these young men trying to figure out what is best
for their futures just reminds us of a truth that is not just a symptom of youth, and that
truth is that we human beings usually don’t do things because of rational reasons—we
follow our gut instincts, something inside of us that tells us to go here or there. So
many of these young men are making decisions based not on what is sometimes most
obviously best for them, but because of an emotional connection they may have to a
particular coach, or a tradition, or a friend who plays there, or even the prettiness of
the girls at the school when they made their recruiting visit, whatever. But we shouldn’t
look down on that reality: we make all sorts of decisions in our lives that have nothing to
do with reasonable, thoughtful thinking. I’ve been making the case lately that it seems
to me that so often religion makes people either mean or stupid, and sadly, sometimes
both, but the reality is that even an authentically rich, deep and thoughtful faith still
trades in the world of irrationality, of instinct, of something deeper than a better
argument, a tighter logic, or a well-played argument.

In fact, I’ve told people for years that I am not a Christian because Christians have a
better argument for God, but because of an experience I had years ago as a youth, a
personal, totally irrational, illogical experience I’ve had with this Jesus of Nazareth,
whom I’ve experienced as being alive and present in this world and in my life. Now, this
can go both ways, in the sense that it allows for some mystery in this life, and it
acknowledges that there are some things that even good, tight logical thinking cannot
parse out. And yet, that irrationality in faith can also have a shadow side, where people
believe something is not true even when the evidence is overwhelming in front of
them—I think of the case of biological evolution, where, despite some 150 years of
overwhelming evidence to support the theory, some Christian people refuse to believe
what is most obviously true, because it seems to contradict a certain world-view they
believe to be the most Christian. For them, to believe that humans evolved is to
challenge the very existence of God and the very truthfulness of the Bible, which is an
objection that would have befuddled Christian thinkers in the first 1700 years of
Christianity, but that is a topic is for another day…

But, still, the apostle Paul embraces the absurd in faith, and he do so here in the first
couple of chapters of his letter to the church at Corinth, of which we have the second
chapter before us. Last week we explored the issue of shame and how shameful it
seemed for those early Christians to follow a Messiah who seemed to be a loser in a
Roman culture that prized winning so much. Paul tells them the wisdom of this world,
the logic of this world that says that winners win, and losers lose, gets upturned in the
cross, in this story of God’s Chosen One being crucified, in this truth that in this
moment of loss, in allowing himself to be humiliated with a criminal’s death, Christ has
won salvation for all. The Christian message, Paul seems to say, is that losing is
winning, and winning is likely to be losing, at least in the upside down logic that God
seems to be trafficking in. In this chapter, in chapter two, Paul continues to make his
case for a Gospel that embraces the nobodies of this world, the losers of this world, the
people who look at the evidence and despite the evidence before them, can really say
that God is on the side of the poor in spirit and the poor in cash, and God is for the
nobodies, the ones that get crucified and thrown away by the religious people of their
day, and the brutal oppressive government of its day, all for the sake of public peace—
“it is better that one man die…” so says the voice of rationality, the voices that also
plotted the end to Jesus’ life, for what they believed to be political expediency.

Paul cites himself as an example of how absurd the Gospel really is—here he is, a man
of simple words, a man not know for his looks or his heights, and if tradition is correct, a
poor preacher, in the great scheme of things—“look at the absurdity of how God has
worked through even me,” he says!   Paul was scared, unsure, didn’t know if anyone
would believe him, and still they, the people at Corinth, believed him and his message
about this crucified Christ, this crucified God. Of course, Paul attributes this to the Holy
Spirit, that part of God within us, and within the world, that makes things happen for the
sake of this Good News that God is shouting, and whispering, out into the world. The
wisdom that God share is not clever, nor necessarily rational, it’s not shallow, it’s not
simply surface deep, but goes deeper and is far more ancient than we can imagine, so
writes Paul. What God was seemingly trying to do in Christ was to counter all those
forces in the universe that say that what matters in this world is winning, is being
number one, vanquishing our enemies, expanding our empire, routing our intellectual
and social enemies. Such a message is profoundly countercultural, even today, in our
culture that is seemingly drenched in Christian assumptions about the world, and
truthfully, it was and has been countercultural even though Christianity became the
religion of the Roman Empire, when Constantine appropriated the faith in the 4th
century and made it into the religion of winners, of empire, rather than a religion of the
losers, the despised, many of whom were found in that church at Corinth.

The reason why the Corinthians, and subsequently, we, know of this truth about the
losers being winners, the Gospel itself, writes Paul, is because of that Spirit, that God
within us, that God that reveals God’s very mind to us—our Spirit speaking to God’s
spirit, divine spirit speaking to human spirit. And, in fact, in reality, we know what we
know because of what we have experienced in this life—not because people have
better arguments about this or that, but because we have experienced life in a certain
way, and seen the world through certain lenses. Likewise, we know of God’s welcome
and inclusion because we have experienced that welcome in our very bones, and we
have been given that experience through that spirit of God within us.

But, of course, something needs to be said here, something obvious, something you
see in those 17 and 18 year old young men trying to figure out what school they want
to play ball at, and that is the truth that trusting your gut doesn’t always give you the
right decision, especially at that age. And one could certainly make the case that
perhaps, just maybe, you and I, we could be misreading our instincts, and maybe we’re
not hearing the will of the Spirit correctly? There are a lot of people out there saying
that God told them to do that, or believe this, and some of what they say God told them
to do is so repugnant, so antithetical to anything I could imagine the Spirit actually
saying—and likewise, I suppose they feel and believe the same about me—they can’t
imagine that God could speaking through me and through this church. How do we
discern between our voice and the voice of God, especially that interior voice of the
Spirit that Paul speaks of here

Before I try to answer that question, I want you to know that I’m a bit wary of Paul’s
argument here is for two reasons: one, I think we Christians don’t do as much as
thinking as we need to, and that, in fact, it is becoming a real crisis within the church,
this unwillingness to think things through, to struggle with history and tradition, and use
the little grey cells, as Agatha Christie’s famous fictional detective Hercule Poirot likes
to say. For example, the unwillingness to struggle with both the reality of biological
evolution, and all its implication for us as people of faith, implications that might be
good and bad, is symptomatic of something going terribly wrong in the church today.
At one time, some of the smartest people around were servants of the church, in the
ministry, in our seminaries, etc, but now those really smart folks are an anomaly, and a
long and important Christian intellectual tradition is beginning to fall apart, I suspect, as
it is in many religions, where fundamentalisms have become the dominant voice of the
tradition.

The second reason I am a bit wary of Paul’s point here is actually found in his actual
life: Paul may badmouth himself, and be all seemingly humble, but this man is no
intellectual slouch, and he is quite aware that he is a formidable intellectual presence—
really, you only have to look at his actual writing and you clearly understand that this
man has a lot of those little grey cells, and he does use them, in trying make his
argument for absurdity of the Gospel. In fact, really, the rest of this very letter is his
attempt to expound on this radical, counter-intuitive, message of the winners being
losers, and the losers being winners—the crucified Christ, this idea that Galilean so-
called criminal killed so notoriously, is in fact, the Messiah, the One who will save the
world.   So don’t take Paul too seriously here when sings this song of false humility—he
knows who he is, and maybe he’s no Joel Osteen when it comes to public speaking, but
I have no doubt that when he spoke, people listened, and were duly impressed by him
and his radical message. He used his brain, and I think he would want us to use our
brains as well.

Still, the question remains: how do we know that the voice we hear within us is God’s
spirit speaking to us, and not just our wishful thinking? Well, I think the clue is found
right here, right here in the Gospel message itself, the counter-intuitive, crazy, radical,
illogical and insane message of the Gospel. If what we hear within us calls us to love
our enemies, as Christ did on the cross, then we know we hear the Spirit speaking to
our spirit. If what we hear is that we should stand by the poor, the least of these, the
nobodies, the despised, the discouraged, the hated, then we can rest assured that God’
s Spirit is speaking to our spirit. If we’re mistrustful of a culture that rewards the rich
and powerful, the somebodies but then demonizes the nobodies, the poor in spirit and
in pocketbook, saying that they always bring it upon themselves, something they said of
Christ as well, if we are mistrustful of that message of the Empire, then we can be sure
that God’s spirit is the one speaking to our spirit. I get that such a message is not
popular nowadays, but it has never been popular, even in Paul’s day, and the moment
Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, we, the church, have
spent hundreds and hundreds of years, listening to a spirit within us that is not of God—
it was the Empire’s voice, and it’s the ancient lie about God being on the side of
winners, the rich and powerful, so in contrast to Paul’s message here in this text. There
is a funny story about a Boy Scout that showed up at a meeting with a black eye.
When his scoutmaster asked him what had happened, he replied that he had tried to
help a little old lady across the street. “How in the world could you get a black eye
doing that?” asked the scoutmaster. “She didn’t want to go,” the scout replied. Now, I’
m not advocating punching boy scouts in the face, but I sure wish we in the church had
been willing to fight back a bit, and not fall into the trap of being co-opted by the forces
of Pilate and the Temple officials and the Empire, and all those threatened by a
message that says God blesses, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the peacemakers,
and the pure in heart, all those people listed in Jesus’ Beatitudes from the Sermon on
the Mount. To know the will of God, to figure out who—God or ourselves— is speaking
to our spirit, we need only ask ourselves whom we are being asked to stand beside,
and with whom we are asked to cast our lot with: it it the rich or the poor, it it the
merciless or the merciful, it it the warmakers or the peacemakers, the proud or the
meek, the somebodies or the nobodies? Amen.