"What Kind of Fool Are You?"

Mark 11:1-17 and I Corinthians 3:18-23

Palm Sunday – April 1, 2012

Reverend Dr. David C. Brown
Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ
400 Glenwood Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37404

Were you among the millions who bought tickets for the Mega Millions jackpot this past week? Of course, you were. So was I. It’s fun to have a moment of fantasy. But when we bought the ticket we knew we were fools to do it. Our chances of winning were nine times worse than to have a television set fall on our head this year. What foolishness to think we could win $640 million. But all of us are fools at some point in our lives.

Did you catch the news item that Jerry Lee Lewis, the original king of rock and roll, married again for the seventh time? There’s foolishness for you. But sometimes our foolishness is a lot more dangerous, like the millions of people who smoke and bet their lives on the belief that they will not get some awful cancer.

Most of us can’t bear watching other people make fools of them-selves. We squirm and turn away because to look at someone being a fool is really to see ourselves. When we make some exaggerated movement, or laugh too loud, or lose our temper, or spill our coffee on the host’s linen tablecloth, or become tongue-tied, or whatever. Suddenly, there we are with a silly grin, a red face and a great urge to sink through the floor. Mark Twain once said, “Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to.” He was right. The blunder and the blush are the stuff of human experience. We go to great lengths to avoid such experiences. We want so much to be strong, to be right, to be wise, to be admired, and to be loved. But sooner or later something happens to strip away our pretensions and show us up for what we are – frail, fallible, foolish human beings. We are all fools, and the greatest fool is the person who thinks otherwise. The question is not whether I am a fool, but what kind of fool am I? What kind of fool are you?

Jesus was a fool! Let’s say it plainly: Jesus was a fool! He left the security of a good job as a carpenter to wander around the county with no place to lay his head. He challenged the authorities of his society, calling them phony hypocrites. He rebelled against organized religion in the name of a higher claim for justice and love. He broke the laws which people claimed held society together and gave it order. He split with his family and was a source of constant worry and embarrassment to them. He spoke his mind directly and honestly no matter whose feathers it ruffled. He hobnobbed with the nobodies, with the outcasts, the scum of his society. He was a reckless, impractical, non-conformist. He lived on the basis of a wild faith in a God and a Kingdom for which there was little if any evidence as people judged things even in that pre-scientific age. Yes, Jesus was a fool. He was judged so by his contemporaries. His few disciples finally abandoned him, denied, and betrayed him. He was executed at an early age as much by his own choosing as anything else. He was a fool. Everyone knows that, even those who claim his name and hold forth in pulpits on Sunday morning. We simply can’t live that way and get along in this world for long.

And yet, Jesus called people fools who do not live that way. He called people fools who do not hear and do his words, who do not love their enemies, who do not forgive those who hurt them, who practice their piety in public in order to be seen by others, who are anxious about their life – what they will wear and eat. Those people, Jesus says, are fools. Those who are self-righteous and do not admit their anger or lust are fools. Those who judge others and overlook themselves are fools. Those who ignore the needs of the least of their brothers and sisters are fools. Those who are concerned about their outward appearance, their image, what other people think of them – those people are fools. Those who are careful observers of the rituals and rules of religion but neglect the demands of justice and mercy are fools. Those who gather an abundance of possessions and say to themselves, “Eat, drink and be merry,” are fools. Those who do not follow him, who do not share his wild, radical faith in the God who is the enemy of all the lesser gods on whom we depend – those people are fools. Those whose faith does not lead them to a permanent revolution of the mind and heart, making them full of child-like questions and wonder, always exploring, always reaching out for new possibilities – such people Jesus calls fools.

Jesus was a fool for living and believing the way he did. Jesus called other people fools for not living and believing the same way. Was he right? Who knows? There is no proof one way or the other, no obvious evidence, no airtight answers. History can be read many ways, but no matter which way we read it, there is always a large remainder that doesn’t fit any interpretation and no one knows how it will all come out. Life makes fools of us all, and death comes early or late to all fools. And after that, who knows? To bet the “now” on the “then” is far from a sure thing. Life’s question is not whether we are a fool but what kind of fool am I? What kind of fool are you?

Take the man who builds bigger barns in Jesus’ parable. Jesus says he’s a fool. But if we choose to be that kind of fool there is, in all honesty, something to be said for us. We will be secure. We will be able to enjoy much of what this good earth offers. Out of our abundance we can give much to church and charity. And, along the way, we can take pleasure in the experiences that are the portion of the successful. We say “honesty is the best policy,” but underneath we know that isn’t exactly so. A little shrewd dishonesty can pay off handsomely. If we know what we want and are willing to work hard to get it, we can. So why not build the bigger barn, the bigger reputation, the bigger investment account? Why not get the raise, the promotion, the invitation, the recognition? Why not make contacts with the people who count? Success, power, status are not unimportant things. We can be really quite happy with them. We not only get along in the world that way, we get up in it. We’d be a fool not to do that.

Yet Jesus says we’re a fool if we do, even if we gain the world. To use people and love things is to reverse the true order of life and to be less than human. The real meaning of life has to do with people, not things. We’re a fool if we build bigger barns instead of loving our sisters and brothers and sharing whatever we have with them.

Or take this matter of loving. Jesus says, again and again, that the person who doesn’t love is a fool. But if we choose to be that kind of fool, there is, in all honesty, something to be said for it. We will avoid awkward, time-consuming involvements. We won’t suffer much. We will be, quite literally, carefree. Our hearts won’t ever get broken. Our burdens will be fairly light, and our world reasonably manageable and free of interruption. As an epitaph on a gravestone put it, “Here lie the remains of Nellie Jones. For her life held not terrors. She lived in splendor by herself. No hits, no runs, no errors.” Detachment, isolation, is not without its advantages. We don’t make many mistakes. We may not help anyone, but then we don’t hurt them either. We have time to read the paper, watch TV, and get to bed at a decent hour. That is not to be taken lightly.

Who can blame us for stepping back from love that goes deeply with enemies as well as friends? To love is to give up our life without knowing if we’ll get it back! Why risk that? Who can blame us for insulating ourselves against the risk of pain and disappointment of involvements which will limit our contacts to just a few people, especially if they are “nobodies”? Life’s too short for that. Keep it light and leave ‘em laughing. As Shakespeare put it: “Let all men count with you but none too much.” We’d be a fool to really love, and we all know that.

Yet Jesus says we’re a fool not to love and to love even our enemies, perhaps, especially them. He claims it’s better to risk having our heart broken than to let it become unbreakable. If we have an unbreakable heart, we’re already dead, a walking, breathing corpse. Love, Jesus seems to show, is movement, movement through our own fears and deceptions, movement toward other people, movement deeper and deeper into their pain and puzzlement and need until it becomes our own. That’s what giving ourselves means. Love, Jesus says, is what life is all about.  Love is what it means to be a human and it’s better to be human for a moment, at all cost, than to be less than human for three score years and ten. “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it cannot bear fruit . . . He who would save his life shall lose it, he who loses his life will save it.” Perhaps not in the sense of living happily ever after, but discovering what it is to be truly alive. So you see there’s something to be said for being Jesus’ kind of fool.

Finally, take this matter of faith. Jesus says those who do not share his wild faith and take the same risks for it he did are fools. But if we choose to be that kind of fool there is, in all honesty, something to be said for us. We’re being reasonable, for one thing, because there’s just no conclusive proof that there is a God. Certainly, when you get down to it, if there is a God there’s precious little, if any, evidence that God really cares about or loves this dust speck in this incomprehensibly huge universe, to say nothing of the creatures whose life span on it is about the duration of the blink of an eye when measured against eternity. Which is not to say human beings aren’t important, but only to say we can’t prove they are important to God as far as anybody knows. If we choose not to be that kind of fool we can settle down. We don’t have to worry that there’s really anything or anyone more important than our own race, or country, or ourselves. We don’t have to struggle trying to figure out what life’s really all about; we don’t need to bother with questions for which there may be no answers. And all the while we can be very religious about it. That’s the beautiful thing. We can refuse the tension of faith and opt for the illusion of religious certainty. We can claim that everything’s already all figured out and tucked away in the Bible, in the church, or wherever it is that reduces life’s mystery to manageable terms and makes us feel comfortable and secure. Now, that’s not to be taken lightly. Faith, in part at least, has to do with living with uncertainties, with risk, a leap, a constant restlessness, a gamble. There’s tension in that and too much tension is painful as any physician or psychiatrist will tell us. So there’s much to be said for whatever reduces that tension, that pain, that uncertainty.

Yet, Jesus says we’re a fool not to run that risk. Jesus, says that we live in the time when all our little gods have fled or failed. Faith is looking ahead and reaching out to a new world of love and justice that only the true God can give us. Faith is seeking the kingdom of that God. Maybe that begins by admitting that our lives need to take a new direction. Maybe that means being foolish enough to follow that fool Jesus even if it means taking up our own cross of sacrifice and love.

The story is told of an early Christian leader waiting to be led into a Roman amphitheater to face an awful, cruel death. A Roman centurion standing next to him asked with a mocking voice, “Well, where is your carpenter now?” The Christian responded, “He’s gone to build a coffin for your emperor.”

What foolishness! What utter foolishness to bet our very lives on the hope of a world of victorious love. Only a fool would do that.

Dr. Wilbur Eddy Saunders was President of Colgate Rochester Divinity School when I was there. The last sermon he preached before retiring was on that verse of Paul saying he had become a fool for Christ. At the end of his sermon Dr. Saunders leaned over the pulpit and said, “Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I ask myself, ‘Have I been enough of a fool?’” That question has haunted me for fifty years. “Have I been enough of a fool for Christ?” Now I ask you, “What kind of fool are you?”