"A Highway for Fools"

Isaiah 35: 1-10

December 12, 2010 + Third Sunday in Advent

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

This is the time of the year when the Darwin Awards are announced. These annual awards are given to those who in the past year have killed themselves by doing something incredibly dangerous and extremely stupid. By doing this they have saved the human gene pool from passing on their defective genes to the next generation. The Darwin Awards spring from the same human impulse to stupidity as we see in the people in the “Jackass” movies or in those who are warned not to try the dangerous stunts in the Geico “Mayhem” commercials.

Here’s a typical Darwin Award story from a few years ago: “The day before the US tax filing deadline, a Memphis Darwin Award winner, trying to beat an oncoming train, drove around the crossing gates . . . . only to be struck head-on by another driver who had the same mad plan . . . The accident happened off to one side of the tracks so the train passed by unimpeded.”

Does this story seem a bit unlikely to you? If so, you are not alone. Many of the Darwin Awards seem more like urban legends, stories which purport to describe some true event but which can never quite be traced down. Too many of these stories have unlikely factual details: two drivers racing to file their income taxes at the last minute, both going around crossing gates, both barely missing the oncoming train and crashing head-on. Actually, the one part of the story that seemed true to me was that it was supposed to have happened in Memphis! Forgive me, I love Tennessee, but too many drivers around here seem to think they’re on the NASCAR circuit!

Still, even if all these Darwin Award stories are not true, I think we can agree that people do idiotic things that bring about their unintended demise. And isn’t it only human when we laugh at them? Don’t we laugh at the Three Stooges and other comedians when they take their comic but seemingly painful pratfalls? Hey, doesn’t that really hurt? Why do we think it’s so funny?

The Germans would say that we have a bad case of what they call “schadenfreude,” taking joy in someone else’s pain, a kind of sadistic impulse in the human condition. Perhaps, but could it also be possible that in laughing at someone else’s stupidity we are able to minimize our own foolishness? “Hey, I may have done some dumb things but at least I wasn’t as dumb as they were. I didn’t end up killing myself.”

No, but if we’re honest with ourselves, the foolish things we have done, the stupid choices we have made, the idiotic risks we have taken, have brought a lot of hurt and harm to ourselves and probably to other people as well. And make no mistake about it, we have all done foolish things. We are all fools at one time or another. You don’t think so? Then I commend to you a little verse in Proverbs (14:24):

“The foolishness of fools is folly.”

That sounds like a tautology, saying the same thing over again. But let me offer this interpretation: the greatest folly we fools can have is the delusion that we’re not really fools at all. And that is the greatest human foolishness.

Perhaps, you still don’t agree with me that all of us as human beings do foolish things from time to time. Let me jog your memory with a few questions.

- Have you ever loved someone you should not have loved?

- Have you ever trusted someone you should not have trusted?

- Have you ever made a decision ruled more by foolish hope than wise consideration?

- Have you ever taken a risk which you were lucky to get out of with your life, your relationships, your finances, or your reputation not ruined?

If you haven’t done any of these foolish things, be patient; sooner or later you will. But if you don’t think you have and don’t believe you will, then probably Christianity isn’t for you. You see, Christianity celebrates the fact that we are all fools – sinners, if you will – imperfect people who, as the Apostle Paul said of himself, are as likely to do the wrong thing as the right. And our only hope is the unlimited grace, love and mercy of God.

I love verse 8 from our Isaiah chapter 35 reading for this morning because of the hope it gives to you and me and all foolish people. Isaiah writes of a time when the foolish people of Israel shall be led home from their exile in Babylon. Once headed for Zion, “no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.” No one will go astray on this highway of hope that will stretch all the way from desperation to triumph, from depression to elation, from abandonment to security, from agony to ecstasy; not even fools who play chicken with locomotives will be lost or left behind.

I believe Jesus would have agreed with Isaiah that, in the end, sooner or later, here or hereafter, God’s desire that everyone will be gathered safely into God’s fold will be accomplished. No one is so foolish as to fall off the highway that leads to God’s heart. There will be no dead ends and no wrong exits. Once we have taken up the journey to God even in the most clumsy, the most backward, the most foolish of ways, we will eventually be found by God. God’s beloved fools – you and I – will never be lost.

I hope you believe that, but even if you don’t, here’s a Darwin Award for Christmastime. Once there was a good guy named Joe. Seems he was engaged to a nice girl, but the wedding couldn’t be scheduled soon enough for his girlfriend who turned up pregnant. Joe knew he wasn’t the father and decided to get his ring back. But, get this, the girl told him she was carrying God’s baby! Then Joe had a dream that he was supposed to marry her anyway and he should give the baby a name that means “God is with us.” What a crazy, foolish story but every year we tell the story again and again. Are you foolish enough to believe something like that?

One fellow who took this whole God’s child thing seriously a few years later wrote about it this way: “For the message of “God with us” is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those of us being saved, it is the power of God . . . Where is the one who is wise? Where is the lawyer? Where is the politician of this age? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world? . . . For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (I Corinthians 1: 18-25, altered by DCB)

I believe Paul would have agreed with Jane Kenyon who writes: “I believe in a God who overcomes you with love, not a God of rules and prohibitions. This is a God who, if you ask, forgives you no matter how far down in the well you are. If I didn’t believe that I couldn’t live.”

Neither could I, but fortunately I don’t have to worry and neither do you. In this Christmas season and in every season of the year, God has prepared a highway for fools like you and me that will take us all home and we’ll never get lost along the way.

Thank God. Amen.