Resolution foolish

My car service falls due each January. New five years ago, I was surprised to rediscover that cars these days require only an annual service, after three years not owning, nor hardly driving, a car. Each new year with Bertie – that’s my car’s name – we check under the hood, adjust parts, clean out tubes, fill reservoirs, realign the tyres (and this year, probably replace a couple …). My Bertie still runs – and according to my sisters, even smells – like a new car, and doesn’t take a lot of work to tune and polish to keep it that way.

We, on the other hand, may not be so fortunate. I turned 45 this week, and it’s certainly starting to take a lot more effort to get myself realigned and retuned, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

Although I’m not so keen on songs we sang in youth group 25 years ago, about being washed clean and purified, such songs still come to mind when considering renewal, re-tuning. For they draw on the richness of symbolism and enacted story of baptism, for one. We may have heard the story of Jesus’ baptism earlier in this Epiphany or post-Epiphany season – baptism, new year, new beginnings – and today’s stories invite us to remember what it is we are beginning again, into what life and story and Spirit we are baptised.

January in Australia is a slow month for many. People gradually return to work, students have not gone back to schools or universities yet, for the most part, and teachers somewhat reluctantly start to turn their attention to the new academic year.

Cricket and tennis players, and cyclists are busy entertaining the lucky ones who can linger a little longer in the rest and relaxation of the season.

Artists and venue hosts are starting to prepare for the busy festival season of late summer / early autumn – including me, look out for an evening of poetry and storytelling with me at Bridgewater arts Centre / Uniting Church on 3 March.

All this to say, the readings on the lectionary today meet us in a season, perhaps, that is ripe for reflection, for our own tune up and realignment. This season of new year and resolutions. But, more than the faddish self-improvement goals we are offered as New Year Resolutions in advertising campaigns, perhaps our resolve is to remember who we are, and the story to which we choose to align our selves and our living. For it does take resolve, doesn’t it. Resolution. Dedication. Discipline, to make attentive our walk with our Holy One. To love lovingkindness. To do justice.

Because it is not always what expect, or in an honest moment, what we hope it might be, this walk with Holy One. Not all improving my self for my happiness and success … and it is certainly not a quick fix removal of all that was ‘wrong’ before

The reminder we have for how to live well, from the Divine-made-human is not what we expect. The incarnation of Wisdom in Christ seems more foolish than what humans might deem to be wise.

The blessings of the kin-dom, the realm, of Holy One seem upside down, seem to be found where the suffering is, not on the other side of it or in the bringing us into happily ever after. How many New Year’s resolutions are made with a hope for happily ever after?

1 Cor today:

Where are the wise? Where are the legal experts? Where are today’s debaters? Hasn’t God made the wisdom of the world foolish?  In God’s wisdom, They determined that the world wouldn’t come to know God through its [the world’s] wisdom. Instead, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of preaching.  Jews ask for signs, and Greeks look for wisdom,  but wepreach Christ crucified, which is a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.  But to those who are called—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is … God’s wisdom.  This is because the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom ….

The people gathering in those earliest communities of the Way were from both Jewish and non-Jewish contexts, cultures, sacred stories and traditions. Whether they came from a Jewish or a Greek context, Jesus, the incarnation of the Divine, crucified is scandalous, is foolishness, is unexpected radical counter-cultural disruption.

I was taken by the phrase, the foolishness of ‘preaching’ – what am I doing here? The act of preaching or proclamation itself not what Paul is naming foolish, of course, but the content. the message. the gospel. the good news – that a saviour who seems to fail, being arrested, sentenced, executed, is good news?

How is it that such foolishness is actually wisdom, wise, good?

Paul continues, in his letter:

Look at your situation when you were called, my friends! By ordinary human standards not many were wise, not many were powerful, not many were from the upper class.  But God chose what the world considers foolish to shame the wise. God chose what the world considers weak to shame the strong.  And God chose what the world considers low-class and low-life—what is considered to be nothing—to reduce what is considered to be something to nothing.

to reduce what is something to nothing

to shame the wise through those the wise dismiss

ah, there it is.

that the wise dismiss as foolish the lower classes, the little ones, ‘other’ from the elite who claim to be the ‘norm’ – that they so diminish the humanity of so many other humans is not wisdom in the realm, the Way, of God.

God chooses the little ones. the unloved. the nobodies. and I’ll be realistic, for the most part, the ones not me. white. educated. middle class. descended from colonisers. privileged. the only thing I have that puts me into the dismissed is that I am female. and yes, even today in 21^st century Australia, I am dismissed from time to time because I am female.

these days, as I seek to follow Jesus’ Way, I find myself looking for ways I might shut up, might seek the stories of the little ones, the overlooked and dismissed – because in my privilege, it is disappointingly easy to dismiss.

When I have challenged others who share the privileges of whiteness and education, and who have that further privileged position of maleness – when I have challenged us together to get out of the way, give up our seat at the tables where decisions are made, to consider not defaulting to tables for decision making meetings, so as to listen to voices other than our own – we do not take to this challenge readily, or even respectfully. It feels foolish, utterly foolish, to give up my power, for whatever reason.

And yet. That is the foolishness to which we are called. That is the foolishness Jesus embodied. that is the Way, foolish though it may seem, that we say we have chosen.

and because it seems like folly, we default to what appears to have more wisdom to it, more logic, more reason. and each time we do, we get a little more out of tune, become a little more misaligned

Now, this ‘foolish’ way of which I speak is not the kind of foolishness that hears Jesus say blessed are those who are grieving, who are hungry, and decide to enter a perpetual state of mourning, or enact an ascetic life of starvation so as to receive blessing. No. Oh, no.

That declaration of blessedness on the ‘hopeless’ and ‘thirsty’ is a declaration of that choice Paul describes – the choice of God to see, to lift up, the ones the so-called wise do not see, the ones the powerful beat down.

God says: I lift you up.

I redeem you.

And when God lifts up and out of the house of enslavement to the world and its ways, that is not for me alone. The wisdom of God that seems like folly is that my liberation is fulfilled in seeking our liberation, your liberation is bound up in mine, which is incomplete until you, with me, are free.

So insidious are the melodies sung by the world they drown out the harder tune to sing – the foolish tune, the generous tune, the tune of topsy turvy paradox. But tuned in to that song we must be; tuned up like my little blue Bertie – with discipline, with resolution, with attention to the Way that leads us into life. paradoxical, counter-cultural, radically liberating life – for all.

As we re-enter the world from our rest and respite of the slow Australian January; as we take the opportunity of the new year to renew our resolve for the Way of God, may we remember that

They have declared to us, Humans, what is good;

what Breath of Life is seeking from us:

Only –

to do justice

to love lovingkindness

to make attentive our walk with our Holy One.

Amen.