You can reinvent yourself, as many times as you like; if David Bowie and Madonna can do it . . .  That’s either foolishness or it’s power.  Remember, power is ability, possibility: not only to do what can be done but also what could not be done.  When you come up against what is impossible, you come up against the limit of your power.  I come up against my limit quickly, constantly.  Foolishness—that’s what the Bible is supposed to be.  Myth, superstition—things science can now explain to us much better, explain to us truthfully.  Now that we have science, you see, we don’t need God.  And I see atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, neutron bombs, Zyklon B, gain of function research, dilation and evacuation, highly profitable surgical procedures being done with no medical necessity, and on and on.  Anti-science?  No.  Science is a tool.

Tools can be used for blessing or for harm.  It all depends upon who is using it for what end.  We must never separate science from who is doing the science, what they are doing with it, and why.  When we—society, culture, those who have power and authority—act as if science is our god—impartial, benevolent, and always correct—we are pulling a heavy, ornate curtain over the reality that science is also used as a tool, by people and by the old gods.  The old gods demand two things: lust and blood.

Who is using the cross, and for what end?  Man used the cross to dispose of yet another inconvenient rabble-rouser, another wild-eyed crank, another would-be deposer of the old gods, the old powers, which are not so easily dislodged.  Who is using the cross, and for what end?  A man used the cross, voluntarily let himself be nailed to it, to hang there bloody, to die of slow asphyxiation out under the hard, dust-choked sun.  He took the cross to himself to die.  He died to rise.

“[T]he message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1:18).  Either the cross is foolishness or it is power.  What would you like your rescue to look like?  Well, let’s take a step back: you realize you need rescuing, yes?  No?  Rescued from what?  Democrats?  Trump?  The Davos set?  Debt?  Sickness?  Sadness?  Boredom?  The frustration of dreams and hopes constantly dashed by life?

Rescued from sin?  It’s the old message!  No wonder few care to listen.  Foolishness to those who are perishing.  What’s the way forward?  What’s the way out?  Politics?  War?—which as the old adage has it, is politics by other means.  Booze?  Complaining?  Anything but that.  (You know, booze rarely keeps people from complaining, quite the opposite—just so we’re clear about that.)  What is the way forward?  What is the way out?  Nobody really seems to know anymore.  Something different, I suppose.  That was why eastern religions gained a foothold in the West, particularly after World War Two, especially in the ‘60s.  It was something different, and it was clear that the old way, the old religion, wasn’t working, right?  All the bombs and blood—it wasn’t victory for everyone.  All the bombs and blood—Christianity was supposed to change all that, make it go away, make it impossible, wasn’t it?  Where’s that kinder, gentler society?!

“For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate’” (1:19).  It was mainly the smart set, the cultured rebels, the edgy visionaries, who threw away the old Christian clothes that never really suited them, anyway.  They took to the different ways, the old different ways, the ways that promised nothing about God but everything about escape and wisdom: the higher, purer way, far from the lust and blood.  And what God says—not that they cared, anymore—is that what counts as wisdom and intelligence from the side of man is nothing of the kind from the divine perspective.  I never encountered as many atheists as I did in grad school, among my fellow students and my professors: my very well-paid professors.  It pays to be an atheist, you know.  If you want to be well paid, better be an atheist.  Nobody outside the ivied walls and ivoried towers cares what those old angry disciples of the hippies and Marxists say or think, but they’re teaching your sons and daughters, your grandsons and granddaughters.  And they’re listening.

In this world, perspective is shaped by institutions.  Sociologists speak of the institution of the family.  We see all around us that families are more unstable now maybe than we’ve ever experienced or heard about.  School—there’s another institution.  Family is where children go when they aren’t in school.  Our children spend much of their early lives, those formative years, in school.  In decades gone by, we never thought much about it.  Reading, writing and ‘rithmetic are not all that’s taught in many schools, now, as the news shows and tells us.  None of this is meant to criticize you who are teachers in the schools.  As Christians, you know you have to navigate those waters very carefully.  Nicholas comes home and tells me what a terrible thing we’re doing to the environment, how we’ve got to stop climate change, how electric cars are the future.  I agree that our relationship with the environment is troubled, but it sounds as if the institution is providing The Answer for my children when the answer is far from clear, much muddier, than what my children tell me.  When the idylls of ideology meet the vicissitudes of reality, which must yield?

“Where is the wise person?  Where is the teacher of the law?  Where is the philosopher of this age?” (1:20).  Institutions instill a particular perspective, a particular set of values.  Institutions shape a particular sense of identity.  The sign outside says, “Independent Thinking”: the product coming out the doors is Conformity.  Institutions produce conformity.  I’m not talking only about schools.  Advancement within the institution requires conformity; continuing membership requires it.  A robust, secure sense of self requires it.  To an extent, we can choose our conformity, but we have to be careful about that!  We have to be wise.

“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1:20).  Any perspective that comes by way of this world is necessarily circumscribed, inherently incomplete.  The wisdom of the world is just that.  The wisdom of the world is for this world.  The wisdom of the world is for making our adjustments to this world, for getting along, for getting ahead.  The wisdom of this world is not for getting out of this world, not for presuming that such a thing were desirable or even possible—the impossible, recall, is the limit of power.  But not God’s power.

Any and all worldly wisdom becomes foolishness before God.  God makes it abundantly clear how foolish is the wisdom of this world.  But that is the case only for those to whom God grants His wisdom.  To love the wisdom of this world, especially what our worldly wisdom tells us about God and God’s ways and what God wants, is to be a fool.  To love the wisdom of God is to seek the wisdom of God, to heed the wisdom of God, and to begin to live the wisdom of God.

The church ought to be the place for that, and the church is itself also an institution, with all the trouble that brings.  The good news is that God’s Church—His elect saints—predates the institution of the church, just as God’s wisdom predates the wisdom of man.  What is the wisdom of God?  Paul begins to let us in on it: “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe” (1:21).  If we do not know God, we cannot love God.  God caused it to be that He could not, would not be known through the wisdom of the world, institutionalized wisdom, get along wisdom, get ahead wisdom, conformity wisdom, rebel wisdom.  God’s wisdom is superior, controlling.  We’ll truly love God when we truly know God, and we know God truly through God alone, not any wisdom of this world.

All the foolishness out there—I mean the plain foolishness and the foolishness of institutional wisdoms—it’s all under God’s wisdom.  He wants the foolishness to be out there; it also is serving His purpose, subject to His plan.  What could that purpose, that plan be?!  It seems that at least part of God’s plan is that the message shall not be for those who hold tenaciously to the wisdom of the world.  So many, too many, do!  Politics will save us.  Democracy will save us.  Recycling and composting will save us.  The highly credentialed will save us.  The Great Reset will save us.  The great bloodletting will save us.  We’ll be saved when we stop reproducing.  And foolishness?  Foolishness will be the salvation of those who believe.  I wish it weren’t “we few, we happy few.”

Salvation is out of the world, out of the hands, the words, the perspectives of the institutions of this world.  Salvation is the Word of God.  We never will know God through this world’s wisdom, nor its institutions.  The wisdom of man is for making man the only god: the power, the authority, the truth.  We’ve seen the idolization of political figures all over the world, and we may think that’s just the exception.  No, that’s the rule.  It’s the old gods, with their imperative for lust and blood.  The ancient Canaanites sacrificed their own children to please the gods, to seek to make them favorable.  Not the exception but the rule of the old gods: absolute power in return for security, the safety net—food, shelter, health, education, transportation, communication, leisure.

What could possibly draw anyone away from those massive udders?  The realization that it was all a lie?  That the king was naked, all along?  The realization that the Kool-Aid was actually poison?  The realization that you didn’t want to die, after all?  No.  None of that.  What could possibly draw anyone away, turn their eyes to the light, the truth, reality?  “Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1:23-24).

No thing will call us away from our enslavement, but some one will.  Who draws us away is God who calls, who causes us to hear, turn, and follow.  Living for some other supposed life after death?  Resurrection?  Judgment?  Take up your cross?  Lose your life to live?  The last shall be first?  Nietzsche, one of the wiser ones to have come along, and the son of a pastor, hated all that sort of talk and expended his copious mental strength on developing a new religion for modern man—though he probably wouldn’t have called it that.  He didn’t succeed, and died in 1900 at the age of 55 after eleven years of institutionalization for dementia believed to have been brought on by syphilis.

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1:25).  Christians are on a journey to the heights of God’s foolishness.  We live from the depths of God’s weakness.  The cross.  If we wear a little gold or silver cross, let us never wear it as a pretty afterthought, but always as a treasured reminder that Jesus shows us there the way to life, and our way of life here, now.  Yes, the cross means you are loved.  That’s not all it means.

We are small leaves on the great river.  The current of Corinth is strong, and though we may have been born and raised in the church, we have also been born and raised in the world and educated by its institutions, even the institution of the church.  The church’s institutional messaging and the message of Christ are not the same: Presbyterians now must certainly know that much!

We don’t live by the institution; no institution can grant us life, peace, security, or joy.  God gives these.  These are the purview of God.  We are those whom God has called, saved, and is actively transforming.  We are those whom God is now conforming to the image of His beloved Son our Savior.  We now hold out the mirror of God’s Word, in which all the cultured despisers, the institutionally credentialed governors of life on earth, are made to see the deformity of their conformity.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.