Sermon — January 29, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
(1 Cor. 1:18-31)
There’s nothing in the world that’s more holy than a good waste of time.
Now to be clear, before you all pull out your phones and start scrolling through the social media of your choice, I said a good waste of time. Not every waste of time is good. Perhaps it’s actually better to put it the other way around, so I’ll say this instead: the most holy moments in this life almost always look, when judged my modern standards of efficiency and success, like a total waste of time.
These seemingly-wasted hours take a variety of forms. Sometimes they mean canceling a meeting or so you can attend a mediocre school play, watch a bunch of small children somehow strike out repeatedly even though they’re playing T-ball. Sometimes it means spending forty-five minutes on the phone listening to an old friend, when you have ten other things on your mind that you need to get done that day. Sometimes it means sitting by the bedside of a parent or a grandparent or a spouse, who’s too deep in their dementia or too close to the end to have any idea you’re there, for hours and hour at a time. Sometimes it means sitting in silence, in meditation or in prayer, simply doing nothing in the presence of God as the seconds tick by.
The most holy moments in life, if you try to measure them in terms of productivity or efficiency, their contribution to the national economy or to your own job performance or physical fitness, almost always seem like a waste of time. And yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. They are the most holy things in life.
I want to step back for a moment and set the scene for our Gospel reading today. You may know that our readings are assigned by a three-year cycle called the “Revised Common Lectionary,” which is shared by Catholics and Episcopalians, Lutherans and Methodists and many other denominations, not only here but around the world. And each year we read through one of the gospels: this year it’s Matthew.
I said last week that last week’s story, in which Jesus calls his first disciples to leave their fishing nets and follow him, marks the end of the stories of Jesus’ birth and adolescence and the beginning of his adult ministry. And today’s Gospel reading marks the beginning of Jesus’ most famous speech, the “Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus had been traveling throughout Galilee, teaching and preaching and healing people from every disease and sickness he could find, and a huge crowd from all over the place had started to gather around him.
And when Jesus saw the crowd, “he went up to the mountain… [and] his disciples came to him.” (Matthew 5:1) And, in words that will set the tone for the entire Gospel—in other words, in words that will be at the heart of everything we hear from Jesus this lectionary year, from now to next December—Jesus begins to lay out his vision of the kingdom of heaven whose arrival he is proclaiming.
Everything that Matthew’s told us so far suggests that Jesus is launching a political campaign. He is the Messiah, the successor to King David. He’s begun proclaiming a new kingdom. And he’s gathered a crowd of followers, from among all the people of his nation. This is the moment for his first great speech, the moment when he’ll lay out his vision for the future, his manifesto for what his kingdom will be, and that’s exactly what he does, in words that are now familiar to us but still haven’t lost their power to surprise:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad. (Matt. 5:3-11)
Jesus turns to his disciples, in other words, to his closest followers, and he points to the crowd, to the multitude of the sick and the tired and the hungry who’ve come looking for healing and for peace, and he says to his disciples, “You’re looking for the kingdom of heaven? Here it is.”
If what you want is a Messiah’s Messiah, a man’s man, a strong, tough leader, this ain’t it. If what you want is an army who’ll throw out the Roman invaders and make your nation great again, this ragtag crowd looks pitiful. If what you want is health, and wealth, and esteem, then Jesus has nothing to offer you in these words. You can already tell, up front, at the very beginning of his ministry, that by any reasonable measure of success, this guy is going to fail—and fail hard. The idea that a movement of the poor and the meek and the mourning, the merciful peacemakers who are pure in heart, is going to throw out the hardened veterans of the Roman legions, is ridiculous. You might even call it foolish.
And indeed it is foolish, and it’s always been foolish, and we’ve always known that it’s foolish, from the earliest days of the Church. “For the message about the cross,” as Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us… it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. 1:18) The ancient Greek culture in which these Corinthians lived and in which they’d all grown up valued “the one who is wise…the scribe…the debater of this age.” (1 Cor. 1:20) But Paul’s proclamation was a foolish one: that the Messiah had come, and he had not thrown out the Romans, he had failed and had been executed on the cross, and that this failure had been the moment of his victory. Paul’s message is a foolish one, an incredible one, but “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength,” (1 Cor. 1:25) and in you, my beloved parishioners—Paul writes, in the ultimate back-handed compliment—in you, who are not, on average, wise, who are not powerful, who are not of noble birth, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:26-27)
God has taken a good hard look at the things we human being strive for—wealth and prestige and the eternal appearance of youth—and God has chosen instead to bless the things we fear, our poverty and persecution and pain. God has considered the ways we spend our time—the ones that are productive and valuable in the eyes of the world, and the ones that are unproductive in the eyes of the world—and God has chosen to rank them in a different way. God has chosen the sick and the tired and the poor, the weak and the meek and the mourning, the persecuted and the peaceful and the pure in heart, the children and all those who can’t “contribute” to society. God has chosen to bless us in all our suffering, to be alongside us in our suffering, and to bless us in our presence with those who are suffering.
God has chosen to bless the time we waste on holy things, and declared it to be the most important time of all. God has chosen to bless us, not when we achieve and succeed and excel, but when we sit, and watch, and wait, and most especially when we sit with the old, and the young, and the sick among us, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs, and the kingdom of God is there.
I suspect that many of you feel, as I sometimes do, that you don’t have enough hours in the day to do everything you need. (Some of you may have too many hours in the day, and maybe that’s a problem for another sermon.) But if you ever find yourself wondering whether what you’re doing is a waste of time, I’d invite you to ask yourself whether that’s just the wisdom of the world talking, to wonder instead whether what you’re doing with that time is in line with the wild vision God lays out for the kingdom of heaven, a vision that values the meek and the humble and the hungry. For “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)