Wednesday’s Word — Edition 155

“We are fools for Christ’s sake,” Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians.

God is foolish, too, Paul says. God is foolish to choose for His holy work in the world the kind of lamebrains and misfits and nit-pickers and odd ducks and stuffed shirts and egomaniacs and milquetoasts and closet sensualists as are vividly represented by us all.

God is foolish to send us out to speak hope to a world that slogs along heart-deep in the conviction that things can only get worse…He is foolish to have us speak of loving our enemies when we have a hard enough time loving our friends…God is foolish to have us proclaim eternal life to a world that is half in love with death…God is foolish to send us out on a journey for which there are no maps, and to aim us in the direction of a goal we can never know until we get there. Such is the foolishness of God. 

And yet, and yet, Paul says, “the foolishness of God is wiser than man.”     

~~~ Frederick Buechner