Year B: March 7, 2021 | Lent 3
Lent 3, Year B: I Corinthians 1:18-25
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
March 7, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 25:05 in).
Shannon and I have two dogs, a little dachshund/Italian greyhound mix named Titan Charles who’s lived with us for about 10 years now and his younger adoptive sister, Neela Pearl. Neela is 50lbs of muscle wrapped in a big, goofy smile and a shiny, charcoal gray coat. She loves cuddles and heavy-duty chew toys and spends most of her day snoring quietly on the sofa. Neela’s first instinct about every person she meets is that they’ll want to be her new best friend. If you were to come over to our house, she’d most likely spend the visit either begging for belly rubs or continually trying to climb onto your lap so she can smother you with kisses. Her love for humans knows no bounds.
Dogs, however, are a different story. When she was less than two years old, we were playing at an off-leash dog park in Texas when a large German shepherd attacked Neela. She ended up with a pretty deep head wound, and it took a while before she healed enough to go back out and play. Unfortunately, at her very next visit—and at a completely different park (we weren’t going to risk running into Zeus again)—another dog bit her just as we walked through the gate.[1] After that, she grew more and more anxious about the presence of any canine she didn’t already know. She started by giving quiet warning growls, but even though the other dogs would generally respect her space and stay away, she apparently still didn’t feel safe. So she started snarling and baring her teeth—also not effective enough for her. Despite our attempts at redirection, she eventually moved into more and more aggressive displays. Now she sometimes starts reacting to another dog when we’re more than a block away. Her snapping jaws, lunging, and a noise I can only call “scream-barking” are genuinely scary.
If you saw her having a meltdown, you’d easily conclude she’s just a mean dog who wants to kill everything she sees. But the more familiar you become with her behavior, the more you realize that behind Neela’s apparent rage and vicious outbursts lies an ocean of terror. After those two early attacks, something seems to have broken in the fight-or-flight part of her brain, leaving her on continual high alert. As I said, she loves people, and she clearly distinguishes between different kinds of animals as we walk, paying little attention to squirrels, bunnies, and even cats. But her baseline response to other dogs—even tiny ones—is “fight.” Our trainers and vets suspect that despite her apparent ferocity, she doesn’t necessarily want to hurt the other dog, although none of us will risk giving her the chance to find out. They say her explosive reaction is a primal safety response: she’s doing everything she can to externalize her intense anxiety. Basically, if she can project her own fear enough to instill it into the approaching dog, she hopes to keep potential threats as far away as possible.
Frankly, it sucks. It’s one of those things I always feel a little sad about inside. Without significant planning and supervision, Neela simply can’t be around other dogs. With enough regular exercise, medicine, and management techniques, we can help her avoid freaking out too badly, but even on her best days, there’s no way we could trust her to romp around or play chase or tug-of-war like she used to. She’s simply too unpredictable. We’re constantly applying new methods of helping her, but at this point it looks like she may never really recover from that early trauma. We know it isn’t her fault. And despite how embarrassing her outbursts may be—and as much as I might blame myself for not being able to help her—it isn’t our fault either. Her fear is too deeply embedded, and her life is poorer for it.
Unfortunately, a lot of Christians spend their entire lives in a similar state of fear—paranoia, really—one connected to two little words in today’s epistle reading: “the world.”
In regular, daily life, those words aren’t scary at all. But put them in a Christian setting, and suddenly they become a harbinger of evil: the world, the flesh, and the devil all tend to lump together in our minds. Preachers often describe “the world” as a sort of intangible global system opposed to God’s reign. Two of the many official theological definitions for it include “the ungodly multitude; the whole mass of men alienated from God, and therefore hostile to the cause of Christ” and “the whole circle of earthly goods, endowments, riches, advantages, pleasures, etc, which although hollow and frail and fleeting, stir desire, seduce from God and are obstacles to the cause of Christ.”[2] For many Christians, “the world” suggests chaos and supernaturally-empowered global conspiracy, which feeds very well into the broader societal paranoia of our age.
However, that’s not what the words meant when Paul was using them. In what has become an all-too-common revelation, we once again find ourselves incorrectly reading later meanings onto earlier texts.
When Paul was writing, “the world”[3] wouldn’t have been a fearful thing to his Greek-speaking audience. Like today, the words were used in connection with the broader planet or universe, but the first things “the world” brought to mind were natural order, good government, and harmonious beauty.[4] For Paul’s readers, “the world” was simply the logical flow of reality, the order found within the course of nature functioning at its best. All of them knew that God made “the world.” God designed, directed, and ruled over “the world.” “The world” itself was not malicious or deceitful. It may have been full of mystery and wonders, but none of them lacked some level of reason or logic. Although it’s easy to read as a declaration of mockery or pride, when Paul asks the Corinthians, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?”, he isn’t condemning scientific knowledge or conclusions drawn from sound observation. It’s a question of incredulous surprise, less like, “Ha! Look at those idiots!” and more along the lines of, “Huh—never would have seen that coming!”
Just like Neela doesn’t really need to fear every bark she hears, no matter how distant, or every dog she sees, no matter how many hundreds of feet away, Christians don’t need to fear “the world.” There really is no cause for panic. People might manipulate “the world” and attempt to bend it to their own advantage, so it certainly doesn’t hurt to keep an eye open. But blind fear is completely unhelpful. It does nothing but isolate and lead those in its grip further into delusion and despair.
God has never been afraid of the world, and we, as God’s children, shouldn’t be either.
In many expressions of American Christianity, self-preservation seems to be the rule of the day. We often demand rights and special privileges and powers that we would then deny to those around us. We act like everyone and everything is out to get us. And that’s exactly the type of thinking Paul is talking about when he says that God made the world’s wisdom look foolish. As it turns out, we are the world in the sense that the Church has come to define it. Paul wasn’t telling us to reject the reality in front of us—doing so leads to death and fear, not life. He’s inviting us to embrace the logic of the cross[5]—Christ’s pattern of humility, immersion, and participation. Christ didn’t come to avoid the world or escape from it. He came to restore[6] it, to raise it—and us—back to godly functioning. Looking around through a lens of anxiety, it’s easy to conclude that in our world only the strong survive, and that “God helps those who help themselves.” But in the reality of God’s world, the meek are the ones who inherit the earth, and the humble gain the Kingdom of Heaven. God’s world is one that overthrows long-established dynasties of fear, reaching out to the lowly and filling the hungry with good things.[7]
As Christians, we have nothing to fear from “the world” around us, nothing that should make us run away from the people and places God both created and redeemed. Hiding our eyes while the planet burns or huddling together awaiting a means of supernatural escape from the consequences of our own actions isn’t the way of the cross. It’s “the world’s” logic—the logic of self-preservation that ultimately leads to isolation and self-destruction. It’s the same subtle hell Neela’s reactivity creates. Does her incessant terror provide her a better, more fulfilling existence? No, all her efforts to scare the world away simply prevent her from being able to fully enjoy the life God gave her and the opportunities we wish we could provide for her. Fear is exactly the kind of wisdom that God makes foolish in Christ. The Bible doesn’t call us to fear or flee the world but to love it. And perfect love—God’s love—will always cast out fear.[8]
[1] Their owners admitted that both dogs were known aggressors.
[2] https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G2889&t=KJV (Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, definitions 6 and 7)
[3] κόσμος (cosmos)
[4] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cosmos & https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%83%CE%BC%CE%BF%CF%82 | Reading Biblical warnings about “the world” with governmental references or obsessions with maintaining “balance” or “law and order” in mind opens up some interesting interpretations.
[5] “Logic” is alternate translation of “message” in I Corinthians 1:18.
[6] Based on the works of early Christian writers, “restore” or “preserve” is likely a better translation of the word we render “save.”
[7] Adapted from the Magnificat (Luke 1:52-53)
[8] I John 4:18