Now in the name of our loving and liberating God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Good morning St James.

First giving honor and praise to God and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I would like to thank Charlie, Loree and Art for their support and guidance, my lay committee for accepting the call to be sojourners with me on my discernment journey. Thanks to my family members, the members of my church family at St James Lafayette Square, my colleagues, friends, and all who are here to share this special day in my life. Finally, but not the least I want to thank the St James Monkton Family for making this a powerful and loving experience.

Good morning again

Just wanted to you know, it is alright to get a little happy this morning and if the Holy Ghost hits you that is alright too.

I Scripture

Would you please take out the leaflet or turn in your Bible to the New Testament Lesson from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians Chapter 1 beginning with the 18th verse. Please follow along with me as I read

For the message about the cross is foolish to those who are perishing, but to us who are being
saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart."
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided,
through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs
and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified a stumbling-block to Jews and
Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than
human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

II Spiritual Reflection

I get so happy reading this powerful message Paul was sending to the Corinthian dealing with the concept of foolishness. So, the title of my sermon today is:

God’s Foolishness is Alright with Me
God’s foolishness
Foolishness
Is alright with me

I have to admit to all of you that my sermon today was not the original direction I was taking Upon receiving my date for preaching from Charlie I rushed to my trusty lectionary to review the readings and the Gospel for today. After reading all of them I decided to develop my sermon based on the Gospel for today. I began to look for stories and Bible verses to match up with the topic of my focus from the Gospel based on the theme of "The Temple", but the more I searched and thought about "The Temple" my mind kept straying from that message and little headway was being made. Being new to this "sermon thing" I contributed my stagnation to "Sermon Block". At the time I had so many foolish thoughts swirling around in my head that did not connect to my topic "The Temple".

As I have grown older I have come to realize to let things of this world that are troubling me go, so I decided to take a chill pill and come back to my sermon later. I now realize that it was the Holy Spirit telling me to be still and listen. In our lives God is always preparing us for a flip in the script that we are following and be open to something that may come to us out of nowhere. The more I think about it I now realize God has a weird sense of humor and he sets us up for that unexpected foolish miracle that will come our way. Through all of my human wisdom of self, the wisdom of this world, and the wisdom of so many false teachings I got lost and so confused. And the whole time I forgot about the true power which only flows from God. God was molding me, and he molds you too to be ready for a message that will have no rhyme or reason at the time it hits, but only give it a moment and God will reveal to you the power it brings to change your life. It is nothing more than God’s foolishness.

III The Vision

The other night I was dead tired from being so busy. I was a little giddy and acting a little foolish at the time. I stopped by my mama’s house to take a short nap and grab a bite to eat before returning to school for a night event. While lying down, a foolish thought came into my head out of the blue to ask Mama if she had some tapes of Bishop Curry’s sermons. Mama looked at me as if to say have you bumped your head boy, because she knew I was aware of the multitude of tapes she had stored in the kitchen. But being mama she humored me and she brought me a stack of tapes. After going through the stack of tapes I selected a few for her to play for me. Within the first few minutes of the sermon the Holy Spirit slapped me and told me to sit up and listen. The more I listened the more I got excited and I began to reflect back to the readings for today. Even though Bishop Curry’s sermon had nothing to do with foolishness, I kept hearing the word foolishness as I sat there and listened to the message. All of a sudden it hit me and I began to remember the words of the Letter of Paul to the Corinthians where he talked about God’s foolishness. In my excitement I got all happy and kept saying to mama I got it I got it and the more I said I got it the more she asked got what? I got the message that God had sent me in such a foolish way.

I am still taken back at the number of times Paul uses the words "foolish and foolishness" in his letter to the Corinthians. Many times when you see these words in the Bible they are used in a negative way, but I submit to you that Paul is using them in an inviting and honorable way. Yes, Paul wrote these words, but I respectfully believe there was a ghost writer sitting with Paul when he penned these letters. That ghost writer was the Holy Spirit and the message was sent to God’s people in such a way that it blew their minds. I can see the Corinthians opening this letter and seeing the word foolish over and over again and saying here we go again with a beating from Paul. If I were in their shoes I would have been mad as a snake thinking that he was going to belittle us again for something he had perceived we had done or had forgotten to do.

IV Why Foolishness

Thank goodness for the foolish ways of God because he used Paul’s words to recalculate our minds to look at foolish in a completely different way. He transformed something perceived to be a weakness and negative into something that is positive and strong. Paul was proclaiming a radical change or shift in the heart, soul, and mind of mankind and through this proclamation Paul was demonstrating the foolishness of God. Flipping the wisdom of the world upside down and turning it around.

Foolishness can mean so many things:
Lacking or exhibiting a lack of good sense or judgment (silly)
Resulting from stupidity or misinformation (unwise)
Arousing laughter (absurd or ridiculous).

"For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God".

The wise men of his times, Jews and Greeks, called Paul and the followers of Christ foolish, but the more they criticized those who had been redeemed by the Blood of Christ, the stronger the ones who had been laughed at and ridiculed became by the everlasting embrace of the foolishness of God’s power. Let the others of their world and ours be mystified by this foolish power of God and cling to the wisdom of the world that can crumble at any moment without warning. Their stumbling-block is our salvation.

See God continues to have fun when he has Paul call out the ones who claim to be wise, the ones who call themselves scribes and educators, and the debaters who claim to know all and proclaim their wisdom to the world.

The noted theologian William Barclay broke it down this way, that both the cultured Greeks and to pious Jews, the story that Christianity had to tell sounded like laughable foolishness. Paul begins by making free use of two quotations from Isaiah (29:14, 33:18) to show how mere human wisdom is bound to fail.

He cites the undeniable fact that, for all its wisdom, the world had never found God and still blindly seeking him. That very search was designed by God to show men and women their own helplessness or foolishness and so prepare the way for the acceptance of the one who is the one true way.

What, then, was this Christian message? If we study the four great sermons in the Book of Acts (2:14-39, 3:12-26, 4:8-12, 10:36-43), we find that there are certain constant elements in the Christian preaching.

• There is the claim that the great promised time of God has to come.
• There is a summary of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
• There is a claim that all this was the fulfillment of prophecy.
• There is the assertion that Jesus will come again.

• There is an urgent invitation to men and women to repent and receive the promised
• gift of the Holy Spirit.

To the Jews it was incredible that someone who had ended life upon a cross could possibly be God’s chosen one. They pointed to their own human law which unmistakably said: “Anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23). But they didn’t know or understand the foolish power of God.

These human wise men of yesterday and of today believe they have all the answers, but God in his foolish ways lets them know that true wisdom only flows from him and through him, and the wisdom of the world is like a candle facing the winds of a hurricane, it has no chance of staying lit. Just by us and Christians of old being foolish enough to proclaim the awesome power of God and our Lord Jesus Christ we will be saved.

I challenge us today to pick up the foolish ways of God. and preach the glory of his word. It is our task to pick up the torch lit by Paul and confront the wisdom of this world and apply that foolish wisdom God has bestowed upon us and spread the love of our Savior to the four corners of this Earth.

V The Glory of God’s Foolishness

James Gibbons Hun-e-ker puts it so nicely when he said:
He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom.

So I tell you, don’t be worried about being called a fool for Christ, because that is better then being called a fool of this world. A world that is on shaky ground flawed with corruption and deceit. But I tell you, you can give me that foolish world of my God any time, because I know it sits upon a strong foundation. A foundation that can not be shaken by any storm of nature. A foundation that cannot be tampered with by man. A foundation that will be here today and for all the ages.

Because:
God’s foolishness allows us to face the evilness of this world.
God’s foolishness allows us to have our right mind each and every day.
God’s Foolishness allows us to have hope, when the doctors give us no hope.
God’s foolishness allows us to believe that there is a better tomorrow when today is so bleak.

But also,
God foolishness allows us to be fools for Christ and defy the wisdom of this wicked world.
God’s foolishness allows us to feed God’s people in body, mind and soul,
Clothe and educate all children, Lift up the sick and needy, and free the minds and bodies of those in prison.
God’s foolishness allows us to follow the teachings of Jesus to love our neighbor as ourselves, and be the warriors of the cross in Jesus name.

All of us should just be happy, because the foolishness of God has brought us here this morning
Something is happening today that everyone told you couldn’t happen, but the foolishness of God made it happen.

So children don’t be weary and don’t you cry,
because
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger then any human strength.
So I leave you today with this one thought!!!!
God’s foolishness is alright with me.
Amen