Preaching like a fool

Thanks to bronchitis and the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, this is the first time I have stood in this pulpit this year. It is good to be back. The bronchitis couldn't be helped, of course, and nor for that matter could the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which this year celebrated its centenary. It was a privilege, in my fifteenth year in Sherborne, to preach my very first sermon at a Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church – and I had the kind of reception afterwards which convinced me that if it were up to ordinary Christians at the grass roots, we could achieve unity tomorrow!

It was equally heart-warming to drive to Poole later in the day to preach at the big United Service at St Aldhelm's, Branksome, and to discover that over two hundred folk had turned out on a pretty rotten January evening to celebrate what unites us all in Christ. And on both occasions it seemed to me that an obvious theme was the one St Paul returns to over and over again in his first letter to the Christians at Corinth, namely that we are called to be fools for Christ's sake because the world judges our Gospel, our Good News, to be utterly foolish, but that is because God has chosen what the world regards as folly in order to shame those whom the world regards as wise. As he puts is, ‘Divine folly is wiser than the wisdom of man, and divine weakness stronger than man's strength' or, in this morning's New Testament reading, ‘the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing'. And it seems to me that once we have grasped that glorious, that hilarious paradox, all we can do is to dissolve into the kind of laughter that ought to mean the end of churchiness, religiosity and taking ourselves far too seriously, and instead discover in our laughter – which reflects nothing less than the laughter of heaven – our need to accept one another in all our foolishness and pretentiousness, as all being in equal need of the grace and the mercy and the forgiveness of God which is shared out to us all in equal measure provided that we never, any of us, imagine that we somehow have a monopoly, a prior claim, on the love of God.

So having started with this theme I find I cannot get away from it, because here it is again in this morning's reading from 1 Corinthians. And there's something hilarious even about that, because our nice new 2008 Lectionaries tell us that this is indeed one of today's readings, and so do the Clergy's big shiny Church Diaries, but the Common Worship Lectionary disagrees and so I had to look it up and the answer was that when the Feast of the Epiphany occurs on 6 th January the Fourth Sunday of the Epiphany uses the Third Sunday of the Epiphany's readings, and the Sunday next before Lent uses the Fourth Sunday of the Epiphany's readings unless the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple is being celebrated on the Sunday next before Lent, in which case the readings for The Fourth Sunday of the Epiphany may not be used but instead the readings for Candlemas. To which the only proper response is that here is proof positive that we are all fools for Christ's sake, and perhaps most especially those who make all these very silly rules and regulations.

And so, dear friends, the inescapable conclusion is that we are all, without exception, Christ's fools, and that here in Sherborne I am probably expected to be the biggest fool of all. And in that, we discover that we have a good deal in common with that strange figure we know mostly from the theatre, namely the Jester, the Fool, in his motley, cap and bells – one of the most colourful figures of medieval court life, and a key player of Shakespeare's and of much literature both before and since.

If you want my job description in a nutshell, there it is: to stand before God with you – all of you – on my heart. And like the Fool I will always be marked out by my dress, by the collar and the cassock, and woe betide us all when these hallmarks disappear in a misplaced clerical desire to be ‘up-to-date', ‘relevant' and ‘PC'.

More importantly still, the other characteristics of the Fool apply equally to us all. They belong to every Christian man and woman, lay or ordained. For example, the Fool in medieval times had a licence to speak unwelcome truths. In Shakespeare's As You Like It he is an all-licensed critic who, when everyone seems to have lost their reason, sees and speaks the real truth about the people around him. And so it should be with us: to speak fearlessly and boldly of God and the things of God, of his justice and of his righteousness, and of the dignity of all people as created in God's image, made and kept and loved by him. Of course such truths will offend some people, just as our Lord offended many, but if we do not air the truths of the Gospel, then we and the Church and the world will all suffocate. It is a heavy responsibility, and one easily abused, but there are times when, after thought and prayer, it is wrong for the Christian not to speak. There comes a time for us all when, with Luther, we have to speak the truth as we know it and say, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.'

And then there is the way in which the Christian, like the Fool, works within a different dimension of time and a different scale of values from the world. Ever conscious of the Kingdom of God, we must look through eyes seeking signs of the presence of the Creator and Redeemer of the universe within the flowing tide of events. And that is why we must speak to a hectic and fevered world of prayer, of making space for God, of holding ourselves and one another before God. Suffering and tragedy and death are not within God's purpose the defeats they seem to the world. Man is not his own circumference, and tomorrow is not the limit of our horizon before Christ, the same yesterday and today and for ever. We stand at the intersection of the timeless with time, citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven now and for eternity.

And, last, the Christian is from time to time called, like the Fool (and like St Paul himself) to be a scapegoat, a target for derision and scorn in a world which prefers darkness to light. Here in Sherborne ours may not be the calling to suffer and die for our faith as martyrs. But in a small way, a humble way, we must each one of us be prepared to accept the scorn and the derision of a world which finds our presence an embarrassment, an accusation, and an irritant to complacency.

Then, as we reflect on being fools for Christ's sake, we may well (to our utter surprise) discover that we are reflecting an authentic icon and picture of Christ himself: the one who proclaimed the truth however unpopular it might be; the one who brought into the time-bound world of men and women the timeless presence of God, the Lord of Eternity; the one who as scapegoat for all our sins was tortured and killed, dying for us all. Here is a true picture of Christ the great High Priest, and to be imitators of him in the folly of the Gospel is the ministry, the priesthood, of us all. The poor blinkered world will condemn us as fools, and imagine that it has no need of the Gospel. But ours is the timeless role of the Fool: to perceive the truth and proclaim the truth and do the truth when all around are blind to the eternal verities; to stand up for what is right, to interpret tragedy and suffering and put them in perspective, to be if necessary the scapegoat who accepts scorn and derision in the cause of God's truth and the service of human kind. This is our calling. As St Paul put it long ago,

Honour and dishonour, praise and blame, are alike our lot. We are the imposters who speak the truth, the unknown men whom all men know. Dying, we still live on; disciplined by suffering, we are not done to death; in our sorrows we have always cause for joy; poor ourselves, we bring wealth to many; penniless, we own the world.