Upon their release the next day, they set off together….

A charge that well might be made against the faithful ever since, as perhaps these three short accounts might prove.

First, there has always been the tendency to cherry-pick the Bible to support private agendas or one’s own pet project. For instance, you are likely familiar with that account of the first Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb in the early hours, only to find the stone rolled away and the body of Jesus gone. She runs to tell the others, and one runs to the tomb, bows down to look in, and, to quote John 20:6-7, “saw the linen wrappings lying there”, together with the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head. These were, of course, the clothes Jesus had been buried in. When combined with that adage, “Waste not, want not”, this led, of course, or so I am told by a certain dedicated lady of the congregation, whose name shall remain anonymous but whose initials are Marlene White, -- this led to the first ever church rummage sale. And scriptural warrant for church rummage sales ever since. It’s in the Bible. You can look it up.

Second, there is always the matter of trying to track down the one, true church. Louie was shipwrecked on a desert island for years until he was finally rescued. Before leaving the island, he gave the rescue party a tour. “I built myself a house. That’s it over there. Here’s the barn, and over here is the church I worshipped in.”

“What’s that building over there?” one of the rescuers asked.

Louie sneered. “That’s the church I used to belong to.”

You laugh. I was once interviewed by a church-shopper. He had visited, he told me, sixty churches on the Cape, and had narrowed it down to two. Sad to say, I flunked the interview – he chose the other church. But if to forgive is divine, to err is to be human, and so a year later, there he was again, back in my study, but this time convinced that West Parish was were he belonged. He may have been a bit nutty, but then again Jesus kept saying nutty things like “welcome the stranger” and “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” and “forgive not seven times but seventy times seven times”, and fortunately this congregation is full of such nuts, and so he was welcomed with open arms.

Finally, sometimes it just seems that our good intentions can just get us side-tracked from time to time, as this story demonstrates.

On the outskirts of a small town, there was a big, old pecan tree just inside the cemetery fence. One day, two boys filled up a bucketful of nuts and sat down by the tree, out of sight, and began dividing the nuts. "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me," said one boy. Several dropped and rolled down toward the fence.

Another boy came riding along the road on his bicycle. As he passed, he thought he heard voices from inside the cemetery. He slowed down to investigate. Sure enough, he heard, "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me." He just knew what it was. He jumped back on his bike and rode off.

Just around the bend he met an old man with a cane, hobbling along. "Come here quick," said the boy, "you won't believe what I heard! Satan and the Lord are down at the cemetery dividing up the souls." The man said, "Beat it kid, can't you see it's hard for me to walk."

When the boy insisted though, the man hobbled slowly to the cemetery. Standing by the fence they heard, "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me..."

The old man whispered, "Boy, you've been tellin' me the truth. Let's see if we can see the Lord." Shaking with fear, they peered through the fence, yet were still unable to see anything. The old man and the boy gripped the wrought iron bars of the fence tighter and tighter as they tried to get a glimpse of the Lord.

At last they heard, "One for you, one for me. That's all. Now let's go get those nuts by the fence and we'll be done."

They say the old man made it back to town a full 5 minutes ahead of the kid on the bike.

I think these stories are so funny because they each have an element of truth in them, and the truth underlying them all is this: we are a bunch of nut cases! We might be tempted to blame this on human nature, and say that whenever you get a bunch of people together over the long haul, after a fair amount of time some of us are going to stray off the straight and narrow with at times comical results. But Paul the Apostle puts the blame elsewhere – he lays it right at God’s doorsteps. He writes (1 Corinthians):

20Where 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? 21For 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. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

26Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, 29so that no one might boast in the presence of God. 30He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

God chose what was foolish in the world – us, those who pick up this ancient text and try to use it as a pattern for our lives; us, those who try to follow a lowly carpenter who ended up nailed to a cross on a lonely hill; us, who with all due respect to Glenn Beck and his claim that we church folk are a bunch of socialists, actually believe that when God calls us to pursue justice this means working to feed the hungry and house the homeless and make our society a place where no one is left behind; us, those who believe that there is something worth living and even dying for that is more important than wealth and worldly success and even, if push came to shove, country – God chose us. The nut cases.

Perhaps this will offend some of you. Me, I take comfort from the idea. Because if God chose me because I am wise, or because I have all the answers, or because I am good looking, or because I am hard-working – than I, and all of us are in a lot of trouble.

Not that, I rush to assure you, I am so easily replaceable, as this last account should, by implication, make clear to you.

You see, there was a well-to-do evangelist who traveled around the country giving sermons, driven by his personal chauffeur. One day, the chauffeur said to him, “Pastor, I have heard your sermon so may times that I believe I could give it myself.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” the evangelist said, “because many people don’t know me by appearance, but by reputation. Let’s try it at the church in the next town.”

The two switched clothes, with the chauffeur wearing the suit and the evangelist wearing the chauffer’s uniform. The chauffer gave the sermon as planned, and received a standing ovation.

Then, from the back of the room, a woman asked a very complicated theological question. “Uh-oh,” the pastor thought in panic, “we’re busted.”

Then the chauffeur replied, “That is such a simple question that I am going to let my chauffeur answer that.”

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