Seriously. Have you ever thought about how crazy this all is? Oh, I've spent days, months, even the past 20 years or so thinking it all over.
God took the worst and made it the best.
He took our weeping and made it our moment of greatness.
He healed because, well, he could.
He fixed it all because, well, he wanted to.
He made the worst of the worst beautiful.
I'm not making this up. This wasn't Peyton Manning walking to the line, reading the defense, making the play-call at the last second.
No, no, no. This crazy idea was, er, well, it was the He did the crazy because that was his PLAN. Let that rest on your breakfast plate a second. This wasn't some last-second hail Mary, mother and such. This was the plan.
Crazy was the plan, not an option, not a thought, not what will happen if we're out of options.
No, crazy was present at the board meeting of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit before the first words of the first Testament were ever presented.
This was the plan.
If this didn't work, crazy would never be brought up again because there would never be another chance. Foolishness wouldn't be an amendment. Foolishness, with a side of bat-crazy, would be offered up on a one-time and one-time only plan of salvation.
There was no, uh, "hey, what if we used this thing called the cross and we sent you down to earth and you did whatever you could to get folks to buy into your teaching and then we could, we could, we would ..."
No woulda, shoulda, coulda here oh, reader of the lost That's Life. No dead Pontchartrain Lake scrolls to be found.
Nope. Crazy talk was crazy walk.
Perhaps one of the most enlightening sentences in scripture is one the apostle Paul writes to a church in Corinth. He gets out his Ipad and looks at ITunes for a moment. He takes out his stylus touch pen and begins to scribble a note to be reflected upon later. His note to himself and to churches beyond includes this idea, one of the more important theological thoughts imaginable, like ideas to change all that would follow.
His idea? "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are being destroyed. But it is the power of God for those of us who are being saved."
He measures the thought of foolishness versus that which is power. The cross, Paul writes after clearly thinking it over for much of the night, is absolute foolishness. It is crazy talk, this idea of someone being crucified and it having meaning beyond death. It is crazy talk, this idea of God putting all his crazy talk into one bundle. It is crazy talk, this movement of the Father's gift of salvation from paltry proposal to penetrating, powerful incredibly vital core value.
It is crazy cross talk, but it is real and powerful cross talk that separates us the Christian from they the non-Christian. One moment we're talking putting the accent on death and destruction, and the next we're dripping with new hope.
Willie Nelson pens possibility.
Patsy Cline warbles to clean and warm her throat.
The world dances for a moment.
And Crazy was born like a wet colt.
Foolishness is the idea that God thought before He invented time the idea of the cross as the means of salvation. Nails would be hammered. Blood would be shed. That blood, the blood of the Pascal lamb, would be the agent of salvation. We would be saved by the blood of the lamb, dribbled down the roped together cross ties of wood, splashed and lavished and painted on the old rugged wood of the old rugged cross.
That's the plan. That's A, B, and C of the plan.
Lamb meet cross.
Savior insert nails.
Jesus bleeds from nails.
Salvation drizzles onto holy ground.
Crazy is as crazy does.
God the Father of all, Jesus the Son, Holier the Spirit. Creator and creation, cross and conflict, blood and beggar, loved and lifted up. The plan devised before plans were possible, before talking was tried, before before was invented.
Miracle before ...
Sign before ...
Trinity before time.
Look, I couldn't make this up even if I tried. No one could. No one did.
Sanity was thrown out because sanity just wasn't going to work. We tried that. That got us a perfect garden and a perfect pair of precious people, and a perfect afternoon of perfect garden walking. Then our own humanity attacked us in our crazy weakness, and it all fell apart. A snake sold its plan, and humanity's perfection died like its immortality.
So, divine plans were re-booted. The craziness of the house of the rising Son became the fall (back).
Life, no longer such a box of chocolates, was suddenly a box of fish and some bread on a Thursday evening. Instead of perfection, we got a pile of crazy.
And it worked. Oh, how it worked.
The power of God, which changed honest-to-Yahweh room-temperature water and stirred it into vats of dinner wine, which humbly washed feet and raised the dead equally well, which called every-day fishermen and made them hook-line-and-sinker evangelists, which converted strict theology of the Moses' law into something an apostle would call grace, which tore apart curtain separating creator and creation, which lit awesome candles to push back the world's darkness, suddenly struck like lightning on a billowy spring day. The strangely silent world changed its tactics. Helpless humanity was washed clean as mandolin strings on a Bluegrass mountain side, smiles were painted, tear stains dried, Old Testament Bibles suddenly given a brand-new testament, and broken hearts were stitched by the lives of martyrs Hebrew and more.
In a moment.
Broken-ness wasn't.
And crazy won for eternity.
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