Ted Trigg, Worship Director
7 AM. Jogging around Greenlake. Training for a triathlon that happens in August. This is ridiculous. It’s cold and gloomy. My feet barely leave the earth. With swimming, I am free of the weight I carry. With biking I can be a racer. Running does nothing for me. Every step is painful.
So, on my most recent jog around Greenlake, on a day when my mp3 player died and I had no form of entertainment to keep me going, I started skipping. I’m sure I looked like an idiot to anyone driving by and in fact got a couple of teenagers honking at me and shouting some expletives at me, stating that my skipping determined my sexual orientation. (I make the assumption they are teenagers. It’s a bias with not basis of truth.) Not willing to give into pressure from the public, I kept right on going until I thought I would die from the motion of skipping. I started running again and found that strangely enough, I had a bit more push for getting back into it. I had cross-trained without even thinking about it. The ridiculous action had paid off!
Our spiritual life demands the same elements of the ridiculous. In fact, the ridiculous comes into play all too often. Consider the saints of the Bible. Moses wants to free the slaves of Israel, tries to do it as the Prince of Egypt, fails, goes to the desert for 40 some years where God calls him to do the very thing he wants. Ridiculous. He stutters. He’s old. He tends sheep. Lead millions to the promised land? BAH!
Or how about David? He is to be the King of Israel. Are you kidding me? He is a shepherd, he is the youngest of seven, scrawny and he plays the harp. The harp? Come on. At least pick a trumpet player! (Also to be noted is that in the culture of the day, musicians were one of the lower social strata). A Shepherd King? What Israel needs is a warrior!
Look at Paul. What does he say about himself? In regard to the law, a Pharisee, circumcised on the eighth day; as for zeal, throw the Christians to the lions; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless. So, God sends him to the Gentiles, the pagans, the heathens, the unclean. What is going on here?
The absurd. The ridiculous. And God is full of crazy ideas.
The ridiculous is an education concept actually. In his book Models of Teaching, Bruce Joyce talks about how we can more easily learn when we associate ideas and concepts to the ridiculous. For instance, if we want to learn the geography of the Middle East, we might come up with a statement like this: I ran to the rack of clothes and saw the serial numbers of the Jordache jeans. How many countries can you see? Let me type it again with bold: I ran to the rack of clothes and saw the serial numbers of the Jordache jeans. Let me spell it out: Iran, Iraq, Saudi (Arabia), Syria, Jordan. The point? The ridiculous and absurd mixes things up and causes us to make fresh associations in our learning. Why wouldn’t this be true of learning about Christ as well? If skipping can make me run better, maybe other bizarre and unpredictable things will help me (read: us) in our understanding of Christ.
Maybe God is calling us to something ridiculous. We want to play to our strengths, our talents, but maybe that is the opposite of what God wants. Maybe He wants to play to the desires of our hearts and the only way we can truly know those desires is to let Him lead us in ways that seem outlandish or in ways that are the opposite of what we would want to do.
Don’t be absurd you say. OK. But consider carefully these words from I Corinthians 1:27: “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” Let’s not forget in our culture that praises the strong and the smart that God is looking for the weak and the broken to become part of His kingdom. It’s ridiculous, but it is one of the mysterious ways that God works.
