Evangelicals need a Biblical theology of foolishness for our generation that will at once “shame the wise” and declare the truth and promise of the gospel. How should that look for Protestant believers in the twenty-first century? Whatever it looks like, it must embrace the foolishness of the cross to affirm that our faith does not “rest not on human wisdom,” as Paul put it to the Corinthians, “but on the power of God.”

The Power of the Cross to Shame the Wise
The Los Angeles Dodgers recently hosted at their ballpark the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an organization that claims to “raise drag awareness” and increase “understanding of gay spirituality.” This has caused controversy since the men in the organization are flamboyantly anti-Catholic, dress as nuns, and incorporate blasphemy into their “performances.” The Dodgers invited the group to participate in “Pride Night,” but before it took place they disinvited the Sisters in response to online anger on the part of Christian groups and others. The disinvitation prompted what was evidently an even bigger backlash on social media from defenders of the Sisters, which prompted the Dodgers to re-invite the group, and then publicly bestow upon them a “Community Hero Award.”
The Dodgers have reconfirmed it is possible to be craven and sanctimonious at the same time.
Drag Queens are not the only means of challenging moral and social norms in society, or, of problematizing heteronormative bourgeois values, as I would have said had I paid better attention during drag queen story hour. What the left has known and said for quite some time–at least since the 1960s—is that just about any kind of clownishness will do. The clown is a caricature, an exaggeration. His method is to distort some facet of reality to the point of absurdity. Big noses, red lips, oversized feet, effeminate men—does not really matter what is exaggerated. What matters is that you, the viewer, are entertained or captivated or distracted. Playing the fool means not fitting in, usually in a spectacular way.
But clowning is about more than mocking the clown. Foolishness can be a means of persuasion, too. In this case, the real joke is not on the fools, but on the people laughing at them. An effective clown prompts you to ponder the world in a different light, imagine another way, maybe even another world, and to come to see your own position as more strange or arbitrary or absurd than you previously thought. Court jesters, parodists, and drag queens have known this as long as they have been around. Embracing one’s own foolishness in the eyes of the majority is a powerful, and potentially revolutionary tool.
This is where Evangelical Christians have something to learn from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Foolishness delivers a message to the ones who laugh; it is a tool of persuasion wielded by outliers in society. After generations of occupying one kind of moral majority or another, Evangelicals have forgotten how to embrace and defend the “foolishness” of our own faith. We have spent the past few decades trying to appease the scoffers. The result is that our resolve to stand for truth is weakened in a world hostile to us. We need to recover the art of godly foolishness, an ancient and venerable means of speaking truth, and one that will inoculate us against the inevitable disdain of the world.
Revolutionary Potential of the Fool
In the 1960s, the radical left incorporated clownishness into its repertoire as a matter of course. Reading about it is quite refreshing, honestly, given how humorless and dour so much of the left can often be. Marx was never known for his knock-knock jokes. In recent years, the left’s resentment toward humor has been on full display. The banning of The Babylon Bee from Twitter for mocking left-wing pieties should have been a Babylon Bee gag, not an actual news story.
There was a period, however, during which this was not the case. In 1968, for instance, the left-wing radicals who called themselves Yippies nominated a 150-pound pig named “Pigasus the Immortal” to run for President against Richard Nixon. They were arrested at the campaign launch in Chicago, and charged with bringing livestock into the city. When asked why they nominated a pig for the presidency, one of them explained it was “because if we can’t have him in the White House, we can at least have him for breakfast.” This is fine political satire, suggesting that the potential bacon value of your candidate outweighs the policy value of your opponent. Surely there were a few Republicans that gave a chuckle at the time, even if they deplored the Yippies.
The 1960s and 70s superstar Marxist intellectual and father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse was completely onboard with this kind of clownishness. Marcuse explained in his jargony though wildly popular writing (every academic’s dream) how all the goofiness amounted to oppositional political action. For instance, he wrote in 1969 that “in some sectors of the opposition the radical protest tends to become antinomian, anarchistic, and even non-political. Here is another reason why the rebellion often takes on the weird and clownish forms which get on the nerves of the Establishment.” This comes from his Essay on Liberation, a title more ironic than “Pigasus the Immortal.”
Marcuse understood the revolutionary potential of the fool, who, by the way, does not have to be as offensive as the drag queen nuns of L.A. to be effective; I suspect that not all drag story hour readers are twerking in the library. They do not have to in order to achieve their goal, which is, according to the nonprofit “Drag Story Hour,” that kids “see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves.” This group started in 2015 in San Francisco to shepherd this “global phenomenon” into the next generation; it understands that the defiance of gender restrictions opens the door for imagining a new world. Deconstruct to reconstruct.
It is important here not to get tempted by the pablum of “authentic selves” into thinking this is innocuous. It sounds innocuous, but there is a difference between innocuous and vacuous. The first is unthreatening, by definition, whereas the second is empty and therefore fillable with whatever one wants to fill it with. Vacuous social justice cliches are the Trojan Horses of the movement. Inside the call to “imagine a world” is the moral sanction to deconstruct the world as it is. Inside the phrase “authentic selves” dwells the doctrine of human sovereignty over human nature. This is the logic of utopia: you deconstruct the “structures of power” as they exist, and in the vacuum install a new king. Or drag queen.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
For the disciples, receiving the Spirit was like Jesus was with them again. Except as they travelled around and spread across the earth, as they’ve been told to, he was still with each one of them. He could now be everywhere, including inside each of their hearts and minds speaking tenderly to them and empowering them for the next test.

After his resurrection Jesus gathered his disciples to give them his parting instructions and pass on his mission. Each of the gospel writers summarise his words a little differently but they all include what Luke calls “the promise of the Father” (Luke 24).

Matthew records it as a promise that Jesus would be with them until the end of the age, Mark that their preaching would be accompanied by miracles. Luke speaks about them being “clothed with power” and John tells how Jesus acted out what would happen to them soon after by breathing on them and telling them to “receive the Spirit.” (Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20).
Jesus was reminding them of what he’d already been at great pains to teach them. In order to complete the task he had given them, making disciples of all kinds of people, they needed the Holy Spirit.
He was clear with them that even after he had gone back to be with God, they shouldn’t launch straight on with the task he gave them, but should wait for the Holy Spirit, who he’d called their “helper”.
On the face of it this seems a bit strange. If my manager at work gave me an important task to do and there was a sense of urgency about it, my natural inclination would be to get straight on with it, or at least find out which of the rest of my work I can stop doing so I have time to do what she needs. I would be confused if after giving me the task, spelling out what needs to be done, and impressing the urgency of it on me, she then made it clear that under no circumstances was I to start. I was to sit tight and wait for someone to help me. I’m sure I’d appreciate help, but I’d feel faintly patronised. Surely I can start, at least, even if I need some other resources?
The disciples have been given a really important job to do, with a sense of supreme urgency about it. They have a whole world to tell about Jesus, why wouldn’t they just get on with it?
Jesus was emphatic. “Don’t go yet, you can’t start without everything you need, so wait until you’ve got it all.” He is like a drill sergeant, surveying his fresh—and slightly deluded—new recruits who are raring to race into a mock battle. The sergeant cautions them against rushing straight in, until he’s given them each some basic training and their weapon. We can be a lot like that, eager to surge ahead without picking up the basic equipment we need to be effective.
“Receiving the Spirit” was all that they were going to need. If we want to follow Jesus and fulfil his mission, presumably we need that too.
A couple of years before, Jesus and his disciples were at the Feast of Booths. This was when the Jewish people remembered God providing water for them when there were wandering in the desert, and it was when they looked forward to the Spirit being poured out like water in the future. On the last day of this festival, Jesus stood up in the Temple courts and shouted:
If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”John 7
Everyone was dismantling the structures they had built for the festival and getting ready to return home. Jesus was saying “the water you’ve been celebrating is available all the time, and the eventual gift of the Spirit you’re expecting has arrived. You can get it through me.” It’s an enormous claim.
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Be AGITATED, GRIEVED, MOVED by the way poverty assaults the dignity of every poor image-bearer of God. We cannot be Christ-like and be apathetic. We cannot be Jesus-followers and be passive about the plight of the poor. Cherishing every human being is required of anyone who claims to love God—because there is a direct link between loving God and loving his image bearers.

After loving the Lord, Himself, with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, the Christian’s second responsibility is to love our neighbor as ourselves. When asked what this command meant for our everyday living, Jesus told the outrageous story of a man walking down the dangerous road between Jerusalem and Jericho, being attacked, robbed, and left for dead but how the good Samaritan, at risk to his own safety, stopped, bandaged his wounds, transported him on his own donkey to an inn where he spent the rest of the day caring for him. The next day he left a considerable sum of money with the inn keeper to continue to care for the wounded man, saying, “if this is not enough, I will cover the extra costs when I return.” Commenting on this passage, author/pastor Tim Keller writes:
“Jesus commands us to provide shelter, finances, medical care, and friendship to people who lack them. We have nothing less than an order from our Lord in the most categorical of terms, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Our paradigm is the Samaritan who risked his safety, destroyed his schedule, and became dirty and bloody through personal involvement with a needy person of another race and social class. Are we as Christians obeying this command personally? Are we as a church obeying it corporately?” (Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road). This episode seeks to look at poverty through a biblical lens, understanding it’s causes, misguided attempts to solve it, and especially what fulfilling our responsibility to care for the poor looks like.
God’s Design for Mankind to Flourish Econimically
As we saw in the first episode in this series, God’s design to provide humans with the sustenance they need to flourish was not just a lush garden full of fruit trees; it was a plan for them to “subdue” the earth. The command “to subdue” implies that, although all that God made is good, it is, to some degree, underdeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that humans are to unlock through our labor. Tim Keller elaborates:
We are not to relate to the world as park rangers, whose job is not to change their space but preserve things as they are. Nor are we to “pave over the garden” of the created world to make a parking lot. No, we are to be gardeners who take an active stance towards their charge. They do not leave the land as it is. They rearrange it to make it more fruitful, to draw the potentialities for growth and development out of the soil. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind: to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, and beauty. And that is the pattern for all work. It is rearranging the raw materials of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people, in particular, thrive and flourish (Every Good Endeavor).
The development of creation’s potential is built upon and requires shalom—the OT word for harmony and flourishing in relationships. God’s design for economic flourishing as described above in Genesis 1 requires harmony in the four basic relationships of life:

Right relationship with GOD—My mission is to exercise dominion over all of life for him, out of love for him.
Right relationship with SELF—My worth and dignity are eternally assigned to me by God who made me his image bearer and equipped me with the abilities to do the good works he planned for me to do from eternity.
Right relationship with OTHERS—My responsibility is summed up in the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Right relationship with CREATION—I am to be its steward developing the potential God placed in it for God’s glory.

The Cause of Economic Poverty
In his book, Walking With the Poor, Bryant Myers describes the fundamental nature of poverty, “Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.” Due to the comprehensive nature of the fall, every human being is poor in the sense of not experiencing the flourishing of these four relationships in the way God intended. Every human being is suffering from a poverty of spiritual intimacy with God, a poverty of internal wholeness and emotional health within himself, a poverty of community, and a poverty of stewardship. Let’s dig deeper.
Adam and Eve were designed to be God’s image bearers, reflecting his nature as a worker and moral ruler. As moral rulers who had the law of God written on their hearts, they were to exercise dominion in a way that pleased God as culture developed and diversified. Human flourishing was the result of shalom in the four relationships of life: 1) Walking in harmony with God’s righteousness, they would have respected private ownership (theft forbidden by the 8th commandment), honest business practices (lying forbidden by the 9th commandment). 2) Experiencing pre-fall wholeness–internal peace with themselves—no sense of inferiority, insecurity, competitiveness, or envy. Sinful selfishness has not exerted itself—and their call to vocation was the call to use their talents, innovation, and resources to make products to serve others. 3) Experiencing pre-fall harmony in their horizontal relationships with each other; their hearts were not governed by greed, selfishness, cheating each other, or jealousy. 4) There was harmony in the created order. There was no poverty that had resulted from natural calamity like earthquakes, floods, or volcanoes erupting. Let’s use this lens to consider the holistic, biblical approach to alleviating poverty in our cities—restoration.
A. Overcoming the poverty of being. Only God knows how profoundly slavery and racism have crushed black men and women’s dignity. I wonder how many centuries it may take to undo such evil attacks on the self-esteem of those who bear the image of God. I’m told by those engaged in city ministry that this shattered self-esteem is linked to many outward symptoms of this brokenness:

a teen boy’s desire to prove himself a man through his sexual prowess.
a teen girl looking for love in the arms of a male who just wants sex.
a teen girl who wants to feel needed by getting pregnant and having a baby who needs her and, to some degree, loves her back.
a boy committing violence to win the respect of the others in his gang.

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