Sometimes I think of the nature of the vocation I’m pursuing and I get caught up in how massively weird it is. It’s only because it’s become a dominant faith tradition through brute strength, colonization, and genocide that Christianity gets a free pass when it comes to bizarre beliefs. We’ve pushed our way into a position of unquestionable strangeness.

But, like, what? I love talking to my kids about the Bible because I may have become numb to the awkwardness of the stories, but their fresh hearing of some of the stranger stories snaps me out of my overly-normalized-and-therefore-missing-the-point reverie. An innocent “But, why?” from my five-year-old gets is the biggest theological jab in the ribs sometimes. And then I read the chapter “Foolishness of the Greeks” from We Preach Christ Crucified by Kenneth Leech. In it, Leech gets at this absurdity that always seems to lose its teeth when it becomes too familiar. “Christian faith is not a reasonable set of beliefs for adults which suddenly goes mad and regresses to fantasy when it comes to the death on the cross. At the very core of the faith is the absurdity of the Word made flesh, God made small.” (11). In short, this is all weird, and there’s no making it not weird. In fact, it’s that very strangeness that holds such power for transformation. Leech says, “Religion goes disastrously astray when it ceases to be a sign of contradiction and becomes the cement for social conformity.” (10). Ouch.

Those moments when we lose sight of how impossible the trinity is, or the juxtaposition of violence and community meal involved in the eucharist, or the embarassment of having our hope for the future and beyond declared a criminal and nailed to a cross to die, those are the moments when we lose the counter-cultural power our faith carries with it. To bring Leech into this one more time, “…instead of seeking a dictatorial imperialism, he created a community committed to values of equality and sharing to work as a subversive and transforming force within the structures of worldly power” (16). Jesus was working hard to go against the grain of imperialism and hierachies of injustice, and he did so, not by matching the same energy of the forces he opposed, but rather by doing something so head-scratchingly odd and foolish that it had and HAS the power to destabilize the powerful.