"Emmanuel: Glimpses of God Incarnate," December 15

Wednesday, December 15

1 Corinthians 1:26-31

“God as Chooser”

AMONG ALL THE CLAIMS OF FAITH, the idea that “God chooses the weak” is perhaps the most difficult to believe. As absurd as the doctrine of Jesus’s “resurrection and ascending” may sound, even this becomes more palatable when wielded by power. But the idea that God chooses the weak over the arrogant, the despised over the celebrated, the poor over the rich, and the lowly over the crème de la crème is like pouring salt into the wound in a time when so many of the lowly are being destroyed by the violence of natural and moral evils. Here in America, our collective sins of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism are getting the best of us, eroding even the nation’s core convictions of toleration, universal equality, democratic freedom, and resistance to tyranny. For the skeptic, this simply raises the question: God chooses the weak for what?

It is all too obvious that the arrogant choose the weak for exploitation, violence, and marginalization. The claim of the text is that God chooses the weak to nullify or cancel out the boasting ability of the arrogant, which, theologically rendered, finds its ultimate expression in claims to divinely inspired exceptionalism. In mysterious ways, God chooses those who are not wise by our particular social standards, those who are not influential and among the “power players,” and those born in the ghettos looked down on by fat-cat hills or across the borders we wall out to challenge our claims that “God is on our side.”

And even as we continue to ask “Why Lord?” in regard to the sufferings of the weak, we must not miss the biblical claim: that God chooses the weak and the oppressed, and that if God also chooses the strong, God chooses the oppressed first. This means that God’s spirit and grace are already present in the places written off as “morally bankrupt” by those who are arrogant; that the oppressed should be understood as sources of communion rather than commodification; and that our imperial culture has become the mission field, in need of divine intervention on behalf of ourselves and the world.

– Dr. Asante Todd (MDiv’06), Associate Professor of Christian Ethics