This is our biggest week of the year...none of our scouts are members...but this weekend they come, some with parents in tow...and so it's like a mini Easter...I chose the Corinthians "foolish" passage...so here goes.

Julie was not anyone's idea of a writer or historian. She had to leave school when her parent’s money dried up, she married a man from a family that was more well known than it was well off and she left the genteel confines of her upbringing in New England to come first the wilds of Michigan, then Wisconsin wilderness, and finally a very early Chicago in the 1830's.

This was still decades before the Civil War, in the years after peace had finally been made with the British following the War of 1812. When Julie got to Chicago, she found that there were still people here, some from her own family, that remembered the first days of Chicago…and, she discovered, that no one was making the effort to write down what they had seen and heard. Her father in law had actually been there…He was in fact the first white settler in Chicago, John Kinzie—a man whose life had been surrounded by scandal and who had originally supported the English against the Americans in the skirmishes that became the War of 1812…He supported them until the scandalous massacre at Fort Dearborn, when Canadian Indians under the direction of the British killed so many soldiers and civilians.

Remarkably…their story had not been told…at least not outside of lurid legends…Julie, who had followed her husband, John H. Kinzie, all over the Midwest had been wanting to write about her adventures in the frontier and this story, the story of the Massacre at Chicago, could be the centerpiece of her memoir. So she began to talk with folks….and most of them discouraged her…How could a woman tell such an important story…why would a woman want to tell such an unpleasant story….why was she worrying her pretty little head about this…After all her husband was becoming more of a leader in town and she should just tend to her duties as wife and mother of six and forget all of this foolishness of being a writer and writing a history of the area.

Her husband did become a leader…he was almost elected mayor of Chicago—and the school across the street is even named after him… But Julie would not be deterred…she wrote the story and published it anonymously in 1844—a time when most women could not publish non-fiction under their own names…Later, it would be the central section of her personal memoir… called Wau-ban…which means morning dawn in one of the Potawatomie dialects.

We know what happened in the earliest days of Chicago because of her foolishness…Also, in the area of foolishness…hers was one of the first sympathetic memoirs involving Native Americans…the Indians who committed the atrocities of the Fort Dearborn massacre were the only “bad” Indians she wrote about…all of the other stories spoke of a decent people who worked hard and were neighbors and friends. Julie was mocked by a lot of men in her day for thinking of the natives as people and friends instead of just enemies…but today she is revered by historians for telling so many stories that needed to be told.

The apostle Paul was mocked a lot for the story he told too. This story of Jesus…the son of God who came to earth and was mocked and killed by the authorities and then rose triumphantly on Easter to free the world from slavery to sin and death…This story was just, well, foolish. Everybody thought so…in the area there were two kinds of folks…The Jews…and, well, everybody else—the folks the Bible calls the Gentiles….It means "the nations"…the people who weren't Jews. In today's passage from First Corinthians, Paul is telling it like it is…Everyone thinks what we are saying is foolish….the Jews think it's foolish because this is not how God works….God is powerful and does things like make rainbows and part the seas…that's how you know God is on your side…not being humble and becoming a carpenter who dies on the cross…the Gentiles, part of the Greco-Roman Empire, were people who followed Philosophers, great thinkers who could solve all the world's problems not with self-sacrifice and resurrection, but through good ideas and wisdom. They couldn't see any wisdom in following someone whose philosophy was so simple and well…so unsuccessful…this Jesus whose philosophy was "Love God and love one another as you love yourself." That was too simple…and too difficult…loving someone else as much as you loved yourself? Loving God instead of fearing the gods and buying them off with a sacrifice in the temple? That was just foolishness…

And Paul doesn't disagree…Yes, Paul says, all of the folks around us think we are fools…and well, we are…After all…isn’t love foolish? Why on earth should someone make someone else more important in their lives than they are? That's dumb…why would you want to make yourself vulnerable to someone else like that? After all…how do you know if they love you back? How do you prove that it's good or right—does love result in great signs and wonders like the rainbow? Or does love make logical sense if we can't prove that the other person loves us back.

Yes, love is perfectly foolish…crazy…nonsense…That is, until someone knows love…until we feel the love of a parent or a spouse or a friend…and realize the great gift that love is in our lives…How it can hold us up when we are down, how it can turn the day around, how it can inspire us to be better people because someone depends on us or because we want to make the world a better place for the people we love. Yes, love is foolish…but it's also the greatest thing there is. It is the thing that turns the world upside down…it is the thing that says the person who is most important to me is not the most powerful one…or the richest one…or the prettiest one…or the smartest one….the one who is the most important is the one who needs me the most…the one I can help…and it doesn't matter if they love me back…

This turns the whole world upside down….this foolishness of God…that makes forgiveness more important than justice…and compassion more important than being right, or in charge, or powerful, or wealthy. We can’t prove it…like the ancient Jews could with signs from God…or the Greeks could with their philosophies and theories…in the foolishness of God… proof isn’t what's important…helping is…loving is…trusting is.

The foolishness of the Gospel…the foolishness of love, is very frightening to some people…when the world is turned upside down…some people get very uncomfortable, even afraid…whether it is something as minor as a frontier mother writing the most important history of the first major event in the life of our city or as important as making love more important than power or philosophy…

And some people do terrible things when they are confronted with the foolishness of God…some lash out, refusing to believe that being more powerful or being “right” all the time isn't more important than love, and the compassion and justice that it requires of us…and so they do terrible things like killing Martin Luther King Jr….or hanging Jesus on a cross….

But if we open ourselves up...if we allow the foolishness to wash over us…sometimes we can do amazing things…instead of being overwhelmed by the hunger in the world, we can help feed our neighbors with gardens and food pantries….instead of being afraid of people who come from another country or whose skin is a different color, we can reach out in friendship and make our neighborhoods and the world a more peaceful place…

We can indeed be inspired by foolishness….just like the person who was inspired by Julie and her book about Chicago…did I mention Julie’s whole name? Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie…She had a granddaughter who was inspired by her grandmother's audaciousness…her willingness to stand up to terrible odds…her desire to make the best of every situation and her foolishness in doing something that only a man was supposed to do…Her granddaughter was named after her….Juliette McGill Kinzie Gordon…who after her marriage was known as Juliette Gordon Low…the founder of the Girl Scouts in the United States…

Like Juliette and her granddaughter…Let us not be afraid to be considered foolish…Let us heed Paul's invitation to boldly and bravely follow the fools of the world…fools like Juliette Gordon Low….fools like Martin Luther King, Jr….fools like Jesus Christ….and may all the world be foolish too….