This is the longest break ever.  Truly, it is.  Typically the break is four weeks long, Loyola gave an extra week this year.  After a long wait I am ready to get this party started.

Over the past month I have been reading through Corinthians, Luke, and the Psalms.  I love Corinthians for the kind, yet stern, pastoral tone, for the practical instruction and grand theology, and for the scope of topics addressed—incest, resurrection, generosity, suffering, and spiritual gifts.

Paul describes the cross as “foolishness to those who are dying, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1:18).  Makes sense, right?  Jesus’ capital punishment does not appear to make him a savior, but God uses the “lowly things of the world to shame the wise” (1:27).   God’s wisdom works through what the world perceives as foolishness.  

Part of college is gaining wisdom, knowledge, and competence.  I have been wondering, “What does it look like to get a degree in Foolishness at Loyola?”  I do not think this means doing poorly in classes or choosing God at the expense of academics–as if the two are at odds.  But I do think that what is often times considered the wisdom of college (self-gratification, personal success, uninhibited consumption and autonomy) is completed foolishness in the kingdom of God.

God’s wisdom is given by the Spirit (2:7) and that wisdom is unfathomable to the “rulers of this age.”  It is unfathomable to the standardized tests, the honors programs, and the GPA calculator.  God’s wisdom confounds all those measurements and redeems those measurements.

In order to gain true God-fearing wisdom you must live by God’s Spirit.  God’s Spirit gives a new imagination to see school not as a chore, but a blessing.  To see classmates as companions, not competition.  To see a degree as a gift, not a right.

So my question we will be asking next week at Ecclesia is this: Are you wise?

–Mike