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They were genetically enhanced mice. One was good-natured and a bit goofy. The other, the character of concern this morning was highly intelligent. What are we going to do tonight, Brain?

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The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world. Before the end of the first chapter, Paul gets to the point. There are divisions between the faithful in Corinth, and Paul recognizes that his own admirers are part of the problem.

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It is neither wisdom, nor learning, nor advanced rhetoric that Paul critiques. Rather, he compels his readers, then and now, to dismiss the temptation to set such traits as the sole criteria for Christian leadership, much less to define someone's status as a member of the Christian community. It is worth noting that the diversity of the church in Corinth might have mirrored the demographics of the broader community.

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First, a Greek city-state that was abandoned in 146 BCE Corinth became a strategic Romans colony. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul recalls, and listen to these demographics, that they are all baptized into one body, whether Jew or Greek, slaves or free. This leads me to wonder whether the house of Stephanas, or more particularly, Stephanas, fits within one of those demographic categories.

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He was the first convert, or his household was the first converts in the region. Or we can consider Gatius, whom Paul baptizes, chapter 1 of 1 Corinthians, and we learn in Romans, later hosted Paul when he wrote the letter to that church. Or not here in 1 Corinthians, but an influential leader in the church is Erastus, to whom Erastus provides greetings to the church in Rome, and he is also the city treasurer in Corinth.

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Certainly, these folks might be free citizens of material and financial prosperity. Nevertheless, Consistent with the ministry of Jesus, here in 1 Corinthians 1, Paul draws a lesson from the demographics of other members of the Christian community. He reminds the church of what was likely painfully obvious to the recipients of the letter.

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Most of the members were the have-nots, the poor, the powerless. In classical Pauline fashion, he signals contrast with that beautiful phrase, but God. And here I will reorder the sentences to emphasize the point.

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Not many of you were wise by human standards, but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. Not many of you were powerful, but God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. Not many of you were of noble birth, but God chose what is lowly and despised in the world so that no one might boast.

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Paul addresses the whole of the Christian community, yet his illustrative language centers those members who are not formally educated, those members who were perceived as politically powerless, those members without a claim to social rank associated with political privilege, or monetary wealth. All the members were included, yet Paul defines divine action by signaling the least and last. And it's in this context that we hear Paul encourage, Consider your call.

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I wonder if the preeminent American philosopher Judith Butler And her idea of precarity would be helpful here. Writing after the unjustifiably evil acts of September 11, 2001, and the ethically questionable subsequent U.S. military response, Butler compelled her readers to consider the precariousness of human life.

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Because we are social beings, we inhabit a shared human condition of embodied vulnerability and dependency. She writes, and I quote, we are undone by each other, and if we're not, something is missing. Which sounds a lot to me like the prophet Habakkuk who wrote, look at the proud, their spirit is not right in them,

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Or we could point to Mother Mary, who sings of the proud, who are scattered in the imaginations of their hearts. Butler applied her existential, and I would argue, pragmatic theory of precarity to the realm of political theory. She suggests that a shared sense of precarious existence can become an anti-authoritarian, democratizing force. She writes that when protesters assemble, people without benefit of civil rights demand moral agency.

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Bodies gathered insist humanity and gender interdependence. Pecarity orients neighbors toward the problems of hemonic rule, where power and poverty are unequally distributed. As such, Butler conveys that vulnerability becomes the ground for solidarity.

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I believe that she is trying to help us to see that the fragile and dependent nature of human life is not something to overcome, rather it's the very condition that allows us to live ethically with one another. Our precarity binds us together. It is the site of our suffering as well as the ground of moral possibility. With Butler's framework in mind, I journey back to Paul.

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Paul, who writes that God chose what is weak so that no one may boast. I do not see this as Paul glorifying ignorance or spiritualizing suffering? No.

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Instead, Paul emphasizes divine relationality. God speaks from within human vulnerability, not from above it. Might we then rephrase Paul's dialectic to address contemporary divisions that attempt to break precarity by maintaining the antagonisms we're told are supposed to divide humanity.

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Not many of you had legal citizenship, but God. Not many of you conformed to gender norms, but God. Not many of you were the beneficiaries of nepotism, but God.

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And to those of us who know legal, gender, and material privilege, precarity is an invitation. invitation to center the least and last, which is an anti-authoritarian framework to ministry. Might this be a way to address the question that we heard from one of our midwinter lecturers, the ethicist David Gussey, who asked us, What path will we take to empathetic solidarity with the oppressed? Might that path

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be to consider our own call. Which brings me unexpectedly back to that genetically enhanced mouse named Brain. In nearly every episode of the animated classic Pinky and the Brain, Brain uses his prodigious intellect toward one end, world domination. We might say that brain represents the inversion of Butler's precarity.

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His genius isolates him. His purpose is control. He speaks but does not listen. He reasons but does not relate.

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Indeed, his reasoning itself is instrumental, never communicative. Thereby brain calculates but does not commune. He seeks to master the world rather than understand it. In this way, brain is a comedic parable of human wisdom.

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Clever, industrious, and yet incapable of love. Might brain also be a mirror into our own academic temptation? to believe that intellect alone can redeem, that mastery equates meaning, or dare I say, that theology can be conquered rather than received. Consequently, this burgeoning faith of the Corinthian church flies in the face of other ancient and contemporary myths that teach us to celebrate obscene greed

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and to idolize unchecked power. The message of the cross is foolishness precisely because it refuses the economy of domination. The Almighty Creator of heaven and earth becomes flesh and dwells among us. Transcendence becomes imminence and takes neither sword nor accumulates wealth.

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The way of Jesus is to feed the hungry, to welcome the stranger, to clothe the naked, to visit the outcast, And in the face of peril, Christ maintained non-violent resistance. And this is the message we proclaim, Christ crucified, salvation by way of God on a cross, the giving up of God's very self. Friends, as we enter a new semester, I invite us to read ourselves into Paul's letter to the Corinthians.

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And let us consider our own call for this time and this place. We exist in bodies shaped by intersectional vulnerability and dependency. Our precarity informs the dialogues that we create together in this shared space of theological education. Yet our temptation may remain the same.

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to be like brain, to exert our will upon others, to believe our task is to win arguments, to imagine our learning grants domineering power. And in this season, when autocratic rule deploys cross-plane soldiers with supposed absolute immunity, our horror simplifies our own thinking. And I'm afraid that it tempts moral outrage toward moral superiority. But lest we believe that liberal Christianity inoculates authoritarian impulses, I challenge us to remember that emotional invalidation, gatekeeping language, and moral coercion are also forms of power exercised against another.

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But friends, Christ calls us to something far more precarious and far more powerful. The foolishness of the cross invites us to generously yield power, to seek truth through communion, to stimulate the process of emancipation through cultural engagements free from force, open or latent. and to embrace empathetic solidarity as the location of creative liberation. Might this be the work of theological education to which we are called, student and teacher alike, to a precarity that centers love?