It's not good to be dumb (a Friday afternoon reflection on Romans 1)

Now there's a kind of dumbness that's not good

 Over the years of serving as the Chetek-Weyerhaeuser High School's cross country coach, I've had the joy of coaching a lot of great kids and Johnny (not his real name) was one of them. He was a kid with autism who on most days brought a lot of energy to practice as well as short, pithy sayings he would frequently repeat as if a mantra throughout the course of a work-out. I used to refer to them as “Johnnyisms”. A good one was: “Difficult things are hard.” So true! True enough that it ought to go on the back of a CC hoodie one day. But my all-time favorite forever remains “It's not good to be dumb.” Amen.

Recently while reading to Mrs. Lindberg's second graders from Shel Silverstein's collection of poems Where the Sidewalk Ends, Mrs. Lindberg asked me to read Smart as her students have been learning money values of late. It's a great little poem that epitomizes the reality of stupid that some people think great:

What Mrs. Blue is asking us

Speaking of stupid, is it just me or do we live in a culture these days
that is embracing dumbness at levels never before discovered? Remember when Mrs. Blue in the movie Forrest Gump asks Forrest, “Are you dumb, or just plain stupid?” And in reply he firmly asserts what his momma once taught him, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Here's an example of the kind of stupid I'm referring to: sexual identity is something fixed by biology. That is, it is a matter of a combination of x and/or y chromosomes. Except if you live in America where it's becoming more acceptable to assert that sexual identity is, on the contrary, rather fluid and can change from day to day. Just the notion of that idea, reminds me of another great movie quote. In Hoosiers, as Coach Dale (played by Gene Hackman), settles into Hickory he makes what a lot of the locals feel are stupid decisions regarding their high school basketball team. One of them finally wryly remarks,

“Look, mister, there's...two kinds of dumb, uh...a guy that gets naked and runs out in the snow and barks at the moon, and, uh, a guy who does the same thing in my living room. First one don't matter, the second one you're kinda forced to deal with.”

In the same way, it's one thing for individuals to believe the sort of foolishness that a person can decide themselves whether or not they are a man or a woman. It's quite another when our government endorses and actively works to protect that notion as if it were a real thing (when in fact it isn't).

All of this and other things going on makes me think of Romans 1. Writing to First Century followers of Jesus as if they were Twenty-First Century sufferers of the rising “truth police” out on the 'net, Paul comments:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Make way for the Stooges

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. (Romans 1:18-23, NIV)

As I read it, if any person – man or woman, white or black, rich or poor – rejects God and his rule, however smart they may be they get morally and really dumber. Oh, they can find an increasing chorus of people who parrot what they think is true but it don't make it so. After all, stupid is as stupid does.

24-25 So God said, in effect, “If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.” It wasn’t long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them—the God we bless, the God who blesses us. Oh, yes!

26-27 Worse followed. Refusing to know God, they soon didn’t know how to be human either—women didn’t know how to be women, men didn’t know how to be men. Sexually confused, they abused and defiled one another, women with women, men with men—all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it—emptied of God and love, godless and loveless wretches. (The Message)

There's a reason that guard rails are placed on curves and bridges on American roads: laws of physics are real things and living in denial of those things can have seriously stupid repercussions – and perhaps deadly ones.

28-32 Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, slimy, cruel, cold-blooded. And it’s not as if they don’t know better. They know perfectly well they’re spitting in God’s face. And they don’t care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best! (The Message)

Johnny was so right: It's not good to be dumb. But we seem intent of running our way there. What kind of culture will we be when God pulls out all the stops and just lets us run loose according to our own whims and fancies? Will we really be in a better place as some truly believe? Or are we caught up in the draw of a society slowly swirling down the toilet? Optimist as I am I want to shout, 'Never!' but stupid is as stupid does and sooner or later heaven will deal with the dumbness we seem to be chasing now and how smart do you think we'll feel then?

Going, going...gone