
I love stories, and life has given me plenty to tell. It has long been my plan to put them down on paper. My path has taken me through 15 years of entrepreneurship, travelling, and finally, immigrating. I found myself again in a new place as an employed software engineer, and now, five years onwards, I am transitioning back to independence.

I was born in soviet Moscow and went to school in a new, unknown country that had yet to define itself. I belong to the single, non-indoctrinated generation of Russians around: we were taught that anything was possible and that our only limits were those we set for ourselves. This played some bad jokes on me: Once my childhood was over, the country decided to make another turn, this time back to authoritarianism, and together with its people, happily embraced the old and familiar soviet dogmas.

So, a year after graduating high school, I jumped on the website development bandwagon that has carried me for the last 20 years.

My experience was not purely virtual: my severe first \[ad]venture was an e-commerce website that sold shoes and accessories (my friend brought the idea, not a passion for shoes!). The next one was even more grounded: a chain of gadget repair stores. The third I would call 'Chinese adventures', as I was involved in trading activities for many small-scale entrepreneurs like me in China. These adventures, spanning from 2000 to 2014, were thrilling but ended abruptly as Russia took a turn I couldn't follow.

That time, my country decided to be, once again, the bad guy and no one asked me if I wanted to participate, so I quit.

The word 'quit' is nice and short! Applying it to reality was a grilling experience. It took me several attempts and struggles to acquire a new true home: Israel. Most of my current stories are related to this land and its people.

I'm practical, so I write about entrepreneurship, technology, business, and ideas in general. I have never been short of ideas, and I believe in the power of sharing them to make the ideas a part of reality, to let them sprout and witness the fruits.

To set the record straight, I am a Christian, so my viewpoint is not so common in Israel or the world of tech. This lens offers a distinctive angle to my experiences and reflections.


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Immigrant, Enterpreneur, Husband, Father and Son

Rodion Kuprin


*Delivered at Immanuel Church, Tel Aviv — February 21, 2026*

**Readings:** 1 Corinthians 3:18–23 · Matthew 5:43–48

---

I have many friends and acquaintances who are not believers, and they send me the same video year after year. The day comes when someone new gets exposed to this piece of humour, and if he knows me, he immediately knows what to do about it.

It's the [George Carlin bit about religion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BFIRgn9OLI&t=1s). I doubt there's anyone in this room who hasn't received it at least once — as a lighthearted joke, or a way to provoke, or as a funny way to finish the argument. I'll paraphrase for those who may have forgotten the punch: there's a man in the sky, he is all-knowing and all-powerful, and he has a particular list of ten things he does not want you to do, and if you do any of those things, you are going to be tortured for eternity. And then Carlin stops, and delivers it: _but he loves you._ And then he stops again: _and he needs your money._

From beginning to end, this bit resembles a worldly version of the creed. It touches on all the pain points the world has with God — his power, his judgment, his love, his Church — and presents our relationship with him as a ridiculous, stupid joke.

And no clever argument on our part can fix it.

This is exactly the reaction Paul expects. He writes to the Corinthians:

> _"The wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight."_

And this works the other way around, too. What is of God appears as foolishness to the world. When Paul stood before Festus, the Roman governor, and spoke about Christ and the resurrection, Festus interrupted him and said: _"You are out of your mind, Paul! Your great learning is driving you insane."_ This wasn't a polite disagreement. This was a powerful, educated man looking at a believer and concluding that he had lost his mind.

Carlin's audience laughs for the same reason Festus shook his head. From the outside — from the world's perspective — what we believe and how we live makes no sense.

---

And Paul's response to this is remarkable. He does not say: "Let me explain it better so the world will understand." He does not offer a smarter argument. He says: _become fools._

> _"Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become 'fools' so that you may become wise."_

God's wisdom is not a worldly wisdom with a cross on top. It is completely, fundamentally incompatible with it. And this incompatibility is not a problem to be solved. It is a feature of life in Christ.

And it touches everything. It's not only the fact that we come to church each Saturday, or that some of us say grace before a meal. God's wisdom, as it slowly works its way into you, begins to reshape the way you make decisions — all of them. Business decisions. Financial decisions. How you treat people who have wronged you. Whether you respond to an insult with an insult. Whether you do what the world expects from you in pursuit of a benefit.

And when you make those decisions differently — not for show, not to be strange, but because you genuinely cannot do it the other way anymore — people around you will notice. They will think something is wrong with you. They may twist a finger at their temple behind your back and refer to you in their stand-ups. And that, brothers and sisters, is not a bad sign.

But let's be honest with ourselves. We all know the tension. We all recognise in ourselves the pull toward having two modes of operation: the Saturday self who sits in this room, and the Monday self who operates by a different set of rules — the "real", "normal" rules. And that gap — between what we confess on Saturdays and how we live — that gap is precisely where God's foolish wisdom wants to do its work.

---

Let me give you an example of what this looks like. It is something that everyone who has decided to accept God's reality and try to live accordingly has experienced.

You see someone around you who is suffering. Perhaps it's sickness, or loneliness, or poverty — or, as it happens quite often, all of the above. He may not be vocal about it. But you happen to be a witness, and he is your neighbour. And as a reasonable person, you sit down and think: here is what I can do, and here is the limit of my ability. I have a family to care for. I have responsibilities of my own. This is a sober, honest approach — and it is not a wrong one. So you do what you can, approaching the limit you have set for yourself.

But the person and his problems do not go away. He lingers near, and he's one of the people you pray for. And you think again — being a reasonable man — I have done what I could. His problems are not going away. Can I solve them? No, I cannot. Perhaps this is simply how life is.

It is always the same question: me or someone else. My evening or his need. A better cut of meat for my family, or a simpler meal shared with someone who has none. We face it so often we barely notice it anymore.

The sages of the Talmud distilled it in its barest form to construct a reasonable answer: two men are travelling through a desert, and one has a flask of water. If they share, both will die. If only one drinks, he will survive. Rabbi Akiva taught that your own life takes precedence. It is an answer that worldly wisdom may call correct.

But being followers of the Messiah who was hanged on the tree, we see that the reasonable answer is not enough.

And we are not in the desert, but now we can return to the person sitting near you — the one whose problems have not gone away — with some better understanding of the situation. The distilled question and the everyday question are the same question. And I have a strong feeling you already know the answer. You have done what you believed you could. Now it is time to do what you cannot. Because it is not you who will do the work, nor is it you who will measure the results. You have been called; you accepted the call. And this time, you will stand up.

---

Now — here is where I want us to notice something we almost never notice.

When we reach a boundary like this — between what is sensible and what God seems to be asking — we feel it as a crisis of faith. As if we are being asked to leap into the dark. And that is understandable.

But consider: the entire world we live in is built on faith, and we never call it that. Banks, money, contracts — the whole system exists, functions, and holds together because millions of people place their trust in it every day. No one calls this faith. No one says: "You are naive for building your entire life around the assumption that these systems will hold." We call it common sense.

But the moment someone trusts God's promise with the same seriousness — the moment someone takes "give, and it will be given to you" as seriously as they take their savings account — it is foolishness. It is naivete. It is the man in the sky.

And here is what Paul catches: _"He catches the wise in their craftiness."_ The wise are not caught because they lack faith. They are caught because they don't recognise their own faith for what it is. The world runs on enormous trust in its own constructs, and calls that trust reason. And the trust God asks of us — which is, in its nature, no different — the world calls foolishness.

---

Imagine a person who has inherited a great estate. He goes about his daily life with a certain ease. And because he is secure, he can afford to be generous. He can afford to be patient. He can afford to take risks that others cannot.

Now listen to how Paul continues — because this is where the passage takes a surprising turn:

> _"No more boasting about human leaders! All things are yours — whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God."_

All things are yours.

You have inherited the greatest estate that ever was. Not because you built or earned it. But because you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

And from within this inheritance, something strange happens to the word _sacrifice._ That evening you spent with someone in need — the one that seemed, by your calculations, unreasonable — what is it, really, set against the estate you have received? What the world calls sacrifice, the child of God may simply call Tuesday.

---

The heir knows what the Father is like. And the Father's love does not stop at those we find easy to love. His sun rises on all. This is where the foolishness of God reaches its most radical — its most impossible — point.

Jesus says:

> _"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven."_

Love your enemies.

In this country, at this moment in history — you don't need me to tell you how that sounds. You know. The world says: pick a side. Protect your own — we talked about it the last time. And here stands Jesus, saying: love them. Pray for them.

This is not a figure of speech and not a metaphor. These words mean exactly what they say. Not love in some abstract, theological sense, but actual love for actual enemies. And throughout the centuries, sincere Christian theologians have dealt with this commandment in exactly the same way as their Jewish sage colleagues: they have struggled with it, spiritualized it, limited the circle of those considered "the enemy," viewed love as an internal state, not as a specific action — honestly and sincerely seeking a way to make God's impossible demand fit within the framework of human wisdom. Which is, of course, precisely what Paul warns against.

We cannot do this. Not by our own strength, willpower or wisdom. To love an enemy requires something that does not come from within us. It requires the Holy Spirit. It requires asking God, again and again, for the capacity to do what is humanly impossible. Not once, but daily. Not as an achievement we complete, but as a gift we keep receiving.

And Jesus himself tells us why: _"that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."_ And then he says: _"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."_ This is, perhaps, the most terrifying sentence in all of Scripture. But listen to what perfection means here: it is the Father's own character — sending sun and rain on everyone, withholding nothing, loving without calculating who deserves it. The perfection Jesus calls us to is not a standard we achieve. It is a character of God we receive. We participate in it not by mastering it, but as heirs — because, as Paul just told us, all things are already ours.

---

And this brings us to the heart of it.

Because Christ was the ultimate fool in the eyes of the world. He loved his enemies — which is to say, he loved us — to the point of death. The cross is the most foolish act in human history: God becoming man, and then allowing himself to be killed by the people he came to save. No worldly wisdom can make sense of that.

And the foolishness we are called into is not a program we execute. It is not a standard we achieve. It is a life we have already been given — in baptism, in the Word, at this table.

Of course this is not something we learn once and hold forever. We stumble through it. We wake up on Monday and slip back into the world's wisdom before we've finished our coffee. And our trust in the one who gave us everything shrinks a little. But each time we act from the "foolish" inheritance rather than from our calculations, it grows a little.

And what does God do with that?

The Psalmist tells us:

> _"He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him."_

The Father Jesus points us to in Matthew — the one who sends sun on the evil and the good, rain on the righteous and the unrighteous — is the same Father the Psalmist sings about. The one whose compassion is not measured by our performance. There is a man in the sky — and he loves you. Not as a punchline. As the most radical truth in the universe. And the cross proves it.

We are fools. We are heirs. We are loved.

And we are sent back into the world — not with a better argument, but with a different life.

Amen.


A sermon on the foolishness of God that confounds the wisdom of the world, and the radical call to love our enemies.

Holy Fools


*Delivered at Immanuel Church, Tel Aviv — February 14, 2026*

**Readings:** Psalm 119:1–16 · Deuteronomy 30:15–20 · 1 Corinthians 2:6–13

---

## I

How free are you? Truly, honestly — how free? You woke up this morning and had breakfast. If you drink coffee, you had coffee. You drove the same roads, walked the same streets, or took the same bus. And in a few hours, you will go home, and you will do what you do on Saturday afternoon, because that is what you do on Saturday afternoon. How much of that did you actually choose?

There is a well-known atheist writer, Sam Harris, who wrote a short book called _Free Will_. His argument is simple: free will is an illusion. We are biological machines. Our choices — big and small — are determined by our genes, our upbringing, and our neural wiring. We are, he says, no more free than a computer running its code.

Long before, Martin Luther wrote a book called _The Bondage of the Will_. And Luther said something that sounds, on the surface, remarkably similar: the human will is not free. It is in bondage. In everyday things, Luther leaves us with that — which coffee to buy, which road to take — yes, you have a kind of freedom. But in the things that matter for eternity — turning toward God, trusting His promise, loving Him with your whole heart — the will that is apart from God cannot do it. Not because it is a machine, as Harris thinks, but because it is captive. Captive to sin, to the old Adam, to a nature that curves inward on itself.

Sam Harris looks at this and concludes: therefore, there is no freedom. Luther looks at the same bondage and says: therefore you need God.

So, again, where is your freedom, your power of will?

## II

Today's reading from Deuteronomy seems to offer the answer. Moses stands before the people and declares:

> "See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction... Now choose life."

Life or death. Two options. Not which coffee to buy or which party to support. The one real choice: God, or not God. Life, or death.

This sounds like freedom. Finally! A choice that matters, a choice that is truly ours.

And if it were that simple — if we could just choose life, just like that — then every sermon could be very short, and we would save much time in church. "Love God. Do not sin." Done. Go home.

But here Luther's insight cuts deep. "Choose life" sounds like an invitation. But it is a commandment. It is the law. And what the Law demands, the bound will cannot deliver. You cannot wake up tomorrow and choose life — real life, life as God means it — any more than you can lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your own boots.

Why? Because "life" in God's vocabulary is not what we think it means. When we hear "choose life," we hear: choose _my_ life. My health. My family. My safety. My people. And of course, these matter. But the will that curves inward on itself can only orbit the self. It can choose individual survival. It cannot choose _life_.

And yet God was not cruel to set this choice before His people. Just verses before Moses says, "choose life," God makes a promise that changes the spirit of the commandment itself:

> "The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live."

God commands what He Himself will provide. He does not say "choose life" and then walk away. He promises to perform the heart surgery that makes the choice possible. Already in Deuteronomy, there is a whisper of the Gospel hidden inside the Law: your choosing will be held by something greater than your will.

## III

God promised the heart surgery. But how? When? Paul gives us the answer:

> "What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived — the things God has prepared for those who love him — these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit."

Now, it may sound like Paul is simply continuing where Moses left off: choose life, love God, and you will be richly rewarded. It sounds like a condition — the things God has prepared _for those who love him_.

But that is not what Paul is saying. Look at the shape of it. He does not say: go and find these things. He does not say: earn these things by loving harder. He says: no eye has seen them. No ear has heard them. No human mind has conceived them. In other words — you could not have gotten here on your own. Not by effort, not by wisdom, not by willpower. These things were beyond you entirely.

And then: God has _prepared_ them. God has _revealed_ them. The Spirit has _given_ them. Every verb belongs to God. This is not a reward for obedience. This is a gift you receive freely — now. Right here, in the middle of your failure, in the middle of your inability to choose life the way Moses commanded.

The righteousness that surpasses anything we could produce on our own is not a higher human effort. It is a different kind entirely. It is Christ's righteousness, received, not achieved. This is the Gospel. Not "try harder." Not "choose better." But: God has done what you could not conceive, and He gives it freely.

## IV

So what does this look like? What does it look like when the bound will meets the living God?

A senior pastor once shared an observation with me. He said that people come to faith carrying all kinds of identities and convictions. Someone arrives as a committed socialist. Someone else as a fierce nationalist. One person defines herself by her politics, another by his ethnicity, another by the cause she has given her life to. Jew and Arab. Left and right. Religious and secular. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. These are not small things — they shape how people see the world, whom they trust, and whom they fear.

And then, he said, something strange happens. Over time, in the life of the church, those identities begin to loosen. Not because the church demands it. But because something deeper is quietly replacing what sat at the centre.

Why? What is doing this?

Jesus tells us:

> "Your Father in heaven causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

God does not pick sides. Everyone is loved by God just the same. And when that truth begins to work on you, the old walls start to crack — not because you decided to tear them down, but because they cannot stand in the presence of a God who refuses to recognize them.

But the world demands the opposite. Pick a side. Pick your faction in the conflict. And the moment you do, you belong to that side. You adopt its enemies, its logic, its hatreds. You think you chose freely, but now the side is choosing for you. Sometimes it is not even a choice: you are put in a box with others who share your skin colour or your passport, and the box decides what you are allowed to think, to feel, to pray for.

This is bondage upon bondage. Inside, the will pulls inward. Outside, the world narrows it further. And somewhere in the middle, Moses is still saying: choose life. How?

Not by choosing _your_ life. But by choosing _life_. Life as God sees it. Life that includes everyone, even the ones your nature tells you to exclude. Life that is bigger than survival, bigger than your side, bigger than the lines the world has drawn.

Here in Israel, we feel this more sharply than most. When you hear the siren, when you rush to the shelter — there is nothing more natural than to pray for yourself, for your people. God hears that prayer. He does not scold you for it.

But death is not only the rocket. Death is also the hatred that grows in your heart while you sit in the shelter. Death is when the enemy stops being a human being in your mind. Death is when the prayer on your lips narrows until there is no room left in it for anyone but yourself.

When the siren sounds, what prayer rises to your lips? Let us be honest. It is not hard to find comfort in the prayers of Joshua's time — prayers for victory, prayers for the destruction of enemies, prayers that God would crush those who threaten His people. Those prayers are in the Bible. They are real. And in the moment of terror, they come naturally.

But we are not in Joshua's time. We are on this side of the cross. And Christ calls us somewhere we would not go on our own:

"Lord, grant peace. Lord, remove the hatred from my heart. Lord, remove hatred from _their_ hearts. Give them a good life, let them see their children back, and let me see mine. Give us peace and spare our lives."

Notice how the Lord's Prayer teaches us to pray in exactly this direction. It begins at the top: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." The first words out of our mouths are not about us. They are about God's name, God's kingdom, God's will — for the whole earth. Only then does the prayer move closer: give us bread, forgive us, deliver us. The blueprint is universal first, personal second. The prayer trains us to see as God sees: from the whole, down to the one.

That is not how we naturally pray. That is how we ought to pray. And the distance between those two — between the prayer that rises on its own and the prayer Christ sets before us — that distance is the exact measure of our bondage.

But when that second prayer begins to form — even weakly, even reluctantly, even through gritted teeth — know that it did not come from you. That is a product of grace. That is the Spirit doing what you could not do for yourself.

That is the heart surgery God promised in Deuteronomy, performed by the Spirit Paul proclaims. In that moment, you are not choosing your life. You are choosing life. And you are free — truly free — perhaps for the first time.

## V

Brothers and sisters: you are not as free as you think. Most of your choices are made by habit, by nature, by the world's demands. And the one choice that matters — life or death, God or not God — is too great for our bound hearts to make alone. Even our prayers reveal it: we orbit ourselves.

But God has prepared what no eye has seen. The Spirit reveals what no mind could conceive. And in that revelation, you find yourself — miracle — choosing life. Not your life. Life. Not by your strength. By His.

Choose life. But know that even your choosing is held by the One who chose you first.

Amen.


A sermon on the bondage of the will, the one choice that matters, and the God who makes our choosing possible.

1 Corinthians

Holy Fools

The One Free Choice