Lent 3 – Year B March
8, 2015
I CORINTHIANS 1:18-31 Panzer
Liturgical Serivce
This Sunday gives of three
really wonderful lessons… Moses giving the Ten Commandments, Jesus cleaning the
Temple, and Paul’s writing on the wisdom of faith. As much as I could see the Old Testament and
Gospel scene’s unfolding before me, I could not stop this one question from
rolling around in my mind. And that is the question I bring to you today: Will
You Be A Fool For Christ?
How many of you wear a
cross? It is not unusual for us to see
in the US or even here in Western Europe people wearing this symbol readily
associated with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But if you think about it, it’s really sort
of odd. After all, the cross was a means
of execution – a means of torture and shame for those who lived in Jesus’
time. In fact, as soon as the second
century, the cross was no longer used a means of execution because it was considered
too inhumane. People suffered too much,
and other, quicker forms of execution were employed.
Today we see a cross and we
immediately associate it with a particular religion, but to the first century
Jews and Gentiles, it was a symbol of imperial Roman domination. It signaled oppression and hopelessness,
failure and loss. How could something
good come from this cross? How could the
future give this method of killing a meaning that was full of life?
And that is exactly the
question that Paul was trying to address. First century people struggled to
understand how Jesus could be the fulfillment of any of God’s promises. For those who expect God's power to be made
manifest through acts of strength and the violence of a revolution, it is
foolish – even crazy – that a Savior would come to his people, only to be
sacrificed on a cross. The Jews asked
the question, "Who could believe that this Jesus could be the son of
God? This is not who we have waited
for. God promised us a mighty soldier, a
ruler like David, wise and powerful and able to conquer the world." They ask the question, "What good is a
dead king to us?"
For those who believe that
God's power will be made known to human kind through wisdom or intellect, the
cross represents a stumbling block to their faith. The Greeks asked questions like, "What
kind of sense does it make for this son of God to come and die so that we might
live?" OR “How can life come from
death?"
Paul's answer is this: The message of the cross doesn't make sense
to those people who cannot believe. But
to the ones who believe, to the ones who have faith that God will do what God
will do, the cross is the symbol of God's power in this world. It is God's power alone which saves each of
us, not anything that we do or don’t do ourselves. God chose this novel way to communicate with
us, so that we would believe in God's ways, and accept God's power for what it
is; the power to shape our lives in a ways which put God first, instead of
ourselves.
Through the cross, God’s
character is more clearly revealed to us.
Unlike miracles, the cross is not a grand display of power and
strength. Instead, it is raw
powerlessness. Unlike wisdom, the cross is
not logical – It does not conform to our way of thinking. Instead, the cross confounds us and calls
into question the way we think about God.
No matter how much we want to think that we are the masters of our own
destiny and the world around us, God has a way of reminding us that the world
can be turned upside down, and it will still be OK. As crazy as it sometimes seems, the cross
shows us that God is in control.[1]
Marian Wright Edleman said it
well in her book, The Measure of Our Success.
God works in direct defiance of human standards. What we believe to be the best way may not be
God's way. What we believe to be God's
judgment of a certain group of people or a particular kind of behavior may only
be our own fear and prejudice holding us back from loving and caring for others
who are different from ourselves. In
light of Jesus’ teaching, our expectations are turned upside, and we have to
learn to think differently about the world, ourselves and people with whom we
share life – those we know and those we don’t know. God's work is so powerful that is
incapacitates and reverses the established values of this world. What that means is that we have to work very
hard to let go of all the baggage that we bring with us on our journeys, and on
our way to the cross be open to all of the experiences and people that God has
in store for us.[2]
United Methodist Bishop Will
Willimon tells a story about serving a church in the town where he grew
up. Northside Church needed to grow – it
had the “we-had-better-go-out-and-get-some-new-members-or-we’ll-die”
syndrome. They studied a program from
their denomination telling them how to get new members. Among other things, the program encouraged
door-to-door visitation. So they pulled
out the town map, organized themselves into groups of two, and armed with
pamphlets about the congregation, these missionaries set out to invite people
to church.
He recalls, “Each team was
given a map with their assigned streets.
Helen and Gladys were clearly told to go down Summit Drive and turn
right. That’s what they were told. I heard the team leader tell them, ‘You go
down Summit Drive and turn right. Do you
hear me, Helen, Summit Drive – turn right.’
But Helen and Gladys, being retire elementary school teachers, were
better at giving instructions than getting them. They turned left, venturing into the housing
projects to the west of Summit Drive. We
told them to go right; they turned left.
Which meant that Helen and Gladys had proceeded to evangelize the wrong
neighborhood and thereby ran the risk of evangelizing the wrong people.”
Upon their return, Helen and
Gladys only had one taker – Verleen – who lived with her two children in the
projects and had never been to church before.
The next Sunday, Helen and Gladys proudly show up for church with
Verleen and her two children in tow.
Verleen liked it so much that she decided to attend the Thursday morning
Bible study. Picked up by Helen and
Gladys, Verleen appeared, proudly clutching the new bible that was a present
from Helen’s Sunday school class. And
when the group started talking about temptation, after reading the 4th
chapter of Luke’s gospel, Will asked the question, “Have any of you ever faced
temptation and, with Jesus’ help, resisted?”
One woman talked about
returning to the grocery store to pay for an item that had been stuck under the
cart and missed by the checker. “Good,
good, just the kind of story we’re looking for,” Will replied. Then Verleen spoke. About a cocaine habit she had kicked… and refusing
to rob a gas station with the daddy of her first child, even though she knew he
would beat her up… saying no, she said, “made me feel like I was somebody. I couldn’t have done that on my own… it must
have been Jesus.” The lesson
learned? That evangelism is not about
getting new members in the church, but about participating in God’s harvest,
which is a gracious, unmanageable, messy by-product of the intrusions of God.[3]
I love reading different
translations of scripture because sometimes a new word or phrase will open up
an idea that I had never thought of before. Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase is
especially helpful, interpreting the words that are familiar into modern day
language – getting down to the bare essentials of what difference these words
can make.
At verse 26 we are used to
hearing Paul say, “Consider your call, brothers and sisters…” But Dr Peterson
uses plain English to remind us that faith thing is really serious business…
and God is the hero in all of our stories.
Hear these words:
Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called
into this life. I don't see many of
"the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not
many from high-society families. Isn't
it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks
and exploits and abuses, chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow
pretensions of the "somebodies"? That makes it quite clear that none of you can
get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right
thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by
way of Jesus Christ. That's why we have
the saying, "If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God."[4]
Our salvation is not
dependent on what we believe about the doctrines of the church. We were not saved because our exemplary
behavior – we break at least one of the Ten Commandments every day. Our salvation is dependent on only one
thing: THAT WE BELIEVE THAT GOD CAN DO WHAT GOD WILL DO TO SAVE US FROM OUR SIN.
God chose Jesus’ path to the cross so that we could have eternal
life. It isn't what we expect. It doesn't seem smart or wise that God would
let his Son die for us. It doesn't even
make any sense. But again, that is the
whole point: WE DO NOT HAVE TO
UNDERSTAND WHY GOD DID IT THIS WAY, WE ONLY HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT HE DID.
At my first appointment after seminary, I ended a youth meeting with the comment, "We have about 10
minutes left over. Does anyone have any questions?" A ninth grader raised
her hand and said, "So what; the big deal about the Trinity? I don't get
it at all." (It really is every pastor’s nightmare… to be questioned on
one of the foundations of faith without the possibility of preparation.) So I started asking them questions about what
they knew about the Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, check... three in
one ‑ one in three, check... ways we experience of God, check. They knew many of the right words. And I
talked a little about the controversies that had arisen over the years, and the
splits that had taken place in the church because people couldn't agree on how
to talk about who God is and what God has done for us.
And
at 15 minutes after the ending time, when parents start showing up to find out
where their kids were, I said, "But in the end, you just have to believe,
because there's always someone to explain every point and possibility of the
Christian faith away. And belief takes faith, which is a gift from God, available
to everyone who asks and is willing to receive it. So I guess the answer to the
question is... the big deal about the Trinity is faith."
And
that's how it is with us. We have libraries full of stuff we've never read. We
have the record of scripture, and the experiences of our lifetimes and the
lives of faithful Christian people. But none of those alone make us believe.
Belief is about faith... and faith is a gift from God. What does it take to
believe? It takes faith.
Paul’s words remind us that
our worlds are turned upside down when we invite Jesus inside our lives. It means learning to listen with our changed heart
instead of our head when it comes to matters of faith. Or resisting the urge to turn around when we
have strayed off course – when we have turned left instead of right. Gladys and Helen could have called for
directions when things began to look different from what they expected. But they didn’t. They just kept going and soon they met
Verleen…and none of them were ever the same.
The foolishness and power of
the cross upsets the apple cart, redefines the status quo, and turns our lives
upside-down. But without it, our lives
are nothing. If our lives have any
meaning, it is Christ who gives it to them.
So now I ask the
question: Will you let the power of the
cross and all of its implications turn your life right-side up? Will you be a fool for Christ? Because that’s the best chance at real life
we’ve got.
Thanks be to God.
[1]
Craddock, Fred B, et al, Preaching Through the Christian Year:Year A,
Trinity Press International, Philadelphia ,
PA
[2] Edelman,
Marian Wright, The Measure of Our Success: Letter to My Children and Yours,
Harper Perennial, New York ,
NY
[3]
Willimon, William H., The Intrusive Word: Preaching to the Unbaptized,
William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand
Rapids , MI
[4]
Peterson, Eugene, The Message, 1 Corinthians: 1:26-30.
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