Sermon, January 27, 2008 -- 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

“Foolishness to the Greeks” (1 Corinthians 1:18-31)
Rick Olson, January 27, 2008

I guess you could say that Paul spoke his mind – he didn’t have any trouble telling it like it is, or was . . . he got downright feisty in his letters, and his passion for his subject shone through all the time. He reminds me a little bit of Paris, a classmate of mine from seminary – he felt passionately too, and it showed through in his preaching. He’s an African American Baptist – don’t ask me what he was doing at a Presbyterian seminary – and in his tradition, they get up on their feet and preach – they pace around, their voices rise and fall, they shout out to the congregation and expect a response – am I right? Can I have an amen? – And I remember our preaching class, where they taught us to carefully structure our sermons, with a beginning and a middle and an end, and a climax two-thirds of the way through, and Paris would just get up and let fly. One week, he was preaching just before me, and it was our first class sermon, he got up and started in, and all the uptight Presbyterians just sat there and watched, like stunned oxen, like deer in the headlights, and didn’t say a thing . . . and then I had to get up and follow that, with my carefully constructed little Presbyterian sermon . . . And I think if Paul could preach – and he claimed he couldn’t – but if he could, he’d preach like Paris, fiery, pacing the stage, because he was passionate about his subject, and he always told it like it is . . .

Take last week’s passage – he was upset about divisions at Corinth, and he just came out and said it – “Each of you says, "I belong to Paul," or "I belong to Apollos,"or "I belong to Cephas," or "I belong to Christ."” and then he really let ‘em have it: “Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” And it was clear what he meant, he said it right out – the body of Christ – that you have all been baptized into – hasn’t been divided, and neither should you. Even with all our different beliefs, all our different takes on theology and church practice and who's in and who's out God expects us to get along. God doesn’t want uniformity, but God does expect unity. And last week’s passage ends at the cross, the center of Paul’s theology – if we fight amongst ourselves, he says, the cross will be “emptied of its power.”

And this week, we take up right there where we left off, right at the cross, and he’s going to tell us what he means by the power of the cross, and once again, he tells it like it is . . . “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” – foolishness! “But for the ones being saved, it’s the power of God!” And right away, he comes out swinging, and we're set up . . . it piques our interest, and we want to read further. Did he just say God’s power is foolish? What does he mean by that? Well, first of all, it's not foolishness to everybody, just “those who are perishing” – that is, non-believers – but for the ones being saved – believers – it’s the whole ball of wax, the whole power of God. And then he quotes scripture, Isaiah to be exact – “I” – and the “I” is God – “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” And what Paul doing is setting up a pair of opposites – foolishness and wisdom – and he’ll play one against the other for the rest of his argument. He says “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where are the debaters?” And the answer, of course, is “nowhere!” And then: “hasn’t God made the wisdom of the world foolishness?” And the rhetorical answer is “Yes!” So to God – and presumably us believers – the wisdom of the world is foolishness, and we moderns say to him “Whoa, there! You mean to tell us that science and medicine and the arts are foolishness? Is that what you’re saying?” And that question’s especially sharp here at Covenant, where we’re intelligent, well-educated and—above all!—competent . . .

So let’s look a little deeper and see . . . first of all, just what is this “wisdom of God?” Well, God's wisdom says that the world didn’t know God through . . . wisdom! It was through the foolishness of Christian proclamation. And what’s so foolish about that? “We proclaim Christ crucified,” and it’s a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to the Gentiles! And “stumbling block” in Greek is literally scandal, and Paul is saying the cross is a scandal to Jews, and those are mighty harsh words . . . but think about it for a minute. To people who are waiting for the messiah, for a glorious, military leader the claim that the leader died a miserable death on the cross would be a scandal, it would be a stumbling block. And ultimately, it’s a stumbling block they couldn’t get around – finally, they rejected the belief that Jesus was their messiah.

And so now we get a hint of what Paul means – it has something to do with Jesus’ death. It’s foolishness to those who are perishing, to those who are of this world, but to those who are called – both Jews and Greeks – to those who are children of God through Jesus Christ, it is the power and the wisdom of God. God’s foolishness – the death on the cross of God’s son – is wiser than human wisdom; likewise God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Note what he’s saying here: foolishness is wise, weakness is strength – it overturns all the ways of the world, doesn’t it? It’s certainly the opposite of what the world says, it’s surely the antithesis of what it values. Paul links foolishness and weakness together – they’re placed in parallel, and thus equated . . . And weakness is foolish to the world, you can’t build an empire without soldiers, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And the bottom line is: you can’t build a religion when your leader’s been hung up to die . . . now that’s a scandal.

By the same token, Paul equates wisdom and strength, wisdom and power. He asks the Corinthians to think about their calls, to consider their chosen-ness – not many of them are wise by human standards, not many are powerful, not many are of noble birth, and here what he means by worldly wisdom: wisdom by human standards means power, it means strength . . . it means being of noble birth, or high up on the social scale, it means having versus not-having. And not many of the Corinthians could say they were wise by these standards, not many of them were powerful. God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things to shame the strong. The low and despised in the world, the martyrs and workers and kitchen help; the animal-tenders and the shoe-shine boys and the wandering schizophrenic Viet-Nam vets . . . God chose them. And by contrast, if God chose weak things to shame the wise, to shame the powerful, does that mean God didn't choose the wise or the powerful of the world? Is this what Jesus meant by all that talk about rich men and camels and needles?

Paul says God chose the things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are . . . God chose the nobodies of the world to make nobodies out of the somebodies. And now comes the pay-off, the upshot of this whole section of letter . . . Why did God choose those that are weak, those that are despised and low and foolish? Why not the powerful and the strong and the rich and famous, couldn’t the faith have been spread a lot faster if there was a little more money to grease Roman wheels? Couldn’t Christianity have swept around the Empire if God had chosen the Senate or the Emperor or the richest merchants in Jerusalem? Why did God choose the weak and the powerless? Paul’s answer is simple: “so that no one might boast in the presence of God..” And at first, it looks like a non-sequitur, like maybe somebody took what Paul was about to say, and substituted something about boasting . . . well, we know it’s not nice to boast, our mommas all told us it’s impolite . . . but what does that have to do with anything? Here Paul’s charging along, talking about the weak and the despised and the oppressed, and how they’re gonna get the goods, and how the rich and powerful are gonna get theirs – the evil Hollywood smut-mongers if you’re conservative, and the soulless multi-nationals if you’re a liberal – and Paul says it’s so nobody might boast in God’s presence? So nobody will brag to God?

If we listen, Paul explains in the next line – “He” – meaning God – “is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” How can we boast, how can we glory, how can we exult, if nothing we’ve done, no power of our own, is responsible for anything we have? Not riches or political power, or large retirement accounts or even going into the inner cities to feed the poor, only God is the source of our life in Christ, and everything else. Only God.

And that’s the scandal of the cross, folks . . . that’s the stumbling block to the world, the foolishness of authentic Christianity. It’s grace folks, a pure-D gift from God. Nothing we have done, or will ever do . . . nothing we save up, or accumulate or finance . . . nobody we help, or save or rescue . . . not anything or anybody is our righteousness or sanctification or redemption. Only God.

And that's still a scandal today, isn't it? Especially around here, especially in this country, where we're conditioned from birth to be self-reliant, where we're taught not to be weak. Be strong! Buck up! Never let ‛em see you sweat! Weakness is a scandal to us in America, and in the rest of the world as well.

And it’s bled over into the church, hasn’t it? Churches think that what they’ve got is because of something they’ve done. Because they’re so competent at being church, so smart and wise to put in this program or that . . . Oh, they don’t say it out loud, they say, and their pastors say that it’s all by the grace of God, but their actions—which is where the rubber meets the road—their actions tell the tale . . . if we just put in one more program, a program that’ll attract people, if we just tweak the music, to be more contemporary, more in tune with what they’re listening to today, man . . . if we just hire the right pastor . . . then everything will be all right. And it’s if we, if we, if we . . . not if God . . .

And often, us pastors are the worst of the lot, we get awful impatient . . . because after all, we’re the experts, we’ve read all the literature, we know how to grow a church, how to increase membership, how to turn things around . . . why aren’t we doing something, why aren’t we, why aren’t we, why aren’t we . . . we’ve talked enough, it’s time to do, time to get something done.

But you know what? “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to shame the things that are . . .” God chose those who submit to God—like Jesus did on the cross—to be the inheritors of God’s kingdom.

So it can’t be “we can renew us . . . we can remake us . . . we can transform us” but it has to be that God can renew us . . . God can remake us . . . God can see us transformed. The wisdom of the world—that siren song of competence and can-do spirit—is the foolishness of God. The foolishness of the world—that we submit ourselves to someone else’s will, to someone else’s time-table—is the power of God. For Lutherans demand programs and Presbyterians demand good, solid preaching, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a scandal here in America and indeed foolishness to the rest of the world. Christ is the power of God, the cross is the wisdom of God. God will transform us, and God will do it in God’s own time. Amen.