I Corinthians 1:18-31
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
20 Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called,both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
26 Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called.Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him. 30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. 31 Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”
Martin Luther talked about the theology of glory and contrasted it with the true gospel, which he called the theology of the cross. A theology of glory is a vision of the christian faith that maximizes success and minimizes sin, pain, setbacks, and struggles. The theology of the cross instead views the cross of Jesus as being deeply revelatory. That often the victory is found in losing. That life comes on the other side of death. That sacrifice is at the heart of love. That weakness and foolishness in obedience to the Father is more powerful and wise than anything we humans could invent. The theology of the cross keeps us honest and realistic in our expectations and proclamations. It refuses to oversell the gospel. It refuses to hide doubts in a back room.
Beatitudes...This is what I was trying to describe the other week when I said that those with worldly success, wealth, health, physically attractive, well-spoken,popular people tend to get more traction on the Christian music and speaking circuit, but that the very kind of people whose lives (in many ways) we don’t want are the ones Jesus identifies as “blessed” in the beatitudes. We want their virtues, just not their circumstances.
Too photoshopped…Versions of the gospel that present the life of faith as too photoshopped, too positive, too edited for public viewing, end up lying, and end up being less satisfying and less meaningful. We end up with a bifurcated life. We put on a wardrobe to talk about God and spiritual things within a “spiritual context,” but use totally different sets of values and vocabulary to talk about everything else. But many folks end up so disappointed and fragmented that eventually they give up. “If that’s what it’s about, it sure isn’t happening for me. I’m out. Isn’t there anything more than this?”
In The Matrix Reloaded Neo has a conversation with the Architect, who tells him that the early versions of the Matrix were designed to be paradise, but that huge numbers of humans rejected the simulations, finding them unbelievable. The machines then included more suffering and futility and evil into the simulation and that seemed more believable. He said they did it to “match the varying grotesqueries of [human] nature.”
The line between good and evil. And that’s the other thing. Versions of the faith that draw the line between good and evil as a line between good people and bad people ends up being ignorant of the essence of what faith entails for they themselves. That line between good and evil is drawn not around others, but through each of us as we make significant choices to reject the evil and embrace the good over and over in daily life. Each one of us is capable of incredible evil precisely because of our innate penchant for rationalization and feigned ignorance. The world is a raw and rough place. And so is the human heart.
Jesus was tempted! Do we dare believe that satan’s invitations were appealing to the Son of God? Do we dare admit that they still hold allure to us? We’d better, lest we fall asleep in the hour of our temptation. Jesus instructed us to pray daily for forgiveness of our sins, daily for the grace to forgive others, and daily for deliverance from temptation. He knows what it’s like to be a human on planet earth.
Look at this cross. When I asked for this cross at the front of our sanctuary to be made, I had very specific requests. I wanted it life-sized. I wanted it made with rough-cut lumber. I wanted it to have some bark still on it. I did NOT want it sanded and straight. And I wanted it bloody. I wanted it ugly and brutal. And I wanted it central.
We should probably also put some symbol of Jesus’ resurrection central in here, because that’s the other side of that coin.
Harold Eberle wrote a brilliant little book where he talked about how many christians live as though they’re still in their sins and in some way under divine displeasure and needing to earn favor with God through repentance. He talked about that sort of set of attitudes as “cross-centered Christianity.” Well that’s not at all what I’m talking about. I’m not viewing the cross as something we are doing for God – I’m viewing the cross as God fully entering into the totality of what human life in a broken world IS in order to bring us to redemption. And faith not being a rescue away from that cross and resurrection shaped life, but rather joining Jesus in fully entering into love and life in a fallen world as redeemed creatures.
God, the atheist? Think about some of the contrasts and tensions of the cross — that moment when Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!?” That moment when, I don’t know how to say it correctly, but what if we said it wrong to point in the right direction — that moment when God became an atheist. And through that kind of fully giving himself to us, we were won to faith. I am. I’m not a believer because God flexed the muscles of his power, but because he flexed the muscles of his humility, love, mercy, and vulnerability.
Authorized doubt and sacred despair. In seasons of darkness many of us have been surprised to find that Scripture itself has prayers and songs of intense doubt and pain that give voice to the rough cut lumber and blood and ugliness of our experience. Oddly, the Psalms pray lament thousands of years before the studies of psychology revealed that people who learn how to narrate their pain end up far more healed long term than people who simply move on and try to ignore it. More on that later… but resurrection comes on the other side of the cross. Not without it.
The contrast is sometimes too stark between church and real life. I have a friend who recently told me about seeing an accident while she was driving and pulled over. She was there hugging this gal, a total stranger, with the bashed up car and the girl crying, saying that the car was her mom’s, christian fish on the back, while the boyfriend hurried to hide the drugs from the cops coming. That’s love on the front lines. But this same friend said it didn’t feel real or right to then come to church where we all smile and sing about how beautiful God is, but you just never know when some little thing will tick somebody off and then the smile is revealed to be a lie, and they’re gone from your life. There’s something there.
Covenant. That cross, that bloody, ugly thing, is actually God cutting a covenant. A covenant! Not a contract in which two parties set forth some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement in which if either side breaches, they go their separate ways. Not an informal arrangement of consumer clients and provider business in which we provide goods and services and you compensate us financially. No. A covenant. Both parties stand there and say, “I’m not leaving; EVER.” That means if you sin against me, I’ll bleed, but I’ll stay. And if I sin against you, you’ll bleed, but you’ll stay.” This isn’t flowery. It’s the cross, man. It’s real!!!
Avoidance. And it’s what is required for love to flourish and for people to become fully alive. Do you think we can even begin to address the issues that need to be addressed in a setting where I can just quit any time it gets hard or scary or boring? Our deep tendency to avoidance and abdication will just take over unless I realize that this is going to be my next forty years if we don’t learn some way to make this better.
Grace. You know what I call that covenant? I call it grace. Grace isn’t God pretending we’re behaving perfectly. Grace is God’s refusal to leave though he sees perfectly clearly that we’re far from perfect in our current state. God refuses to let that dictate to him who we are, and it’s that covenant commitment in Christ that enables us to actually change.
Eggshells. Without that kind of covenant, we walk around on eggshells, managing other people’s potential reactions. Both their reactions to our sins, but also their reactions to our actual best self. And how will I gather the courage and love to deal with what’s bothering me well if in the back of my mind is the option to simply find greener pastures? Lack of covenant is weakening on all sides.
One of the crucial questions of any relationship, family system, or community is, “What does it feel like to fail in this environment?”
No perfect people allowed. I have found the gritty real world of Jesus to be about a million miles from the Pharisees and Scribes, and much closer to the sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes. I’m not saying willful sin. I’m saying no masks and no pretense. I’m saying admit what’s really going on. I’m saying fall forward. I’m saying no perfect people allowed. And I’m saying I know that we change the most, and the best, in an environment of acceptance.
Lift a finger. We hear Jesus harshly rebuke the religious leaders for loading people down with more theological hoops and religious rules to keep to be considered upstanding in their circle, none of which grow them in faith, hope, and love, and none of which detangle their hearts from the insidious sins that actually are sucking the life out of them. He says you load down people with heavy burdens, but don’t lift a finger to help. People come out worse than before they ever got religion.
God’s commands are NOT a moral straight jacket meant to control us. You know, God’s commands aren’t there to tell us how God demands we live. They are there to reveal to us the nature of how life actually works. You can do whatever you want, you can grind the gears and crash the car of your life in the name of freedom. But that’s not freedom. God has no desire whatsoever to control you. His commands are an explanation of how you and I are made to thrive.
We don’t get away with anything. We tend to reap what we sow. I’m not saying God comes after us. He actually comes after us to get us out of trouble! He’s the most joyful Being in the universe, and in fact, the Holy Spirit has an interesting name in John’s Gospel: The Helper!!! Religion loads you down with burdens but doesn’t lift a finger to help, Jesus gives us an easy yoke and a light burden and does literally all the heavy lifting. He wants to get to the root of the problem, and he knows that will never happen if we are terrified of punishment.
“I didn’t ask to be created; and now if I sin, I burn.” The other day I sat with a young man who has been in and out of addiction for years. He said he wishes he wouldn’t have been born. He said “Nobody asked me before they made me, now if I do what makes me happy, what I want to do, sin, then God will send me to hell. How is that fair? And I’m too weak to fight the sin! How is that fair?”
The story we tell ourselves about our life. All of us live in the story we tell ourselves about the meaning of our life. We don’t live by facts. We live by arranged facts. Facts attended to, ignore, selected, organized, and interpreted. A story. And this story is a subtext of our consciousness. We are telling ourselves but usually not in a direct and examined, conscious way. And we each have various parts. The parts of the self actually communicate to each other, fight against each other, or work together. The parts of the self are made to be aligned. Sin brings them into enmity. Disorder.
Many conversions. When we say our big yes to Jesus, the rest of our life then entails many opportunities, forks in the road where we have opportunity to say another yes, and another yes. Each time is a kind of conversion. If we keep saying yes, our parts align.
There is an inward journey we must go on, which is the primary journey we are on. In the inward journey we stop reacting to our unhappiness with the blame game and the complaining heart that externalizes and defends. The inward journey refuses to accept the lie that the thing that provokes me is to blame for the brokeness in me that is provoked…And the question to ask to your own soul in the presence of God is actually very simple.
“What do I need to attend to that I’m avoiding?”
Fight the fight you’re actually in. We’d rather talk about something else. We’d rather fix something else. We’d rather attend to something else. We’d rather be somewhere else. We’d rather blame someone else. But there’s a thing that’s happening here and now between us and God, and usually affecting us and somebody else, and the authentic journey of cross and resurrection is that way. We’d rather avoid that death and get back to winning.
The kernel of true faith…But if we do, we get what faith is actually all about. It isn’t about following arbitrary rules in order to avoid hell and get to heaven later when we die. It’s about knowing Christ and being formed into his likeness. It’s about voluntarily becoming like him in his death and then God does something we cannot do: resurrection.
God creates, science discovers. I love when science or psychology discovers a biblical truth and then gives it a big name. A few years ago a study was done on the therapeutic benefits of writing. So a sample group was given a basic assignment, write each day for a fixed number of minutes about anything you want. Go. They did and the benefits were there. They experienced a boost of well-being and increased function throughout the duration of the period of their lives in which they wrote daily. But another sample set was given a more precise assignment. Enter into your painful memories and write about them. Their results were different. They experienced a temporary dip in function and emotional reserves. They re-experienced the painful things. But then something happened that Jesus knew would happen…They experienced a long term rise in their emotional and functional health.
The cross is so filled with meaning that I will never do God justice with my one life and my little words, but surely God has fully entered into the depths of what this beautiful and tragic human life is…and by entering, by being fully there, fully open to it, he has overcome. And he calls to us to join him there in death, and thereby, resurrection.
“Join me in this place of being real. This place of authentic love. This place of covenant. This life in a state of grace. This defenseless place of truth without judgment. This place where what’s really wrong can be addressed at the root…Open up your heart, and let me in! You’ve followed me into the light. Follow me into the dark.”