Foolish
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
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From what we can tell, the Corinthian church was beset by factions. It’s the very first thing that Paul brings up in this letter of his to the church. Word has reached him that the people who made up the Corinthian Christian community were quarreling and had divided into camps loyal to one or another of the evangelists in the church. There was the camp for Paul, whose missionary journeys are well documented. The camp for Apollos, who is introduced at the end of chapter 18 in the book of Acts, a native of Alexandria in Egypt who had been instructed in the Way of Jesus. The camp for Cephas, otherwise known as Peter, one of the original twelve. And a camp that appears to have eschewed the others and claimed loyalty simply to Christ. At the time that must have been rough, four separate groups in the church- each with their own agenda. Paul’s brain would have likely exploded at the prospect that in two thousand years, not only would a third of the world population identify in some way as Christian, but that this global body would be divided into the tens of thousands of different denominations. To be Christian, is to be acquainted with division. Sure, we like to sing, “we are on in the Spirit/ we are one in the Lord.” But truth be told, we are not one in just about everything else. We’re not one on the doctrines we use to articulate just who Jesus is and how salvation works. We’re not one on how to understand sacramental practice and what it means. We definitely aren’t one on things like the role women should have in the church, or homosexuality, or even instrumental music in some instances. To be a Christian, it would appear, is to be divided. The problem with that, for Paul, isn’t so much with the differences. The problem is when we allow those differences to create conflicting loyalties that empty the cross of its power.
There’s a great joke by Emo Phillips about a man who saw someone on a bridge who was getting ready to jump. “Don’t jump,” the man cried out. “Nobody loves me,” said the person on the bridge. “God loves you,” said the man, “Do you believe in God?” The person said, “Yes.” The man asked, “Are you a Christian, or a Jew?” “A Christian," said the person. “Me too,” said the man, “Protestant, or Catholic?” “Protestant.” “Me too,” said the man, “What denomination?” “Baptist,” said the person on the bridge. “Me too,” said the man, “Northern Baptist, or Southern Baptist?” “Northern,” said the person. “Me too,” exclaimed the man, “Northern Conservative Baptist, or Northern Liberal Baptist?” “Northern Conservative,” came the reply. “Me too,” said the man, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” “Great Lakes region,” said the person. “Me too,” said the man. "Council of 1879, or Council of 1912?” “Council of 1912,” said the person on the bridge. “Die heretic!” cried the man and pushed the person off the bridge. Too often, what starts as a well-meant act of love quickly dissolves into the same old same old of division and distrust. We can get so wedded to our tribe, our group, our camp, our party, that we lose sight of the cross and its message.
The message of the cross is the power of God to us who are being saved, says Paul. But what does that mean? Just how are we being saved? And what exactly does the cross have to do with it? To look around church world you might conclude that the cross is our lucky charm. After all, isn’t that’s what you’re supposed to use to ward off vampires and all other manner of evil? Is that what Paul means when he talks about us who are being saved? Whenever I find myself in a conversation with someone who starts talking about salvation, I feel the need to stop them and clarify what we’re talking about. Because much of the time what’s being talked about is a question of afterlife, who goes to heaven to be with God and who goes to a hell of eternal torment. The only problem is that such a conception is closer to the Greco-Roman cosmology of Elysian Fields and Hades than it is to what Jesus, and by extension, Paul are talking about. For one thing, to use the words “us who are being saved,” suggests that salvation isn’t a one-time event, an up or down vote in the court of the heavenly host. Instead, Paul paints a picture not unlike the Exodus. For the Hebrew slaves, crossing the sea was only the beginning of their salvation journey out of slavery. As many of the people who escaped enslavement in the South discovered, you can cross a line and still not feel free. We are a people who need saving every day. And what we need saving from is the very tendency to divide ourselves up along party lines that confronts us at every turn. It’s that same tendency that sees the cross as foolish.
That’s because the cross is far from a lucky charm or talisman. That isn’t how the power of God works, which is sort of the point that Paul is trying to make. We are so far removed from the historic experience of the Roman Empire that it can be hard to grasp just what the cross meant to the earliest Christians living within the Imperial cult of Rome. The cross meant death. But more than that, it meant humiliation, shame and utter defeat. Crucifixion is what Rome did, not just to punish people, but to make them so reviled that no one would dare associate themselves with someone who had been crucified or the things that might have got them crucified in the first place. Who would want to celebrate that? Who would be foolish enough to believe salvation could come through something like that? It sounds like the opposite of what it means to be saved.
Several years back, the magazine GQ did an interview with the comedian Stephen Colbert on the eve of his taking over the Late Show that had been hosted by David Letterman. In that interview, and elsewhere, Colbert shared the tragedy that shaped his life: the death of his father and two brothers who were closest to him in age in a plane crash. As the interview progressed, he revealed how he trained himself, not just onstage but in every day life to steer toward his fear instead of away from it. “I like to do things that are publicly embarrassing,” he confessed, “to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone. I like getting on elevators and singing too loudly in that small space. The feeling you feel is almost like a vapor. The discomfort and the wishing that it would end that comes around you. I would do things like that and just breathe it in.” He takes a deep breath in after saying this and then adds, “Nope, can't kill me. This thing can't kill me.”
That is the power of God in the message of the cross that saves us. It saves us every single day if we will let it. The message of the cross is effectively this: history doesn’t belong to the winners. Or, maybe history does, but eternal life sure doesn’t. It belongs to God in Jesus Christ who wasn’t just killed on a Roman cross, he was beaten, he was broken, he was completely and utterly defeated. He endured our worst; the worst of what humanity can do – and it didn’t kill him. No that’s not right either. It did kill him. It did. But death didn’t get the last word. Death did get to write that story because it didn’t win. That is the power of God that saves us. That is the power of God at work in a world that continues to operate under the prevailing understanding that might makes right, that if you aren’t first the you’re last, saving us from a world that doesn’t just think it knows better, but thinks it knows best. So that on the one side you have people who looks for signs of strength, signs of the miraculous, signs of triumph and success. And on the other side you have people who look for wisdom, who want a good compelling argument, something that is entirely reasonable, understandable, something that makes sense.
Listen, the cross does not make sense as a means of salvation. It just doesn’t. And as signs go, it’s a pretty poor one for salvation given that it is more appropriately associated with loss, with defeat. And as wisdom goes it is simply barbaric, it is mindless violence intended to instill sheer terror on those who look upon it. But if you’re someone who knows loss, if you’re someone who has experienced defeat, if you are someone who has endured far more unreasonable than singing too loudly in an elevator full of people, the cross says, “nope, can’t kill me. This thing can’t kill me.” And you are being saved. We are being saved.
This is the foolishness that God has chosen to shame every well-reasoned attempt to make sense of what too often is senseless. This is the weakness of God that brings shame upon every muscular attempt show of strength. These things that we hide, the low and despised moments of our lives that we wish would just go away, these are the very things through which God works to dismantle the dominant narrative and save us from those who tell it, the ones who would have us believe that we are nothing. Because when the world has done its worst, the power of God says, “nope, can’t kill me. This can’t kill me.” And it can’t kill us either. Instead we are set free, we are being saved every day from every power and principality that would put us down, make us afraid, or have us believe that we are who they say we are. We are not. We are who God says that we are through the foolishness of the cross. Nothing more, and certainly, nothing less.