A Sermon
Based Upon 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25
By Rev. Dr.
Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat
Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Epiphany, January 4th,
2015
“For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor. 1.25).
We begin each year with a study of one particular
book of the Bible because we believe the Bible is God’s word which speaks God’s
truth in God’s world. If that is your
belief, I invite you to be here on Sunday mornings, when I’ll be preaching on
the most important texts of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I also invite you to come and study with us on
Wednesday evenings, as we go deeper.
To guide us through this letter, we will be led by
some of the major ideas found in 1 Corinthians 13. This is one of the most familiar Scripture Bible
passages, known as “The Love Chapter”. It
is a text most often used at Weddings, but it was meant for the church. It is to the church that Paul declares that “without love” we “gain nothing” (13: 3) and we “are
nothing” (13:2). He ends with a
most memorable conclusion: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these
three; and the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor. 13.13).
Of course, love is the greatest, who would dispute
that? Even the Beatles once sang “All You Need is Love!” But how do we define love? You can’t simply define love as a simple
feeling of emotion. You have to define
love as it is practiced in the realities of everyday life. This is why the book of 1 Corinthians is so
important for the church of Jesus Christ, even still today. Here, in this letter, Paul confronts
real-life-situations in the early church that can help us put love into
practice, so that we too, can know better how to love each other in Christ’s
church, and know more fully what it means be Christ’s love in the world.
Love is most important to the Christian, because,
as another Christian writer put it, “God
is love” (1 Jn. 4.7). Who among us
would dispute that the call to God’s love is what is most unique about the
Christian faith? Jesus is our Lord because he is also our
example and our model of what love means and what love looks like. Jesus is what it means to love God and what
it means to love each other. When we
look at Jesus we also say, this is how God is: loving, caring, forgiving, and
redeeming. Just as it is a beautiful
thing to love, it is even more beautiful to know the source of love: to know a living
and loving God.
But then, as Fred Craddock has said, somebody is
going to say to you, if love is so beautiful and so good for everybody, “then what happened to Jesus?” Here, we must face the truth. This Jesus who came to love and to show the
face of God as a God is love, was treated as a criminal and was executed as a
threat. This is also the place where we
must speak of love. Even as Christians,
we live in a world where it getting harder to love.
LOVE IS
NOT EASY
To love as a Christian is not easy. This is the reality that confronts us as we
begin our study of Paul’s letter to Corinth.
We can speak of love in many different ways, but when we begin to speak
of how to love like Christ loves, we can get into all kinds of difficulty.
Take the situation in the church at Corinth, were
Paul tells us there were already ‘divisions’
(1.10) and ‘quarrels’ (1.11). Now this might sound like those early
Christians were nothing much more than a bunch of ‘battling Baptists’, who were
part of a fragile, naïve, impossible fellowship of uncommon belief. But think again. The church at Corinth was located on one of
the most important trade routes of the ancient world. Try to imagine a church strategically
located on the Panama Canal. That was
Corinth. The city was located on an ancient canal ‘crossroads’
of trade, travel, and culture. Paul
acknowledges his thankfulness (1.4)
for this ‘spiritually gifted’ (1.7)
congregation in this city (1.2), but such a constantly changing diversity of people
and culture also provided the endless challenge of living with extreme differences
which brought disunity (1.10).
The disunity in Corinth focused itself in “quarrels” (1. 11) and religious ‘cliques’ (1.10) which formed around personalities. The focus was not on Jesus, as it should
have been, but it was on arguing the question, who was the best preacher
(1:12ff)? This turned faith into a
game of politics and a push for power.
One group voted for Paul, another for Apollos, another for Peter, and of
course, one for Jesus. To have a group vote
Jesus sounds good, but even this meant their own personal interpretation of
Jesus.
Once I was pastor of a church that knew what they
wanted. The problem was, that what part
of the church wanted, the other part of the church didn’t. Both
wanted their own particular type of worship.
This wasn’t just a problem in
that church, it was the problem found in many churches during the 1990’s. The differences in changing worship styles,
unless carefully navigated, can divide and destroy the unifying purpose of a
church. That’s why they called those
struggles, “Worship Wars”.
When I became pastor here, there were some who
wanted me to launch out with a new ‘contemporary’ or ‘blended’ style of
worship. Some wanted me, as a newly installed
pastor-leader, to ‘take the bull by the horns’ and ‘put my neck on the chopping
block’ for the sake of their vision of what this church could be. While I would count it an honor to die for my
Lord, I would not count it any honor to die for someone else’s view of what a
church should be.
Personally, I do not have a problem with
‘contemporary,’ ‘blended’ or ‘traditional’ worship styles. I’ve been a missionary and on the mission
field you get used to seeing God work in many different ways, as long as it is
done with integrity and unity of purpose.
I want our churches to be growing, but I don’t think it would be healthy
to be growing just for the sake of getting bigger, or even only to be as big as
we used to be. I think church growth is
about much more than growing in numbers.
It should also include reaching out and growing, but growth at all
costs, is not healthy, but not to grow is to eventually die. So, when a few people wanted me to take our
churches in a new direction, I listened.
I polled the deacons and discovered that there was no ‘same mind’ or ‘same purpose” about changing our worship style. That is why I did not lead us in that
direction, and still haven’t. But this
question of shared vision and purpose does bring up a very important question
we need to consider today: What does bring us together with the ‘same mind’ and the ‘same purpose?’
As we enter this 8th year of ministry
together, the elephant in our living room is the continued decline of church here,
and most everywhere in our land. What
should we do about it? The reality is,
we can’t do anything about anything until we have ‘the same mind’ and the ‘same
purpose’. To come together and begin to take the risks
we need to take to discover our shared ‘mind’ and our shared ‘purpose’ is the
hard work of love. Isn’t that the hard
work lovers do, before they get married and start life together? They want to know what the other thinks, and
they want to discover how they think alike.
So, what do we believe about who we should be and what
we care about in our church and community?
Can we find a shared vision on
the kind of ‘agreement’ (1.10) we
should have together? What would make
us look forward to worship and to serving Christ this year and in the years
ahead? What brings us here to work and
to witness for our common Lord? What might
‘strengthen’ Christ among us (1.6)
as we share in this ‘fellowship’
(1.8) of Jesus Christ so that we come together and not fall apart?
Before we look at the answer Paul shares, which
should also be ours, we need to be reminded that the problems of unity in
Corinth, remind us, first and foremost, why love is not easy: You
cannot be the body of Christ when you only want what you want. You have to also consider what God
wants? It is what people wanted, not
primarily what God wanted, that got Jesus killed. It is what people wanted, not what Jesus
wanted, that caused people to use Jesus as a weapon and divide and quarrel over
their differences. It is what people
still want, not what the Holy Spirit wants, that still causes people to form
cliques, groups, and factions in churches and communities, all in the name of a
gospel, while working against God’s unifying work of love, grace, and
oneness.
THE
MESSAGE OF THE CROSS
Most all of us know the challenge of being ‘of the same mind’ about anything. People are different. People have different backgrounds,
experiences, and goals. How could the
Christian church or the Christian truth ever expect to find a unifying
principle? Paul says that unifying
principle comes in ‘the message of the
cross’ (1:18).
We still like to sing about the cross, but who is
willing to carry one? But this is
exactly what Jesus called us to do, and it is this ‘message of the cross’ that makes the difference in our life and in
our destiny as the church of Jesus Christ.
Isn’t this what Paul means when he says that ‘the message of the cross is foolishness to show who are perishing, but
to us who are being saved it is the power of God’ (1.18).
According to Paul, it is only when the church of Jesus Christ, lives and
dies the cross, that it truly believes in the cross. This is what he goes on to explain when he
says that his own focus as a preacher, was not only fancy words or speech, but
it was only to preach “Christ crucified”
as the way to release God’s power into a perishing people and give them new
life. Can we think about how this might
happen through us in this year ahead?
How could we be people who not just talk about the cross, but how can we,
‘take
up the cross’ in how we live for God in our own lives. Could we dare to try what Paul calls this ‘foolish’ wisdom of God that is still ‘wiser’
than any ‘human wisdom?’ What in the world does Paul mean by this?
It wasn’t long after those first missionaries who
returned with Ebola, they were being called “Heroes”. Interestingly, they were not being called
‘heroes’ primarily by churches, but they were called ‘heroes’ by the media, by medical
personnel, by the scientific community, and even by the President of the United
States. They were called ‘heroes’
because they put their lives at risk for a cause that was bigger than themselves. They did not desire to die for this cause,
but they knew when they got on those airplanes, when they went into those
remote places, and when they worked with diseased people, that they were ‘bearing
a cross’ to bring health, hope and healing to hurting people---and that
they were doing it for reasons that were beyond themselves and they were
willing. (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/special-features/2014/08/140829-ebola-caregivers-doctors-nurses-west-africa-sierra-leone/).
This is the ‘wisdom
of God’ which is wiser than the ‘foolishness
of human wisdom’. The foolishness of
human wisdom, would say, do what feels good, do what is best only for me, and
do what I want to do only to get what I want
(A former SC republican party chairman suggested that to rid the U.S. of
Ebola, you should put Health Care Workers down) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/opinion/nicholas-kristof-how-to-defeat-ebola.html.
But
the ‘message of the cross’ is not to
see one’s own benefit, but to seek the benefit of loving, no matter the cost. This was the ‘message of the cross’ when
Jesus died for us, and it is still the message of the cross, as we are
commanded to “take up our cross’ and to ‘follow him.’
Calling upon Jesus is just another dead religion,
when it’s just talk about love, or when we go on our way, happily or
sentimentally singing about the old, rugged cross. But when you participate in the faith, when
you are willing to take up your own cross, and you’re willing to make daily sacrifices for Jesus, even
to willing to suffer personal loss for the sake of sharing God’s love in the world;
it is then that faith become real because it becomes love. How
will your faith become love in this year ahead? How will you make sacrifices for the Christ
who makes God’s love real for you?
When we love like Jesus loved, as those missionary doctors
and nurses are still doing, it is such a living ‘message of the cross’ that puts
the world to shame, and it might even put a lot of churches to shame too. What are we doing to sacrifice ourselves in
some way because of this Christ who sacrificed for us in every way? If we will love like this, in this year
ahead, it can keep us focused on what God wants and what the world needs
most----heroes of love who still bear the cross of Jesus Christ.
GOD’S
FOOLISHNESS AN OURS
When that young Pakistan girl, Malala Yousafzai stood up for the right of girls like her to have
the right of an education, beyond the religion of her world, she was standing
with Jesus and taking up her cross, even if she still believed in Allah and
remains a Muslim. While I would
personally thank her for living like Jesus, and I hope she might become a
follower of Jesus too, the truth is, right
now, she probably does more good for her world and for ours, if she remains a
Muslim and lives like Jesus. Muslims
would not trust her, nor see her as a hero, if she publically converted to the
Christian faith. Can you see how she still
bears a cross? Malala can bear a cross
for Jesus as a Muslim in a way that she never could as a Christian.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying I don’t want her to become a
Christian, but I am saying that being a Christian is more than being baptized
with water, joining a church, or saying a mere word of “yes” to Jesus. Sometimes
we need to be baptized by fire, we need
to join with Jesus not just join a church, and we need to live a life that is
more than words. We need to
understand, that bearing the cross of Jesus is bigger than one religion or one
way of looking at the world, because Jesus is the only Savior of the whole world,
whether everyone believes in him to be or not.
What I’m saying is foolishness, but it’s God’s
foolishness and even it’s smarter than anything else we’ve got to offer. There is no way to make progress out of the
darkness of this world without bearing the cross. There is no way to break down the walls of
differences between religions or between people, without the way of the
cross. There is no way to pave a new
road ahead, or to make God’s way straight and sure, without taking up a cross
yourself, and risking yourself to join with others and to love even those
others, who are much different than you.
There is no other way forward, without the cross. Only ‘the
way of the cross leads home’, as the song says.
We might see things differently, and that can be
O.K., but we can’t go forward together, unless we are willing to ‘take up a cross’ and ‘sacrifice’ or even ‘die’ for the truth that will forever remain beyond ourselves. There is no other way that leads us
forward. There is no other power that
works. There is no other truth that brings
people together in love and hope. Every
good power God gives us for our way ahead is found in the power of love that
was first released on a cross.
“Consider
your own call, brothers and sisters….” (1.26). That’s how Paul ends his appeal for his
church to focus themselves in the way of love found in the message of the
cross. You don’t have to be a ‘somebody’ to answer
this call, Paul says. In truth, first you have to make yourself a ‘nobody’. You
have to make yourself a ‘nobody’ because you can’t love somebody or be fully loved,
until you realize that before God, we are all nobodies, made somebody through
the cross that declares God’s unending, unconditional, and undeserved
love. Today, consider your own call to
this kind of love. Amen.
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