CUPC
The Third Sunday After Epiphany
January 26, 2014
Sermon: “The
Foolishness of People”
I Corinthians 1:10-18
Some people worry about
appearing to look foolish. What if I
told you that being a Christian may be all about looking foolish?
Foolishness and “being fools”
are important images in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.
Paul’s first letter to the
church at Corinth is an opportunity to look at problems plaguing this early
congregation, problems that they might not have been happy to know would still
be read two millennia later. Paul was
addressing some very specific problems within the congregation. Can they really be meaningful to us today? Have any of you eaten meat that was part of a
pagan sacrifice lately?
How do we understand the
truth of God’s Word in these words that Paul directed to a very specific
audience at a very specific time in history.
Readers of these words throughout the past 2000 years have sought out
the light of God’s Word from their own viewpoint, and the quality of light can
certainly be different depending on where you are standing when you look for
it.
The core of all of Paul’s
theology is Christ-crucified and the new era of God’s reign that has
arrived. He doesn’t have either patience
for or an interest in things that we today might call denominational
struggles. His concern in writing to the
people in Corinth is that they remain focused on Christ-crucified and in that
vision remain in harmonious fellowship with one another. He wanted unity in Christ to be the gravity
that kept their world from spinning off into the darkness. Paul interprets everything in light of “the
testimony of Christ [I Cor. 1:6].”
Paul is less concerned here
with Christ’s death representing a universal atonement for personal sin and
more concerned with Christ’s role as the first fruits of a new creation in
which our relationship with God has been restored. He is less concerned with the faith of an
individual and more concerned with the communal expression of that faith by the
congregation. As he is writing to the
Corinthians, Paul’s Christology speaks to the new lives to which we have been
called and the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death as the pattern of Christian
life.
The people in Corinth were
primarily non-Jews for whom the concept of one God was not necessarily easy to
grasp. Their whole social and religious
milieu was rooted in the recognition of many gods who were worshipped by means
of a staggering variety of practices.
Paul’s primary job was reorienting the very way in which these people
thought about “God” and their relationship to life.
Paul is preaching of a God
who is affirmed by sacrificial love with the life and sacrifice of Jesus as the
model for Christian existence. The model
of Jesus as the first person in God’s new creation turns the world’s notions of
power and status upside down. If they
would live as followers of Jesus then the Corinthians must accept that they are
all linked together – regardless of monetary wealth or political power or
social status, rich and poor, slave and free person – they are all linked
together in a community of mutual love and concern.
Such a notion was a hard
sell, even to people who wanted to claim Jesus as their own. It sounded like pure foolishness that none of
the world’s markers of wealth and power and status were worth anything in this
new world order. No
other “god” required that they change their view of the world. Paul insists that this is where living out
the Gospel will lead you. This is the
only place it will lead you.
This is not a sermon
addressed to an individual. This is a
sermon addressed to the church, the congregation because the health and
vitality of the whole congregation was Paul’s primary concern.
If we are trying to
understand how Paul’s words in this letter may apply to our lives, we must
start with that awareness of the congregation, of our congregation, of Christ
United Presbyterian Church. The first warning that Paul gives us is to never
forget for whom we are here. We are not
a congregation because of Bill, or because of Celeste or because of Jim: we are a congregation because of Jesus, and
if we come together around any other person or reason then we have already
missed the point.
Arguments and strife have
destroyed more than one congregation, and Paul wants the people of Corinth to
stop bickering. I’ve seen many examples
of churches that have fallen apart because of internal strife. In a church of 500 members, while 20 people
are arguing about the pastor, 200 people may leave. The people who didn't like the pastor will
blame it on the pastor and the arguing goes on ever more heatedly. But the fact remains that the 200 people may
have left because they became disgusted with the fervor of the arguments that
they encountered every time they came to church.
Spiteful bickering over
personalities is unhealthy behavior in an organization, any organization. If you want an organization to succeed, that
kind of behavior must stop. But that
wasn’t the basis of Paul’s admonition to the church at Corinth. He wasn’t calling them back to harmony for
sociological or organizational reasons.
He was calling them to harmony in the unity of Jesus Christ.
Paul tells them that it is
unimportant who baptized them. It is
totally insignificant whose preaching they like the best. Lining up with the preacher who is the most
eloquent and charismatic is an insult to the message being preached.
There is only one reason why
we are here. It’s not to hold up this
building. It’s not because we like the
preacher – or pianist, or someone else who is here. It’s not so we can look around and somehow
feel superior or inferior to other people who are here. We are here because we are a congregation,
called together to share and spread the Word of the Gospel of Jesus Christ;
called to live in loving fellowship with one another in imitation of the life Christ
wants for us and as a visual proclamation to the world that we are different:
we are fools for Christ.
It’s too easy to personalize
the messages of scripture as if we can live as Christians in isolation. It’s too easy to demonize the “larger church”
because of the denominational factions that exist all around the world. Paul isn’t writing to address global
problems. He’s writing to address the
life of a congregation of people who would follow Jesus.
We are the called-together assembly
of the people of God. Our faith is
expressed in the quality of that togetherness, that loving fellowship that we
share with one another. Our faith is
expressed in the upside down logic that says Christ crucified, hung in shame
from a cross, is the reason that we are here.
Our faith is expressed in so many ways that the world would call
foolish.
The future of this
congregation is based on only one thing:
keeping Christ crucified at the center of our being as a
congregation. If that is at the center
of all the hopes and plans that we try to live out over the next few years then
the Holy Spirit will lead us and our purpose as a congregation will be
fulfilled. It is the foolishness of
Christ crucified that tells us this isn’t about money, it isn’t about
buildings, it isn’t about preachers: it
is only about our sharing Christ’s love as we live and proclaim that God’s
reign is very near and we are living today on earth as we shall in God’s heaven.
Amen.
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