Just Plain Silly

Merritt Island Presbyterian Church

January 22, 2017  The Third Sunday After Epiphany

I Corinthians 1:10-18           “Just Plain Silly”

Last week, the reading from I Corinthians opened with Paul praising the Corinthians: “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” 

Just a few short verses later he says:  “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.”

Wow!  Who could have imagined that:  quarreling saints!

Do you think they were fighting over politics?  Was the latest proconsul elected from the first district of Corinth making some of them unhappy?  He had been elected through the use of divisive rhetoric that threatened to eject the immigrant Athenians who only a mere 500 years earlier had fought against the Corinthians in the Peloponnesian Wars.  They had to go!  Although some of them had families that resettled in Corinth a few hundred years ago, they were not to be trusted.  They were not real Corinthians. 

Of course some of them had become Christians.  Were the fights in the church over the political sentiments or the ethnic origin of some of its members? 

No!

Paul would have been pretty surprised to find that members of the church were turning against one another over electoral politics. 

What Paul was upset about was about a form of politics in a broader sense.  There was a competition going on between different people (and their followers) to be recognized as leaders within the congregation and dividing the congregation in the process.

Paul says he didn’t bring them the Gospel to make them disciples of Paul.  They aren’t supposed to be followers of Cephas or Apollos.  No one in the Christian congregation should be looking to elevate themselves.  There is only one leader; only one Savior; only one God; only one Lord.  And his is the name above all others:  our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The congregation at Corinth – like the one on Merritt Island – exists only as long as it is all about the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.  No matter what goes on in the world, we are about the love and grace of Jesus.  Period!  If we abandon that love and grace from the Lord then we rob the cross of its meaning.  In other words, we rob ourselves of the meaning of Jesus’ death and triumph.  And the powers of death and world shall have won.

Why did Jesus come into the world.  To save you? 

From what? 

Jesus came into the world, came to be among us because we had forgotten – still forget – who God is.  Jesus revealed to us the nature of our God.  Matthew 5-7 tells you who God is and what living in God’s presence is all about.  Matthew 25 tells you who God is and what God expects from us. 

Jesus came to save us from the powers of death and the world SO THAT we might remember who God is and what it means to live in God’s presence.  Jesus came to save us SO THAT we might confess, repent, that is turn around and turn back to God, and begin to live now – here and now – as the creatures that God had intended us to be in God’s new creation.  That new creation began on the cross and none other than Jesus is the first citizen of that new creation. 

I can hear some of them saying to themselves – or perhaps to the person sitting next to them – “Get real.  We live in the real world.  What Jesus described in Matthew 5 through 7 was some kind of pie in the sky poetry.  And the stuff in Matthew 25 is a little scary but we live in the Roman Empire right now.  That’s who and what we need to deal with. 

“I come to our worship celebrations.  I contribute to help feed the poor, although I’m not sure where all the money actually goes.  I know the Jesus story, and I like Jesus and all, but we live under other rules!  Jesus is nowhere to be seen around here any more.  You can’t expect me to live that way.  The rest of this stuff is foolishness.” 

Foolishness.  The Gospel is just plain silly!

I recently finished a book about the folly of the decision making process followed by most humans.  The book was filled with examples of how we make foolish decisions on inadequate data (especially when we are making decisions on quantifiable problems), and how we fail to apply basic logic to everyday problems often complicating issues that are logically much simpler than we recognize. 

The work on basic logic reminded me of Genesis 4:9, “Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’” If you recall, the Lord didn’t respond directly to Cain’s question. 

Throughout time people have come up with all sorts of clever responses to Cain’s question, most of which totally missed the simple and logical point.  The only answer sits in the illogical nature of Cain’s question.  The instant he refers to Abel as his “brother,” he acknowledges certain responsibilities toward Abel that he was defensively trying to deny.  No, he wasn’t his brother’s keeper:  he was his brother’s brother!

Among those people who sometimes say, “Get serious.  The Kingdom of God isn’t here.  That’s foolishness.  I’ll worry about that later.  The United States of America is here.  That’s the only thing that’s important. Besides, didn’t you say I was saved by grace?  OK.  That’s done.  God has already forgiven me for my selfishness, my meanness and pettiness and stinginess.  I can’t really do anything to change or lose my salvation anyway.  Right? So don’t bug me.”

HMMMM.

Like the Lord back in Genesis 4, the answer to that question is already found in the logic of the terms themselves.  Yes, you are saved by grace. You have been saved FROM the death that dominates this world: the meanness, the pettiness, the selfishness, the stinginess, the blind hate, and the belief that your true salvation is defined by this world and its so- called leaders. 

We don’t need to go into a faith drives works or a works defines faith debate.  The founder of our Reformed faith, John Calvin, believed that our salvation, our justification before God, and our pursuit of Christ’s holiness, our sanctification, are inseparable.  They are inseparable in Christ, and our own salvation flows from our union with Jesus.  That’s what we remember every time we celebrate communion.  Calvin said: “Thus it is clear how true it is that we are justified not without works yet not through works, since in our sharing in Christ, which justifies us, sanctification is just as much included as righteousness (Institutes, 3.16.1).”

OK.  That might have been a bit too esoteric.  Let me break it down.  You don’t have to read Calvin, but you really need to read the Scriptures.  Seriously.  You do.  In Jesus there is no separation between salvation and a life of holiness.  That life is defined very clearly in Matthew 5-7 and Matthew 25 as well as many other times in the Gospels and in the whole of the New Testament.  If Jesus is your Lord then you will behave in a certain way toward one another.  If Jesus is IN you, to recall one of Paul’s phrases, then you will do your best to live out a life defined by his holiness. 

That’s why “I don’t have to do anything to be saved. Right?” is as specious as “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  If you are saved from the deadly powers of this world, then by definition your life is no longer defined by the powers of self-interest, hated, bigotry, meanness and fear, and yes that means that you do live as Jesus would have you live here and now in God’s new creation. 

The last verse of this morning’s reading is the answer to “Get serious.  I’m living in the here and now.”  “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

That phrase “those who are perishing” is about the people who pursue the world’s definition of winning and success.  That’s whom Paul is talking about.  And there were some people back in Corinth, just as there are some people here at Merritt Island Presbyterian Church, who even want to bring those deadly worldly goals and worldly tactics into the life of the church. 

Those who would use the goals and tactics of the world to divide the church into “my church” and “their church” are the ones who are perishing.  Those who think that self-interest and meanness are the ways to succeed, those who seek and often receive the adulation of the world, are the ones who are perishing. They are the ones who will say that the Sermon on the Mount is poetic foolishness.  They are the ones who will say that a king who defines victory as death on a cross is foolishness.  They are the ones who will say that the notion that God has a new creation for us right now, right here, is foolishness.  They are the ones who are convinced that they know better than God how to live and succeed in this world.  They are the one’s who forget that this is Christ’s church and if he is not the head then we are lost.

Paul’s plea to the church at Corinth is for loving unity centered around remembering who God is; remembering who Jesus is.  That wonderful chapter that so many pastors misappropriate for weddings, I Corinthians 13, isn’t about weddings: it’s about the way we lovingly treat one another.  It’s about the way we treat our neighbors.  It’s about the way we treat all of God’s children. 

The Gospel is all about God defying the world of power and prestige, of self-interest and greed, and toppling it in order to set before us his new creation. When the Gospel is pronounced, to their own surprise and amazement, people change. Lives change. Conditions change.  New worshipping fellowships come into being, filled with people seized by the Gospel, knowing it’s true despite everything, learning to love the God who is revealed and alive in Christ Jesus, and more urgently giving Jesus alone their supreme loyalty.  Jesus came to remind us; we share communion lest we forget!

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

“IT IS THE POWER OF GOD.”

Thanks be to God.  Amen.