Transcript
Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from among the nations that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise. Come, let us worship God.
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Let us pray. Let the good news come now, our Father, not only in word, but in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full assurance, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Listen now to the reading of God's Word from Paul's first letter
to the Corinthians, the first chapter beginning at the 18th verse. 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. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made
foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the foolishness of our proclamation to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom. But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. But to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness
is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce
to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. In order that, as it is written, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. This is the word of the Lord. In order to understand this text, we must distinguish between the cross and burdens. You will often hear
people say, as you minister to them, I bear a heavy cross. What they mean is that they carry a heavy burden. A burden is not a cross. It is not the cross. Illness and disease are burdens. I read just this week in the Presbyterian Outlook of the death of Bob Anderson. You don't know Bob Anderson. But Bob Anderson and I were young pastors together in Garden Grove, California. He organizing a new United Presbyterian Church of North
America, and I a new Presbyterian Church USA. He was a wicked tennis player. It has been my lot always to play tennis against left-handers, and they are doubly wicked. A great, great human being who developed a rare type of bone cancer. We saw him and his wife, Dottie, at the General Assembly just last June in Milwaukee. Thought it was under control, and read in the Outlook that Bob had died in October, 62 years of age.
Bob bore a heavy burden, but the burden of his disease was not a cross. The loss of a loved one is a burden. My wife and I had dinner in San Francisco at the recent AAR and SBL gathering with a couple from our congregation in Burlingame who had just this fall experienced the death of a 36-year-old son to AIDS. They are hurting. There is great pain in their lives. But their loss is not a
cross. It is a burden. Poverty is a burden. I read in the New York Times recently that the baby boomer generation would not know the Great Depression from the Great Flood. I am at that point where I do remember the Great Depression. I remember picking up my father one Friday evening in our old 1931 Chevrolet and having him say to my mother, they closed the shop today. My father was a printer, a blue collar tradesman of
great pride and great skill. I remember him going to work for the WPA half a day to put food on the table. I remember the day when Mr. Waugh, our landlord, came for the mortgage payment. My folks had upscaled from a $3,000 home to a $5,000 home. And the monthly mortgage payments were $25. And my mother, with tears in her eyes, saying to Mr. Waugh, I cannot pay you. Bill is out of work. And
our Jewish landlord looked her in the eye and said, Stella, not to worry. When you and Bill can pick up the payments, we'll pick them up. We were that far from losing our home. And I know that poverty is a burden, but it's not a cross. Oppression is a burden. Some of you will remember Bishop Carol E. Tote, who was here as the Mackay professor last year, former bishop of the Hungarian Reformed Church. He was here
on the campus yesterday, stopped by the office. And we visited about what is happening in Central Europe. And his words were that we have overthrown the oppression of the communist state and now we are subjecting ourselves to the oppression of ethnic hostility. And all that had simmered for 40 years beneath the domination of communism has now erupted. And we are inflicting oppression upon one another. We have seen that in our visits to Romania, to Transylvania, where
the Hungarian minority is under severe oppression. Oppression is real. It's terrible. It's global. But it's not a cross. It's a burden. The message about the cross, which is at the heart of the Christian gospel, is about a particular cross, the cross. It's about a particular event. It's about the death of a particular person. It's about a crucifixion. It's about an execution of Jesus. That cross, His cross, located on a hill called Golgotha outside the gates of
Jerusalem. Sometime in the early part of what we now call the Christian era, Jesus died on a cross. Jesus was put to death by Romans. That's the cross that is at the heart of the gospel message. We use the cross as a symbol. We talk about it as a symbol theologically. We talk about it as a metaphor theologically. It is not a symbol. It is not a metaphor. The cross is an event. And moreover, it is
a redemptive event. Something happened in that event that has changed the world, changed human history, and has changed human life. God did something at the cross. And it affects what Paul calls righteousness and sanctification and redemption. Paul very clearly tells us that the message about the cross does not meet what we would call the public criteria of either wisdom or power. The message of the cross was foolishness to Greeks because they sought wisdom. They sought rationality.
They looked to universals. The particular was to them a scandal. And Jews thought it weakness, which it was. Because they saw the divine present only in evidences of power. We need to note the antitheses that are at work in this passage. Wisdom and foolishness. Power and weakness. But the interesting thing, if you read it very carefully, is that Paul never plays wisdom off against foolishness. He'll play wisdom off against weakness. He never plays off power against
weakness, but he plays power off against foolishness. Which leads me to believe that he has combined these antitheses into two, not a double set, but one set. There is on the one hand wisdom and power and on the other hand foolishness and weakness. That's the antithesis. Where there is wisdom there is power and where there is power there is wisdom. That is the other assumption. And Paul's message is that God's foolishness is wiser than our wisdom.
Isn't that amazing? Think of all the things you're studying just now. And there's wisdom. No doubt about it. Wisdom of the sociologist. Wisdom of the psychologist. The wisdom of the philosophers. The wisdom of the theologians. The wisdom of the historians. God's weakness is stronger than our power. And God's foolishness is wiser than our wisdom. Christ crucified, says Paul, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. And this message, when believed, deliberates us not from
our burdens, not from our burdens, but from our sin. From our sin. In Romans chapter 6, Paul does a little charismatic interpretation of baptism in which he says that when we are baptized we identify ourselves with Christ in His death. And we are raised with Christ to newness of life, even though our resurrection with Christ is an outstanding event. And he comments about the death of Jesus. The death He died, He died to sin. Once for
all. But the life He lives, He lives to God. That's what happened at the cross. Jesus was not a victim. Jesus himself took the cross upon Himself and thereby died to sin that He might live to God. And Paul continues, so also you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. The cross is something we take up ourselves. The cross is never laid upon us. We are never victimized by the cross.
We never inherit the cross. The cross is never the problem of our society or our culture. It is never the problem of our environment. The cross is something we take up. We decide to identify with Jesus in His death. We decide by faith to die to sin in order that we may live to God. We all bear different burdens, but we are all burdened in one way or another. There is no one who escapes the burdens
of this life. And what the Gospel invites us to do is to bring our lives with their burdens to the foot of the cross where the ground is level and there to die to sin that with our burdens we may live to God. I say to you this Gospel message is for all people of all races and both genders of every social class and strata. Paul says of the church in Corinth, not many of you were
wise by worldly standards. Not many of you were of noble birth. He didn't say not any of you. There were the rich and the wise and the powerful in the congregation of Corinth. The Gospel had spoken to their need their need to die to sin in order that they might live to God. There is no privileged position of anyone before the cross of Jesus Christ. You and I have been called by God to proclaim that cross
and we can proclaim it with integrity only if we ourselves have identified with that cross and made it our own not to escape the burdens of life but to give up the sovereignty of ourselves in order that we might be useful for God. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit Amen.
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Go forth now into the world in peace, be of good courage the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.