I remember watching the TV fundamentalist preachers on Sunday afternoons, waiting for my NFL football games to begin, and wondering about what they meant by “the world”? Fundamentalist Christians often refer to “the world” as bad, and they are very critical of mainline Churches like ours as “worldly”. Then, I had not yet studied theology, nor did I have any analysis to offer on God’s character or the different ways that character is described by different faith communities. But even then, I was perplexed by people who seemed to live by “worldly” definitions of success calling out “the world”. “The World”, according to them, was “loose”, immoral, debased, deviant. “They”, by which they meant people not like them, lived by arrangements not sanctioned by what they called “Biblical norms”. “They” were defined almost entirely by sexual norms, people who found love and relationship in ways these Christian fundamentalists found abhorrent. No mention of greed, no mention of cruelty, no mention of poverty, no mention of war, no mention of illness or disease. “The world” was 100% defined by sexuality. If there was any mention of greed, it would be in the context of tithing, if you spent on yourself and did not give God a tenth of what you had, you were cheating God and God would punish you.
As years went by these TV preachers added others to the mix of “worldly people”. Science became taboo, mostly because science seemed to prove other types of sexuality were normal, science seemed to undercut Biblical literalism (Genesis was not science, it was theology), and science and medicine made miracles of curing cancer by the touch of a faith healer less than a sure thing. I wondered then, and now, why do these men say they are opposed to “the world” and yet live according to “the world’s” norms of success, money, luxury, fame, popularity?
But Christian fundamentalists are not alone in these contradictions. Mainline Christians also have an odd way of interpreting a saviour born in a manger, growing up in a ridiculed place like Nazareth, harassed by authorities, who instructed his followers to carry no possessions, who died as a traitor of the state, whose followers worshipped for the first 300 years in people’s homes… From all of that to mainline churches building churches that resemble the grand Roman buildings Jesus mocked, with clergy dressed in gowns resembling the Roman hierarchy, to living as disciples with more passion for worldly success than sacrificial discipleship. In the United Church, for years and years, our churches were often named after rich businessmen, not Christian martyrs. And at funerals, when lives are grieved and celebrated, how do we sum up their offering? Not by pointing to counter-cultural living but rather by naming success, in terms that sound more like “the world” than the Gospel.
Our reading begins with a reference to “the message of the cross” (NRSV). Alexandra Brown points out how curious the phrase would sound, both to Jews and Greeks. “For Jews, the logos was the law and Wisdom…For Greeks, the logos signified the reason behind the cosmic order and the advances of philosophy in understanding that order.” Brown concludes, “This ‘logos of the cross’ constitutes a contradiction in terms offensive both to the reasoned and to the religious mind.” This contradiction gets exactly to Paul’s point. The message about the cross is confounding to the wisest of human minds. Yet what appears as foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:23) is really “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24).
This would be especially true for people like the Corinthians. If Paul’s discussion of knowledge in 1 Corinthians 8 can be taken to represent them, some of them were impressed with their own knowledge. Paul knows he cannot win an argument based on who has the more reasonable position, so he speaks of God’s wisdom only really making sense in an entirely different realm. He contrasts “the wisdom of the world” with “the foolishness of our proclamation” the advantage going to God’s foolishness.
Paul agrees that the message of the cross is, from any normal human vantage point, foolishness, but nonetheless asserts God’s wisdom in it. Paul directs his readers back to the prophets. This upending of human wisdom on God’s part is not without precedent. In fact, it is arguably in character for God. Through the prophet Isaiah, God had said, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart” (Isaiah 29:14).
Though we do not know the precise demographic makeup of the Corinthian church, the scholarly consensus follows NT author Wayne Meeks’s conclusion that Paul’s congregations included a mix of social classes with all except people of the very highest and very lowest social locations represented. In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul does not say, “None of you were wise by human standards,” but rather, “Not many of you.” Perhaps a few people in the congregation were wise, powerful, and/or of noble birth. But most of them would not, and quite apart from the question of how God might be at work in Christ, Paul’s observations imply that most of the Corinthian congregation — who have themselves not been all that wise or powerful by the world’s standards — should perhaps ask themselves if they really want to play by those rules.
Author David Lose and others talk about preaching as telling the truth twice: preachers tell us the truth in terms of our distance from God’s vision of life for us, and preachers tell us the truth again of God’s work to bridge that distance and raise us up to that life. There is a great foolishness in the Corinthians putting on airs as they seem to be doing, enthralled with their own importance, their own wisdom, strength, knowledge, and so on. The first truth about them is that they are self-impressed little people. The second truth? “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The three sentences about God’s choosing start out sounding like they are about God’s choice of the Corinthians. But is the topic God’s choice of the Corinthians, or God’s choice of the cross? By the last of the sentences that begin, “God chose…” the cross and Christ’s death on the cross are again Paul’s focus: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:28). God’s choices of the Corinthians and of the cross merge until each of them helps to make sense of the other, and both of them look to be in character for God.
God chooses the way God chooses not just to demonstrate the capacity to upend the status quo, as if God were saying by these choices, “I’m bigger than you.” God chooses the foolish/weak in order to upend the status quo and in order to create life. “[God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus,” Paul says (1 Corinthians 1:30). For as long as people have followed the way of Jesus, there has been foolishness. There is the quotation from Flannery O'Connor about knowing the truth and the truth making you odd. At first, I thought the quotation was funny, and then I thought it was wise, and then I wondered what most folks hear from pulpits and if they ever heard anything odd or foolish or wise in the way of God.
God is not battling wisdom. God, through Christ Jesus, offers us another kind of wisdom, the wisdom that is deep and true, the wisdom that is not concerned with appearance or association. The wisdom that is not wise is the kind that points to self, that seeks to humiliate the other, that treats knowledge as a weapon. God, through Christ Jesus, is offering us true wisdom. Such wisdom can be handled by the weak and the poor and the unconnected and the invisible ones. In fact, the very wisdom of God came to us as weak and poor and unconnected, an unlikely one not only to teach us the wisdom but to embody it too.
The cross is the ultimate dead end of any attempt at human self-fulfillment, human betterment or progress. Hanging from the cross, in humiliation and utter defeat, there is nothing to be done to vindicate the work of Jesus or to make the story come out right except "the power of God." Rather than base his proclamation on human reason, common sense, or artful arguments, Paul spoke in halting, hesitant "fear and trembling" so that if they were to hear and to understand, to assent and to respond, it would have to be solely through "the power of God."
Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “If someone has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.” Martyrdom is not masochism. It’s living as if an alternative reality is more real than the existing structure of society. And it’s living with the consequences of that faith, that belief, that understanding. King also said, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” The cross is a symbol and a calling card for people who follow Jesus, to pick up our cross and follow him, despite the consequences. The message of the Gospels, the message of the Hebrew prophets, seems to be, lasting change, lasting justice, will only come to be when hearts are changed, not when status is achieved. “The world” will only be truly transformed when those who believe in a divine justice, who live by a mystical vision of eternal kin-dom, find relationship in hope-filled, just, and healing community.
To some this is foolishness. The cross is often used in our culture as a symbol of either a) what Jesus did for me and/or b) who we are, as opposed to who “they” are. But for me the cross is the truth, that in our humility, weakness, and brokenness, we find solidarity with one another, we find our kin-ship, we finally find our home. Amen.