Sermons

The reading you heard this morning is from Paul’s letter addressed to the church in Corinth and in the eight verses you heard, wisdom or some derivation of the word wisdom is used eight times. In postmodern terms, we’ve come to understand wisdom as something we use to discriminate between right and wrong. A wise decision is made through careful and calculated reason. But in the 1st century Greco/Roman world, and even long before Jesus, in the Ancient Near East, wisdom was not limited to reason. Wisdom enveloped one’s entire being. It was not acquired by humans, it was bestowed upon them by a deity. Wisdom was divine and attributed to God. In the Hebrew Bible Wisdom is personified and according to Proverbs she was present at the beginning of creation. Paul’s audience would be familiar with the passage in which Wisdom herself speaks.

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work…..When there were no depths- I was brought forth-when there were no springs abounding with water.-Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth.” (Prov 8:22-25)

Wisdom is created out of nothing, by God. God’s wisdom, not ours.

In the passage you heard, Paul is positioning the Wisdom of Christ up against human wisdom.

But Paul doesn’t just point to Jesus as wisdom. Paul points to the cross.To understand God’s wisdom, Christ’s wisdom is to understand the cross.

Martin Luther the primary figure of the Protestant Reformation once said, “the theologian of the cross preaches what seems foolish to the world” (1 Cor. 1:18). Martin Luther is quoting that first line of the scripture reading you heard this morning.

The cross then, as it is today, is a foolish marketing tool. A place of public humiliation and torture for any human being. Crucifixion was carried out by an oppressive Roman Empire to suppress anyone who attempted to subvert their economic and political power. For Jews, who believed in the Messiah, the cross was absurd. For the Greeks, this cross bore no resemblance to Plato’s Form of Beauty. Why would God allow this man to suffer and die a humiliating death if he was the Son of God? It’s absurd, it’s foolishness, and Paul points out it’s the perfect paradox of our faith.

(Vs 27-28) “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.

It is out of this nothing that God created wisdom in Proverbs, and it’s how God continues to create wisdom today in all of us. Out of nothing. Of not knowing. And perhaps especially when we allow all we think we know to die, in order that God might birth a new thing in us and around us.

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There is an interesting debate in our culture right now around the subject of identity; identity politics, gender identity, sexual identity, racial identity, and religious or spiritual identity. Little by little, we are identifying as one or the other. We call ourselves a Presbyterian church and I’m willing to bet most of us aren’t sure what that means. We call ourselves part of a reformed tradition, which even I have trouble explaining. We identify as Christians. We know that that, pretty simply stated, means to follow Jesus Christ, but half the time we disagree on what that means. We love to impose our understanding of Jesus on others, feeling pretty smug that we’ve got the answers when in truth, truth with a capital T is that we know nothing for sure. That’s the paradox of our faith. The more we embrace that we do not know, the deeper our faith grows. To reduce to nothing things that are.

In Exodus, Moses asks God for God’s name. God answers; I am. What kind of answer is that? In Psalm 46 God speaks; Be still and know that I am God I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth." Our identity lies in a God who makes God self-known in being above all identity, even our identity as a nation, A God for the whole world.

Throughout the Bible, we see the personal relationship and the communal relationship to God. We see it in the commandments, we hear it in the Beatitudes, in the Psalms, in Proverbs, again and again, there are these two categories of our personal and communal relationship with God. Leviticus and in the words of Jesus later on, sum these ideas of the personal and the communal into two. Love God, Love others. That simple, that complex, that cross.

Love God, that’s your personal relationship, and it’s so wonderfully unique. My continued prayer is that you will desire that, and explore that and practice that every day. Love others, I think that’s where we get into trouble. Oh, we’re pretty good at that here at our church. The Deacons make sure of that and will continue to do so by building stronger relationships with those we serve. And I celebrate that we will continue to respect our differences as we have done. So I’d like to address a larger scale of division that I am witnessing in our greater culture.

The division I perceive in our country right now lives in this identity struggle. And it frightens me to my core. I’m on this side, I’m part of this movement. The more we identify as only one thing, the more at risk we become of separating. I’m not telling you not to support a cause or fight for what you believe to be good and right. I’m suggesting that how you do so, in the long run, is far more important. To assimilate means take in (information, ideas, or culture) and understand fully. So if you’re going to take a stand, be clear on all the information.

Visit a worship service of a religion you don’t think you understand. Read a newspaper that is the polar opposite of what you’ve been reading. Listen to people you don’t necessarily want to have dinner with, the ones outside our bubble within the bubble, and form the practice of not knowing, praying on your knees as a symbolic but oh so a meaningful act of humility to God’s will.

Mark Lilla, Professor at Columbia University wrote an article titled, The End of Identity Liberalism. The article does a fantastic job of pointing out how we’ve stopped listening to one another. People who are having trouble putting food on their tables don’t want to hear about trans gender bathrooms. In part, he argues that the liberal press that has lost touch. He writes-

A post-identity liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and about what matters there especially religion. And it would take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.

The professor then talks about speaking at a union convention in Florida, where we quote Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941. He writes, “The hall was full of representatives from local chapters — men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem and then sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt’s speech. As I looked out into the crowd and saw the array of different faces, I was struck by how focused they were on what they shared. And listening to Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear — freedoms that Roosevelt demanded for “everyone in the world” — I was reminded of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are."

This idea of educating ourselves through a historical dimension became even more apparent as I recently when to see the movie Hidden Figures- about three African American women in 1961 who worked at NASA and who was pivotal in putting John Glenn into space. I cried a lot during that movie, although, by now, you're starting to catch on that I cry at just about anything including hallmark cards.

I cried because my heart ached for how wrong we collectively were for separating ourselves from others based on the color of their skin and committing crimes in the name of religion. And we are still doing that or a version of that today, in a million different ways. If you are asking, “when will we move beyond this and get over it?” I would say, we never move beyond it. We carry that burden with us, just as we carry the burden of the holocaust with us, just as we carry the burden of the cross with us, always to remember and never to forget. We learn from the mistakes of the past.

That’s our cross. It is a way of life from the moment Jesus dies. Jesus exposes the vulnerability of what happens when we divide ourselves and Paul is preaching that to the church at Corinth and I’m preaching today. If we are going to identify as Christian, as one who lives into the living cross, then we die to separation thinking, and we embrace a theology of understanding and loving others as yourself.

John Calvin, the father of the Presbyterian Church, adds this to Luther’s theology of the cross- “In Christian life, we are not our own; we belong to God. “Let us, therefore, forget ourselves and all that is ours. . . .“Unless you give up all thought of self . . . you can accomplish nothing here” (3.7.5)

Forget what you think you know about God. Let go of what you think you are so sure about in Jesus Christ. Because when we give into assuredness, doesn’t God have a way of coming in and shaking solid ground? All those stories in the Hebrew Bible, that is the Old Testament, that we say we can’t relate to. All of those amazing awe-inspiring stories of a God who brings disaster, who people call vengeful and wrathful, others like myself, see as merciful and loving, because in those stories, God displays this lesson over and over again; you who are sure of your power, your dominion, your wisdom, your identity, let me stop you right there, and remind you of your dependence, your humility your vulnerability. Let me expose you for what you are, you are children of God, which is nothing and is everything. It is everything because you are children of God’s. But it is nothing because it is equally bestowed upon all people.

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28)

Amen.