1 Corinthians 1:18-25
“Here and Now We Stand Because of the Cross”
By: Rev. Kenneth Sauer, Pastor of Parkview United Methodist Church, Newport News, VA
I will never forget it.
I was about eleven years old.
He was not a preacher.
He was the director of our Youth Choir.
He had no training in preaching.
His words were not polished or eloquent.
But I will never forget them.
He was asked to deliver the sermon one Sunday morning.
What he did was simply tell the story of Christ and Him crucified.
I can still hear his words about Christ…arrested…tried…
condemned…beaten…mocked…
whipped…
stripped…hands and feet nailed to a cross…side pierced…loud cry, “It is finished.”
That day, when the Youth Choir Director spoke, it was not his reasoning powers or any eloquence on his part that touched me so deeply…nor was it due to my own ability to rationalize and understand.
No, it is the power of love that this old but always new story releases whenever it is shared.
That love has touched and changed my life, as it has done for so many other people.
The heart of our faith is Christ and Him crucified.
When that simple…
…yet profound message is proclaimed and taught, it releases a power that changes people, in ways that the most learned and scholarly psychologists and philosophers of this world can only dream about!
In our Epistle Lesson for this morning, Paul is speaking about wisdom—true wisdom!
True wisdom is how God thinks, how God acts in the world through Christ.
For many people in the world who remain unconverted, this message sounds like foolishness.
But to those of us who have indeed heard, believed, and experienced “the message of the cross”…
…it is the power of God!
Just look at what happens in the lives of people when this message is preached and taught.
…Murderers become maryters…
…fighters become lovers…
…hate-mongers become peacemakers…
…drunks become evangelists…
…gang members become church members…
…and the list could go on and on and on!
The very power of God is let loose in those of us who are being saved by the message of the Cross!
As Christians, we are bound together by the ‘message of the Cross’…
…and here and now we stand in a different place because of this Cross!
After Jesus uses the analogy of the camel and the eye of a needle to present the odds of a rich person entering the kingdom of God, His disciples raise their voices in protest: “Then, who can be saved?”
To this Jesus responds: “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
Our hope never resides in our own efforts, but in the unimaginably foolish love of God.
And it is only foolishness when it is seen from the perspective of this world.
If we ask the world for the answers to our questions, we are doomed with the world’s answers…
…but when we come to God for our answers we obtain the ultimate wisdom!
At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry…
…after His baptism…
…He immediately went into the desert, where He was tempted.
The basic temptations were power, prestige, and possessions.
He wrestled with these for forty days until Satan left Him…promising to return at the most opportune time.
And here in the desert we reach the depth of the gospel’s foolishness.
In our society power, prestige, and possessions are the basic promises that are advertised all around us as the rewards for living by society’s values.
But these things are foolishness to God, and they are foolishness to those of us who are being changed by the power of the Cross.
There is no escaping the seriousness of Christianity.
Either it is a stumbling block to people in our society…
…or the values of modern society are foolishness to the serious Christian.
It cannot be both ways.
Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson writes: “For our present age, in which the ‘wisdom of the world’ is expressed in individualism, narcissism, a preoccupation with private rights, and competition, the ‘wisdom of the Cross’ is the most profoundly countercultural message of all!”
It takes courage to trust in the message of the Cross because this means that we are going to be radically different than the world around us.
The crucifixion of Jesus began long before He was born.
It began in eternity…
…with a decision in the heart of God to journey from glory into poverty…
…from power to vulnerability…
…from awesomeness to nothing.
The God of the universe made a conscious decision to be born as a human baby in a finite world.
Marveling at this miracle of miracles, the apostle Paul writes in Philippians chapter 2:
Jesus “Who, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!”
This was the first step to Calvary…
…it’s what theologians call the self-emptying of God.
The “message of the cross” begins with God’s willing and loving release of privilege and power…
…some of the basic principles and values that our modern society places a high price tag on.
Many of us do not understand the wisdom of God at work in Jesus.
In Jesus’ day, the political powers were threatened by it!
They held onto another kind of wisdom…a worldly wisdom about what was true and right.
It was built on power and control.
And this is still the mindset of the world!
The world, through it’s wisdom, cannot understand a wisdom based on love and grace.
How foolish and weak it sounds to “turn the other cheek” in the face of an adversary’s threats.
How foolish and weak it sounds to speak of “loving your enemies.”
What kind of craziness is it to forgive others seventy times seven?
What foolishness it is to speak of “loving your neighbor as yourself”?
How silly it is to want to see yourself as a “servant” rather than as “the one being served.”
This is not the way of the world, but it is the way of Christ!
When Jesus took our sins upon the cross…
… He took it upon Himself to let go of His privilege, power, and prestige in order to be identified with us…sinners who deserve death.
And in order for us to more fully comprehend the meaning of the ‘wisdom of the cross’, we too must learn to identify with others….
…but this is a very scary word.
Identification means more than just caring or feeling for people.
Identification is becoming one with people…
…it is risking our identity by sharing the identity of another.
When the Nazis invaded Denmark in the Second World War, notices quickly went up in Copenhagen, ordering all Jews to sew big yellow Stars of David to their clothes so that everybody could identify them as Jews---or as a lower form of life.
A valiant Christian was in the habit of riding in the parks of Copenhagen every day; and the day after that edict was published, he went for his ride as usual.
Just one thing was different.
Sewn to his tunic, for everybody to see, was a large yellow Star of David.
At Bethlehem in Judea, some two thousand years ago, the God and the King of the Universe put on the badge of our humanity and cried out from a little manger: “Fellow human beings!”
In that great moment of history God was passionately identifying with us.
If we ask God to enable us to try to get into the shoes of those who have nothing…
…we will be less obsessive about wanting everything.
If we are struggling with what ‘the message of the cross’ will require of us, let’s remember that the closer we get to those who are hurting and those who are suffering and those who have been broken by this world…
…the less difficult it will be for us.
When we begin to identify with the pain of other people…
…it changes what is important to us.
Have you noticed that from the very start of His ministry right on to the Cross at Calvary, Jesus turned the values of society upside down—or shall I say, the right way up?
Because Jesus became one with the least and the lowest of this world, He always saw things through different eyes.
Someone has said that life is like a shop window where somebody has broken in at night and exchanged all the price tags so that the things that are really cheap have been marked most expensive and things that are really valuable are now marked dirt cheap.
That’s what the ‘wisdom of the world’ has done.
And in order to get our values right again, ‘the wisdom of the world’ must be replaced by the power of the life-saving ‘message of the cross.’
And so, we come to the Cross, where Jesus let go of everything for love.
And we who find it so difficult to let go of the world stand in awe because that place of dying to self becomes a place of profound beauty and joy—it’s the place where we find life!
The richest man in the world once asked the wisest man in the world: “What is God?”
The philosopher asked for a day in which to deliberate, and then for another and another and another…
…finally, he confessed that he wasn’t able to come up with an answer.
He said that the longer he thought about it, the more difficult it was for him to frame an answer.
An early church father used this as an example of the world’s ignorance of God outside of Christ.
“There,” he exclaimed, “is the wisest man in the world, and he cannot tell you who God is. But the most ignorant among the Christians knows God and is able to make Him known to others.”
Here and now, we as Christians stand on a different place because of the ‘message of the Cross’.
What are we doing about it?
Let us pray: Almighty God, we thank you for the great wisdom and power of Your Cross!
May we never take it for granted. Give us the courage to resist this world’s game of winners and losers, and help us lose our taste for all such games. May we be ever-mindful that in
Jesus not a single person is excluded, not a single grace is held back. Empower us by the
message of the Cross to realize that this is what life is really all about---life in it’s fullest!
In Jesus’ name and for His sake we pray. Amen.
