Living The Paradox
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 11, 2012
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
They brought the accused into the dock. There was a look of expectation from the jury and the judge as they gazed at the accused. They had no idea where the trial would lead and what would follow. The charges against the accused were read out loud. They went something like this:
- over thousands of years you willingly and knowingly led people in your direction;
- you willingly and knowingly chose one nation amongst all the nations in the world to represent your will;
- you mislead people by providing them with a restrictive law by asking for their obedience;
- the accused wilfully and knowingly came as a poseur and this poseur was given the name Jesus, which means “to save the people from their sins” as if that was ever really needed in the first place;
- the accused willingly and knowingly promised a spiritual presence to all who believed that this spirit would never leave them, not in this life, not in the life to come;
- the accused willingly and knowingly gave false hope to millions of souls throughout the ages that placed their trust, even in their dying moments, into his hands;
- and, for all of these crimes the accused is charged.
The accused was asked how he pleaded
God said, “I am guilty as charged.”
If you think this is fiction or something that one has imagined purely in the recesses of their mind, believe me when I tell you that it is an everyday occurrence in the minds and the souls of human beings. We put God on trial. It is fascinating! Over the last few months, I have visited bookstores in New York City, in London, and here in Toronto to find there is a whole industry that is built around bringing God to trial. Witnesses talk about God in the pejorative terms that I used in the charges made. If you summarize all of them, it comes to the conclusion that God should be put away just like a criminal, and that we as a society would be better off without God at all.
Unless you think it is just an intellectual exercise, or simply the product of those who have either had no faith, or have lost their faith, or give faith no thought, we all do it from time-to-time. There are moments in our lives when we put God on trial. We put God on trial when bad things happen to us and we wonder if the Holy Spirit is with us, and when the Holy Spirit is finally going to do something to act on our behalf. We all do it!
There are times when deep in our hearts we question this whole notion of a suffering servant, the whole idea of the Cross being our salvation, and we put God on trial. There are times when we actually wonder if it was wise to choose one people to somehow reveal the purpose to the world. Wasn't that an error of judgement, when in fact all the nations should have been chosen and not just one? And then, we put God on trial. When we feel guilty after doing something wrong, and we resort to our own way of explaining away our problems, but deep in our hearts we know that it is wrong. We put God on trial.
Paul knew that humanity always puts God on trial. In the very first century the Corinthian Church and the society in which those early Christians found themselves was also putting God on trial. There were those who purported to dismiss God and to dismiss as foolishness, utter foolishness, the whole concept of the Cross of Christ. But Paul comes to the defence of God! Not that God needed any defending per se, but that the people might understand and appreciate the very God they were dismissing and calling foolish.
He affirms in 1 Corinthians 1 that God is different and that God's ways are not our ways. God's power is not our power, but it is manifested in weakness and often the seemingly unwise or un-powerful are the ones who follow him, have faith in him and believe in him. He is reaching out to Christians and saying, “Do not let this accusation against your God cause you to turn away from the truth of what you have been taught. Hold on to the Cross! Don't let go of that image. Don't let go of that reality, for it is there we see the wisdom of God, which to the world is foolishness.”
He even asks the question, rhetorically and almost with humour: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Where are they?” In other words, they are not in the Church; they are outside thinking all that happens within is foolishness. Do not misunderstand me: Paul is not calling into question scholarship. He is not calling into question the use of the intellect nor the mind. He is not questioning the search for knowledge for knowledge's sake. He is not, far, far from it. He was a man of letters and scholarship himself. But for those who think they know through their own wisdom what God is like and therefore can dismiss the Christian God, they are the ones that Paul is addressing.
He addresses this in the most powerful way, because he makes a distinction between two kinds of wisdom: the wisdom of this age and the wisdom of God. The wisdom of this age, Paul argues, is a worldly wisdom and at the very heart of it is the belief that you need to know right ideas about God to be able to talk about God. Get this clear: worldly wisdom means you need to know the right things about God to be able to talk about God. And so they set up a group of elite thinkers, philosophers, those who had this particular insight and knowledge of God. They purported, because they had the special learning and knowledge to know more about God, and therefore because of the basis of that knowledge could dismiss the God Paul was talking about because that is not their God.
The God that Paul had been talking about is a foolish God in the world's eyes; the God that they had come to was a God of elite thought, of great knowledge, and of great insights. The wisdom of this age though goes beyond that. It not only purports to see that you have this special knowledge, but it believes that your redemption, your salvation is based on having this knowledge, this experience of God through human wisdom that builds and builds and builds.
If you think that I am only talking about something that happened back in the time of Corinthians, believe-you-me that has existed since time immemorial and is here today. The aforementioned bookstores are full of shelves that have the same attitude towards God. The more you know, the more enlightened you become about God, and the less you need the God of the Bible and the God of history. You can come to God on your own.
Just this week I was watching a PBS special and there was a man - I will not mention his name because I do not want to freely advertise him - but he comes on a lot, and he seems to talk a lot, probably like me. I watch him because he really is a good orator and a very engaging speaker, and I think, “Well, maybe I can learn a thing or two from him.” But, every time I hear him, I come away profoundly frustrated and a little bit disturbed because it seems that he pulls from knowledge all over the place, like strands from the air and even if they are contradictory it doesn't matter to him, he just likes naming them and using them to make one essential point.
The essential point of every single speech that he ever gives is this: There is no need for us to have faith. What we need to do is to come to a greater knowledge of ourselves and our lives and who we are and to release the good person within us, because essentially when it all boils down it, we are God. Therefore, self-knowledge becomes knowledge of God and the more we know about ourselves, the more we know God.
This sounds very much like the wisdom of those in Paul's day. They strongly held this view and belief. So strongly held was it in Paul's time that it threatened to undermine the whole of the Christian Church, because the Christians were saying “Well, are we then foolish? Are we then following the wrong God and do not have wisdom?” And then there was a crisis of faith.
I think Christians two thousand years later ask the same thing. Are we really dinosaurs in what we believe or is there some real truth and wisdom to what we hold on to? Essentially the philosophers and the wisdom of the age in both times wanted to have wisdom to save us from God. That was the end result. Paul responds to them with the wisdom of God, not wisdom about God. For Paul, the wisdom of God was foolishness in the world's eyes but it was wise because it came from God, and it was manifested in history and in time and in place.
It was revealed over time in a people and in a person on a Cross, and this might appear in the world's eyes to be foolishness, but it was God's way of revealing to us his weakness through the Resurrection, showing that his weakness was greater than human strength. This is what he wanted to do and this is what God wanted to show. All God really wanted then is not for us to build up knowledge or ideas about God, but to have faith. It was not the elite, it was not those who had great status, it was not those who had great intellectual insight and wisdom and power, but it was those who believed who could appreciate the wisdom and the power of God.
He also revealed a new way of living. For Paul it wasn't just a matter of thinking or believing, it was a matter of living. Clearly Paul had a low view of some of the philosophers of his age. He suggests in many ways throughout the whole of 1 Corinthians, not only today's passage, but all the way through they often get haughty and puffed up and full of pride. And, you know, it happens in every era and in every time.
We make assumptions that there are people that know more of God than we do. We sometimes even elevate clergy to the point of believing that we know more and more about God than everyone else knows about God. And we clergy always say: “God forbid that you think that!” But it doesn't seem to matter you still pour it on us. It is about faith! That's what matters! That is where the real power is. Sure, we should know certain things and God forbid we would spend our education not learning a few things along the way! But without faith it is nothing!
The wisdom of this age purports to know so much about God that you actually don't need God. You certainly don't need the God of the Bible, or the God of history, and you definitely do not need the God of the cloth, because it is not only having a knowledge of God that makes you haughty, but the idea that you can somehow make ethical decisions quite alone without any reference to God or to God's word.
What happens when that occurs is that all you are left with is living a life that is profoundly private, and private in the pejorative sense of the word. If the faith of wisdom of this Age causes you to live only on the basis of what you, yourself are prepared to accept or reject, after having built up your system of wisdom so that you no longer need God, you therefore don't need the community of God, you do not need the collectivism of wisdom, you do not need the Church, you do not need faith. What you need to have is your own personal knowledge of God and that will suffice. You can have that in a cloister! You can have that in a closet! You can have that in your bathroom! You can have that anywhere because you do not need anyone or anything else as long as you have the right ideas about God.
Let me tell you, this is one of the great challenges of our Age. There are people who isolate themselves in their little worlds and their knowledge of God and they think that is all that is needed and will suffice. But that is the end of the story. Private faith, clearly without God, but claiming to have knowledge of God, everything fades. To those who want a private, little intellectual faith, the Cross and all that it represents is to use a Greek word that Paul uses, a “scandalon”. It is a scandal! It is a scandal that God could be weak! It is a scandal that God would want to save us! It is a scandal that God's love is manifested in the suffering of the Son!
Three weeks ago I went to a small English village in Berkshire. I was walking past a very ancient Anglican Church, built I was told by the Rector in the 1400s. It was an amazing old building! There was the Rector -somebody out of an Agatha Christie movie -in his cassock actually cleaning the front steps of the church and polishing the brass. God bless him. It was like going back in time hundreds of years. He was so kind and the fact that I showed an interest in his church made him so excited, I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I mean, “Wow, someone who cares, you know!” Of course, then he found out I was a minister and then the discussion really increased.
We started talking about the old building, and I said, “What is the single biggest problem that you have in maintaining this old building?”
He said, “Ivy, that's that problem. Ivy! It just wrecks a building like ours! We've had ivy here for two hundred years, and just look at what it has done to the place!”
I thought, “Two hundred years, time is so different in other parts of the world!” and I said, “Yeah, sure, ivy must be a big problem.” But, I thought, “Man, this isn't your biggest problem, let me tell you.” But, that is what he thought.
Then, he told me a story, and I don't know why it led to this but he felt he had to tell it to me. He said, “There once was a church around here and it used to have on the front of it a sign that said ”˜We preach Christ crucified.' What happened was that the ivy started to grow over the wall of the church eroding the letters as it came along, and the ivy grew over the last words, so all that was left was ”˜We preach Christ'. Then, the ivy continued to grow, and it removed the next word, so it had removed ”˜crucified' and it had removed ”˜Christ' and we were left with ”˜We preach', and then finally, the ivy covered it all, and just left ”˜We'.” And then, he continued, “I wonder what happens if the ivy just keeps on growing and there is not even a ”˜We' anymore? In fact, there is nothing. I don't know about you, maybe I am just an old ”˜has been' in the ministry, but it seems to me that we just don't preach ”˜Christ crucified' and we are ashamed of it - just a thought!”
What a wise old vicar! I think he is right. I think that he is right that if you live without the Cross of Christ and you remove it, you are ultimately left with “We” and then in the end you are left, honestly folks, with nothing. If you have your own little private faith and your own little private ideas of God, believe-you-me, that is not living, that is not life. Paul says on the other hand, these powerful words. He says to those early Corinthians, “None of you were wise, none of you were influential, none of you were a person of high birth....”, and if you read on in the rest of Chapter I, which I hope you will, you will find that very verse.
The early Corinthian Church was not a church of the powerful and of those who were influential by birth, or who had access to “Sophos” - wisdom and yet Paul says that the wisdom of the Cross is greater than the wisdom of the world. That even at its weakest, it is stronger than the strength of this world and that is how God demonstrates his life.
As a boy one of the things I used to love to do during what in England was the Easter Break, as David reminded me this morning, and not March Break, was going down to the local courthouse in County Durham in Darlington. I would spend my days off sitting in the gallery watching trials take place. It was fantastic! I would wear a faux leather jacket - I mean I am only fourteen - take a couple of Wagon Wheels to keep me going through the day, sit there and munch on them while watching all the local criminals come before the court. Because it was a county court sometimes there were really juicy things like grievous bodily harm - I love that - and I was particularly interested in those cases. I was fascinated and thought that someday I would be a lawyer.
I sat there thinking “Wow! This is fascinating!” I would go every single day. The judges got to know me - the guy in the plastic coat with the Wagon Wheels sitting right up there in the gallery looking down on everyone. Some days I was the only person there. I couldn't understand why people didn't spend the whole of their Easter holiday there with me but they had other things to do. I couldn't understand that!
Anyway, I sat there, listened, and enjoyed. After about three days of this, I came home to my father and made this observation: “Dad, it seems to me that the vast majority, if not all the people who are appearing before this court, are poor. They all seem to be poor. There is something wrong!”
My father suggested that all the poor aren't criminals and that all criminals aren't poor just that often people by virtue of financial challenges and other problems find themselves in court for misdemeanours and other crimes and this is a huge social problem.
He made this point though and it is one that I have never forgotten: “It seems to me that while all crime needs to be punished and there needs to be due process, I wonder where people go to find forgiveness? Honestly, I think that is where the Church comes in.” When the courts have done their business where does the Church come in?
The more I have thought about that over the years, the more I've come to the realization that is why I am in the ministry. I think that it is in the Cross of Christ that the weak and the broken find their forgiveness. I think even the haughty and the intellectual and the arrogant eventually come to the point, I hope, where they see the errors of their ways in dismissing God. It is then that the Cross of Christ, and the forgiveness that he brings through God's weakness really hits home.
When all the defendants rise to give their testimony to God, the accused, I think you will find coming forward those who are dying, those who are unemployed, the poor, the refugee, those who are in chronic pain, those who are lame, those who are bullied and despised, those who have been rejected by men, those who are ill, those who are tormented by their sins, those who are struggling with their mental anguish and depression. They will come from the four corners of the earth. They will come from the deepest and the darkest places. They will come from the places that are despised as foolishness by the wisdom of this world.
They will come, and they will defend God, and they will do so because of the Cross. They will say, “At this Cross and in this Cross I find my life. This is the God that I will follow. This is the Lord that I cherish.” This might be the foolishness of men, but it is the wisdom of God. Amen.