First Lutheran Church
March 7, 2021 + The Third Sunday in Lent (B)
First Corinthians 1:18-25 18The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
20Where 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? 21For 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. 22For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Sermon “The Foolishness of the Cross”
Pastor Greg Ronning
Where do you experience God? Do you experience God in nature? Do you experience God on the top of holy mountains, in the majesty of a star filled night, in the depth and the power of the ocean, in the stillness of the desert? I do. Do you experience God in those so called “perfect moments?” Do you experience God in profound “aha” moments, in coincidental connections, in synchronicity, in perfect days, wonderful nights, in serendipity? I do. Do you experience God in creativity? Do you experience God in music, in art, in film, in performance, in personal moments of creation? I do. Do you experience God in relationships? Do you experience God in love, in friendships, in fellowship, in holy conversations? I do.
In all these things we experience God, yet in all these things we don’t truly experience the whole fullness of God. They are mostly just a glimpse into the divine, mountain top moments that flirt with us, quicken us and make us feel good. Wonderful moments to have and to hold along life’s way. In all these things we see God, we find God, but in all these things God doesn’t really “find” us. We are not “saved” by the beauty of nature, we are not “sanctified” by perfect moments, we are not “made whole” by art, and we are not “transformed” by friends. All those things play a role in our faith life, even significant roles at times, but not alone, not as stand-alone events, not apart from that place where God truly meets us, at the cross.
Lutheran Theologian Dan Ehrlander writes, “God meets us most profoundly, God becomes incarnate in our world, God truly connects with us, at the point of our deepest reality – our honest confrontation with weakness, pain, suffering, and death.” God discovers us not “neatly and “above it all,” not in the wonderous, but rather “in the midst of it all.” And unfortunately, this “counter intuitive truth,” this divine paradox, sometimes escapes us. We don’t always look for God in our lows, we’d prefer to find God in our highs. It seems “foolish” to look for God on the lowly cross instead of on top of the holy mountain.
We live too much of our life desperately seeking out love, hope, and meaning in all the wrong places. We desperately try to “get our act together” so people will notice us, acknowledge us, approve us, and maybe even love us. We desperately try to clean ourselves up, put our best foot and face forward, hoping to catch the eye of another. We’ll go to drastic lengths, in desperation we will even “change our appearance,” just to fit in, to seem perfect, to make ourselves stand out, hoping that it will make a difference. We’re looking for God by climbing to the tops of our mountains, in the hopes of our glory!
The irony of it all is that God is present for us with love, hope, and meaning, but our desperate acts to find that love, hope, and meaning lead us away from God. God is not waiting for us in the hopes of our glory! In this week’s epistle, in a word from St. Paul, God invites us to surrender our desperate lifestyle of trying to get it all together, and just be human. For it is in our most human moments that our desperation will be satisfied, that healing will take place, that love and peace will embrace us and our world. We don’t need to get our act all together for God to take notice of us and love us, God already has taken notice, and God already dearly love us, just as we are.
This is the good news. And it seems like such a “surrender” would be an easy thing to do. But it’s not. “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.” We live in the world, a world that has taught us to look for sure things, sound logic, and common sense. And the cross is none of those things! How can death possibly lead to life? How does letting go of life create life? How does the broken body and heart of Christ bring life to the world?
Lutheran Pastor and Theologian, Mike Coffey, in his book “Renounce, Resist, and Rejoice,” reminds us that the cross is a necessary part of the Christian faith, that it is necessary for something new to happen, that is necessary for true liberation, that it is necessary for transformation, that it is necessary for us to experience God’s love. However, he adds, “Except, don’t mistake it: It wasn’t necessary for God.”
He reminds us that God’s mercy, love, grace, and life-giving power doesn’t depend on some contrived system of offense and retaliation, the need for some kind of debt to be repaid, or as the appeasement of some kind of divine anger. God loves us, because God loves us! God is love, God’s is truly unconditional love, and “nothing can separate us” from that love, and so it is that the cross is not necessary for God.
But once again, it is necessary for us, for on the cross God in Christ Jesus exposes the emptiness of this world, the emptiness of the principalities and powers, the emptiness of violence, the emptiness of every human idolatry (money, things, power, government, anything) that seeks to replace God. On the cross they are revealed for what they are: distortions of truth, outright lies, the work of doubt and fear. Every time we gather around the cross “these things” are “exposed” in order that we might be changed, made new, made alive in the love of God. We “need” the cross, and we are called to engage the cross, not that we might die, but that we might “die to sin” and rise again to life abundant.
The Cross, it doesn’t always make sense, but it does make a difference. There is no love stronger than the love of the cross. And once you’ve experienced being loved like that, being loved in the midst of all your broken-ness, being loved as you are, for who you are, because you are; - you will never be the same. All things will truly become new. God invites us to surrender to the foolishness of the cross, the saving power of God.