Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Her mother asked me to come over and talk to her. Her daughter had been in the grip of the "Moonies" for the last six months, totally incommunicado. I rushed over to attempt to deprogram her.

"Carolyn," I pled, "how on earth could you have gotten mixed up with the sect, this cult?"

She told me about how she had met a couple who had taken her one night to see a movie featuring the Rev. Sun Yung Moon. "When I heard him preach on that film," she said, "I said to myself, I haven't heard preaching this good since Rev. Willimon! Rev. Moon believes exactly like you. That's why I'm a follower today. I owe it all to your preaching!"

"Carolyn," I said, "do you have a gun, or even a knife would do, a rolling pin, anything to kill myself with?"

I thought of that conversation sometime later when an old preacher answered, in response to my question about what he had learned in forty years of preaching, "What have I learned about preaching? The possibilities for being misunderstood are virtually limitless."

Look at me on Sundays, casting my little words out into the silence. They bounce off the walls, ricochet back at me, die and are heard no more. What a way to earn a living! Just words.

Some years ago, in doing research on a book on burnout among pastors, I found this to be one of the major reasons why pastors call it quits. Preaching.

It's the most fragile of the arts.

Paul has it right when he declares, "The word of the cross is foolishness…. We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block, an offense." How foolish to think that something significant happens in something so vulnerable, so prone to misunderstanding, as preaching.

Paul says that talk about the cross, preaching a crucified savior, is sheer folly. Why folly?

Why is the word, word about the cross offensive to both Jews and Greeks? Well, for one thing, there was no worse way to die.

Romans flogged victims nearly to death, then nailed hands and feet to the wood. Though widely used, classical Roman Literature downplays its role in the Roman legal system, stressing that crucifixion was only used on barbarians, Jews, and then, only in the most rebellious of them.

On the cross, it was not only the physical pain. To be hung up naked for all to see and mock. No wonder that crucifixion was especially popular torture for robbers, and rebels

A crucified Messiah? Bonhoeffer is right: "It is no small thing that God allows himself to be pushed out of the world on a cross."

Imagine driving by a building that has a hangman's noose, an electric chair, on its sign out front. If you were a Jew, Greek, or barbarian, wouldn't you find it foolish for folk to assemble to worship that?

Yet Paul claims that, in the cross, we find life. No, here Paul says that word about the cross, preaching cross, is the source of our salvation.

Just words?

In the last century, the German philosopher Lessing, spoke of "the ugly broad ditch" which separates the event of Jesus Christ in his time from our contemporary appropriation of that event in our time. How, asked Lessing can one event in one time be accessible to us in our time? Or, as Dan Via puts it, "How does the distant 'then' become a 'now'? How does Christ engage us now?"

The gospels typically solve this dilemma by proclaiming cross and resurrection together. "He was crucified, dead and buried, and rose from the dead," we say in the Creed. The resurrected Christ is not trapped in time, man of the First Century but not our own. He is raised.

Paul preaches this in places like Romans.

But here, to the Corinthians, Paul grounds salvation, not so much in resurrection but in preaching, in the "word of the cross." He doesn't mention resurrection. Resurrection is replaced by a word. The word of the cross makes Christ present. A rather amazing claim for words, don't you think?

But not just any old word. It is word about the cross.

Paul's claim: God's saving power in Christ meets us in the foolish preaching of the cross.

It pains me to say this, thinking of the lousy sermons I've heard and more that I've preached. But perhaps that's one reason why you are here, you have met the risen Christ in something so vulnerable, so foolish as preaching.

Wasn't it the poet Eliot who said the job of literature is to turn blood into ink? In preaching, we turn words back to blood.

Just words. What is there about the "word of the cross" that has power to save? Power to save must mean power to break sin's grip on my imagination, to bring me back toward God. Matthew, Mark, and Luke speak of such power in terms of stones rolled away, the earth shaking, an angel's voice, broken bread and opened eyes. That's power to save.

But here Paul says "the word of the cross" is just that dramatic. How can words be so powerful? The cross, says Via, is the supreme event, of divine intrusion and disruption of what we count as smart. You know what counts for wisdom in our world. A good pension and perquisites. Why people come to a university? For the pure, unfettered pursuit of truth? Forget it. They come for their ticket to success, as this world defines it. A Duke degree? What power, what certification of wisdom!

We faculty? As for us, we don't have huge salaries, but we have power over young persons' lives. We are the gatekeepers on the path to glory. That's power.

Yet Paul says that God in Jesus Christ is powerful and wise in those places we call foolish and weak. God is revealed in that place we would least expect to find God--on a junk heap outside the city, splayed naked and bleeding on a cross, in the fragility of preaching.

This unexpected, weird, dislocation of power and weakness, wisdom and foolishness in the cross is dramatic revelation that, in Via's words, "things are not what they seem."

Pilate saw, in the cross, justice. Caiaphas saw, peace. Don't we believe in peace with justice? The people saw revolution, or miraculous healing, or some other self-evident power for good. Jesus was nailed to the wood only for these things we think good. There on the cross, God took our piety, our patriotism, our noble ideals and stripped them naked, made them foolish, when all the while the world thought we were making Jesus look foolish.

As Paul puts it, on the cross God was busy making nothing, those who strut about seeming to be something.

It's quite a sight someone who seemed to be something reduced to nothing. Any of you ever seen someone who seemed to be something, come to nothing?

When I first visited him, he was a successful business person, with a fine home, a beautiful family, three cars in the custom built garage.

The last time I saw him, after the trial, he was peering at me through the bars of a state prison and he looked like a scared, helpless little boy.

It is something to see someone who has been something reduced to nothing.

Yet when those who seemed to be something are reduced to nothing it is now possible that their lives might be reconstituted into a new something, some fresh, new reality outside themselves and their devising. Those who once sustained their lives on their own, by their accumulation of success, power and prestige, in their foolish nothingness, are now free to lean on a reality greater than themselves, namely, the wisdom of God in Christ, the word of the cross.

After the cross prys open, stirs up, demolishes our wisdom and power, we are free to encounter a different reality. A strange word has come to the wise and powerful (us). To believe that word would seem to any Bible-believing Jew, or rational, university educated, or self-indulgent barbarian to be foolish. But in the topsy, turvy world of the cross, this word is the wisdom and power of God.

So what are you leaning upon?

In my brief bout with the US Army, ROTC, they took a group of us college boys over to Fort Bragg for summer camp. First day, they marched us in, shaved our heads (not much worse could done to a twenty-year-old in the Sixties), and paraded us around stark naked for three hours of examination. It was humiliating, pointless, I thought.

Then I got to know more of the Army. Turns out, they had worked with college boys before. We were smart, self-confident, proud individuals. The Army knows that people like that don't make good soldiers. So what you do is strip you, wrench from you what you're holding, and you'll fall into line, cling only to your platoon, rely only on your buddies for survival. It works.

On the cross, Jesus commended his spirit into the hands of his Father. When you've been stripped, picked clean, there's nowhere else to go.

Typical of us, we come expecting to get a word from God in some noble, exalted, powerful place. To our surprise and disruption, we get a word from a cross, a rather ignoble medium of communication, don't you think?

I don't know wherein your source of self-security lies, that thing on which you lean for support, that security which needs to be ripped from you and brought to nothing by the word of cross. Our world has a myriad of ways of denying the cruciform power and wisdom of God--I've got my chevrons on my sleeve, my diplomas on the wall, my steeple, my professional title, insurance polices--you've got yours.

But I also know that life has a myriad of ways of shaving your head and stripping you naked, so-to-speak.

So the cross tells us to be attentive to those offending, disruptive, cruciform messages we receive, those painful moments when our once secure world is torn asunder and what we thought was something is reduced to nothing.

Is this a word from the cross? We well might ask.

I pulled up a chair close to her bed. She was in great pain, flung down by a serious illness which had kept her in hospital for weeks.

"I keep asking myself, 'Is this God's will? Is God trying to tell me something?'"

I said, "God didn't will this; this isn't some message from God. It's a virus!"

"Can you be sure, preacher?" she asked.

"I'm an awfully proud person. Takes a lot to get my attention. And then, well after the cross, who can be sure what God might be trying to tell us?"

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