Re/Learn: 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

 Third Sunday in Lent

¹⁸ For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹ For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
    and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

²⁰ Where 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? ²¹ For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. ²² For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (ESV)

 

          “Moron.”  Noun; “a foolish or stupid person.”[1]  Dating back to 1912 and first used as a medical diagnosis for someone deemed psychologically underdeveloped, the word is now widely considered an insult whose use, even casually, is discouraged.[2]  Etymologically, it is a transliteration of the Greek “moros,” “foolish.”

          “For the word”—ho logos, the same language used of the Word that was in the beginning with God and was God in John chapter one—“for the word of the cross is moria;”[3] moros, folly, foolishness…moronic. Paul does not start soft.

          This first Corinthian letter is not Paul’s beginning overture to the churches in Corinth; it is clear that he had a longer-standing relationship with the community, long enough that a woman named Chloe thought to ask him for help in dealing with the community fracturing under the weight of several divisions about how to live faithfully in matters of food, sex, company, worship—life.  So Paul wrote, in the irked pastoral way he has, in response to this message of division.

          Division within the Body of Christ is no thing of the past, is it, Church?  Perhaps not food, but sex, company, and worship?  These are certainly still things we wield against each other in the heated conversations of what it means to be faithful and how we are called to this life following a Christ we think we understand.

          It is not terrifically surprising that the Corinthians churches were having some trouble—Corinth was a crossroads of the Roman Empire with layers of socioeconomic statuses, religious affiliations, and would-be leaders.  Suzanne Watts Henderson describes it as “a thriving melting pot where social mobility and economic opportunity fostered vigorous competition in the marketplace of goods, ideas, and even physical prowess.”[4]  Corinth was a happening town with a lot of opinions on what made something likeable, valuable, worthwhile, or wise.

          And Paul has no patience with that because he is not interested in being hip or likeable.  He is compelled to be Christ’s.

          Our text today begins the letter’s substance, just after the salutations and Paul’s mention of Chloe having asked him to talk to this community in the first place.  “For the word of the cross is folly…”

          It is important to note that everything that comes after this in the letter is anchored here in Paul’s insistence on the message of the cross and how the message of the cross will never make sense if we run it through the linguistic translator of the world.  When Paul says the word of the cross is moros, he’s not being hyperbolic.  In a town like Corinth where it literally paid to be in the know, where gods were a dime a dozen and one who would bless you for the right response was easy to find, the idea of Christ crucified was not only foolish but downright weird.

And this is not a truth limited to 1^st century Paul and the squabbling Corinthians.  Jesus of Nazareth was born out of wedlock to a girl who was nobody in an occupied city under the thumb of an empire and became a refugee in a foreign country as a toddler.  He grew up to become a homeless teacher Who consorted with sex workers, IRS agents—ah, sorry, tax collectors, welfare recipients—ah, no, I mean the meek and the poor, and zealous insurgents seeking to overthrow the government.  He talked about how corrupt the religious system of the time was and how God’s Kingdom would include the least and the last with honor and He did not apologize for saying that the empire was finite.  After several years the governmental authorities flipped one of His friends into betraying Him so they could hold a sham trial and convict him without cause and execute Him by lethal injection—ah, no, apologies, by nailing Him to a cross and letting Him slowly suffocate.

The message of the cross is folly.

We who live in the 21^st century West where Christianity has held sway for more than 1,500 years may have trouble with the idea of folly.  I talked recently about how we have glorified the cross because we honor Christ’s resurrection that defeated death and the power of such a gruesome implement, but sometimes we make it a little too glorious.  The message of the cross seems to make sense to us for it is the very water in which we swim; the United States are, after all, one nation “under God”—or, at least, we have been since 1954.[5]  When someone hits their thumb with a hammer in this part of the world, they yell “Jesus!” rather than “Brahma!”  Scriptural references litter our speech as we encourage people to be good Samaritans, to stay away from forbidden fruits, and to bravely escape something by the skin of your teeth.[6]  The message of the cross isn’t folly, it’s culture.  Of course Jesus died and was risen.  That’s Easter, when Jesus and Cabury celebrate with a big family lunch.

Precisely because this message of Christ crucified has become so normal, it behooves us to take a moment and remember that it is actually quite bizarre.  Professor Richard Carlson puts it like this:

“The core of Paul’s preaching is the word of the cross (1:18) and the proclamation of Christ crucified (1:23). Yet this is not a message geared to win friends or influence people. The cross was a lousy marketing tool in the first century world (as it most likely remains in the twenty-first century). Here it is important to realize fully the first century realities of crucifixion. This was the enactment of capital punishment meted out by the forces of the Roman Empire. It was reserved for those disreputable individuals or groups such as rebellious slaves, insurrectionists, pirates, or brigands who had threatened the divinely sanctioned social order of the Empire. Thus the cross was the imperial instrument used to suppress subversion.

As a public spectacle, crucifixion was an act geared to shame its victims through degradation, humiliation, and torture before, during, and even after death ensued. At the same time, it was a political statement which declared that all who threatened the imperial social order would find themselves co-crucified with the current victim. In some Jewish circles, it could also be regarded as a sign of divine curse (cf. Deuteronomy 21:23).

Given this reality, it would be sheer idiocy (not just mere foolishness) to speculate how the cross might be a means of divine revelation. Paul, however, goes much further. He does not speculate on what God might or might not be doing through the cross. Rather, he openly, boldly, and regularly proclaims the cross as the intentional and exclusive means God has chosen to encounter humanity and initiate our salvation. The cross is the divine activity which both embarrasses and embraces humanity in an inclusive way.”[7]

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,” says God—not just that the presence of the Creator among the created will be weird but that it will run utterly counter to everything we think we know.  Now, we who are Methodist and hang our proverbial hats on the Wesleyan Quadrilateral that celebrates God’s connection to us via Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason may get a bit ruffled by that idea, but please note that Paul isn’t asking people to check their brains at the church door.  In point of fact, do not do that.  God calls all of us, including our intellect, into the strange relationship of the Spirit and it is neither fun nor healthy for us to come to our faith without the gifts of critical thinking and curiosity and mental connection.  But we cannot and must not think that we have a grasp of the whole thing and that it makes sense by human standards because it utterly does not.  The message of the cross takes every dynamic we as people understand about how to get ahead in the world and stomps on it with nail-pierced feet.

“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?”  Paul may as well be asking, “Where is the expert rounding through the morning talk shows?  Where is the bishop?  Where is the senator?”  All of them are confounded by the idea that a scandalous death led to a wondrous resurrection that kicked off a whole new way of connecting with the Divine. 

Our world likes power.  We see it in the influence of the billionaires who yank whole governments along on strings; we see it in the posturing of so many world leaders at the moment who project only strength and never compassion; we see it in the smallest of playground interactions where it is never acceptable to not know something or to be caught on the outside of the ruling clique.  To claim a God Who consistently reaches away from power to the powerless, Who became powerless enough to be nailed to a cross and die there, is bizarre, is baffling, is foolish, is moros.

So what?  Our faith is weird, okay.  But it’s ours and we’re navigating it as best we can, right?

The thing about a life of faith is that it is a life.  Whether we have been in the faith for two days or two decades, we do not understand the fullness of God Who calls us to constant reexamination of who we are as Christians and what that looks like in a world that has very definite ideas about what that means.  We have to relearn our own tenets all the time because we as people are constantly changing.

To relearn:  to study, revise, go over, refresh in one’s memory.  We who preach Christ crucified—and it’s not just me, although I preach in the most noticeable way—have to constantly relearn the foolishness of this and refresh in our own memory that this faith will not endear us to the world.  We are not called to Christianity so that it can make us smarter or prettier or more likable or wealthier or better at trivia.  Those things may happen, but the folly of the cross is that we are called to follow a Man Who said give up your lives so that you might find them; love your enemy; care for the neighbor you not only don’t like but have an ancestral blood feud against; take care of yourself as though you are a valuable creation of God; hang out with sinners and see them—and you—as people.

We are just nearing the halfway point of Lent, Church, and we are in the thick of the wilderness.  This month marks a full year of the reality of the pandemic in the US and I think pretty much all of us are exhausted by the constant shifting of “the new normal.”  This pandemic has exposed a lot about our sacred and secular structures that was not only unhealthy but actively destructive and we as a Church are having a crash course in relearning what being Church actually means.  It’s tough; this has forced us to rethink what worship looks like, who is included and how, what ways we are connecting to the communities in which we live, where God stays in the midst of grief and catastrophe, and how we preach this Christ crucified to the wise ones of the world who look at us and see only the division and the backbiting.

We who are weary of the wilderness do not want to preach Christ crucified; we want to preach Christ resurrected, Christ strengthened, Christ smiling and gentle, Christ coming to help out when we need Him, Christ not rocking the boat too much, Christ blessing our lives and then not getting in the way of them.  We are humans who live in the world; of course we want that.

But, like the Corinthians, we are called to more.  “The world did not know God through wisdom, [so] it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.”  What do we preach?  Vulnerability.  And vulnerability is terrifying.  Vulnerability will get us hurt, and bamboozled, and overlooked; vulnerability will ask us to reach out to people we do not know or do not like, to call out systems that dehumanize and degrade, to take up our cross that will hurt like Hell.

Vulnerability is foolishness.

And it is what will not only set us free but save us.

Jesus did not set out to get crucified because He liked the pain or the attention or because He was just ornery.  Jesus set out to radically love in an acceptance that did not play by the rules of the wise.  We are not called to preach of Christ crucified because we want to be martyrs.  We are called because it is Christ crucified Who extended a hand to us when we were the least and the lost, Who called us by name and said you are beloved, you are Mine, you are a whole and good creation in the world that tells you otherwise with every new orator.  How can we not spread that kind of good news, Church?  How can we do anything other than say to the people who ask us that our hope is in the God Who loves us even to the cross and the grave, Who walks beside us in the wilderness, Who refuses all the ways we tell ourselves we are less because God sees infinitely more?

“For the word of the cross is folly.”  Let’s get foolish, Church, because this is a world that desperately needs to hear about love without measure, about acceptance without restrictions, about power without domination, about life and life abundant.  May God grant us the faith to recognize God’s wisdom and wrap ourselves in that as we step into the world.  Amen.

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[1] Moron | Definition of Moron by Merriam-Webster (merriam-webster.com)

[2] The Clinical History of 'Moron,' 'Idiot,' and 'Imbecile' | Merriam-Webster (merriam-webster.com)

[3] μωρία; see Strong's #3474 - μωρός - Old & New Testament Greek Lexical Dictionary - StudyLight.org

[4] Henderson, “1 Corinthians,” in The New Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary, Abingdon Press:  Nashville, TN, 788.

[5] When the phrase was added to the pledge of allegiance.

[6] From Job 19.

[7] Commentary on 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 - Working Preacher from Luther Seminary