God Chose

Sunday, March 11 2012

Lent 3B

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Text: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

¹⁸For the 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. ²⁶Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, ²⁹so that no one might boast in the presence of God. ³⁰He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, ³¹in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Imagine that Manju Ganeriwala was a member of Jerusalem Baptist Church. THE Manju Ganeriwala. Do you know who she is? She is the treasurer of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Wouldn’t that be something if she and her family were members of Jerusalem?

It’d be pretty cool, don’t you think, someone of that stature to be a part of our community? But why stop there? Imagine that Governor McDonnell was a member, heck; while we’re at it let’s imagine that President and Mrs. Obama, Malia and Sasha made their way here each Sunday morning.  I think they could be here pretty quickly in Marine One, and there’s plenty of room for them to land behind the parsonage.

Cliff would have two additional members in the class, not counting the Secret Service detail, and Malia would be in the youth class, while Sasha would be with Jane in the older children’s class for Sunday School. They would be welcomed among us.

It is cool enough to think of President Carter still teaching Sunday School each Sunday after all these years as an expression of his faith, but to be able to welcome the President … arguably the most powerful individual in the world … as a member of a little country church in rural Virginia … it would certainly make for interesting fellowship meal conversations.

The community in the church at Corinth was an interesting mix. Something we really can’t QUITE connect with today is to wrap our heads around slaves living and working alongside everyone else. There were slaves in the congregation at Corinth. There were also laborers, indentured servants, probably the equivalent of street people, as well as folks from the other end of the societal spectrum – the city treasurer was a part of the community. For a city of its size and importance both strategically and economically, that was a VERY significant position to hold.  There were also wealthy members of the society: merchants, business owners, folks who could afford the finer things of life at the time.

That combination of factors – the wealth and power of some in the church alongside the poverty and powerlessness of others – made for the conflict that Paul addresses in his letters to them.

There was still, despite what they had been taught by Paul when he established the church, an innate inclination to recreate the church in the image of the society around it – import the ranking and privileges from outside into the community and into the way they behaved with each other.

What resulted, unsurprisingly, was a church that was rife with conflict, with bitterness and discord. Wealthier people were taking advantage of the fact that they could begin to gather earlier in the day, since their schedule allowed for more freedom, and were beginning the celebration of communion before the whole of the community had gathered. Communion for them was a full-blown meal, not simply a piece of bread and some wine, but meat, bread, vegetables, fruits, and LOTS of wine. So much so that by the time the rest of the community showed up, they were drunk. And the saddest part of it was, they felt justified in doing what they did, since they were now ‘free in Christ’, not bound by the norms and morals of the prevailing society.

Paul begins his argument not so much against one faction or another in the church, but more FOR the need for unity within a congregation. That regardless of their position in society, regardless of their wealth, power, or other outward sign of success, the people within the community of believers in Corinth were in every sense of the word, equals because of what God had done for them in Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection.

We like to hold up our society as one that is as egalitarian as it can be – that is, that all are equal under the law. To a degree this is the case, especially taken in comparison to other societies around the world today. But I have seen enough and read enough to know that we are not quite as equal under the law as we would like to think. George Orwell’s phrase ‘some are more equal than others’ comes to mind, if you have the wherewithal to hire or employ a raft of attorneys, almost anything is possible, up to and including declaring a corporation to be a person.

In truth, our society is as prone to stratifying itself as any around the world. We may not see it as such, we may call it by a different name, but the fact is, we do think of ourselves to belong to different castes, and carry on our lives accordingly. And we don’t really seem to let that ‘all men are created equal’ sink in all the time.

And it is doubly sad when it bleeds over into the church.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever heard about an experience in church was from a dear, gentle man who shared of a time when, in the context of a somewhat contentious business meeting, as he began to stand and speak, another member of the church stood and told him to sit down and be quiet, that he was nobody and came from a family of nobodies.

I can’t imagine anything being more antithetical to the gospel than that.

The single most radical aspect of the gospel is this: God is no respecter of persons. In other words, nobody gets a special table, special treatment, for being someone – or NOT being someone.

We find that in Jesus’ telling his disciples that ‘the first shall be last and the last, first’ when they ask for those special seats at his right and left hands once he comes into power.

The point Paul is making in the passage is exactly the contrary of what was and continues to be the norm around this broken world of ours: God intentionally CHOSE this foolishness of a Savior and Redeemer of the world to be nailed to a cross and killed AND STILL BE our Savior and Redeemer despite that fact. God intentionally CHOSE a bunch of uneducated backwoods fishermen, a couple of religious fanatics, and a tax collector among others to take his message to the rest of the world.

God intentionally CHOOSES frail children of dust to proclaim the immeasurable riches of his grace not because they are eloquent or convincing or geniuses, able to argue the opposing viewpoint into submission, but precisely because they CAN’T.

It’s the whole reason it is called FAITH that we are called – that we ANSWER our call from Christ to follow. Not because it is reasonable and logical, but because it isn’t. It doesn’t quite make sense in the eyes of the world, this whole believing that a man who lived two thousand years ago was God in human flesh, going about the business of reconciling the world to God’s self.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means we are called to proclaim our faith in humility and trust in the one about whom the message is. Part of the pilgrimage of faith through the season of Lent is to practice humility.

But rejection of humility is epidemic in the modern world, from Marx to the defenders of capitalism, from Freud to Nietszche to Ayn Rand. Why be humble? Humility is un-American. What about our Yankee know-how, our get-up-and-go? Humility denies the glory of rational, scientific humankind. Humility is born of a monastic hatred of the body. Humility is a phony posturing. “When you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

For too long Christianity has advocated groveling, self-hate; all that posture has ever created is neurosis. Humility is an inferiority complex turned into a virtue.

But when Paul exhorts to humility, he is not advocating neurosis. He is calling for the very opposite of a neurotic distortion of reality.

The call for humility is a call for simple realism; an inferiority complex is just that – a complex, a false assessment of oneself. A guilt complex is just that – a neurotic reading of events narcissistically focusing blame on oneself. However, when an Albert Speer at Nuremberg confesses his guilt, he has no guilt complex; he is guilty. The sinner humbled before God is not sick: he is coming to health.

Paul exhorts people to humble themselves because humility is an honest and objective reflection of our real relationship to God. The fact is that we are dependent. All that we have comes from God -- our lives, our salvation, our hope, our Christ. God has given all; nothing is our own. God gives; God will take away; God will give again. To be humble is not an act of self-effacement best cultivated by spending years in a monastery. It is a simple, objective recognition of the reality of God. Humility isn’t even a virtue, any more than to recognize that the sky is blue is a virtue. If God is God, then we are God’s creatures. To be humble toward God is to acknowledge what is both the most obvious fact and yet the most difficult admission: we are not God.

As Christ followers, we must never be taken in by worldly attacks on humility – not only for our souls’ sakes, but for the sake of the world itself. A prideful Christian is perhaps the world’s most dangerous citizen. We are God’s people. Without humility, this statement - which ought to fill us with awe before the wonder of God becomes the basis for the most unspeakable arrogance before God and ultimately before our neighbor. How fanatical Christians become when they put the stress on “we”: we are God’s people.

Only in objective awareness of our dependence on God can we hope to be delivered from judging and thus despising and thus oppressing – our neighbor.

I would remind you of the exchange between Jesus and the Lawyer in the 10^th chapter of Luke, when asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus asks him to answer it for himself, and he does, saying “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus, somewhat dismissively, replies, “Yep. That’s it. Go do that.” But the lawyer has another more probing question. ‘Who is my neighbor?’

And Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which presents us with a picture of how God sees us over and against how we see each other. The man who was attacked was left unconscious, naked and nearly dead. 

There was no way either of the first two men who walked by could tell if the man was of any repute or not. He was naked, so they couldn’t tell from his clothes. He was unconscious, so they couldn’t ask him who he was. He was a conundrum, a riddle without a ready answer. So rather than risk exposure and vulnerability, they chose to keep to themselves.

God did not choose to keep to God’s self.

May we go and do likewise.

Let’s pray.