Nonsense
1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23
January 23, 2011
They’ve made all those movies about the Gospels and the Ten Commandments and David and Bathsheba, Noah and the Ark; I just don’t know why they haven’t made one yet about Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. It’s got it all: conflict, sex, orgiastic meals, theft, one group plotting against another, and love and reconciliation. By the eyebrows raised, I imagine more than a few of you are going to do some catch up reading.
I remind brides and grooms that the famous Chapter 13 is set not in an idyllic and sunny atmosphere, but in the midst of trouble and conflict, which is where and when most love is called to exert its strength. Paul begins his letter in the usual formal first century Greek manner, but by verse 10 the polite formalities are over.
Paul has been reading the correspondence from the church he established and he can only shake his head at how wrong things have gone. It was a painful lesson for Paul that what he believed he had clearly taught to these Corinthians about Jesus had been watered down, eroded and distorted. All Paul could do at this distance was to write out loud, “This isn’t what I taught you and how I showed you with my life about how to be Christian!”
It seems the Corinthians had devolved into petty factions, each surrounding a particular leader and personality. There were some who thought Paul was the answer to the world’s problems, and frankly there are still many churches and preachers who operate as if Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of this faith we have. A person by the name of Apollos was another to whom many clustered, and Cephas, certainly not the Peter we remember, was a similar demagogue. Oh, and a few thought Christ was a worthy talisman to whom they should offer their prayers for success and wealth.
Paul pleaded for unity, though he didn’t mean the kind of denominational unity, one universal church under one leader. What he meant was a church with one mind focused on God and Christ. Over too short a period of time, the Corinthian Church had become a center for spiritual entrepreneurship and fashioning your own religion. Many of these Christians had been worshippers of a multitude of Greek gods; now there were multiplying leaders who competed against one another for personal allegiance.
Paul was disappointed because they had missed the point of the story. He was not sent to recruit people into his camp for his own advantage and power, but to proclaim the Gospel plain and simple. Clarence Jordan retranslates it so that we get the thud from the verse. “The fact is, Christ didn’t appoint me merely to initiate converts, but to tell the great story, simply and without display of learning, lest the noose of Christ become something to be toyed with.”
The noose of Christ sounds less genteel than the Cross and that’s Jordan’s intention, for with our eloquent wisdom we have made the cross more acceptable, more dignified and less harsh. We have preferred a kinder, gentler faith which is more poetic and less threatening than the faith of Jesus and Paul.
“For 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.” Most of our society today is convinced that all this cross-talk is obscene nonsense and foolishness and therefore, if we raise a voice to insist upon this foolishness, we are considered idiots and people who do not have good judgment. In business, professional and social life, if you have said too much, that can really hurt you.
Your foolishness can really set you back in Canada. James Ron, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University, has written that the global affairs students in his department – future diplomats or United Nations staff members – are virtually illiterate when it comes to their own religion and even more to the religion of others. Whenever he has raised international issues that have a religious dimension, his pupils seem almost indignant, some even accusing him of trying to legitimize religion.
That’s the problem, even in the United Church and denominations akin to us, we seem hell bent on legitimizing ourselves. We wish to appear eloquent, educated, relevant and politically savvy, and certainly never foolish. From time to time there is an earnest movement afoot in some churches to get rid of the Cross, because when you understand what it is, it is a crude, violent obscene instrument of execution that frightens children and is distasteful to a society that never experiences such things. The alternative then is to use the image of a Phoenix as our symbol of faith, the mythical beautiful bird arising out of the ashes to new life. Somehow such suggestions seem to ignore the distasteful, violent, corrupt world we live in. All we need is turn on our radios, TV’s or computers to see how foolish such pretensions to a more dignified beautiful life are. No religious faith that is worth following is ever legitimate. The institutions of legitimacy – whether they be of business consortiums, political establishments, or ecclesiastical bureaucracies – are afraid of the power of God and their consistent response is that such power that moves and changes lives is not legitimate, and therefore illegal.
You probably did not notice in today’s Gospel reading how foolish and illegitimate we were from the beginning. The Lectionary Guys skip over the story of Jesus in the wilderness, possibly because it is too nonsensical to be applicable to the modern world. Jesus is back into the world and its so-called reality, and right away hears that John had been arrested. Jesus leaves Nazareth and heads deeper into Galilee to Capernaum in the region of Naphtali and Zebulun. These were not the rich suburbs, but the backwater of the Holy Land. As far as Jews would have thought then, this was not the Holy Land, for that was Jerusalem and its suburbs.
If you are planning to do something of world-changing impact, don’t you usually begin in the center of the universe – no, not Toronto – but for all of the history of the Hebrew Bible and its journey, isn’t Jerusalem the only place to make a beginning? Yet Jesus began in places so off-market, so unknown, that the evangelist had to throw in the oracle from Isaiah 9 about this God-forsaken region to justify Jesus going there. Wouldn’t God have known this stuff, read the marketing reports and the importance of location, location, location? It really doesn’t make sense, given what we know, a foolish decision.
Yet, God knew what was going on. You may all have thought it was nonsense and foolishness, but if you can only do something great in the center of the universe, then there is no other universe. God tends to go for the big picture which means all the world and all the people, even those in Capernaum and Outlook and Leader, Rockglen, and Waskada. Foolish wisdom which grants you the power of God in the way worldly wisdom can’t touch. In that foolish way, Jesus approaches those same two brothers Simon Peter and Andrew, fishermen, not priests or rabbis and governors of a province or a military officer. You know, having been a fisher never helped either of these disciples. Jesus cast his net upon them, “Come with me. I will make you fish for people.” Isn’t that nonsense?
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan