Monroe Congregational Church: God’s Alternative Wisdom

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 30, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last Monday as I was driving down Kelsey Street here in Monroe I found myself behind a Jeep Cherokee with several bumper stickers and other symbols affixed to the rear window and the rear bumper. One of the bumper stickers said: "Don’t mess with Texas." I won’t go on about that one, much as I am tempted to. Of greater interest for my purposes this morning was the juxtaposition of a couple of the other bumper stickers with another symbol above them in the back window. One bumper sticker was the Christian fish symbol. Another proclaimed: "Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven," a perennial favorite with conservative Evangelicals. These bumper stickers loudly proclaimed the vehicle’s owner’s status as a self-avowed Christian. Above these Christian bumper stickers, taking up the whole back window of this stations wagon were two crossed American flags.

When I saw this wonderful apparition I had just come from a time with our Monday morning lectionary study group at which we read and talked about the Scripture readings that we just heard. I had expressed my impression that these readings are so rich and deep that I wished the lectionary hadn’t put them all on one Sunday. A preacher could practically preach an entire career’s worth of sermons out of these texts. One of the people in the study group asked me: "Do you see a common theme in these readings?" I immediately answered: "Oh, yes. They’re all about God’s alternative wisdom, about how God’s wisdom is radically different from and a clear alternative to the wisdom of the world."

Maybe that’s why I was so struck by the juxtaposition of symbols on that Jeep. Scripture says: God’s wisdom is not the wisdom of the world. The Jeep’s symbols proclaimed, to me at least, exactly the opposite message. They said to me: There is no inconsistency between allegiance to Christ and allegiance to the powers of the world, or at least allegiance to the greatest power in the world. There’s no discontinuity there, no problem with reconciling the two. That, I thought, is precisely the opposite message to the one in this morning’s Scripture readings. The Jeep said: God’s wisdom and the wisdom of the world are one, or even that the God part is subordinate to the world part. The American flags were on top, remember. Our Scripture this morning says: God’s wisdom is not the world’s wisdom and is vastly superior to it. Let’s take a closer look at those readings.

We actually had three reading from the lectionary this morning although it may look like we only had two. In addition to the two Scripture readings designated as such we had our Call to Worship taken from Micah 6:6-8, a portion of the Hebrew Scripture reading specified for this Sunday in the lectionary. Micah talks about God’s requirement only that we do justice--that’s the first thing--, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. That’s not what the world requires of us even to be considered religious in the world’s eyes, but it is what God requires of us. The Beatitudes that we heard from the Sermon on the Mount stand worldly wisdom completely on its head. In worldly terms the meek aren’t blessed, the strong are. The poor in spirit, much less the actual poor, aren’t blessed, the rich are. Most if not all of us in this room have mourned. We might be blessed in some sense when we do it, but that blessing sure isn’t apparent at the time, and it sure isn’t fun. And so on. The Beatitudes are a prime example of the way Jesus turned the wisdom and expectations of the world on their head.

This morning, however, I want to focus on the passage we heard from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. In that passage, Paul talks explicitly about the distinction between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God. Paul asks rhetorically: "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" We ask: How has God done that? Paul answers: Through the cross of Jesus. In the best known lines from this passage--and some of the best known and most important lines in all of Paul’s writings--he says: "For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." Making this bit of inspired nonsense complete Paul concludes: "For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength." 1 Corinthians 1:21-25

What’s going on here? What’s Paul saying? To get at what he’s saying, let’s start by asking why he’s saying it. Paul’s central proclamation, and the central proclamation of the Christian movement of which he was a part, is that Jesus is the Christ, that is, the Messiah that the Jews had been waiting and longing for since at least the time of Micah in the 8^th century BCE. But in making that proclamation, Paul (and

Christianity generally) had a big problem. The Messiah was supposed to be a king, a very earthly king whose task was to be the restoration of the kingdom of David as it had been around the year 1,000 BCE and the liberation of the Jews from the oppressive yoke of foreign, Gentile empire. Jesus, however, was and did nothing of the sort. He wasn’t an earthly king. He didn’t restore the kingdom of David. He didn’t drive out the Romans, the latest in a long series of Gentile conquerors and occupiers of Judea. Not only did he not do those things, he went and got himself crucified as a common political criminal by those very Romans that the Messiah was supposed to drive into the sea! Some Messiah! Some Christ! That’s what the world says. The world looks at Jesus and says: Loser! Failure! Criminal! Weakling! Fool!

But Paul looks at Jesus and says: Weakling? Yes, but in the weakness of God that is stronger than human strength. Fool? Yes, but in the foolishness of God that is wiser than human wisdom. What could he possibly have meant by that? I think he meant by that something that is squarely in the tradition of the Jewish and Christian proclamation of the alternative wisdom of God that we saw in the passage from Micah, written 800 years before 1 Corinthians, and in the Beatitudes that Jesus spoke a few decades before Paul wrote 1 Corinthians and that Matthew recorded in the form in which we have them a few decades after 1 Corinthians. He meant that at the heart of the Christian message lies what to world surely seems an absurdity: God’s wisdom and strength are revealed most clearly and most fully in the cross of Jesus, who, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, really is the Christ.

How are we to understand that? All I can do is tell you how I understand it. You’ve heard me say this before, and you’ll hear me say it again. The cross of Jesus reveals the power and wisdom of God because on that cross, in the person of Jesus, God’s own Son, God demonstrated to us and to all of humanity God’s unshakable, indestructible solidarity with us and with all creation. On that cross, in the person of Jesus, God entered, in God’s own person, fully into all the sin, suffering, and death that are an inevitable part of human existence. On that cross God took human sin, suffering and death into God’s own person and shared in our experience of them. On that cross God said: "I love you humans so much that to show you how much I will empty myself of my divinity and share fully in your human lot. When you see me on that cross in the person of my Son you will see that I am with you on your own crosses, whatever they may be. You will see that I do not reject you because of the world’s sin but that I am always there in the midst of it, bearing the brunt of it with you, suffering with you, dying with you.

"And not only that. After I have gone to the cross for you, you will see that with me sin, suffering, and death never have the last word. When I raise Jesus from death you will see that death is not the end, for Him or for you. You will see that my love for you survives death. You will see that although death is very real, I can and do overcome it and bring forth new, transformed, eternal life from the midst of it."

Can all the power the world can muster do that? No. Can the greatest military force the world has ever known do that? No. Can the wisest wisdom the world has ever produced teach us all that about God’s love? Not even close. For us Christians at least, only the cross of Jesus can do that. For us, only the cross of Jesus can each that. God’s radical, revolutionary, and undying love for us is not the wisdom of the world. It’s the alternative wisdom of God.

And here’s at least something of what that love from a cross means to us. Because in the cross we know that God goes with us wherever we go, we can enter into the world with all its sin, suffering, and death, with courage and even in peace. Because from the cross God has shown infinite compassion for us, we can have at least finite compassion for suffering humanity, whether that suffering be from disease, despotism, or natural disaster. Because we know through the cross that God suffers with all who suffer, we are moved to do what we can--and more--to relieve that suffering. And because we know through the cross that God shares our own suffering and enters even into our deaths to bring forth new life, we can bear our suffering. We can face our death, and we can do so in peace.

That sure isn’t the wisdom of the world. It isn’t the wisdom of American or any other national flags over Christian slogans on the back of an SUV. No, it is something much, much better than that. It is the wisdom of the cross, the alternative wisdom of God. Amen.