1 Corinthians 1:18-31

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. For it is written,

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

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Consider 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. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. In contrast, God is why you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Sermon Text

I think that we live in an age that is fundamentally trapped in a contradiction. We live in  a post-truth a society. Before AI even entered the scene to produce fake stories, photos, and videos at an unprecedented rate, we had already begun to give up on seeking actual truth from the world around us. We can be sold, by multiple accounts and channels, pundits and Large Language Models, a version of the world that gives us everything we could possibly want. There is no bad news, except that proves what we already think about the world. There is no complicated balancing of different facets of the world, because we can have everything shaved down into an easily digestible pill.

It’s hard not to be cynical about the state of things. Everyday I log onto Facebook (my first mistake,) and see people sharing videos that I can tell are fake, that have a bouncing watermark to hide the “Made by AI,” indicator that most generators have, and yet people share them like they’re real. For year I’ve seen people pushing narratives about their neighbors, about vaccines, about all kinds of things in Heaven and on Earth, and none of them do so in pursuit of truth – but confirmation. Truth asks us to reflect, to change, to help one another. Falsehood invites us to confirm our thoughts and feelings, to distrust one another, and to take what we can for our own good.

Truth is often inconvenient. Truth is not something that serves us, it is something we must be in service to. It is so fragile, so easily broken in this world, that we have to find ways to cling to it whenever we can. Truth must be preserved, we cannot speak idly about anything for fear of harming it. We must understand that the world has real, objective features that cannot be changed for our convenience. We must see in the world around us, the things that transcend our whims and cut deep into reality itself.

Our scripture today focuses on “wisdom,” which is not always synonymous with truth. It typically refers to the practical knowledge necessary to live a good life. However, Paul seems to be directly talking about world views in this letter. The paragraph before today’s lection talks about how people in Corinth are fighting over which teacher in the Church is better. Some call themselves followers of Paul, others of a guy named Apollos, and still others unhelpfully say that they follow Christ alone. Paul looks to all these impulses of choosing worldviews, of defining ourselves by teachers or lack of teachers, and asks people to commit to a higher calling even than that.

The people that teach us are always secondary to the things they teach. The truth that they reveal surpasses the individual in most every circumstance. The people who claimed Paul was the true teacher of the Gospel missed the point as much as those who privileged Apollos, what mattered was not the teacher but the thing that was taught. The thing they taught was that Christ was crucified for the redemption of the world and that he was raised from the dead to prove the redemption was complete. That was what really mattered. Those who claimed to only receive their teachings from Christ missed the point because they denied their bias by claiming this singular authority in their life. They also still were not looking to furthering the truth of the Gospel, but establishing themselves as better than the sectarians.

Paul describes the message of Christ’s crucifixion as something rejected by all people, largely because it is not convenient. Paul sites Jewish demands for signs of Jesus’s truth, but those signs already happened and were rejected. Those signs asked them to accept God in human form and gentiles as children of God and shame as the greatest honor. It was not convenient to the culture they had gotten used to. Greeks, likewise, demanded well-reasoned philosophical arguments, and all they got was, again, the cross and the resurrection.

The cross was and is a foolish idea. God coming down into humanity and dying does not make sense. God dying in so horrific and painful a way is not befitting the eternal ruler of creation. That a dead man, regardless of his divinity, could rise from the dead is nonsense – the dead always stay dead. Yet, in the face of that absurdity there is a truth that cannot be denied. God did become human, that God-man did die, and that God-man did rise again. The reality of Jesus pushes against all logic and reason and yet it still remains true. That is the essence of the mystery of our faith.

Truth is always messy like this. We are made to find out the best response to situations where, with some notable and obvious exception, there is not always one “right,” thing to do. When we look at our family troubles, there are not villains and heroes, just people struggling to live and love together. When we look at our world, there might be a handful of mustache twirling villains, but there are many more people just trying to do right. The problem is, in our attempt for good, we get lost in our own version of truth, and that version can lead to us committing grave sins against one another in the name of what is “right.”

The reason Paul asks us to see our lives primarily through Christ and his crucifixion is not so we can live in denial of the many other truths in life. It is instead so that we can root ourselves in the most important truth that allows us to make sense of all others. A God who lives is one thing, but a God who is willing to die… Unthinkable. A God who loves is one thing, but a God who loves until it hurts… Unimaginable. A God who makes even death subservient to life… Simply amazing. Our life is built off of the truth of Christ’s life.

Because of this, we are to live as people who love till it hurts, that live with a mind toward the welfare of others, that sees nothing as truly catastrophic because even loss can be gain. We are to build our life off of a foundation of love, of sacrifice, and of service. That is the mystery we must proclaim and place all other truth upon. – Amen.