Corinth #4

1Corinthians 1:18-31

I have been thinking about parts of this passage for about 6 months. Sometimes I am captured by the idea that the message of the cross is foolishness to the dying. We are all dying, really. It would seem Paul is drawing a line in the sand for what is to come, bedrock to either build upon or reject, nothing in between, no grey area. The message of the cross is either foolishness or the power of God. Life or death.

Really very simple and yet terribly inconvenient if one wants to saunter off back into a religious haze. So very few know what to do with the message of the cross so we try and box it in or parse it down into understandable chunks but by doing that we diminish it. Many just don't know what to do with it so it is deemed foolishness and ignored.

It was July 17th, a Sunday, and I found myself after church in the return line at our local Lowe's store returning a sliding screen door that was too small for our back slider. I was still dressed in my clothes from church, not a suit and tie but certainly not what one usually wears when returning something at a home improvement store. A man stepped into line behind me and started to chat. I mentioned I'd just come from church, sort of like casting out a line to see what would happen, where might this little conversation go. He explained he and his wife usually attend a church in the next town to the south of the suburb we were in. Then he said exactly how the world ignores the message of the cross: "You know what I think, if you are good enough person you will make it".

There it is, complete and utter dismissal of the message replaced by the flimsy hope of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Frankly, if I look down metaphorically at my own boots, I don't have bootstraps and I am hopelessly stuck in the muck. It is very easy to see the folly of this line of thought, this reduction of the message of the cross to meaninglessness. We who know our Bibles can easily point out the error of this.

There is something else though that eats at me a bit when I ponder this passage. Some time ago I heard a friend of mine offer a devotion on the subject of holiness, our personal holiness. He did what we often do when discussing this, he spoke of the things that would show others our holiness, the list that our culture of the moment would dictate.

This is our attempt to understand what often can't be understood, the message of the cross for those who believe in it. We are called to be holy but what does that really look like? It is so much easier to construct a list and check it off from time to time to assure ourselves of our own personal holiness. Problem is, we are trying to clean ourselves off with filthy rags, just smearing ourselves into a point of denial. It's a religious form of trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

The passage ends with this, "It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.' ” Part of the message of the cross is captured here, Christ has become for us our righteousness and holiness. I've come to reject the notion of the "list" for holiness. I look to the fruit of the Spirit: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self Control. Like so much of what Jesus offers, relationship with Him is the key here, not a list to check off from time to time. The end result may look similar to the list but there is so much more depth to allowing the Spirit to grow His fruit, my heart yielding to the gentle yoke of Jesus.

Christmas Eve

It's Christmas Eve. I am a bit overloaded with Hallmark-Christmas-movie-sentiment though. I am tired of hearing that family is what this time of the year is all about. I've watched more than my share of Christmas themed shows this season and have heard it over and over again. Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to the family that will gather at my home tomorrow. It is a joy to get together but I have grown weary of so much focus on that aspect of Christmas at the expense of "the" event that is overlooked in a culture that is too politically correct to call this season what it is, a celebration of the birth of Jesus.

As this day has drawn closer I've spent some time reflecting on the accounts we have of His birth. We gravitate to Matthew and Luke's accounts with the poignant details of the birth in a barn attended to by only Joseph and Mary. Lowly shepherds are the only ones who receive an announcement and they heed the request to find the baby laying in a manger in swaddling clothes. How appropriate that these men of low class status are the ones angelically confronted by the birth, after all, He came for the outcast. He came as a shepherd for lost sheep. I have been captured once again by the simplicity, joy and mystery of Incarnate God, Emmanuel. The whole village of Bethlehem missed it, I will not. What must have Joseph and Mary thought when those shepherds showed up telling their story of angels declaring the birth. I will not miss this.

I've wandered around though in John's account. He didn't write much of the detail of those days but simply mentions, "The Word became flesh". I've placed this simple phrase in the midst of Matthew and Luke's account. The very Word made flesh is stunning if you think about it. God comes not as a book or a set of principles to study, to know, to practice but as a baby, to grow to be a man, to be known in relationship. He is not to be known primarily as a theological experiment to be tested but as a man to be known.

I am often reminded of some of His last words, "Lo, I am with you always", and then He left. Certainly He meant His presence to mean something other than what we normally think. Access to His presence, knowing Him, is an exercise of faith, an acknowledgement that we are not highly evolved animals but we are created to be spiritual beings as well as fleshly beings. Jesus coming to be fully man and fully God, the mystery of Incarnation, tells me I will never be fully human without exercising the faith to unlock the mystery of knowing this man who said He would never leave me, this man who started life as a human being in a manger, born in a barn, visited by lowly shepherds.