A sermon on 1 Corinthians 1: 10-18 & Matthew 4: 12-23 by Nathan Nettleton

It is not hard to see why we so often find it so difficult to speak about our faith in Jesus Christ to people outside of the church. The Church itself can make it difficult. Its history is full of scandals and betrayals of its own message, but also it is divided; often bitterly divided. It is hard to make a message of reconciliation sound credible when we have clearly failed to model that reconciliation among ourselves, and many people outside the church say that the fractures and animosity in the church are one of the big things that keeps them from considering it seriously. Along side that difficulty is the awkwardness of the message itself. Even if we were managing to show a more united front to the world, the message of the cross is a difficult thing to make sound attractive. Or even intelligible. In a world that is obsessed with the pursuit of success, power, money and celebrity, the idea that the life that is worth living is to be found in patterning ourselves on one who was dismissed as a loser and who died an apparent failure is not going to be easy to market. Most of the time we have enough difficulty coming to terms with it ourselves, let alone promoting it to anyone else.

Evidently, these are not new problems. In fact the Apostle Paul found it necessary to address them in his correspondence with the church in Corinth in the first century, and we heard part of what he had to say read for us earlier. Perhaps the factionalism he describes was not much different to the denominationalism of later centuries. At least the roots of it sound very similar. He speaks of people forming factions around particular leaders. “I’m with Paul.” “I’m with Apollos.” “I’m sticking with Peter.” And, of course, some people are trying to trump them all by saying, “Well, I’m with Jesus Christ.”

Everybody has their perceptions of which camp is best, which faction is the strongest, which version of the truth is the most compelling. Everybody wants to be on the right side. In no time at all, people are defining themselves by what they are for and against, and thus, by whom they are for and against. If I’m sure my side is right, then I’m sure your side is wrong, and therefore you are wrong, and therefore we are no longer friends but hostile adversaries.

Paul also acknowledges the difficulty of making the message of the cross sound plausible and meaningful to those who have not embraced it. He admits that his proclamation of the message has not been done with eloquent wisdom, and that to many people, the message about the cross is sheer foolishness. He realises that this message does not seem to make any sense at all to those who have not experienced its truth for themselves. There is no way to explain it that sounds sophisticated and attractive. There is no way to reconcile it with the quest for money, power and glamour. It will always sound like foolishness, but to us who are being transformed for the new life in Christ, this apparent foolishness is the power of God.

But Paul doesn’t just acknowledge these two difficulties. He also suggests that there is a relationship between them which we might otherwise easily miss. He seems to be saying that one of the reasons we split into factions is precisely because we are often uncomfortable with the apparent foolishness of the message, and so our desire for something more profound and successful leads us to want to identify winners and align ourselves with them. We want to be on the side that has the most compelling and attractive and effective version of the message.

It is not hard to see this at play in some of the divisions in today’s church. It is there in some of the denominational divides, but most of them a ancient history now and they are no longer the biggest fault lines. Think of the divide between the so-called mega-churches that strive to have congregations numbered in the thousands, and those that decry such quests as a worldly sell-out. Now I am one who thinks that the motto of the Hillsong Church, which names its goals as being ‘big’ and ‘influential’ are a failed attempt to incorporate the values of the world into the gospel of Christ, but even in saying that, I have to recognise that I am at serious risk of falling into the same pattern. While not seeking to be big, I am seeking to identify myself with what I perceive as right, and I am doing that by defining myself and my beliefs against someone else and their beliefs. Is the desire to be seen by others as “right” any more godly than the desire to be seen as successful? Probably not. Both are primarily concerned with how others see us, and both are equally dismissive of the other. Both are ready to sacrifice the reputation of the other, and sacrifice unity with the other, for the dubious prize of being in the in-group, the elite, the chosen ones, the winners.

It is the impossible paradox. The more strenuously we endeavour to avoid the pitfalls of seeking worldly success and status, the more vulnerable we are to becoming every bit as divisive as those we perhaps rightly wish to differentiate ourselves from. Even those of us who steadfastly seek to avoid divisiveness — we define ourselves only as Christian and not by some denominational label, we have an all-inclusive theology that can accommodate almost any belief and call it Christian — even we are just as at risk. In the same move that was probably being made by those at Corinth who said “we belong to Christ”, we easily fall into defining ourselves as those who don’t use divisive labels and are therefore superior to and to be distinguished from those who do! The refusal to wear a label can be every bit as divisive as proudly wearing one.

O what a tangled web we weave! Is there any way out, any way of life and freedom and hope? Well, probably no, but miraculously, by the grace of God, yes!

There is probably no way for us to free ourselves from this web by our own efforts. It is part of the nature of being human that we are caught up in a universal human system of defining and dividing against and excluding and dismissing those we have defined ourselves against. Our very best efforts to reform ourselves just dig us in deeper and prove more fully that such sin is deeply embedded in our nature and we can no more remove it than cut out our own hearts and live on without them.

But, as foolish as it undoubtedly seems, in the disgraced death of Jesus, there is the power of God to save us and set us free. What Jesus reveals to us, in his living and in his death at the hands of the unholy coalition of the authorities and a lynch mob, is that God is not in the business of defining anybody out. God is not assessing our performance in order to determine who God might be willing to be associated with and who is beyond the pale. Rather, in the cross, we see God willingly be associated with all who are defined out, all who are excluded, all who are deemed to be expendable because they have failed to measure up to some standard of acceptable behaviour or belief or belonging. In the cross we see the complete impossibility of any of us being godly enough to emulate the outrageous courage and grace of Jesus the Messiah, and thus earn our way into the favour and life of God by our own efforts, but we also see that that is absolutely no obstacle to being embraced in the love of God. We see that the whole world conspires to vilify and exclude one another, and that Jesus identifies himself not with one side or another, but with every side in its experience of being vilified and excluded. In his identification with the vilified and excluded, he becomes the one on whom the world pours all its scorn, the one whose commitments and action are inexplicably foolish in the world we live in, and the one who all the world unites against to shun and destroy.

But even when we have destroyed him, and most especially when we have destroyed him, he comes to us as the one who with wounded hands reaches out to us and embraces us with inextinguishable love and forgiveness.

And so now, even when me most obviously and tragically fall into turning on one another and dismissing one another, Jesus is there offering us grace. When we are vilified and attacked, he is there with us, taking it on the chin with us and standing in solidarity with us to strengthen us and see us safely through. And when we become the perpetrators, savaging others, he is there in front of us, taking our venom and bitterness on himself, and continuing to reach back to us with the love and forgiveness that can only come from the ultimate victim of our sin. There is no where we can go and nothing we can do that will cause Christ to give up on us and stop offering us his extravagant love and mercy.

No wonder this message is foolishness to the ears of those who have not surrendered to this grace. It makes no sense at all in a world bent on winning at all costs and rising to the top, over the bodies of those we have deemed to be expendable. It makes no more sense that praying, no more sense than gathering each week with a weird and disparate group of oddballs to worship an executed messiah. It makes no more sense than expecting to encounter the Risen God in the sharing of fragments of bread and wine around a table. But here we are, because we are surrendering ourselves to God’s desire to save us, and we have begun to see and believe that that the foolishness of God will prove wiser than the wisdom of the world, and that the suffering of God will heal the earth and fulfil our hopes of justice and peace.