A sermon on 1 Corinthians 1:10-18 by Nathan Nettleton

There are some things it doesn’t pay to get to clever about. The most high-tech, sophisticated, ingenious answers are not always worth the effort. Take Victoria’s public transport ticketing system for example. According to the experts it is the most advanced and sophisticated public transport ticketing system in the world. Light years ahead of the old system with little people sitting behind windows or walking down the aisle selling you tickets by hand. Now the experts are probably right, it’s a very impressive system, except for one thing – it doesn’t work. At least it doesn’t work unless you get security guards to stand next to the machines to keep the vandals from damaging them, and since the security guards cost nearly twice as much as the little people who sold you tickets by hand cost, the high-tech system doesn’t seem like such a good idea. And I don’t know about you, but even if they didn’t cost more, I find that having too many security guards around makes me nervous. Conductors were better, don’t you think?

The Apostle Paul had a problem with the church he’d planted in Corinth. You’ll be hearing a bit about it over the next few weeks, because our readings are going to follow his attempt to address the problem in his first letter to them. And at the guts of what he seems to be saying to them is that there are some things it doesn’t pay to get too clever about and the message of the cross of Christ is one of them.

It seems that the good folks of Corinth liked to get right into the newest and fanciest thing. They prided themselves on their sophistication. They weren’t just simple folk who could settle for a simple faith, they were sophisticated intellectuals who liked fathom the deeper meaning of things and explore the fine details of every new religious idea that came their way.

But of course the more you get into the fine details of things the more you find that you can disagree over, and when being the one with the cleverest and most profound insights becomes the name of the game it is no time at all before you are dividing up into factions and fighting over it all. It’s not clear that at Corinth things had gotten really nasty, but there were identifiable factions – I belong to Paul; I belong to Apollos; I belong to Peter; I belong to Christ – and Paul was concerned that they were becoming so bogged down in their fancy arguments that they’d forgotten the main point – Christ crucified and resurrected, reconciling the world to God.

There are some things it’s not worth getting too clever about. We are here together as a worshipping community because we have experienced the love of God in Christ. We are here because in a man being tortured to death on a cross we have encountered the God of the Universe, a God who shares our suffering and leads us on through resurrection to newness of life.

It is such a seemingly absurd idea that it’s no wonder people get embarrassed about it and want to turn it into some sophisticated philosophy, some profound new wisdom. But as Paul seems to be saying, as soon as you do that you get bogged down in the detail and instead of being a power for reconciliation it becomes something that divides us up into warring factions instead. At its heart the gospel is quite simple – it’s ugly, unsophisticated, gory and awkward – but its quite simple. In Jesus dying in agony on a cross at the hands of callous men, we have met God and witnessed the lengths to which God will go to reach us in love and save us from the world’s headlong slide into destruction. We have met a God who could go through the full horror of death and still defeat it from the other side.

We worship God together because we share that experience together. Not because we interpret it the same way, or because we all agree on all the implications of that for how we live, or because we all subscribe to the same party lines on what it all means. There is nothing wrong with discussing those things, so long as we don’t fall into the trap of thinking they are what really matters. What really matters is our common experience of Christ and his suffering love and our willingness to respond to him in gratitude. And it might look foolish, and it might seem embarrassing, and it might not win us any scholarships, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God and the only things that really matters.