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1 Cor 1:10-21
A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany
In our 1 Corinthians text for today, Paul is talking about all the quarreling among the Christians in Corinth. There were factions. There were those who say they belong to Paul, and others who belong to Apollos, and still others who belong to Peter, and those who belong to Christ. Things weren’t going well. It had become a matter of personalities.
Paul had to deal with that throughout his career because it had become evident that he wasn’t an impressive person. It seems he might have been an epileptic, or he might have stuttered, or he might have had bad eyesight.
Who wants a preacher with those problems? Had there been call committees in his day, many would have said: “Paul, thank you for interviewing; we don’t think you’re a good match for us.”
Paul was attacked not only here, but elsewhere. In 2 Corinthians 10 through 13, he writes that others accused him saying: “Paul, you haven’t really suffered; you haven’t had enough troubles.” He answers in 2 Corinthians 11:23-29, noting how often he’d been imprisoned, beaten. And more. He writes he had been: “Three times shipped wrecked . . . in danger from rivers, robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, in the wilderness, from false brethren.”
Other opponents of Paul said: “Paul, you don’t know how to do miracles!” Paul responds: “I did more miracles than you did.” But, he adds: “All of that is irrelevant. What’s relevant is: Is Christ being proclaimed? Is the cross being proclaimed?”
That takes it out of the arena of personalities.
1 Corinthians 1:17 states: “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.”
Every congregation wants a good preacher. It’s hard to thrive without that. But therein lies a temptation for the pastor, that is, to aim for eloquent wisdom or entertaining story-telling.
It’s tempting for the preacher to be “interesting” and even entertaining. The pastor of a large congregation brought a race car into the sanctuary for one Sunday’s sermon. It was quite a show, but what happened to the word of the cross?
Entertainment evangelism and eloquent wisdom are dangerous because then “the cross of Christ is emptied of its power.“
It’s tempting to think the purpose of a sermon is to persuade you by argument or emotion so that you are convinced and you get on board. When this happens, the Evil One then has us both because that’s not the goal of preaching.
In 1 Corinthians 9:16, Paul writes: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” The test of what it’s about is whether or not the gospel is preached. That means pointing to the cross alone in such a way that there are no preconditions nor postconditions for salvation. Preaching in such a way that we all see our need of a savior and the Savior we need.
As Paul writes in Romans 1:16: “The gospel is the power of God for salvation.” That’s different from thinking: “Oh, it really doesn’t matter what is preached.” Or it doesn’t matter if the pastor tells stories and jokes or uses the sermon to promote alleged “good” causes.
It’s more than a big deal. Salvation is at stake. The Word of the cross is the power of God for salvation, nothing more and nothing less.
How does that come to you and me? Paul writes in Rom 10:17: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the preaching of Christ.”
Luther has a striking way of putting this. He says the church is a mouth house, not a book house. The reason is because Christ comes from the future, from his future kingdom, to be with us today.
Gerhard Forde, noted modern Lutheran, said that pastors are essentially ambassadors who are trained and authorized to publicly prosecute the mission of the church.
Forde wrote: A pastor is “an ambassador, one who is called, authorized, and sent to do the bidding of the sovereign.” And the bidding or task is “to set people free from sin, death, and the devil by the word of the gospel and to call into being thereby the church which proclaims and waits upon the coming of the eschatological kingdom of God” (“Public Ministry and its Limits, dialog 30:2 [1991] 102-03).
When you and I drive by churches around town, we can think: “Ah, look, there’s another embassy from the future.” We may note the architecture of a church and how it reflects the era in which the church was built. But whatever “history” is on the outside, the future on the inside. What’s going on inside is that the crucified and risen Christ himself is at work. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:20: “So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”
How does this work? It’s in “the doing of it” that God works.
Paul writes in Romans 10:17: “Faith comes by hearing and hearing comes by the preaching of Christ.”
Isaiah 55:11 says: “My word shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.” God’s Word is effective by itself. If that were not true, I could not stand to be a preacher because then it would depend on me whether it worked or not. Thank God it doesn’t depend on the preacher.
Second, it doesn’t depend on our hearing. That verse in Romans 10:17 is worth repeating: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the preaching of Christ.” In the preaching the Holy Spirit produces faith. Not because of something we do, but rather that God is at work in the doing of it.
It’s not as if we sit here and gather information and say: “Will I or won’t I be convinced?” The Holy Spirit works through the Word. Thank God! Because otherwise how would we know if we could be sure? How could we be certain? Have I heard it correctly? Have I believed it enough? Have I done the right thing? No. It doesn’t depend on that. God is at work in the doing of it. For this reason, my salvation is sure.
A congregation is like one beggar telling another beggar where the food is. That’s what it is about. We go to church because that’s where the food is; that’s what the promise is, as it says in Matthew 18:20: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”
That’s the promise, and it doesn’t work elsewhere, not on a mountaintop hike or a walk on a beach. Rather, here is where life is given to us, where the living bread from heaven is given to us. John 6:51: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give to the world is my flesh.”
That’s what Paul is saying, too, when he writes: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18).”
That’s our comfort and our mission. We are here to publicly proclaim the Lordship of Christ and to wait upon the coming of his kingdom.
Amen