I Cor. 2: 1And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.[a] 2 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. 4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
If we’re looking for a phrase to describe the times in which we live, might I suggest, “Nothing succeeds like success.” This week’s presidential inauguration, like all inaugurations, no matter who gets elected, was a celebration of success. Not only the success of a candidate’s campaign. For the parades and other events that followed the oath of office, like the marching bands and choirs from various colleges and high schools, we rightfully celebrate their success in practice and performance. In the galas and receptions that follow each inauguration, the three piece suits, the tuxedos, the guest lists and the swanky settings, also testify to success in society, politics, media and business. You had to be greatly and publicly successful in some such way to be invited.
I wonder if my invitation got sent to the wrong address.
Now I’m all for celebrating success, when it’s fairly earned and for a worthy cause. So may God bless all the athletes, artists, business people, farmers, teachers, students and others with the kind of success that puts bread on the table, clothes on our children, that makes us better persons, and which makes the community better.
One can also succeed at gambling, or poaching salmon, but success alone doesn’t justify those things. Whenever success becomes its own justification, no matter what we succeed at, or how we succeed, then we have gone from a rightful appreciation of success to an idolatrous cult of success. If we believe that “nothing succeeds like success,” and that we and our worth are validated, or justified, by our success in the eyes of the world, and by the symbols of success that we amass, like the salaries we earn, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, and how popular we are, then we have fallen for the false gospel of the cult of success.
This false gospel of the cult of success is nothing new. It’s what Saint Paul and the gospel were up against when he first entered the city of Corinth. Corinth was Ground Central of the cult of success. Blessed with not one but two well-protected sea ports, one facing east, toward Asia, the other west, toward Rome, Corinth was a proud, powerful and prosperous cosmopolitan city, full of all the signs and symbols of success: success in commerce, success in culture, success in politics, success in religion, the religions of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, and success in providing all the pleasures people could want. Whatever you wanted to do, not only was it permitted in Corinth, it was expected and celebrated. You could even find a temple to it. The motto of prosperous, powerful, prestigious and pleasure-oriented Corinth was more like, “nothing succeeds…… like excess.”
Which brings me to the first question in the sermon outline: Why the fear, trembling and weakness for Paul at the gates of Corinth? That’s no way to get a hearing for the gospel, not in Corinth, for sure. And besides, didn’t Paul and his missionary team carry the greatest success story of all, the good news of the resurrected Jesus Christ? What success in business, politics, sports or war could ever match overcoming death and walking out of your own tomb, alive? Could Paul not have spared himself much weakness, fear and trembling if instead he had resolved, at the gates of Corinth, “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him resurrected?”
Well, actually, he had tried that, just a few days before he entered Corinth, in that other great Greek city, of Athens. And it didn’t go well. In fact, it blew up in his face. That very experience in Athens may be what left Paul in “weakness, fear and trembling.” Now you’d think at first that Paul’s ministry in Athens was a success story. In sermons, Sunday School classes and at seminary, I’ve heard many times that Paul’s message to the philosophers on Mars Hill, in Athens, is a model of missionary strategy that we all should imitate.
You may remember the story from Acts chapter 17. As Paul is walking around the Greek city of Athens, the Jewish rabbi in him is vexed and perplexed by the idols and images and shrines to all sorts of pagan gods and goddesses. But then he comes across a shrine to an unknown god.
Paul is then granted an audience with Athens’ leading philosophers, on Mars Hill, he takes the unknown god of Athens as his point of entry for the gospel. Their unknown god, Paul tells the philosophers, has been there all along, watching over and caring for all nations of the world. Then he quotes some other Greek philosophers and poets to strengthen his case and build a bridge to his audience. Their unknown god is now revealing himself to them and to all the nations through someone whom he resurrected from the dead, Paul says.
Pretty good mission work, right? Good job of walking in someone else’s shoes, learning their lingo and their culture, and building bridges rather than walls, right? Yes, I think. We should always do that, not just to get an audience, but out of genuine respect and love for people. And yet Paul’s preaching hit a sudden roadblock, one there was no avoiding: the resurrection of Jesus. As soon as Paul mentions that God raised Jesus from the dead, the Athenian philosophers laughed up their sleeves and said, “That’s enough, Paul. We may want to hear more about this. But don’t call us; we’ll call you.”
Paul never did get the call back.
It wasn’t that the Greek philosophers could not believe in a miraculous physical resurrection from the dead. They didn’t want a physical resurrection from the dead, however miraculous. “What rubes those Jews are!” they probably said to each other after Paul left. “Don’t they know that the whole point of philosophy and spirituality is for the spirit to escape the body, and this evil, disgusting material world, and rise above it into a purely spiritual, disembodied freedom? Next thing you know, those Jews will be saying that their supreme God even loves this world!” And then they all laughed.
If that’s how Athens’ leading philosophers reacted to Jesus’ resurrection, what do you think they would have thought about the cross and the crucifixion? If a physical resurrection was strange, new news to the Greek mind, then the cross would seem like a radioactive toxic waste dump of shock and shame, to avoid at all costs. If they choked on the resurrection, they might have torn their hair out over the cross.
But in Athens, Paul never got to mentioning the cross, and Jesus Christ crucified, before he got the gong, and was laughed off the stage, because he put the resurrection and the empty tomb first in his message. And there he got stopped in his tracks. Did Paul think that if he first got the philosophers on board with the triumph of the resurrection, then the seeming defeat of Christ on the cross would be an easier pill for them to swallow? And did Paul think that, if he got the philosophers at the top of Athens’ social heap on his side, everyone else would follow in faith, down to the slaves and the scullery maids? If so, he was abruptly educated otherwise.
So, in answer to the first question in the sermon outline, Why the fear, trembling and weakness for Paul, upon entering Corinth? Two possible reasons: a) First: Paul’s painful experience in Athens. Maybe Paul was sobered and chastened by the unsuccessful results of his effort in Athens to make the gospel so friendly to the Greek mind, on Greek terms, especially to those high upon their pedestals in Athens’ cult of success. Never again in Paul’s ministry would he delay or downplay the fact of the cross, hoping to soften its scandal, because precisely in its shock and shame, its scandal and its strangeness, and its appearance of defeat, lies the saving, transforming power of the cross.
B) or The second reason for Paul’s “weakness, fear and trembling” at the gates of Corinth, we might call the “grasp the nettle” lesson. If you’ve ever pulled weeds without gloves on and accidentally grabbed a stinging nettle, you know what that means, as your hand burns and itches for another half hour. We say, “grasp the nettle,” for anything that we just have to take a deep breath and do, knowing full well what risks and costs come along with the benefits. Paul resolved, from Athens on, that whenever he preached the gospel, he had to overcome his “fear, trembling and weakness,” and just grasp the nettle; just name the cross and the crucifixion plainly, forthrightly, and up front, whatever the risk of a rude shock and surprise, or contempt, or a wrathful reaction, even in hostile environments like Corinth, especially in Corinth, where nothing succeeded like success. Or make that, excess.
Paul’s fears of a hostile reaction to the strangeness and scandal of the cross were well-founded, by the way. Persecution broke out against the new church within a year.
But Paul was proven right about this too: that the cross of Christ, such a potent symbol of shame, weakness, foolishness, failure, death and defeat, was the very key to unleashing God’s power to topple the idols of success and excess, transform people’s hearts and lives, even in the worldly wise, proud, power-tripping, pleasure-worshiping city of Corinth. So many more Corinthians believed and received this strange good news in Corinth, of all places, than in Athens, where Paul had tried to downplay and delay the strange news of the cross. The new Corinthian Christians believed precisely that which they should have found most unbelievable. They were converted and comforted by that which you think they would have found most offensive and frightening. Precisely at that point where the good news of Jesus was most news to them—a crucified God and Savior?—was where they found that news most good and powerful, both to confront and to comfort them.
Which brings me to the second question: What power does the message of the cross unleash in our “Corinth” today? For we live in a globalized media environment like Corinth, in which nothing succeeds like success. Or excess.
There are many things I could say about the meaning and the power of the cross. But the meaning I which to focus on now is one that I see on those Sunday evenings when I lead Vespers services at the Marquis Center of Hope Village. Before the service starts, as some of Hope Village’s most elderly, frail and physically limited residents file into the room, some being pushed in wheel chairs, some pushing their own walkers, one of the attendees brings me a simple wooden cross, which I then place on its spot high up on the wall, between the fireplace and the ceiling. This last time I did that, I overheard someone say, “It always gives me great comfort to see the cross up there.” I’m glad I didn’t voice the thought that went through my mind: the cross was most definitely not originally intended, by those who used it on slaves, subjects, prisoners and rebels, as a sign of great comfort.
I also start each vespers service by saying that we will take some requests for favorite hymns to sing. There is a gentleman who every Sunday I’m there requests that we sing “The Old Rugged Cross.” Now don’t roll your eyes and ask, “Doesn’t he know any other songs?” He has Stage 4 cancer. I can tell you that because he is quite open with everyone about it. So I’m not violating any pastoral confidentiality nor any HIPPA regulations. Could it be that he talks about his cancer so calmly, and with such equanimity and acceptance, because of what that hymn expresses, that we shall “exchange [that old rugged cross] someday for a crown” It’s not hard to see how the cross would be a symbol of comfort for him.
With that gentleman who always requests the Old Rugged Cross, I too can sing, “And I love that old cross where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain.” The cross gives me the comfort of knowing that when I face the Most High and Most Holy, my sins have been paid for and pardoned.
But the cross is like a diamond with many facets. Look at it from different angles and some slightly different, but related, things emerge. For the weak, the lonely, those overlooked and those overrun by the cult of success, the cross speaks of God’s solidarity with us in our weakness, our mortality, and our vulnerability. It speaks of a culture of solidarity between a holy God and us sinners, between the eternal God and us mortals, between the Almighty God and us in our frailty. Among us, it speaks of solidarity between Jew and Gentile, solidarity among the poor and the prosperous, solidarity among the powerful and the powerless, solidarity between the haves and the have-nots, between the successful and the strugglers. Which is good news for everyone, because we are all some of each. Another word for that culture of solidarity is The Kingdom of God. And we, the church, are the demonstration plot, or pilot project of God’s cross-shaped culture of solidarity.
But from the viewpoint of Corinth’s cult of success, the cross doesn’t look so comforting. If anything, it looks like the finger of that giant hand which King Belshazzar of ancient Babylon saw in the middle of his riotous feast, in his cult of success, or excess. That hand was writing the writ of his empire’s doom upon the wall. Or maybe the cross looks like a giant arrow pointing downward from the sky, drawing our attention and affection downward to the very people who get sacrificed to the cults of success, the slaves, the soldiers, the subjects, the poor, the powerless, the supposedly expendable and negligible people. From the temples to the cult of success, the cross may even look like a giant crowbar, coming down from heaven to pry up their shrines and symbols, so that in their place can arise a culture of solidarity.
So in answer to the second question, What power does the cross reveal and unleash in today’s Corinths? It reveals and unleashes the power of God’s culture of solidarity, in place of our cult of success. The cross of Jesus Christ reveals and unleashes the power of God’s compassion, of God’s identification and solidarity with us in Christ, in all aspects of our humanity except sin, even to sharing our suffering, shame and death, and so create in us a culture of solidarity.
I saw something of this culture of solidarity taking shape in, of all places, the Detroit metro area when our family lived there some twenty-five years ago. Detroit, as you may know, is one of the most racially segregated and estranged urban areas in the country. To cross Eight Mile Road (yes, the one made famous by the rapper Eminem), the road which separates predominantly poor African-American Detroit from its mostly wealthy Anglo suburbs, feels like crossing no-man’s land in World War I. But a culture of solidarity was being created by some churches and ministries across 8 Mile Road, especially by an inter-church ministry called “Joy of Jesus.”
Joy of Jesus brought together churches and businesses, faith and entrepreneurship, to start a food bank, a school for under-served children, a daycare for working parents, summer camps for youth and children, a car repair business so that Detroit residents could get to jobs in the suburbs, and a job search and training center. Black Detroit church members and leaders started and ran Joy of Jesus, along with staff, interns, volunteers, funds and friendships from the predominantly Anglo churches.
That school and those ministries demonstrated God’s culture of solidarity on both sides of 8 Mile Road, rather than a cult of success that estranged white from black, rich from poor, city from suburb. I have to believe that the cross of Jesus Christ has everything to do with that.