A Sermon on 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Preached February 3, 2002

By Donald M. Tuttle

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

Years ago a theologian declared that preachers ought to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. As I understand it, this declaration was a call to relevance. He rightly understood that people no longer live in biblical times and the preacher who spends his or her 20 minutes on Sunday explaining in great detail the architectural emphases of the Solomonic Temple will not only bore his or her congregation but leave them void of a meaningful word from God. Only when the preacher or the faith addresses the questions people are asking is it relevant.

Certainly those are wise words. But as important as "relevance" may be, we need to acknowledge its dangers. Too often, in our attempt to be relevant, we have found ourselves giving up convictions central to our faith.

Not long ago I was looking at a catalog of evangelism programs. One book that was offered outlined what it called "event evangelism." The premise was to invite a celebrity or well-known person in the community to an event in which he or she would talk—Oprah-style—about his or her faith. That is not a bad idea. Nor is it a new one. Robert Schuller does it virtually every Sunday, parading before the congregation the hottest available movie stars, politicians, authors or sports figures to tell about their faith.

Yet is that being relevant? Is it making the faith significant to the people in the pews? Or is it subtly corrupting the faith by suggesting that following Jesus is not about taking up one’s cross but about grabbing the key to wealth, power, success and the other desires our culture worships?

Let me give you another example. We met at a minister’s meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. He was the campus minister at the University of Louisville, a position funded by the Disciples of Christ and a couple of other denominations. At the time our congregation was trying to devise a way to reach out to the college community, so I asked him to tell me about his ministry. He talked about some of the activities he organized and in the course of the conversation he mentioned—just in passing—that he never spoke about Jesus. I found that curious and I asked him about it. He said there were people of many different faiths on campus and to speak of Jesus would isolate him from them. He also said that many of the faculty would not welcome him as a peer if he sounded too Christian. "I just talk about God," he said. "That doesn’t bother anyone."

Yet do you see what was happening? To be relevant, he had to sublimate the fundamental confession that he had made in his baptism and in his ordination, the fundamental conviction of Christianity—that Jesus is Lord, that he is the one by which we know God. To become "relevant" he had to stop proclaiming Jesus Christ.

Often today for Christians to be considered "relevant" we must water down our convictions about God, Jesus, the purpose of humanity, and the intentions of God for our life to the point we are no longer faithful to that which we have received. As William Willimon has put it: "In leaning over to speak to the modern world, we have fallen in."

So what must we do? Should we be deliberately irrelevant?

Of course not. But what we must remember is that Christ did not come to merely speak to people, to affirm their current understanding of the world. He came to change them and their understandings. He came to transform them from their human point of view to God’s point of view. And he did so not by fulfilling their cultural expectations but by defying them, by challenging them to see the world in a fundamental different way, through the cross.

Today the cross has been sanitized. Everybody wears one, including Brittany Spears, Madonna and Eminem. Today the cross is a fashion accessory, polished gold or shining silver. But for those in the first century, the cross was anything but beautiful or charming. It was an instrument of capital punishment, of torture and death. Those sent to the cross were first flogged nearly to death and then their hands and feet were nailed to the wood. Stripped naked, they were left—sometimes for days—for the weight of their own bodies to suffocate them, for the elements to ravage them, and for the people to mock them. In that culture, the cross was a symbol of the ultimate failure.

So it was no wonder that many rejected the news that Jesus was the Christ. The Jewish culture said the Messiah would inaugurate a great kingdom. It said the Messiah would sweep to power by defeating the forces opposed to God—forces like the Roman government. They even expected great signs of God’s work to be manifested in the sun and moon. To them, it was unthinkable for anyone to suggest the messiah died, much less died on a cross.

The Greeks found the idea equally foolish. What their culture prized was wisdom and intelligence. They had already concluded that God, to be God, had to be above any possibility of pain or distress. To claim that a man who wasn’t smart enough to save himself from crucifixion was God’s son was unthinkable to them.

Yet what did Paul do? Did he play down Jesus’ death on the cross and play up his miracles or teachings? Did he try to make the faith more relevant by reshaping it to fit their expectations? No. Paul rightly understood that the relevance of the faith was not something they could grasp without conversion, without abandoning their old way of thinking and adopting a new one. That is why he says that the cross is foolishness for the perishing but the power of God for those being saved. That is why he says it is a stumbling block for the Jews and foolishness for the Greeks, but the power and wisdom of God for those who are called, those Jews and Greeks who have come to see the world through God work on the cross. Only those who have been changed by their faith in Christ can understand that through the cross God accomplished what no power on earth could do—defeat death and evil once and for all. Only those who have been changed by their faith in Christ can grasp the wisdom of a God who sends the Son to redeem humanity. They understood not because the faith had been made relevant to their cultural expectations but because their expectations had been changed by their faith.

Let me offer another example. Many of you may be familiar with Malcom Muggeridge. He was a British journalist, author and satirist. For most of his adult life, he reported a fascination with the Christian faith but still rejected it. In fact, he wrote in 1966 that he didn’t believe in the resurrection of Christ or that Jesus was the son of God. But just a few years later he would embrace Christianity and become on of its staunchest defenders.

What made the difference? Was it that someone had come along and made the faith relevant to him? No, it was through a process of conversion, a process by which the assumptions and expectations he brought to the faith were changed and he began to see the power and wisdom in what God had done through Christ.

One such conversion took place in Calcutta, India. Malcolm was visiting a home for lepers run by the Missionaries of Charity. He had always imagined that a non-religious human-centered approach was the best way to view the world. He believed that was the way to bring unity and peace to the world. But as he strolled through that leper facility, he realized that no merely humanist view could account for lepers, much less take care of them. To care for those the world does not want to touch, to humanely treat the outcasts of society, made no sense to him. But as he spoke to Mother Teresa and the others, as he began to be immersed in their world, he began to see that their actions made sense in a cross-shaped culture, a culture that knows God loves people enough to suffer and die for them. His experience changed his expectations.

So what is it that we are doing in the church today? It is hip to be relevant, to offer a quick answer for the questions people are asking. But the deeper challenge we face as the church is to help people let faith change them, their view and their questions. The deeper challenge we face is immersing and sustaining people in a culture shaped not by today’s newspaper but the cross of Christ.

Ruth and I have often talked about the situations we experience in ministry. Often people come to us in the midst of crisis—a women with an unwanted pregnancy or a couple whose marriage is in trouble. Often they want a quick answer, a simple solution. We have a relevant ministry to offer in such times. But the greater challenge is bringing people into the life of Christ so that they can see the world through the cross, see the way in which God intends our sexuality to be manifested, the way marriage is intended to be live. The greater challenge is to help people come to see through the culture of the cross and thus live in its light.