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“Your church is really dark up front. Have you noticed how you are always in the shadows?"
Leave it to a Wisconsin visitor to rub salt into a familiar wound. The contractor who built the original church changed the plans to give the ceiling above the altar a tilt. I said go for it, because it would be great for sound projection. But he forgot to change the lights, keeping them flush with the ceiling, so all the light for the pulpit, baptismal font and altar goes either right in front of the first step or right onto that beam above me. I’d love to have spotlights coming in from above on the pulpit, altar and baptismal font to bathe them in light and emphasize our proclamation of the Gospel in Word and Sacrament. A remodel job for the future.
But in a way, the gal from West Bend was right. Every preacher in this pulpit better be in the shadow, because that’s where we are saved.
Saved in the Shadow of the Cross
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Real wisdom.
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Real power.
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Real salvation.
“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (18)."
That’s how the Apostle Paul starts out this section of his magnificent letter to the Corinthians, his 4.0 idiot church. Gifted. Wise—with more than a few of the city’s ruling elite in the congregation. Powerful—the gifts of the Holy Spirit had been poured out among them in miraculous fashion with their speaking in tongues and miracles done in their city. But don’t rely on that, Paul was urging them. That will only mislead you. Relying on your power and wisdom will only divide the congregation, condone wicked living and cause self-inflicted trouble. All of this was already happening to them and it would take Paul two letters and one visit to straighten it out! Stay in the shadow of the cross, for there is real wisdom.
Needless to say, the world did not think the message of Jesus Christ was wise. “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe (21)."
Paul uses a word for his work he heard often—moronic. That’s what that Greek word translated for us as “foolishness," means. Absolute moral folly. Moronic, for a set of sons convicted of killing their parents to plead for leniency because they are orphans. Moronic for television executives to say their violence and sex on television influences no one just before they charge companies millions of dollars for advertising so they can influence people to buy their products.
The world thought the preaching of the Gospel was moronic, because, if people where forgiven by God and promised heaven, why should they be good?
There’s that thinking in us, too. I hear it whenever someone asks me if a mass murderer on his deathbed could simply say he was sorry to God and go to heaven. I hear it whenever someone is talking about a vicious, vengeful ex-spouse in a custody or financial battle and they are wishing, though they have not spoken it, that the ex lands in the next to deepest pit in hell.
I know the feeling. Been there. Oh, not the messy divorce part, but I do know that feeling of wanting to call down righteous vengeance from heaven upon the twisted, depraved and incorrigible, having experienced grade school as a Viking fan during the Green Bay Packer glory years.
But the cross isn’t moronic. God’s wisdom is wiser than the world’s wisdom. I’ll talk about forgiveness of sins later, but I want to talk now about how much wiser God’s wisdom is than the world’s wisdom in the realm of godly living.
Forgiven believers live a wise life in this world. They generally don’t rob banks. They generally don’t do dope or methamphetamines. They don’t usually get into their cars, half-smashed, and drive over three neighbors’ front yards before they end up clipping the side of their own garage and stalling out the car.
They do live a godly life because they want to serve God. They live a godly life because they want to be of service to their fellow man. They live a godly life because they want to do good from the heart, whether somebody sees them or not.
That’s why we didn’t have any of those fancy fund drives to get this church built. No major donor support. No thank you dinners and testimonials. No inductees to a hall of fame. Come to think of it, we didn’t even have a party for the gang who took down the pews, stored them and put them back in, saving us about $10,0000 in the process! It was one for all and all for Christ. That’s our attitude, because God has given his wisdom to us, the wisdom that comes from the forgiveness of sins. If it were my ideas that were driving this church, or our synodical president, Karl Gurgel, or Martin Luther’s ideas driving this church, well, I guess to be honest we would have to display those human faces on the walls of this church like Saddam Hussein’s or Mao Tse Tung’s mugs were plastered all over the cities they terrorized. Where are the pictures? Where are the wise sayings of man? All I see when I look around, is the cross.
There’s real power in the cross.
The world of the Apostle Paul was basically like ours. Or at least, like our movies. There were either chic flick people who liked to think and feel, or there were action-adventure people who liked power. You had the Greek geniuses at geometry and on the other hand you had the Roman engineers who could build aqueducts to bring water into Roman swimming pools from hundreds of miles away. “Greeks look for wisdom and Jews demand miraculous signs, but we preach Christ crucified (22)."
The Jew was looking for power, a supernatural power from on high.
They had been raised on the stories of miracle power. Moses delivered the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt with ten terrible plagues culminating in the Passover. Joshua made the River Jordan stop flowing and the sun stand still. The Lord, as Isaiah had predicted, had destroyed an enemy army at the very gates of besieged Jerusalem. Elijah had raised a dead boy. If a man was from God, if his message was from God, “what sign will you give that we may see it and believe in you?"
And here’s what I don’t get. If ever there was someone who did miraculous signs, it was Jesus. Never, in a space of three and a half years had any prophet of God ever done so many miracles. In fact, Jesus pointed to those miracles to strengthen the faith of believers. When imprisoned John the Baptist tried to get the last of his groupies to follow Jesus, Jesus told them, “Tell John the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor (Luke 7.23)." Jesus pointed to those miracles to confront the unbelief of his enemies. “The miracles I do in my Father’s name speak for me, but you do not believe (John 10.25-26)." I don’t know why they didn’t get it, except that Jesus was coming to be a deliverer from sin and they wanted neither to confess their sins nor to stop sinning.
We Americans can get hooked on power at the expense of caring for our spiritual well-being, too. I mean, we’ve got power. Shock and awe. We already can vaporize cities with but a bomb. I wouldn’t be surprised, because we are so sick of our boys getting blown up and shot down in Iraq, if, before I die, every single fighter and bomber will be remote controlled. And why stop with the Air Force? With these super ascenders and robotic assisted shoes, we could probably put a few divisions of robot warriors on the mean streets of any occupied town. No groins—no deadly groin wounds.
Couple military power with the power of modern technology and the power of modern medicine—we can look inside someone else’s heart, and head, too, for that matter!—it is easy to see how we can fall into a very materialistic view of life, like this life is all there is and the spiritual side of us is just make-believe.
But how good is that CAT scan going to be when you and I are standing before God’s Judgment Seat? Think we can blast our way past the pearly gates with a nuclear-tipped cruise missile? Think again. The power of God was revealed in the resurrection of the crucified Christ. To raise someone from the dead and give them eternal life—that’s power!
That’s a power for salvation, because in the shadow of the cross we find real salvation.
“We preach Christ crucified: to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (23)."
Real salvation. What does that mean? Is it that your reputation is salvaged after your death so people think your thoughts again and talk well of you? Like Galileo, who first fought with the Pope about the earth revolving around the sun? What good does (rare) intellectual vindication do people when they are dead? None. Real salvation. Is it that your personal or national interests are preserved by a show of force so that you can make money selling your goods in foreign market or that a disease which threatened your life is now cured? But you can’t take all that money with you. Even if you are literally buried with it, like King Tut, they are not going to accept that currency in the afterworld any more than we accept rubles in America. And another disease will always be waiting in line to do us in.
Real salvation is that our sins are forgiven so that, even though we have to lose our physical life for a time, we will never lose our spiritual life, our soul will never die or suffer torment, but will be reunited with our body for an eternity of happiness alive in heaven.
Jesus doesn’t do your trigonometry problem sets for you. Jesus doesn’t self-detonate the bad guys before they walk into a crowded Iraqi marketplace. Jesus does pay for our sins by his death on the cross and lead us to heaven by his resurrection from the dead. That’s the cross of Christ.
Is that real or not? Are we just fooling ourselves in the shadow of the cross as a way to get through this life? A lot of con men never want their clientele to ask those kinds of questions. Christianity encourages it. In fact, Paul himself, in writing to these same Corinthians said, “If only for this life we have hope, we are to be pitied more than all men (1 Corinthians 15.19)."
How do I know this salvation from the cross is real? I know it because Jesus Christ rose from the dead. He said he was our Savior, he promised to miraculously rise from the dead to prove that he was our Savior, and he did it. Or is that miracle not good enough for us? Of all the eyewitness to the resurrection, not a one of them recanted, even under torture. Persecution even unto death could not shake early Christians from their firm belief that Jesus had risen from the dead and that meant that they would live forever. People who had spent all their lives trying to save themselves through a search for wisdom or through ritual and secret ceremonies gave them up to embrace the cross as the only way to heaven.
How do I know besides Jesus’ resurrection from the dead that this salvation from the cross is real? Watch out now. Are we going to pick and choose our powerful miracles and expect God to do requests? Didn’t Jesus say in a parable, “If they don’t listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not listen, even if someone rises from the dead"? The cross is good enough because Jesus is good enough. He is my life, he is the way, he tells the truth so we are
Saved in the Shadow of the Cross
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Real wisdom.
-
Real power.
-
Real salvation.
So why stay in the shadows? Well, because the spotlight belongs on Jesus. He’s our Savior. You aren’t . I’m not. And the cross, well, it’s like a blast shield to protect us from the blast of God’s anger over sin which he poured out on Jesus when he hung from the cross. Forgiveness is free, but it wasn’t cheap. You and I couldn’t bear that punishment, so Jesus took it upon himself.
So, maybe spotlights, huh? Not to make the whole area bright, but just the three places up here where Jesus comes to us in Word and Sacrament.
Rev. Don Pieper is a minister in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. He has devoted his life to sharing the Gospel of Christ to all of Gods people. For more information about the Green Valley Evangelical Lutheran Church visit us at www.gvelc.com or call 702-454-8979 .
Ask for Pastor Don or Pastor Matt.
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