4/3/60

Scripture: I Corinthians 1: 10-25

Text: I Corinthians 1: 23-24; “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

When Paul was known as Saul, a well informed and capable Pharisee, it was easy to understand his determination to stamp out that sect which called themselves “Christians.” They seemed to be a dangerous lot. And anyone could see that the effective way to deal with them was to put them in jail; perhaps execute a few of them; and keep after them until the fad wore itself out and the people all turned again to proper Hebrew religious principles! But when the stormy Saul became a convert to Christianity, was re-named Paul, and went about preaching “Christ crucified” --- that was not easy to believe! What got into the man, anyway?

Wherever Paul went preaching “Christ crucified,” he met incredulity and skepticism. The notion of a conquest by dying on a cross ran directly opposite to the thinking of that time. (As a matter of fact, it runs counter to a lot of the thinking of our time, too!) Whoever heard of winning a battle by being nailed to a cross? Battles were won with swords, spears, and stones. Nobody achieved sovereignty by sacrifice. The very idea of it was a “stumbling-block” to the Jews, and foolishness to the intellectual and reasoned Greeks. It is a wonder that Paul convinced anybody.

It is worth noticing, however, that Paul did not modify nor water down his message to make it more palatable to those who were skeptical. There are those who say, “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.” But Paul was not of that belief. On the contrary, he kept on saying to skeptical crowds, “We preach Christ crucified.” They could accept it; or they could reject it. However, before they turned their backs upon it, they had better look at their own lives in the light of it. There was more to it than first meets the eye; for in truth “Christ crucified” was “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Part of the difficulty lay in the fact that Paul started where most people were then reluctant to start, and where we are equally reluctant to start. He began with the stubborn fact of sin. Paul knew that sin had to be conquered before anything else could be conquered. It made no difference who ruled their world -- whether Rome or Egypt or Babylon or Assyria or Israel --- nothing would be made better until somebody overcame “the radical evil in human nature.” Turn anywhere you please in our time, and it is plain that the trouble is sin --- sin in the Soviet, sin in Germany, sin in France, sin in the USA.

I realize that one who attempts to discuss this field is in the company of those who are supposed to take such positions! Was it not the late President Calvin Coolidge who is reported to have attended a nearby Congregational Church without Mrs. Coolidge one vacation Sunday. I do not know why she was not along, for I have the impression that the whole family usually attended Sunday worship together. At any rate, Mrs. Coolidge asked her husband, when he returned home after, what the minister had preached about. The president reported, in one word, “Sin.” “Well,” persisted Mrs. Coolidge, “what did he say about it?” And Cal replied, “He was opposed to it.”

Maybe he could have been expected to report in the same vein had he been present here today. At any rate, sin has been a burden of the prophetic message throughout the ages -- not because it is a favorite topic of preachers, but because it is the constant burden of mankind’s trouble. For we try to avoid the fact of our own sin in one of two ways.

1) First, we avoid the fact of our own sin by looking at the sin of others. It is easier to think of the sins of those terrible Soviets than it is to look directly and honestly, at the wrongs that we allow to continue rampant in our own land. It is easier to note and bemoan the crime wave in Chicago than to face the wrongs of ourselves and our own families in this church where it gets pretty close to home. That is just what Israel did 1900 years ago. As the Jews saw it, the Romans were colossal sinners. If Roman power could be destroyed, or expelled, and Israel restored to power, sin would be conquered and the kingdom of righteousness would return.

It is always easier to look beyond our selves for sin than to look at ourselves. We are like the administrative leaders of a small college which tried to attract the attention of anxious parents with this catalogue announcement in bold type: “This college is located seven miles from every known form of sin.” So we are disposed to look for it somewhere beyond us, or at least away from ourselves. Again, we avoid the fact of sin by calling it something else. We speak of a “mistake,” an “error of judgment,” and “unfortunate affair,” --- but not sin. Sometimes we blame our sins on “heredity,” or “environmental factors” or glandular deficiency (which may help with analysis but avoids blame.) But sin isn’t sin at all! That is why a student came up with the prize question submitted in her ethics class. “Professor,” she wanted to know, “what the dickens is sin?”

Call it what we will, the simple truth is that sin is a fact which we cannot avoid. It confronts us at every turn - in school or out of school; in politics or out of politics; at church, at home, at work. Why do many of us lock our doors at night? The answer is the fact of sin. Why do policemen patrol their beats and cruise around our town day and night? It is an expensive procedure to deal with sin. Why do you put your valuables in a bank vault behind a heavy door of especially hardened steel? You simply know that sin is real. Income tax investigators, juvenile courts, truant officers, the FBI --- all these are a concession to the fact of sin. A lot of newspapers would be hard put to it to fill their space and sell their product if it were not for human sin. For sin is news. And, if some people have a tendency to break into that part of the news now and then, a host of us eagerly look for the news on that account. Possibly it is our own sin that makes us so willing to recognize the sins of others. It enables us to feel more virtuous than we are, which, by the way, is sin!

It is sin that loosens our tongues in gossip that does no one any good. It is sin that inspires our conflicts and animosities. It is sin that destroys the unity and peace of homes. There is no use is asking: “What the dickens is sin?” You and I ought to know!

Paul started with the fact of sin. And he went on to say, “We preach Christ crucified.” It was his way of saying one very important thing; namely that sin is costly. In essence, every sin means that somebody is crucified in one way or another. It means that somebody is hurt, injured. Whether you know it or not, sin hurts you. It hurts me. Paul put it aptly when he wrote, “The wages of sin is death.” We might wish he had said it so the translation need not sound ungrammatical, but we have no quarrel with the essential truth of Paul’s statement. Sin involves spiritual death; it poisons the possibilities of our minds and wills. It makes cowards of us. It separates us from God and leaves us isolated from the source of courage and faith and hope.

Now and then you will hear some husband say; “I’m in the dog house.” Maybe he forgot the little woman’s birthday. Or perhaps he stayed too late on the golf course. Possibly he tramped through the freshly cleaned living room without wiping the garden dirt off his shoes. When a fellow says, “I’m in the dog house,” he describes a temporary isolation from his wife. And the experience is emotionally and spiritually upsetting.

Of course, there may be times when we put ourselves in the dog house. We become isolated from others not by their anger but by our own sense of guilt. The “hidden sins of the heart” make us unable to communicate comfortably with those against whom we have sinned. Fundamentally, sin leads us to self-imposed isolation from God, It puts us in a spiritual “dog house.” God has no less love for us, but our communion with him is thwarted by something in ourselves. There is a self-erected barrier between ourselves and the source of our self-respect and dignity, our faith and our hope. Sin hurts us, and involves our own suffering.

More than that, there is a close relationship between sin and suffering because all of us are in what the prophet calls the “bonds of love.” Sin is never a private affair. The fellow who staggers down the street “in his cups” does not sin alone. Some of those who see him may be amused at his uncertain motion. But if he happens to be your best friend, or your father or your son, there is nothing funny about his predicament. That folly becomes tragedy to you. Always, where love enters, sin ceases to be comedy and becomes tragedy. Somebody is injured; somebody is being crucified.

You read in a newspaper the sorrowful story of scandal and the lurid story of a marriage that failed for want of loyalty and honor. You may pass it off with the comment, “My, what is this world coming to” and then go on to the sports page. But if it happens to be your sister who is involved, you do not read with objectivity. You know very well that sin means suffering for many. It means, among other things, a cross for you.

I shall never forget the heaviness of heart which filled his eyes and voice years ago, when a fine man said to me in private, after church on a Sunday, “This afternoon, my best friend is going to run away with another man’s wife,” and, though he had struggled to help his friend see and draw back from the wrong that was being committed, he had found no way to avert the tragedy.

The cross of Christ tells plainly that somebody is always crucified by sin. That is not easy to face. A man was in jail where he had been detained for a serious offense. A minister visited him there and then went to talk with the prisoner’s wife and children. It was not a pleasant experience. The most agonizing part of it came from one of the boys, who may have been about 10 years old, who said: “My daddy couldn’t have done anything wrong.” In the days that followed, through trial and conviction, that lad was crucified, emotionally and spiritually. A thousand other kids might have seen in the city newspaper the story of a father who had sinned, and might have read it quite dispassionately. But one who loved was injured.

“We preach Christ crucified,” said Paul, as if he meant to say that there is some relationship between our sin and Christ’s cross.

And indeed there is. We know Pontius Pilate, the practical politician compromising honor for the sake of expedience. We are kin to those Pharisees, standing in defense of our prejudices no matter who gets hurt. We know Peter retreating under stress to denial of his Lord. We are Thomas, doubting the challenge to our faith. We are the multitude, swept along by the tides of the hour, singing praise one day and shouting condemnation a few days later, forgetting our obligation to the highest that we know under the stress of the moment.

We have read before, and we may now read again, the story of Holy Week. Can we read it without being involved? The reason why that story lives, in centuries of repetition right down to the latest moment of human experience, is that so much of it is our own experience. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” There is a single answer to the question: “Yes, I was there; and so were you. God forgive me, I had a part in it. And so did you. “Sometimes it causes me to tremble.”

“We preach Christ crucified” because our kind of sins crucified him then, and still crucify him now. Those of us who read the story of the gospels leading up to Easter recognize ourselves involved in the drama. Perhaps that is one reason why we are so eager to be involved in the drama of the resurrection, as well, on Easter Day.

But part of the deep relationship between our sins and the cross is that upon that cross of redemptive suffering we see the suffering love of God “reconciling the world,” and us, “unto himself.” Put the truth as simply as possible: on the cross we meet the mightiest power there is to redeem and change life, and lift us, forgiven, above the sins that claim us. We meet the decisive power of suffering love that care so deeply.

A professional psychologist remarked that he had developed the capacity to “confront grievous situations unemotionally.” I wonder if he was any help to people in “grievous situations.” Could there be any healing in it? I’m afraid I don’t want my doctor to be oblivious to my pain, nor my dentist to be unmoved by my discomfort. Part of their healing ministry to me has been their understanding of how I feel.

More important, I do not think of God as utterly detached from me in solitary grandeur on a distant heavenly throne. He is beside me, knowing how I feel, sharing my hurts. And even when I grieve Him by my stubborn willfulness or my neglect, His love constantly pulls me away from my sins.

I want Him to let me out of my spiritual dog house in forgiveness and love. And that is what He is ready to do for me--and for you. His readiness to do this is not the result of our wishful thinking. For he plowed it into history at Calvary!

So “we preach Christ crucified” --- the cross is a portrait of God who cares. “We preach Christ crucified,” the visible evidence of God who confronts our grievous situations with compassionate concern and redemptive love.

In a thoughtful moment, a man said to his friend, “I should think the evil of this world would break God’s heart.” To which the friend quietly replied, “It did.” The cross is the stark, splendid symbol of that heart-broken concern. In Marc Connelly’s well-worn play of 30 years ago, “The Green Pastures,” you may remember the scene wherein God looks down from the window of his office, seeing and feeling the sin of the world. And the Lord says to Gabriel, “What more can I do to save them? I’ve sent a flood; I’ve sent plagues; I’ve sent prophets; and they still sin. What can I do to deliver them?”

Standing there by the window, a picture of compassionate concern, he sees a shadow fall on the wall beside him. “Who’s dat?” He asks. And Gabriel replies, “Dat’s Hosea. You remember him, don’t you? -- the prophet whose wife deserted him and shamed him with her unfaithfulness? And in the end, through suffering and love, he brought her back to help her rebuild and renew her life.” And the Compassionate Watcher by the window says, “Does that mean God must suffer too?” “Yes,” says Gabriel, “that’s what it means.” The next scene brings the climax. God, still looking down from the window of his heavenly office, says, with untold anguish, “I see a young man carrying a cross up the hill.”

“We preach Christ crucified” because that is the best way we know to picture the eternally loving and compassionate God constantly ready and longing to redeem us from our sins and gather us into His Kingdom.

AMEN

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, April 3, 1960

Waioli Hiuia Church, March 31, 1974