Christ the Power of God
for
Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ
September 14, 2025
by
Rev. Tom Sorenson
Scripture: 1
Corinthians 1:22-24
Let us pray:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be
acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
It
really is strange when you stop to think about it, isn’t it. I mean, we’re a
Christian church, which means we worship and seek to follow someone named Jesus
of Nazareth, whom Christians confess to be the Christ, God’s Anointed One, and
indeed even to be God Incarnate. We call him Lord and Savior, or at least some
of us do; but here’s an undeniable historical fact: Jesus’ itinerant ministry
around Galilee and eventually Judea in what we call the first century CE ended
in dismal failure. It’s easy enough to look at what happened to him and say he
was a fool who didn’t understand the world in which he lived. He did, after
all, die a horrible death on a Roman cross, the Roman cross being an instrument
not only of death but also of terror directed against all the people.
Criminals, especially political criminals, got themselves crucified. Decent
people didn’t. From a worldly perspective, there is only one thing we can call
Jesus: Loser! His ministry ended in disaster. He ended up being executed in a
horrific way as a political criminal.
And
yet. And yet the cross, that instrument of suffering, death, and terror on
which Jesus died, became the central symbol of the Christian faith. And Paul
speaks of that cross in the text we just heard. In our passage from 1
Corinthians this morning, Paul calls Christ crucified “the power of God
and the wisdom of God.” The obvious response to that claim seems to be: Say
what! A man nailed to a cross has or is the power of God? A man nailed to a
cross has or is the wisdom of God? That doesn’t make a lick of sense! And, of
course, from a purely worldly point of view, it doesn’t.
But
God doesn’t work from a worldly point of view. God works from a point of view
that so transcends our human way of seeing things that we can never fully know
just what God’s point of view is. Yet one way to make sense out of Jesus’
seemingly senseless crucifixion is to consider just how Christ crucified could
indeed be the power and the wisdom of God. That’s what I want to try to do this
morning.
According
to worldly wisdom, Jesus’ crucifixion should have been the end of him. But what
happened regarding Jesus after he was crucified and, of course, after he was
resurrected? His movement didn’t die with him as had the movements of many
other would-be messiahs. Instead, his followers, or at least some of them,
stayed together. His followers, or at least some of them, began to proclaim
Jesus and his teachings to be “good news,” “gospel,” indeed to be the best news
there ever was or ever could be.
At
first there weren’t many of them, certainly less than one thousand and perhaps
less than one hundred. At first they were all Jews, and nearly all other Jews
rejected their declaration that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. At first, very
few gentiles would have understood anything Jesus’ followers were saying. For
the Jesus movement is rooted in Judaism and doesn’t make much sense if you
don’t know Judaism, which only very few gentiles of the time did. The earliest
Christians should have gotten nowhere when they proclaimed the gospel of Jesus
Christ to non-Jews.
But
they didn’t. It took awhile, but by around three hundred years after Jesus’
death, the new faith that claimed him as its founder became the official faith
of that Roman Empire that had so brutally executed him. And from there,
Christianity spread around the world. Today, it is by far the largest faith
tradition in the world. Christians have spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to
every corner of this little planet we live on.
Now,
don’t get me wrong. I know perfectly well that the tradition has gotten Jesus
wrong more than it has gotten him right. I know perfectly well that Christians
have been guilty of sin after sin, the sins of hatred and the sins of violence.
It’s easy enough to dump all over Christianity and call it all horribly
misguided, for a great deal of it has been and is horribly misguided. I’ve
written plenty of condemnation of what Christianity became and is myself, as
have countless other people.
But
here’s something of which I need to remind myself and perhaps need to remind
you. The horrible parts of the history of the Christian faith are only part of
the story. They’re only part of the story because the Christian faith does and
always has contained within it not only darkness but also great light. Great
spiritual light. The light of peace. The light of hope. The light of love.
Indeed, the light of God. And countless people over the last two millennia have
found all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in and through the Christian faith. I
have found many of those gifts in my Christian faith, and I hope that you have
found them too. Jesus’ crucifixion, of which Paul speaks so powerfully, should
have been the end of him. It wasn’t.
But
what do we see in the way the Jesus’ movement didn’t die with him? We see that
God works through the Christian faith in the world, though not only through the
Christian faith. We see that God works through Christianity and indeed in the
world generally in ways we humans find hard to understand and usually consider
to be weakness rather than strength. God works through people and only through
people. God works quietly. Almost always behind the scenes. God has immense
power, but God doesn’t use that power to intervene directly in the world to
compel change. Rather, God works slowly. God bends the arc of the universe
toward justice, but God does it slowly and in almost imperceptible ways, and
sometimes that arc reverses course and moves away from justice. Yet, with time,
God does draw justice out of oppression. God draws peace out of violence. God
draws hope out of despair. Maybe we don’t often see God doing those things in
the world, but God is there doing them through God’s people nonetheless.
And
folks, isn’t that very, very good news today? We live in a world and in a
nation that have gone badly off course. In our nation today the sin of racism
is on the rise. That despicable thing we call white supremacy is becoming
socially acceptable again. Our cherished democracy is under assault. The
environment of the only planet we have to live on is under assault, and those
in power in our country not only don’t do anything about it, they make it worse
by denying that the assault is real. The health of all Americans is under
assault by a Department of Health and Human Services that denies the efficacy
and safety of vaccines. The welfare of the most vulnerable among us is under
assault by a government that slashes the amount of money to assist them while
giving massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy. Yes, indeed. We live in a nation
that is pretty thoroughly messed up.
But
see, the world has always been pretty thoroughly messed up. Tragically,
Christians have done more than their share to mess it up, but the Christian
faith has also always also been there, through at least a minority of
Christians, speaking God’s truth and working to bend the course of history in
the right directions. And over long periods of time, the Christian faith has,
at least some extent, succeeded in doing so. The world today, messed up as it
is, is nowhere near as violent as the Roman Empire was in Jesus’ day. And
though injustice and oppression are intolerable realities among us, they are
far less prevalent in our world than they were in Jesus’ world. And God has
done and is doing a good deal of that work precisely through the people who
claim Jesus as their Savior.
There
really is no way of seeing Jesus other than as Christ crucified, just as Paul
says. And Christ crucified has been the power and the wisdom of God at work in
the world, in God’s own ways, ever since that unjust crucifixion that took
place so very long ago. We can, and indeed we must, continue to trust that God
is at work in God’s own ways in our time just as God as always been at work in
God’s own ways throughout human history. If we will look beneath the surface of
Christianity’s horrific history and, in many ways, horrific reality today, we
can see Christ crucified as indeed the power and the wisdom of God. Therein
lies our source of hope. Therein lies our only source of hope in today’s
troubled world.
So
let us cling to our faith in Christ crucified. Let us hold onto that faith as
the solid rock on which we can stand. Let us trust with every fiber of our
being that God has not abandoned us any more than God has ever abandoned people
who truly understand Jesus Christ and the ways of God he teaches us. The ways
of nonviolence. The ways of peace. The ways of justice. The ways of love. If we
can hold onto that trust, we can make it through these difficult times, and we
might even be able to help our nation make it through these troubles times. May
it be so. Amen.
