Christ the Power of God

 

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.