The latest Sermon

Rev. Ellen Campbell Gardner

Jeremiah 9:23-24, 1 Corinthians 4:8-13

Teach us your paths. Lead us in your truth and teach us. For you are the God of our salvation. For you we wait, all through Jesus Christ our Lord.

 If I were to say to you, these are terrible times. If I were to say to you, society has turned from one God to many gods. If I were to say to you, immorality is rampant. There's moral corruption everywhere. If I were to say to you, there's political instability. Oh, you're getting nervous, aren't you? If I were to say to you, there's judicial injustice. Where if I were to say to you, there's divisions and fractions abound. You might think that I'm talking about the world today.

But no, this is the introduction to Jeremiah and to 1 Corinthians. Because believe it or not, those were times of equal instability as today. Actually, more instability than today.

Jeremiah was a prophet in the time of Israel just before the exile. When the people of Israel didn't believe that they could ever be conquered. Because, quite frankly, the Assyrians couldn't do it the last time. And we all know that they're the biggest and the baddest enemies around. So that didn't happen then. We can depend on the walls around Jerusalem to save us. And that's how they lived. Depending on rocks to save them.

 And then we come to the Corinthians. And wow. Whoa. I've heard it explained probably the best way by my dear friend, Pastor Carolyn Poteet. That Corinth, it was right on the trading lines. Corinth was a cross between L.A., New York City, and Las Vegas. That gives you just a sense. In fact, there was a phrase that people used to say, Living like Corinthians in a time of Rome. And that meant that you were living a pretty wildlife. The role of the prophet Jeremiah and Paul in our New Testament text finds themselves asking some of the same questions that we as Christians today are asking ourselves.

How do we function in a highly secular society? How do we serve with delight when things seem to be crumbling around us? How do we cultivate a heart for desiring God first and God alone? This is our task this morning as we read from Jeremiah. Let's start with the ninth chapter, verses 23 through 24. This is the back of your bulletin if you want to read along. But I'll read it for you. This is what the Lord says. Let not the wise boast of their wisdom, nor the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me. That I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on the earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord.

And from our New Testament text, from 1 Corinthians 4, verses 8 through 13. And you might think I'm crazy when I'm done reading this. Why did she choose that text? But it will speak to us through the power of the Holy Spirit. Already you have all you want. Already you have become rich. You have begun to reign, and that without us. How I wish that you really had begun to reign, so that we also might reign with you. For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of procession. Like those condemned to die in the arena. We've been made spectacles to the whole universe, to angels as well as to human beings. We are fools for Christ. But you are so wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. We are honored. You are honored. We are dishonored. And to this very hour, we go hungry and thirsty. And we are enraged. We are brutally treated. We are homeless. We work hard with our hands. And when we are cursed, we bless. When we're persecuted, we endure it. When we are slandered, we answer kindly. We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world, right up to this moment.

Traditionally, we say, this is the Word of God. And people say, thanks be to God. But you might wonder after that scripture, if thanks be to God is what we should be saying. This is a confounding scripture. And I think it shows the confoundedness that Paul was feeling in the midst of hearing all of the news from this church that is just off the rails. This church that is living according to, well, living like Corinthians, instead of living like Christ's followers.

 My husband and I, Ernest, were here last week. We have been serving as transitional pastors for the last five or six years. He for 13 years. That's his gig. And we know that the church is a tough place. On the one hand, we accept what earlier in Corinthians we hear that we have all we want already in Christ as Christians. All is ours because we are in Christ, and Christ is in God. That's our assurance. That's our identity. But as transitional pastors, we see that many of the churches we enter into talk so much about what happened 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Money in the bank, seats filled, lots of youth tours.

I was just speaking with your music director about that earlier. I was at my home church last weekend for the 50th anniversary of Camp's ministry. And I was around and surrounded by so many of my contemporaries that we went on mission trips to Europe.

And it's great to look back. But I wonder sometimes if we're like the church in Jeremiah's time, that we spend so much time looking back in the present that we don't see that our future is only in Christ. Or in God as Yahweh, as the people in Jeremiah's time would have seen.

It leads me, and believe me, there is hope in this. It leads me to ask, what is it that defines us as a church? And that's really what Paul was asking the church of Corinth. What is it that leads you? What is it that defines you? Who do you belong to? And it causes us to take time particularly, no, at every church right now, to take time to rethink what it is that we are doing.

Is our hope based on what we call a lower room mentality of peoples and places and personalities and programs? Because those always seem to change, don't they? The things that we believed 10, 20 years ago are very different from the things that we believe today if our entire focus is on people, places, personalities, and programs. But if we live in the upper room, our focus is on Jesus Christ the same yesterday, the same today, the same tomorrow. And Paul is challenging us to still see us first and foremost as disciples of Jesus Christ.

And he says, are you willing to be fully in, to be fully on display perhaps, to be fully ridiculed by a secular culture, to face hardships for the gospel? In other words, what is your focus, what are your expectations? Are they lower room or the upper room? And he uses this very interesting illustration, and I think Pittsburghers get this better than anybody else. Because this is, if you remember in the first part of the first Corinthian text I just read, he's talking about a procession. And the procession that he's talking about where he says, we are at the back of the procession, was a procession that the Romans always carried out after they won a battle.

It's kind of like the Steeler's Victory Parade, or the Penguin's Victory Parade, or even further back, we still remember the Pirate's Victory Parade, right? Oh, everybody comes downtown, and we all enjoy the victory. But there's one slight difference. In this parade in Rome, the captors that survived were led at the very back of the parade.

And their destination was very, very different from all of the Roman guard. The Roman guard would go back to their barracks, but these people, these conquered people, were destined for the Colosseum. Either as gladiators fighting for their lives and probably losing, or as people that would be fed to the animals. All for sport. They were conquered people. And Paul is saying, we are at the back of the line with the conquered people.

 And, you know, if your focus is lower Rome, that should be pretty frightening. That should be something we don't want to buy into, do we? Because nobody wants to be led to death. But the reality is that all of humanity is at the back of the line, aren't we? Because we're all dead by sin, right? We're all broken.

We're all headed for the Colosseum. Because none of us escaped death. We're all headed for the Colosseum.

But Paul says there's a very different thing going on. Because we stand and we take our place at the back of the procession because we know we're conquered by something very different. We're not conquered by lower Rome, people, persons, personalities, and programs.

We're conquered by the emperor, the God who would not let us go and send his son. We're conquered by the one that is the son who gave up his life because he knew the character and he knew the steadfastness and he knew the faithfulness of the father. And we are conquered by the Holy Spirit that is guiding us and always with us.

Do you see the difference? Who is it that has conquered you? And does it really annoy you that I am saying to Pittsburghers in 2024 that you are a conquered people? As Americans, we don't like that idea. But as Christians, we do like that idea. Because we understand what conquering by Jesus Christ has done for us. Because it hasn't led us ultimately through death to death. But it's led us through death to life eternal. So how is it that you're seeing the church in 2024? Do you see it as the ABCs of church? And I love this one because it really does. I was convicted by it. I'll just say that. Attendance. A. We really would like the attendance of a big box church, wouldn't we? We don't want to say we would like to be a big box church, but we don't like the attendance of a big box church. B. Building. Beautiful. And your building is beautiful. But it can take over a lot of the budget, can't it? Keep it that way. And cash.

How much money do we have in the bank? Those for a rural church that's living in. And you've got to cover those things. Don't get me wrong.

But when you live in a lower room, that becomes the primary thing in our minds. Those ABCs. But what is Paul? He's giving a very different acronym.

He's saying that R should be foolish, F for foolish, W for weak, and D for dishonored. Now, that just doesn't sound like good news. And if you read this through and you're not thinking of it through the upper room lens, it may feel a little hopeless.

So who are the victors, then, in this parade? It's all about the way you look at it, isn't it? It's all about who you worship. And dear ones, we are created with a God-shaped hole in our heart because we were created by God to be in relationship with God. But John Calvin also reminds us what sin has done to that hole in our heart.

And he puts it this way. He says, you know, because of sin, the human heart is an idol factory. And when we forget that, we unwittingly reduce God's ways to our ways, God's thoughts to our thoughts.

Our hearts become factories of idols in which we fashion and refashion God to fit our needs and our desires. And Jeremiah, boy, he got that, didn't he? Do you remember what he said? Wise men don't boast in wisdom. And I say there's always somebody wiser out there, isn't there? If you're smart, good on you. But there's always going to be somebody smarter than you. Mighty men, Jeremiah said, won't boast in his might because we know that strength fades. I felt that this morning when I got up there. Strength fades. Rich men can't boast in their riches. I've never seen a rich person be able to take their riches to heaven.

In fact, Jesus had a parable about that one, didn't he? If you're going to boast, Jeremiah gives us this upper room advice. Boast that you understand, and you know God. Do you know God? Do you know the power of the one that you are worshiping this morning? All of us can't know that entirely.

But is that the one who has your focus every day? Jesus knew the Father, didn't he? Jesus took time to go and be with the Father and pray. Jesus, there are a lot of things the disciples wanted him to do. And he was like, no, I'm about my Father's business. So no, I can't be doing that. We go into the next town. But there are people here that need to be healed.

Yeah, but that's not why I came. I came to bring the good news that God is not giving up on us, that God will save us. Jeremiah saw that Judah was focused on human wisdom and power.

 And Paul recognized that the Corinthian church was making the same mistake. The question is, are we any different? Can we leave this place today with fewer people in the congregation, with hope or with despair? And you're not alone. Every church is going through this right now.

My point is not to judge you, but it's to ask, what do I do with God's Word when it contradicts the culture that I live in? The lifestyle I've adopted, do I choose God's call or do I choose the culture? And how do I justify that choice? If I'm a disciple of Jesus Christ, how am I justifying the choice? So let's talk a little bit about these words. Foolish. Weak. Fools for Christ, scum of the earth. What is God doing here? Through Paul's words, what do we call to do? Because we know the Beatitudes are kind of similar, aren't they? Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn.

What are we doing here? What Paul is doing is he's calling us back from the illusion, and it's the first lie, wasn't it? You're not the boss of me. I don't have to do what you say, God. I'm going to eat that apple.

He's calling us back to that union and the power of who we were when we were totally reliant and totally lived in the wisdom and the glory of God. He's calling us back from the delusion that in ourselves, we can do it all. He's saying that weakness connected to the God that created the whole universe is power.

He's saying that foolishness in the eyes of this culture that changes all the time, but in the eyes of the one who created it all and has all the wisdom, that the foolishness of this world is the wisdom of God. Trust it. And when you are captured and a captive of God, then all the things that are scandalous to the world become honor.

Take the cross. And I wear a cross around my neck. Maybe some of you do too. But when Jesus died, you would not have had a cross around your neck. Because the cross was scandal. The cross was humiliation. The cross was the most wicked and awful way to die. It was relegated to only the worst of society. And yet we wear our cross around our necks as a sign of the sacred now because Jesus has transformed it.

When we are wild, we bless. And that changes lives, my dear friends. When somebody wants to hurt you and you forgive them, they realize they don't have power over you anymore.

The most frightening thing to a despot is the belief of Christians, and that's why they have to kill them in China. They have to kill them in other places because they cannot conquer the spirit that has been conquered by Jesus Christ. When persecuted, we endure. When slandered, we entreat. Because we have been conquered by the one who conquers all things. The Apostle Paul, did you know that when the Apostle Paul later, after he had written this letter, but later, when he was in prison, they had to change out his car all the time because he kept bringing them to Jesus Christ.

And it wasn't because of all the things he said, it was because of the way he lived. The same thing was true for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That wonderful, wonderful theologian and preacher from World War II who could have come to the United States, could have been in New York City teaching at a very famous seminary, but he chose to go back to Germany to be with the people and speak truth in the midst of Nazi Germany. And he was jailed in a concentration camp, and he was guarded by SS guards and you know SS guards were the most formidable of all the guards in the German army. And they had to keep, again like Paul, they had to keep changing them out because they kept coming to Jesus Christ and they kept asking for forgiveness and they were ruined as SS guards. They were conquered by the gospel, not by the victors.

 And so the question becomes in this church, when you feel persecuted, when you feel weak, you praise God and say, what's next? In this world when you're confounded by the things that are going on, do you fall into despair over this election? Whatever side you're on, do you fall into despair, or do you say, I am a conquered person of the one whose will will be done as it is on earth, as it is in heaven? Do you leave this place with joy at the name fool for Christ? Or do you wince when you're called scum of the earth by somebody who just has never been conquered by the prince of peace? I pray that as you go out, I pray this sermon hasn't been so long that you've lost focus. I pray that you find yourself at the end of the line with the truth and the hope and the victory in Jesus.