Beyond Wisdom – Seventh Sunday of Easter (1 Corinthians 1: 25-30)
This week we will step back into the sermon series tying into the theme of “Beyond” which is also the theme of the Disciples of Christ General Assembly, taking place in this July in Memphis, TN. As a reminder, the Assembly is a biennial, soon to be triennial, convention that brings together Disciples from all over the country for a week of fellowship, sharing, learning, and business meetings. Each year there is a scripture and a theme chosen for the Assembly. For this year’s assembly the scripture chosen was Ephesians 3: 20-21. The theme that was selected around this verse is ‘Beyond.’ As in beyond comfort zones, beyond understanding, beyond perceived limitations. Beyond anything that may be keeping us from living in God’s presence with wonder and with hope. As you might have noticed, today’s sermon is titled “Beyond Wisdom.” So, with the context of that theme in mind you might be asking yourself, “Why do we need to get beyond wisdom? Isn’t being wise a good thing? How does wisdom keep us from moving and growing beyond comfort zones, understanding, or limitations? In fact, wouldn’t wisdom help us to grow in this way?”
Well, those are all fair questions. Especially coming from our perspective here in the 21st century where to be wise is a virtue, wisdom is valued, and yet, maybe we see that wisdom is also severely lacking in some areas of our society. In fact, we may feel the need to move toward wisdom not beyond it or away from it. Again, all that is fair. So, let’s look at the text so that we might start to understand why Paul spoke against wisdom.
Our reading comes to us from Paul’s letter to the church he founded in Corinth. At the time, Corinth was a large and prosperous Roman city. It was a hub for commerce and art and philosophy. So, of course, that would make it an attractive location for Paul to start a church. However, all of that meant that there was quite a bit of social stratification and separation in the city. Then, as we see in major cities today, there were social elites, who were able to take advantage of the things the city had to offer, and there were those who were poorer and less fortunate members of society. Paul’s church was made up of both types of people, and this was cause for some division and debate within the church. Another thing that is not uncommon today. Furthermore, as Paul was not the only teacher to see Corinth as a good location for a church. Some of the “wiser” elites in the community were swayed by a teacher named Apollos, who was a powerful and eloquent speaker, especially about Jewish scripture. So, Paul was losing members of his church to this man. Some stayed, but it became just another point of division within the church. Paul writes in this letter to convince them that these divisions can be healed, but also to make a case for foolishness, and of course, his teachings over those of Apollos.
So, when Paul writes this letter to the church, he writes to address these tensions. However, he is not necessarily writing to mend fences or create compromise. His letter, specifically some of the words in our reading today, are meant to encourage radical change. And this is directed at the privileged and well to do people in the church. These few upper class people are implied when Paul states in his letter “Not many of you…” Meaning many in the church were of humble station, but there were some who were well off. The people Paul describes as having “wisdom.”
In this time and in this context, wisdom does not simply mean someone who has the spiritual gift of wisdom. In the context of a city like Corinth wisdom represented the elites. Wisdom represented a source of power that placed certain people further up on the social hierarchy than others. Paul understood that a world that was constructed around this kind of distribution of power was a world that used human wisdom, rather than the wisdom and power of God. So, Paul does something to shift the way his church looks at these things. He decides not to use the word ‘wisdom’ when talking about God. He chooses to describe God’s work in the world as “the foolishness of God” that is opposed to the wisdom of human societies. Specifically, Jesus’s death on the cross is the foolishness of God because it is an example of God showing God’s power through death and humiliation rather than strength.
Some will use wisdom to grab for power and control. God’s power is displayed in the choice of humility. That is, the choice not to use power to conquer or oppress or control. Instead that power is used humbly, to offer freedom through salvation and new life. Now, this sort of thinking made as little sense to people in Paul’s time as it would to people in ours. Especially people with wisdom, or power in society. Through the lens of human wisdom, a God that humbles themself seems foolish. This is best illustrated by victory through the suffering and humiliation of the cross. That Jesus was willing to suffer and die on the cross, at the hands of the elite and powerful of his time, only to rise again in three days, should be proof enough for us Christians that this type of foolishness is the way of God. Unfortunately, we often instead choose to follow the wisdom of the world. We choose to twist and contort God’s foolishness so that it will fit into a human’s wisdom-sized box.
We overlook what Paul says, that wisdom and strength and noble birth are not the way to salvation. Paul says it is only through God and the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ that we are redeemed and made free. It is not something we can take credit for, or as Paul says, boast about, because it nothing we have done. It has been done for us. And yet, we make hoops to jump through and rules to follow in order to bring this radical love back under our understanding and control. If you behave this way, or achieve certain things, you will be saved. You will have earned this gift from God. After all, that’s how we get what we want in life, isn’t it? We make the grades, we win the race, we capture attention, we accumulate more than our neighbors. We earn it.
Paul’s letter calls us to move beyond our understanding of things in this way so that we can be open to change and to God’s will. Looking at the world this way means foolishness equals wisdom, weakness equals strength, and so on. This means looking at something like salvation in a different way as well. Salvation, when viewed through the lens of the wisdom of God, is not something accomplished through merit as we humans understand it. At least not any merit that we can understand or hand out to others. This is why God chose the most unlikely way to bring us the blessing of salvation. A way we cannot understand or take credit for.
Paul also, tells us that God chooses this path of humility in order to shame the powerful. “God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong.” We should note that this is one of the only times we would find God using shame as a tactic. Again, it is the wisdom of this world that tells us shame is a useful tactic for motivation or discipline. Or to teach a lesson. Which is more how God is using shame in this instance. To bring a lesson to those who think their wisdom or their strength makes them more worthy. The foolishness of the cross is shameful to them because it is a reminder that Jesus possessed none of the kinds of power that were valued in human society. A reminder that remains necessary and relevant even today.
When Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians, wisdom and foolishness were words used to describe social status as much as anything. There were divisions in the Corinthian church, some having to do with social status. Perhaps some were feeling shame. However, Paul is trying to convey to his audience that he believed the church could move beyond the divisions imposed by humanity and that the church was a place for rich and poor, the weak and the strong, the wise and the foolish. So, looking at this from the perspective of the church in the 21st, understanding now what Paul was talking about when he brings up wisdom, can we say that the church has moved beyond such divisions. Or, in our context, do there continue to be certain values of the world that keep us from following the way of foolishness laid out for us by God?
It is not hard to see places where this might be true. There remain churches today that find value in aligning with the wisdom in the world. Seeking to find power through politics or the ideology of Christian Nationalism. There are churches that exclude certain groups because they do not believe the right things or live their lives in the way the people in the church deem worthy. There are churches that hoard their resources or seek to accumulate wealth as an organization. All these things sound like they align with man’s wisdom. None of them sound like the foolishness of God.
So, in the church we are not called to be wise (at least not in the ways of the world). We are called to be foolish. We are called to go beyond the values we have learned from the world, we are called to move beyond structuring our lives and our communities according to those values. And beyond that kid of wisdom is the openness and freedom of foolishness. We realize that like any fool, we don’t really understand. Like a fool we let our heads be emptied of what we think we know so that we can submit to God. We acknowledge that we are not strong enough to change the world by force, but we may be weak enough to let it change and grow as God created it to change and grow. So, as we consider what it might look like to go beyond wisdom, pray that we allow ourselves to be foolish and empty our heads of what we think is wisdom, so that we can be filled with the wideness and the freedom and the joy of God’s foolishness at work in the world.
Amen.