Mortals at the foot of the cross

March 20, 2009
Jedadiah Scharmer
  

1 Cor 1; 18-25 – Mortals at the foot of the cross – Oak Knoll March 15, 2009
Pastor Jedidiah Scharmer

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. Amen
If you live a good life and are a good person that pretty much qualifies you for heaven. Right? Isn’t that what the world says? And so goes the wisdom of the world and those that are perishing. Wouldn’t that be grand though, it would be really great, if nice people merited heaven, if being kind and generous and serving others and loving our neighbors really got us approved by God? It doesn’t.
I was baptized as an infant west of the cities in a little town called Buffalo Lake. I grew up in the church and was a very good boy. To be a pastor you have to have pretty good pedigree right? A perfect little story book childhood –don’t you? Nonsense, that would be the wisdom of the world, saying that good people are Godly and go to heaven and that naughty people are ungodly and deserve hell, that’s the wisdom of the world. But in any case, and for the record, I was a pretty good kid by most worldly standards.
This morning you heard a reading from the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the people of Corinth. And he says there are 2 types of people. There are those who are on their way to perishing and those who are being saved. And the ones following the wisdom of the world are perishing and those being saved find the foolishness of the cross to be their saving Grace.

Most religions are about making better people, making better moral, ethical decisions, loving our neighbor better and tying to live better lives. Every religion invented by humans is of human wisdom. Right behavior and right living constitutes a good relationship with God. But that is not what our Bible says.

Christianity is not about behavior reform but about making a human right before our Holy God. That is why the cross looks foolish to the world. This Jesus that comes not to call the righteous but to call sinner looks terrible. This faith in a God who dies is not a powerful religion at all in the eyes of the world its foolishness and weakness. An unemployed peasant crucified as a criminal… as our God? You can see how this is pretty unspiritual, un-supernatural, not very feng shue for that matter! Truly a stumbling block for the world as they search for enlightenment and access to a life beyond this world.

If you have ever been in a Christian confirmation class you will have learned that in baptism the old sinful self is drown and the new creation is born. This baptism puts the Old Adam and the Old Eve to death who sin against ourselves and our neighbors and then try to justify ourselves with good and religious deeds. This Old Adam and Eve are the part of us that you might call the ego, the pride. It’s the self preservation part of us that keeps us reliant on ourselves instead of God alone. Yet there seems to be a process along the way. Paul says it like this: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

There seems to be movement in time found in these words “those who are perishing” and “those who are being saved.” In the process of being or becoming. As we grow and mature we find that the Old Adam and the Old Eve, the old sinful self in us that was drown in baptism is a pretty good swimmer and tends to pop for a breath of air almost every day. This old self wants to be saved too. But the cross is not about retraining and restricting the Old Adam but about putting him to death. It’s not about saving some of the good parts of the old Eve but about finally killing her all together.

It wasn’t until after high school that the Old Adam in me decided to really start swimming laps. I started college which for me meant unrestrained living and parties with all of the pitfalls that come with that. That’s what happens when you go to college you finally get free. Right? You know what I am talking about. There is freedom to live on your own away from parents and faith communities and all the restrictions and expectations. Most Hollywood stars look back on their life and call it a life of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. And from any perspective, both the world’s or God’s, my life was not in the process of becoming saved. I was perishing and becoming my own little hell on earth.

Yet I had known and had heard that it was Jesus who died on the cross to cover, blot out and wipe away my sin. And I needed that, I knew it, I was a wreck.

Jesus and the cross are the only way to eternal life to being saved. But just as surely as I knew that, my head and heart followed the wisdom of the world. I believed what the world believed. The only way I was going to be saved was to become more godly. I was going to have to get my act together. I was going to have to discipline myself and straighten myself up before God would ever approve of me. Beyond that I had some make up work to do for all the time I had spent running from and ignoring God.
And for a while that wisdom of the world really worked. I got clean and sober, I controlled the desires of my flesh and I devoted my life to God. But the wisdom of the world and the will power of human flesh only last so long and even then it doesn’t get us any closer to God. I was still on the way to perishing. Instead of living in unbridled freedom against God’s will I was laying on myself every rule in the bible I could find. And it wasn’t more than a few years before I realized I still didn’t feel God accepted me for all the good I was trying to do, all the right behavior I was trying to maintain.

However in Jesus, through the cross, we see God in a new way.
Paul says: Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, 29 so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

There was one night I was sitting in a decommissioned train depot pouring out my spiritual ineptness to a friend. I was telling all the ways my self control, my trying to be righteous; trying to be good in the eyes of God wasn’t working. I was telling how all I felt was judged, that my past was too ugly, my sins were to great, my brokenness was too real and with all this tying – you could still see through it all; God couldn’t use me.

And that was honestly the very first time my heart was ready to let the most important words of my life sink down deep into my soul. I heard the Gospel fresh for me. I heard the foolishness of the cross proclaimed over and against the wisdom of the world. My friend said – “You know that is why Jesus died – to give you another chance.”
This death of God to forgive my sins crushed the way I was relating to God. I was a fool trying to prove myself worth saving in the eyes of God. This Jesus, in God’s wisdom, had come to meet me right where I was.
The cross stands at the beginning of a transformed life for you and I.
We are saved not by what we have done or left undone but by the sheer act of mercy and love found in a crucified God who’s arms are open to receive our junk. There is mighty, mighty healing power in this cross for you and I.
In fact Jesus says in Mark 2:17 “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”

So when you feel yourself too far from God or too broken or not quite all together in front of God then you are ripe for redemption and salvation. God has lead you to the path of being saved at the foot of the cross. Come on, today just let Jesus love you right in the midst of your junk. He will heal you this morning because you are angry, because you are hurt, because you are fearful. He needs you more than you know you need Him. He has already proved that on the cross he went to for your sake.

And when you find yourself giving and loving and doing good for others and you no longer measure it but it’s just what comes flowing out of you then you are starting to understand the reality that in Christ, God has justified you and declared you right already. Now we can boast and our boasting is in Christ.

My Old Adam comes up for air every day still, he’s getting a little weaker though, and it is only expected that he will until the day he and this mortal body dies. But the God that lives in me continues to lead me on the way to being saved. That process takes my mortal life to the foot of the cross is where I have found total security. And the old Adam hates that…and the new creation praises Christ.
Let’s pray…