The Foolish Wisdom of the Cross - 1 Cor. 1: 18-31

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

This morning, I’ll tell you stories about two men. The stories are true, but I’ve changed the names.

About twenty years ago, I had gotten into a new hobby and was really enjoying it. While searching for supplies, I emailed a small businessman - let’s call him Sam - with some questions about his product. Sam replied, answering my questions, but he also said that he noticed my email address was “pastormeyer@XYZcarrier.com” and was curious: was I, in fact, a pastor? Yes, I replied, I was a Lutheran pastor. It turns out that the man was Jewish from his father’s side. He was far from practicing Judaism as a religion, unless one considered politics to be a religion, which was his main connection with his Jewish roots. He could care less about Kosher, Sabbath, or synagogue, but if you said something bad about Israel, he would argue policy and history with you.

Sam had been reading a series of fictional books set in medieval Germany. The story was set in the Thirty Years’ War between Lutherans, Protestants, and the Roman Catholic Empire in the 1600s. He had questions about what he was reading, especially what separated Lutherans from other Christians. Over the course of several months, we sent lengthy emails back and forth as I tried to answer his questions faithfully as a Christian. I was feeling quite good about the trajectory of our friendship. I had been praying about these conversations, that the Holy Spirit would use me as his instrument to bring this man to faith in the same Jesus that his genetic ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, had yearned to see, and that my friend would be able to make the good confession of faith that Christ was also his Lord and Savior. I sent him a copy of Luther’s Small Catechism and an invitation to call anytime to visit about what he read.

Then, the conversation went silent: no emails, no phone calls. After about three weeks, I emailed him, asking if he got the Catechism and if he had any questions, I would love to talk with him. A few more silent days passed when, finally, he emailed me. He thanked me for the gift of the Catechism and told me it would have a special place in his library, right next to his other special religious books, including his Quran. I still remember the feeling in my stomach when I read what Sam wrote. He said something like this: “I have to know: do you really believe all that stuff? You really think that God would surrender his perfect Son for a bunch of stupid sinners who keep making the same mistakes over and over, and he keeps forgiving over and over, and there is never any consequence for what you do? You don’t think you have to try to win him back over, somehow, and try to fix your mistakes? What about being good and doing good things? Where’s the justice in ‘grace’?” There were a few other questions, but you get the idea. I emailed back, answering directly, simply, faithfully, restating much of the Apostle’s Creed, but even as I wrote, it felt that things had changed. Later that evening, I got an answer with a tightly worded email, “If you really believe all that, I’m sorry…You’re not as smart as I thought you were. I really feel sorry for you and the job you have to do.” We never spoke again. I discovered via Facebook that Sam died a few years ago, and when I read that, I wept. I wept because I lost a friend, or someone I thought was a friend at one point. But I hadn’t only lost him in this world. Sam was, as far as I knew, lost into eternity.

I thought about Sam when I read this morning’s Epistle. “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God,” (1 Cor. 1: 18).  

To Sam, the word of the cross was nothing but foolishness. What kind of God was this, he wondered via email, who would kill his own son? What kind of God continued to forgive people who continued to break his rules over and over, seemingly without end? He was very much an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy, and the concept of full and free grace was too much to grasp. It made no sense – it was, in a word, foolish.

I wish I could tell you that was the first and only time I heard something along those lines. I wish I could tell you that I didn’t hear an elderly man in a nursing home tell me that Christianity was the stupidest thing he had ever heard of, or have a mother weep in my study because her daughter decided wicca’s white magic showed her what – quote - real power was like, or that a confirmation student told me that maybe, someday, she would have time to learn this “Bible stuff,” but for now, she just wasn’t interested and that her parents shrugged and told me, “Well, it is her choice, you know.”

You’ve had things like this happen to you as well, because of your confession of faith in Jesus Christ, living a life of repentance, and receiving the gifts given to you in your baptism. Someone in your family sees you as old-fashioned and out of touch. An aunt or uncle openly mocks those who bow their heads to pray over a meal. A cousin has embraced Islam, or Scientology, Creationism or some other religion claiming they are all viable gods and paths to heaven. Your son or daughter has embraced an alternative sexual lifestyle as being perfectly acceptable. A grandchild denies their infant baptism. A friend calls Christians judgmental hypocrites. A coworker has given up completely and says that there is no God and says you are wasting your time going to church.

But it’s not just in your family – it’s Christian families across the globe. For you, and for families like yours, your family dinner table is not so much divided by race or political party or whatever current topic is on the news - your family dinner table is divided because of Jesus and the word of the cross.  The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. It feels naïve, backwards, simplistic. How is it possible that one person could possibly forgive? How can faith save? What kind of God would make this a means to salvation?

You know, it’s funny. If you go back to Genesis chapter 3 and read the account of the Fall, you discover this: satan’s temptation caused Eve to see the Tree was “desired to make one wise,” (Genesis 3:6). Satan’s temptation was for wisdom, to be just like God. That’s worldly wisdom: be like God; take the place of God; make yourself out to be God.

Paul asks “where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world…” (1 Cor. 1: 20). Wow them with what you know, what you think, what you feel. It doesn’t even have to be wise, per se, in the traditional sense of the word, as long as it’s louder, faster, and more edgy than someone else. Do you remember the presidential race leading up to the 2024 election? It was almost as if the two candidates weren’t running for the highest office in the land, but to see who out-shouted the other while out-doing the other with outlandish promises. That’s worldly wisdom. For Eve and Adam, they listened to satan’s wisdom. In a left-handed way, satan did tell the truth – they did learn what evil was. They certainly gained a measure of wisdom with one forbidden bite. But they also lost the perfect relationship with God while gaining the knowledge of death.

In Romans 5, Paul says that by one man, sin entered the world and through another man the world would be saved (Romans 5: 12-19). To turn this slightly, through one tree, worldly, foolish wisdom entered the world; through another tree, God’s wisdom would be shown. It would be the fulfillment of the Tree of Life that Adam and Eve were banned from in the Garden. You and I know this tree simply as the cross: the cross of Christ.

The cross truly is the tree of life for those who believe the tree to be the instrument of terrible death for Jesus. He would die for the times that we chase after the world’s wisdom, with all its allure and tempting desire to be gods into and unto ourselves. He would die, perfectly resisting such temptations for himself, remaining obedient to the Father’s will for the salvation of the world. His death on the cross becomes the atoning price for us for the times we fail to resist wisdom’s siren song, the innocent for the guilty, the sinless for the sinful. This tree, this tree of the cross, gives life. You celebrate this fruit of the tree as you come to the Lord’s Table today. Here, truly present in, with, and under bread and wine, is the body and blood of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, giving to you want was earned at the cross. You leave, strengthened by the wisdom of the cross to endure the temptations of the world.

To the world, this word of the cross is folly. But for us, the being saved ones, this word – the word made flesh, Christ, the Son of God – of the cross demonstrates the power of God to save the world. The Christ of the cross is the wisdom of God incarnate, the fullness of the power of God to rescue and redeem the world from its own brand of foolish wisdom.

I told you about my friend, Sam. Now, I want to tell you about another friend whom I’ll call Rodger. Rodger had fought cancer for almost ten years. There were surgeries, radiation treatments, courses of chemotherapy, sandwiched between brief declarations of the disease being in remission. Unfortunately, the doctors, despite their best efforts, were proved wrong and, finally, “remission” was replaced with “untreatable.” The family threw him a big birthday party, wanting to celebrate with him. A family friend gave him a wooden cross, designed to fit comfortably in the palm of the hand while praying or simply to hold. As the disease continued to overwhelm his body, that palm-cross was an ever-present friend. When I asked him about it, Rodger told me that that little cross was a tangible reminder of the cross of Christ. “It reminds me that Jesus even has cancer beaten,” he said, “and if he has beaten cancer, he can certainly forgive me.” The cross went with him in a few ambulance rides, spent time in his hand in the hospital, and when the decision was made to enter hospice, the cross was right there, every day. His kids didn’t understand. They teased him a little bit about it, not to be ugly, but not understanding what the cross meant for their dad or for others who saw it as the sign of a promise fulfilled.

The night before Rodger died, I visited with him and his wife. We laughed and we cried together, knowing that the end was near. That night, we celebrated the Lord’s Supper together in his hospice room. In that meal, the power of the cross was present in the body and blood of Christ. To human eyes, to worldly wisdom, it hardly seemed like a meal at all – just a piece of bread and a sip of wine, and not good bread or wine at that. To human wisdom, bread and wine are incapable of offering anything other than satisfying hunger, but a bite and a sip are hardly satisfactory and certainly not able to offer forgiveness, life or salvation. To worldly wisdom, it was a waste of time. For Rodger and his wife, there was nothing foolish to them in that meal – it was the promise of Christ.  I had mentioned in a prior visit that I would like to pray the commendation of the dying with him. That evening, he said it was time. So with the same sign of the cross that was placed over him in holy baptism eight decades earlier, we placed the sign of the cross over him, commending him to the Lord’s eternal care. I’ll be honest: I choked up while praying the rite. I couldn’t speak, overwhelmed with emotion. With his frail hand, he held mine and placed his cross into my hand. “Don’t forget,” he told me, “Jesus died for you, too.”

That wooden palm-cross sat at my desk this week as I finished writing this sermon. To those who don’t know, who don’t understand, it’s just a hunk of wood. The same was probably said about the cross that held Jesus’ body 2000 years ago. To us who are saved, by God’s grace through faith, the cross preaches volumes. The word – the Word! – of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, Jesus is the power of God for our forgiveness and salvation. Amen.

(I'm humbly proud to say this sermon, along with last week's, was published in the Advent-Epiphany issue of Concordia Pulpit Journal, Vol. 36, Part 1, pp. 36-39; (c) 2025, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, MO. I thank CPH and the editor for asking me to write for the Journal.)