We are tired of performing. We are exhausted by the
effort of holding it all together. You know what I mean.
The curated profile. The highlight reel that never ends.
The face you put on at work, at school, at church to
avoid the messiness that lies behind the mask. The
three in the morning whisper: if only you would work
harder… If only you would plan better… If only you would
hold on a little tighter, you could manage it all.
We are exhausted because we are white knuckling our
way through life.
How are you? Oh, I’m fine. I’m busy, but I’m good.
The church in Corinth was fractured. Debates over
who had the most impressive teacher, the most
sophisticated theology, the most spiritual credibility.
Some claimed Paul. Some Apollos. Some Cephas or
Peter. Pick your camp. Pledge your allegiance. Parade
your loyalty. Status competition dressed up in religious
language was tearing them apart. Everyone clinging to
their own saviors. And Paul is determined to demolish
them all. We proclaim Christ crucified.
To the sophisticated Ancient Greeks in Corinth, it was
foolishness. Who worships a God who suffers? A Messiah
who loses? Absolutely absurd. To those who were waiting
for the God who would come in might and in glory, it
was a scandal. A crucified God cannot be God—unless
everything we assumed about God was all wrong.
Paul will not soften the edges of his offense. The
foolishness of God is wiser than your human wisdom.
The weakness of God is stronger than your human
strength. If Jesus Christ is your Savior, every other
candidate for the role will fall far short. Not the media
that tells you what you want to hear. Not the leader who
claims God’s blessing on conquest. Not the platform
built to confirm your instincts. Not the version of Jesus
you have optimized to be useful, or palatable, or safe.
Only Christ crucified.
Paul insists the Corinthians stop clinging to their
wisdom. Stop clinging to their strength. Stop clinging to
the self they’ve built to prove that they’re worthy. And
instead, cling to the cross.
Which means that the cross is either the truth about the
world, or it is a decorative distraction. A piece of jewelry.
A logo for a religion that has moved on to more practical
measures. This ancient tool of Roman crucifixion—this
electric chair of the Roman world—is either the way of
salvation, or we are wasting our time and our lives.
Because if the cross is just another prop for our agenda
or perhaps a tragic turn in the life of an otherwise
inspiring teacher, then Christianity is a naive ethical
program with a sentimental attachment to a first-century
victim of state violence. But nothing more than that.
But if the cross is the word of God, if this is how God
saves, if this is who God is, if this is what God looks like,
then the cross is not just one truth among many. It is the
ground beneath all truth. It is the truth that rearranges
every other truth. The truth that changes our lives and
our world.
It changes our script too. You know the one. The script
you were handed, the one you’re passing on. The one
that says you earn your meaning, your worth. That it is
your responsibility to build your significance. That you
can save yourself. The cross says, “You are never going to
save yourself because you were never supposed to.”
The cross is not the triumph of the strong. It is the power
of God.
And so, like people of every generation, we cling to more
convenient gospels. We prefer a God who rewards our
hustle, secures our future, justifies our side. We want
faith that feels a little bit like an investment strategy.
We want to be a people chosen and armed by heaven.
We want a Jesus who lines up with our politics and
blesses our enemies list. But the gospel says your worth
is not your productivity or your possessions or your
perspective. Your security is not your savings account.
Your righteousness does not come from being right.
Paul was writing to a church that had made precisely
this mistake. You see, like us, the Corinthians were not
godless people. They were religious people who had
conscripted God for their own purposes—their wisdom,
their status, their camp, their team. Two thousand years
later, the Baptist theologian Russell Moore has a name
for this impulse. He calls it means-to-an-end cultural
Christianity. The end is power. The cross is still there. It’s
hanging on the wall. It’s on the necklace. It’s on the tattoo.
The bumper sticker. But the meaning has evaporated. The
scandal has receded. The cross is nothing more than a
cipher for our ego. A Jesus conscripted for the cause. A
cross that costs nothing. A gospel that leaves us exactly
as we want to be.
Listen to this: you can say the name of Jesus and still be
clinging to Caesar. Perhaps the problem was never that
our leaders can’t tell the difference between themselves
and Jesus. It’s that too many of us can’t.
Paul, writing to these sophisticated Corinthians, these
faithful Christians, is insistent. I refuse to play that game.
I have a one-track mind. Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
The crucified Christ cannot be controlled. Only that
Christ is worthy of your worship.
Ben Sasse is dying. He was diagnosed in December
with stage four pancreatic cancer. He was given four to
five months to live, which means he is in that window
now. The cancer is inoperable. Already metastasized all
over his body.
Ben Sasse spent his entire adult life holding things
together. He was a senator from the state of Nebraska.
A university president. Success and power. He was
good at it. Dying does not flatten the reality of a person,
but suffering certainly strips away the performance.
Cancer has called him back to the limits of his humanity,
and he has chosen to die publicly, to share his journey
and express his faith. He’s doing that for his three
kids and for anyone else willing to listen. In a recent
interview, he quoted Tim Keller who died of the same
disease and said, “I hate pancreatic cancer. I would
never wish it on anyone. But I would never want to go
back to a time in my life when I didn’t know the prayer of
pancreatic cancer.”
Reflecting on that prayer, Sasse speaks to the power
of the Gospel, saying, “My soul thinks Ben should be
God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks. But I’m pretty
grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-
idolatry. I don’t feel ready to die. But to whom would I go?”
When the diagnosis comes, the plan collapses. When
you finally run out of ways to hold it all together, when
the performance is over and there is only what is true,
what remains? Christ, and him crucified.
Paul plants his flag in the most offensive moment,
the moment when all the world could only see failure.
The moment of deepest weakness, and Paul says that
moment is the moment of salvation.
Eight years ago this month, I came to be your pastor.
Like Paul, I came in weakness and in fear and in
trembling and feet far too small for the shoes I was
filling. In eight years, I’ve learned a lot about you. Some
of you arrive a little late. Some of you get grumpy about
scooting over. You have complicated and firmly held
opinions about applause in worship, except for the
prayer clap with the children, which is beyond dispute.
Coffee cups in the pews? A subject on which
reasonable people disagree. I could go on and on
and on. The printed words for the Doxology are only a
suggestion for you people. And the announcements at
the beginning of worship are always too long, unless I
leave out the thing you wanted me to announce. Then
they’re a little too short.
In other words, you are exactly like every other church in
the history of church. You are human. You are quirky. You
are occasionally obstinate. And you are so deeply loved.
Eight years is long enough to know what you’re made
of. I have sat with you in hospital waiting rooms and
stood with you at gravesides. I have watched you show
up for people when it was inconvenient for you. I’ve
watched you ask hard questions and not be satisfied
with easy answers. I’ve watched you open your hearts
and your minds and your hands in ways you may have
thought were not possible. I have seen your courage.
I have heard it in your voice. I have watched you give
in ways that you will never mention and will forbid me
from mentioning. I have watched you love God. I have
watched you love each other. I have watched you love
this city.
In the spring of 2020, when the world shut down and
our doors closed, I had been here a little over eighteen
months. I felt lost in the chaos, and so I did what comes
most naturally for me. I tried to put it all on my shoulders
as if I could carry you. I planned and organized and
pressed and clenched. I barely slept for weeks. I ran
myself into the ground. I frayed the closest relationships
in my life. And all I produced was exhaustion and anxiety.
Like many pastors across the country in those days, I
considered walking away. I never told you that. I did not
need a better strategy for holding on; what I needed was
to be held. In my moment of undeniable weakness, what
I needed was a Savior. Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
The weakest moment is the moment of salvation.
Paul says that God chose the foolish things of the world.
Not the impressive. Not the powerful. Not the ones
who have it all together. The ones who know they need
a Savior. Whatever you have built, whatever you have
earned, whatever you have held with human strength, it
will never be enough because it was never what defined
you. And the community of faith that trusts this truth to
its core is dangerous.
Here’s why. It does not fear the world’s rejection. It is
unashamed and unshaken. It is dangerous because
it cannot be frightened into silence, or flattered into
complicity. It cannot be bought off with comfort, or
status, or power. It is dangerous because it stopped
clinging to everything the world told us to hold and
clung to a crucified Lord instead. And found him alive.
David Foster Wallace once wrote that everything he
ever let go of had claw marks in it. Me too. The thing
you are trying to hold together. The version of yourself
you are working so hard to maintain. The grief you are
managing all by yourself. The performance you have to
keep up day after day, week on week. The three in the
morning whisper that has not let you rest. What if you
could set it all down at the foot of the cross—your fear
and your failure—and open your hands?
My friends, whatever anyone else might say, the Gospel
is not the triumph of the brutal. It is not the victory of the
vicious. It is not the conquest of the cruel. God wins by
giving everything away.
So stop clinging to the things that will not save you.
Cling to the cross. You are not defined by what you could
never hold. You are held. You always have been. Amen.