The People of the Cross 1 Corinthians 1:26-29
This is the transcript of a sermon preached by Mark Booker, Senior Minister of Park Street Church in Boston, MA, on December 3, 2023.
Greetings to you on this first Sunday of Advent. Advent is a season in which we renew our hope in the return of Jesus as the only solution to the world’s--and our hearts’—many problems. And we also think about being ready for his return. That means putting things in order, and, specifically, casting off the sin that clings so closely (Hebrews 12.1).
In our ongoing consideration of the cross in 1 Corinthians 1, we are making a direct hit today on a sin that all of us wrestle with in some way. This is the sin of pride, or, more specifically, it’s the sin of vainglory. These two compete for a spot in lists of the seven deadly sins of the Christian tradition, and they’re typically very related. Pride is about needing to be better than your neighbor, about seeking the highest place (or at least a comparatively higher place). Vainglory is about needing your neighbor to recognize you as important, special, gifted, worthy (whether you actually are or not). Pride is generally the soil out of which our pursuit for vainglory, or self-glorification, grows. In our pride, we crave the esteem and recognition of our peers, our colleagues, our friends, even our enemies. This is the reason that every time we tell the proverbial story about the fish that we caught, the fish gets bigger and bigger. We want to be seen as something, as someone—as powerful, wealthy, wise, holy, beautiful, a gifted communicator, a compelling author, a hardworking student, a sensitive, caring mother, a present father, a dutiful son or daughter, and so on. We want to be praised by others, or possibly even envied. And if we get that glory, that recognition, then we think we have arrived; we’re worthy and admired. Until we need more and the cycle repeats. This is the way the world works.
But not so with God and his Spirit-breathed, new creation kingdom people. As we’ve seen in our study of the cross in 1 Corinthians 1.17-2.5, God’s renewing and reconciling work undermines and subverts the sinful ways of the world—whether in ancient Corinth or in Boston today. In our study of this passage last week, we saw that Paul points to 1) the cross of Christ and 2) the simple heralding of the cross in the gospel as two examples of how God’s new work subverts the systems of value, worth, honor, and status in his day. As we turn to vv26-29 today, Paul brings a third piece of evidence of God’s subversive ways to the foreground: the members of the Corinthian church themselves. We want to consider three things in our passage: 1) who they are (and are not) - v26, 2) what God was doing in this – vv27-28, and 3) why God was doing this - v29.
1. Who They Are
In v26, Paul urges the Corinthians to look at themselves for a moment: “For consider your calling, brothers.” What will they see? Paul gives three negatives here. “Not many of you were wise according to the flesh, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” Paul is saying, let’s be honest, you—at least the majority of you, Corinthian believers—were of little to no significance in any of cultural systems of worth, status, honor, or value. Not wise, not powerful, not of noble birth.
In other words, God didn’t start a church in Corinth with influencers, world-changers, or movers-and-shakers. Let me put this in the vernacular of our day (and I’m going to come close to home here, but know that I love you and you are my friends!): God did not start with HLS grads, venture-capitalists, investment bankers, tenured professors, professional athletes, beautiful models, or seminary professors. When Paul urges them to consider their calling, he’s drawing attention to their lack of status in the eyes of the world. Most of them had unimpressive resumes. They were not the best and brightest. Quite the opposite.
Let’s acknowledge that God already had a pattern of working this way. Consider that Jesus chose not the scribes, Pharisees, or Sadducees—the religious professionals—but fisherman. Remember the way they were referred to after they began their Spirit-empowered ministry in Jerusalem following the Day of Pentecost? “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished.” Acts 4.13. What Paul is saying to the status-seeking church in Corinth is this: you fit the pattern. While the world may be impressed with important people, with their positions, wealth, and titles, God is not. His redemptive work is not dependent upon them, and he is intentional about that—which we’ll unpack in a moment.
If you’re someone who doesn’t think you have the right status, a lofty title, a weighty position, the right resume, then I hope you’re encouraged by what Paul affirms here. And I hope the church is a place of encouragement for you because here, in the church, it doesn’t matter who you are (or are not) in the systems of worth, value, honor, and status in the world—or at least it shouldn’t matter. God—not our wealth, our degrees, our worldly success, our beauty, our connections, or our intellect—God empowers, gifts, and sends people into the world, not the credential-giving, status-making, worth-declaring institutions or systems of the world. “Not by might, nor by power, (and we could faithfully add any other status or flex we can think of ) but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.” Zech 4.6.
God is not impressed with our credentials or worldly status. He never has been. Consider Ps 147.10-11, “His delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the legs of a man, but the LORD takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.” Remember the selection of David in 1 Sam 16. Samuel “looked on Eliab and thought, ‘Surely the LORD's anointed is before him.’ But the LORD said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16.6-7).
And can we please, in light of this point, be more critical of mission strategies that soley prioritize those with worldly status, wealth, or promise? Everyone need to be reached, including those in privileged positions, and it is very possible to do this with a pure heart. But my guess is the amount of Christian mission money spent per undergraduate student at Ivy League schools this year is staggeringly more than the amount spent per stedent at a state school, and in a different stratosphere than the amount spent per student at a community college. Can we, in light of this text, just ask the question: is this ok?
2. What God Was Doing
Paul’s next point, in vv27-28, is that this composition of the Corinthian church wasn’t an accident. It was God’s intentional choice by which God was subverting the ways of the world. Verse 27 begins with a conjunction, “but” as the ESV translates it, or it might be better to say, “on the contrary.” Instead of working in this worldly way, on the contrary, God is at work in a different way. Doing what, we ask?
Paul makes two observations about the actions of Almighty God in making this peculiar choice of these particular people, one in v27 and the second in v28. And they’re both abrupt and a bit jarring. Let’s let them jar us and shake us a bit.
First, in v27, we learn that God was shaming the wise and the strong. The verb here means to put to shame, to humiliate, to bring low. By bringing renewal through the subversive action of the cross and by starting with a community of people mostly of low status, God is signaling loud and clear—in front of the whole world that was enamored with the wise and the strong (has anything changed 2000 years later? No!)—that in his kingdom this status means and counts for nothing. If anything, high status in the world is a spiritual liability—consider Jesus’s words in Matthew 19.23, "Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven.” God’s salvific, new creation work is independent of the gifts and status of those who are typically at the center of consequential actions and events in the world. Normally, they were making the decisions, they had the VIP seats, they were the life of the party. But God works in a way that subverts all of that, that brings the wise and the strong low, puts them to shame.
What do we do with this, with God humiliating others? First, he did this to make an emphatic statement that his ways are, as he says in Isaiah 55.9, higher than our ways. Status in the world strokes our pride and can lead us to ignore the giver of every good gift. Worldly strength and wisdom—and the status that typically accompanies them—is irrelevant to God’s new and shocking work in the cross.
Further, we normally think of humiliating others as mean, but it’s just the opposite here. There is a great grace to the strong and the wise in God’s humiliating action. Such shaming helps them to confront the lie that their wealth or intellect make them more important, weighty, or valuable than others who are lower down in these cultural systems of value. God’s work in the cross strips them of their prideful position, and invites them to humbly enter this community, where our worldly status is of no worth or value, where every member of the community—while differently gifted and differently positioned by God—is of equal worth and value, beloved by the head of the community—Jesus—and valuable to every other member in the community.
One of the signs of this equality in the church is that we all share in the one meal of communion, as we’ll do in a little while. Each one—irrespective of our status in the eyes of the world—each one comes to the same table to partake of the same bread. Remember that today as you see each other come forward. We are level in the body of Christ and if anyone is high (even within the church), he or she is to become the servant of all. This is a different kind of community.
God starts here to humble the exalted. This may be how it works out there, but not in my house! God is saying. Not here. How tragic that we have lost this chief insight. It is not uncommon to hear large churches like Park Street Church critiqued for making service in leadership positions dependent upon success in one’s careers. That should not be!
And let me address the reputation of Park Street as a church of intellectual sophistication and significant influence within evangelicalism in the past 100 years. We ought to embrace and not reject the particular gifts, strengths, and role that God has given to this church. These are unique blessings and responsibilities, but we must equally beware of the way in which the enemy can use them 1) to puff us up, 2) to think of ourselves as better than other churches in Boston, even if that’s subtle, or 3) to overestimate our value to God or our importance within the kingdom ecosystem of this city or this nation.
Any sense of pride in this is misplaced. We are to steward the unique calling and history that God has given to us within this community as we take up the cross, and press on toward the goal of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, but we are prone – are we not? - to be so proud of this history and role that it can tempt us to develop an ungodly sense of spiritual significance, worth, or even superiority. This is not of God, but of the enemy who will use anything, often especially the good things in our lives, to render us unfruitful.
Second, in v28, we learn that God chose these particularly low-status people in Corinth—consider your calling!—“to bring to nothing the things that are.” Let’s think about the things that are. Surely these are the opposite of what he mentions in the first part of v28: the opposite of the low are the high and exalted, the opposite of the despised things in the world are the praised and honored things of the world. The “things that are” are those people that are something in the world.
These people who were a big deal, God brings to nothing. The verb here translated “bring to nothing” can mean to nullify, to cause something to lose its power or effectiveness, to make powerless. How does God do this? He inaugurates and accomplishes his new work around them, without need of them or their status, and in a way that assigns no value to their present power/status/honor in the systems of the world.
It would be a bit like showing up at the Indianapolis 500 speedway on Memorial Day weekend for the big race and at race time all the Indy cars are stuck in their pits unable to start and a lone VW Bug (think Herbie...) putters out onto the racecourse, barely completes the mileage and takes the checkered flag. God’s work in the kingdom reflects a massive and shocking reversal.
The star is brought to nothing while the lowly are exalted. This is what Mary celebrates in anticipation of the birth of Jesus. Luke 1.51-53, “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”
God worked this way in the gospel, but this is how God had always worked: he chose the prisoner Jacob to deliver the Egyptians (and God’s own people) from famine. He chose the people of Israel despite, as we read in Deuteronomy 7, not because they were more in number than other nations—they were not. They were small and weak relative to the superpowers around them. He chooses the humble Davids with their slings and stones to topple the Goliaths with their shields and spears. This is how our God works.
3. Why Has God Done This
The answer to why God works in this way comes in v29, “so that no flesh (ESV has human being) might boast in the presence of (before) God.” God’s trifecta of the cross, the preaching of the cross, and now the calling of this low and despised people subverts the values of the world. And God works in this way, he subverts these systems, Paul says, to keep us from boasting that this new, revolutionary, counter-cultural community and our place within it have anything to do with our worldly status, location, or endowments. The only big deal in the church is God himself—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and he will share his glory with no other. To be on the inside of his new creation work is to be there solely by sheer gift, a gift which is based on no prior status or worth of our own. God doesn’t care about that and doesn’t need that. In fact, the only way to enter the family is to accept God’s shocking and subverting way of the cross, to be stripped of our pride by recognizing our great need and recognizing that the cross was for us (and because of us, because of our sin), and to exalt God for his grace, mercy, provision, and gift. These are things that we don’t deserve. We have no claim upon him, nor right to be in this place. It’s only because of God’s mercy and grace. So we respond as the psalmist exclaims in Psalm 115.1, “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!”
So God has worked in this way, to keep us from boasting, from making a big deal of ourselves. Because God knows the tendency and propensity that each one of us has to make ourselves a big deal. Remember it was our desire to become higher that led to the initial fall (Genesis 3.5), and all the brokenness of the world has resulted from that impulse (and still does). Is it any surprise, then, that when God acted climactically to overcome that sin and to redeem us from evil, he has done so in a manner and way that subverts our systems of self-exaltation? Our Tower of Babel building enterprises that we participate in weekly, if not daily? And in Corinth long ago he chose the have-nots, the lowly, the despised to make this point emphatically that there would be no ability for anyone to boast.
I recently had the wonderful experience of visiting one of our oldest saints who is nearing the end at the age of 101 years old. During the visit, as I was sitting on the couch with her, I asked her, “How is your faith?” Her response was brilliant. She just looked at me and quoted the well known hymn: “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness...On Christ the solid rock I stand all other ground is sinking sand.” What a powerful word from a beautiful woman who has had a great impact on this church over the decades. All other ground—that status, that worth, that sense of honor that we crave—that is sinking sand in comparison to the rock of Christ.
All this is to put an end to boasting, to our primal sickness of self-exaltation and pride, because we bring nothing to this equation, nothing but our filthy, prideful, status-seeking (and deeply loved!) selves which we cast upon his mercy and grace. There, our pride has no place but only the exaltation and praise of the one who died for us while we were still sinners to rescue and redeem us. Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling.
And if there is no boasting before God then there is no boasting before one another—and Paul has this in mind all along. People in Corinth were dividing into factions, claiming to be wise, and then seeing themselves as better than others and looking down their noses at others in the community. The cross allows none of this. So later, in 1 Corinthians 4.6, Paul writes that none of us should be puffed up against another. And then he says, “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4.7) All that we have is the result of God’s sheer gift and mercy.
Conclusion
As we enter the season of Advent and prepare in a fresh way for Jesus’ return, do we glory in this new way of God working that subverts and topples the way of the world? Or are we leeching off the world’s system still, trying to derive from them what we can only rightly derive from the Lord, and thereby distorting the beauty, power, wisdom, and truth of the gospel that manifests in a church community that derives its sense of well-being, worth, value, and honor only from the Lord himself and nothing and no one else. Is there any way in which we are like the Laodicean church that says: “ I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,” but we are “not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev 3.17). And that it is only from Jesus—the crucified one—that we can get true riches that address our deepest poverty, true clothing that covers our shameful nakedenss, and true sight that heals our hard-wired blindness. It’s only from him and from his grace.
Having been so ministered to by him and by the shock of his cross, will we turn once again to seek the status of the world? Having been so deeply loved, valued, seen, and affirmed by God, having been embraced as his adopted children, will we still seek the glory that comes from men alone? It is the love of God in Christ—manifest on the cross—and this alone, that takes the sting out of our pursuit of vainglory. This love that is, as the wonderful hymn says, “vast, unmeasured, boundless, free, rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me. Underneath me, all around me, is the current of Thy love; leading onward, leading homeward to Thy glorious rest above.” Will we allow this love to melt us once again, to fill our hearts and our minds such that we can put aside childish, expired, dead-end ways of living, and simply rest in the wonderful gift of God through Christ Jesus our Lord—and then live out of that rest and fullness, out of that affirmation, in a manner that is a fitting response to his indescribable gift—as the humble, loved, renewed, empowered people that we are in him?