This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 02/08/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: 1 Corinthians 2.
Two weeks ago, I preached on the first chapter of Paul’s first letter of the Corinthians. This morning I’m preaching on the second chapter of that same letter. You may recall from chapter one, the context of this letter is that the church in Corinth, which Paul helped to plant is suffering from divisions. There are people in the church who are saying, “Oh, I’m Paul’s man; Paul’s our real leader here,” and there are other people saying, “Oh no, it’s Apollo. Apollo is the guy in charge here.”
Paul challenges this infighting and calls the Corinthians to repentance. He says, “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” He says, “Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel.”
Paul goes on to explain that the wisdom of God is found in foolishness and the power of God is found in weakness. God has chosen what is low and despised in the world; the things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are. He talks about the message of the cross: The cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God.
In our reading this morning, Paul is continuing this same argument. He’s writing to the Corinthians in this context of power struggles between different factions and leaders. He’s explaining that these struggles between human leaders are pointless and a distraction from the true purpose of their community.
Paul writes to remind them how the church in Corinth started. It started through his preaching. This could be an opportunity for Paul to boast and say, “Look at this great thing I did. You all know that I’m your leader because I was the one who came and preached the gospel to you.”
Paul’s totally capable of saying something like that, by the way. Paul does have a bit of an ego at times. But that’s not where he’s going in this letter. In this second chapter, he reminds the Corinthians of how when he first came and preached the gospel to them, he decided to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and him crucified. He came to them in weakness and fear and much trembling. He reminds them that his speech and his proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power.
Why is this important?
Paul reminds them that his preaching and his witness were not impressive, not spectacular, not a superstar performance, because it was never about Paul. It was always about Jesus. Paul’s apostleship, his proclamation, his witness that gathered the church in Corinth was one that came from the Spirit of God, not from Paul. He was sent so that their faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on the power of God.
I grew up in a family of activists. My family were a part of a very intense Christian community in Wichita, Kansas that was focused on social justice and prophetic action in the world. The Christians I grew up with believed that if God’s Spirit was within us, we wouldn’t just go to church on Sunday morning but otherwise be normal Americans. Being followers of Jesus meant that we’d be called to acts of mercy and justice and prophecy.
So, in the context that I grew up in, I took part in a lot of social action campaigns – things you might call protests or direct action. We marched across Kansas against the death penalty. We worked for nuclear abolition. We wrote our members of Congress asking them to change unjust policies and stop preparing for war.
One direct action campaign that I’ll never forget was one we did to pressure businesses to remove violent toys from their shelves. During one action, we went into a department store during the Christmas season. I remember that my dad was dressed up as Santa Claus and a lot of the rest of us including me were dressed up as Santa’s elves.
We went into the children’s toys section, and we elves would go find toys that were violent – plastic guns and army men and missiles – and we would take them to Santa. We’d make a big show of it, in front of all the shoppers. We’d say, “Santa, we didn’t make this toy, where did this come from?” and Santa would say, “Oh my goodness! This definitely is not ours. These shouldn’t be played with by children. These are very violent, destructive toys. What are they teaching our children?”
We had a lot of fun.
Growing up in this kind of community, taking part in all these actions, I learned a lot of things about how the world works and how society responds when you break the rules a little bit. I learned that if you’re disruptive, pretty soon you’ll be dealing with a manager. And it doesn’t take too long for the police to be called.
I learned that the police have a certain way of going about things when they encounter a disruptive scene. Usually the first thing that police will do is ask, “Who’s in charge here?” We as a community knew this. We prepared for this. We we ready for the inevitable question from a uniformed authority figure. “Who’s in charge here?”
This is an important question for the police, because the police are about maintaining order. They don’t want to address a whole group of people and try to get all of them individually to do what they say, right? That would be like herding cats. What they want is a single point of authority. By speaking to that point of authority, they can command the group.
We, as direct action campaigners, were sensitive to this need that the police had. We knew that things would go much better if we provided them a single representative that they could speak to.
The police really liked this. They felt like they understood what was happening. They got the orderly interaction that they needed. But for our part, we knew that the spokesperson wasn’t our boss. They were just our representative that we had designated as our ambassador to the authorities.
Sometimes our representative was a person you might call an “important” person in the direct action – one of the organizers, one of the masterminds of the action. But other times the representative might be someone quite unexpected. Sometimes one of the children from the group might be our point person. We enjoyed watching the police respond to this. We had a lot of fun doing things in a way that was perplexing yet non-threatening to those in authority.
At this point you might be saying, “Micah, what on earth does this have to do with Paul’s letter to the Corinthians?” That’s fair.
I would like to suggest that what I experienced growing up in a Christian community of direct action has a lot to do with the way Paul viewed authority in the church. In the church at Corinth at that time, people were fighting about who was the leader. But Paul writes to them saying, “This is all irrelevant. You’ve missed the entire point. I’m not in charge. Apollos is not in charge. Jesus is in charge.”
Jesus’ leadership is very different from the way things would be if Paul or Apollos or whoever else led the church in Corinth. Human beings tend to lead communities in the way that a policeman can understand. We designate a leader, and that leader gets to make the decisions for the community. They are the decider.
You see this a lot in the world of business and nonprofits. There’s almost always a CEO or an Executive Director at the top of the org chart. You even see this in a lot of churches. You get bishops and elders and deacons and popes. As the church has conformed itself more and more to the mainstream culture, it has often taken on hierarchical forms that make sense to a policeman. But this is entirely contrary to the way authority works in the Kingdom of God.
This is surprising to the world. In the mind of the human authority, a kingdom should be top-down. There should be one person in charge, and below that person you’ll have other designated authorities who report up. And finally, down at the bottom, you have all the regular people who just do what they’re told by the bosses above them.
The Kingdom of God works differently. The presence of Jesus is a different kind of leadership. This is what Paul is talking about the secret and hidden wisdom of God. He’s describing an authority that comes through the power of the cross.
Paul says that, when he first came to Corinth and began his proclamation of the gospel, he decided to know nothing among the Corinthians except Jesus Christ and him crucified. He didn’t preach with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power.
What does that even mean?
I believe what Paul is saying here is that, when he showed up in Corinth to share the gospel with the people there, he kept his message very simple and very focused on Jesus and the cross. He told them what Jesus accomplished through his self-emptying and self-sacrifice; through his humility and death.
There are so many other things that Paul could have talked about. Matters of church discipline. Organizational structure. What the rules should be in terms of dietary codes and circumcision. Paul could have focused on baptizing people. So many options.
So why did he limit his preaching? Why did he decide to know nothing among the Corinthians except Jesus Christ and him crucified?
Paul is very clear on why he did this. He writes that his “speech and… proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” Why? “So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.”
What is the power of God? Paul says in the first chapter of this letter that it’s the cross. The cross is the power of God.
What makes the cross the power of God? What makes the cross the foolishness that is God’s wisdom and the weakness that is God’s strength? What is it that caused the curtain in the Temple to be ripped down the middle the moment that Jesus died?
The cross is an explosive event. It is a like a spiritual bomb going off, leveling everything around it. On the cross, Jesus fully empties himself. He humbles himself to the lowest point. He becomes the epicenter of the great leveling that God is bringing to our world. As a result of this self-emptying and sacrifice, God vindicates Jesus by raising him from the dead and giving him the name that is above every name.
This is the revolution – not merely that Jesus is raised from the dead, but that we are raised with him. Not only does Jesus empty himself and descend to the lowest point; we join him there. We ourselves are emptied of all human wisdom and power, so that we too might take part in his resurrection. We enter into a new kind of kingdom where God rules us directly by his Spirit.
This kingdom is hard for the policeman to understand. It’s not about setting up another system of mediating authorities where you’ve got one guy at the top and then some other guys below him and then a bunch of powerless followers at the bottom. The kingdom of God that Jesus inaugurates in his crucifixion and his resurrection is one where, in the words of George Fox, “Christ is here to teach his people himself.” It is a family where, in the words of Paul, “We have the mind of Christ.”
In the resurrection of Jesus, “We have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. … We speak in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit.”
The Spirit of God dwells within us. The resurrected Jesus walks with us. We have the mind of Christ, alive within us and available to lead us. We are sons and daughters of God – filled by the Spirit and transformed by God’s love.
Those who have not received this spirit, those who Paul refers to as “unspiritual,” find this to be foolishness. They can’t understand it. But for those of us who have received this Spirit, for those of us who are walking in the way of Jesus together, we discern all things, and we ourselves are subject to no one else’s scrutiny.
When we are breathing God’s spirit and walking with Jesus, when we truly understand the gifts bestowed on us by God, we’re like that Christian direct action group that I grew up with. We become a community that can appoint a little child as our leader if we want to. If the policemen of this world need to talk to our boss, they can talk to a grade schooler. Because our children, too, have the Spirit of God.
I was talking to a friend of mine recently who belongs to a different Christian tradition. In his tradition, he felt, the role of leadership is specifically for the people who have been ordained to the priesthood in his church. As a normal Christian, as a member of what he calls the “laity,” he didn’t believe it was his role to shepherd other people. He told me, in his words, “I’m just a dumb sheep and I need the priests to shepherd me. The priests are the ones with the authority to shepherd. I’m just a sheep to be shepherded.”
I pushed back on this. I told him, “I don’t understand ministry in this hierarchical way that you’re describing it.” I said, “If you came to my church, if you came to Berkeley Friends Church, and you asked any random person, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ The answer you would get is, ‘Jesus.'”
I’ve been thinking a lot about that conversation this week. I’ve been thinking about how confident I was when I said that. I told him, without any hesitation, “If you came to Berkeley Friends Church and asked, ‘Who is in charge here?’ Any man, woman, or child would say, ‘Jesus.’ They wouldn’t say, Micah. They wouldn’t say Faith. They wouldn’t say Ministry and Counsel. They would say, Jesus.”
I’ve been thinking about that all week and I believe that what I said is true. I believe we know as a church that, ultimately, our leader is Jesus. We go directly to him. We have access to him through the Holy Spirit. We know him. He leads us. He’s our authority. I believe we know that.
But I want to make sure. I want to make sure that we are remembering that. I want to ask all of you a few questions, to make sure that we remember our answer:
– Who is in charge here? (Jesus)
– Who is the wisdom and the power of God? (Jesus)
– Who sets the agenda at our business meetings? (Jesus)
– Who leads our ministers and elders and committees? (Jesus)
– And when someone shows up and asks, “Who calls the shots around here, who’s in charge?” What do we say? (Jesus)
Amen.