A Fourth Church Sermon by Adam H. Fronczek

March 15, 2009 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

Vespers Meditation

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18–25

During Advent and also during Lent, ministers find that, a week at a time, typical worship attendance starts to trickle upwards, culminating, of course, at Christmas Eve and Easter, the two dates when even the most infrequent of churchgoers are likely to show up. During Advent I find this easy to understand. During Advent, the music is familiar and the church is decorated with greenery, and alongside children who look forward to opening presents on Christmas morning, we as worshipers anticipate the great assembly on Christmas Eve, the lighting of the candles, and the singing of Silent Night. And Advent should be this way. Advent is about waiting for the fulfillment of a wonderful promise, the promise that God is coming into the world to be with us. Even Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and the wise men who lived through it the first time knew something about that promise; they had something for which to hope. Advent is a time of hope. It’s an enjoyable time to come to church.

Lent, if we do it right, should feel different. If we pay attention to Jesus’ road to the cross, and if we pay attention to the response of those who followed him, we see that Jesus’ followers never really understood that Easter was coming. When Jesus was arrested, his followers betrayed him and fled; when he was killed, they were hopeless; and when he was raised from the dead, most of them did not recognize him at first and did not believe what had happened. Jesus’ followers were completely surprised by Easter. If the church did as good of a job observing Lent as we do observing Advent, you wouldn’t want to want to be here right now, because Lent is about the cross. It is about remembering our mortality and the reality of death all around us. It is a time of sacrifice and austerity. It is a time to think about loss. And why on earth would you want to come to services like that for a period of forty days?

Oddly enough, it occurred to me this week that the true message of Lent might actually be welcome this year. This year we might be a little closer to being able to relate to it. Earlier this week, I followed the media coverage surrounding the trial of Bernard Madoff, the financial schemer whose deceitful practices resulted in many of his clients losing their life savings. They innocently entrusted him with their savings and now have nothing. Madoff’s story touches on many aspects of the current financial crisis, but the thing that caught my attention most about Madoff’s story this week was that he knew that what he was doing was wrong from the beginning, but he thought he would be able to fix it. In his address during his hearing this week, he admitted, “I knew what I was doing was wrong, indeed criminal. . . . When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients.” (New York Times, 13 March 2009). What caught me about this statement was that Madoff made a mistake that is common to so many people: many of us, at least from time to time, live as if we are invincible. Mortgages, cars, vacations, or what we eat and drink from day to day, how we treat our own bodies or our loved ones—whatever our level of wealth, our culture has convinced us to live beyond our means, to overreach, to live as if we are invincible. And this kind of living has led millions of Americans into debt or onto the street. American businesses have been driven into failure, and the reason we hear again and again is that while many of us might have known we were not really so well off, like Madoff, we thought things would keep getting better and somehow we’d find a way to pay for it all. But we can’t. We have been undeniably reminded that we are not invincible. All of us can fail.

In recent days, our president has tried to impress a similar message upon the public, reminding us that in recent years many have overreached and that we need to return to living within our means and to making decisions that are responsible.

I wanted to begin with a detailed description of this current cultural background, because in tonight’s scripture lesson from 1 Corinthians, Paul shares a message that has a similar meaning, and a similar audience.

Paul is writing to the Corinthians, the people of Corinth, a city that, in the modern world, would have been in great danger of financial crisis. Corinth sat on a narrow strip of land between two bodies of water. By shipping goods through Corinth, one could pass across that narrow strip of land from one seaport to the other and avoid the time and risks of a much longer sea voyage around the larger land masses to the south. A few smart men who understood this geographic advantage used it strategically. They made a lot of money, and they made it fast, and people flocked to Corinth to grab a piece of the pie. In Corinth it was all about being smart and well-spoken and knowing how to maneuver around the system, and then, if you did well, living in Corinth was about how to enjoy what you had earned. Those who were successful felt invincible. But as our current financial crisis is teaching us, it can be risky to live as if you are invincible. And when a church was planted at Corinth, Paul had a word of caution for the seemingly invincible people: “Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

You see, Paul’s audience was made up of a couple of groups: some of them were Jews who had anticipated that their savior would defeat the Roman Empire and restore them to political power; others were Greeks who placed their hopes in a savior who would teach them wisdom so that they could understand all of life’s mysteries. Living in Corinth reinforced these ideas: money and wisdom and political power seemed to rule the day. And here comes Paul, minister to the people of Corinth, telling the best and the brightest, the greatest investors, the wealthiest and most esteemed members of the city, that they should forget about their own wisdom and worship a man named Jesus, a man who had survived only on the handouts of others and who died a convicted criminal at the hands of the Roman government. And his symbol is a cross, a tool of capital punishment, no more glamorous in that day than a noose or an electric chair is in our day. This was Christ’s symbol. And this man, Paul says, was God’s own Son.

The message is not an appealing one. It doesn’t sound good. And what’s more, I don’t even think I’m supposed to make it sound good. If I find some way to take this story of death and sacrifice and dress it up in enough pretty language to make it sound appealing, then I’m doing exactly what Paul says I’m not supposed to do. I’ll send you away thinking, “Wow, that Adam Fronczek sure can preach; he even made death on a cross sound glamorous.” And if you said that, you wouldn’t actually be coming to terms with mortality; you would only be coming up with one more way to pretend that you’re invincible, just like the people in Corinth did.

The only way the message of the cross sounds good is if you can appreciate that God is being honest with us. God is being honest with us that no matter how rich or pretty or clever we may try to be, you can’t take it with you. Every one of us will one day die, and when that time comes, our riches and our looks and our smarts won’t matter a bit. What does matter is that God sees through all of these things, and then instead of loving us because we’re so very rich or clever or beautiful, God just loves us because we are God’s children and we make mistakes and overreach and need God’s love and forgiveness.

If we really did Lent right around here, by the time Good Friday rolled around each year, all of us would be completely at a loss. We would have burned up every bit of hope in ourselves; we would look at ourselves and see clearly all of the ways that we have been hiding from the truth that every one of us is deeply flawed. And the reason that would be the right way to approach Lent is because then, when Easter morning arrived, we would be absolutely shocked that Jesus came back for us, and the only person we would have to thank would be God. None of us would come to church on Easter thinking, “Isn’t the choir great” or “Isn’t the preaching magnificent” or “Didn’t the florist do a nice job with those flowers?” We would just praise God. And we would walk through the doors of the church declaring with the psalmist, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”

And it’s not that God doesn’t want us to be happy or like ourselves. But if we could forget our own selfish goals, just for a moment leading up to Easter, we might take the gifts that God has given us and find ways to use those gifts not just for our own good, but to help our neighbor, whom God loves as much as God loves us. We would use the gifts God has given us not for our own sake, but for God’s sake.

The old Southern preacher Will Campbell was once asked to sum up the Christian message in ten words. He used nine: “We’re no damned good, but God loves us anyway.” If our culture lately has left you feeling a bit down, a bit betrayed, a bit helpless, a bit less invincible than you used to feel, perhaps Lent is the right place for you to be right now. Be at peace, for God is coming to find us and to save us—not because we have done so well, but because we need God and God knows it. If you need a little strength from beyond yourself tonight, come to the Lord’s Table and be fed. Amen.