Excellent Answers Can't Get Us to Excellent Love

We live in a world of hot takes. Everybody has a strong opinion, a compelling idea, and a thread explaining why everyone else is wrong. This fall at The Table Church, we're moving through Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth. We want to ask what it looks like to follow Jesus in close proximity to other people: people you didn't choose and people you can't control.

Before Paul gets to any of the specific issues that divided the Corinthians, he makes an appeal. "Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be knit together in the same mind and the same purpose" (1 Corinthians 1:10). One liberation and inclusion translation puts it beautifully: Let there be no ripping apart between you, but be mended together.

That's the heart of this whole letter. Paul is calling the church to live in shalom, the Hebrew word we usually translate as "peace." It means much more than the absence of conflict. Shalom is the right ordering of relationships, with God, with each other, and with the world. Paul isn't asking the Corinthians to paper over their conflict. He's taking seriously how deeply we humans love rivalry, competition, and pulling each other apart.

So what must be the foundation of a church in a world full of hot takes? Paul's answer is going to sound foolish, and I think that's the point.

First, a Word About Paul

I want to name something before we go further. One of our congregants, Ethan, has named this season the "All Paul Fall." Thank you, Ethan. I know that for some of us, the prospect of an All Paul Fall brings a sigh, an eye roll, or a quiet Lord, have mercy, here we go.

I sympathize. I've told the story many times of how the great theologian and mystic Howard Thurman was shaped by his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. She had been enslaved and never learned to read, so she often asked young Howard to read the Bible to her. But she was clear that he was never to read from the letters of the Apostle Paul. When he asked why, she explained that her enslavers, the people who believed they could own her body and soul, had always loved to read Paul to the enslaved.

So if you feel some churning in your gut about an All Paul Fall, I think that's good common sense. Paul is still centered by so many modern-day would-be masters. Many churches use him to suppress certain kinds of people and certain kinds of theological ideas. Nancy Ambrose taught us something sacred: if we want a different kind of Christianity, we have to center different kinds of texts. We need texts that question the business-as-usual exploitation, extraction, and transaction of our world.

Yet and still, we need the pastoral concern of a Paul. Paul, who has been so misinterpreted. Paul, who never expected his letters to be overheard. Can you imagine someone reading only one side of your text messages and building a whole religion out of it? Paul, whose complicated rhetorical style makes him hard to read. Paul, who has entire letters credited to him that he probably didn't write. And Paul, who would probably be horrified that so much of the church puts more weight on his words than on the words of the Lord he served, Jesus.

Wherever you land on Paul, there are scholars who agree with you. Dr. Miguel De La Torre offers a helpful image for how to hold all this. He points to Jacob wrestling beside the Jabbok River (Genesis 32:22–32). Scholars aren't sure whether Jacob was wrestling with God, with himself, or with something malevolent. What's clear is that Jacob wrestles. We are people who wrestle with the Scriptures, whether they seem to reflect God, mirror ourselves, or release something sinister. We should expect the Scriptures to leave us with a limp. Not because we've been browbeaten into submission, but because we're being drawn into mystery and made more aware of our limitations.

Jacob came out of his wrestling with a new name. I hope and pray the same will be true for us this fall.

The Pitch-Perfect Self

Now let's turn to the passage itself, 1 Corinthians 1:18–31. Right after Paul names the division and quarreling in the church, he uses a series of sharp contrasts, and a whole lot of hyperbole, to ground the Corinthians in some basics of discipleship.

"Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" (1 Corinthians 1:20).

To hear why these questions landed so hard, you have to understand Corinth. Greco-Roman culture was steeped in the belief that polished rhetoric, cultured speech, expert knowledge, and a pitch-perfect presentation of the self were of the highest value. The educated were trained in the art of clever, compelling reasoning, and everyone else aspired to it. In a society built on honor and shame, pulling off that kind of performance got you honor. It moved you up the social ladder and gave you status.

Corinth also had a large population of formerly enslaved people. Paul points out that most of the church there did not have wealth, power, or elite parentage. "Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth" (1 Corinthians 1:26). Most of this church was poor. No wonder they harbored fantasies about being the wise one, the scholar, the debater of this age. Those were the paths to status.

We live in that world too. It rewards speaking the right way, carrying yourself in a refined manner, and delivering a sharp pitch for the image you want to project. A few weeks ago, a friend helped me launch a website to house my writing. I thought it was pretty cool, until I noticed my Instagram algorithm kept dropping me into accounts making it very clear that I do not talk right. There is a whole industry of influencers obsessed with elocution: how you speak, how you present, what you do at work if you want to get ahead. They tell you that you win status, in the workplace or in the theological marketplace, through tips and tricks rather than character and substance.

I used to teach The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is considered one of the great American novels for good reason. Jay Gatsby spends his entire life transforming himself from a poor boy in the Midwest into an "Oxford man." With his enormous mansion, his lavish parties, and the right clothes, Gatsby embodies the modern and postmodern predicament: image is everything. If we can just get the right image, we too can be among the elite, with all the privileges that come with it.

When a Good Thing Becomes an Ultimate Thing

Here's where this passage gets uncomfortable for a church like ours. At The Table, it's easy to think of ourselves as an intelligent church. Many of us come from spaces that were anti-intellectual, where curiosity was treated as a threat. So it makes sense that we take pride in our intellect, in making arguments that appeal to reason, and in asking good questions. Those are good things. But I wonder where that good thing has become an ultimate thing. I wonder where we, like the Corinthians, need to have our speech gifts and our expert knowledge checked.

Many of us have been through deconstruction, the process of taking apart the faith we were handed so we can examine it honestly. Many of us are now doing the slow work of reconstruction. I wonder whether that long, wandering path of seeking truth has sometimes veered toward the much easier path of seeking airtight answers.

I wonder where we might have traded seeking the mystery for the much more appealing task of seeking mastery.

In short, this passage invites us to ask how we might have become entangled with spiritual elitism.

Paul knows his audience. "Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom" (1 Corinthians 1:22). Jews sought signs of deliverance because they were an oppressed people living inside an empire, not unlike many disabled, BIPOC, and queer folks today. Greeks desired rational proofs because that's what their culture had formed them to value, not unlike many of the white Christians I know. Both longings make sense. Paul doesn't dismiss either one.

Instead, he says: "But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23).

A God Who Is Forever Crucified

The Corinthians were starting to give in to the world's standards of honor and status. Into that situation, Paul lifts up the cross. In the ancient world the cross was a scandal: repulsive, dishonorable, ridiculous. And it is exactly the thing that shatters the world's reasonable, perfectly presented, logically compelling accounts of what matters.

Here's a detail I love. When Paul calls Christ "crucified," he uses the Greek perfect tense. That tense describes an action in the past whose effects continue into the present. As one scholar puts it, for Paul, Jesus is forever stamped by the cross. The glorious truth that Jesus is risen does not erase his identity as the crucified one, the lamb who was slain. Christ crucified is a pinnacle of what God has revealed about who God is. This is a God who chooses what is foolish, weak, low, and despised. This God draws us toward a future beyond our most airtight imagining, in order to abolish the death-dealing powers and patterns of the world.

Most of us are far removed from the indignity of the cross, so an ancient piece of graffiti helps. Around 200 CE, someone scratched an image into a wall inside the Roman imperial complex. It's one of the earliest depictions of the cross in history. Many believe the artist was a guard, or perhaps a child being educated in the imperial household. It shows a person facing a cross, and on the cross is a figure with the head of a donkey. Underneath is an inscription: Alexamenos worships his God.

It was meant as mockery. Look at this fool worshipping a crucified ass.

Yet Paul is clear. God has chosen exactly what others mock, what others find stupid and shameful. At the heart of our faith is a complete reversal of values, an epistemological revolution. That's a fancy way of saying we have to count as sacred the knowledge and experience of the Nancy Ambroses.

Nancy Ambrose seeded the theological vision of Howard Thurman. Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited went on to shape the theological vision of Martin Luther King Jr. It is the Nancy Ambroses of the world who are most equipped to teach us. They teach not with eloquent speech or polished presentation, but, in Paul's words, "with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (1 Corinthians 2:4).

Baby, Just Stop Trying

So here's the question for us: Are we prepared to reject the world's standards of knowledge, standards by which most of us would be rejected anyway?

I can imagine Paul saying to us today: Consider your own call, beloved. Not many of us are straight enough. Not many of us are thin enough. Not many of us are white enough. Not many of us are eloquent enough, educated enough, or well-traveled enough to be what the people with the right answers want anyway.

I imagine Paul saying to us, "Baby, just stop trying. Stop trying to be what they want."

Instead, Paul says, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 1:31). Boast is another way to say glory, and glory is another way to say rejoice. Go on ahead and rejoice in the Lord. Paul knew what we still need to learn: it is all too easy to use our head knowledge and our correct words as weapons, and sometimes as armor. We can know all the facts about our world and still miss the point. Excellent answers cannot get us to excellent love.

An encounter with God as revealed in Christ matters far more than any status we gain through our own techniques of mastery. The romance of this relationship matters more than our ability to analyze the dynamics of connection. Knowing the scent and texture of our faith matters more than grasping the science behind the art. Trusting dependence is everything.

Go back and read the passage, and notice who the subject of most of the sentences is. God chose. God decided. God is why you are in Christ Jesus. It is this foolish God in whom we boast. That undercuts all our claims to status: our doctrinal correctness, our pure morality, even our proper politics and partisanship. Those claims are the roots of division in the church.

When God begins all the sentences of our lives, our faithfulness will not look like human wisdom. It will look like the wisdom of the cross. It might even look like a piece of graffiti mocking us on a wall.

Alexamenos Is Faithful

Here's the end of the story. In a room next to that mocking graffiti, archaeologists found another inscription. Maybe it was written days later, maybe years. It seems to answer the first one. It says simply: Alexamenos is faithful.

The world will always have its standards: the right image, the right words, the airtight answers, the pitch-perfect self. Some of us have spent our whole lives trying to measure up. Some of us have gotten very good at it. Either way, the invitation is the same. Stop auditioning for approval that was never the point. Build your life, and build our life together, on the foolish wisdom of the crucified Christ.

So this week, notice where you reach for being right when what's needed is being loving. Notice where you're performing. And then, gently, stop.

Friends, may our fellowship be established on the foolish wisdom of the crucified Christ. May we too be found faithful.