By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
Monday
Saving foolishness
I Corinthians 1: 17-25
All our readings this week are from the letters of Paul. These are remarkable documents. They had such impact on the early church that nearly all Christian writing for the next few centuries took the form of epistles.
The epistle to the Romans is the closest thing to a general theological tract that Paul wrote. The rest of his epistles are genuine letters, addressed to particular groups in particular circumstances. They are composed on the run and are most revealing of the warmth and heat of the relationship between the apostle and the people to whom he is writing. As you read the epistles of Paul you meet the writer face to face.
In these epistles you also have primary documents on the early church. This is not promotion material. This is not a story written about the first Christians. This is a glimpse at the first Christians. As you read these documents you watch those early Christians relate to one another, you watch them believe and discourse. If you want to be visited by a cloud of real witnesses, read Paul's epistles.
These documents are also first-class aids to theological thought. They were written because the author thought people were mishearing the gospel. He was most concerned that it be the true gospel of Jesus Christ that got heard. He took up the task of making essential distinctions.
And further to this end is the fortunate fact that a string of documents by the same author have come down to us. It is never an easy matter to know what an ancient writer with a different language and from a different culture is saying, especially when he is writing God-talk. When have you understood what he intended you to hear? When asking yourself this question, it is a great help to have before you several writings on the same subject, by the same author .
The foregoing is an argument for reading the epistles as whole pieces rather than snatching bits here and there out of them for comment. But that would have meant publishing Paul's epistles for the Lenten Booklet and someone has already published them.
However, I find even the bits eloquent expressions of the radical gospel. The preaching of the cross of Christ is the theme for today. To one group it is a stumbling block, to another foolishness. To people who look for signs of God's power, the cross of Christ looks like failure. To people who want salvation to make their kind of sense, the cross of Christ is nonsense. But to us, who are being saved, it is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
In a diversion of thought, while dealing with a quarrel between adherents over who was the best leader, Paul sums up the theme of this Lenten book.
With the help of an editor, who would watch for exclusive language, Paul would have written a great Lenten book.
Offering
Lord and lover of all, receive our sacrifice of praise.
It is a sacrifice to afford you proper praise.
It means losing all our other dreads in the dread of you alone.
It means having no other gods before you, and surrendering our trust in a myriad of unreliable and dangerous saviours.
It means being excluded from all boasting, and receiving our creation and justification as a gift.
It means letting go our own righteousness and our need to be innocent, and relying on your forgiveness and grace.
It requires some dying to rely on your grace alone.
We risk everything.
But we who have tasted the kingdom know it is the pearl of great price.
We who have glimpsed the treasure, make haste to possess the land in which it is found.
Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb.
Receive our sacrifice of praise,
O God.
Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen