Christ Lutheran Church
Cleveland, Ohio
February 1. 2026
by: Rev. Lynn Podoll

Epiphany 4
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One of the very important principles of reading and interpreting the Bible is CONTEXT. It is something I have tried to drum into the heads of all the people I served in 5 parishes in my active ministry – and to some degree in my retirement. There are questions need to be asked. “What is the immediate context of this verse?” “What do the verses just before or after tell us about how to read this verse?” “What is the setting in this chapter, or this particular book of the Bible?” “How does this fit in the whole New or Old Testament?” Without these questions a lot of people over the years have come up with very strange and even heretical ideas. And context is really important when we look at today’s Epistle reading.
If you were able to be present last Sunday, you heard that St. Paul came down very hard on the Corinthian congregation for the divisions in that congregation. (One commentator called it a verbal “spanking.”) Some in the congregation said they were followers of Paul or Peter or Apollos. Some wag even claimed to be a follower of Christ! And that is just the beginning of all the dissensions in this congregation. In today’s Epistle, Paul seems to take off on a totally different direction with all his talk about the wisdom of this world and God’s foolishness, as you heard. On first glance, it looks like Paul is talking about something completely different, something totally out of context. But when we look closer, we see that Paul is very closely addressing those divisions. He is thrusting a spear into the very heart of the issue that is causing the divisions in that church – human pride! We all know what that is, because if we are honest, we have to admit that we have all been there. We have all considered ourselves in one way or another to be superior to others. In one of the more embarrassing moments of my life was in 8th grade. I remember thinking what a wonderful world it would be if everyone were just like me. Talk about the height of arrogance! I have confessed that sin very thoroughly over the years. Maybe you have some divisions in your church. Maybe you are guilty of being a part of them. Maybe it is your pride that is contributing to them. Maybe you are sitting here today thinking, “Boy, that sure applies to (someone else.)” We are all very good at seeing the faults in others and missing our own. But just remember what your mother told you when you were seven about pointing your finger at someone else.
Conflict arises when we think we are something on our own. We think we or our opinion is better than others. Now this is not something new. It is as old as the human race. In some ways, it is the beginning of sin in our world. Adam and Eve ate the fruit that God forbade them to eat because they were tempted to try to “be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5) Wounded pride led Cain to kill his brother Abel. We could trace the history of humanity with stories of people thinking they are better than others, from the beginning to the time of our Lord Jesus in his conflicts with the Jewish leaders to Paul’s comments about the Greeks seeking wisdom from human sources to our time. When Paul asks, “Where is the scribe, where is the debater of this age?” (I Corinthians 1:20) he may be referring to Jews and Greeks. The word “philosophy” even means “love of wisdom.” Both these groups loved to debate, to argue about all kinds of things. They seemed to believe that in so doing they could arrive at truth. But the blessed apostle reminds us that “God [has] made foolish the wisdom of this world.” (I Cor. 1:20) Human wisdom cannot lead us to God. Only God can show us the truth about himself, and he reveals the ultimate truth about himself in the cross. To the unbeliever of any stripe or any age, the cross looks like foolishness.
Toward the end of the first century a Roman governor named Pliny wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan about a certain strange group of people in his area called “Christians.” He wrote, “They are accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and to sing responsively a hymn to Christ, as to a god.” (Quoted by Erich Kiehl in a chapel sermon at STL seminary on February 9, 1989) Now Pliny had no problem with singing to a man as to a god. The Romans had recognized any number of very human men as divine. The shock for Pliny was that this was a man who had been crucified! If you were crucified, that meant you were the lowest of the low, strung up between heaven and earth, shamed, bloody, naked, exposed, until you finally suffocated and died. Only a really serious criminal received that kind of treatment.
So we can see how shocking outsiders would find for Paul to say that the word of the cross “is the power of God.” (I Cor. 1:18) To the average person, the cross was a horrible instrument of death, but to us, the cross is the instrument of God’s salvation. And to add to the scandal, when Paul talks about the cross, he is not talking about the beautiful, shiny, clean item that many of us wear around our necks or display in our homes (and our churches.) No, he is talking about something very messy and unpleasant. He was talking about a crucifix, as gory as things come. The cross reminds us of the enormity of God’s love for people who did not, do not deserve it. Our blessed Lord’s crucifixion, unpleasant as it is, demonstrates for us of the enormity of God’s love for us. Our human minds cannot fully comprehend that great a love. But we do well to remember that Isaiah speaks with great insight when he says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways, my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8, 9) Where we might have thoughts of revenge or retaliation, God has thoughts of love, mercy and forgiveness toward us.
Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher and scientist of the 17th century, once wrote “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.” It was kind of a way of saying that there are limits to what we understand. We might revise that for our purpose here as, “God’s heart has reasons that human reason cannot know.” You can’t reason your way into God’s heart. Why would God create this amazing world, with us as its crown? Why would God give us speech and the ability to imagine and create amazing things? And then when we rebelled, why would he make a way to redeem us, even when we never asked for redemption. He made a way to buy us back, “without any worthiness or merit in” us. (Small Catechism, Apostles Creed)
So the love and mercy of God are a mystery, a great and joyful mystery. And how do we know this or believe this? Many people seem to believe that they can find their way to God through contemplation and meditation. I hasten to add these are good things. But we cannot expect to find God or his truth inside ourselves. Faith and God’s truth come from outside ourselves. His Holy Spirit brings us the saving knowledge of who God is and how God is and how God operates from outside ourselves. He does this through God’s word and promises, as we find them in Holy Scripture, and as that Word is expounded in preaching and teaching, in hymns and poetry and devotional writings.
If we can say that “God’s heart has reasons that human reason cannot know,” then we can also say that God’s heart has reasons that you can trust. And we find those reasons in Jesus Christ, his Son. He comes and brings that love and mercy to you personally in water with the Word, through bread and wine with the Word, through the Word of your pastor in Holy Absolution. You can trust that Word of God in all its forms because it comes from God’s heart.
So what appears to the human heart to be folly is actually God’s loving wisdom for a people in need of his redemption and mercy, your need for his redemption and mercy. It is through Paul’s preaching of “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks” (I Cor. 1: 23) that we find the true wisdom. Jews did not expect a Messiah who would be crucified, and the Greeks likewise found it astonishing to sing a hymn to Christ, the crucified One, “as to a god.”
So back to context: Paul addresses the divisions in the Corinthian church – and any church – with a reminder that it is only because we are in Jesus Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit that we can claim anything, certainly not anything in ourselves. “… because of him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption….” (I Cor. 1:30) Four gifts, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption – each of them is worthy of a sermon in themselves.
Then God gives you his heart to love other people you would not love naturally. But since we are all one in Christ, we are able to respond in ways that build one another up. With that heart that God gives, we find ways to admire those we would look down on without God’s love in us.
So Paul concludes with the statement that is almost a shout: “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (I Cor. 1:31) And that is how you address divisions in the church, by pointing to the love and grace and wisdom of God, revealed in Jesus the Christ. In His name. Amen.