2-01-2026

“THE CROSS: FOLLISHNESS OR WISDOM?”

Text: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Sunday February 1, 2026 – Epiphany 4

Trinity – Creston

       Grace, mercy, and peace is yours from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!

Our text for this 4th Sunday after the Epiphany is the Epistle lesson from 1 Corinthians 1  that was just proclaimed.

Let Us Pray: Dearest Jesus, send your Holy Spirit to remind us that you call people in all walks of life and on all levels to be your disciples and you use what we consider ordinary to bring others to you.   Amen.

Dear Fellow Redeemed in Christ:

Often over the years, when I’m doing business or interacting with the community, I get different reactions or questions when people find out that I’m a pastor. Oh, you’re a pastor? Yes, I replied, I’m a Lutheran pastor. I met a man who was Jewish from his father’s side. He was far from practicing Judaism as a religion, unless one considered politics to be a religion, which was his main connection with his Jewish roots.

He couldn’t care less about kosher, Sabbath, or synagogue, but if you said something bad about Israel, he would argue policy and history with you.

Joe(His name) had been reading a series of fictional books set in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War between Lutherans, Protestants, and the Roman Catholic Empire in the 1600s. He had questions about what he was reading, especially what separated Lutherans from other Christians.

Over the course of several months, we exchanged lengthy emails and had even lengthier phone calls as I tried to answer his questions as a pastor and a friend. I was feeling quite good about the trajectory of our friendship.

I had been praying about these conversations, that the Holy Spirit would use me as his instrument to bring this man to faith in the same Jesus that his genetic ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had yearned to see, and that my friend would be able to make the good confession of faith that Christ was also his Lord and Savior. I sent him a copy of Luther’s Small Catechism and an invitation to call anytime to talk about what he read.

Then the conversation went silent: no emails, no phone calls.

After about three weeks, I emailed him, asking if he got the catechism and if he had any questions; I said I’d love to talk. A few more silent days passed when, finally, he emailed me. He thanked me for the gift of the catechism and told me it would have a special place in his library, right next to his other special religious books, including his Qur’an.

I still remember the feeling in my stomach when I read what Joe wrote. He said something like this: “I have to know: Do you really believe all that stuff? You really think that God would surrender his perfect Son for a bunch of stupid sinners who keep making the same mistakes over and over, and he keeps forgiving over and over, and there is never any consequence for what you do? You don’t think you have to try to win him back over, somehow, and try to fix your mistakes?

What about being good and doing good things? Where’s the justice in ‘grace’?” There were a few other questions, but you get the idea. I emailed back, answering directly, simply, faithfully, restating much of the Apostles’ Creed, but even as I wrote, it felt like things had changed.

Later that evening, I got an answer with a tightly worded email: “If you really believe all that, I’m sorry . . . You’re not as smart as I thought you were. I really feel sorry for you and the job you have to do.” We never spoke again.

I discovered via Facebook that Joe died a few years ago, and when I read that, I was sad because I lost a friend, or someone I thought was a friend at one point. But I hadn’t only lost him in this world. Joe was, as far as I knew, lost into eternity.

I recalled my friend and the abrupt end of our friendship when I read this morning’s Epistle: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (v 18).

That truth that we instill in our children, our preschoolers, “Jesus died on the cross for our sins”, was foolish was folly to him.

What kind of God was this, he wondered via email, who would kill his own Son? What kind of God continued to forgive people who continued to break his rules over and over, seemingly without end? Joe was very much an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy, and the concept of full and free grace was too much to grasp. It made no sense. It was, according to Joe, foolish.

3.

I wish I could tell you that was the first and only time I heard something along those lines. I wish I could say I didn’t hear an elderly man in a nursing home tell me Christianity was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard of, or …

I wish I’d never heard a confirmation student tell me that maybe someday she’d have time to learn this “Bible stuff,” but for now, she just wasn’t interested—and then have her parents shrug and say, “Well, it’s her choice, you know.”

I suspect I’m not the only one here who’s had that happen. Maybe you’ve had it happen to you as well. It’s because of your confession of faith in Jesus Christ, your reading the Word of God and living a life of repentance and receiving the gifts given to you in your baptism. Someone in your family sees you as old-fashioned and out of touch.

But it’s not just in your family; it’s Christian families around the globe. Someone openly mocks those who bow their heads to pray over a meal. Someone embraces Islam or Scientology or some other religion, claiming they’re all paths to God and heaven.

Someone has embraced an alternative sexual lifestyle as perfectly acceptable. Someone denies his or her infant baptism. Someone calls Christians judgmental hypocrites. Someone gives up completely and says there’s no God and you’re wasting your time going to church.

For you, and for families like yours, your family dinner table is not so much divided by race or political party or whatever current topic is on the news; your dinner table is divided because of Jesus and the word of the cross. “The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” (v 18). It feels naïve, backward, simplistic. How could one person possibly earn forgiveness for all? How can faith save? What kind of God would make this a means to salvation?

You know, it’s funny. If you go back to Genesis chapter 3 and read the account of the fall, you discover this: Satan’s temptation caused Eve to see that the tree was “desired to make one wise” (Gen 3:6). Satan’s temptation was for wisdom, to be just like God. That’s worldly wisdom—be like God, take the place of God, make yourself out to be God.

Paul asks, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (v 20). Wow ’em with what you know, what you think, what you feel.

Do you remember the presidential race leading up to the 2024 election? It was almost as if the two candidates weren’t running for the highest office in the land but to see who outshouted the other while outdoing the other with outlandish promises. That’s worldly wisdom. Eve and Adam, they listened to Satan’s wisdom. In a left-handed way, Satan did tell the truth; they did learn what evil was. They certainly gained a measure of wisdom with one forbidden bite. But they also lost the perfect relationship with God while gaining the knowledge of death.

2.

In Romans 5, Paul says that by one man sin entered the world and through another man the world would be saved (Rom 5:12–19). To turn this slightly, through one tree, worldly, foolish wisdom entered the world; through another tree, God’s wisdom would be shown. It would be the fulfillment of the tree of life in the garden from which Adam and Eve were banned. You and I know this tree simply as the cross: the cross of Christ.

The cross truly is the tree of life for those who believe in what Jesus earned on that instrument of terrible death. He would die for the times that we chase after the world’s wisdom, with all its allure and tempting desire to be gods unto ourselves. He would die, perfectly resisting such temptations for himself, remaining obedient to the Father’s will for the salvation of the world.

To the world, this word of the cross is folly. But for us, the being-saved ones, this word—the Word made flesh, Christ, the Son of God—this word of the cross demonstrates the power of God to save. The Christ of the cross is the wisdom of God incarnate, the fullness of the power of God to rescue and redeem the world from its brand of foolish wisdom.

1.

I told you about Joe. Now I want to tell you about another friend whom I’ll call Rob. Rob had fought cancer for almost ten years. There were surgeries, radiation treatments, courses of chemotherapy, sandwiched between brief declarations of the disease being in remission.

Unfortunately, the doctors, despite their best efforts, were proved wrong and, finally, “remission” was replaced with “untreatable.” The family threw Rob a big birthday party, and a family friend gave him a wooden cross, designed to fit comfortably in the palm of the hand while praying or simply to hold.

As the disease continued to overwhelm his body, that palm-cross was an ever-present friend. When I asked him about it, Roger told me that the little cross was a tangible reminder of the cross of Christ. “It reminds me that Jesus has even cancer beaten,” he said, “and if he has beaten cancer, he can certainly forgive me.”

The cross went with him on a few ambulance rides, spent time in his hand in the hospital, and when the decision was made to enter hospice, the cross was right there, every day. His kids didn’t understand. They teased him a little bit about it, not to be ugly, but not understanding what the cross meant for their dad or for others who saw it as the sign of a promise fulfilled.

The night before Rob died, I visited with him and his wife. We laughed and we cried together, knowing that the end was near. That night, we celebrated the Lord’s Supper together in his hospice room. In that meal, the power of the cross was present in the body and blood of Christ.

To human eyes, to worldly wisdom, it hardly seemed like a meal at all—just a piece of bread and a sip of wine, and not good bread or wine at that. To human wisdom, bread and wine are incapable of offering anything other than satisfaction of hunger, but a bite and a sip are hardly satisfactory and certainly do not offer forgiveness, life, or salvation. To worldly wisdom, it was a waste of time.

But to Rob and his wife, there was nothing foolish in that meal; it was the promise of Christ. I had mentioned in a prior visit that I’d like to pray the commendation of the dying with him. That evening, he said it was time.

So with the same sign of the cross that was placed over him in Holy Baptism eight decades earlier, we placed the sign of the cross over him, commending him to the Lord’s eternal care. I’ll be honest: I choked up while praying the rite. I couldn’t speak, overwhelmed with emotion. With his frail hand, he held mine and placed his cross into my hand. “Don’t forget,” he told me, “Jesus died for you too.”

To Those like “Joe,” the Cross Is Foolishness,
but to Us like “Rob,” It Is Wisdom of Eternal Worth.

The word of the cross—the Word made flesh!—is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, Jesus is the power of God for our forgiveness and salvation. Amen.

Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior.  Amen.