Eastertide: Spiritual Wisdom, 1 Corinthians 2, Andrew Evans

Well, good morning. Wow, it is rainy, but guys, you

can do better than that. Good morning.

Yeah. Help, Right?

The sun will shine again. Yeah.

My name is Andrew Evans. I am one of the pastors here at

Church of the Resurrection. It's great to be with you.

Please turn with me in your Bibles to 1st Corinthians

chapter 2, First Corinthians chapter 2 in the Black Pew

1 Corinthians 2 · chapter mention

Bibles. You can find this on page 895,

then on to the next page. And before we get started, let

me pray for us. Father, I praise you that even

on gloomy and wet mornings, you have shown the light of Christ

on us and on our lives. Pray that you would illumine our

minds this morning through your through your word.

I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Let's talk for a minute about Ted Talks.

Ted Talks. So they began in the 1980s in

California, of course, naturally, and they really began

to grow in popularity in the in the mid, early to mid 2000s.

So Ted, Ted talks, they are like basically the Ted, Ted stands

for technology, education and design.

And they're talks about interesting things basically.

And they've become incredibly popular, it seems.

I mean, some videos have millions of views on YouTube.

There's a Ted Radio hour on NPR. They have Ted conferences all

over the world now very popular. They are kind of, you could say,

a phenomenon now. What makes them so popular?

What makes Ted Talk so popular? I think that they are an

irresistible cocktail of three different ingredients.

They are rhetorically powerful. You could say speakers.

Unlike me, they're not supposed to use notes.

They, you've probably seen the videos, right?

They kind of wander around the stage.

There's a red circle here and they like wander around.

They've got their pointer with their slideshow and they're,

they're just talking to you, right?

And you hear them and you understand them and there's

nothing between you and them. And so you can really get what

they have to say. So we, we're getting, Lord

willing, some new wireless microphones here.

And Soleimani has threatened to start wandering around the stage

while he preaches. Maybe we need to do like a red

circle here, Say you can, you can wander this far and no

further. So rhetorically powerful, right?

That's the first thing. The next is that they explain

some aspect of the world. This is what they promised to

do. They promised to give some sort

of framework, some sort of new understanding, some sort of

secret knowledge that unlocks some aspect of reality for us.

I was listening last weekend, I was driving somewhere and I was

driving probably like four blocks away and took about 10

minutes. So I had the radio on and and it

was the Ted Radio hour. And so they were talking about

about autism, but people who aren't exactly autistic and, and

these sort of characteristics of these not quite autistic people.

Super interesting, really fascinating, really sort of

helping me to understand some aspect of reality.

That's what they're promising us, You know, that that's like,

they're helpful, right? So they're, they promise to

explain some aspect of the world.

And when you pair this with, you know, the guy wandering around

on the stage with no notes, it becomes very persuasive.

And then the final ingredient in this irresistible cocktail is

that they offer a kind of path forward.

They tell us how to act because just understanding the world,

just having this framework isn't enough, is it?

We need to know how to live, what to do in light of this.

Yeah. And so this is what they, this

is what they offer. They typically, they always

offer some sort of some sort of thing.

Sometimes it's sort of at the end.

Sometimes the whole thing is like 15 steps.

It's all global warming or whatever.

But they offer you, they give you something to do.

So this is what Ted talks offer us, what they offer the world,

right? Powerful rhetoric, a new

powerful understanding and action points things to do with

that. Now they seem they, they are a

kind of relatively new phenomenon in a way, right?

But they're actually offering something that is as old as

humanity itself. What they're offering us is

wisdom. Wisdom, persuasive,

understanding the world and how to live because of that reality.

And this is something that we just so desperately want, isn't

it? We want to understand the world,

especially our world today, which feels like the very

foundations of our world are shaking because of all sorts of

changes. And we we just desperately want

to know what is going on. And then how do we live because

of that? So, you know, we read our sub

stacks. I have my subscriptions.

I subscribed to somebody earlier this week and I read a great

essay, really helpful. We read our sub stacks, right?

Maybe we go check out the latest Jonathan Haidt or James Davidson

Hunter book. You know, the anxious

generation. We're all anxious.

Why are we anxious? We've, you know, flipped through

The Economist. I was talking to somebody

earlier and I was like, do you read the Economist?

And she said, no, but I should. I said go in peace.

You don't need to be the Economist, but this is what we

want to understand. And so all these places sort of

promise understanding. They promise to help us sort

through the the chaos of our universe, the chaos of our

world. If you read The Economist, it's

really OK. It's OK.

We want wisdom. We're looking for wisdom.

And in this we are just like the Corinthians, aren't we?

They valued rhetorical power. They sought the wisdom that this

that this insight promised. There were Corinthian Ted talks,

you could say rhetorical competitions, where people

sought to be the most the most popular, the most persuasive.

But the problem for the Corinthian church, I think, was

that they felt like they were giving up the wisdom that the

city so valued. Because, you see, Paul didn't

come to them in lofty words of wisdom.

Paul never would have been invited to a Ted conference.

Maybe he would have been like on some secondary stage and, you

know, the backwaters of, I don't know, Paris or something.

Definitely not. Definitely not in Washington,

DC. He talked about one thing,

talked about Jesus Christ and him crucified.

He talked about a savior who died, apparently intentionally.

Great message, guys. Yeah, really good Paul.

And his demeanor as he's talking his, his rhetorical power was

not particularly persuasive, was he didn't come with confidence.

He came with weakness, fear, much trembling.

This is what Paul came with. He was a terrible messenger for

a frankly uninspiring message. And so the Corinthians probably

thought like, look, I want to be a Christian, but can we do any

better? Like, is this really, is this

really what we have? Am I, I have to give up what

this city so values, in fact, what humanity has been seeking

for so long in order to be a Christian?

I think I have to give up wisdom.

And I think that we can be so tempted to think that as well.

Is Christianity really, really wise?

Is it really sophisticated? Does it actually give us a deep

understanding of what's going on in the world?

And I think that we can be tempted to say, well, as a

matter of fact, I think it's true, but it's not that

sophisticated. We're not really wise.

And, and we're tempted as a result to try to try to

sometimes trim out parts of our faith that are, that are less

persuasive. You could think about this with

the, with the focus on love that we see in so many places.

God is love. Amen.

So true. I preached about that last

weekend. God is love.

But if that's all we focus on, that God is love, we can

actually end up with a very distorted understanding of who

God is. And we can end up doing really

silly things like dismissing Paul and trying to exalt the

ethical teachings of Jesus because because Christianity

calls us to love, to a deeper love, to more than love in a

way, it calls us to to holiness, to self sacrifice, to that dirty

word purity. God calls us to all of these

things and we have to hold all of them together.

But this can feel just so profoundly old fashioned and

unsophisticated, can it? So is there real wisdom in

Christianity? And Paul's answer here is a

resounding yes. Yes, there is real wisdom in

Christianity. If you want true wisdom, look to

Christ in faith. That's what Paul is driving us

toward in this passage. He wants us to see where real

wisdom is and how we can get it. But I think it's so telling that

Paul doesn't begin by talking about wisdom.

He says in verse 6 that he does offer wisdom, but that's not

where the book starts. That's not where he starts in

his argument here. He starts with God and he starts

with God acting. This is actually the heart of

Paul's counter intuitive and kind of backward rhetorical

strategy. He does everything that he can

to point away from himself and to point to God and more

specifically to God's action in the world in Christ.

The danger of speaking too confidently, of being too

persuasive, is that people can actually end up putting their

faith in Paul and not in Jesus. But this isn't where Paul wants

people to look. Paul wants people to look to

Christ and him crucified so that, as he says in verse 5,

their faith would not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power

of God. And with this phrase, the power

of God, Paul here is inviting us to see one of the most profound

truths about the cross. Because at the cross, what seems

like powerlessness, it's actually the supreme

demonstration of God's power. At the cross, where the Son of

God died, God decisively dealt with the guilt and the shame of

his people. At the cross, he reconciled all

who would come to him in faith to God.

At the cross, it looks like weakness and powerlessness, but

it's actually the power and even the wisdom of God on full

display. God acted in Christ for you with

power, and the resurrection vindicates Christ as a

demonstration that Christ is here in power.

This is what Paul proclaimed, and this is where he wants all,

all of his rhetorical power, everything that he has,

everything that he's pointing to is pointing at Jesus, at Christ

crucified. He is lifting up before us the

God who has acted for you in Christ.

This is the beginning of wisdom. And when we put our faith in

Christ, in God's action for you, we actually begin to gain the

truest and the most lasting wisdom.

Because you see, the problem with the wisdom of this world is

that it passes away. It doesn't last sub stacks the

latest books. They might have some explanatory

power, but they will start to fall apart.

They'll show themselves to be incomplete or maybe just

downright wrong. So consider as a as a perhaps a

lighter example, eggs. Eggs.

Yeah, eggs. So should you eat eggs now?

It depends who you ask and when you ask.

As a matter of fact, because if you were to ask your great

grandparents, they would say, yes, of course.

Obviously they fill you up. They're good food.

That could be energy for the day.

But if you were to ask somebody in the 60s, they'd say, ah, yes.

The latest scientific study informs us that eggs have

cholesterol and cholesterol causes heart attacks.

So you should not eat eggs. Or if you do, just eat like 3 a

week. OK, so then a little a little

while later, say, should we eat eggs?

And you know, the dietitian will respond.

Well, as it turns out, there are two kinds of cholesterol.

There's there's good cholesterol and there's bad cholesterol and

eggs perhaps have some of those. So just go easy, maybe a little

bit. Last decade, you asked, should I

eat eggs? I'll respond.

Well, as it turns out, the the latest study says that there is

no such thing as good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.

It's all fine. So yes, eat as many eggs as you

want. So what's the truth about eggs?

What do we do? It's a silly example, but I

think it illustrates the point here, right?

That the wisdom of this world will pass away.

You know, 1800s Karl Marx claimed to explain everything

through economics, class relations, power relations.

But his theories proved incomplete and historically

disastrous. You could say Sigmund Freud,

early 20th century, took the psychological world by storm

with his psychoanalysis. It promised to explain

everything, including civilization and its

discontents. Could you get bigger than that?

But from what I understand, Freudian theory is basically

discredited today. More recently, some of the sages

of our own time have proclaimed the explanatory power of trauma

and physical memory, the memory in our bodies.

Maybe you've read read the book or or like me, read a review of

the book The Body Keeps the Score.

Seems like this theory has some explanatory power, but it also

seems like it's perhaps losing some steam.

Will it be discredited completely like Freudianism?

I don't know. It's almost certainly

incomplete. It's worldly wisdom.

It will pass away. The wisdom of Christianity is

not like this worldly wisdom. The wisdom isn't of this age or

of any age. It's not kept and doled out by

the the sages and even you could say the priests of our day.

This wisdom of the world is past is bound to pass away, but the

wisdom of Christ will last. It can be so easy to think that

Christianity is old fashioned and and unsophisticated,

simplistic, insufficient. And that's why I think we we so

quickly run to all these other theories that offer offer quick,

excellent explanations and we run to them before we do the

hard work of searching our Bibles and praying to the God

who sent his Son to die for us. You might think that the Bible

doesn't have much to say about modern issues like transhumanism

or or climate change, reproductive technology.

But my friends do not miss the riches that lie in our faith on

all of these issues. The Bible does speak to them.

Our faith does speak to them. And the starting point, the

wellspring of all of this wisdom is Christ crucified.

So before running to the latest economic theory or or

psychological or sociological book, start by reading your

Bible, start by praying to the God who sent his Son to die for

you, and then go read the books and see what they have to say.

I think you'll be surprised at the riches that you already have

access to just as simple Christians, because in fact,

you're not just simple Christians.

This is Paul's point in verse 10 and following.

If you are a Christian, if you are looking to Christ in faith,

you're not just left to your own devices to try to to figure out

what the wise course of course of of action is.

This wisdom is actually given to you by the Spirit of God

himself. Have you ever had an argument

with somebody and the person says, why are you so angry at

me? And you respond, I didn't, I

didn't actually didn't think I was angry at you.

As a matter of fact, I was, I was maybe sharp, but it was for

these other reasons and I wasn't particularly thinking about you

at all. And maybe that's part of the

problem, but but I wasn't angry and I wasn't really perturbed at

you at all until this very moment.

And wouldn't it be just so useful if they could be inside

your head and understand your thoughts, sort of have your

spirit in them so they can know what you're thinking?

That'd be just really convenient, wouldn't it?

Our spirit understands our thoughts, but other people don't

seem to have access to our spirit.

This is the source of many, you know, miscommunications between

friends, between spouses. And the same is true for God,

right? God has a spirit, and the Spirit

understands his thoughts. That's what Paul says.

But The thing is, God's spirit isn't limited in the same way

that our spirit is limited and doesn't stay separate from us.

God actually sends His Spirit to us and the result is that the

Spirit enables us to understand what God is doing and what His

plan for the world is. What God is giving us.

This is verse 12. We have received not the Spirit

of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might

understand the things freely given to us.

My friends, just pause to think about how amazing this is.

The Spirit of the God who made the universe, who has been

orchestrating all events from the beginning of time.

That spirit is in you. If you're looking to Christ in

faith, you had the Spirit of the living God in you.

As a result, we have access. To the mind of God, we can

understand God and his purposes, maybe not perfectly, certainly

not completely, but we can still have true understanding of God

and of His work. And we do this first and

foremost by looking to Christ and faith.

And the result of, of receiving the Spirit is that we have this

deep understanding, we have wisdom.

We are spiritual people. This doesn't mean that we're,

that we're, you know, have our head in the head in the clouds

and we're, you know, too heavenly minded to be any

earthly good. Rather, we're actually able to

start viewing the things of this world rightly, correctly,

properly. Our view of people will change

from from burdens, maybe opportunities to exploit, to

people created in the image of God being offered salvation in

Christ. Our view of business will change

from opportunities to get rich to perhaps opportunities to

build lasting institutions that that benefit other people and

glorify God. Our view of politics will change

from power plays that are seeking to, you know, own the

libs or resist Trump, to opportunities to promote justice

and seek the true flourishing of our fellow man.

The gospel enables all of this, and we as people indwelt by the

Spirit, can think this way. The Spirit enables us to have

true wisdom, and if the Spirit gives us this true wisdom, we

should have a confidence that is not shaken by what other people

think. Natural people might grasp some

of the truths that we have to say, but they won't get it.

All spiritless people will think that what we most believe most

deeply, most truly about Christ is folly.

Our hope is that a 1st century Jewish man who died a brutal

execution on a wooden cross at the hands of the imperial force

at the time that that he is our hope.

It seems crazy, but it's true. This is our hope, and we should

not lose confidence just because people who aren't Christian

think that what we believe is absurd.

Friends, we have the Spirit of God in US, giving us access to

His plan from before the foundation of the world.

We can see God's plan at work in Christ because of the Spirit.

And because of this wisdom that God's Spirit gives us, we can

judge those around us with true judgement, and we don't have to

fear their judgement. Verse 15, The spiritual person

judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.

Now his point here isn't a kind of mental impunity that you can

think or say or judge whatever you want.

Being a Christian doesn't baptize everything we think.

We still are sinful, we can still make mistakes, but we

don't have to fear the judgements of those who are not

Christian. You will be judged, but their

judgement of you is not what matters.

So my friends, be at peace. If your marriage is hitting some

rough waters and all of your non Christian friends are are

telling you to abandon ship, you can stand firm and love knowing

that cruciform service that Christ showed us is the path of

wisdom. Maybe your financial advisor is

telling you you really need to put down the hatches, need to

cut back on some of this giving, but you can stand firm in love

knowing that because of the Spirit you can see all that God

has freely given you. Maybe your family is telling you

you have to affirm the lifestyle choice of the member of your

family, even though you know it is sinful and wrong.

You can stand firm in love knowing that Christ died to

redeem us from sin. If your friends are are getting

all worked up about the latest political brouhaha and they're

inviting you and they're wondering why are you not

getting all worked up, You can stand firm in love knowing that

Christ died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Our King sits on the throne, and all of the authorities and

rulers of this world will pass away.

This wisdom that we have in Christ gives us the confidence

to stand firm in love even when we find ourselves alone.

So, my friends, do not fear. The world cannot judge you.

Instead, you can with confidence, judge the world.

So my friends, do you want this wisdom?

Do you want the deepest, truest understanding of the reality of

of true reality and the ability to act well on that

understanding? Look to Christ, look to him in

faith. Place your hope in Christ and in

Christ crucified. And we do that by immersing

ourselves in God's Word. The Bible is where we find

Jesus, not in our hearts, not in our emotions, but in God's Word.

So what are you reading first in the day?

Is it Twitter or X or the Bible? What are you thinking about at

the end of the day? Are you thinking about the the

latest scandal? Or are you thinking about what

God has done for you in Christ? You must be in God's Word.

And this means that we must be in God's Word among God's

people. We learn about God's Word from

each other in small groups. You hear sermons that try to

unfold what's going on in the Bible.

And we come to church to pray, to sing, to read, to hear, to

even taste God's Word. And we live and we worship in

this great tradition of the church, of people through

millennia who have been meditating on God's Word.

You know, give us insight and riches that we can Plumb.

This is one of the great riches of the Book of Common Prayer,

actually. It unites the church in a

liturgy through the ages that centered on God's Word.

And the result of this marinating in God's Word that

points us to Jesus is that we will have a stability that the

world will lack. You won't be blown around by

fashionable trends, by the latest Ted Talk.

But more than that, you won't be blown around by petty anxieties.

Petty tyrants roam the halls of our offices, but you do not have

to fear them. You know that God has already

acted decisively for you in Christ.

You know that Christ is alive, that he will come again.

Your eyes are not trained on yourself and your situation, but

on the victory that Christ has already won for you at the cross

and in the empty tomb. Your faith is not in the wisdom

of man, but in the power of God. Here, my friends, here lies true

wisdom. So, friends, do you have this

wisdom In the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy

Spirit, Amen.