The Foolishness of Preaching

Christian Community Presbyterian Church
Bowie, Maryland
October 11, 2026

The Foolishness of Preaching
1 Corinthians 1:18-25

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[This sermon was offered in celebration of the 50th anniversary of my ordination as a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)]

 

    How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
    Is laid for your faith in God’s excellent Word!
    What more can be said than to you God hath said,
    To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled? Amen.
    ("K" in John Rippon's Selection of Hymns, 1787)

The Corinthian church is divided. Paul begins to speak to the divisions with a quotation from Isaiah, a key prophet in the Old Testament. In Paul’s day, the Hebrew scriptures were the Word of God. Isaiah spoke for God saying, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Isaiah’s word emboldened Paul to preach the simple yet profound message of the cross of Christ.

The cross is the radical basis for Paul’s words. There is a reason “John 3:16” placards keep popping up. As Eugene Peterson phrases the verse in The Message, “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.” That is the foolish message: the cross is God’s shocking intervention to save and transform the world.

Wisdom was ripping the Corinthian church apart. Some Corinthian church members boasted about possessing exalted knowledge and about being rhetorically gifted to spread that knowledge. God, however, tossed that shallow wisdom to the four winds. In Christ God revealed a radically different wisdom that subverts any past, present, or future wisdom touted by the public intellectuals in the community. God chose to save the world through the ignominious and powerless death of Christ, not through arcane ideas or flowery oratory.

Paul is angry with the Corinthians who think that they have already achieved the realm of Christ’s rule and are in possession of the full faith. They claim to see through a clear window rather than in a dim mirror. For Paul, The message of the cross is the power of God for those who are being saved. “Are being saved” denotes ongoing action, not a past event.  

Much of the world clings tight-fisted to the notion that everything has to be over and done with. Check the box and move on. That was Paul’s complaint about the divisive Corinthian church members who thought that they owned God and that they could tell God what to do. The Israelites had the same notion as they kvetched to Moses in the Sinai desert. Neither they nor the Corinthian intelligentsia had the final say in how the world worked or how grace flowed from the wretchedness of the cross. But they were sure they had all the answers. Through all the ages since and into our own time some followers of Christ have claimed to have all the answers. And God simply says no.

In the Interpretation commentary on First Corinthians, Duke University New Testament scholar Richard Bevan Hays (no relation) writes that a very literal translation of Paul’s words to the Corinthians would read, “For the foolish thing of God is wiser than humans, and the weak thing of God is stronger than humans.” He continues: “This foolish and weak thing is the event of the cross itself. The cross is the key to understanding reality in God’s new eschatological age. Consequently, to enter the symbolic world of the gospel is to undergo a conversion of the imagination, to see all values transformed by the foolish and weak death of Jesus on the cross” (R. B. Hays, First Corinthians, p. 31).

Some of the Corinthians didn’t want their imaginations converted or their values transformed. Those Corinthians were celebrating a wisdom other than the gospel. They still looked at the world from the perspective of the old unredeemed age. The pundits of Paul’s day failed to understand what was happening. Their self-proclaimed wisdom failed to know the truth about God. This failure is for Paul a mysterious part of God’s own purpose.

As Isaiah said, God’s ways are shocking and amazing, countering everything human common sense claims. It’s done through the foolishness of preaching. That foolishness, as the other Richard Hays says, “points to the utter craziness of the gospel message by commonsense standards. How can the ignominious death of Jesus on a cross be the event of salvation for the world? One would have to be a fool to believe that. Yet that is precisely what the gospel declares” (R. B. Hays, First Corinthians, p. 30).

Jew and Gentile alike rejected what Paul and his contemporaries preached.  A careful reading of the sermons of the Book of Acts shows that there were certain constant elements in early Christian preaching:

• The claim that the great promised time of God has come.
• A brief telling of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 
• The assertion that these events were in fulfillment of Hebrew scriptural prophecy. 
• The contention that Jesus will come again. 
• And to cap it all off, the invitation to men and women to repent and receive the promised gift of the Holy Spirit. 

This preaching was a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. 

If you had English Literature in your education, you will remember Macbeth, the troubled Scottish thane who killed King Duncan to gain the throne. On hearing of his wife’s death and knowing that he would soon face his own demise, Macbeth uttered his soliloquy:

    Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.
    (Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5)

Preachers can echo Macbeth’s lament as they reflect on the effectiveness of their ministry, feeling like the world sees them as poor players strutting and fretting on the stage, not being heard, telling a tale that few people find significant. To onlookers the Word is foolishness compared to the world’s wisdom.

Nevertheless, preachers speak the Word; we cast it upon congregations like the sower in Jesus’ parable of seed and soils (Matthew 13:3-9, 18-23). On another occasion Jesus told his disciples that while one sows, another reaps (John 4:37-38). Preachers who sow the Word may not experience the reaping. Worshipers exit sanctuaries with the perfunctory, “Good sermon, pastor.” At least that’s better than the comment one parishioner made: “Pastor, each of your sermons is better than the next.”

The Word is preached, but to what end? Will the intended meaning be received? Will it be misconstrued? Will the Spirit enable some part of the sermon to convict the heart of a worshiper? Preachers may never know or understand the outcome.

A worldly wise person once asked a staunch church attender if he remembered any of the sermons he had heard. “I can’t say that I do,” was the response. “Well, why go?” “It’s like this,” said the man. “I’ve been married for over forty years. My wife has fixed me dinner every night. I can’t remember a single meal I’ve eaten, but I’ve been fed well. It’s the same with the sermons. I may not remember any of them, but I’ve been well-fed and I’m the better for it.”

People love being entertained. In church they sit like an audience in a theater watching actors on a stage. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard rewrote those roles. The preacher is not the actor; the congregation is not the audience. The audience is God. The cast of actors is everyone in the pews. The preacher directs the people in their stagecraft which is the liturgy of Word, Table, and Font.

Preachers stand in pulpits week after week, spilling ink on manuscripts, aligning electrons and pixels on iPad screens, vibrating the air with words. To what end?

"The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." Every time we gather we continue in God’s process of salvation. It started long before we came along and will continue long after we are gone. To extend Kierkegaard’s theater image, you and I are the cast and crew for one scene in a progression of scenes in which God is praised. As we entered the stage we received the script from the previous cast. We do our parts until we exit the stage as the next cast enters. This is the power of God working in the world through the proclamation of the gospel, constantly moving towards the culmination of salvation for which the cross was the earth-shattering beginning.

I was taught to spend at least ten hours preparing worship and preaching. Try doing that in a week filled with meetings, hospital visits, and family responsibilities. Worship is not a salad of prayers, hymns, scriptures, and preaching unceremoniously tossed together. Every part of the service from prelude to postlude needs to serve the day’s scripture.

This is why we worship. This is why we preach. We preach the cross which is “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Each sermon, each prayer, each hymn brings us ever closer to the fullness of God’s grace in Christ. This is reality not delayed gratification. “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! O what a foretaste of glory divine!” We recognize the cross for what it is, the power of God, and this changes the way we understand everything.

The Cathedral of St. Michael in Coventry, England depicts this beautifully. The 20th century cathedral was built as an extension of the stone hulk of the 14th century church which was firebombed in the 1940 German blitzkrieg.

A 75 foot by 39 foot single-piece woven tapestry rises behind the altar. It shows a seated risen Christ surrounded by the traditional symbols of the four gospel writers. The worshiping community faces their Lord and Savior as they offer their worship.

That is what we do here. We don’t worship the preacher, whoever she or he may be. We give praise and thanksgiving to God. We act our faith with words, music, prayer, movement; we use sound and silence; we offer ourselves in intimacy, vulnerability, and compassion. That is the ministry to which I was called and in which I have served.

Therefore, hear the words of the Gospel In the words Paul preached to the Roman church community, “Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

Thanks be to God for such glorious foolishness. Alleluia! Amen.

Many thanks to Rev. Dr. Kori Phillips McMurtry and Christian Community Presbyterian Church, Bowie, MD, where my wife Paula and I attend in retirement, for the opportunity to celebrate this milestone.