The Lutheran Hour
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"A Foolish Moment"
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Text: 1 Corinthians 1:18-22
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Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Having heard those wondrous words, there are some of you who may be tempted to turn off this broadcast. Stay your hand for a moment. Spend the next few minutes with me as I tell you about how the cross of Christ can make a profound and powerful change in your life. Now if you’re still with me, let me ask, have you ever had a “FOOLISH MOMENT”? A foolish moment is defined as a time when you take your common sense and intellect, wrap them up most neatly, and throw them out the window.
The subject for today is foolishness. The world is full of it. A number of years ago, the firemen of Virginia County wanted new helmets. The helmets they ordered were colorful, high-impact plastic. They would adjust to head size and resist scuffing. There was only one thing wrong. When you got them near heat, they melted.
The subject for today is foolishness. The world is full of it. In California there was a 20 foot modern metal sculpture called, “Great Planes Study Number Seven.” It was destroyed by workmen with bulldozers. The workmen thought it was junk. Worse, it was more than a year before somebody noticed the sculpture was missing. Worse still, city officials paid the artist to replace it.
The subject is foolishness. The world is full of it. Brazilian farmer Romeo Bittencourt, from Puerto Alegre, got a divorce. Romeo is 90 years old. He has been married 65 years. He has 12 children, 50 grandchildren, and 36 great-grandchildren. The reason for his divorce: “Incompatibility.”
Foolishness — the world is full of it. Outside Orlando, Fla., a state trooper hailed a truck driver on his CB. He asked, “What is your speed?” The truck driver quickly lied back, “65, officer, just 65.” The trooper immediately radioed, “Then I advise you to pull over and get out of the way because I just clocked your trailer doing 80.”
Cats have foolish moments when they climb a tree and can’t get back down. You have a foolish moment when you eat mini-donuts, corndogs, cotton candy and then get on the tilt-a-whirl at the amusement park. When I look for my keys jingling in my pocket, that’s a foolish moment. When I push on the door that says “pull,” that’s a foolish moment. When we dial the wrong number, apologize to the person who answers, and then dial the same wrong number again — that’s a foolish moment. When we are stalled on the interstate and explain to the police officer, “Yes, sir, I knew the gas gauge said empty, but I thought I could keep on driving for awhile,” that’s a foolish moment. The person who wrote to the Internal Revenue Service and asked if they could please have their name removed from the mailing list was a foolish moment. All of us have had them. I mean, all of us. When you start your car and it’s already running, that noise tells everybody around, you’ve had a foolish moment.
The Bible tells us humanity has had a lot of foolish moments. When Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for having fallen into Satan’s temptation, when they turned around and saw the angel guarding the entrance and realized they had lost paradise, that was a foolishly sinful moment. When Moses hit the rock rather than speaking to it as God had commanded, performing an act of disobedience which would stop him from entering the promised land, that was a foolishly sinful moment. Look at every Scriptural personage and you will see that not one of them escaped having a foolishly sinful moment. All did things they regretted; spoke words they wished they could have recalled; took paths they wished they could have retraced.
Now let’s get something clear. When you have a foolish moment before the world, you feel silly. You might even feel stupid. But when you reject the Lord and His will for you, when you ignore the power of salvation contained in the cross, the foolish moment takes on an infinitely deeper and darker meaning. Foolishly avoiding the power of the cross is not merely silly or stupid. It is sin. And there is no foolishness more unbelievable than dying people who reject the message of the cross. It is worse than a drowning man laughing at the life preserver thrown to him. It is worse than the patient whose lungs are filling with the fluids of pneumonia, making fun of the doctor who approaches his bed with a shot of life-saving penicillin. It is the man being forced into bankruptcy ridiculing the relative who comes to bail him out. Paul is right when he said, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.” But this is not an amusing foolishness. It is a pitiful, sad, strange foolishness which inevitably leads unbelievers to earthly sadness and eternal death.
Dear listeners, know this well. God’s powerful message of salvation is a simple one. It starts out with all of humankind locked in the jail cell of sin and rebellion against God’s perfection. Because the thought-word-deed crimes we have committed against the holiness of God and our fellow humans, we deserve to be punished. Justice demands it. No one can argue that it is unfair. There is no escape. There is no reprieve. There is no parole. We are destined to die for our sins.
Now, the world may say the cross of Jesus is foolish. They are wrong. The cross is not foolish. It is God’s grace and the power of God which gives salvation. The cross is God’s love, concentrated in a form that can forgive every sin and save every soul. It is not foolishness. Rather than sentencing us for our crimes, God had His own Son nailed to the cross in our place. Supreme Court justices do not do such a thing. Judge Wapner and Judge Judy do not fine their children for the crimes of others. But that is what God, in His grace, did for the lost of this world. For this gift we should instantaneously be grateful. God’s Son has lived for us and fulfilled the law for us. God’s Son suffered and died for us, defeating the devil and death. It makes no sense, but upon this truth, all who believe, including you and me, have eternal life.
How has the world reacted to God’s grace? Remember, the subject of today is foolishness and the world is full of it. Don’t be surprised when I tell you that groups throughout the world have reacted foolishly to God’s grace. There are religious bodies who foolishly say that Jesus didn’t finish His job and our salvation is incomplete. There are churches that take God’s pure Word and foolishly try to rewrite those divinely inspired Scriptures to make them acceptable and more tasty to the modern spiritual palate. There are pseudo-scholars who take God’s truth and foolishly try to turn it into a personal opinion that may or may not be true. It makes no difference. In the days of Paul, as well as our own, the cross, to the unsaved, is the ultimate in foolishness, but it is also the power of God for salvation to all who believe.
Around the turn of the last century, a wealthy Chinese businessman came to Europe and found himself fascinated by some of the technology including a powerful microscope. Looking through its lens to study crystals and the petals of flowers, he was amazed at the beauty and the detail. He purchased one of these devices and took it home. He thoroughly enjoyed using it until one day he examined some rice he was planning to eat for dinner. He discovered tiny, living, many-legged creatures were crawling in his uncooked dinner. After some agonizing, he concluded there was only one way out of his dilemma — to destroy the microscope. Foolish? Not any more foolish than those people who do not want to admit to their sin; no more foolish than those who think God’s truth is trivial; no more foolish than those who think they have the power to live successfully without the forgiveness which Jesus has won for them on the cross.
The power of Christ’s cross shows them as pitiful creatures who must come to God in repentance. Rather than admitting their weakness, they blunder ahead, blindly, foolishly, promoting their wisdom as being best and right. And how has humanity’s wisdom turned out? We were told that children didn’t need parents. We are finding out it isn’t so. We were told that men and women are the same. It isn’t so. We were told that it doesn’t make any difference what television programs children watch. They can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Then after a few children killed their parents and their friends, we found out that wasn’t so. We were told that children weren’t affected if their parents got a divorce. We are beginning to understand how much they are affected. Human wisdom told us that eggs were good, then they were bad, then they are good. Milk was good, then it was bad, then part of it was bad and part was good. We were told by human wisdom that leisure suits were here to stay as the height of fashion. Such is the wisdom of man.
Not enough? Facts unquestioned today in the human sphere of influence are the center of jokes tomorrow. The bones of a dinosaur proclaimed to be a missing link are pronounced bogus. We were told Halley’s comet would be the view of a lifetime. It fizzled. We were told the asteroids crashing into Jupiter would be nothing. They were spectacular. The point is: if we can’t trust humankind’s wisdom when it comes to the stuff right under our noses, why should we trust it when it is measured against the omniscience of God?
What God is offering is not foolishness. It is salvation, pure and simple. The subject for today is foolishness. The world is full of it. Not long ago there was an airline (I’m not allowed to say which airline) whose pilot, after a considerable delay, came on the intercom to announce: “There’s a warning light for the thermal expander valve on the number two engine and I won’t fly until it’s been replaced. The passengers are requested to return to the terminal waiting room.” Passengers did that, and then 10 minutes later were told to get back on the plane. One passenger from Harland, Minn., asked a flight attendant, “That’s amazing. Did they get the new thermal expander valve installed already?” The attendant said, “My land, no! There’s not one of those things within a thousand miles. They got us a new pilot.” Foolish to trust your life on an airline that would do such a thing? Maybe. But to trust eternity on man’s wisdom is foolish to the nth degree.
The subject for today is foolishness. The world is full of it. But I encourage you to trust the Lord whose Son is salvation; whose cross is power, whose wisdom cannot be impeached. If you wish to know more about this wisdom of God, my colleagues at Lutheran Hour Ministries will give you assistance by calling 1-800-876-9880. Call. It won’t be foolish. In fact, it would be the smart thing to do. Amen.
LUTHERAN HOUR MAILBOX (Questions & Answers) for September 15, 2002
ANNOUNCER: “Why should I go to church when I can be a Christian at home by myself?” I’m Mark Eischer and joining me once again is Pastor Ken Klaus. We started discussing this question last week. We talked about the importance of being part of a congregation. As part of this congregation, this body of Christ, what are we to do?
KLAUS: First, we are to start thinking of each other. Of course, some will reply, “When are those church people going to start thinking of me?” Wrong question! We are to comfort each other. We are to build up each other. We are to confess our sins to each other and we are to pray for each other. How can we do any of these things if we avoid each other?
ANNOUNCER: But our listener might ask, “Is all this really necessary?”
KLAUS: Once again, back to my first thought, “Wrong question.” Let me say it a different way. What would you do with a car that started once every five months?
ANNOUNCER: I’d get rid of it.
KLAUS: What would your boss do if you showed up for work only to collect your paycheck?
ANNOUNCER: He’d get rid of me.
KLAUS: What would your wife do if you forgot her birthday, your anniversary, never came home, never saw the children, never said, “I love you,” or showed others in any way that you even remotely cared about her?
ANNOUNCER: God forbid that should ever happen.
KLAUS: Why?
ANNOUNCER: Because I love her.
KLAUS: And if you love somebody, you want to show it. Right?
ANNOUNCER: Right.
KLAUS: That’s the way it is with Jesus. He doesn’t want to twist somebody’s arm and say, “Come to church!” He doesn’t want to force people to care about each other, to reach out to each other, to share the Gospel with each other. He says you should want to do these things. You can’t stop yourself from doing it. We have good news of great joy, and the world needs to hear it. How can I possibly say “I love Jesus” and not share Him with those who are lost?
ANNOUNCER: Maybe our listener still isn’t convinced. Maybe he/she has had bad experiences at church. Maybe they think the things we do in worship are boring and unnecessary.
KLAUS: One of the best answers I can give to that is from a very old story. A man went to church on a Sunday morning. He winced when the organist missed a note during the prelude. He frowned at the teenager talking when everybody was supposed to be praying. He knew the usher was watching to see what he put into the collection plate. He didn’t like that one bit. The preacher messed up grammatically at least six times in the sermon. When he slipped out via the side door during the closing hymn, he muttered, “Never again, what a waste!” Now, another man also went to church. He heard the organist play a majestic and very complicated prelude. He overheard a young girl explaining the service to a friend she’d brought with her. He was pleased his church had accepted a challenging budget and he appreciated the sermon. It answered a question that had troubled him for a long time. As he walked out, he thought, “How can a man worship here and not feel the presence of God?”
ANNOUNCER: They went to the same service, didn’t they?
KLAUS: Yes. More often than not, at worship you will find exactly what you are looking for.
ANNOUNCER: If I may ask, Pastor Klaus, what do you find?
KLAUS: Over the years, a lot of things. One thing I have never found is a boring Savior. In His life He was accused of a lot of things — rabble rouser, false prophet, the devil. But nobody ever, ever, called Him boring. How could He be? He is Good News. He is great joy. I found my crucified and risen Savior, Christ the Lord.
ANNOUNCER: Thank you, Pastor Klaus. The next Lutheran Hour message is titled, “Discerning the Divine.”