"When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." [1 Corinthians 2:1-2]
On the days when my faith is at its most wobbly and I ask myself why I continue to do my best to keep following the way of Jesus, one thing that grounds me again is the simple realization that the New Testament writers just do NOT sound like politicians angling for a bump in the polls. That's part of how I know there's something to the Gospel: it ain't a stump speech full of empty campaign promises or a televised spectacle of bluster meant to rile up someone's base.
I say this with the awareness that as I write, we are hours away from another State of the Union speech and its younger sibling in our era, the official response from the opposition party. And even before the teleprompters are fired up, the speeches are given, the facts given their most favorable spin, and their sound-bytes fired off for their intended audiences' most sympathetic news channels, you and I already know how the pageant goes. This is as close to a national liturgy as we get. We declare the "state of the union" is "strong"--and then we take different measures of either why it's already so strong [incumbents like to stress this] or what would make it even stronger than it is now [opposition parties take this tactic]. But either way, the So-and-Sos of both of our parties believe their job is to project "strength" and to cast themselves [and their respective ideologies] as the most capable, most intelligent, and most skilled ones to maintain that strength. And so they compete in a game of who can use the loftiest words, or the catchiest slogan, or deliver the most punch with a one-liner, all so that the cable news networks can spend the rest of the week debating who "won" the night's messaging. Forgive my cynicism in advance [I think that may be the gift and curse of my generation], but if that's not how the whole rest of this evening's crossfire of pontificating goes, I'll eat my hat.
And more to the point for us as people striving to love like Jesus, it just strikes me how different that whole bit of annual political theater is from the witness of the New Testament. In these few verses from what we call First Corinthians, which many of us heard read this past Sunday, the apostle Paul makes a point not to peddle empty promises or schmaltzy rhetoric about God or about this new religion he's come to tell you about. All he talks about is Jesus--and there is no Jesus other than the Crucified one, as far as Paul is concerned. There is no sloganeering, no partisan angling, and no attempt to make himself look smarter, wiser, tougher, or more successful than he actually is.
In other words, Paul knew that it sounds empty, shallow, and fake to try to persuade people on big promises or cheap appeals to being "strong" or "successful" or "great," if only you'll support his candidate Jesus for Lord in the next election. And instead, Paul focuses on the very thing that makes Jesus look, to the watching world, like he is a weak failure of a nobody. He centers on the cross. And he does not, not as some fine print he'd like to skip over or sweep under the rug, but as the very heart of the Christian message. God's way of reigning and rescuing the world is not through conquest or domination, not through PR victories or polling numbers, and not through the usual means of military might, economic power, or overwhelming coercive force. God's way of reigning the world is the preposterous notion of dying for it at the hands of the rulers of the day, absorbing the empire's violence into himself, and breaking its power in death and resurrection. It is decidedly NOT through the means of what we usually recognize as "success," "strength," or "greatness." And so Paul doesn't try to sell the gospel in those terms, because he knows they are just so much hot air. That's because where spin ends, genuine love can begin.
It is easy to lose sight of this in our day, when so many voices confuse Christianity with the usual modes of getting things done in our culture. We are so used to Big Speeches making grand (and vague) promises of success, or loud angry bluster stoking hostility aimed at "those people" who will take away our strength or our power or our greatness, that we can easily miss how that whole way of thinking runs counter to the way of Jesus. And here the contrast could hardly be any clearer: rather than attempt to gin up support for a party's agenda with glittering generalities and vapid appeals to "strength," Paul zeroes in on Jesus the Crucified, the One whose way of saving the whole world (not just America, mind you) is the self-giving love and rejection of violence that looks like failure and weakness to the watching world. Paul knows that the way God loves--revealed in Jesus--doesn't dwell in boasting about greatness or envious posturing to vie for power. God's love is shown precisely through what looks like weakness, what looks like foolishness, what looks like... a cross. That is precisely the opposite of the contest of spin-filled pageantry and politics that will consume the airwaves before long.
After hearing so many religious hucksters in my day who peddle a version of Christianity that sounds just like a stump speech, a State of the Union address, or a partisan rebuttal, sometimes I forget--the real gospel sounds nothing like those diatribes. The real gospel sounds like Jesus, the Crucified One, and it is exactly because of that difference that I find myself drawn back again to it and to Jesus himself, over against a world full of pompous pundits and campaign noise. The real gospel sounds like love that doesn't have to brag.
What I need is exactly what Paul has given us: the word that God has saved the world in love by dying for it already. That doesn't sound like a campaign promise or a pitch for reelection--that sounds like news of something already accomplished.
What if today we spent our energy trying to sound more like Paul's uninflated genuine love than the talking heads behind podiums?
Lord Jesus, keep me centered on you today, especially over against all the noise and bluster around.
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