JANUARY 21st, 2024 PASTOR DON PIEPER
The Corinthian Complex Corinthians 2:1-9; 10-16
“GOD'S SECRET PLAN!”
Last week we started a new sermon series exploring Paul's letters to the church in Corinth. I know what some of you may be thinking. Isn't it vorboden to read someone else's mail? Well these letters are in the Bible so I'm thinking it must be alright. (looking up) It is alright, isn't it? (thumbs up)
It is? Good. So, last week we learned a bit about the context of the letter. In Acts 18 Luke tells us how Paul and his friends planted the church in Corinth, after being rejected by the Jews in Athens & elsewhere in Greece. Corinth was the economic center of Greece and how Paul spent a year and a half there, following a messy court case, involving accusations of breaking Roman law. Paul shares a Good News message; of Jesus' death and resurrection and the implications those events have for all the world from here on in. Paul's referring to all that, with his words, “When I first came to you...” (1 Corinthians 2:1)
Paul now writes from Ephesus to encourage and correct those seeking to live out their young Christian faith in the face of tremendous pressure to conform to their pagan surroundings. In the face of pressure to embrace the wisdom of Greek thought and pagan world view, Paul writes about a time-less, supernatural wisdom: “My message, though in plain simple speech, relied on the power of the Holy Spirit. I did this so that you would not trust in human wisdom but in the power of God... The wisdom we speak of is the mystery of God, God's secret plan..., offered for our ultimate glory...!” (1 Corinthians 2:4-5, 7)
Paul speaks of God's secret plan, a great, cosmic mystery! This isn't just about one city in the first century Roman world, if this plan is of the Creator's design, it is, by definition, for all of creation, God is sovereign over all the earth, time and space of His creation. So, this letter is for us as well!
It's as if we've received an invitation to be part of God's secret club...!
Calvin: Good news! I'm starting a secret club and you can be in it!
Hobbes: Oh boy!
Calvin: It'll be great! We'll think of secret names for ourselves, secret codes for our secret
correspondence, a secret handshake even! We'll have a secret clubhouse with a secret
knock to get in, and we'll do BIG, secretive type things!
Hobbes: Uh-huh. I see. Why all the secrecy?
Calvin: People pay more attention to you when they think you're up to something,
Hobbes: Ah....
In a sense, that's what Paul is saying, only it's not just that he thinks God is up to something – God most definitely is! He has a secret plan and He wants us in on it, because God knows that when we fully grasp the nature of the mystery, we'll be so in, that the world we'll notice and pay attention!
So why is this plan a secret? What is it that God so mysteriously has up His sleeve? As Hobbes so eloquently asks, 'Why all the secrecy?' Why was His plan previously hidden? Why has no eye seen, no ear that has heard, no mind that has imagined God's great secret?
So really two questions, Paul's words raise for me. One, why all the secrecy? And two, what is the secret? What is it, to use the common expression, that God has up His big all powerful, proverbial sleeve? So, to answer the first question, why all the secrecy, it'd be better to ask the question, who...?
To ask who is to discern why it was kept a secret, especially on learning the who is humanity.
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After all, “His plan was previously kept hidden...since before the world began.” (1 Cor 2:7)
That points back to the Genesis creation story, to say, the fall of humanity and a soiling of paradise! God has kept it a secret perhaps because of our track record, to keep us from spoiling another paradise, one is and one not yet. Maybe God's kept it a secret because as Paul writes, “(some) people who aren't spiritual can't receive these truths from God's Spirit. It all seems foolish to them and they can't understand it, for only those who are spiritual can understand what the Spirit means.” (1 Corinthians 2:14)
Paul quotes the prophets who speak of a kind of common deafness and blindness to what God has prepared, or to put that in the common tongue, what God has up His sleeve. Author, Phillip Yancey writes of an experience of the Magellan explorers along the coast of Argentina. There they saw the fires along the coast of the native peoples there who strangely ignored them. The natives there had not had yet any exposure or contact with the outside world. Later they explained that they'd considered the ships an apparition, not knowing how to make sense of what they're seeing. They lacked the experience, the imagination, the inclination, to decode the evidence right before their eyes!
There is a blindness, that shrouds from within, that makes a person, as Paul put it, unspiritual. In Yancey's words: “A society that denies the supernatural usually ends up elevating the natural to supernatural status. Annie Dillard tells of experiments in which entomologists entice male butterflies with a painted cardboard replica larger and more enticing than the females of their species. Excited, the male butterfly mounts and remounts the piece of cardboard. 'Nearby, the real, living female butter-fly opens and closes her wings in vain.' “C.S. Lewis uses the phrase, 'sweet poison of the false infinite' to describe this same tendency in the human species. We allow substitute sacreds, or false infinites, to fill the vacuum of our disenchanted world and cloud our collective minds.” (Phillip Yancey)
The hiddenness of God's mysterious plan is not so much of God's doing as it is our own. We've been involved in the cover up since the very beginning. The fig leaves sure weren't God's idea!
But no matter be it our ignorance, indifference or defiance, there is a deep longing in all of us to truly see. To see and to know, deep down, who we really are, to belong, and to be loved. We all have this. This longing to see to know. As author W. H. Auden expressed in poem form:
“Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lovely lady who dances and the man madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the deep sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye!” (W. H. Auden)
There is more at work here than meets the eye, that would be one possible translation of Jesus' prolific message: “The Kingdom of God is near! Repent and believe this Good News!” (Mark 1:15)
Which get us to the other question, what is God's secret plan? What is it exactly that our Creator and Redeemer has up His extra-large sleeves? Actually, I've kind of given it away already. In quoting Paul's quote of Isaiah 64:4, where Paul's prophetic reference reads as follows: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.” (Isaiah 64:4/1 Corinthians 1:9)
There it is already there, in the Old Testament Book of Isaiah. The mystery! The secret, that which no mind has imagined, but the clue is huge – for those who love him. That is, the who here is us as well, those who have responded to the nudge of the Spirit, and pursued to know him as he does us!
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That points to the nature of this secret plan, that is perceived by those who seek and embrace the loving relationship that God has always offered, ever since he walked beside us in the Garden. He de-lights and us and wants to share himself that we might delight in him, because He is so ever delightful!
More than we can imagine, but His delight is to give us glimpses of that, until one day we'll take it all in, and marvel in it, as Paul will later put it, “Now we see things imperfectly, as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)
Or in the words of Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and sand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” (Albert Einstein)
Jesus' Kingdom is experienced not only, in the life to come but in the here and now, as we not only experience but help bring to life, moments of clarity – life is lived best in giving it away! God's secret is to give us special glasses, spiritual glasses if you will, so that our eyes are open to truly see.
God's secret is that He wants to share his mind with us, so that we'd more and more, share the same mindset. How is this possible, as Paul points out, since “No one can know God's thoughts except God's own Spirit. And yet, we have received God's Spirit, (not to be confused with the worldly spirit that abounds), but He's given us His Spirit so we can know the wonderful things God has freely and generously given us, (most vital of which is His giving us himself in Jesus Christ)!” (1 Corinthians 2:11-12)
You need eyes to see and ears to hear, Jesus said to those who doubted him. It takes the mystery of faith, to trusting in him, for God has no apparent interest in compelling belief. If he had, the resurrected Jesus would have appeared to Herod and Pilate, not to his disciples. But it was sinners not like you and I that Jesus came and invited them on the adventure of a life time, as he does you
Because rumors of another world are just that, rumors and not proofs, a thin membrane of belief separates the natural from the supernatural. That is why everything hinges on something incredibly supernatural, so counter intuitive that is could be called, foolishness, as Paul has already written: “The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction, but for those of us who are being saved (by God's grace mind you), it is the very power of God!” (1 Corinthians 1:18)
It all hinges on Jesus' cross and resurrection, a theme Paul will return at the climax of his letter but for now he makes it clear, this is at the center of God's secret plan, it's the mystery of the open tomb!
It is to what Jesus has done there and now thru his living Spirit that we are urged to contemplate and implement into our lives, as He leads us by the same Spirit!
As Yancey writes: “Jesus' formula for living seems naïve and even foolhardy, unless you share his view of the world. Most of us see life as an arc beginning with birth, which we can't remember, and death, which we can't imagine. Jesus spoke of his role before birth and death and his years on earth as a period of transition. That point of view changes everything. His established settlements of the city of God while living in the city of this world.” A footnote on the pages of history may help. (Phillip Yancey)
During the days of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960's, Chairman Mao dismissed beauty as a bourgeois concept. Red guards closed flower shops and ordered people to destroy their goldfish. Everyone dressed alike, in unisex, uniforms. The world went gray.
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Or so it seemed. Actually, beauty went underground. Women cultivated flowers in their homes and wore brightly colored blouses under their gray Mao jackets. Children hid jars of goldfish under their beds. Until government policy changed, beauty existed as a kind of dangerous, hidden secret – a rumor of another world. Perhaps that kind of shared secret was what Jesus had in mind when he told his critics they could not pin down the kingdom of God: 'The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is', because the kingdom of God is within you.' (Luke 17:20-21)
In prisons, in catacombs, and even in the corridors of power, his followers whispered the pro-vocative secret that our planet, marked by violence, decay and death, is not all there is. As Paul put it: “If only for this life, we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” * In his letters, Paul sought to convince the new community of a way to live based on the reality of another world. The doorway lays through the resurrection – it's God's great secret! It's a peek thru the curtain!
* (1 Corinthians 15:19)
Shall we like, Lucy, standing before the wardrobe, take the next step? Let's pray...