012708//

'Wooden Surgery'

Psalm 27:1, 4-6; I Corinthians 1:10-18

Despite the costs, the risks and the pain, the number of elective cosmetic surgeries performed each year continues to sky-rocket. More and more aging baby boomers are choosing to move their quest for the perfect body from the gym to the surgical table: liposuctions, tummy tucks, hair implants, nose reconstruction, permanent lip color, eyeliner and brow-contouring, and until recently, the all-time favorite, breast implants. A friend of mine got breast implants and she actually gave me all her old padded bras because she wouldn’t need them anymore. Apparently she thought I did though!

Once most popular, now most suspect, is the use of silicone for replacing or augmenting body parts. The damage silicone is suspected of causing happens when this viscous fluid escapes from its plastic sealed packets and flows into the body itself. The leaking silicone causes the immune system to react against it defensively as an intrusive substance. Ironically, it is the immune system that determines what is "self" and what is "other." No matter how much we rearrange, add to or reduce our bodies to create an artificially "improved" version of ourselves, it is our own biology that tells us what is false advertising.

The old catch-all phrase "plastic surgery" doesn't even begin to cover the range of options in procedures and materials available today. Yet, altering our exteriors has never succeeded in changing one iota of our interiors. All the weakness, selfishness and sinfulness endure as a smudge on the soul. All our cosmetic attempts to alter this original base fail. It was Paul's great gift that his realism about our interior life kept him focused on the centrality of the cross. Hence his stress on the scandalous, miraculous message of the cross: 1) There is nothing you can do to make God love you less. 2) There is nothing you can do to make God love you more.

God's love is constant and unyielding. The only reconstructive surgery that has ever successfully transformed the human condition took place on the cross. Wooden surgery - not plastic surgery - is the source of our salvation.

In the cross God showed a reckless disregard for appearances, for propriety, for appropriately restrained behavior. The cross demonstrates the enveloping totality of God's love for us - a love that extends above and beyond all the traditional norms of the human capacity to love. Paul returns again and again to the cross - its ugliness and its power - in direct opposition to the sensibilities of the Corinthian church members. These early Christians were already embroiled in the age-old game of church politics. They were bickering among themselves, pitting this faction against that, and each was trying to win support (like Paul's) to their own "side."

This internecine quarreling served several purposes. It gratified the ego-needs of those identified as party leaders - making them feel important, in charge, in control of this new faith. Splitting into factions also gave a sense of ownership and identity to all the members within each group. Humans have strong "tribal" roots and are continually forming cliques, clubs and voluntary associations with strict rules of conduct and belief to help feed that instinctive need to "belong."

Paul sensed that one of the most compelling reasons behind all the "party politics" at Corinth was to deflect attention away from the scandal of the cross. This flagrant display of God's unyielding love was simply too outrageous and uncomfortable for the Corinthians to swallow. Is there any one of us who did not pass through a phase in adolescence when parents became the most enormous embarrassment we had to bear in life? God forbid that someone from school should have seen us out in public - in the mall or at a restaurant - with our Mom or Dad.

But far, far worse was when one or both of our parents decided to surprise us and help out at some school-sponsored event - a dance, a swim meet, a basketball game, a play or a debating match - and maybe actually (horror of horrors) scream and cheer us on! To adolescents, parents are always either too fat or too thin, too rich or too poor, too loud or too quiet, too young or too old, too nattily or too shabbily dressed, etc. And there always lurks the extreme danger that they might want to hug or kiss their offspring right there in public, in front of the "coolest" kid in school.

The Corinthians were behaving like embarrassed adolescents about God's totally uncool public expression of overwhelming, scandalous, unrestrained love in the cross. They tried to push the cross into the background. They relied instead on their own energies, which they poured into creating new cliques that they hoped would be their salvation. Belonging to the "right" group would somehow make it possible for them to manipulate God's irrepressible love into a more presentable form.

Paul derides all these attempts at self-salvation. We cannot maneuver God's favor or manage it "our way" by taking up one side or another (Apollos, Cephas or Paul himself) and presuming that membership will steer God's love toward us. All our theological quarreling, all the party politics, all the cosmetic adjustments we try to make in ourselves and in our lives are without consequence without God's saving grace in the cross of Jesus Christ.

You can't get to God and to God's love without crossing the cross. It is the cross that trumps and transcends all divisions, no matter how deep, no matter how wide. Only the wooden surgery of that old rugged cross stitches together and binds together the family of faith.

So on this day, the day of our congregational meeting, I want us to focus on what unites us, the overpowering, triumphant love of Christ and not get distracted by lesser things that put their hold on us. I don’t want to hear anyone say, 'I belong to Jean' or 'I belong to John' or 'I’m a Yardville person' or 'I’m a Pilgrim person' or 'I only want traditional worship' or 'I only want contemporary worship.' What unites us is not our taste in music or our common history or our own particular priority in ministry, but our Lord Jesus Christ and his saving grace. And so I also don’t want us to run away from the scandal of the cross - the scandal that God risked everything to pour out his costly love, and that as followers of Christ we need to be willing to do the same.

//