( 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 ) - [ Deutsch ]
Peace be with you from Him who was, and who is, and who will be.
Today I am giving a sermon by Hans-Martin Heyns, who was a pastor in Lower Saxony and is now retired.
Dear community,
Do you think you're smart, even above average? Are you influential or do you have power? Do you come from a respectable, respectable family?
If this is true for you, then this text is a real challenge for you.
From "The Good News" I read the sermon text from 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, verses 26-31
26 Look at yourselves, brothers and sisters. Who, then, has God called? There are not many of you who are wise or influential by human standards, or who come from a distinguished family.
27 Rather, God has chosen the simple and powerless in the world to humiliate the wise and powerful.
28 He chose for himself the lowly and despised, who count for nothing, because he wanted to make into nothing those who "are" in the world.
29 No one shall be able to boast before God.
30 But God has called you to fellowship with Jesus Christ. With him he has given us everything: he is our wisdom – the true wisdom that comes from God. Through Him, we can stand righteous before God. Through Him, God has made us His holy people and freed us from our guilt.
31 It was to come to pass, as it is written in the Holy Scriptures: "Whoever wants to boast of anything, let him glory in what the Lord has done."
At the time of Paul, Corinth was a young, up-and-coming and contradictory city with residential districts of wealthy businessmen, and a port city typical of the time with the corresponding milieu: a colorful mixture of peoples with many uprooted and stumbled people. The viciousness and sexual permissiveness of the city was proverbial. And the community consisted mainly of people from these circles: dock workers, prostitutes, petty criminals, slaves and simple traders.
Are these now the better people favored by God? Do we all have to become like this: vicious, criminal, simple, so that God is gracious to us and chooses us?
Or does Paul mean to say that faith and thinking do not go together according to the motto: "He who believes does not think, and he who thinks cannot believe"? People still say, "I think scientifically, so I can't believe." Is that so? Or is a Christian not allowed to succeed or have power?
Or does God delight in seeing us small and humiliated , so that He can then show us His mercy from above? Sometimes we Christians tend to a false humility, which then quickly makes us appear hypocritical, according to the motto: Before God humiliates us, we humiliate ourselves and show it in front of other people.
No! That's not Paul's point. Paul was also one of the wise and influential, and in other cities the rich, the influential, and the powerful also belonged to the churches.
But Paul makes it clear: Everything that we have and can do, that counts for something in the world and can bring us prestige and high positions, that counts before God - nothing at all.
In the sight of God, those who are wise are no more than those who are simple ; who occupy high positions are no more than those who are at the bottom ; who have no more ancestry than those who do not know their parents; who have a lot of influence and power, no more than those who have nothing at all.
First of all, God brings us down to our pure existence. Nothing counts before God.
This is difficult to accept, because we are used to the fact that we can and have to show something. With what we are and have, we want to achieve important things, we can influence our environment and we also have successes. In the world, in daily life, that's what it's all about. But God pushes all that aside for the time being and looks directly at us as simple people, without our facades.
This is the first imposition and challenge of this text:
Are we willing to let God bring us down to our pure existence and to acknowledge that before God we are no more, but also no less, than all other human beings?
What counts with God is not what we can show: education, success, material possessions, Christian humility and piety, but what we allow to be given to us by Jesus Christ: forgiveness and a life as a child of God. Forgiveness is not about a few minor or major moral offenses, but to accept God's forgiveness means: I leave my appearance aside; I cease to want to know everything better than God; I stop pretending to God, the world, and myself and trying to prove how good and valuable I am.
I know that God loves me as His child. I am allowed to live as His child. For me, this is the most important thing in life and for eternity.
Being a child of God is the highest I can achieve as a human being. And the nice thing about it is that I don't have to do it myself and I can't do it. Rather, it is the great thing that Jesus did it for us.
And now I want to listen to Him and learn from Jesus how my life can succeed, how I can live meaningfully and fully.
I trust that He knows better than I do. In Jesus, God shows us the way to a successful life. This is the wisdom of God.
Are there not countless examples from history and the present where we human beings, with our power, our influence, our wisdom, have steered the chariot of life or society into a dead end, even in the Church? God shows us a better way in Jesus. What He gives and shows us in Jesus is better than what we can do and brings us a full life.
This is the second imposition and challenge for us: Are we ready to simply let God give us gifts and to recognize that we need to learn again, to become disciples of Jesus, to listen to his wisdom?
But what are we to do with our gifts and abilities, our power, our wisdom, our influence, our wealth, our piety?
The answer is short: we are to let them be sanctified,
by giving them back to God and putting them at His service. We should relinquish sovereignty over our lives and no longer decide arbitrarily according to our own plans and thoughts, but ask God: What should I do with it in my family, at work, in politics or in other areas? We are to ask God to use all of this to do something good and blessed in this world, to bring a little more joy, justice, peace, love and hope into this world, to create a little bit of paradise in this world, to bring God to people and people to God.
Wisdom, power, wealth, prestige, influence, career are very important in the eyes of the world, but they are also dangerous: they can make us vain and arrogant, destroying not only our relationship with God or with other people, but also disfiguring our own personality.
But if we know that we have been richly gifted by God and live as His children, then we no longer need all this for ourselves, but can put it at the service of God and as a blessing for other people.
Thus, our sermon text is an indication of the great Christian freedom: to be free from all external things that are so important in the world; to be free to love and to put our lives at the service of God.
Amen.
And may the peace of God, which surpasses our understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.