Mtr Kelli Joyce

Friends in Christ,
 

I have a deep love/hate relationship with today’s passage from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. Read one way, it’s the mother of all backhanded compliments. “God chose people like you, who are pretty much bad at everything, to make sure it was clear to the whole world that the plan of salvation wasn’t being accomplished by means of any particular human competence.” Read another way, it’s the wise and powerful and wealthy that he’s indirectly insulting - “God would actively prefer to work through and with people with absolutely nothing going for them instead of working with you.” It’s a passage that doesn’t necessarily leave anyone feeling great about themselves when all is said and done.

But hidden within this passage about how God chose to form the church of Corinth primarily from outcasts, there’s a key truth about who God is, and how God chooses to work in the world. God’s wisdom and power are so radically and completely different from, are so much greater than, human wisdom and power, that it effectively erases the meaning of any distinction between weak and strong humans, or wise and foolish ones. In the grand scheme of things, by God’s standards, every one of us is weak, and every one of us is foolish. God didn’t need human aid to create the world, or to save it once it had fallen. And so God chose to work in ways that, from a human point of view, seem counterintuitive, unseemly, and yes, foolish. So that the whole world might come to know that every one of us had been saved by grace, through faith - and even that faith is a gift of God, totally apart from our skills or good deeds or deserving. God set it up this way so that no one would be able to brag about their salvation. We’re all on equal footing before God - we must all be willing to be weak and foolish, without shame, for the sake of the Gospel.

In peace,

Mtr. Kelli