"Perishable"
Isa. 9:1-4; Ps. 27:1, 4-9; 1 Cor. 1:10-18; Matt. 4:12-23
Dr. George R. Sinclair
Pastor
January 27, 2008
Some weeks I take work home. Last week was like that. I ran out of time and ending up taking home commentaries on 1 Corinthians. I wanted to see what they had to say about today’s text: “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Earlier in the day I had been thinking about that word perish. Fruit is perishable. We usually get a box of oranges at Christmas, maybe some grapefruit. The boxes are always stamped Perishable. Sometimes they say, Open Immediately. Spiral cut Honey Baked Hams come that way. You don’t want to wait until New Year’s on a spiral cut Honey Baked Ham. They’re best opened immediately. Grapefruit lasts well into January, but not spiral cut honey baked ham.
Anyway, Thursday night I’m sitting there reading commentaries on Corinthians and I’m thinking about perish-ability and somehow I also manage to gain control of the TV clicker. Do you read with the TV on? That’s kind of a dumb thing to do, but somehow the TV is usually on at our house—Paula grades papers or works equations and I read. The TV is more “white noise” than anything else.
Anyway, I’m sitting there reading Corinthian commentaries and I get clicker control, which doesn’t happen all that often, and I flip over to The History Channel and a two hour special is airing: Life After Humans. I like that kind of stuff. Paula can’t stand it, but there was nothing else on, so I get to watch. I’m sitting there reading about Paul’s letter to the Corinthians and watching Life After Humans. At first I’m mostly reading ’cause I want to finish the commentaries, but then I stop reading and mostly watch ’cause I’m fascinated by Life After Humans. Did you happen to see the program? Life After Humans?
I didn’t see the first twenty minutes, so I’m a little unclear about what happened to everybody all over the planet all at once, but that’s the show’s premise. “What would happen if humans everywhere all at once disappeared?”
So far as I know, the show didn’t propose how that happened, what wiped us out—maybe it did and I didn’t see it. Anyway, what would happen if all of us, if every human being, in a moment, in a twinkling of the eye disappeared from the face of the earth? What would happen to all of our stuff? What would happen to the cars we drove to church? Or to the hymn books we’re singing out of this morning? What would happen to Terry’s pipe organ or to this pulpit or to these Corinthian columns? What about the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge? How long would they last? And what about the animals—dogs and cats, the animals in zoos, those still in the wild or the fish in the sea?
I think they said that there are something like 140 million homes in the United States. They wouldn’t last very long. They’re made mostly of wood. Now I live in a hundred year old wood framed house and it’s in good shape, but it’s been restored and I have it painted every few years and if I live there long enough I’ll have a new roof put on. But if I weren’t around to take care of it and keep it up it wouldn’t last all that long. Have you ever been driving through the countryside, you know, on a county road, and you come along an old home place that’s been let go—vines growing over it, trees even, the roof’s caved in—it doesn’t take long before nature reclaims unattended wood frame houses.
The same is true with cars. They pretty much disappear after seventy five years, all except the tires. They last a little longer. But what about the Empire State building or closer to home—the RSA tower? If unattended, how long would these great structures last?
Re-enforced concrete is very strong. I was up in the RSA Tower this week and stood on the 30th floor and it felt pretty solid. You can see a long way from the 30th floor. The thing is re-enforced concrete and has a lot of steel in it. And steel has a lot of iron in it. And we all know what happens when iron meets water. Leave a regular old nail in the rail overnight and it will leave a rust spot the next day. Re-enforced concrete has a lot of iron it. Give it long enough, say five hundred years, especially here along the coast, and it will rust. And when that rust expands it will weaken the concrete and then it all comes crumbling down--same with the Golden Gate Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge only they’re worse ‘cause the steel on those bridges is made to wiggle a little, but when they rust they get brittle and when the wind blows they break much more easily.
What would happen if humans all at once disappeared from the face of the earth? To make a long story short, everything we’ve ever made—the houses we live in and the really big stuff like the RSA tower, the Pyramids, even the Hoover Dam, all of that would disappear; along with every word we’ve written, every song, every movie, even the stuff recorded on DVD’s, all of that would disappear. It would all vanish in 10,000 years, which in geologic time is a blink of the eye. Nature would reclaim everything humans have created. Nothing of what we call civilization would be left. Well, one scientist did say Mt. Rushmore would be left and would show we were once here, but even Mt. Rushmore, which is pure granite, if given enough time would also disappear.
“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
We are perishable. When we are born, it ought to be stamped on our foreheads: Perishable. But it’s not. We think we’re going to live forever. “And the things we have, whose will they be?”
Well, we put up monuments, mostly in graveyards—markers we call them. We hope somebody remembers us. And you hear that at funerals—especially TV funerals. “So and so will live forever in our memory.” That’s a nice thought and I surely hope I am remembered. I remember my parents who are deceased. And I remember my grandparents, but I know next to nothing about my great-grandparents, and even less my great-great grandparents—they are forgotten. And, as much as I don’t want to hear it, I too will be forgotten—not by my children and hopefully not their children—but it won’t be long before I am forgotten. I am perishable.
Maybe my picture will hang in the GSPC Rouge Gallery and a hundred years from now visitors will walk by and say, “Well, there’s old Dr. Sinclair. Says here he was pastor from 2002-2017. Wonder what he was like? Do you reckon any of his people are still around? Oh, here he is in the Archives Tell the Story Part 3. ‘Dr. George, as the children called him, was really tall and sat in a little chair when he gave the children’s sermon.” That’s what it will say, my life in a footnote. I am perishable.
Foolishness, I suppose, is a matter of perspective. The fool thinks he will live forever. The fool thinks she can achieve immortality. The fool thinks this world and this life is all there is. Fools perish.
Actually Paul uses a much stronger word. The root means “to utterly destroy” or “to kill.” We say people perish in fires. Sailors perish at sea. “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are being “destroyed.” That sounds harsh, doesn’t it? It certainly sounds dark. Was Paul just having an off day? Was he trying to shake up the divisions at Corinth by rattling the sword of mortality, you know, was he trying to put the “fear of God” in them? Or, was Paul simply stating the obvious? We are perishable. From the moment we are born we begin to die. I think Paul is saying that, but I also think he had something more I mind. I think Paul was talking about futility.
There’s a great line in one of our Confessions about futility: “Death often seems to prove that life is not worth living, that our best efforts and deepest affections go for nothing.” Futility.
People perish for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the loss of hope. I think about the mother of those four children who were allegedly thrown from the Dog River Bridge and the man who allegedly threw them from there. How do you go on after a thing like that? And if in fact the father is guilty, how will he ever live with himself? And how do you make punishment fit a crime like that?
People perish for lot of reasons. Sometimes we perish because of what we’ve done or because of what we’ve left undone. Sometimes we perish because of the things we cannot fix, the potential that will never be realized or the sorrow that never goes away, wounds that never heal. “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing . . .”
I don’t think Paul was being mean-spirited when he said that. I think Paul was speaking with a heavy heart. I think Paul was speaking out of deep anguish for those who do not believe. I think he was in anguish over those who live with false hope. Real power, the world imagines, is coercive. Real power wins. Real power gets its way. Real power insists that my needs are met and maybe yours if there’s enough left over. Real power protects us from risk making us invulnerable to sorrow and disappointment. Real power exacts revenge. It settles scores, gratifies instantly. Real power makes us immortal—like the gods. That’s the false hope of the world. It’s understandable that we would marshal its power against futility. But it’s still false. Paul calls it foolish.
But what about the cross, the message which is “the power of God to those who are being saved?”
Hearing that message means in the first place that we take to heart our perishable nature. The fool says in his heart “There is no God.” The greater fool says “Man is the measure of all things.” We don’t live forever and we don’t hold all of the cards.
I will be 55 on my next birthday. Fifty-five is not all that old and God willing I hope to live another forty years. But fifty-five is old enough for me to start feeling my bones. When I was thirty I never felt my bones. I’ve been having problems with one of my hips, actually both, but one more than the other. My body’s telling me—“You’re not so young anymore. You’re not going to live forever.” That’s a pretty important thing to know. I am perishable. I won’t live forever. But there is another kind of perish-ability.
I love that line from Clint Eastwood, “A man’s got to know his limits.” That’s another kind of perish-ability. We don’t hold all of the cards. There are limits to what we can fix. There are limits to what we hold together. We are perishable. The good news is: We don’t have to worry about holding things together. God does. We can’t fix all that’s wrong. God does. God is imperishable. I’m glad to know that, but I’m also glad to know that the way of the cross is God’s way.
I’m glad to know that forgiveness is better than revenge, that generosity is better than greed, that communities matter as much as individuals, that choice is better than coercion, that risk is more valuable than security, that patient endurance brings greater peace than instance gratification, that loving is better than being right, that giving is better than having. I’m glad to know that the way of the cross is God’s power at work to save us.
We are perishing and some of us are being saved. Some of us have heard the message of the cross. Some of us are being saved from the false hope of the world.
Personally, I like that fact that Paul used a present participle—we are being saved. Maybe salvation comes all at once for some people. Maybe some hear the message of the cross “all at once,” in a moment when a commitment is made or a burden is lifted and it feels like you’re brand new. That’s a wonderful thing and we should be happy for people when they have that. But for me hearing the message of the cross happens in fragments, like gathering crumbs from a Table. I gather a few crumbs here and a few there and pretty soon I have a meal and I’m fed. And each time I am fed I’m more convinced than the last that “the life God’s will for each of us is stronger than the death that destroys us . . .”
Salvation, and whatever crumbs we catch of it, means “nothing can ever separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.” The cross means God is with us even when we are not with God, that God loves us even when we don’t love God. The cross means that even though perishing one day we will put on imperishability. And in that day God will say to us, “Well done good and faithful servant, enter the joy of your Master.” Amen.