Simply Scandalous

I have a bit of a strange habit. I'm not sure if its a good thing or not, but for whatever reason it seems to be the way in which I tend to operate.

A Sunday morning will roll around and I will be sitting in church. The pastor will begin their sermon and...I'll start to write down sermon notes. But not from their sermon. From other sermon ideas that suddenly pop into my head and have nothing to do with what the pastor is saying. I jot them on random pieces of paper, on the back of church bulletins, or whatever I can get my hands on.

Now this doesn't happen all the time and admittedly should happen less than it does (because God needs to speak to me through the sermon as well). But I can't deny that I've gotten some good ideas while sitting there in a pew.

One of these is a meditation on the "Scandal of the Cross" coming from I Corinthians 1. As Paul says, for those who cannot imagine God becoming human and dying on a cross for humanity, Jesus' whole existence seems dreadfully scandalous and just plain silly. It is an inversion of everything the world says about power and getting ahead.

It is great and wonderful and amazing...but it's a scandal.

It is a scandal I like, but all the same not the one people often think of when considering the Church 2000 years after our savior walked the earth.

I compare Paul's discussion with a scene from the miniseries entitled "Jesus" that was on television a few years ago. Near the beginning of the show, the title character is given visions of the future. Visions that did not focus on his own death, but rather the way in which his name would be used in the future. War. Crusades. Inquisition. Extermination. Hatred. Violence. He was not excited to receive these visions. I was not excited to view them.

But they are true.

And this is a scandal too. The way in which Jesus has been used through the centuries as a tool for gaining power and oppressing others hurts and saddens me. It has wounded many beyond our imagining. Is it any wonder the world isn't too keen on the Church?

Yet I know there is a way back to the principles of Paul in I Corinthians. I wonder, in this imaginary sermon, how we might go about reclaiming the true scandal of the cross. How we might avoid the scandals of our own making and turn to the scandalous and confusing love of God.

Confusing because it is free. Confusing because we don't deserve it. Confusing because even though God knows the darkness of our hearts and how we might use His name to make the most hideous scandals, He still dies for us.

It comes to this: which scandal do we want to be known by---God's or the mess of our own making?

But God chose the foolish things of the world to
shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the

world to shame the strong.

I Corinthians 1:27