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Message from Pastor Bill – April 2010
Wooden Surgery
Only the cross of Jesus Christ can heal, bind together, and make whole the wounded, the wound-up, and the worn-down.
Dear Saints:
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 the site of 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. The old catch-all phrase "plastic surgery" doesn't even begin to cover the range of options in procedures and materials available today.
Altering, changing, or modifying our exteriors have never succeeded in changing one iota of our interiors. All the weakness, selfishness, and sinfulness endure as a tattoo of 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:
There is nothing you can do to make God love you less.
There is nothing you can do to make God love you more.
God's love is constant and unyielding. As the beloved hymn "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" proclaims in its second line, "...there is no shadow of turning with Thee.” 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 extended 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."
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 and special klatches 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 the efficacy of 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 effect without God's saving grace in the cross of Jesus Christ.
You can't get to God and to God's love without confronting 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.
Peace and Power,
Pastor Bill
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