Holy Cross Day - 1Corinthians 1:18-25

It was more than 100 years ago (116 to be exact), the people of God living in the south end of Union County Ohio came up with a plan to build a school. Through hard work, dedication, commitment and follow through they established St Paul Lutheran School, which was dedicated on May 29, 1892. One year later, St Paul Lutheran Church was chartered into existence as a member congregation of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Over the years the school has seen its share of changes, and certainly many students have passed through the doors to receive their education, yet through it all St Paul’s has existed as it has been established, a place for the education of our children that is founded upon the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, St Paul’s is today as it was over 100 years ago, a school and a church that exists for the sake of lifting high the cross.

How appropriate then, that as the school year begins and as we officially commission our teachers for their work in our school for yet another year, that we do so on Holy Cross Day. Holy Cross Day is simply a day that the church remembers what Christ did for us on the cross: that it was on the cross that he died for us to pay for our sin as our perfect sacrifice so that we could be saved. This is why our school exists. The teachers at St Paul Lutheran School teach all of the academic subjects of math, science, reading & writing, social studies and the like. But all of these subjects are taught alongside the wonderful truth of the cross. This is a place that lifts high the cross of Jesus Christ to proclaim to our children, to teach them what Christ did for them as he paid for their sin on the cross. St Paul School is a place where we lift high the cross of Jesus Christ.

The need to proclaim the cross

Our epistle lesson for Holy Cross Day is taken from St Paul the apostle’s first letter to the Christian church in Corinth. He was writing his letter to a church that was largely affected by influences from outside the church.

The city of Corinth was a very cosmopolitan city with a great deal of power and wealth from the many merchants who lived in this important hub along ancient trade routes. It was also a very religious city, with some influence of Judaism, but Corinth was especially infamous for its idolatry worshipping Venus, the Roman goddess of love and fertility.

With all of the wealth and power that many Corinthians were accustomed to, not to mention the influence of idol worship and the sins of adultery and prostitution that were common with such idol worship, there were many challenges to the Christian church in Corinth. They struggled with these many temptations and sins. The letter of 1 Corinthians reflects these struggles, addressing sins of disunity, prostitution, sexual sins within the congregation, what to do about food that had been sacrificed to idols, and the rejection of the resurrection. It seems that any problem a Christian congregation could have, the Corinthians were struggling with it.

So Paul wrote to teach them. He wrote his letter to confront their sins, to instruct them in worship and in Christian living, and to encourage their appropriate use and understanding of the Word of God. Writing to Christians living in a pagan and unbelieving world there is a fundamental difference in the approach and understanding. In our text Paul points out the very kernel of that difference. The thing that sets the Christian apart from every other person of every other belief, the thing that makes Christian worship the one and only worship of the true God is the cross – Jesus Christ, the Son of God who has been crucified for sinners!

If the Corinthians lived in the midst of sin and temptation and struggled with the many sinful and evil influences that existed in their own culture, you and I have that same struggle in our own day and time. The Corinthians struggled with division and disunity in the ranks. Division is caused by false doctrine; someone in the church begins teaching something other than the pure message of the cross of Christ. People follow this new wind of teaching and suddenly the church is divided. With as many different churches today as there are pages in the phonebook, the church today struggles with false doctrine. The Corinthians struggled with pagan worship and idolatry. Our own world continues to reject any Christian teaching of the true God and the cross and instead is interested to acknowledge the false gods of Buddhism, eastern mysticism, not to mention Islam. The Corinthians struggled as they lived their daily lives in their pagan city, but they could go home and shut the door on this sin. For you and I, the temptations continue to abound – every false doctrine, every false god and every temptation known to man is but a click of the remote or a click of the mouse away. The sins that lived in Corinth are alive and well today.

There has never been a time in the history of the world when the proper education of our children has been of greater importance. With so many evil and sinful influences present in the world, our children need education, but they need the proper worldview that can only come from an education built on the foundation of the wisdom of God revealed in the death of His Son on the cross. They need a worldview that helps them to understand themselves as sinners.

This past week in the news we were all afraid that we were going to be sucked into a black hole when the scientists switched on the super hadron particle collider that was just built in Geneva Switzerland. They turned it on and we are all still here. The whole reason for building this expensive and technical piece of equipment is because scientists believe that they can recreate the circumstances that led to the big bang – the foundational theory behind the theory of evolution. If you and I are and every piece of matter in the universe are all no more than particles, than there is no such thing as sin and there is no need for salvation and there is no need for the cross.

Our children need to know the difference. They need to who they are as sinners under the cross. They need to be taught the essential educational building blocks of education, but they also need to learn to think. They need to learn how to stain out the truth from the lie. They need to know the Word of God. They need to know what it says and what it does not say. They need to have a firm hold on the truth so that when they are confronted with the lie they will not be deceived. They need to be immersed in the Word of God so that when the temptations to sin come to confront them they will have the strength to stand against them.

These days the truth is so fractured. It is so broken up into small parts. The truth of God’s word is not taken as one single unified body of doctrine and teaching, instead it is a smorgasbord of individual small little truths all strung together. The effect is that people feel like they can pick and choose. I heard this week that there is a woman who has made her fortune in the porn industry who has claimed to be a devout catholic. This is what happens. We believe that we can come to the altar of Christ on Sunday and claim to believe what the bible says there but then leave to live whatever life we choose and it doesn’t matter that the two don’t match. We break our lives into pieces, compartments that we think we can seal off from one another. It is almost like trying to take 1000 different pieces from 1000 different puzzles and trying to put them all together. The pieces don’t fit and even when we mash them all together the picture that we have created doesn’t make sense.

Paul says that the cross of Jesus Christ is power of God for the salvation of all who believe. There has never been a day, there has never been a time that the cross of Christ has been more important. With all of the many things that could, that would pull us away from the truth we need to hold ever so tightly to cross of Jesus Christ. We need to cling to the cross.

We need to see in the cross the wisdom of God. Our world is absolutely filled with men and women trained in the wisdom of the world. They sound Oh so smart and Oh so convincing. It is so easy to listen to the sages and the scribes and the debaters of our own age and to be led astray. Their words so often sound like the very things that we find ourselves thinking. We need the cross. We need Christ’s wisdom. We need to read and to study the bible.

As much as a Christian education can help students along as they study the Word of God and as they memorize portions of scripture, there is no failsafe. There is no foolproof method for bringing your children up to know the wisdom of God and to throw away the wisdom of man. As much as we want that for our children, we don’t even possess it for ourselves. You and I are so easily deceived and mislead and before you know it we hear thoughts in our head and words from our mouth that sound just like the sages and scribes and debaters that we have tried so hard to refute. If all we had to rely on was our own wisdom and our own strength we would most definitely be lost forever.

But God has not left us to ourselves. Yes God gives to us a school and teachers and religions classes and the catechism. All of these things will help us and will keep us going the right direction, but when we step away from that direction, which every one of us does every single day, we need the cross – not just for its wisdom, not just because it will help us to win debates and find the right answer to the question of our origins. We need the cross because it is in the cross that our sins are washed away and forgiven. It is in the cross that our sinful nature is crucified so that we die to be raised again to a brand new life.

As we raise our children to live their adult lives in a sinful, deranged and dangerous world more than anything they need to know where they can go to be cleaned. They need to know where they can go so that God will wash away the sins that have latched on to them as they went on their way through the world.

It happens every day. We wake up with the determination to do better than we did yesterday. We try our hardest and do our best but before you know our sinful nature has gotten the better of us and we find that we have fallen again. The sins that we hoped to leave behind us are once again at the forefront of our thought and activity. The muck and the slime of this sinful world has gotten splashed up on us again and we are corrupted and dirty. We need the cross.

The blood of Jesus is the soap that gets us clean. It washes off those sins. It penetrates to deepest reaches of our souls and lifts the stain of sin from our hearts so that once again we are clean. Your children and my children need to know Jesus. They need to know the cross. They need to know that Jesus died on that cross for them so that when they have fallen into sin and temptation they can be clean.

If all our children needed was an education they could receive that any number of places. We could send them to any number of schools that would give them the same skills of reading, writing and arithmetic that we provide for them here. What we give them here, however is something that is not permitted and often not tolerated in other educational institutions. We give them the cross of Christ. We give them the soap that washes off the scum of sin. We give them the blood of Jesus shed for them on the cross.

For over 100 years students have been coming to St Paul Chuckery and most of you sitting here today are the beneficiary of that education. But what has been of greatest benefit to you, isn’t the fact that you can read, it isn’t the fact that you can balance your checkbook, It is the blood of Jesus Christ that has washed you clean under the cross.