Someday, God willing, a long time in the future, I will retire. I know many of you know more than I do about that moment, and hope you\u2019ll share your wisdom. I imagine I sitting on a boat in a quiet little cove, watching the sun go down, with a cup of coffee that has on it the image of this church\u2019s building and the words, \u201cFirst Congregational Church 1850-2000 150 years of returning God\u2019s love.\u201d You\u2019ve seen these cups; we use them at coffee hour. Maybe your home is like ours, with cupboards that accumulate the bits and pieces of where you\u2019ve been. Jacquelyn has a cup from Southwest Airlines, I have wine glasses marked \u201cUS House of Representatives\u201d from when I worked there and cups from many different churches and group with whom I\u2019ve had the good fortune to be associated. Like the glasses and cups, we accumulate as well bits and pieces of wisdom along the way. Sometimes they are formulated as little sayings: \u201ca stitch in time saves nine, \u201cwhen you\u2019re in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop shoveling\u201d and so on. We learn, bit by bit, and we pass these things on. Long ago, when I was an intern and got into a bruising fight over church supplies, the wise senior Pastor for whom I worked said, \u201cNever mess with the tissue in the ladies room.\u201d All these sayings and experiences are a sort of wisdom and from them we take our course day to day. For what does it mean to be wise? Isn\u2019t it to choose each day, every day, a path that leads forward?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere is the wise one?\u201d, Paul asks just before the section of First Corinthians we read this morning. It\u2019s a good question, isn\u2019t it? Surely we want to find ourselves following someone wise, someone who can help us choose the best path. Bookstores, television and the web are full of people eager to lead us, to tell us what to eat, what to wear, how to do makeup, how to exercise, how to pray, how to live. But what does Paul mean by wisdom? Paul comes from a tradition that knows two kinds of wisdom. One is the common sense stuff I\u2019ve mentioned, the accumulation of human experiences, distilled by history, from which we take daily decisions. Scripture has a whole category of such sayings called Wisdom Literature; the book of Proverbs is an example and you can find similar pieces throughout the Psalms. There is a common folk wisdom and yet it may not always be reliable.<\/p>\n
\nI came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If he doesn\u2019t have a special wisdom, a unique insight, what does he offer? Just this: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.\u201d <\/p>\n
Christ Crucified<\/h3>\n
Now this is a curious statement. Paul is an apostle and the foundation claim of an apostle is an encounter with the Risen Christ. Paul didn\u2019t follow Jesus through Galilee or make the journey to Jerusalem; Paul wasn\u2019t at the last supper or in the garden, he didn\u2019t weep at the foot of the cross. But according to his own account, the Risen Christ appeared to him and called him to preach. So we might expect that Paul would say something like, \u201cI decided to know nothing among you but the Risen Christ, Jesus resurrected and alive again.\u201d But he doesn\u2019t. He rests his claim not on common wisdom or the special experience of the Risen Christ but on the public event of Christ crucified. \fWhat is it about Christ crucified that Paul believes can lead us? There on the cross we find not the shining light of special wisdom, secret wisdom, but a public display of ultimate humility. The cross is an emblem of ultimate love: a man laying down his life, giving up his dignity and power out of love for all humankind. All common wisdom comes down ultimately to this one principle: stay safe. \u201cOnce burned, twice shy,\u201d we say, and so many other things that all have the common purpose of keeping us safe. We learn what\u2019s dangerous; we learn how far out on a limb we can go and still survive. But the cross is not safe, the cross is not a limb from which retreat is possible. It is the contradiction of human wisdom: it is the act of embodying the love of God. So Paul offers wisdom, but not human wisdom, as he says; he offers instead the cross, the wisdom of God, the sacrificing, love of God that overcomes division, overcomes hatred, overcomes safety to transform human life into love.<\/p>\n
The Mind of Christ<\/h3>\n
So Paul preaches that we should let go of our human wisdom and instead offers what he calls \u201cthe mind of Christ.\u201d Now the amazing thing about thinking with the mind of Christ is that we already know how to do it. To live from the mind of Christ is to take seriously the language of Christ about God as our parent and each person as a child of God and carry it forward into action. Do you know how to care for a child? Isn\u2019t the first lesson of parenting to put another\u2019s needs first? Did you stay up when you were exhausted with your child, sacrifice things so they could have something, did you feel your very being stretched to learn to love a child? Of course you did; all parents do. To think with the mind of Christ is to project that experience onto the wider screen of our whole lives. To think with the mind of Christ is to think of others first.<\/p>\n
Missions and the Mind of Christ<\/h3>\n
One of my favorite missions around here is the coats. We don\u2019t often talk about the coats but it\u2019s a simple mission. It gets cold here; we all know that. So we all have coats to keep us warm. This isn\u2019t as obvious as it seems. I remember years ago when I lived in northern Michigan welcoming a new pastor named Paul and his family to our town. They\u2019d lived in tropical Brazil for years and then in Florida. They knew Michigan would be colder so they bought coats: what we would call windbreakers. They arrived on a day when we got two and a half feet of snow, the temperatures were in the 20\u2019s and their moving truck was stuck in the drifts. Watching him and his wife and their two kids, it didn\u2019t take more than a moment to get them inside and start rummaging through the closet to get them some real northern Michigan coats.<\/p>\n
We do the same thing here. We know there are people in our area who are just like my friend Paul. They aren\u2019t prepared for the cold and they need coats. Many of us have spare ones and sometimes it\u2019s possible to buy an extra coat on sale. So we collect them up; every once in a while Jim Dennehey takes them to the South End Community Center, where they are given to people. It\u2019s simple. Haven\u2019t we all seen a kid about to go out the door and said, \u201cPut on your coat, it\u2019s cold out there\u201d? The coat collection is the same thing: it is the mind of Christ to recognize that there are others, equally children of God, who need coats and to share them.<\/p>\n
If I think with my own mind, if I rely on my own accumulated wisdom, it tells me to keep safe and keep what I have. But when I think with the mind of Christ, I am led to risk and share. The coats are an example; so is the mission we announced today, to collect toothbrushes for kids in Nicaragua. Who are these kids? I don\u2019t know them. They aren\u2019t mine. That\u2019s what my own mind might say. But the mind of Christ tells me that they are my brothers and sisters; that we are equally God\u2019s children, so I have a responsibility for them and to them.<\/p>\n
Thinking with the Mind of Christ<\/h3>\n
Thinking with the mind of Christ can make for difficult questions. This week Governor Cuomo proposed cutting visitation at maximum security prisons to weekends only. The reason given was saving money. Well, my mind, my wisdom tells me that\u2019s a good thing. But what about the mind of Christ? What does the mind of Christ think about a policy that hurts the children and wives of prisoners, and prisoners themselves, the most vulnerable people, to save money? I leave that question for you; it\u2019s not my intent to suggest political points but to invite you to think about everything, from daily life to politics with the mind of Christ.<\/p>\n
You Children Mind!<\/h3>\n
When I was small, before I had accumulated much in the way of things or wisdom, my brother and I were sometimes left with my grandmother. She was a woman always busy, too busy often to monitor two small boys. So we would get into things and do things she didn\u2019t want done and I remember how in an exasperated voice, she would sometimes say, \u201cYou boys mind now!\u201d She didn\u2019t have to say what \u201cminding\u201d meant or what rule we had broken; we knew. What Paul is saying to the Corinthian Christians, what he is saying to us, is simple: \u201cYou people mind!\u201d We have the mind of Christ: if we use it to guide us, rather than our own wisdom, our own traditions, surely we will come back to Christ\u2019s way. If we live from the mind of Christ, knowing him crucified, surely the love of Christ will shine from us.
\nAmen.<\/p>\n
Not to Regular Readers<\/h2>\n
You may have noticed, no sermon was posted last week. The reason is that our church was blessed to have a guest preacher and this preacher was blessed to sit with his wife in worship! Our Guest Preacher was Bryan Niebank, and you can read his sermon here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You Children Mind! A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor Fifth Sunday After Epiphany\/A \u2022 February 5, 2017 Click on the link below to hear the sermon preached Someday, God willing, a long time in the future, I will retire. I know many of you know more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[77,7,39,3,2,69],"tags":[70,73,72,71],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1corinthians","category-epiphany","category-exegesis","category-sermon","category-worship","category-year-a","tag-mind-of-christ","tag-1corinthians","tag-kindness","tag-missions"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":519,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}