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Title: Broken Body Language
Date: January 27, 2008
Texts: Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 4-9; I Cor 1:10-18; Matt 4:12-23.

He is not just one who prays, not even one who prays best, he is sheer prayer. – Herbert McCabe

This passage from I Corinthians is always bad news for preachers. We’re basically told that all the work that goes into crafting a clever sermon is a waste. Paul says, “Christ sent me to proclaim the gospel, not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” So much for eloquence. Boring is better—no fluff, no illustrations, just the gospel. So I bring you a boring sermon…

Apparently there’s a lot of fluffy preaching going on at Corinth, at least that’s what Paul hears through the grape-vine. Paul started this church in Corinth, and now it’s grown to about the size of our church—maybe a little bigger, a dozen more, 60 people is what the scholars say. But God’s call took Paul elsewhere. And when he left town, someone else came along—someone a lot more entertaining, eloquent, and better looking. His name is Apollos.

We begin to see that he’s probably a bigger problem than Paul’s letting on by all the repetitions—Apollos is named in our passage, then again in chapter 3, “For one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos’” (v4), and Paul comes back to him again, singling him out in 4:6.

And it’s no mistake that Paul links Apollos to the problem of eloquent preaching. Acts 18 gives us some more detail about this Apollos. He’s not a bad guy; he means well; he’s just mistaken about a lot, but gathers a crowd nonetheless because of his clever tongue.
In verse 24 the author of Acts describes Apollos as a “learned man, with a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures.” That’s good, right? And he “speaks with a great fervor,” it says in verse 26. He can stir up the crowds. He knows all the right moves, perfect timing, a commanding voice. But not all is at it seems: “He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquilla heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately” (v26).

And Paul says in I Corinthians that it’s not about eloquent speech, it’s not about clever preaching, and it’s not about a commanding presence. Instead, it’s about what we see as “the foolishness of Christ.” Fancy talk only empties the power of the cross of Christ. As he says later in chapter 1, “but we preach Christ crucified” (v23).

Paul knows something about us, he knows about this tendency we all have. Paul knows that we like our ears tickled. He knows that we are easily persuaded by people with fancy speeches. This is the sort of thing that happens everyday on the street corners of Corinth. Gifted orators battle it out to see who can gather the best crowds. We watch basketball or go to movies for entertainment; the people of Corinth go hear sporty speeches. And apparently this sort of thing is making it’s way into the church. Church as entertainment; preaching as rhetorical delight.

And the Corinthian body of Christ is suffering from rhetorical success, from oratory sophistication—with people like Apollos in the pulpit, who speak with fervor, yet don’t exactly speak truth. Messages that create divisions within the body. Mixed-up messages, but convincingly proclaimed.

But Paul offers another kind of language, a message full of mystery, the cross, Christ crucified. “Not with eloquent wisdom,” Paul says, “so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” And he goes on, “For 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.”

The power of God is found in weakness—not Apollos’s eloquence. Power in weakness. Not the power of refined proclamation, but in vulnerable weakness, Christ crucified. There’s a different kind of language, Paul says. It’s the language of a broken body—the body of Christ broken for you.

Broken body language. Repentance is all about learning the brokenness of our bodies. Matthew 4 says that “Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matt 4:17). And we learn what repentance looks like when he finds Simon and Andrew, James and John. “And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’” Repentance is about following. It’s about changing your mind, and learning to move your body differently, moving the way Jesus moves.

Why? Because “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Matthew quotes from Isaiah chapter 9 to help us understand what it means for this kingdom to come near: “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.” It’s about the light of God shining in the middle of darkness, God’s life revealed in the shadow of death.

It’s about the cross, and the people who follow Jesus to the cross. It’s at the cross that we find the culmination of the life of God. It’s at the cross that we can begin to see the way God’s light shines into our world of darkness. It’s at the cross, as we gaze at the cross of death that we can start to learn how the kingdom of heaven draws near. It’s at the cross that we see the weakness of Jesus which is the power of God—the God revealed in weakness. We proclaim Christ crucified, Paul says.

And this is not something that Apollos, with his fervent and eloquence speech is best equipped to proclaim. The language of the cross is something we learn how to speak with our lives—it becomes our body language. It’s a language that we speak when we repent and follow.

Jesus says, “Follow me.” It’s the same sort of thing he said last week, “Come and see.” It’s an invitation to walk on Jesus’ path, to learn how to walk like Jesus does, to learn his body language. It’s not simply about an eloquent tongue. It’s about the eloquence of our bodies, the way we speak of Christ by what we do with our lives.

And ours is a life of crucifixion, because we follow Jesus, the crucified. That’s the body language we spend our lives learning, and that learning is called discipleship. Not because we hate our lives. Crucifixion is about the way we love life, and have come to see all the ways we submit to the forces of dehumanization, forces that kill us, forces that diminish us.

The life of faith is the crucified life where we fight against the powers of evil, powers that infect our lives, that permeate our lives, that convince us that the world is ok the way it is.

How do we become this crucified body-language? I wonder if prayer is the answer—prayer can be our broken language, very different from Apollos’ commanding eloquence. Because prayer is the language of repentance, it’s the language for people who confess their weakness and lack of direction. Prayer is the way of discipleship because it’s our way of confessing our inability to fight against the forces of sin, and ask God to give us what we need for the journey.

The body at prayer is our crucifixion; the praying body is the crucified body. It’s a re-presentation of the crucified Christ, living in submission to God’s will—it’s the weakness of Jesus that is the power of God.

And the Jews and the church have always turned to the Psalms as the place where we learn how to pray, like our Psalm this evening: Psalm 27, where it says, “Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me! ‘Come,’ my heart says, ‘seek his face!’… Do not hide your face from me… Do not cast me off, do not forsake me, O God of my salvation!”

I can hear Jesus praying this Psalm. “Do not cast me off, do not forsake me.” That’s Jesus on the cross, when he prays, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” We hear the crucified Jesus pray like our Psalmist. And resurrection is the answer. Resurrection is how we know that God listens to those who “cry aloud,” as Psalm 27 says. Resurrection is how we know that the one who walked in darkness, who lived in the shadow of death, as Isaiah says—that one has sees a great light, the God of eternal life.

In prayer we learn the body language of the crucified Christ. In prayer we learn how to see the enveloping darkness, so we can see the glimpses of light. Because it’s the people who know they walk in darkness who learn how to cry aloud for the face of God, who cry aloud for the kingdom of God to draw near.

Prayer is how we learn about Christ crucified. And I not only hear Jesus pray this Psalm, Psalm 27, but I also hear you pray it as well… every Sunday. “Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud, be gracious to me and answer me!” I have never been part of a church where people have the courage, in the worship service, to admit weakness, to offer shouts of joy, to cry aloud, and even every once in a while, to confess sin and repeat.

That’s how we proclaim the power of God… in our weakness, our lives of crucifixion, of prayers that share in the prayers of Christ crucified, our wounded leader. It’s not in eloquent speech, it’s not like Apollos, or any other preacher—it’s in our corporate weakened worship. It’s in our broken body language… language that breaks, voices that crack, and speech that stutters. That’s how we reveal the cracks in our lives that display God’s light… in and through the brokenness.

It takes courage to ask for prayer. And I am grateful of these gifts that you offer, the gift of weakness, which is the power of God. Prayer is how we begin to let go of our lives. It’s how we risk looking foolish—for as Paul says, “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.”

It’s our confession that we are not our own masters, we are not our own lords, we need to follow Jesus. Prayer is repentance—the way we turn into the path of Jesus. It’s our daily repentance, our daily invitation for God’s kingdom to draw near.

Now, I don’t usually get specific about practical matters. But I think here’s a good one. Every Sunday, in the bulletin, we announce the Psalm for next week. If you want to learn how to pray, how to repent, read that Psalm every day out loud as your prayer. You don’t need to be creative. Just read it as your prayer and see what happens. It’s a start. And it’s how we prepare to proclaim and receive our worshipful prayer that we offer on Sunday.

(pause)

In a few moments we will celebrate communion. Communion is also our prayer. It’s also about how we become the broken body, the broken body language, of God. This broken body is something we have to learn, and we learn it by receiving it. We open our hands, and with our hands we open our hearts and our lives, to receive the body of Christ, broken for you, and the blood of Christ, shed for you.

Communion is how we proclaim Christ crucified: the weakness of God, which is the power of God. Communion is where we learn the broken body language of God: Jesus whose body breaks and spills over into our lives. Communion is where we receive the broken body of Christ, so we can offer our lives to God, who binds them together through the Holy Spirit, that we may be God’s broken body poured out for the world. This is how we learn the broken body language of God—our weakness which is the power of God.