1 Corinthians 2:1-16; Matthew 5:13-20

Today we are three Sundays away from the start of Lent. This Sunday is known Septuagesima Sunday, which means that we are 70 days away from Easter. Next Sunday is Sexagesima Sunday, and the Sunday after that is the last Sunday before Lent, also known as Quinquagesima Sunday. I hope you are taking notes because there will be a quiz later, and I will need the proper spelling of those words. 

The point of these names is mostly to signify that Lent and Easter are coming. We are still in Epiphany, and we have not transitioned to Lent yet, but Lent is coming, and thanks be to God, so is Easter. In Lent, it is traditional for a community of believers like us to all read the same book as an act of Lenten devotion, and I would like to suggest that we all read a small book by Francis Chan entitled Letters to the Church. I’ll have more to say about the book as Lent approaches over the next few weeks, but for now, I wanted to put it on your radar as Ash Wednesday draws near. 

To the task at hand then, there are three things I would like us to focus on this morning. The first two come from the Gospel lesson, and the second comes from the Epistle, and we’re going to take them in reverse order: Epistle first, then Gospels. But what I want you to do is, as you hear me speaking and saying what I’m about to say, I want you to be thinking about who St. Dunstan’s is called to be as a church. 

Paul says at the beginning of our reading, “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus the Messiah and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1–2). There is a lot that we could say here, but to keep it simple and to keep me from going off on rabbit trails, this is the essential message of the Christian message that will never not be a part of our life together at St. Dunstan’s. There is only one message for the world, and there is only one message for the church, and they are the same message. “Jesus the Messiah and him crucified” is Paul’s shorthand way of saying more fully what he says elsewhere, like 1 Corinthians 15: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” (1 Corinthians 15:3–5). 

That’s it. That’s our message to the world. That’s my message to you. That’s what I’m going to preach to you for as many Sundays as you’ll let me because every genuinely Christian sermon is simply a riffing on that sentence. To put it bluntly, if you’re not preaching the cross of Jesus Christ, you’re not preaching. The cross is and will always be the center of our life together and our teaching here at St. Dunstan’s because Jesus command to those who are on the way is simple: take up your cross and follow me. 

But also notice that for Paul, the cross is not just a historical and theological event. For Paul, the cross is the place where God’s secret and hidden wisdom is made manifest, the wisdom which is now made manifest in his preaching. He says, “But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:7–8). To put it simply, the cross reveals the wisdom of God, which this world does not understand, and therefore our decisions as a church, assuming we want them to demonstrate and reflect the wisdom of God, must be cruciform. They must be shaped by and defined by the cross of Jesus Christ. 

Second, Jesus uses two metaphors to describe the people of Israel in Matthew 5. If we don’t recognize that first and foremost Jesus is talking to Israel, we are missing a step in the hermeneutical process by which we come to u