We Proclaim
February 09, 2025
We Proclaim
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones
First Central Congregational Church
9 February 2024
Now I would remind you, my siblings and friends, of the good news that I and my predecessors have proclaimed to you, which you have received, in which you also stand, through which you are also being saved, if you hold firmly to the message, for you have not believed in vain.
This is a season for proclamation. For the apostolic work of the church. For us to be reminded of the good news of the gospel and for us to share that good news with the world around us.
We live in a time when people hunger and seek after meaning. They want to be part of something bigger, that helps them to make sense of their lives. Something in which they can stand.
The Anglican bishop and Bible scholar N. T. Wright has declared that the current mission of the church is to pioneer a way into a new world, in which we model a new way of being human, rooted in the love of God. Which includes a reconstruction of how we know, not through abstract propositions, but centered, also, in love. The church helps us to see our lives as part of a great love story, from which we draw our model of human flourishing, and the courage required for living in these days.
One of my UCC colleagues told a story a few weeks ago at our annual conference about a young woman who, when she joined the church, asked to address the congregation. And what she said was “Thank you for this space where my life can be bigger and more beautiful.”
This is the good news that we proclaim.
And the message we proclaim is a message of salvation. We are being saved by this good news.
The good news that God has invaded the world in order to complete the creation by defeating the forces of sin and evil and setting us free to become a new, flourishing humanity.
That is the essence of the story of Jesus that Paul tells us here in 1 Corinthians.
The story begins with acknowledging that we stand in need of deliverance from this world, this age. Here’s how feminist scholar Beverly Roberts Gaventa describes the situation:
Our deep attachment to corrupt systems of measurement, our distorted quest for identity, to say nothing of the malformed relationships between men and women—all of these are more than attitudes in need of adjustment. They are symptoms of the persistence of the “present evil age” with which the gospel collides. No social agenda will correct the situation, and no pedagogical strategy will suffice, because the power of evil is such that it can corrupt even the purest motives and the sternest resolve.
As Paul scholar Anthony Thiselton states, “the gospel is not a human social construction.” So it is not wedded to any ideology or party or nationality. It is God’s power of love at work in the world to bring about a new creation.
Which is the essence of Paul’s proclamation, that he had received and handed on to the churches—"Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was raised on the third day . . . and appeared” to so many people, including Paul himself.
This story is about power, it is about love, it is about vindication and liberation, it is about newness and opportunity and hope, it is about sharing in glory. And this story is the place in which we stand, which gives us courage to keep on proclaiming.
Gaventa writes:
First, Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death). This means that the gospel is first, last, and always about God’s powerful and gracious initiative.
God has acted to bring about a renewal of the cosmos. An act of compassion, grace, and love.
And God’s “invasion” of the world, as she describes it, is not your normal human invasion. God came to earth as a baby born to a peasant family on the far reaches of the empire. And the man that child became led no armies and engaged in no violence. Instead Jesus awakened the Spirit within everyone he encountered, setting them free to flourish and become who God dreamed that they could become. He showed a new mode of human existence, and when others saw it they were amazed and desired the same thing.
And Jesus not only didn’t use violence; he became the victim of state violence, a lynching, an innocent lamb taken to slaughter. And in that way absorbed the violence, modeling a sacrificial and peaceful way of being. A way to end the violence, end the war, end the oppression.
But that death was not the end of Jesus, for God raised him from the dead, vindicating Jesus and his way of being and making clear for all time that this is the way we should live, this is what God wants, Jesus’s way should be our way, so that all might live and all might flourish and all might share in divine glory.
And through that Sin and Death are and will be and are being defeated. Because we followers of Jesus have become God’s agents of new creation, being used by the Holy Spirit to bring about the common good for all humanity and all creation.
God is reclaiming and renewing the creation for our liberation and our flourishing and our participation in glory. Within us lies the germinative energy, as the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov calls it. The seed from which the new creation is constantly growing.
And this is not merely a spiritual reality we proclaim. We proclaim a bodily resurrection. As Michael Gorman writes, “The body is the means by which we encounter others and serve God.” And that resurrection change is already occurring in our physical bodies as we turn them away from Sin and death and toward God and what God expects of us.
Our bodies then bear witness to a new humanity and a renewed creation through the acts of support and service we provide one another, all humanity, and the whole creation. We become vessels and agents of God’s love, that we talked about last week. And I really enjoy this description of that love, appropriate for the week of St. Valentine’s Day, by Beverly Roberts Gaventa—“When Paul speaks of the ‘love of God in Christ Jesus,’ it is no sentimental valentine but a fierce love that rescues creation itself.”
Paul proclaims this story and what it means for us as a source of power and courage and hope because it is Paul’s own story. He has witnessed it. He has experienced it. And as an apostle he invites his hearers and readers to make it their story too.
Paul himself is an example of the new creation. He once persecuted the church, involved in the deaths of some of Jesus’ earliest followers. A man who believed that religious zeal meant purity and dogma and even using violence to achieve your religious aims. But all of that changed forever for Paul when, he encountered the Risen Christ. He became a man of peace, going about the world trying his hardest to create radical egalitarian communities of mutual love.
And so he becomes our apostle, our model of the work to which God continues to call us as a church.
Work that we can only accomplish because of the grace of God that is with us.
This is what Paul wants his readers to remember. And what I too proclaim so that you too might remember and believe. Believe the great story of which you are apart. Believe in the power, the courage, the hope that are yours. Because God is at work in you and through you. God has saved you, is saving you. Setting you free from all that enchains you, including Sin, Death, and the evils of this age. Creating you anew, a new human being, in a renewed body, that shines in holy glory.
This, my friends and siblings, is what we, with authority and humility and courage, proclaim.