PAUL’S FIRST LETTER TO THE CORINTHIANS
PART VI

CHRIST THE FOUNDATION
February 22, 2014
Westmount Park United Church

We are now at the end of a six week series of sermons based on epistle readings taken from the beginning of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. In the past five weeks I have been preaching on a variety of messages from the first three chapters of First Corinthians; first, that our relationship to God and to one another in the fellowship of the Church is by God’s grace; second, that because each of us has been united with Christ we must have unity with one another; third, that by human standards the gospel seems foolish because it is grounded in Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross; fourth, that our faith rests not in our own strength but on the power of God; and fifth, that although Paul and others have worked hard for the church in Corinth any success they may experience is because God gives the growth. The message of today’s sermon is that any church fellowship, indeed any Christian life, must be built on the foundation of Jesus Christ. I just now described these sermons as having a variety of messages, but looking over what I have said and am about to say I realize there is one underlying basic message which Paul has for the Corinthians, and nearly two thousand years later for us. In all that he has to say Paul is declaring what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. He is delivering the gospel, the good news of God’s saving redeeming love for us which has enabled us to be the Church, a fellowship of Christian people dedicated to living out God’s love for us as we love and care for one another, the good news of God’s saving redeeming love which has enabled us to build each one of our lives on the foundation of Jesus Christ.

    Epistle Reading – I Corinthians 3: 10 11, 16 23

“God has placed Jesus Christ as the one and only foundation, and no other foundation can be laid.” [I Corinthians 3:10] Jesus is the foundation of the Church. It is built on him and on him alone. Unfortunately we too often try to build up the Church on top of other foundations. Perhaps the most popular and ultimately false foundation of the Church is financial solvency. It is a very seductive temptation to build the Church on the foundation of money, to make judgements about what we should or shouldn’t being doing as a church and as Christians in terms of financial losses and gains. A similar false foundation is that of popularity. We try to build a church by making it a popular place. We build on this false foundation when the main purpose of our worship is to provide pleasure and entertainment or when we think of ourselves as being primarily a friendly social club, instead of building on the foundation of Jesus Christ, dedicated not to catering to ourselves but to serving him.
The false foundation which Paul goes on to talk about in our reading from First Corinthians is worldly wisdom. “If anyone of you think that you are wise by this world’s standards, you should become a fool, in order to be really wise.” [I Corinthians 3:18] By worldly standards following Jesus is folly. The wisdom of this world is not built on the foundation of Jesus Christ. The foundation of our society is the consumption of goods,
intensified to the greatest possible degree by highly sophisticated marketing techniques. Our society is not built on Jesus. We do not live in a Christian society. There may be certain broadly held ethical standards that are rooted in Christian principles of love and respect and justice, but the real motive forces that drive our society are not at their foundation grounded in Jesus’ life of sacrificial love. Unfortunately we can too easily find ourselves building on the wisdom of the world instead of the wisdom of God. So instead of having Jesus as the foundation of our lives we use the Christian religion as a sort of sugar coating which we spread on top of our society and on our family life. We layer this sugar coating of religious observance, for instance, on special public occasions where priests or ministers are asked to bless various sorts of public functions. A religious observance which is an add on, if not an after thought, is not built on the foundation of Jesus Christ.
Jesus is, or should be, the foundation of the Church. We build our lives on that foundation, as Christian individuals and congregations, by being united with him through the Holy Spirit, by being bound to him in our communion with one another, by having faith in Jesus (believing in him, trusting him, being spiritually linked to him), and by seeking to obey him (committing ourselves to discern what Jesus would have us do and then striving to follow in his way.)
The true foundation of the Church Universal is Jesus. The only solid foundation for any individual church congregation is Jesus. But how can we insure that we are building our community of faith, here at Westmount Park United Church, on the “one and only foundation” of Jesus Christ? Well, there are a number of things that can be done in order to place our church’s life squarely on Jesus and not on a false foundation. One is learning all that we can about him. The best and most obvious way of doing that is to study the pages of Holy Scripture, particularly the New testament with its Gospel narratives which interpret for us the significance of his earthly ministry, and also the reflections on the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and
resurrection that come to us from the other New Testament writers. We also centre our church fellowship on the foundation of Jesus Christ by being united with him in worship, through offering up our prayers and our praises, by hearing God’s holy word read and expounded, by drawing near to God in Christ through the sacraments.
“God has placed Jesus Christ as the one and only foundation, and no other foundation can be laid.” That means we need to ask some important questions of ourselves, like: What is the foundation of my life? What are the fundamental principles or driving forces by which I live? Are Christ like attitudes at the heart of what I do because I have laid Jesus as the foundation my life through study and worship and prayer and devotion, or is Jesus just a sugar coating? Is the Christian religion layered on top as an after thought, a ritual, a way of trying to make excuses in weekly worship for the “me first” way I live the rest of my life? Is Jesus like the leaven or the yeast which pervades the whole loaf, giving life and health to it, or is Jesus just a sugar coating designed to make life a little sweeter without changing the real substance of who we are deep down at the very foundation of our lives? I guess the question to ask right at this very moment is this: Am I here in church today to serve my own felt needs by having a surface layer of religion smoothed onto my life, or am I here to lay a firm foundation of faith in and dedication to Jesus.
The wisdom of this world is that we should all strive to be independent, free standing individuals, living life the way we please. But the wisdom that comes from God is that life at its very best can only be lived by building on the foundation of Jesus who comes to bring us life in all its fullness. Jesus is our foundation because he undergirds each of us individually, and he is also our foundation because we are firmly attached to the fellowship of God’s people which is built squarely on Jesus Christ.
“For God has placed Jesus Christ as the one and only foundation, and no other foundation can be laid.”