In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit

 It was well over a century ago that Charles Darwin wrote his landmark book, "The Origin of Species."  In this book he set forth the now well-known theory of evolution.  One of the main tenets of this theory was something he called natural selection or the survival of the fittest.  His suggestion was that the strongest and most adaptable animals would flourish, while the weakest and the least adaptable animals would die off.  While that is basically logical, he then made a faulty leap of logic and said that therefore organisms would ascend to ever higher levels of development and whole new species would develop.  All this based on the idea that survival belongs to the fittest.

 Well, in our text for today, St. Paul sets forth a proposition about humanity which stands all of that on its head.  We might call it, "The survival of the weakest."  The ones who survive before God, he says, are those who are lowly and powerless.  The text proclaims, "God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.  He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before Him."  Today, then, we are going to take a few minutes to look more deeply at this mystery–to see the futility of the world's wisdom, and to understand that our true wisdom and the only one in whom we can rightly boast is Christ our Lord.

 One of the first questions we need to ask is "What is the wisdom of our world?  What is it that contemporary man boasts of?"  There are at least two answers to that question.  The first is our many technological advancements.  If you would have told somebody just 100 years ago that people would be able to travel across the ocean by plane in a matter of hours, that rockets would take men into space and back again, that cures for a whole host of terrible diseases would be discovered, that a piece of metal the size of your thumbnail inside of a computer could store volumes of information and enable you to communicate with other people throughout the world on the internet, they certainly would have thought you were crazy.  We who live in this age of microwaves and remote controls and outpatient surgery certainly have witnessed many amazing technological advancements.

 One might therefore be tempted to put the question to Paul, "What's so bad about all of this?  What's wrong with this wisdom?"  To which he would reply, "Technology is not wisdom."  Now, there is nothing inherently bad about scientific advancements.  Certainly much good has come from them.  They do exhibit knowledge as far as they go, but not wisdom.  For these advancements of which we boast really only address temporal, earthly concerns.  They do no even begin to address the ultimate questions of humanity, which is the heart of what true wisdom deals with.  Can technology bring you inner peace and happiness?  What can it do for you beyond the grave?  How does it help your relationship with God?  Here Paul would say that our wisdom not only fails, but it can even have the effect of hindering our relationship with God.

 You see, our technological abilities have tended to foster the notion in us that there are man-made solutions to all of our problems and man-made inventions to fill all of our needs.  We no longer as a culture look to God for help but to the idol of scientific research.  We trust that in time we'll be able to overcome any obstacle that might be placed before us.  In the end our scientific advancements have given us an inflated understanding of ourselves, an improperly magnified perception of our power and intelligence.  And thus, they have often had the cumulative effect of reducing our awareness of our total dependence on God.

 The second big piece of wisdom that modern man boasts of is his "discovery" of how we came to be, namely, the theory of evolution mentioned at the beginning.  Watching TV and reading various magazines and books, you would think that evolution was scientific fact, not a totally unprovable, man-made theory.  Now, I am hopeful that all of you recognize this theory to be totally incompatible with the Scriptural account of creation and not to mention inconsistent with the scientific data--and so I don't wish to spend time on that now.  But nevertheless, there are still at three ways in which the false evolutionary theory has had a big impact on the society in which we live every day.

 Firstly, it has encouraged the degrading concept that humans are simply highly developed animals.  Though we are the most evolved (it is said), our "family heritage" is the same as many or all other animals.  But in fact, the more we see ourselves as animals, the more we are seeing ourselves as sinners.  To be a sinner is to be subhuman, animalistic, governed by base instincts.  But God created us in distinction from the animals.  He has given us a soul and a will which He seeks to shape to be like His own.  We are not animals, for we were created in the beginning in the image of God.

 Secondly, evolution has supported the idea that there are no absolute standards of morality.  For if there is no God, no Lawgiver (or at least none that we can be sure about), then how can we know for sure what is right and what is wrong?  Consider our nation's discussion of the topics of abortion or homosexuality.  Anyone who wishes to state the truth unequivocally that such things are wrong is said to be closed-minded and one who is merely forcing his views on others.  We have become a society where absolute truth has been replaced by relativism and individualism.

 And then thirdly, this whole evolutionary worldview tends to breed despair and uncertainty–despair, because our lives are made to have no transcendent or lasting value, and uncertainty, because the meaning of life is made unclear.  What's the point of living in a pointless world?  The ever-high suicide rates bear this out.

 Considering all of this together, perhaps we can better understand Paul's words in the epistle, "Where is the wise man?  Where is the scribe?  Where is the scholar of this age?  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?"

 Indeed He has.  In order to save a world lost in the weakness and foolishness of sin, God chose to act in a way that would put to shame those who are wise and strong in their own eyes.  He chose means which themselves appeared to be weak and foolish but actually contained His power and wisdom.  In this way only those who had been brought to recognize their utter lowliness before God would be saved, while the supposedly intelligent would perish in their ignorance.

 The means I refer to, of course, are the man Jesus and His cross.  By all appearances he was an ordinary Jew–perhaps an out of the ordinary teacher, but a common man nonetheless.  And yet contained within His true humanity, He was the very Son of God sent to rescue and deliver mankind.  Likewise, Jesus' death appeared to be just another one of many criminal executions.  But through the cross, forgiveness of sins was earned for us, death was conquered, and Satan was defeated.  Christ played the fool in order to make us wise.  He became helpless in order to make us strong.  Paul states this all quite well when he says, "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God."

  Paul explains more fully how this is at the end of our text.  He states that Jesus became for us what we were not on our own.  By ourselves we were spiritually ignorant, so He became our wisdom.  We were guilty, so He became our righteousness.  We were impure, so He became our holiness.  We could not redeem ourselves, so He became our redemption.  Everything that pertains to our being saved, all of it is to be found in Christ.  Therefore, when we are "in Christ Jesus", when we are baptized into His name, joined to Him by faith, then all of those attributes of His become our own.  Trusting in Christ, we are now wise unto salvation, right with God, set apart and holy, redeemed by His blood.  Jesus is all in all for us.  Everything flows from Him, both for this life and for the one to come.

 And that is precisely why Paul says that no one may boast before God.  For our being saved has nothing to do with our merits and everything to do with Christ's.  The text says, "Brothers, think of what you were when you were called.  Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth."  For the most part, God has not chosen the big shots of this world, He has chosen us–to illustrate that everything depends on His grace and mercy and not on the worthiness of people.  We can't even begin to boast before God because to do that would be to reject Christ and to claim independence from Him.  Our upright living, though it is commanded by God and necessary, is completely excluded from how we are saved.  Christian righteousness is not a righteousness that is within us.  Rather, it is a foreign righteousness, outside of us–namely Christ Himself.  II Corinthians 5 declares, "God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God."  Our sin is counted as belonging to Christ, His righteousness is counted as belonging to us.  The people of the world may look for goodness and wisdom within themselves; but Christians cling to a goodness and a wisdom that is outside of themselves, that which is in Christ.  Therefore, the text says, "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord."

 And if we are going to "boast" of ourselves, then Paul says in another letter to the Corinthians, let us boast of our weaknesses.  For when we boast of our weaknesses, then we are boasting of our helplessness before God.  And if we are boasting of our helplessness, then we are really boasting of the power of God freely given us in the Gospel of Christ.  It's evolution upside down, the survival of the weakest.  We who are weak before God survive through the hidden wisdom of the cross and so are made strong.  He gives meaning and purpose and direction to our lives.

 Imagine for a moment a competition between a non-Christian university professor and one of the young children from our congregation to see who is the smartest.  Before a regular panel of judges, without a doubt the professor would be declared the winner.  But now imagine if that same competition were to take place before the judgment seat of Christ.  Now who's the smartest?  Certainly it is the young one who loves and trust in Jesus and who knows and follows the way to eternal life.

 Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us take a lesson from that; let us throw away any infatuation we may yet have with the wisdom and the ways of this world, and let us seek after wisdom which is true and eternal, that which is in Christ Jesus, who is Himself Wisdom in the flesh, the way and the truth and the life.

   In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit