Risk (3rd of Epiphany, 2026-01-25)

Epiphany 3, 25th January 2026

© W Kirchmeir

Risk

[Isaiah 9:1-4; Ps.27:1-6; 1 Corinthians 1:10-17; Matthew 4:12-23]

May the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be ever acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.

Dear Friends in Christ,

Paul is worried about the church in Corinth. He worries about the quarrels that threaten to break up the congregation there. Each one, says Paul, is claiming some kind of special relationship, some kind of special truth. "I am Paul's man," says one. "I am for Apollos," says another. "I follow Cephas, I follow Christ," say others. And Paul scolds them for this division amongst them.

Somehow, this group of Christians has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. 

Somehow, they have fallen into the trap of believing that a particular formulation of the truth falsifies all other formulations of the same truth.

And so they quarrel.

These divisions run deep and dangerous, and Paul will have none of it. "Surely Christ has not been divided among you!" he says.

For there is only one Christ, one Saviour.  "Was it Paul who was crucified for you?" he asks. For only Jesus of Nazareth was crucified.

"Was it in the name of Paul that you were baptised?" Of course not, for we are baptised in the name of Jesus the Christ.

Paul even thanks God that he has baptised only a few of them, whom he names. For he does not wish any of them to claim that they follow him rather than Christ. Paul rejects any hint that he has looked for followers for himself. He has come to proclaim the Gospel. And that Gospel does not rest on some specific formula of words, but on a fact: The fact of Christ’s death on the cross.

We too have difficulties like the Corinthians. For example, we argue with other Christians about what we should understand when Jesus says the bread and the wine are his body and his blood. We hear those words in every Eucharist.

Paul's warning to the Corinthians holds true for us, too, and has held true for the whole church, and has been ignored by the church at different times and in different places.

Why does this happen?

Why do Christians quarrel amongst themselves?

Why do we argue and fight about the words that say what our faith means to us?

Many reasons account for this behaviour, certainly. We know that language can mislead us. We know that we cannot properly or fully express the mysteries of which we speak.

So we fear that what we say will make us imagine what is not so. We fear that what we say will mislead us into falsehood and damnation. I suppose we can condone such reasons for argument, because they arise from a genuine desire to know the faith as it should be known. For our faith seems to depend on what someone has said, on what someone has told us, which is the Good News. We must be sure we know what that Good News actually tells us.

We don’t want to risk being wrong.

But Paul hints at another reason: our natural gratitude to the person who has introduced us to the Gospel can become an excessive reliance on that person's words and opinions. It becomes not "Jesus says" but "This man says." Or "This woman says." We mistake the messenger for the message, and hold to the doctrine not because it is true, but because it comes from some specific person. So we too might have said, "I am Paul's man," or "I follow Cephas." And from such loyalty to the friend and teacher who told us of Jesus can arise quarrels and fighting.

 We could go on finding reasons for the quarrels and the disagreements among us. But I don't think such a search would serve much purpose. A deeper and more serious reason underlies them all.

We want certainty. We want a guarantee that what we commit ourselves to will work out exactly as we expect.

We don't like risks, especially real risks. A real risk is one that could result in great harm. And what harm could be greater than the risk of eternal damnation, of eternal separation from God?

For such separation is the closest the spirit can come to death, and because it lasts for eternity it is far worse than mere bodily death, which lasts but a moment.

Now at first glance this desire for certainty, this desire for a risk-free choice, this desire for guarantees looks reasonable. Why take chances? Certainly, we should not take foolish chances. Jesus called foolish risk-taking a sin. When he refused to throw himself from the temple roof as Satan suggested he should, he said, "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."

Trivial risks can easily be avoided; that's what makes them trivial.

The risk of damnation is not a trivial risk.

But here's a strange thing: This serious risk is precisely the kind that God expects us to take. God expects us to take him on faith, without proofs, without guarantees. He expects us to trust him even though we do not and cannot completely understand his promises. That's just what he did when he was on this earth, and it's what he continues to do.

 When Jesus went into Galilee and gathered his disciples, he invited them to take risks. He called on Peter and Andrew, and they left their boats and came. He called on James and John, and they put down their nets and followed him. He gave no guarantees – he just asked them. They required no guarantees – they just up and followed him.

 What it comes down to is this: That to live a life of faith means to take risks. Later in their ministry, when the riskiness of everyday life on the road got a little too much for the disciples, they complained about it. And Jesus said, "Take no thought for the morrow."

 Another time, Jesus told the story of the rich man who had stored treasures and provisions in his barn, and went to bed secure in the knowledge that he had a guaranteed future. Except that his future came to end that night, for the angel of death summoned him.

 There is no guaranteed future.

Even the Gospel doesn’t come with a guarantee. There's nothing that tells us we can return the product to its maker for repairs or replacement if it does not work as expected. All we get is a statement of facts, and a claim that they hold an astonishing meaning. A meaning we could not possibly see for ourselves or by ourselves.

Paul says these are the facts:

Christ was crucified.

Christ died.

Christ rose from the dead.

And he says that these facts mean that God himself died and rose again.

And that in doing these things God has redeemed us from the consequences of our sin and disobedience to his will.

And that he did this so that we might share with him that eternal mode of being that we call heaven.

Now the facts that Paul refers to are attested only in the Bible. Until the Christians become a nuisance a generation or two after Jesus' death, we have no other historical source for their existence than the Bible. So these facts are not very well supported.

But the degree of proof doesn't matter.

Even if the whole world accepted these facts, even if we had all the documentary proof we wanted and more than we needed, we would still have to take the meaning of these facts on faith.

Because all that the histories, any history, could prove is that a religious personage caused some trouble and was put to death before he could start a revolution.

The histories could not record that this was the Son of God.

That is a truth revealed to us by the power of the Holy Spirit.

That is a truth we must take on faith.

That is a truth we must risk believing.

We must risk building our whole lives around that truth.

But here’s another strange thing.

Through faith this gamble becomes a certainty.

But when we don't have that certainty, then we need to guarantee the truth of the faith by guaranteeing the truth of what we say. Then we cannot  tolerate other people's ways of talking about the faith because they might be talking nonsense. Or worse, we cannot tolerate how other people express the faith because the differences might mean that we are talking nonsense.

Divisions about what we mean when we claim to believe this or that form of words are evidence that we lack faith. That we are unwilling to take the risk of affirming a truth we cannot express clearly, nor fully, and certainly not certainly.

When we refuse to take that risk, when we demand certainty, we lack faith.

That fact explains Paul's anxious anger at the divisions amongst the Corinthians. He feared that they lacked faith. He saw the consequences of that lack of faith in the quarrels and the fighting. Only a group of people desperate for guarantees of truth, and terrified of the consequences of falsehood, will fight amongst themselves as the Corinthians did.

So Paul says he came to proclaim the Gospel, that the fact of Christ crucified might have its full weight.

That weight we know. We glory in that knowledge.

The psalmist sings that the Lord is the refuge of his life. We sing that same song.

He prays that he will be constant in the house of the Lord, that he will seek him in his temple. We pray the same prayer, and worship together here today because God has answered that prayer.

The psalmist says he will acclaim God with sacrifices before his tent; we make the same acclamation in our offerings of treasure and time.

We too will sing a psalm of praises before the Lord, every Sunday in our common worship, and every day as the sureness of the promises of God sounds like music in the background of our lives.

And when Jesus calls us to follow him, we will drop whatever we are doing, we will abandon whatever the false wisdom of this world has told us is worth pursuing, and with Peter and Andrew, and James and John we will follow Jesus.

And Jesus will transform our lives.

Outwardly, the world may see little difference. But because all that we do we do in praise of the Lord and to fulfil his commandments, to the eye of faith all that we do will signify the power of the Spirit working in our lives.

 Let us pray.

 Lord Jesus Christ, you revealed yourself to be the Son of God that we might know the salvation promised to us in your death on the cross and your resurrection from the dead. Grant now that we may believe what you have revealed to us, so that we may fulfil your will in this earthly life, and in the end enter with you and all believers into the eternal presence of the Father. We pray by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.