I don’t know about you, but for me some days are brighter than others. That’s the glass-half-full version. The darker way of viewing it is the glass-half-empty version. That is, some days are darker than others. And, of course, I do know about you. I know enough about many of you to know that you also know something like my occasional darker days. Call it mood swing, low biorhythm, situational depression, hormonal shifts – and, yes, men have those days, too; it’s only an old husbands’ tale that maintains the myth of female hormonal imbalance. Many of us – perhaps most of us – suffer through days of less than exultant joy, some more serious and painful than others.

When we mourn the death of someone we have loved beyond measure in our days on earth – when rampant war and senseless violence seem to overwhelm God’s good earth – when something to which we have attached so much of our life, material and emotional, such as the stock market, takes a plunge, we feel a shock to our system. There are days, quite frankly, when I can hardly think of anything but death, including my own. Such days as those consumed by sadness undefined foretell the day when each of us shall be no more. But it’s even more than death of self; it’s death of bigger things we know.

The ills of our society and of the broader world cause me to wonder about the future of Western civilization as we have known it – and perhaps that’s part of the problem and the solution: that Western civilization as we have known it has embodied the cancerous cells that are gnawing away at the good stuff. I hear reports that there has been a dramatic downturn in the number of people in our own country – a country that has stood virtually alone among developed nations of the West in declaring itself “religious” – who no longer describe themselves as “believers.” What is happening to our church, I wonder? Not to this congregation in particular, but to the whole Christian faith movement of which we are a part. And if that goes – or goes in another direction that all our wise prognosticators seem able only to guess about – where does that leave us? Those are the kinds of thoughts and feelings I have on darker days such as most of the days last week, for some reason or reasons unknown to me, turned out to be.

But then midweek I received a gift. It came in the words of Paul in his letter to his friends in the church in Corinth that we have just shared in our reading and hearing. Words about perishing or being saved. Paul frames his discussion as either-or: those who are perishing or those who are being saved. We’ll allow him that distinction as long as we still allow God the decision and not presume to know ourselves just where we or others stand. But, of course, Paul speaks on behalf of those who he presumes are being saved: that is, those who have heard and accepted the good news of Jesus Christ, those who have come to embrace the gospel of the cross. And that gospel, he contends, has not been and probably will not be for everyone. For the whole concept of the cross flies in the face of worldly wisdom and strength. It takes a huge leap of faith for believers to forsake commonly held wisdom of the world for what can seem the foolishness of the cross, to allow the commonly held concept of worldly strength to be replaced by what seems the weakness of the cross.

H. Richard Niebuhr, the other Niebuhr brother who, along with Reinhold, helped guide Reformed theology in the last century, contended in harmony with Paul that, yes, we are being saved from calamity and despair. “We are indeed coming through disaster,” he claimed, “but we will not be lost. The cross does not deny the reality of death. It reinforces it. It denies its finality.”

And that is the kind of message I need to hear on my darker days to bolster my faith. A pasted-on sweet smile, sentimental Christian mood music, or comforting words from the “health and wealth” gospel that packs stadiums for people seeking absolute assurance and certainty don’t hack it for me most days, but especially not on darker days. Then I need honesty such as the apostle Paul was not afraid to preach to a people many years ago who, in their own society, were much like us: prosperous, skilled, competitive, argumentative, and, in most cases, I presume, very likable all in all. But very human. Just like us.

And being human they were predisposed to think in human terms about what makes sense, what makes smart, what makes strong, what makes rich. They were a ripe, if not also a potentially reluctant, audience for Paul’s words about the power of a cross which they might have perceived as weak, the wisdom of a cross which they might have dismissed as foolish. What kind of faith, after all, adopts as its chief symbol an instrument of cruel political torture and death on which, it then proclaims, God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, God’s Messiah, died? Only a faith, the answer might go, that does not shy away from the reality of death but believes in the redemptive power of God to overcome the otherwise finality of death, whether of the body or of human political, religious, and social systems.

For those who do not shy away from its reality, the cross is not a symbol of foolishness at all, but of the power and wisdom of God. As contemporary biblical scholar, Jeff Paschal, has stated it, “Though we know better, Christians sometimes fool ourselves into believing that we can rely upon our own abilities, our own expertise, our own planning and sophistication. Degrees, insurance policies, master plans, and systematic theologies are good things, unless we pile them up to convince ourselves that we have life all figured out and our future neatly planned. In the shadow of the cross, such ‘wisdom’ and thinly veiled attempts at control seem foolish.”

Witness the wisdom of the world in the cascading economic collapse around the globe. Do we still doubt our vulnerability in such worldly schemes? To whom do we turn for help? As Paul says, “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?”

Through the apparent – but not actual – foolishness of the cross, God calls into question what we so often erroneously value. When we’re sailing along on the crest of the wave of prosperity, we can be starstruck by the beautiful, the popular, and the wealthy; but the cross is ugly, unpopular, and poor, representing the very poverty of Christ, who emptied himself for the sins of the world. Too much of the world is impressed with violent, ravenous power while the cross cries out with a flesh-and-blood message of nonviolent and sacrificial giving.

Are we not sometimes mesmerized by the eloquent even as the cross speaks crudely of God’s peculiar –let’s say unique – power and wisdom? “The cross,” Paschal observes, “reminds us of our ultimate allegiance not to our country, not to our family, not to our work, but to Christ. For Christians, the cross declares that we embrace truth when lies seem easier, gentleness when force is attractive, justice for the oppressed when maintaining the status quo would be simpler, generosity when hoarding would be more comfortable, forgiveness when a hateful grudge would taste so good.”

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead . . .

Jesus, whom we call our Lord and Savior, that is, the one on whom we stake our lives, did not shrink from death when to save his skin he would have sacrificed his integrity and his oneness with the God he called his Father. We all know that sometimes we must suffer through the pain of darkness in order to glory in the light. But it’s not easy.

I was working with a client in counseling the other evening. We’ve been seeing each other every week for nearly two years. Suddenly I sensed a powerful breakthrough. I suggested to him, with some measure of suddenly re-discovered confidence in the process, that I thought the past five minutes had been the most important in all the time we’d spent together. “How do you feel?” I asked, hoping he might name joy as the emotion I was already feeling for him. But, then, he was the one going through the process after all. He looked at me with some obvious discomfort and said in a tone suggesting he had been hit hard somewhere in the mid section, “This is hard work.” Of course, it is. I knew that as his therapist. And I will have to wait patiently for the time when he can say for himself that the pain has emerged into joy.

But the hypothesis grounded in the world’s wisdom declares that death is the end of the story. That there is only pain, not joy. Only a tomb, not a resurrection. The new hypothesis, on the other hand, proclaims that through God’s saving act in Jesus Christ we, too, following in his steps, carrying our own cross, are also being saved. It’s usually in those moments when we feel most like creatures who are perishing – in the darker days of our lives – that Paul’s blunt words can lift us up. For Paul’s new hypothesis is that we are being saved from perishing, a perishing which can mean being done in by the destructive consequences of our own self-saving actions. We are being saved from our sinful selves.

Adam Eckhart, another biblical commentator of our time, continues Paul’s proclamation when he says, “If the perishing is our doing, the saving is God’s doing. By the surprising, ultimate power of the cross, God says no to the apparent logic that everything moves toward death. Jesus, nailed to the cross by those who sought to overpower and outlast him, embraces his suffering and death, rather than rage against it. Christ takes the crucifixion as the entry point into the saving power of God, and through it he denies death the final word. The new hypothesis is that we belong to God, who is saving us.

“God saves us from the old hypothesis so that we can live as valued creatures and proclaim salvation to others. God bestows infinite value upon us that does not depreciate as we age and does not rise or fall with our grade point average or annual income. . . . God challenges us during Lent to confront the world’s fatalistic wisdom, to recognize its tempting power and its insufficiency. The old hypothesis of perishing is not as much wrong as it is incomplete. Before there was evolution and survival of the fittest, there was God’s creating word; and while there is still death, in the end there shall be new life in Christ, bestowed and breathed upon us by the Holy Spirit. The message of the cross, God’s weak and foolish new hypothesis, absorbs the old hypothesis into the wholeness of the resurrection.”