1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who by His cross gives us eyes to see what the world cannot. Amen. Our message from God’s Word today, as we continue our Summer Catechism Sermon Series, “Perspectives on the Cross” is taken from 1 Cor. 15.1-11 and is entitled, “Cross Eyes-The Apostles’ Creed,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. There is a certain kind of person who absolutely refuses to wear glasses. They squint through every street sign, every birthday card held at arm’s length like a man defusing a bomb. They are convinced that if they just try a little harder, things will come into focus on their own. They will not. That is not how eyes work. And I am sorry to report, that is not how theology works either.
3. We live in a world that is squinting at God. People are straining to make Him out. Some see a God who is terrifyingly powerful but cold and distant, a cosmic clockmaker who wound up the universe and stepped away for coffee. Others see a God who is warm and affirming but has no backbone, no holiness, no word of judgment — a divine golden retriever, friendly and utterly toothless. Still others can’t decide, and so they cycle between devotion and doubt, between “Praise the Lord” on Sunday morning and “Where are you, God?” on Tuesday night. The problem is not with God. The problem is with the lenses through which we are trying to see Him.
4. St. Paul, writing to the church at Corinth, had seen this kind of blurry theology up close. Corinth was a city swimming in competing philosophies, mystery religions, and spiritual novelties. The Corinthians were sharp people, well-traveled, culturally sophisticated — and in danger of losing the very thing that had saved them. So Paul writes with urgency: “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you” (1 Cor. 15:1–2).
5. Notice that word — remind. Paul is not introducing something new. He is wiping the fog off the lens. “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). First importance. Not second importance. Not a supplementary doctrine for advanced believers. First. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the center of everything — the fixed point around which all true knowledge of God turns. Take that away and the whole picture collapses into blur. This is why the Church, in her wisdom, gave us the Apostles’ Creed.
6. Look at that Creed — the one you have confessed so many times that you could recite it in your sleep. Three articles. Three persons of the Holy Trinity. God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. God the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life. And there, in the center, in the Second Article, the long and detailed confession of Jesus Christ: born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. The cross is not an afterthought. It is the center. It is the lens.
7. And what a lens it is. Through the cross of Christ — through what the Reformers called the theology of the cross — God the Father who seems so impossibly distant and majestic suddenly comes into focus. The God who spoke the cosmos into being, before whom the seraphim cover their faces crying “Holy, holy, holy” (Is. 6:3), is the same God who so loved the world that He gave His only Son (Jn. 3:16). The fearsome Creator and the tender Father are the same Person, and you cannot see that without looking at a wooden cross on a hill outside Jerusalem.
8. Through the cross, the Holy Spirit also comes into focus. Jesus promised, “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me” (Jn. 15:26). The Spirit does not point to Himself. He points to Christ. He opens spiritually blind eyes — and gives us what Luther called the fides, the faith, to receive what the cross has accomplished. The Spirit gives us cross eyes. This is why Luther insisted, against the speculative theology of his day, that we must begin with the revealed God — rather than the hidden God. We do not begin with abstract reasoning about the divine nature and work our way down to Jesus as one interesting case study. We begin at the manger, at the Jordan, at Gethsemane, and above all at Golgotha — and from there we look upward and outward and say, now I see who the Father is. Now I see what the Spirit does. The cross is the interpretive key to the entire Godhead.
9. Now, the enemy has always known this. Which is why every heresy, ancient or modern, is an attack on the Second Article. Some say Jesus was not truly divine — merely a great teacher, a moral exemplar, a spiritual influencer with unusually good content. But a merely human Jesus cannot bear the weight of the world’s sin. A merely human Jesus cannot rise from the dead. A merely human Jesus is a wonderful man and a crushing disappointment, because what we need is not a better example — we need an atoning sacrifice.
10. Others say Jesus was not truly human — that God only appeared to suffer, only appeared to die, that the eternal Son couldn’t possibly have gotten His hands dirty with actual flesh and blood. But a merely divine Jesus, one who only play-acted humanity, did not truly take on our nature, did not truly carry our griefs, and did not truly conquer death in the very nature that had fallen. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14) — not appeared to become flesh. Became. Truly. Fully.
11. These are not merely ancient debates settled in dusty council chambers and of no concern to modern Lutherans. These heresies are alive and well. They circulate on social media. They occasionally appear in Christmas sermons. They are the theological squinting of a world that refuses the glasses the Church has offered for two thousand years. There is nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9), and there is nothing new about the enemy’s strategy: blur the Second Article, and everything else comes undone.
12. The Athanasian Creed — that magnificent, uncompromising confession we pull out on Trinity Sunday — answers these distortions with precision and clarity: “We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance.” Our intellect will not arrive at this on its own. Our emotions will not feel their way there. Only the Spirit, working through the Word and the Sacraments, gives us eyes to see this God — and see Him clearly.
13. Paul ends his rehearsal of the Gospel with a remarkable bit of personal testimony: “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Cor. 15:8–10). Here is a man who once had the worst possible theology. He was highly educated, deeply sincere, thoroughly committed — and completely wrong. He had looked at Jesus through the eyes of his own religious tradition and seen a blasphemer, a threat, a problem to be eliminated. Then the risen Christ appeared to him on the Damascus road, and Saul of Tarsus, who had been blind in precisely the ways that mattered, received his sight.
14. By the grace of God I am what I am. That is cross-eyed theology in nine words. Not by my education. Not by my sincerity. Not by my moral effort or theological precision. By grace. Grace that bleeds from a cross. Grace that rolls a stone away from a tomb. Grace that opens blind eyes and gives the worst sinners among us, the capacity to see the living God and live. You have confessed the Apostles’ Creed many times. Maybe so many times that the words have become comfortable furniture — present but unnoticed, like the exit signs in this sanctuary. I am asking you today to confess it next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, with cross eyes. Look at those three articles and see the cross at the center. See in the First Article the Father who made you and loves you with a love that sent His Son. See in the Second Article the Son who wore your sin like a garment and left it in a tomb. See in the Third Article the Spirit who even now, at this very moment, is creating and sustaining saving faith in your heart — because Lord knows you could not have gotten there on your own.
15. The world is squinting. The world is holding God at arm’s length, or pulling Him uncomfortably close, or declaring that the whole thing is too complicated to bother with. The Church’s answer to all of this is not a clever argument. It is a cross. It is a creed. It is the good news that Paul delivered as of first importance, and which we have received, and in which we stand, and by which — by grace, through faith, in Christ — we are being saved. Put on your cross eyes, dear saints. Everything looks different when you see the world through the lens of Calvary. Amen. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen. (Phil. 4:7)
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