Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
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SERMON
It may be a cliché, but it’s all too true:
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We take up once again with Paul’s letter to the Corinthians –
a first-century group of Greek-speaking people,
in part of the Roman Empire,
brand-new Christians still learning what that means.
At first glance,
it seems they couldn’t be more different from us.
They expected Christ to return right away,
we don’t expect any such thing …
They met in people’s homes;
we have elaborate buildings in which to worship and meet …
They had only stories from traveling apostles;
we have the whole Bible, in many different languages and translations …
For them, the Christian faith was new and exciting and maybe even a little scary;
for us, it’s an “old, old story” that has become fairly routine.
Yet throughout this letter – and others as well,
we find Paul and “his” congregations
encountering the many of the same difficulties,
fighting the same battles,
asking the same questions,
as we ask two thousand years later.
With just a little editing,
these could easily become
Paul’s letter to the Texans …
or the Epistle of Paul to the Oak Cliff Dwellers,
or something else quite contemporary.
At the very beginning of this particular letter –
and remember, as Van told us last week,
while this is the First Letter of Paul’s to the Corinthians that we have,
it seems clear from the way he says things in the letter
that it’s actually already the second time he’s written to them.
Anyway, he’s just completed the standard greeting and introduction,
like you would find in almost any letter from that time period,
and what’s the first thing he brings up?
Members of the congregation have been bickering with each other,
and he wants them to stop.
How interesting, that that is his number one concern.
Perhaps it’s not the most important ultimately,
but it is the one which, until it is dealt with,
is going to keep them from doing anything else constructive.
I don’t think Paul is suggesting to them
that they will never, or should never,
argue or disagree about anything at all –
Paul himself always seemed to be ready for a
good theological debate.
If you really wanted to wind Paul up,
just suggest to him that there’s no such thing as resurrection.
Or tell him that, in order to be a good Christian,
you must first become obedient to all of the Jewish Law.
He’d argue with you about that for hours.
No, as Paul addresses the Corinthians here,
the first rule of engagement he seems to be urging upon them is,
Don’t fight over stupid things.
Honest theological debate is one thing,
quarreling and sniping over things that don’t matter is something else.
“I belong to Apollos.”
“I belong to Cephas.”
“Well, I belong to Paul.”
“Too bad for all of you, I belong to Christ.”
The equivalent in a modern-day congregation might sound something like:
“I was baptized by David Pittenger, so there!”
“Well, before you were born, I was baptized by Jasper Manton!”
As if who baptized us matters anything at all
as to whether we are faithful disciples here and now.
You can hear different factions within the larger church
engage in the same kind of bickering:
“I belong to the Westminster Confession.”
“I belong to John Calvin.”
“I belong to Karl Barth.”
“I belong to [fill in the blank]!”
To all of that,
Paul responds with a great big “So what?”
Where are you proclaiming the good news?
How is your life demonstrating your discipleship?
Will you please pay attention to what’s important?!
And, in our congregations –
as in other relationships, though we won’t talk about that today –
it’s very easy to quarrel about trivial things
in order to keep ourselves from looking at the really big things.
Just for example, let’s say:
If, at least twice a year,
we can waste half an hour in a session meeting
arguing about dirty dishes in the sink,
why, just think of all the really controversial and important stuff
we can avoid talking about.
Gil Rendle, a highly respected church consultant with the Alban Institute,
will flat-out tell you:
Any time that we spend bickering about the little things
is nothing more than work avoidance.
We focus on x,
because otherwise we’ll have to notice that for years,
we’ve done nothing about y and z,
which are the real issues facing us.
Paul suggested that to us long ago.
Don’t fight over stupid things.
If there are real issues that are causing trouble,
figure out what those are,
and deal with them.
But don’t waste your time – or your fellow church members’ time—
or God’s time –
squabbling over trivialities.
Again, this is not to say that within the church,
we should never disagree with one another.
Quite the opposite.
If we take our faith and our discipleship seriously,
there will undoubtedly be times when we will disagree with one another,
and be quite passionate about it …
like Paul.
If someone in a congregation tells me, “we never disagree about anything,”
then I know one of two things is true:
Either (a), they’ve managed to run off everyone who disagreed with them in the past;
or (b), they’ve reached a point where their friendship has become
more important than their discipleship,
and so disagreements are swept under the rug,
and no conversations of any depth are allowed to happen.
Paul was passionate about the things that were important to him,
and he didn’t care who knew it!
He didn’t even care if some people were offended
by his passion about certain things –
which puts him securely in good company, with Jesus –
he cared only that he was being as faithful as he knew how,
and encouraging others to do the same,
and trying to spread the word about Christ as well.
Of course, he felt some time pressure that we don’t feel,
since he did still believe that Christ’s return
was going to happen very soon.
Even so,
we can learn a lot from his willingness to say,
“Here I stand;”
and to deal seriously with those who stood somewhere else.
Which brings us to the second of our “rules of engagement.”
If number one is, don’t fight about stupid things,
rule two has to be this:
Don’t demonize your opponents.
We have to look at the whole context to see that lesson in these verses,
but it’s clearly there.
You have the three factions who claim
to belong to Apollos, or Paul, or Cephas –
perhaps, these were people who thought of each of those as
“their favorite preacher,”
or maybe they were baptized by one of them –
but then you also have this other group saying
“I belong to Christ”
as if the other groups didn’t.
We can be quite sure that Jesus
didn’t preach in Corinth,
and didn’t baptize anyone there,
so clearly, this fourth group
is trying to trump the others.
“You all are bickering about these humans who have been in our midst,
but we belong to Christ.”
Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.
Churches do this today.
The mere names we choose for ourselves and our groupings
hint at the ways in which
we perceive ourselves as right and the others wrong.
Not merely different, oh no – wrong.
Start with the early church:
We’re Catholic.
That is, we include everyone.
If you aren’t one of our group,
then you aren’t among the faithful,
because we include everyone that’s a real believer.
Then, who split off first?
The Orthodox.
That is, we’re the ones who believe the right things –
that’s what “orthodoxy” means, “right belief.”
The rest of you may say you’re part of the church,
but we know; we’re the only ones who believe the right stuff.
Of course, we have to be careful that we
use the names which groups choose for themselves,
and not the ones that others applied to them.
“Society of Friends” means something quite different from “Quakers,”
which was originally a derogatory name.
At any rate, how about later church history?
We are among the “Reformed” –
not those who are stuck in the past!
The “Church of Christ” gave itself that name
in much the same spirit
as those Corinthians who were saying, “We belong to Christ.”
That is, we are the church of Jesus Christ,
and you are not.
Even groups today that refer to themselves as “nondenominational”
mostly take way too much pride in that:
“we’re not like you people
who have split off into other groups.”
We name ourselves in ways that belittle, and seek to exclude,
those who see things differently from us.
Paul tells the Corinthians to cut it out.
He is telling us the same thing as well.
While we may choose to stick with the names that have so much history,
we simply have to live as if
they weren’t intended to divide and exclude.
Within our own denomination,
groups have to stop naming themselves in ways that imply
others are wrong, or worse.
“Voices of Orthodox Women”?
What does that imply about the rest of us –
shall we become Voices of Heretical Women?
“Presbyterians for Renewal”?
Does that mean that,
if we don’t agree with their conservative agenda,
we are Presbyterians for Stagnation?
“We belong to Christ.”
So do those who genuinely disagree with us.
Rule of engagement number two:
Don’t demonize your opponents.
When we write off people who are made in the image of God,
we are writing off a part of God.
It was hard to be the church in first-century Corinth.
It is hard to be the church in the world of the twenty-first century.
The reasons are different,
but the problems are the same,
and human nature is still pretty much the same.
May God grant us the grace to choose our battles wisely,
and to fight them fairly,
so that our witness to the world is strengthened and not compromised.
Don’t fight over stupid stuff.
Don’t demonize those who disagree with you.
Beyond that, strive together
to find what it means to be faithful
in this time and place.
Thanks be to God,
who never gives up on us.
Amen.
© 2002 Julie
Adkins (e-mail: Drjadkins@aol.com)