More Than Our Arguments

My second entry in this blog—called Being Good Enough—I talked about how we as ministers have no gauge for figuring out if we are doing our jobs.  In that blog I mentioned how we tend to focus so much on numbers of folks in the pews, or the money that is collected during stewardship season, or any other barometer for measuring our success.  What if, I pondered, we focused less on being successful and more on being faithful?

Though I have worked now in three churches that would be called corporate-sized, I am a product of small church ministry and see the beautiful ministries that only small churches can do. On February 1 I was blessed to celebrate Holy Eucharist in one such church. 

 Outside of St. Marks, Hazard, KY

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Hazard, KY is the very definition of a small church.  They have been without a full-time priest for almost four decades, and their numbers have decreased more and more as the coal industry has slowly dried up in the Appalachians.  However, this faithful flock continues to gather for weekly worship—Eucharist once a month, Morning Prayer the other three—and live out their baptismal covenant by loving their neighbors and serving Christ in Hazard.  Parishioners fix weekly meals for those in need, open their parish building for NA and girl scout meetings, and provide hospitality when the little outdoor theatre across the street is in-season.  So while the Sunday morning community is tiny, the faith is huge.  This community could easily get angry over the way things are or be bitter than some of our diocese’s parishes have four priests when they have none.  But they don’t do that.  They see the unifying force of God’s love manifested in Jesus Christ, and they live into it.  It was an incredible blessing for me (and Casey) to be with them and celebrate the Feast of the World’s Redemption in their midst.

With that being said, what follows is the sermon that I preached at St. Mark’s on that Sunday, focusing on St. Paul’s 1^st Letter to the Church in Corinth and its varied disputes over trivial matters.  Paul urged those folks to look past their differences and embrace their unity in Christ, and that is what he is urging us to do now.  Enjoy J

 St. Mark's parishioners singing the final hymn.  Casey was not as excited.

 "Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him."

--1 Corinthians 8: 1-3

Have you ever had a disagreement in your church?  Never, right?!  I find that hard to believe.  It's amazing, isn't it, that churches, houses of God, places of prayer and refuge, often times are the places where some of the loudest, most vicious disagreements occur.  It might be over that new Prayer Book (which, by the way, is older than me!), or the altar not being on the wall.  You know the old joke about how many Episcopalians does it take to screw in a lightbulb, don't you?  Three.  One to change the lightbulb, one to hold the ladder, and one to complain about how much nicer the old bulb was because his grandmother gave it.

Petty disagreements are not something new.  Not to the Episcopal Church and not to Christianity on the whole.  And if you think that the church is divided today, you shoulda seen the church in the ancient world in the decades after Jesus' resurrection and ascension! The church back then made the church today look like a group of folks sitting around singing Kumbaya!   A perfect example is today's passage from St. Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth.  Things were so bad in that church that Paul had to write two letters to them!  Today we hear how some of the folks in the Corinthian church were worried whether they were eating food that had been sacrificed to idols.  Because this is a major sin in the Hebrew Law, a good number of believers were concerned.  But the church also contained believers who were not of the Hebrew tradition, Gentiles.  And for those believers, eating such food wasn't an issue at all.  And so you can see where this is heading:  one group within the church is pitted against another, and so Paul is contacted to settle the dispute. 

But rather than siding with one specific  group, Paul brings the hammer down on the community as a whole.  The issue about eating food sacrificed to idols is a non-issue, he says, because there are, after all no other gods but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  So what does it matter if such food had been sacrificed to these other gods when they don't exist anyway?  But this isn't really about food at all.  Paul himself says, 'Food will not bring us close to God.'  So if it's not about food, what is it about?

It's about disagreement and our own pride.  It's about letting our own knowledge, our own certainties about the way God and the world work, get in the way.  Paul's plea in this reading today is a plea to put down those certainties, those childish squabbles, and focus on what is really important, namely the community's unity in Jesus.  Paul isn't trying to convert the community, they've already bought in to the message of salvation in Jesus, but his frustration is that the people's spiritual gifts are not being used as they should, and they're letting their differences get the better of them, and in doing so are forgetting about what binds them in the first place--the love of God in Jesus Christ. How beautiful is that line:  knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.  This is what we that community in Corinth, and we today, are called to do:  build one another up.

This is a really good lesson for us to hear in this day and age.  Too often we let the things that divide us get in the way of truly working together.  Why is that?  Perhaps it's our own pride getting in the way.  Maybe it's because we sometimes forget that this whole business of being Christians is not about ourselves, but about proclaiming the Good News of Jesus.  Maybe we forget that our similarities far outweigh our differences.  That's one reason I like Pope Francis so much.  He has said that some of the hard-lined  controversial practices of the Roman Catholic Church--such as women's ordination, gay marriage, and abortion--are off the table and that Rome's stances on such issues aren't changing anytime soon.  Still, he urges Christians everywhere to put those differences aside and focus on the things that bind us, namely taking care of the poor, visiting prisoners, and focusing less on our own worldly goods and prestige.  He gets it!  He gets that our common life together is about focusing on those things that we have in common, not those things that divide us. 

I know that on some level every person here has experienced disagreements so fierce that they either threaten to rip a community apart or actually succeed in doing so.  I know that in our very diocese there have been tremendous disagreements--usually over money--which have splintered our communities.  I know that parishes in Lexington and Versailles left the diocese over disagreements 10 years ago.  And I know that small parishes here in the coalfields and the larger ones in the cities often have trouble seeing eye to eye when some the former have so little and the latter have so much.  I know that disagreements still arise--just come to convention next month in Morehead and you'll see what I'm talking about.

But the Good News for us today is that we have the chance to really hear what the apostle Paul is saying.  Yes he is speaking to a specific church at a specific time in history--and understand that the issue with food is one of MANY arguments that the church in Corinth found itself having.  But Paul's cry to cast away our petty, childish disagreements is a cry that we can certainly stand to hear today.  He even says that he will no longer eat meat at all if it means that this dispute will go away.  What Paul says to the Corinthians he says to us today:  you are more than your arguments, more than your differences; , more than your own knowledge.  You are the Body of Christ.  Right now in this place you are the Body of Christ. Here, at this holy table, Jesus cares nothing about all of that knowledge that we may like to puff up.  Jesus cares only about love.  He sees none of the differences that we see.  He only sees us for who we are: children of God.  Broken and flawed, yes.  But also beloved and forgiven. 

Paul's plea is that the church in Corinth focus on building each other up, not tearing each other down.  And so that is our plea today too, here at St. Mark's, in the Diocese of Lexington, in the Episcopal Church, and throughout the Body of Christ all across the world.  Build each other up.  Encourage one another.  Focus on those things that unite us, not the things that separate us.  Take care of each other, inside and outside these walls.  That, my brothers and sisters, is Good News, indeed.