"Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord
Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions
among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it
has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my
brothers and sisters. What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,”
or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Has
Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the
name of Paul? For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel,
and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied
of its power.
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."
--I Corinthians 1: 10-15, 17-18
Paul. He had many leather-bound books.
Let's talk a bit about the letters of Paul. This guy was kind of a big deal, and if you got
one of his letters, that was kind of a big deal.
While the early church respected Paul for his contributions to the life
of the faith, the truth is, you usually didn't get a letter from Paul unless
something was wrong. This is especially
true for the Corinthians, for whom things were so bad that Paul wrote them
once, checked up on them, and then had to write them again; in fact, the Corinthians had to get two MORE letters from Clement of Rome before things finally started to straighten up for them! Basically, if your church sought the wisdom of someone like Paul and
got a letter from him, odds were that things weren't going so well.
That's what we find here in the first chapter of Paul's
First Letter to the Church in Corinth.
It's clear, even to our modern ears, that something is wrong. After his usual salutation, Paul says,
"I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, that there be no divisions among
you." Obviously there is division and quarrel afoot, but why?
Paul writes that some are saying, 'I belong to Paul,' while others are saying, 'I
belong to Apollos' or Cephas (that's the Greek name for Peter), or Christ. Why such hostility? What were these groupings all about? Well, the communities to which Paul wrote
were extremely diverse, made up of all sorts of Christians. There were those who were still very much
steeped in their Jewish identity, those who were Greek, and those who were some
other kind of Gentile. The members of
these groups had mostly been baptized by the same person. You can see what ends up happening: one group gets baptized by one person,
another group by another person, and
eventually the groups begin to bicker and argue, saying, "We're more
important than you because so-and-so baptized us." Yes, this was a real argument! If we're looking at the groups, it's a fair bet
that those who said, 'I belong to Paul' were the Gentile converts, the ones who
said, 'I belong to Apollos' were the Greek converts, the philosophers who were
trying to adapt their old ways of thinking to this new Christian thing, and
those who said, 'I belong to Cephas' were likely the Jewish members of the
congregation. As for those who said, 'I
belong to Christ' the theologian William Barclay suggests that these are your
run-of-the-mill fundamentalists who believed that they, and they alone had it
all figured out. In short, the the whole
makeup of the Corinthian church was a mess.
Paul's advice is for them to put aside their differences
and remember what matters. It does not
matter who baptized you. It does not
matter where you came from or what your labels are. What matters is that you belong to
Christ. All of you. What matters is the cross, that great big stumbling
block: for Jews because they couldn't
get beyond the line in Deuteronomy 21: 23, which says anyone who hangs on a
tree is accursed (how then could the Messiah be accursed if he hung on a tree?!), and for Greeks because their wisdom taught them that God
could not suffer, otherwise he (or she) is not God. And yet, Paul reminds them, this community is
full of Jews and Greeks--and all sorts of other folks--who have been able to
lean on the unifying love of Christ poured out on the cross without letting
their identities as Jews and Greeks get in the way. At least not up to this point. Now, all of a sudden, folks are letting their smaller labels--Jew, Greek, Gentile--get in the way of their larger label--Christian. This is a problem.
Christians today are not so different. We have our little groups too, which we call Episcopalians, or Methodists, or Roman Catholics, or Baptist, and too often we let such labels get in the
way. We are, first and foremost,
Christians. We belong, first and
foremost, to Christ. We do not belong to
the Episcopal Church, or the Methodist Church, or the Roman Catholic Church, or the Baptist Church, but we
belong to THE Church, which is to say, the Body of Christ. That's not to say being Episcopalian, or Methodist, or Roman Catholic is a bad thing.
We need to affirm those identities because they are important to us, they shape
who we are. Paul does not condemn the
people for being Jews or Greeks--shoot, he himself affirms over and over again
that he is a Jew. They should maintain
those identities, but they must never let them get in the way of their common
life as Christians. And we are the same
way. It's ok for us to embrace our
individual identity as Episcopalians, but we must never claim that we are
somehow better Christians because of it.
What unites us is always more important than what divides us. Paul knew that, and so must we.
Imagine a church made up of folks from all over the
spectrum of Christianity. There are those
who have been in the church for generations, others who have just recently
joined, and others who are there but aren't sure they buy into it just
yet. All of these folks have an identity
that they bring into the church, and that affects how they worship, how they
hear the sermon, which songs they know, or whether they stand or kneel to
pray. Each person brings something different, yet this church is united in its diversity. Know of any church like that? I do: the Church of the Good Shepherd in Asheboro, North Carolina!
Good Shepherd, which I have been blessed to serve for the last year and a half, is a community made up of folks from all walks of life. There are those of who have been Episcopalians our
whole lives. There are those who still deeply
identify with another tradition, be it Methodist or Roman Catholic, or
whatever, but who come to Good Shepherd because they find it a place of welcome and refreshment. There are others who aren't
even sure what they identify as, and they too have a place where they can belong. This
church is really good about welcoming people right where they are. It doesn't matter what labels we wear,
what matters is our love for Jesus; after all, that's what brought folks here. Each person is honored, each of their labels respected and upheld, but at the end of the day everyone unites around the larger label that we all share: the label of a follower of Jesus Christ. I look around Good Shepherd and see
the kind of community that Paul had hoped Corinth would be; that is, a diverse and united community.
I know that you know churches like that. Maybe your church is like that. Now imagine if those of us who are part of such welcoming and affirming communities took that attitude, that kind of welcome, out into the world
with us. Inside the church walls we're so
good at looking past labels and affirming people for who they are, I wonder if
we might do that elsewhere, too? In a
world that is so divided on so many fronts--where some folks have their smaller labels disrespected, while others cling to their smaller label so tightly that they can never even speak to the Other--I wonder if we could be the beacon,
if we could show the world a better way, a way that affirms our individual
identities, while reminding them that what unites is always more important than
what divides. I wonder if our church communities could go into the world and make it a little more like that Kingdom we always talk about.
