I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends. I'll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.
Now I imagine I've just begun to offend some of you, to make some of you uneasy. You didn't come here on a Saturday morning, for Heaven's sake, to hear some self-righteous pastor stand up to preach at a presbytery meeting (in his own pulpit, no less; isn't that dirty pool?); and open up with a comment that makes you think of church politics. Here we are, hunkered down in our various little camps--warming ourselves by the fires of our own arguments about Amendment B and then Amendment A and then Amendment O and then another Amendment A--and everybody in this room knows that, whatever fire we're warming ourselves by, we're right. Even if we're non-aligned, we're right to be non-aligned! We've just gone through another denominational blood-letting, and we're awkward about winning (because what, really have we won?), or sore about losing (because we weren't supposed to lose); or maybe we're just sick of the back-and-forth. But the last thing in the world that we want is for the outgoing Moderator of this presbytery (and we all know where he stands, by the way) to just stand up in that pulpit and pull a scab off with that pious challenge to get along.
Isn't it a little late in the day for getting along? Haven't we in fact started a host of little cottage industries dedicated to not getting along? Formed every party imaginable? Coalition, Covenant Network, Presbyterian Lay Committee, Presbyterians for Renewal, Witherspoon Society, More Light Presbyterians, on and on. All over the country, in places like Birmingham and San Francisco and Lenoir, North Carolina, we've bought stationery, rented office space, hired staff, published manifestos, hosted conventions. Where does he get off talking about getting along, being considerate? Too late in the day for that. Anybody who has the nerve to preach before presbytery ought to just promote the Pension Fund and forget the wistful talk about cultivating a life in common. Better yet, anybody who has the nerve to preach before presbytery ought instead to just stick to scripture.
Well, sorry, folks; but I'm going to say it again. I have a serious concern to bring up with you. I'll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.
By the way, that is scripture. If you're offended by it, it's no wonder. Scripture often is offensive; and if it isn't, maybe we're not reading it carefully enough. In this case, it's Eugene Peterson's translation of the tenth verse of the first chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. He spends the first nine verses doing the bread-and-butter stuff, the introductory stuff you see in all of Paul's letters. It's often very formulaic: "Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus" etc. etc. etc. "To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints," etc. etc. etc. "I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus" yada, yada, yada. It's the formalities.
Until verse 10. And Paul leads off--rather sternly, I think--with the most important issue on his mind. "I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends. . . I'll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common"
At the time he's writing this letter, that church is probably
not more than five years old. Paul organized it and moved on
(that was his pattern), but he didn't forget about it. You know
how that is. You start a church, you get the building up, you
buy the hymnals, somebody handy with tools gets out in his garage
over a couple of weekends and fashions a pulpit and a table and
a font, and somebody else who knows how to type comes in and prints
the bulletin every Sunday; and, before long, there are a couple
of hundred people on the rolls. And sooner or later you
move on.
But you don't forget. None of us do. The new pastor comes in
and does things differently, and you hear about it. If things
really start to implode, you hear more than you want to hear.
The high-church people are standing guard around the pipe organ,
and the new folks are all flocking to hear the praise band on
Sunday mornings in the gymnasium, and the mission people are at
the throats of the evangelism people, the Personnel Committee
is chaired by a retired Army colonel; and everywhere there are
factions, and Paul has heard everything. Chloe's people called
him up and gave him the whole story. Some of those Corinthians
have claimed the sanctuary, some are holed up in the Family Life
Center, some are in the Fellowship Hall, and, of course, as always,
there are a few in the Parlor (just to make sure nobody's using
the furniture). And, keep in mind, there are not that many of
them to begin with. Outside estimates are that that church has
250 people, 300 tops; but, more recently, scholars have suggested
that it's no larger than fifty or sixty. That's a lot of pathology
for fifty or sixty people. But it can happen.
In this church, shortly after the Civil War, they called a new
pastor. And then, over the next ten years, that pastor managed
to haul approximately a third of this congregation before the
Session, where they were tried for various warm-blooded sins.
It must have been his way of getting their minds off all the
musket balls embedded in the walls of the building, all the bloodstains
down in the basement where Union troops had used the place to
butcher cattle. That's all I can figure. He was diligent; he
summoned a full third of them into the Session Room over the years
of his ministry. It wasn't the unexciting stuff--usury, for example
(Presbyterians hardly ever get tried for usury). It was the tabloid
stuff: public drunkenness, dancing openly in public, taking excursions
to Savannah on the sabbath. Trials before the Session! It went
on like this for ten years. On one occasion, near the end of
this man's ministry in this church, two young girls--recently
confirmed here--were brought before the Session, where it was
demanded of them that they confess attending a party where there
had been dancing. They confessed, and the Session minutes read
that these girls vowed that they would never dance again as long
as they were members of Central Church. The very next entry in
the Session minutes, by the way, is their request that their letters
of membership be transferred to another church. It wasn't a large
church back then, but there was a lot of pathology. A few years
after that man left, they tore that building down, and they built
this one; and I believe that they did that because, long after
that chapter in this church's life, they were afraid, maybe, that
all of that pathology lurked still in the plaster and the pews.
Just like that church there in Corinth, where things are so bad that factions have now been established. Some say, "I belong to Paul." Some say, "I belong to Apollos." Some say, "I belong to Cephas." And I can just feel the blood boiling--can't you?--as, right away, once the introductory stuff is over, Paul cuts to the chase. "I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friendsI'll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other" And then, a few verses later: "Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?" He's getting up a head of steam--can't you feel it?
Which is why what happens next is just remarkable. It's our text for today--and it's the beginning of a colossal change of subject. It goes on for almost two chapters, and--at first glance, at least--it has nothing to do with what Paul is so exercised about just a few verses earlier. Has Paul forgotten what he was mad about, and is now off on some other topic? Sure looks like it. There's not a word in these verses about Corinthian factions, and there's hardly anything much about Christians. Instead, it's all about Jews and Greeks. All of their avant-garde philosophies, all of their theories about worldly matters, all of the ways in which those sophisticated idolatries demand signs or want proof and thereby arrive at what they call wisdom. Sure, they stroke their beards and sip their sherry and have their silly little circular conversations with one another and get written up, maybe, in The Atlantic Monthly; but they wouldn't know real wisdom, Paul says, if it slapped them in the face.
If they want to know real wisdom, Paul says, they've got to stand on their heads and behold the way the world looks when it's upside down. Only when they're standing on their heads will they be able to see that their wisdom look like foolishness--what with its attempt to invent God in their own image! Only then will they begin to get that the foolishness of the cross is a scandal to the Jews because, for Jews, gods don't dwell with people; and is folly to the Greeks because, for Greeks, gods don't die. The Jews believe that God dwells far removed from people in the holy of holies, but the foolishness of the cross depicts a God who comes to dwell in the dirt and grime of human life. And the Greeks believe that God does the sorts of things that wise people do, but the foolishness of the cross--in which weakness becomes its own kind of strength--so blatantly undoes the wisdom of the world. So that, for both Jew and Greek, what God is up to in our midst rebuts what we expect and assume about God. The God that Paul is talking about is so above what we can imagine as to make our parties laughable, our notions of God so partial and off-the-mark.
It's a very important argument! But, like I said, it appears to be a colossal change of subject! What does it have to do with all the factionalism that Paul is so steamed about in that church in Corinth? Unless. . .unless, as a rhetorical strategy, Paul is moving from anger to subtlety. Peter Lampe, a distinguished New Testament professor, has written that, in this extended two-chapter interruption, Paul is making the case that the Christian theology of these partisans in Corinth is not one whit better than that of the world--of the Jews or the Greeks. Not one whit better! In this extended insertion about the Jews and the Greeks, he has drawn them a picture which he hopes, perhaps, they will study and study and study until--lo and behold!--they see themselves drawn there. Boasting as they do of being of Paul or of Peter or of Apollos, they're behaving as if their little partisan glimpses of God are the complete picture of God; and, proud as they are of what they think they know about God, they are standing in the same spiritual wasteland as the wisdom of the rest of the world.
And from that perspective, after almost two chapters of reflection about that pitiful, insufficient wisdom of the world, Paul returns, in chapter 3, to his initial argument. "And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, 'I belong to Paul,' and another, 'I belong to Apollos,' are you not merely human?
"What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growthFor we are God's servants, working together; you are God's field, God's building."
So it is that our text for today is hardly a change of subject after all, but instead an object lesson--an elaborate drawing of godless, so-called "wisdom" in which, if we look carefully, we will see ourselves. All hunkered down in our factions--you in yours and I, certainly, in mine--we are so tempted to think of the church as being, really, about power and votes and winning or losing; when, all along, it's about something altogether different. Fundamentally, as Paul says later on in this letter, it's really about a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
And if we are, in fact, "God's building," as Paul puts it, maybe someday we, too, will despise, and want to be rid of, any portion of the plaster or the pews that nourishes anything less than that which God desires from us; until we, too, might embody, for God's sake, the sort of foolishness that rebuts and redeems the sad, tired wisdom of the world.
You and I know, like the backs of our hands, the "rap" on the church--how it's a bunch of ordinary people making extraordinary claims, all of that. But once in a while, we see a glimpse of what the church will be when God is finished with it, and it takes our breath away.
I have a dear friend who just recently moved from one parish to another. His first Sunday in his new church, in fact, was this past September 9th. And then, on the following Tuesday, sometime during his second cup of coffee, one of my friend's custodians on duty heard a loud noise up in the sky. It was a plane flying over--far too low, and obviously in a flight pattern that was unusual for that location. The Tiffany windows in the sanctuary rattled as if they were about to come crashing to the floor, and this custodian ran out into the church courtyard to see what was the matter. He got out there in time to see a plane crash into the World Trade Center. For he was standing, after all, in front of the First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, where his pastor, my friend, had just preached his first sermon.
In just hours after that attack, that church--some fifteen or twenty blocks north of Ground Zero and only two blocks east of St. Vincent's Hospital--became a staging area, a gathering-place for grieving and searching families, and, beyond New York itself, a focal point for the concern and prayers of Presbyterians all over this country, all over the world. Even as that church went about memorializing six of its own who had been killed in that atrocity, and even as it went about attending to the pain of so many others, it also began receiving the ministry of hundreds of congregations that were bearing them up in a terrible hour.
I was with Jon Walton a little over a month ago, and he presented a paper to the group we were in, in which he reflected upon that very ministry. He told of the deluge of mail, and e-mail, and banners, and cards from Sunday School children and adult Bible classes from all over the country, all over the world. The greatest number of them came from Texas (go figure!), but there were such expressions as these from churches in Wales and New Zealand and Australia.
He told of three cards that came all the way from kindergarten children in some Sunday School down in Columbia, South Carolina. The children--named Hank and Lainey and Kate--decorated the cards with American flags and a cross with the sun shining behind it, and all three cards said, "You're in our prayers."
A sister congregation in the Covenant Network of Presbyterians sent First Church New York City a check for a thousand dollars. But the Session and congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Boise, Idaho (which, most decidedly, is not in the Covenant Network) sent a check for five thousand dollars. And then two people named Bob and Becka hand-delivered a check from the congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
And then there was the banner--from St. Paul's Presbyterian Church in Orlando--which was delivered personally by representatives of that congregation who had their picture taken, with the banner, in front of the chancel steps of First Church New York City, so that folks back home could see that they were really there.
Then later, there came word from the Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh, Scotland, that, at a city council meeting there, the Right Reverend John Miller--Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland--had addressed the council and had prayed with them for that congregation in New York.
"If [we] thought we were alone," my friend said to us in prepared remarks, "that we had to endure this trial or walk this hard way or bear this sorrow without any friends, [we were wrong]. The whole world crowded into [our] sanctuary and we [were] surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses."
And then, with tears forming in his eyes, he said one last thing. "This past year, in New York City, at First Church, we received first hand word of . . . faith in the Lord Jesus, and experienced . . . love toward all the saints. In a dark time, it was all that we had; and by the grace of God, it was all that we needed -- that, and the grace of God."
That's the foolishness Paul would have us aspire to. That's the building Paul would have us be.
Over this last year, I have become a huge fan of the prayers of our colleague in this presbytery, David Fry from the Pleasant Hill Church. They are so simple that they are profound, and so eloquently honest; and whenever, in some meeting, David is asked to pray, my heart lights up. At a Committee on Ministry meeting back in November, when my eyes should have been closed and my hands folded reverently, I found myself instead reaching for a pencil to write the prayer down, thinking even then that I might quote it on this very occasion. "We ask you," he said, "for many things, O God; but what you consistently give us . . . is community, each other."
It's almost a joke, isn't it? It reeks with irony, that we who are so different are thrown together, seemingly by chance, but in fact by God! And I believe that God, when beholding the church, waits in patience until the day when, together--not apart, because the idea of the church splitting apart is a scandal to the gospel--but together, we will get it, and become precisely who it is that we are meant to be.
Meanwhile, I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends. . . . I'll put it as urgently as I can: we must get along with each other. We must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.