Sermon, January 20, 2008 -- 1 Corinthians 1:10-17

“I'm With Him” (1 Corinthians 1:10-17)
Rick Olson, January 27, 2002

Paul's writing is the oldest in the New Testament – he began about 20 years after Christ's death, and was martyred in Rome fifteen years or so after that. We know more about Paul than any other biblical writer, and his undisputed letters take up a quarter of the New Testament. He traveled the mid-East, proclaiming the Gospel and planting churches like so many figs trees. Thessolonica. Corinth. Galatia . . . He'd get a job in the town where he was preaching, and go to work to pay his own way. Acts says he made tents, and our church has a category of pastor called tentmaker, who start a church, while working at another job to pay the rent. To do that takes a special person . . . maybe one like Paul.

His letters are absolutely fundamental to Christianity, especially the Protestant flavor – they're the wellspring of irresistible grace rediscovered and revitalized by Luther and Calvin. Paul's fallen into disrepute recently, because some of his prose is sexist by today's standards, and some of it has been used by the church to oppress women, and he sure enough was a product of his time, although he was probably less sexist than many. After all, it was Paul that wrote “There is no longer Jew or Greek . . . slave or free . . . male and female; for all of you are one in Christ.”

Be that as it may, we are all by and large Pauline Christians, and it's important, I think, that we listen to what he has to say. All but one of his letters were written to churches, to communities of believers, and all of those – except maybe Romans – were written to churches with problems. And it never ceases to amaze me how relevant they are to us today, and his letters to the church at Corinth are no exception. That church was full of division, and does that ring a bell? What other church do you know of that’s full of division? Do you think that Paul’s advice to the Corinthians might have something to say to us Presbyterians 2000 years after the fact?

We begin right after his introduction, at the part where he gets down to his reason for writing – or one of them, anyway. He's appealing to the church's members to get along. He tells them to “be in agreement,” to be undivided and, in fact, to “be united in the same mind and purpose.” And he tells them this in the name of Jesus Christ, no less – he's claiming the authority of Christ, as if he is speaking for him, and so even though he uses the language of appeal, it has the force of a command. And the command is: “You all had better get along, ‛cause I – who speak for the messiah – say so.”

He's heard from “Chloë's people,” maybe from her household, about what's been going on. And we don’t know who Chloë was – the word people is not actually in the Greek. It may be she was the wife of a wealthy merchant, and thus would have had a household under her, or maybe a concerned leader within the church, who dispatched messengers to Paul. Scholars think that in the earliest Christian communities, women played a significant role, and we know that unlike the fashion of the day, Paul welcomed women as colleagues in his ministry. It was only in the second century that the church hierarchy began to push women out of leadership roles.

But whoever Chloë was, the report she sent Paul wasn’t pretty – there are quarrels among the congregation, squabbles where there should be smiles, division where there should be unity. And in case the hearers of the letter missed the point, he spells it out – “Each one of you says "I belong to Paul," or "I belong to Apollos," or "I belong to Cephas," or "I belong to Christ."” Factions had developed around personalities, and – more to the point – the theologies they represented. And he includes himself first in the list, and ironically Christ. And I can see the congregation squirm as the letter is being read, because what Paul is saying is that if you spread division, even in Christ’s name, you are part of the problem, not the solution. He includes them in the same list – and what he says is “People who boast of belonging to Christ – “I am of Christ!” – are no better than those who say “I am of Cephas” or “I am of Paul.”

And now Paul goes into full rhetorical cry, and you can almost see him pacing around, gesticulating as he speaks – “Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” And of course the answer to all these questions is a big, fat “No!” Christ has not been divided! Paul hasn’t been crucified at all, much less for them! And as for baptism, most folks there could remember theirs, and they sure weren’t in the name of Paul – they were all baptized in—and the Greek says into—they were all baptized into the name of Christ. And in Paul’s world, the name of Christ was the same as the person, as the being of Christ, and so at baptism they – and we! – become metaphorically part of Christ’ body! And has that been divided? No!

And Paul’s glad he didn’t baptize any of them – except of course Crispus and Gaius, and those were at Stephanas’ house – because if he had they might run around saying they were baptized into Paul, and not into Christ. And none of them were baptized into Apollos’ name or Cephas’ or James’ or John’s or anybody else's, only Christ’s . . . and they weren’t baptized into any theological agendas, either, and they all had them Peter (called Cephas by Paul) felt that to be Christian you had to first convert to Judaism. Apollos was charismatic and preached a kind of wisdom theology emphasizing knowledge and understanding. And I don’t think Paul would have minded so much, if folks had disagreements in belief or practice – although he had fierce convictions about those things. What he’s objecting to here were the quarrels and division that had resulted from those disagreements at Corinth. He says “Hey – let’s remember what’s important here . . . did Apollos die on the cross for you? Were you baptized into Cephas’ name, or into mine? Of course not . . .”

And now we come to the end-run of his argument – “Christ did not send me to baptize,” he says, “but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” Even though baptism is central to Christian identity, even though it’s through baptism that we become part of Christ's body, Paul’s work, and by extension the work of Apollos and Cephas, is to preach the gospel of Christ. And not with clever arguments, or wise words, or charismatic speech, lest these things – and the people who put them forth – become the center, and the true center, the cross of Christ, be emptied of its power. And for Paul, that's center of the Gospel: the cross, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Was Paul crucified for us? No. Was Apollos or Peter or John? Of course not . . . division in the church, focused on this personality or that, or this belief or that, takes away from the true center of the faith; it robs it of power. Quarrels and feuding and fighting empty the cross of its power, and make the sacrificial act of Christ’s crucifixion null and void.

Well. There's nothing new under the sun, or in Christianity’s case, nothing new under the cross . . . churches are still full of people, all with egos, all with different life experiences, all inclined to believe in different ways. Different parts of the Christian story are emphasized in different ways – some prefer to dwell on the sadness, on the inescapable sorrow of the crucifixion, others can’t stand all that doom and gloom. For them, it’s all about resurrection and hope and springtime. Other disagreements are more intractable, and can become bitter – they revolve around what scripture says and how we are to use it in our life as a church, But whatever the disagreement, whatever the squabble, Paul tells us to get over it . . . we can’t let disagreements stand in the way of our mission, our work here on this planet.

Historically, that’s been hard for us to do. Split after split has wracked the Church . . . a thousand years ago the Eastern Orthodox splintered off over, among other things, the nature of the Trinity. Five hundred years later came the Reformation, and bloody conflicts raged across Europe in its wake. And many American denominations – including ours – split over slavery. Some of those breeches have never been healed.

Presbyterian history in America can seem like one big fight, as one argument after another has wracked our church. And that’s not a thing of the past, either – today, after all our sad experience, all our heartache and pain, we're at it again, along those good old standby lines of liberal versus conservative. In general, conservatives think the liberals go too far in being reformed, too far in accommodating our faith to the demands of society, and the liberals think the reverse – that conservatives don't go far enough. And if the fight goes on long enough, and it has this time, it degenerates into name-calling, and nasty rhetoric, with liberals calling conservatives oppressors and the conservatives calling liberals heretics. This time the lightening rod issue is ordination standards, in particular the ordination of homosexual Christians, but it goes deeper than that, touching on doctrines like the necessity of Christ for salvation and the authority of scripture in our lives.

Now, we're all entitled to our own opinions, we're all entitled to our beliefs about these issues; Paul doesn't expect uniformity of belief he makes that clear elsewhere in this letter. But what he does demand is unity within the body. He expects us to work together, to remember into whom we were baptized, and where the center of the Gospel lies. Were we baptized in the name of the Covenant Network? Did Jerry Falwell die for our sins?

When Christians start taking sides, when they start forming lobbying groups like the Presbyterians for Renewal and the Presbyterian Coalition, or Covenant Network on the other side, for that matter, they start to lose focus, they begin to empty the Gospel of its power, to push the cross out of the center of their ministries. They hold their own meetings, pass their own resolutions and become, over time, “shadow assemblies,” complete with officers and constitution. It's happened before, and when it has, schism hasn't been far behind.

But factions and feuding and fighting affect more than just denominations. They're deadly to individual congregations, as well . . . Personalities arise, and they crystallize around ideals or doctrine or teaching; and groups of supporters form and pretty soon you've got opposing camps. And it doesn't matter what the issue is, really . . . it could be ecclesiastical – related to how the congregation is run (more than one church has split over music style, for instance) or it could be theological, over some little – or not so little – point of belief. Or it could be nastiness between individuals, back-biting, gossiping, talking behind each others' backs. It doesn't really matter – it saps the congregational ministry, it sucks life and power right out. We end up spending all our time and energy worrying about the problem, and how to solve it, rather than our mission, which is proclaiming the gospel in thought, word and deed.

Brothers and sisters, God does not expect us to have uniformity of belief, God doesn't desire us to think and act like robots, feeling the same, thinking the same, believing the same. But God does require us – indeed, commands us – to be unified in mission and purpose, to not waste God's precious gifts of time, talents and money – God's good grace itself – squabbling like buzzards over a carcass. The church was formed by God in an act of grace and love. It's high time we Christians started acting like it. Amen.