Belonging

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Epiphany 7A

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Text: 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23

¹⁰According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.¹¹For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.

…

¹⁶Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? ¹⁷If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.¹⁸Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. ¹⁹For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” ²⁰and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”²¹So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, ²²whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, ²³and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

Last Saturday afternoon, knowing that Leslie would be preaching on Sunday, I decided to set myself a task:  assembling Hannah’s new dresser.  It came in 3 flat boxes from the store.  I began at 3:30, opening, unpacking, counting and organizing all the pieces, and, with a little help from Hannah turning the thing over in the later stages, was finally done at 10:30 that night. Even though I freely admit to being mechanically challenged, there are some things that I DO feel capable of doing.  I managed to complete the job with only one small blister and one small cut.

To be able to watch it come together from all the seemingly hundreds of little pieces and flat boards into this big, solid piece of furniture was a deeply satisfying experience.  I’m pretty sure the single determining factor was the fact that I was able to see the project move from beginning to end, and the end product was … something concrete, something I could put my hands on and touch.  Something that was easily quantifiable – easily measurable. 

Not all the tasks to which we set our minds are that clearly defined, that cut-and-dried.  Especially when it comes to spiritual ones.

Paul was dealing with that issue in his continuing interaction with the church at Corinth: the fact that it was not a completed work, but a work in progress.   

In the first few verses of chapter 3, Paul uses language that evokes the image of a farmer. It would be familiar to the Hebrews of his day, who would have grown up with the concept of Israel as being referred to in Isaiah 5 and in Ezekiel 36 as a garden or a vineyard, in those passages, each servant has a God-given task to carry out.  These tasks are meaningful and necessary work.  One plants the seed another waters the land … but growth?  Growth is a gift.  Those who have worked to plant and water can only do one thing once their work is done, and that is to wait.  They cannot make a plant grow.  It is the same with spiritual growth. 

Paul continues the description with a different metaphor, that of a building.  There is the foundation that has been laid in the person of Jesus Christ, and that is what he is building on – he or whoever comes after him. 

The point he is making is that each of the builders – whether himself or someone else – is working towards the same end – the completion of the building.  Just as the farmer and the farmhand go about different tasks to the same end – the harvest – so it is with Paul and other apostles who come and preach and teach the people of the Corinthian church – to deepen their faith, to strengthen them, and to help them mature in their knowledge and understanding of the Gospel.  They are not in competition with each other but are collaborators, coworkers for the Kingdom.  It is the noblest thing that can be said of anyone who works for the Kingdom, that we are fellow workers for God.

I remember in youth group how 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 was always brought up when the discussion turned to how we were to treat our bodies as young people. 

¹⁹Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? ²⁰For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

It would seem that verses 16 and 17 are an early reference to that same thought, and while that IS one way to understand and interpret those verses, and there IS a valid point to be made, their focus is different at this point in the letter. 

Paul is using the plural form of ‘you’ here.  He is speaking to the Corinthian church as a whole – as a congregation.  This is one place where the King James English serves a clarifying purpose in it’s use of ‘ye’, rather than the modern English ‘you’ that has come to be used for both singular and plural cases. 

Note what Paul is saying: that the Spirit of God – the Holy Spirit – dwells in us both as individuals AND as a community – and that even as we would seek to allow the Spirit to show himself through us by individual action, we are just as bound to allow the Spirit to show himself by COMMUNAL action.  The two go hand in hand. 

We cannot say that the Holy Spirit is working through and dwelling in us when our words or actions are tearing at the spirit of unity, at the willingness to work together for the Gospel, when they are causing strife and dissent and conflict in the larger community of believers.  That is not an easy thing to say or an easy thing to dwell on, but it is one of the lessons we have from the Corinthian church.  There were factions that had formed within the church that were still living as they had in the world before they heard the Gospel, still separating themselves from other believers based on status and wealth and position, still looking down on the poorer and marginalized members of their same community, and considering themselves to be holier because of it. 

Paul is reminding the Corinthians that they are ALL – each and every one of them – a member of that Holy Temple of God, and he gives warning in verse 17 to anyone who destroys the unity of that Temple.  There is some uncertainty as to whether he is directing the comment to particular individual or to a group of individuals in the church, but it is, in either case, a sobering thought. 

Paul then goes back to the themes he’s touched on earlier in the letter – those of factions and of wisdom.  He again uses the word ‘sophia’ in verse 18.  His juxtaposition of the ‘wisdom of this age’ over and against the foolishness of God again underscores how we as humans so easily fall back on trusting our own ability to achieve so much that we extend that skill to … everything. 

For most of our 50,000 years of recorded history, we gazed at the moon and wondered what it was, what it was made of and how far away it was. And finally, we decided to engage the challenge. Our technology had advanced to the point where it was almost within our reach, and from that day in September 1962 when President Kennedy announced our intention to put a man on the moon within the decade, we set our minds to it and completed the task within seven years of that date of that speech. 

Our abilities and skills and knowledge have grown exponentially in the intervening decades.  And our hubris – our pride – has kept pace with that growth.  There is an almost breathless anticipation to know and to see what we are capable of.  To be sure, we are capable of what would even in the relatively recent past be considered miracles.  To be able to instantly communicate with someone thousands of miles away simply by pushing some buttons and placing a device next to our ear, or to be able to open the chest of a living human being and repair a tear in the tissue of an organ and close them back up and have that person recovery to full health, would be unimaginable to our ancestors.

There is a measure of justification in being proud of an extraordinary accomplishment, but hubris is something else – it is unmitigated pride – pride without humility, pride that ignores the fact that we are created beings, frail and fraught with weaknesses and flaws.

We are SO skilled, SO capable, SO gifted by God to be so creative and inventive, that we tend to forget where the gift comes from, so dazzled are we by our fancy trinkets.

It is a fundamental point to understand that if we begin to rely on our own abilities, our own skills and knowledge as a way to understand and master the relationship between God and us, and by that understanding we are attempting to close that gap ourselves, we are trying to be the arbiters of our own salvation, and that is something that only God is in a position to do.  There is no form of human understanding, of human wisdom, that can hope to fully grasp the mystery of the cross.

I wrestle with it even now.  I question the why of the sacrifice, the why of the atonement, why the need for all of that – the passion – to take place at all.  It seems, to my supposedly modern sensibilities, such an archaic thing, a barbaric thing.  I would much rather find a cooler, less passionate, cleaner, clearer, simpler act that God might have taken in order to redeem the world to God’s self.

There must be a radical break in our understanding of wisdom.  It is a turning away from our self-centered wisdom and an acceptance of God-centered wisdom that is revealed in the cross of Christ.  Not what we can learn about life in the world, or the Solar System, or the galaxy, but what God reveals at the cross – THAT is wisdom.  It’s not that we SHOULDN’T strive to learn as much about life in the world, the Solar System and so on, but that we must keep in perspective what that knowledge is to be used for. 

Verse 21 – ‘for all things are yours’ … Paul steps back and is saying to the Corinthians, ‘look, yes, there is all this knowledge and all this wonder and it is all there and it is all good, but it is not to be used to divide you from your brothers and sisters in Christ.’ His essential call to the Corinthians is for unity in Christ.  He again brings in the factions, speaking perhaps euphemistically of those belonging to him, or to Apollos, or to Cephas, and he expands it to encompass the whole of human knowledge – ‘the world, or life or death, or the present or the future,’ and he says that that way of thinking is irrelevant to the Kingdom.  We all belong to Christ, and through Christ we all belong to God.   

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist church at Emmerton?

I wondered as I was putting this message together how many of you would begin to question at a certain point in it whether I was directing the message at a particular situation within our community of faith.  Let me assure you I am not – at least not intentionally – not KNOWINGLY.

I simply think it is helpful to visit the lessons we find in scripture at any point in our walk, in our joint pilgrimage, as we travel this road together, to have maybe a dispassionate view – a view at a distance – of a situation with which we may have been faced in the past or with which we may be faced with at some point in the future. 

In doing that, my prayer is that we would be able to step back and remember the lesson that our spiritual ancestors at Corinth laid out for us as they struggled with their own faith and their own identity as a community of faith.

Let’s pray.