Sermons
Epiphany 4
We hear the announcement ‘a reading from the first letter of St Paul to the Corinthians’, or whichever epistle is appointed for the day, so frequently that it is easy to forget that the epistles of the New Testament are real letters written by and to real people trying to work out how to be Christians. The conventions of letter-writing change over the years and few of you I suspect begin your letters by announcing who you are, what God has called you to and by listing your hopes for the strengthening of the faith of those to whom you are writing. Perhaps you should. So the fact that St Paul’s letters do not begin, ‘Dear All, hope you are well, weather continues charming, etc.’ is likely to put us off the scent and encourage us to glaze over as we hear yet another snippet of something potentially disturbing written by a rather difficult man a very long time ago.
And, unlike St Paul, we don’t tend to pack our own letters with theology or moral advice. Again, perhaps we should. St Paul’s letters certainly contain plenty of moral advice, some of which is even applicable to our own situations and a huge amount of theology, most of which we need never delve too deeply into in order to live a fulfilled Christian life. But today’s reading shows St Paul at his absolute practical best, this opening section of his letter to the church at Corinth contains excellent advice, he is both firm and encouraging, and for those reasons it is worth pondering what he has to say.
Paul has received news from a group in the church at Corinth that there is quarrelling there. We cannot tell now what the issue was that caused dispute but Paul’s listing of various leaders suggests that groups had formed factions around several leading personalities: Cephas, Apollos, Paul himself. It may be tempting to join in with Paul in his rebuke of these foolish divisions which are destroying the unity of the church at Corinth and putting in danger their united focus on the person of Jesus himself. But if we pile in behind Paul too readily it may be because we hope thereby to mask our own inclinations to foster behavior which divides Christian from Christian whether at a local level or a denominational level. I think we all engage in this from time to time and often behind the tempting façade which we construct in front of our actions, a façade emblazoned with the title ‘I am doing this for the good of the church’. The temptation is to place a cause or an issue above the gospel – and because the cause feels justified, perhaps even God-given we can find ourselves pursuing it ruthlessly and at the risk of alienating our brothers and sisters in Christ. And the cause can be almost anything. It might be social action, or liberalism, it might be the fight to maintain the liturgical status quo or to abandon it, it might be expressing support for the role of women or gay people in the life of the church, or indeed suppressing those roles and claiming Biblical justification for that action. Whatever the cause, however right or indeed righteous it feels, there is always the danger that it might take the place of the unifying business of recognizing that in the person of Jesus we see God fully revealed.
So this is why Paul asks, ‘has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you, Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?’. Of course not. The absurdity of the questions points us to the absurdity of following this or that issue or this or that leader to the exclusion of following Christ as one body.
But what might that unity look like? It is important to distinguish between unity and uniformity. The unity of the Christian church is never going to look like the unity of a communist party rally in one of the old Eastern-bloc countries. Unity of display is of little use to Christians unless it is achieved organically. What Christians share should never result in McDonaldisation, for the sustenance provided in that pattern is indeed uniform and uniformly un-nourishing in the long term. Christian truth does not come in small enough packets of meaning to be susceptible to being supersized. But it is through return to the central truths of the faith that any lasting unity will be achieved. Unity is not achieved by the suppressing of different views but by bringing those views up against the central verities of the Christian revelation: the incarnation, the doctrine of the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, etc. Church division cannot be mended by ecclesiastical politics, the healing of schismas comes only through allegiance to the central doctrinal statements that define orthodox Christian believing.
The church has sometimes apparently fallen apart over things that in the longer view appear of little consequence and a group of little schisms arise from time to time to which the label adiaphora can be applied. There was a good one in 17th century Lutheran circles between one group who held that worldly pleasures such as theatre or dancing were sinful and another who thought these matters were adiaphora, indifferent, not matters essential to the faith. And it is a return to the essentials that Paul recommends to the bickering Christians of Corinth.
St Paul may have been ‘of his time’ when talking about how women should do their hair, or how people should respond to the truth about their sexual identities, but in giving advice to Christians to stick to the essentials he seems to me to have very good advice indeed to offer any who would take their Christianity more seriously than pursuance of the latest cause or issue. The cause or issue may need our support and we can give time to that with a clean conscience if we don’t miss the main act. If politicians need reminding that at the end of the day ‘it’s the economy’, perhaps we need to remind ourselves from time to time that at the end of the day ‘it’s Christian truth’.