Corinth, for anyone who may be
wondering, is located on an isthmus about 85 kilometers west of Athens. I
Google-mapped it this week! Since my internal metric-converter isn’t very good,
I also found a website where I could convert kilometers to miles. All of this
under the category of sermon prep time! So,
in American English – Corinth—what the locals call Korinthos—is just about 50
miles west of Athens. You can drive it in 56 minutes.
I read once, somewhere, that
one in five Americans can’t find the United States on a map of the world, so
maybe this information doesn’t mean very much. But this being a particularly
astute congregation, I’m sure at least 4 out of 5 here today could pick out
Europe on a world map, and from there it’s not too hard to find Italy (the
boot) - then you just go to the right of that and you’re in Greece. Athens is
more or less in the middle.
There are no direct flights
from Logan Airport to Athens, but there is a flight from Logan to JFK leaving
at 11:30 this morning, and then a direct flight at 4:30 p.m. on Delta to Athens.
Yes, today. If we could get to JFK this afternoon, then we could all be in Athens
at 9:40 a.m. local time tomorrow - where we could rent a car at the airport and
start driving west. If everything went smoothly we could be eating souvlaki for
lunch in Korinthos, followed by little nap by the pool.
The travel advice comes free
of charge today. I begin here, though, because I think that sometimes when we
open the Bible - especially when we are sitting in church – and then we hear
someone say “the Word of the Lord” (and we say “thanks be to God”)—there is
some part of us that can forget that that Word was first written to real people
in a particular place at a particular time. Sometimes we imagine “Bible-land” as
a kind of fairy tale land where people wore long-flowing robes and talk with bad
Elizabethan accents.
But while the Scriptures no
doubt carry a timeless and transcendent meaning, they also have a real-world
context. Before they made it into the Bible, Paul’s letters were just that:
letters written in Greek, to his friends in Corinth and other equally real
places like Rome and Galatia and Ephesus. He wrote to real people serving on
the vestry and on the mission committee. He wrote to real people who were
trying to live out their faith as best they could in a changing world, people
who had real struggles and real conflicts. While it has no doubt changed a lot
in two thousand years in all of the ways you would expect things to change, I
think just being in Korinthos and breathing in that sea air and feeling that
awareness of our own foreignness would significantly change the way we hear Paul’s
letters.
So even if we can’t all get on
that plane from JFK this afternoon, maybe we can try to imagine Paul – before
he was ever called a “saint”—coming into that port city to proclaim the gospel
and trying to build a congregation. Corinth
was not some out-of-the-way backwater - but right in the middle of a major
commercial hub, a port city where diverse cultures from north, south, east, and
west converged. Then, as today, diversity provided both an opportunity and a
challenge. The congregation reflects the diverse make-up of the city: there
were Jews there who believed messiah had come and his name was Jesus. But there
were even more Gentiles, goyim, which
is to say all sorts of people from diverse religious backgrounds who were also
coming to see the way of Jesus as the Way to full and abundant life. They come
to the community, however, with different perspectives and different values and
different backgrounds. They didn’t
always get each other’s jokes. And here is the thing: while they all agreed
that Jesus was the Christ, their differences had become a source of deep tension
and conflict for the community.
So Paul’s reason for writing
not one but two letters to them is that they were fighting – a lot. In fact the
key theological question underlying both First and Second Corinthians is this: how do you hold together a community that
includes people of such different perspectives and beliefs? Obviously you
try to keep Christ at the center, but that is often easier said than done.
For St. Paul, the key to
Christian community is love. Faith, hope, and love are all important—the big
three. And Paul loves to argue theology as much as the next guy. But make no
mistake, even this great theologian of the church who inspired many who
followed him to embrace faith rather than works as the path to salvation
recognized that you can have all the faith in the world—enough to move
mountains even—but if you don’t have love you gain nothing. You are nothing
more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. You remember that? We hear that
part of the letter a lot at weddings - that thirteenth chapter of First
Corinthians. And we get all goose-bumpy when we look at this young couple and
the reader says they will need to be patient and kind and gentle and not
arrogant or rude. But the truth is that Paul wasn’t writing to a couple on
their wedding day—even if that does turn out to be good advice for making a
relationship work. Paul is writing to the vestry and the altar guild and the
property committee in a congregation not so different than this one –in Korinthos in the middle of the first century.
And the fact is that he is writing to people who have been behaving badly. They
have been arrogant and rude and boastful and impatient with each other.
So I’ve jumped ahead like ten
chapters from the text we heard today but it’s important to know where it’s
going: I Corinthians 13 – that love chapter – takes us to the heart of what
Paul wants to say to that congregation and maybe what he says to those other
congregations in Rome and Galatia and Ephesus too. You could distill both
letters and maybe even all of Paul’s writings down to that single chapter. And
maybe that’s what every preacher needs to say in every generation to every
congregation – the very same thing Jesus said (and did) on the last night of
his life when he took a towel and washed his friends’ feet and gave them their
final instructions: love one another. That’s all I ask. I give you a new commandment to love one another.
Preachers need metaphors,
though. The most famous metaphor that St. Paul offers to that community of
Christians in Corinth is of the human body. What does love-in-action look like,
Paul asks? Well, everybody is not supposed to be the same. That would
just be silly. If every part of the Body was an eye, the Body would see extremely
well, but hearing and digestion would be a problem. The human body needs eyes
and ears and a nose and fingers and toes and all the rest. Moreover, an eye
that wishes it could hear is of little use to the body since the ears pretty
much have that job covered. Paul wants that congregation to figure out how to
embody the love of Christ through cooperation rather than competition. He wants
them to learn to value and honor one another’s gifts—their own and
others—rather than envying the gifts that others possess. He wants them to celebrate
their unity in the midst of their diversity, rather than striving for
uniformity.
Now I realize I have taken a
little detour today. We have this very short epistle reading today—just these
four verses from the third chapter of First Corinthians. And here I am talking
about first-century Greece, and a conflicted congregation there, and why it is
love that binds Christians together. And we’ve not even gotten to today’s
epistle reading and I’m pushing my time limit and I know that some of you are
wondering, “how much longer, Lord, until we eat?”
Fear not. The good people in
Holden got used to that over fifteen years, but they also learned to trust that
eventually I would find my way back.
…like a skilled master builder, Paul writes to that congregation, I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder
must choose with care how to build on it. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.
Paul turns to the world of
architecture to remind those first-century Christians in Korinthos and us who
have gathered here today to listen for a Word of the Lord that there is only one
foundation. As one of the great hymns of the Church puts it in borrowing this
same metaphor: “the Church’s one
foundation, is Jesus Christ her Lord.”
This is good news! As St.
Michael’s continues to move through a season of transition, it brings with it
both an increase of anxiety, but also a host of new possibilities. Even when it
may feel like the foundations are shaking, it is good to be reminded that just
as the foundation in Corinth was not Paul or Apollos, so here at St. Mike’s it
is not Don or Frank or Warren or whoever may be called here next: the
foundation was and is and will be Jesus Christ.
Our work—the shared work of
both the ordained and laity—is to build on that foundation. And that work is unfolding
here even now, even in this season of waiting. The great gift of this time is
that it has within it the potential to draw you back to those foundational
values, back to the risen Christ upon Whom everything else will be built.
This is not just a time of
passively waiting for what comes next. It’s a time for a deepening awareness
and for prayer and for asking the really big questions like “what does it mean
to be a follower of Jesus in Worcester County in the twenty-first century?”
When we look back to a place like first-century Corinth they won’t give us all
the answers, but they will remind us of what it takes. Faith, hope and love,
for starters. But above all, love. A Body that works together rather than at
cross-purposes. A community that is building something together, not from
scratch but on the sure foundation of what began in the hills of Galilee two
millennia ago. Transitions invite congregations back to the basics.
Labor Day weekend is as good
a time as any to stop and ask: what role will you play going forward in the
life of this congregation? What gifts do you possess to help this congregation
move from good to great, and how will you share those in love? Ultimately as
each person begins to take hold of that and pitch in with what they can do, the
new St. Michael’s will begin to emerge. It won’t look the same as the St.
Michael’s of the 1950s or the 1980s. It will be a new creation. Each of you
must choose with care how to build on that sure foundation that has already
been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment