Arguing Over Building Plans

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"Arguing Over Building Plans"

1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23
February 20, 2011

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

It may or may not be a surprise to many of you, but I usually never know what text I’ll be
preaching on from week to week, though, of course, the lectionary offers four scriptural
passages to choose from each week, and I usually choose from those four. All that is
to say is that I didn’t really plan on following this thread from First Corinthians we’ve
been on, but every week I’ve gone back to that Corinthian well, because, I think, it has
been a deep one from which to draw some wisdom. Not all of First Corinthians is as rich
as the these first three or four chapters, in my opinion, just as my preaching from week
to week can be awfully uneven, and can range from the sublime to the banal. So it is
with Paul, but these three chapters, they are rich fare, and he continues to offer us a
gourmet meal in today’s text, in contrast to moments later on when the menu
disintegrates a bit.

What is on the menu today is the fifth course of a meal he’s been feeding us, this
mediation on what has caused this Corinthian church to splinter so badly, with various
believers lining themselves up behind certain leaders in the congregation, and
declaring the other as less than faithful, perhaps even heretical, in comparison to the
teachings of their favorite preacher or teacher. Last week we explored the metaphor of
the field and I went with the companion metaphor used by Paul there, the metaphor of a
house, to help us distinguish between our houses in this world and our actual spiritual
homes, that home being us, we who are being built by God in this life, and in this world.
Houses disintegrate, they fall into the dustbin of history, but homes, they are eternal, in
a way, and the homes God is building start within us, and what God is building is us—
we are what God is obsessed with, the building of that which is eternal in us.

Today, though, we have Paul continuing that metaphor, that building metaphor—in fact,
he is building on it by pointing downward, to the foundation of any home, and every
building, for that matter. He points to the roots and says that whomever we follow—him
or Cephas or Apollos—the reality is that the foundation of any building they or we build
is the Christ, is this one whom we all follow. The home, the buildings, the palaces, the
shacks, the two-level split ranch in the suburbs, so to speak, all have a common
foundation, and this common foundation is the Christ. Now, whatever we build on that
foundation, or whatever God builds on that foundation, is likely to be different from
each other, because we are different people, with different building needs, different
space requirements, and our homes, spiritual or otherwise, are likely to be reflective of
our particularity, our own likes and dislikes, our prejudices, even, our assumptions
about what home should look like.

And I think that is the dilemma, isn’t it? I mean, if we Christians share a common base,
a common foundation, which is the Christ, which is our relationship and experience of
this one from Nazareth, how in the heck did we end with such variety of structures built
on this common base? Two thousand years of doing this work of building spiritual
homes and rarely do the homes look the same, even if they are in same
neighborhood! We have raving liberals and raving conservatives and everything in-
between, and, frankly, if you talk to them and to us, it sure doesn’t sound as if we have
a common base, a common foundation. Maybe in name, but not in practice, at least if
one looks at the various houses, and homes built on that common foundation. The
conservatives don’t think liberals are really Christians and the liberals think the
conservatives practice a form of Pharisaic Christianity, focused on personal moralism
with little concern for the poor and needy, for justice for the “others,” in our cultures. I
know I’ve fallen for this perhaps false dichotomy, more so than ever, really, as the
church truly has become more and more divided over issues of inclusivity, over who is
welcome, and to what extent they are welcomed, something that effects me and many
of my friends very much. It’s personal for me and my friends and loved ones, and it
harkens back to a big question that my theological opposite probably ask as well: how
could fellow Christians build THAT kind of building on the foundation that is the Christ?
Given the often profoundly different structures/homes we Christians have built for two
thousand years, how could we be so at odds about what that kind of home that
foundational footprint calls us to build on it, on him?

Now, I bring up that question, and I’m not sure Paul gives us any easy answers here in
this text, or anywhere for that matter.   Frankly, we are highly attached to our buildings,
aren’t we, literally and figuratively, even when we think we’ve walked away from them for
good. For example, I got a phone call three or four months ago from a mother who was
looking for a church building to host her daughter’s wedding. She mentioned that she
was a member of a house church, which means she was part of a small group of
Christians that don’t meet in an actual church buildings, but have decided to follow what
they believe to be the New Testament model of the church, which is home based,
rather than building based. And, actually, I get it—there is something to be ashamed of
in the way we Christians spend millions and billions of dollars on buildings that are
rarely used more than a couple of times a week, in a world where thirty thousand
people die of hunger every day. And yet, as I have argued here and elsewhere, almost
from the beginning people of faith, of every faith, have built buildings, temples,
mosques, churches, to somehow give physical voice to the wonder they feel before the
Holy. And even most of the poor, the poorest of the poor, build spaces, structures that
give embodiment to their sense of the grandeur of God, one way or another. Now,
whether or not that should be the case, one can certainly argue that point either way,
but I don’t think that the instinct to build something, anything, in response to spiritual
wonder is something we humans are going to get rid of anytime soon.

Back to the story of that woman and her daughter’s wedding—in the end, it didn’t work
out, because she wanted her own minister to do the service, and though we have made
some exceptions to the rule that the minister of the church conducts the services of the
church, including weddings, we generally avoid being a wedding or even funeral
chapel. Now, I must admit that I thought it was very, very ironic that this woman, and
her daughter didn’t want to just have the wedding in their living room, or in an outdoor
pavilion, or somewhere else—they wanted it done in a space that looked like a church
building, even though they likely consider this building to be unbiblical, or at least not a
good stewardship of resources. Like I said, we get attached to our buildings, the ones
in our heads, in our dreams about what a church wedding should be, even if we think
we’ve walked away from the institution that care takes that building, for the sake of
spiritual purity.

Certainly we are attached to this space, it having housed us for a 150 or so years, in
one shape or another. In the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, there are several
churches and church buildings that were decommissioned about six years ago, so to
speak, but some of the members of those churches have refused to leave their
buildings, standing guard, literally night and day, to make sure that the diocese doesn’t
come in and change the locks, and sell the buildings to pay off some obligations
coming out of the priest sexual abuse scandal of the last ten years. The parishnioers
hold lay led services, and they take turns at night staying in the building, refusing to
take any chances that they might lose their precious buildings. (http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/17/boston-cardinal-weighing-_n_824606.html) In my more
youthful days, I would have looked down on such an attachment to buildings, but, with
some time, and having served two churches that could only afford to rent space from
other churches, I’ve come to realize the power of space, and of owning your own
building, and what that means to a community of people. Again, it’s a bit too easy to
dismiss the human need for buildings, for tradition, for connection to a physical past, to
a shared story, for a home in this world, all represented by wood, mortar, thinking that
we are somehow above such seemingly crass materialism. Until you lose a building, or
have never had one, or want a significant ceremony within its walls, it’s probably best to
tiptoe through this subject with deep respect for the human desire to build a spiritual
home, literally and figuratively, in this world.

And yet, Paul rightfully cautions us not to get too attached to these places, to these
buildings we build in this world. What he worries about, I think, is something I said last
week: that we will confuse a building for a home, a house for a home, and we will fail to
realize that we are that building that God is making in this world, we are that home God
is building in this world. The people of the church are that holy temple God is building
in this world, and, to the credit of the mother I just mentioned, we are what will be
eternal, not the buildings and spaces like this one that so often distract us from that
inner journey with the Christ. Now, what God builds inside each individual, or each
group of people, to Paul’s point in this text, may not make a lot of sense to me or you
and vice versa, and it may be irrational, something we touched on a few weeks ago, the
craziness of the Christian witness—but it may be yet what God is building in this world,
a different home than our own, but a home for someone, or some people, nonetheless.
People can follow the different home building blueprints of Paul or Cephas or Apollos or
Calvin or Luther or Wesley and still be building a home in God, despite the difference in
structures, despite the different room plans built on the very same foundation.

The danger, of course, for us Christians, is when we decide that all houses built on this
particular foundation, this Christ, should all look the same and be the same, and if they’
re not, we start calling out each other out, and openly doubting whether or not we even
share the same foundation. We theological progressives do it a lot and I think the other
side does it even more so, mostly because of their need to keep all the buildings in the
neighborhood within a particular housing style—they seem so often mimic that out of
control home owner’s association one finds in some neighborhoods. Nonetheless,
when we doubt the foundations of others, of other Christians, when we doubt whether
or not those “others” are actual followers of Christ in the first place because we
disagree with the house they’ve built on the same foundation as we have, we are in
very dangerous territory. As Paul says in our text here, we are then questioning the
wisdom of God, the God who gave us the responsibility of partnering with God on
building on that one foundation, rather than giving us the exact same blueprints for
what to build on each and every foundation, on each and every experience of Christ.

I know you think of me as perfect…but I am certainly guilty of that sin. I have bought
into the wisdom of the world, to use Paul’s language here, that says that unity is
sameness, that we have to all agree on how to live out the Gospel, or the whole thing,
this Christianity, seems like house of straw, if we can’t all agree on some basic issues.
But that doesn’t seem to be the way of it, the way God has allowed it to be, to grow, to
be built. Maybe God was quite content with giving us the foundation, the Christ, and
then letting us do the building, to do the building of a home that suits our own needs,
our own particular wishes. Some need a split-level ranch, and others needs a
townhome, and others need a high rise condo—we need different places to live, and so
God has allowed it, because God seems to be “into” diversity—you have only to look
around at humankind to see that truth.

I know the larger church has been condemned, and damned, and questioned because
of our propensity to argue each other out of each other’s homes, thus requiring the
building of yet another home in a neighborhood that probably didn’t need yet another
home. But that seems to be the way God works in this world, and or at least how God
has allowed the church to do its work in the world—in my house, there are many
mansions…indeed, that is so true. However, I do want to point out something that can’t
be missed, in all of this talk of home building on this one foundation, this Christ, and
that is that church buildings are not single family dwellings—no, in fact, they are built
for groups of people, families of people, and that is surely a telling sign of what it
means to be build on that one foundation: on that one foundation, many are gathered,
and that ought to tell us something about foolishness of God’s wisdom. You see, it
would be so much easier to have our own private religion, our own private journey with
Christ, with God, and simply do it alone, to walk with and towards God all alone—and
there a lot of people doing that nowadays—but I don’t think that was the divine plan.
That one foundation on which many homes are built are in neighborhoods where the
homes are full of people, and most of them not at all related to each other biologically—
they’re family, certainly but not by blood, but by choice. That should reminds us that
whatever home we build on that one foundation, or whatever home we buy in the
marketplace of churches out there, just expect other people to be there, living with you,
dying with you, going with you, wherever the journey should lead. Amen.