Engaging Paul On Conflict

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"Engaging Paul On Conflict"

1 Corinthians 1:10-18
January 23, 2011

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that
all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be
united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by
Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I
mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong
to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for
you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can
say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of
Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.)
For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent
wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. For the message
about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being
saved it is the power of God.

One of the things I’ve almost loved about the work of preaching is the gift of being able
to be in conversation with these ancient voices, to be in relationship with the ideas, the
assumptions, the worldviews, that both mirror our own and yet are sometimes strangely
different than our own. Today is one of those texts that feels incredibly human,
incredibly real, in the sense that Paul’s words to some ancient congregation almost
1900 years ago could still probably be said to many congregations today. It’s so ironic
and so telling that almost from the beginning we Christians have consistently and
constantly failed to heed Jesus’ call in the Gospel of John to be as one, to be disciples
that were unified rather than divided. Christ’s call for unity is emblazoned on the logo
of our own denomination, the United Church of Christ, as you can see if you look on the
back of your bulletin today. And Paul here, almost from the beginning of this letter is
begging the Christians at Corinth not to divide themselves up, not to devolve into
spiritual camps and wage war with each other, all in the name of either the preachers
they are fans of, or the preachers who baptized them, as if some special connection
and allegiance had mysteriously happened between the baptizer and the baptized.

Again, this ancient voice cries out for these earliest of converts to the Christian faith not
to get lost in the details, so to speak, and really one can make the argument that this
whole letter is making that simple argument, that simple case for unity, for being one,
and not becoming divided. And yet, if I could speak to Paul, I almost want to shake him
a bit and say, get real, Paul, brother. If you have 5 people in the room, you have ten
opinions about the one issue, and division and difference are simply the realities of life
actually lived in this world. Even Christ knows that his message of repentance and love
and grace divides rather than unites, and it so divisive, so dangerous, that they killed
him because of it. Dear Paul, dear naïve Paul, don’t you realize that differences of
opinion, different tastes in music and food and politics, all of those differences make
the world go round?! Yes, I think I would say to him, I am quite aware that differences
within a religion and differences between religions seem to often lead to war and pain
and destruction, all done in the name of God. But even those differences within a faith,
and those differences between the religions of the world, even those differences
between faiths make the world a more interesting place. I don’t think I would want to
live in a world that didn’t have the beautiful Buddhist temples found in Thailand, or the
Haj in Mecca, or dozens and dozens of other holy sites of other religions strewn
throughout the world.

And yet, of course, let’s face it, Paul’s got a point here, though it is not a point he
always follows through on. Paul is not exactly a unifier in the early church—there is
certainly ample evidence that he had his fans, his camp, and he also had those who
thought he was troublemaker himself. There is a reason Paul spends a lot of ink his
letters defending himself against those who thought his ministry was one that divided
Christians from one another rather than unified them. Perhaps he was right most of the
time, about this or that point, but there seems to be some indication that he didn’t
always have the greatest skills when it came to making his points—he too could be
accused of dividing up congregations, if only by the tone and tenor of the way he
dressed down those he disagreed with.

Despite all the internal contradictions found within Paul, internal contradictions that we
all carry within us, of course, Paul does indeed have a good point here. We ought not
to be spending our time and energy debating about issues that really do not matter, or
at least seem not to matter too much to God since both in the received Scripture, and
received history of the Church, we seem never to have any clarity on so many
theological points that have haunted the church since the beginning. And yet, we
argue, and we divide ourselves, and so there is United Methodist Church next door to
us, which is different than the Free Methodist Church only a few miles away, and we in
this church are no longer in denominational fellowship with the Congregationalists in
Watervliet because we are now in different denominations, different camps, and on and
on we go, dividing up ourselves, calling ourselves followers of Calvin or Wesley or the
Pope, and then subdividing ourselves from there. And I know there are some that claim
that they only follow Christ, but that shows a lack of knowledge about their own
particular theological heritage, and even Paul is not buying that line, (“I follow Christ”)
as you can see from this text.

For the Corinthians church in that first century, this argument over ideas and
explanations is not such a surprising thing, of course, because of the Roman culture so
infused with Greek understandings of the world. For the Greeks, ideas mattered, big
ideas usually, and so in the ancient world, one was tasked with making your case for
your idea about God or the gods, the universe, how government should be run, etc.
This first century church is simply doing what everyone else is doing: arguing about
ideas, about doctrine, about the details around the big idea, the big idea here being
this crucified Christ who has come into the world, saving those who believed. From
there, well, you can imagine how a church drenched in a culture that valued the
thinking and arguing through of ideas would deal with that big idea, and how quickly
everything would devolve from there into a big fat argument. Indeed, the whole history
of the church for two thousands years has been a conversation, at best, about that big
idea, and, at worst, it has been a bloodbath both within and without the boundaries of
the church, arguing over the meaning of this Christ and his crucifixion.

And yet, there have been exceptions to this rule, individual churches that haven’t fallen
into that pattern. They are few and far between, though they still exist. I think this
particular congregation is one of those odd places where we seem to fight well with
each other, where, even in our disagreements, we can seem to get along with each
other. And even when some have disagreed vehemently with the stance of this church
on an issue, those folks left well, so to speak, for the most part, and that healthy parting
is a sign of a healthy ability to disagree with each other, a desire not to do harm to the
church as one walks out the door. As someone who has pastored congregations who
have been ripped asunder by congregational conflict, where one could see the church
being divided into different camps, a Paul and Cephas and Apollos camp, though with
different names and different allegiances, having seen that first hand, it is an amazing
to see how we have avoided that painful pattern, that ancient pattern we have a
glimpse of here in this letter to the church at Corinth.

So, how did this happen, and why did this church seem to avoid the pattern that seems
to haunt so many churches, the pattern of destructive and pathological congregational
conflict, played out decade after decade? I have a few theories, but there are two I
want to point to today that are actually found in our text today, found in Paul’s wish for
this congregation on the brink of self-destruction. The first, I think is found in Paul’s
moment in our text, where he is wondering out loud about who he had baptized at that
church, perhaps hoping that no one would claim allegiance to him, simply because he
had baptized them. I love Paul’s thinking out loud moment here, because I think it
probably points out the fact we in this church have not been a congregation centered
on each new pastor we got, and so we were never a congregation that felt forced to
make a choice between loving Kevin or Ann or Paige, or whatever. When you’re a
small church and pastors, come and go, you don’t necessarily take on their issues,
their identity, and so it’s easier to move on, and not become bogged down in conflicts
centered around an idea that a pastor felt strongly about or a style she practiced in the
congregation.

But the second reason I think this congregation has avoided defcon five conflict, and
the most important point here, is that, unlike this first century Corinthian church, we
have not been a church centered on doctrine, on belief, on having the right beliefs
about God, the Christ, or whatever. We are not concerned with everyone here
agreeing on the big idea, on what the meaning of Christ’s crucifixion was and is, and so
we never fell into that hole of calling each other heretics because we didn’t always
agree on the meaning of the Christian story. In our better moments, we have done
what Paul asks us to do here, which is to proclaim the cross, the grace of God found in
Christ’s decision to experience what we experience as human beings, death, desertion,
pain, and hope, of course. The meaning of that death, and meaning of Christ’s
resurrection from the grave, that has been something for us to continue explain or
argue over, or whatever…but it hasn’t divided us, like it has so many communities of
faith.

What I think Paul is saying here, especially in the last few verses of our text, is that the
point of the Gospel is not found in the details, is not arguing over whether or not we are
in this theological camp or that theological camp, about the ultimate and final meaning
of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. What he seems to be saying is that the cross,
which is the heart of the Christian story, is not something to be argued over, to be
worked on, something to be made sense of, but, rather, that cross, that story is one to
be lived out, in the real world. Paul will draw this point out throughout the rest of the
letter, but here he gives his thesis statement, and that is we need to let go of our
arguments about the meaning of it all, and just lived into the wonder of it, the grace of
it, the love found within it, that big idea of the cross and the Christ crucified. Live the
Christian life, the Christian story, and forget about trying to be all smart about it, and
have it worked out in a nice theological system we can all agree on. As I’ve repeated
here a dozen times in this very sanctuary, Mother Teresa’s words still echo true here:
Enough words, let them see what we do.

For someone like me, that is hard thing to hear, because I do love thinking about the
big ideas—I would have been very comfortable in that Roman world so informed by
Greek thinking, if only because they cared deeply about the big ideas. But it’s people
like me that have gotten the church into so much trouble over the centuries, and so
one should avoid people like me at all costs, at least when it comes to such theological
matters. When talking about the issue of homosexuality, I often say to folks that it
doesn’t matter to God who we love, but rather, what really matters to God is how we
love. That truth is the same for theological differences, for our different
understandings of the cross: it does not matter who we follow—Wesley, Calvin, Luther,
Mary Baker Eddy, whomever—rather, what matters is how we follow those saints—does
doing so make us kinder, more loving, more graceful, more understanding of each
other? It is the doing of our beliefs and not the eloquence with which we speak of those
beliefs that is the measure of our faith---again, it is not the “what” or the “who” that
matters, but the “how,” that is the test of a real authentic faith in Christ. In our best
moments around here, in this church, we have done that, and thus likely avoided the
plague of conflict that seems to have engulfed so many local churches and the church
universal for two thousand years.

I don’t know if you noticed this past week, but Sargeant Shriver passed away this week
at the age of 95. Shriver was John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, and father to the
famous journalist Maria Shriver, who’s married to the famous ex-governor of California.
Many thought he’d married into privilege, but Shriver, at one time on the Democratic
ticket for the Oval Office, had plenty of talent and skill in his own right. When President
Kennedy picked him to be the first director of the brand spanking new Peace Corps in
1961, fifty years ago, it wasn’t nepotism, it was a merit-based decision. Shriver went on
to head a program that was officially established March 1, 1961. Since then more than
200,000 people have volunteered to live at subsistence level and earn little pay to
assist more that 135 countries. The average age of the Peace Corps volunteer is 28,
and at this very moment more that 8,500 of them are working in 77 countries. They
volunteer in education, health and HIV, business development, environment,
agriculture, and other areas. Shriver got this program going, and it’s still going strong
with a budget in excess of $400 million.(Homiletics Online Blog) We are lucky enough
to have a member in our congregation that served in the Peace Corp, Sherry Meyer.
What was different about this new program, this Peace Corp, was that it didn’t just talk
about the best of America, the goodness of Americans, especially during a time when
we were competing with Soviet Union for hearts and minds of many countries in the
world—it actually embodied those ideals for all the world to see. And I get that there
was a political edge to why the Peace Corps was created, but it was and is a good
program, because it showed us Americans at our best, it showed us doing, rather than
just speaking about what is best about our country and the ideals it embodies, however
imperfectly. The meaning of the cross is perhaps left unexplained, shrouded perhaps
in an air of mystery, or at most, spoken of with a bit of humility on our part—it is, as
Paul said, foolishness—but the life that cross calls for—love, and sacrifice, goodness
and integrity, and deep faithfulness to each other and God, those things we need to
continue to embody in our very lives, our lived lives, in this place, and with each other.
Amen.