Sermon: ...if Christ has not been raised...

First Presbyterian Church

February 16, 2022, Epiphany 6C

1 Corinthians 15:12-26

 

...if Christ has not been raised...

 

 

To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

--Shakespeare, Hamlet, III:1

 

 

These words from Hamlet's famous "to be, or not to be" soliloquy, are of course broadly famous as a key moment of that character's struggle with what to do in what he increasingly sees as a hopeless situation. So burdened is he that he is contemplating suicide. 

This particular portion of the soliloquy contains a particular phrase that has taken on a life well beyond what Shakespeare might have imagined. The phrase "shuffle off this mortal coil" has become a commonplace slang reference to death, and especially death as a leaving behind of the physical life. Note that the soliloquy contemplates "what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil"; while the body is dead, evidently the spirit is still kicking, at least enough to be tormented by dreams. 

Based on today's reading from 1 Corinthians, we'd have to guess that the Apostle Paul would get pretty frustrated with this soliloquy, maybe even jumping up and exiting the theater in a huff. If anything is made clear in today's verses, it is that resurrection is real, and it is not merely spiritual. If you were wondering after last week's reading why Paul was so adamant about providing that whole list of witnesses to the resurrected Christ, you now have your answer. 

It seems that there were some among the Corinthian fellowship who were perhaps still (as they were in so many things) under the influence of certain Greco-Roman ways of thinking about the relationship between the soul and the body. In much philosophy, particularly following Plato, soul and body were separate things. In short, much of that thought saw the body as a thing to be escaped; let the cludgy old flesh die and the spirit be set free upon death. Not all Greco-Roman thought accepted this - the Epicureans and Stoics were two such examples - but a good bit of such thought held that death was the chance for the soul to be free of the body, fulfilled at last. 

It should be noted that such a philosophical bent doesn't necessarily result in an outright skeptical or denialist position about physical life after death. It isn't as if Corinthian objectors were necessarily getting all riled up about this talk of resurrection because it offended them intellectually; it's also quite possible that they were offended emotionally by the whole idea. In other words, such an objection might be framed not as "that's impossible" or "that's ridiculous"; it might as easily have been framed as "oh, gross" or "why would you want that?" When one is conditioned intellectually or emotionally to see the body as an encumbrance, being taught that your body is part of the whole resurrection package can be a shock to the system.

It might be easy for us moderns to scoff at such thoughts or fears, but let's check ourselves: are we that far from such attitudes about body and soul, really?

That line from Hamlet's soliloquy, for example, and the evolved interpretation of it as being freed from the body, seems pretty Corinthian in some ways. Are our old gospel hymns and songs completely free from the whole idea of, say, our disembodied souls floating off to Heaven while our bodies remain in the grave or in whatever state they have been treated after death? Or take the whole idea of ghosts, for example - what is that spirit doing floating around all un-embodied? If we're not making popular-culture fun with ghosts as disembodied spirits, we're making horror movies about "dis-emspirited" bodies, or zombies. For what it's worth, that image of a body in, shall we say, really rough condition, wandering the earth creating terror, is probably not that far off from what those Corinthians might have thought about resurrected bodies. 

There's another way that the whole "being rid of the body" idea becomes particularly alluring: when those bodies suffer illness or pain. I know that many of you here in this sanctuary, and likely many of you on the live stream as well, have experienced that struggle, either for yourself or for a loved one or friend; I know I have. We even acknowledge this struggle in the liturgy for the Service of Witness to the Resurrection, when we offer our thanks to God that for the deceased, "death is past and pain ended." Being ready to be rid of the physical stuff is not uncommon, when we think about it.

However we frame it, Paul is having none of it. And the biggest reason for Paul's agitation is not any particular concern about disembodied spirits or dis-emspirited bodies or anything like that. No, for the apostle, horrible thing about denying resurrection is that if you say there is no resurrection of the dead, then you are saying that Christ was not resurrected from the dead. And that Paul cannot accept.

"If Christ has not been raised," all of Paul's work is in vain.

"If Christ has not been raised," the faith of the Corinthians (such as it is), or of any of those to whom Paul has ministered, is in vain.

"If Christ has not been raised," Paul and his fellow laborers are liars. If the dead are not raised, somehow, some way, some time, then Christ is not raised. Paul and his fellow laborers have done all this work in proclaiming Christ raised from the dead, which can't be so if the dead are not raised, he says. 

"If Christ has not been raised," the faith of the Corinthians, and for that matter your own faith, are not only in vain, but futile, even pointless. You are hopelessly mired in sin with no redemption coming.

"If Christ has not been raised," the dead in Christ are not even that - not even "in Christ"; they're just dead.

"If Christ has not been raised," if our hope in Christ was only about this walking-around human life, then (in one of the most heart-wrenching lines of all scripture) "we of all people are most to be pitied." 

But! "But", as Paul reminds his readers, that's not the case. But, as Paul reminds his readers, "Christ has indeed been raised from the dead." Here he comes up with the evocative phrase "the first fruits of those who have died" to describe Christ. And of course, if Christ is only the "first fruits," we are led to believe there are more "fruits" to come. In case it's not clear, that would be us, when our time comes. 

Again, you have to tune in for one more week to get how Paul envisions all this working out. Verses 21-23 give some description: 

For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being. For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.

 

We get just a little tease there of Paul's "big finish," speaking of the return of Christ and where we fit into it. But for this point, we are reminded that as Christ was raised from the dead, the same will be true for those who die in Christ. It's worth remembering that for readers of Paul's own time, Christ's death was in living memory. 

It's a different challenge for us, nearly two thousand years after the fact, to hold on to that hope, and clearly many today who call themselves "Christians" have none of that hope, but have placed all their hope on power in this world. But Paul is insistent that this is our hope. We don't live hopeless lives. We don't live in vain. We are not cast off by God to be forgotten or to disappear into oblivion. Our future is with God. We have a future, and our future is with God. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #35, Praise Ye the Lord, the Almighty; #246, Christ Is Alive!; #250, In the Bulb There Is a Flower

Sermon: The Basics

First Presbyterian Church

February 9, 2022, Epiphany 5C

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

 

The Basics

 

 

 

"Let's get back to basics here..."

"OK, back to square one..."

"Remember how all this started..."

"Remember your fundamentals..."

"In a nutshell..."

We have a lot of ways to talk about the need, every now and then, to return to those things in our work or our family life or our life in general that are most basic, perhaps most foundational, to how we operate or how we live together or even to how we exist as a human being. It's not uncommon to get so caught up or maybe bogged down in the day-to-day details of that activity that we forget why we're doing that thing in the first place. Sometimes we really do need to get back to basics, or remember how we started, or to sum it all up "in a nutshell." 

As the Apostle Paul draws to the conclusion of his letter to the church in Corinth, after pages upon pages of instruction and correction and chastisement and sometimes downright frustration, he apparently decides that the Corinthians need to get back to the basics and remember why they're even a church in the first place. Today's reading constitutes those "basics," at least as Paul understood them; the rest of the chapter, which we will attend to on upcoming Sundays, describes how Paul concludes the Corinthians got off-track.

In this case, these "basics" are cast as the message Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians. Paul makes no claim that the message is in any way unique to his ministry; as we will see, he is quick to acknowledge that others proclaim this same basic account, and some of those have even borne their witness to the Corinthians themselves. But notice how carefully Paul casts this message before he even gets around to repeating it:

Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you-unless you have come to believe in vain.

 

That's kind of a mouthful, but Paul is taking pains to stress just how basic this message was to the Corinthians' (or snyone's) very existence as part of the body of Christ. He then reiterates again that what he has taught them he taught "as of first importance," as if he hasn't stressed this point enough already. 

But then, Paul probably had reason to be so precise about his proclamation. There were plenty of examples of churches in Paul's travels that had decided, on their own or through the influence of bad teachers, that other, nonessential or even non-justifiable thoughts needed to be elevated to primary or indispensable status. Perhaps the most notorious example is found in his letter to the church of Galatia, the one where Paul writes "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting..." almost immediately in the letter (1:6), and later is moved to exclaim "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?" (3:1). 

What had the Galatians done to provoke such ire from Paul? They had, under the influence of those "bad teachers," decided that, for example, male Gentile converts to this community of believers should be required to undergo the rite of circumcision according to Jewish practice; in short, they had to become Jewish to become Christian. Galatia wasn't the only place where Paul ran into this obstacle to faith - those bad teachers traveled almost as well as Paul did - but his literary outburst in that letter is perhaps most striking. Indeed, Paul had reason to be very precise and direct about taking the Corinthians back to square one.

The gospel in a nutshell, as Paul puts it?

that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures...

 

There it is. The basics. The gospel in a nutshell. 

The self-described "lectionary comic strip" Agnus Day takes on this passage in a humorous exchange between its two characters, sheep named Ted and Rick. Ted remarks of this passage that "there it is, the whole gospel in a handful of verses," to which Rick, the wiser sheep, responds that "Paul doesn't want them to forget the basics of the faith." Then the punchline, from Ted: "Makes me wonder why I'm carrying around the rest of this Bible...". 

No, this passage is not an invitation to toss out the rest of the Bible - there's a lot more to be said about how this gospel came to be and what it means for us. As far as the most basic element of why we are what we are, though, it's hard to add to this. We echo this in our Lord's Supper responses: Christ has died. Christ is risen. (Paul will get to the "Christ will come again" part later in this chapter.)

With this basic gospel stated, Paul then engages in some "human bibliography" - being careful to cite sources for this gospel, in particular the part about Christ being raised. (Yes, this might serve as a clue to what is to come later in the chapter.) He does this by rattling off a pretty impressive list of witnesses to the risen Christ. There might be an inclination to panic over the fact that this list doesn't necessarily correlate to any particular account of resurrection appearances in any of the gospels. Don't panic. Remember that Mark's gospel includes no such appearances, Matthew barely gets in any, and John flatly admits that there's a whole lot more he could have included in his gospel but didn't. Also, those gospels hadn't even been written at the time Paul is writing to the Corinthians to boot. Nothing in the gospels gives us any reason to question what Paul has received and passed on.

Of course, the last witness Paul lists is Paul himself, referring to his dramatic conversion recorded in Acts 9. Paul is quick to acknowledge his own dark past as one who "persecuted the church of God," but uses that failure of his past to illuminate the grace of God that made him into what he now was, even if he can't stop himself from going on about how hard he's had to work at this before acknowledging God's grace again. 

In short, here's the point, so far: Christ died and was buried, Christ was raised again (this is all consistent with scripture, Paul points out), and we have a lot of witnesses to the risen Christ, some of whom you know (it seems that Cephas, whom we know as Peter, might have visited Corinth at some point). That, Paul tells his readers, is the most basic foundation of your faith, of your being what you are. 

This is a challenging topic to translate into our own modern context. Those eyewitnesses are no longer with us, after all, and the church has blundered through nearly two millennia of trying, with intent good or ill, claiming all manner of other doctrinal assertions as "fundamentals" of the faith. This has inevitably done incredible damage to the church's witness, not to mention to those who are victimized by such assertions. 

No, none of that: the fundamental of the faith, Paul would say, is this: 

...that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures...

 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #485, We Know That Christ Is Raised; #441, Hear the Good News of Salvation; #649, Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound

 

 

Sermon: The More Excellent Way

First Presbyterian Church

February 2, 2025, Epiphany 4C

1 Corinthians 13:1-14:1

 

The More Excellent Way

 

 

One of the challenges of preaching a text like this one, which has gained tremendous familiarity over time due to its popularity as a text for weddings, is that we forget that it is not a free-standing, isolated poem unrelated to anything but itself. Even in the act of preaching outside of a marriage ceremony, seldom does all of this other stuff in Paul's letter to Corinth get looked over and considered. We might even forget, after a fashion, that Paul didn't write his letters in chapters - these divisions were created much later, mostly for reading convenience. There are probably quite a few churches where this text is being heard today, in isolation, after weeks of sermons from Luke's gospel, where folks switched over for today because this is such a popular text while the reading from Luke, where the people of Jesus's hometown get so mad at his sermon that they try to kill him, is less appealing. What gets missed in that case is all the connections between this chapter and what has come before in Paul's letter.

To take one example, consider the very first verse of chapter 8 of 1 Corinthians. It would seem to be a strange place to look, given that its first words are "Now about food sacrificed to idols...", which doesn't seem like the introduction to a statement on the importance of love. Nonetheless, before we can even get away from verse 1, Paul has reminded his readers and hearers that "knowledge puffs up while love builds up." He goes on to add that whatever anyone knows (or thinks they know), it's not sufficient, but one who loves God is fully and completely known to God. 

Additionally, a number of other passages earlier in the letter lay a foundation for this discourse on love by pointing to God and our utter reliance on God. It is because of God that "you are in Christ Jesus" (1:30); God is "the one who makes things grow" no matter who planted or watered the seed of the gospel (3:7); God is the one "through whom all things came and through whom we live" (8:6). The God who is this foundation and source and root and all is the one who is the source and direction of our living, and that is found in the love God loves for us, which we then are directed to love towards one another. 

For that matter, other portions of chapter 13 are also echoes of earlier discussions in this letter. Take a look at the list of characteristics of love in verses 4-7:

o   "Love ... does not envy" (4), but the Corinthians are apparently full of "jealousy and quarreling" (3:3); 

o   "Love ... does not boast" (4), but the Corinthians do (4:7, 5:6, where Paul flat-out says that their boasting "not good"); 

o   "Love is not ... proud" (4), but the Corinthians are often described as arrogant or "puffed up" (4:6, 18-19; 5:2, and 8:1); 

o   "Love does not delight in evil" (6), but some of the Corinthians have engaged in taking advantage of unjust courts to exploit others (6:7-8).

Paul has been building the case against the Corinthians throughout the gospel, and far from being cut off from that case, this chapter is very directly addressing their condition. All of these faults that have been noted in this letter point to a decided lack of love in the community.

There is something else to note about this list in verses 4-7. While those in verses 5-6 are more regularly translated actively - " rejoices..." "bears ... believes ... hopes" - some get translated in such a way that we probably don't notice that Paul is using his verbs here. If we were to diagram the phrases "love is patient" or "love is kind," for example, we would place "love" as the subject, "is" as the verb, and "patient" or "kind" as the "object," an adjective modifying "love." That's not how the Greek in which Paul writes works, though. What we translate as "is patient" or "is kind" is the verb of Paul's statement; we might come closer to catching the force of his instruction if we rendered those clauses "love acts patiently" or "love does kindness," representing how these traits are not passive feelings but actions, or even more ways of behavior rather than only of thought or emotion.

This brings us to perhaps the biggest challenge to our knowledge of this chapter, the part that tends to get most buried in marriage-service renderings: love is action. Love is not a thing that is felt; love is a thing that is done, no matter whether the feelings or emotions are there. That is indeed the animating principle behind this whole chapter, and again what the Corinthians seem to be sorely lacking, for all their other spiritual gifts they so liked to boast in.

I've no doubt that we can all come up with times and occasions in which we have witnessed the very people who talked the good game about loving turn around and engage in the most hateful and destructive actions imaginable, maybe even claiming to do so in the name of love. Paul isn't having it; "knowledge puffs up while love builds up."

It is also this understanding that makes all those other spiritual gifts marked by Paul in chapter 12 so utterly dependent on love. While addressing multiple of those gifts, it becomes clear quickly that the business of speaking in tongues was a particular source of boasting among the Corinthians when Paul takes it on first and most elaborately in verse 1. To speak in "the tongues of mortals or of angels" without love is not merely "nothing," as later phrases will conclude; it is the equivalent of "a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal." Here the reference seems to be to the practices of some of the temples devoted to Greek and/or Roman gods in Corinth, whose observances were sometimes marked by the regular and prominent sounding of exactly those loud percussion instruments. It's almost as if Paul is saying when you go off on your ecstatic utterances just for your own elevation, with no care or love or concern for your fellow followers of Christ, you're acting exactly like the lost souls you used to be - remembering that before being added to the church many of the Corinthians had been participants in those temple rituals to those Greek and Roman idols. 

The point of this section, which gets elaborated in chapter 14, is not to dismiss those spiritual gifts; the point is that none of those gifts - not prophecy or knowledge or faith to do great things or those tongues - are of any use when not practiced in love, the love that forms the body of Christ and in which that body both lives together and lives toward the world around it. It's even possible that such gifts practiced not in love are more harmful than good. If you can't do it in love, honestly, you're better off keeping it to yourself. Love is the reason any of those spiritual gifts have any value. Love, that divine love infused into human existence, is why any of those works matter.

All of this is part of why Paul could refer to love as "the most excellent way" back at the end of chapter 12, but we shouldn't leave out the end of this chapter in that respect, either. Of all the gifts or behaviors or traits of the life of the body of Christ, love is the one that is eternal. Prophecies will end; when at last we live in eternal union with God, what is the need for prophecy? The gift of tongues, or ecstatic utterances believed to be given by God, seems rather superfluous when in God's eternal presence, yes? Our partial and unfinished knowledge will, at minimum, be finished in the presence of God. 

Even faith and hope, as Paul describes in this famous chapter’s final and most famous verse, are secondary to love in this way. Faith and hope are beautiful. They are amazing gifts of the Spirit. But like the others Paul describes, they are finite gifts to help sustain us through this in-between time. If faith is, as the author of Hebrews describes, “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see,” then what is the point of faith when we are in the very presence of God, seeing God face to face? What is the point of hope, or what is the need for hope, when God is unmistakably and unshakably in the midst of us, for all to see? The partial things, as Paul says in verse 10, come to an end.

But love never ends. Love is as eternal as God is eternal. 

Love. Never. Ends.

Though it is technically not part of today’s lectionary reading, the first verse of chapter 14 is useful, or even needful, to place chapter 13 into proper relationship with chapter 12: “Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the spirit.” 

Not either/or, both/and. 

Paul’s instruction does not mean that the Corinthians, or we, should somehow deny the gifts we have been given by the Spirit – and remember from back in 12:3 (a couple of weeks ago) that anyone who truly confesses that “Jesus is Lord” is gifted by the Holy Spirit. Rather, Paul needs the Corinthians, and us, to understand that the care and feeding and usage of our spiritual gifts within the body of Christ and out in the larger world only works in the context of love – the love that God has shown us so that we might show love for one another and for all of God’s creation. 

Our stories of love will not necessarily be showy or dramatic. They will be heartbreaking at times. They will try our patience or our virtue. We may stumble in grief and leap for joy at the same time because of that love. But if we dare to call ourselves followers of Christ, we will love, without reservation and without qualification.

We will love because God is love, eternal and unending. We will love because God loves. We will love because Christ loves. And we will love because that’s what the body of Christ does.

For love, eternal and unending, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #14, For the Beauty of the Earth; #525, Let Us Break Bread Together; #693, Though I May Speak (The Gift of Love)

 

Sermon: We're All In This Together

First Presbyterian Church

January 26, 2025, Epiphany 3C

1 Corinthians 12:12-31

 

We’re All in This Together

 

 

It was a nearly unavoidable song not that many years ago, when the Disney Channel first aired its infectious little show called High School Musical. First it was the television musical, then it became an actual high school musical, and now you can find television shows about productions of the high school musical. And wrapping it all up was the one inescapable, irresistible song that represented the show’s climax: “We’re All in This Together.”

That title happened upon a phrase and idea that has been batted around endlessly, it seems. You could go out and google dozens upon dozens of quotes that either use that phrase as a basis or comment upon the idea. While I don’t want to think about Lily Tomlin’s spin – “We’re all in this together alone” – I have to acknowledge, if this quote is accurate, that Johnny Cash might have put the best spin on the quote in his version: “We’re all in this together if we’re in it at all.” 

I’m pretty sure the Apostle Paul was not much for song and dance, and I doubt he played the guitar or sang songs about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. But he’d be able to appreciate at least the basic sentiment found in this pithy little saying. Being the eloquent preacher and letter-writer he was, however, it befitted Paul to find a clever and illustrative metaphor to demonstrate just how thoroughly we, the followers of Christ, really are all in this together. Borrowing a metaphor found fairly often in Greco-Roman philosophical rhetoric, Paul came up with the theme of today’s reading: the body of Christ.

That Paul chooses the body as a metaphor for the innerworkings of the people of God is striking and informative in ways that the apostle himself might not even have imagined. 

As noted just now, it wasn’t uncommon for teachers and writers in the Greco-Roman world to use such a metaphor to describe communal life, though no other biblical author makes use of it. Philosophers and political figures were particularly fond of the body metaphor in that culture. For a politician, for example, the metaphor of the body might well be used to suggest that every member of a society had his or place to fill. A body needs a head; that place was to be filled by the “elites” of society – the wealthy, the military elite, those in power. A body also needs hands and feet; here pretty much everybody else in society, those charged with the hard or dirty or dangerous work of society was to fulfill his or her role. Needless to say that metaphor never really has gone away even it if might be expressed in different ways.

Paul, though, takes a different angle on this metaphor. For Paul, what matters is the utter interdependence of the body – the degree to which the body needs everything in good working order. Parts of the body that might be regarded as weaker, or less “respectable,” are treated with greater care and covered or protected more carefully. In Paul’s scheme of the body, no part can claim to be independent of all the other parts. The eye can see all it wants to see, but without feet and legs to move, or hands to hold or to pick up, the eye is powerless. The head is useless without the rest of the body.

Many of us know what it is for our physical bodes to fail us or betray us. We see what needs to be done but we just aren’t capable of doing it physically. If one part of the body suffers, the whole body suffers with it. And so it goes with the body of Christ, the church; when one member of this body suffers, we all suffer with that member.

Paul wants us to understand, in verse 13, that in being baptized in Christ we are baptized into this one body, no matter the differences between us. Indeed, following on the first part of this chapter we heard last week, the differences we bring to the body are not accidental; they are necessary, they are by design, both in a given local congregation and in the church universal – we need all those different experiences, all those different backgrounds, for the body of Christ to function rightly and bear witness to the good news.

This is where it gets tricky, though. We are not always good at dealing with difference. We don’t always care for diversity, even as we need it. New Testament scholar Brian Peterson puts it bluntly in noting that “We often confuse unity with uniformity, because it is much easer to gather with people who are like ourselves than it is to reach across the divisions which mark our culture.”[i] We are more comfortable with a church where everybody looks like us, talks like us, is about the same age as us, reads the Bible in the same way as we do – or for that matter, votes like us, roots for the Chiefs like us, and all sorts of other things that may have very little to do with the life of the church. It’s a natural inclination, but it isn’t really all that Christlike. 

In verse 13 Paul refers to two of the great divisions he knew to be at work in the church – “Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.” Admittedly, “Jew or Greek” is not a huge dividing line in the modern church, and while slavery certainly does exist in the modern world still, such a dividing line doesn’t run through the modern church in quite the same way it did for Paul’s Corinthian readers. We do, though, have lots of dividing lines among us in the church today:

Black or white, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Native American…

Or how about Democratic or Republican?

Maybe rich or poor?

Native-born, naturalized citizen, immigrant waiting to be citizen?

Straight or gay?

How about married or single?

Progressive or mainline or evangelical or fundamentalist?

How are we, as the church, the body of Christ, at truly living in the diversity that makes us work? Or are we still inclined to hole up in like-minded enclaves of homogeneity?

Whether we acknowledge it or not, when any part of the body of Christ suffers, whether they look like us or think like us or sound like us or have anything in common with us other than Christ, we all suffer, and we don’t bear witness to the gospel the way the body of Christ is meant to do. And to the degree that we stand by and let that suffering continue, we are complicit in damaging the body and its witness.

Having worked through this body metaphor, Paul now returns to the diversity of spiritual gifts, or manifestations of the presence of the Spirit, that he had discussed earlier in this chapter. Again, the list is incomplete, but Paul now places those gifts in the context of the church as God appoints people to contribute: apostles, prophets, teachers, doers of powerful deeds, healers, helpers, leaders, speakers of various tongues. And just as the body would look rather ridiculous if it were nothing but an eye or a foot, so the church becomes rather ridiculous if it consists of nothing but apostles or preachers or teachers. 

But as Paul closes this thought, he actually “teases” us with something even better, a better, “more excellent” way for the church to live or for the body of Christ to function. 

The diverse and distinctive appropriation of gifts is characteristic and even needful in the church, and the diversity of members matters profoundly as well. And yet, there is something else that matters more than all of these, or more precisely is the very thing that makes this distinctiveness and diversity work. What is it that makes the body of Christ what it is meant to be? What is it that brings all those diverse gifts and abilities and manifestations of the Spirit together in a way that enables us truly to bear witness to the Christ we say we follow?

But that's for next Sunday. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #409, God Is Here!; #318, In Christ There Is No East or West; #306, Blest Be the Tie that Binds

 

---

[i] Brian Peterson, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a,” Working Preacher (workingpreacher.org, 24 January 2016 2^nd reading), accessed 21 January 2016.

 

 

Sermon: Just As the Spirit Chooses

First Presbyterian Church

January 19, 2025, Epiphany 2C

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

 

Just As the Spirit Chooses

 

 A few years ago the internet humor site Unvirtuous Abbey posted a cartoon image that suggested the Apostle Paul at work writing one of his letters to the various churches under his care. The captioning of this image, however, took a creative slant: the imagined text of the letter under construction began thus:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, to the churches of the United States of America – grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ: I don’t even really know where to begin with you guys…

 

It’s a funny line, and easily evocative of just how far much of the church in this country have strayed from being Christlike in any discernible way. The truth is, though, this isn’t that far from how the actual Paul began some of his letters, and how he was compelled to speak to the churches in other letters even when he was able to keep his opening more cordial. For example, in the letter to Galatians Paul barely manages to get through a fairly doxological opening statement before turning to chastisement in verse 6: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel…”. Things were evidently that bad.

As for the letter we are reading today and in the forthcoming weeks, Paul actually manages to get though not only the formal greeting, but a nice blessing as well, before turning to the matter at hand at the beginning of this letter: “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and in the same purpose.” Paul elaborates that the Corinthians have apparently devolved into factions around one leader or another in the larger church – Paul, Cephas (or Peter), Apollos (the evangelist introduced in Acts 18), or even – in a super-self-righteous move – Christ. Paul quickly admonishes the Corinthians for this, but the correction of this division will go much deeper and in fact constitute the bulk of this letter. There are many things going wrong among the Corinthians, and Paul is setting out to address them.

Paul’s work in his travels was frequently made more challenging by the difficulties of churches made up of diverse groups of people and the disputes, disagreements, or contests that too often arose between those groups. For example, by the time Paul is making his travels, the congregations to whom he preaches and writes are usually composed of both Jewish and Gentile converts to Christianity. At times the Jewish party would contend that the Gentiles needed to take up practices associated with Judaism (most notably the act of circumcision for males) before they could be fully accepted into the fledgling group of Christ’s followers. To put it more briefly, they felt that Gentiles should become Jews in order to become Christians. Paul, despite his own thoroughly Jewish heritage, argued against that claim, agreeing with those who called that an unnecessary burden.

The conflict Paul addresses here in today’s reading is a different one, not necessarily based on Jewish-Gentile dividing lines, but one that caused tremendous strain in the church at Corinth no less. In this case, this local church was struggling with the effects of spiritual pride and even a kind of competitiveness, in which some claimed that their specific and distinctive spiritual gifts made them spiritually superior to others. This kind of spiritual elitism never ends well, and Corinth was no exception.

After much chiding and critique earlier in the book on this and other matters, Paul now turns with chapter 12 to address “matters pertaining to the Spirit.” “Spiritual gifts,” the term you see in verse 1, is certainly part of the matter, but not the full extent of what Paul wants to address. 

First, Paul is compelled to remind his readers – a great many of whom in Corinth were Gentile converts to The Way – that all of them had been equal in ignorance before following Christ. The lot of them had been, as Paul describes, duped worshipers of powerless, speechless idols. Even as followers of Christ now, Paul challenges them to understand that they have much to learn, particularly about the Holy Spirit.

For example: no one who is speaking under the influence of the Holy Spirit could ever utter the phrase “Let Jesus be cursed!” You can’t do it. To be sure, there are times when even we followers of Christ speak decidedly not under the influence of the Spirit! But that’s a different story. Similarly, but not quite the same way, one cannot make the claim that “Jesus is Lord” except by the power of the Holy Spirit. Even being able to make the confession “Jesus is Lord” is evidence of the work of the Spirit. 

Understand what it means: anyone who confesses “Jesus is Lord” is doing so by a gift of the Spirit. There is no one who confesses Christ is Lord that is not gifted by the Spirit. If that’s the case, no one has any business claiming that any other believer has no spiritual gift. We all do. That’s how we can even be followers of Christ at all, by the gift of the Spirit. You didn’t think you earned your salvation, did you?

With that understanding, Paul turns to the issue of differences in spiritual gifts and other workings of the Spirit. One of the common threads of what Paul has to say is that difference or variety or diversity is inevitable and indeed is “baked into” the way that the Spirit “gifts” the followers of Christ. Each of us receives different abilities or talents or gifts, and that itself is a very intentional work of the Spirit. 

Paul sketches out only a few of these possible gifts or abilities in verses 7-10. By no means is this a complete list, but Paul mentions the speaking both of wisdom and of knowledge; faith; healing; miracles; prophecy; discernment; and the speaking and interpreting of tongues. And as Paul notes, the Spirit allots these gifts to the children of God quite according to the Spirit’s own choosing, and nothing other – “just as the Spirit chooses,” as verse 11 puts it.

Paul here is urging the Corinthians to understand that this dispersal of the gifts of the Spirit was absolutely no cause for pride. There is no basis for any claim that having any one spiritual gift made you in any way superior to or more important than any of your sisters or brothers in Christ. 

I have been called as the interim pastor of this church for a little more than a year and a half, after eight+ years at my previous call. I believe I do have some gift for the speaking of wisdom or knowledge, perhaps a way of describing preaching. Hopefully those three years I spent in seminary helped develop that gift to some degree. But if I were ever tempted to think that this specific gift was somehow “more special” or more important than other gifts, … well, let’s just say that many weeks or even months in this vocation have really caused me to wish I had a gift for healing or miracles instead. 

What Paul needs the Corinthians (and us) to understand is that we need all the gifts. This church can’t survive on preaching alone. Nor can it survive on any one of the gifts the Spirit might bestow. We need them all, both our own church here and the greater church around the world. And when we turn inward, when we start failing to welcome others into our church, or when we start drawing lines to keep some out and include only certain people, “folks like us,” then we are cutting ourselves off from some of the very gifts or manifestations of the Spirit that we absolutely need to survive, for the common good.

And it’s not even about our surviving, in the end. Our church, local or universal, is not put here on earth to serve ourselves. These flourishings of the Spirit that are made manifest in us are here to show God’s glory to those all around us. We are here to bear witness to the gospel, to be the vessel by which that good news is given to all the world around us. And those gifts of the Spirit are scattered out among us for that very end; giving glory to God that the world might see.

Beyond the matter of not indulging in pride over one’s spiritual gifts, there is also the matter of not dismissing what one contributes to the body as somehow being unimportant or not really mattering. If everybody in a congregation is determined that because their gift isn’t for preaching or prophecy it isn’t important, the church misses out on those less flashy gifts like faith or discernment and suffers for it. All the gifts are needed. 

This is part of the church “being an epiphany,” participating in showing Christ to the world. When we all pull together using each of our distinctive gifts for the work of the kingdom of God, we become a revelation of God to the world, through the working of the Spirit. We show Christ to the world. We show the world what it looks like when the Spirit is working among us. Or, when we start elevating some gifts and demeaning others, when we start indulging in pride about our own spiritual abilities, or when we cut ourselves off from the gifts we need in the church because we don’t like the people who have them? Or when we hold back the gifts God has given us for whatever reason? We fail to bear witness to God’s Spirit, and in fact do damage to that witness among the larger church.

Right now, this congregation is doing alright - better than many other congregations, believe it or not. It takes every spiritual gift that is present among the people of this or any congregation, and then some, to keep things afloat. We don’t have space for anybody to decide that their gifts or abilities don’t matter; we need them all. There is no one whose gifts or talents or abilities don’t matter. We need them all.

The abilities we bring to the body of Christ are not an accident. The Holy Spirit is working in us, each of us, all of us, so that we might bear witness to God and to the gospel of Christ to a world that desperately needs to be reminded of that story and to hear that witness. Being prideful about some gifts or dismissive of others is failure to show Christ to the world. We have no margin for error; we need all those manifestations of the Spirit to do our job in the world. 

For gifts of the Spirit, and the opportunity and obligation to use them together, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #292, As the Wind Song; #308, O God, in Whom All Life Begins; #733 We All Are One in Mission

The image referenced in the first paragraph...