February 2, 2003 Sermon by Tim Lusk

It’s interesting that the lectionary that runs through February deals with First Corinthians. I’m going to be doing a sermon series on First Corinthians. I ask you, if you can remember, to read First Corinthians yourself. That way if I say something that is not right, you can correct me later. Reading the book should take you no more than about 20 minutes. I’ve always said that I hate it when people take Bible verses out of context. That is when someone pulls a verse or two out of the Bible from here or there. You always need to see a verse in the context of the book in which it was written. It might also help you to discover what God might be saying to you, not in just in what I’ve got to say, but in the words of Paul himself. I want to tell you a little bit about the city of Corinth. Corinth, about 80 years before Jesus was born, was completely obliterated by the Romans. They destroyed the city to keep the people who were in that city from rebelling against the Empire. About thirty to forty years before the birth of Christ, the Romans started rebuilding the city. It had two harbors located on two seas, and there was an influx of people at that time from all over the known world. What is interesting is that the secular historians of that day tell us that it was a city of debauchery and of hedonism. Now if you understand how hedonistic the Roman culture itself was, then for the Romans to make that comment about Corinth can only tell us how really hedonistic the city of Corinth was. And I don’t know of any other New Testament community that could have represented Prescott, Arizona, better than the city of Corinth. How many of you have lived in Prescott at least thirty years? Raise your hands. I thought so. We always come here from somewhere else, don’t we? I don’t know if Prescott has the debauchery of Corinth, but what I do know is that because we come from so many different places, we exhibit a vitality here that is really interesting. What we also bring are different ideas and different perceptions of how we see the world. And so I think that what Paul had to say to the Corinthians would be a good less for us as well. Now I need to go ahead with my Bible lesson before I get into my sermon, because I think it’s important to set the stage of Corinthians. This week I sat for hours going through commentaries, because there is something that has intrigued me for a long time. The main issue in the Corinthian community that Paul is addressing in this first letter is that there were divisions and factions in that church. Now we would never have that in our congregation now, would we? Would we ever have differences of opinion about things or something like that? I would like to try to sneak around and figure out what those divisions are. You know, just like the National Enquirer, I want to know! And the point I’m making is that not one commentator can sift through every word that Paul has given us and tell us precisely what those factions were. Some of them actually complain that Paul wouldn’t bother understanding the different factions. But I think that Paul was smart, and he had no intention of telling us what they were. But he did tell us one thing. Evidently there was one group in that community who thought they were more knowledgeable about what it was to be Christians. And they were claiming that because they knew more and were smarter than the rest of them about what it was to be Christian, that they were more Christian than the rest. And Paul really has some scathing words for them regarding their arrogance. Now, have you ever heard someone say you can’t be all things to all people? We’ve heard that all our lives, haven’t we? It’s interesting what Paul says to us. He says that he will be all things to all people. How difficult is that? You’re already getting nervous, aren’t you? You know that it’s almost impossible to test this concept out. Paul says that not only will he be all things to all people—Jews to Jews, Gentiles to Gentiles, weak to the weak—but he also says that he will be a slave. Slave is a strong word to all people. Now let’s set the stage for what I think is a very contemporary issue. I’ve noticed over the last five years in all my reading and news watching that the developments in this wonderful, free society—the democratic republic in which we live—that something has changed. Once it was easy, and we assumed we lived with freedoms including the ability for each of us to think differently from one another. We respected that and struggled it out, and then we went on living with some sense of unity and family. What I’ve noticed in the last few years is a real brittleness in our society. Now people hold to their opinions so strongly, and when someone disagrees with them, then there is such brittleness that it is so easy to pull away and no longer have any unity. I see this brittleness in politics, but I see it in particularly in mainline Protestantism. But we mustn’t be fooled. The Evangelical and Catholic communities struggle with lack of unity as much as we do. I see it in our debates in the public schools and public education. Somehow we have lost what I consider to be the civil in our civic life. Somehow if we disagree, we automatically assume that we are right and they are wrong. By the way, we live in a day and age when knowledge has increased to the point where we can know a lot of things. So we readily assume, myself included, that we’ve read so much, that we must all have the best opinion on an issue. Those silly people that disagree with me just haven’t read enough, right? We all think that way.

Now I want to ask you a question. I want you to think of something recently that we may be disagreeing about—like a war over Iraq or something like that. The apostle Paul says that I will be a slave to all people. I’m going ask you something that is going to make you bristle. I want you right now to think that your job is to give in to the other person’s position, and acknowledge it, and figure out why it’s right. What I want to say to you is something fairly philosophical before I return to the text. There are things that we easily agree upon in life and can remain objective about. Does anyone think that the sky is pink today? I think we are pretty much in agreement that the sky is not pink. You know something is wrong if you see the sky that way. There are things we disagree about most, and I could name a whole bunch of controversial issues. My bringing these issues up would make you feel even more uneasy than you already do. There are things that are really clear that we can see in life and we agree on these things as we go on. It is often those things that are less clear that make us afraid. And because we are afraid, we hold more tightly to our opinions than we ever would otherwise. The reason there is so much emotion in being right or wrong is because all of us feel insecure of not knowing how things are going to turn out. One of our modern obsessions is one day knowing all things in this great scientific age. We want to predict the future, and we want to be able to control the world with the knowledge that we have. What I want to say to you is that this notion is blasphemy from a biblical point of view. The truth is that only God—and God alone—has any control over where the world is going or where it might be. As much as we might desire to think that our opinions will determine the future, they will not—no matter what those opinions are. God will always be a lot more in mystery than we will understand in life. I say that because often we think that we can even figure God out and know who God is. We think that perhaps we can control God, and God will become more like me. Certainly if I’m a Republican then God will be a Republican as well. Likewise if I am a Democrat. Now you laugh about that, but we really want to shape God into who we are. The truth is that the Apostle Paul and all the great writers of biblical texts always remind us that God is always more than we can imagine God can be. The minute we think we’ve figured God out, God will slip away from us. It is with humility that modern people need to understand that the mystery of the life in which we live often leaves us with unanswerable questions. What is the right answer to the war that may be looming right around the bend? It seems to me (and I have my own opinion about it that I’m not going to share with you) that people on both sides of that issue can tell us good reasons why they hold the positions that they have. No matter what you and I think as we sit here today, whatever will happen is going to happen. We can’t change that. But what we can rely on is that God’s serious loving grace will be in our midst. Human beings will continue to do the things that we have done from one generation to another. We will never be infallible, and we will continue to hurt one another. Perhaps we are concerned about the American military build-up or with one particular person in the world who has proven a lack of love and compassion for the common good. All of us must know that we need to live with an understanding our human frailty and become all the more aware of why it is the Christian faith teaches us simply of our need of redemptive love. Christians come to know of redemptive love through Jesus. The center point of what Paul is trying to tell those Corinthians is that they must trust in God though Jesus. Our redemptive love through Jesus is what unites us even when we have strong disagreements. We are not united by the rightness or correctness of our opinions, but we are united by our sense of humility as we stand before a mysterious God. Our God has given us a gracious life, which we human beings manage to muck up no matter how hard we try. We must acknowledge that particularly in moments like we are living in now, our need for God’s love and God’s grace is greater in ways we cannot fathom. We all need a strong dose of humility as well. Paul has said that he will be all things to all people. He said this not because he was without a sense of ethics or a sense of who he was, but because he understood that the principle job of a Christian is to know God’s redemptive love as revealed though Jesus. Then we are to share God’s love with the rest of the world. There is nothing that Paul says about our opinions or anything that should get in the way of that. This week we need to pray for our world. We don’t know where things are going. We need to pray that all God’s children—from one end of this globe to another—forget the modern notion that we as human beings have reached our peak of superiority. We humbly need to seek God’s grace.