A Disconcerting Sight
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
I once had a student whose dad was a pilot for a major airline who told me this true story. Her father flew DC-10s from St. Louis to the east coast. There were certain business people who took the same flights on a regular basis and, while certainly not friends, he recognized them enough to exchange pleasantries. One of these frequent travelers was visually impaired and used a guide dog. On one occasion, the flight was so delayed that it was decided to let the passengers back off the plane to wait in the terminal. When the student's dad was exiting, he noticed this visually impaired fellow and his dog and asked if there was anything he could do. "I think I'll just stay here," the man said, "but it would be great if you could give Buster a little exercise." So her dad did. He never forgot the stares of folks in the terminal as he took a walk in his pilot's uniform, wearing his pilot's sunglasses, apparently being led by a guide dog. I think all of us would agree that such a sight would give us pause. I hope it doesn't sound small minded to say that, even given the great technological advances in guiding aircraft by computers, I would probably not want to be a passenger on his plane! As much as everyone's mother may tell them not to judge a book by its cover, there are some things that just don't look right. They are downright upsetting.
Paul is dealing with such a situation in Corinth. The behavior of the Corinthian Christians was not only damaging to themselves but was impeding their witness in the larger mainly non-Christian community. While they may have been sighted, they were acting as if they were blind. You will recall that Paul never used the word "Christian," but rather referred to people as spiritual or unspiritual. Those who had the Spirit had accepted that God had made himself known in Jesus Christ. The problem is that at least some of the spiritual people in Corinth were acting in an unspiritual or unchristian manner. Paul is quite specific: They were exhibiting the unspiritual behaviors characterized by jealousy and quarrelling. Here is an example of Paul being more nuanced than we sometimes like. We can almost hear folks in Corinth asking, "Well do you think we are Christians or not?" to which Paul gave a resounding, "Yes."
Particularly in more conservative Christian circles, folks often like to speak about "Christians" and "non-Christians." We prefer our dichotomies simple. Paul would seem to be implying one: Unspiritual people (non-Christians) are characterized by discord and quarreling while the spiritual (Christians) by harmony and unity. "They will know we are Christians by our love." I hate to be the one to break it to you, but church quarrels are just as mean and unreasonable as any other kind. So does that make the quarrelers not real Christians? No, but Paul is bold to point out that it makes them immature ones. The "babes in Christ" are spiritual people who nonetheless keep acting like unspiritual ones. Paul does not doubt the substance of their salvation, but it troubles him that they don't look all that much like Christians. It is a disconcerting sight.
Paul introduces a subtle distinction that is hard to convey in English. There is a repetition in verses 1 and 3 where Paul calls these Corinthians "worldly" (NIV) or "of the flesh" (NRSV). Here is the subtlety: both the words Paul uses have "flesh" (sarx) as their root. The first term has an ending that indicates "made of" flesh (sarkinois), which is literally true of all humans. We are human beings with human bodies: We are made of flesh. This in itself is not perjorative. But the second time Paul uses the term it has a slightly different ending (sarkikoi), which indicates not only "made of" but also "dominated by." As people with the Spirit, we should be increasingly dominated by the Spirit. Pointing out that they are real people, really made of flesh and blood, is a neutral statement; to point out that these Corinthian believers are dominated by human nature apart from God, that they have somehow received the Spirit but not really allowed it to work in their lives, is damning indeed. Francis deSales once observed that there are some folks who think they are angels when they are not even very good people. That is a big problem.
This is no doubt why Paul, never a master of subtlety, is not content to drop the matter with this play on words. He tells his audience that they are babies, still drinking milk rather than digesting meat. Being a baby is not a bad thing when you are three months old. In Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6, Paul celebrates the moment when we enter into the faith and are able to address God as "Abba," but he expects that the child's vocabulary will grow. In the case of our children, they soon learned a second word: "No."
By calling some babes and indicating that their behavior hampered his communication, Paul is clearly implying that there are others who are more mature who he is able to address with a fuller Christian vocabulary. His classic statement of the process of Christian growth is spelled out in Philippians 3:12-15:
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind....
-- Philippians 3:12-15a
That end toward which we are "pressing" can be translated in various ways: perfection, maturity, completeness, full development. But whatever it is, it is that goal which we, like the apostle, recognize we have not yet reached. When one talks about striving on toward perfection, many Christians immediately think of John Wesley's notion of sanctification, as if he invented it. Not everybody likes that idea. But here is Wesley's source -- the apostle Paul.
I understand why people don't like the idea of Christian growth. We would like it if Christians were like the Greek goddess, Athena, who sprang full-grown from the head of Zeus. Wouldn't it be super if Christians just appeared fully mature when they were confirmed or when they went forward at a revival? We could then, in good conscience, appoint the new convert to the role of Sunday School Superintendent. No fits and starts; no skinned knees; no appallingly embarrassing moments. Nowhere does scripture talk about such a thing. In fact in the very foundational stories of Genesis, we find this encounter between God and Cain:
Then the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it."
-- Genesis 4:6-7 (NIV)
Whatever else is in this story, two things are clear: the active presence of evil in the world, colorfully crouching, like some fanciful gargoyle from a medieval cathedral, ready to spring and trip us up and the notion that what we do matters. We are called to master the evil that lies in wait and that implies development. There is a popular brand of theology that assures us that "God has a plan for your life" and seems to imply that all we need to do is sit back passively and wait for God to work things out. Paul would refer to that as remaining babes in Christ, or so it seems to me.
Others dislike this idea of Christian growth, of striving toward the goal, because it seems to set up a spiritual hierarchy that strikes us as, well, unchristian. Does this not foster a kind of competitiveness of those who are further along the path to perfection? Does it not suggest that there might be some people who, for whatever reason, are more suited than others for a particular task? And, as Christian people, are we not to believe that we are totally egalitarian, that all are created equal and that in Christ Jesus there is no distinction? The answers to the questions are "No," "Yes," and "No."
No, Christianity is not totally egalitarian. It obviously is egalitarian in one dictionary definition: "Affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people." This is what Paul talks about in Galatians when he says that in Christ social distinction such as male/female, slave/free, or various ethnic distinctions should fade away. But insofar as "egalitarian" is understood to mean a flattening of all function, Paul challenges that notion later in 1 Corinthians when he comes up with the analogy of the body of Christ functioning like a human body whose parts, while varied, must work together.
Like any good teacher, Paul wants to drive the point home before moving on, so in the event that the Corinthians had not gotten his drift about their inappropriately childish behavior and their need to grow, he comes up with an example that combines the two: the workers in the field. And at that point, some of us may immediately be in trouble since the majority of Americans find themselves very removed from the farm. It was at least 25 years ago that my wife, a kindergarten teacher, began noticing that fewer and fewer children would give the "correct" answers that milk came from the cow and eggs from the chicken: now they come from the jug, the carton, and the supermarket. But hopefully, we at least know that in the farm field things grow, and that for the farmer work is ultimately never done, it is always in process. This year's harvest is followed quickly by next year's planting and so on. Think of the biblical metaphors that suggest process. There is the potter at his wheel in Jeremiah. There is the house built on the rock in the Sermon on the Mount. (Anyone who thinks a house is not a work in progress has never owned one.) We can see Paul using the analogy of a master builder. Paul wants us to understand that the Christian life, both at the individual and the collective levels, is very much a work in process.
Paul is able to come back to the untoward problem of divisions within the Christian community. It is unreasonable, ludicrous in fact, to quarrel about which apostle is the "top" apostle in the process of growing Christians. All three whose names marked the parties in the Corinth church were simply God's workmen on God's farm, and the Corinthian Christians were the growing plants on the farm. The famous sentence, "We are fellow workmen for God," or better, "We are fellow workers with God" (1 Corinthians 3:9), does not here mean Paul and the Corinthians, as sometimes misinterpreted, it means Paul and Apollos and Cephas.
Once again, this rich image reinforces all that Paul wants us to learn. Paul, Apollos, and Cephas were not trying to begin cliques or "denominations." They were servants working cooperatively, complimentarily, and recognizing their own ultimate powerlessness to bring about growth. They were, in other words, modeling their work as Christians in a way that eluded many of the Corinthians -- and unfortunately in a way that has always eluded much of the Christian church. The image was meant to be humbling. As great as modern medicine is, we know that doctors do not heal, they merely facilitate the healing process. Similarly, even the most efficient high-tech farms are subject to the forces of nature. So any of us who in any way strive to advance the cause of Christ cannot "convert" or "grow" another person in the faith. We can do our work of planting, like Paul, or watering, as did Apollos, but ultimately the growth, the increase, will come from God.
If there is a church in America that doesn't love a theme, an emphasis, an action plan, or a mission statement I haven't found it. All these tools are fine as aids in actually evangelizing and nurturing (planting and watering), but all too often they become the focal point of our efforts rather than a tool. I am so old, I was pastoring churches in 1973 when the whole of our country was set to be evangelized by the program "Key 73." Of course, the country didn't know it and history would indicate it didn't happen. According to the Wheaton College archives, "Key 73 evolved out of a meeting convened by Billy Graham and Carl Henry in 1967 at a hotel on the Virginia side of the Key Bridge." As an interdenominational evangelistic strategy for 1973, Key 73 encouraged joint evangelistic programs on the denominational level, individual denominational plans for witness, and local outreach tailored to specific situations. Key 73's executive director, Ted Raedeke, summed up the program goals this way in Christianity Today: "... To confront people more fully and forcefully with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, by proclamation and demonstration by witness and ministry, and by word and deed."1
I am sure that Key 73 had some positive results. But I sure do remember pouring an awful lot of time and energy into a series of programs and resources that did not transform the little Ohio churches I served. While I would not dismiss it, as has Robert M. Price, as "a much-ballyhooed evangelistic juggernaut," or a "token of failed religious triumphalism," it is, for me at least, a reminder of how easy it is to focus too much on tools and techniques, and not enough on simple servanthood that recognizes that real growth comes from God.
Here is the really sad and immensely sobering part. All the things Paul addressed, which are still concerns today -- factionalism, infighting, immaturity, placing too much stock in ourselves and not enough in God's power -- while they may be difficult for those of us immersed in the church to discern are immediately obvious to those on the outside. Immature, self-important people proclaiming themselves to be the epitome of Christianity appear as attractive and reassuring to a wondering world as my student's dad did, walking the guide dog through the airport. People searching for meaning in life and healing from its hurts find this a disconcerting sight. Humble servants, recognizing their own limitations, their own need for growth, and their absolute dependence on God are far more likely to see their labors blessed with increase. Amen.
____________
1. http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/GUIDES/020.htm#410.
Paul is dealing with such a situation in Corinth. The behavior of the Corinthian Christians was not only damaging to themselves but was impeding their witness in the larger mainly non-Christian community. While they may have been sighted, they were acting as if they were blind. You will recall that Paul never used the word "Christian," but rather referred to people as spiritual or unspiritual. Those who had the Spirit had accepted that God had made himself known in Jesus Christ. The problem is that at least some of the spiritual people in Corinth were acting in an unspiritual or unchristian manner. Paul is quite specific: They were exhibiting the unspiritual behaviors characterized by jealousy and quarrelling. Here is an example of Paul being more nuanced than we sometimes like. We can almost hear folks in Corinth asking, "Well do you think we are Christians or not?" to which Paul gave a resounding, "Yes."
Particularly in more conservative Christian circles, folks often like to speak about "Christians" and "non-Christians." We prefer our dichotomies simple. Paul would seem to be implying one: Unspiritual people (non-Christians) are characterized by discord and quarreling while the spiritual (Christians) by harmony and unity. "They will know we are Christians by our love." I hate to be the one to break it to you, but church quarrels are just as mean and unreasonable as any other kind. So does that make the quarrelers not real Christians? No, but Paul is bold to point out that it makes them immature ones. The "babes in Christ" are spiritual people who nonetheless keep acting like unspiritual ones. Paul does not doubt the substance of their salvation, but it troubles him that they don't look all that much like Christians. It is a disconcerting sight.
Paul introduces a subtle distinction that is hard to convey in English. There is a repetition in verses 1 and 3 where Paul calls these Corinthians "worldly" (NIV) or "of the flesh" (NRSV). Here is the subtlety: both the words Paul uses have "flesh" (sarx) as their root. The first term has an ending that indicates "made of" flesh (sarkinois), which is literally true of all humans. We are human beings with human bodies: We are made of flesh. This in itself is not perjorative. But the second time Paul uses the term it has a slightly different ending (sarkikoi), which indicates not only "made of" but also "dominated by." As people with the Spirit, we should be increasingly dominated by the Spirit. Pointing out that they are real people, really made of flesh and blood, is a neutral statement; to point out that these Corinthian believers are dominated by human nature apart from God, that they have somehow received the Spirit but not really allowed it to work in their lives, is damning indeed. Francis deSales once observed that there are some folks who think they are angels when they are not even very good people. That is a big problem.
This is no doubt why Paul, never a master of subtlety, is not content to drop the matter with this play on words. He tells his audience that they are babies, still drinking milk rather than digesting meat. Being a baby is not a bad thing when you are three months old. In Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6, Paul celebrates the moment when we enter into the faith and are able to address God as "Abba," but he expects that the child's vocabulary will grow. In the case of our children, they soon learned a second word: "No."
By calling some babes and indicating that their behavior hampered his communication, Paul is clearly implying that there are others who are more mature who he is able to address with a fuller Christian vocabulary. His classic statement of the process of Christian growth is spelled out in Philippians 3:12-15:
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind....
-- Philippians 3:12-15a
That end toward which we are "pressing" can be translated in various ways: perfection, maturity, completeness, full development. But whatever it is, it is that goal which we, like the apostle, recognize we have not yet reached. When one talks about striving on toward perfection, many Christians immediately think of John Wesley's notion of sanctification, as if he invented it. Not everybody likes that idea. But here is Wesley's source -- the apostle Paul.
I understand why people don't like the idea of Christian growth. We would like it if Christians were like the Greek goddess, Athena, who sprang full-grown from the head of Zeus. Wouldn't it be super if Christians just appeared fully mature when they were confirmed or when they went forward at a revival? We could then, in good conscience, appoint the new convert to the role of Sunday School Superintendent. No fits and starts; no skinned knees; no appallingly embarrassing moments. Nowhere does scripture talk about such a thing. In fact in the very foundational stories of Genesis, we find this encounter between God and Cain:
Then the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it."
-- Genesis 4:6-7 (NIV)
Whatever else is in this story, two things are clear: the active presence of evil in the world, colorfully crouching, like some fanciful gargoyle from a medieval cathedral, ready to spring and trip us up and the notion that what we do matters. We are called to master the evil that lies in wait and that implies development. There is a popular brand of theology that assures us that "God has a plan for your life" and seems to imply that all we need to do is sit back passively and wait for God to work things out. Paul would refer to that as remaining babes in Christ, or so it seems to me.
Others dislike this idea of Christian growth, of striving toward the goal, because it seems to set up a spiritual hierarchy that strikes us as, well, unchristian. Does this not foster a kind of competitiveness of those who are further along the path to perfection? Does it not suggest that there might be some people who, for whatever reason, are more suited than others for a particular task? And, as Christian people, are we not to believe that we are totally egalitarian, that all are created equal and that in Christ Jesus there is no distinction? The answers to the questions are "No," "Yes," and "No."
No, Christianity is not totally egalitarian. It obviously is egalitarian in one dictionary definition: "Affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people." This is what Paul talks about in Galatians when he says that in Christ social distinction such as male/female, slave/free, or various ethnic distinctions should fade away. But insofar as "egalitarian" is understood to mean a flattening of all function, Paul challenges that notion later in 1 Corinthians when he comes up with the analogy of the body of Christ functioning like a human body whose parts, while varied, must work together.
Like any good teacher, Paul wants to drive the point home before moving on, so in the event that the Corinthians had not gotten his drift about their inappropriately childish behavior and their need to grow, he comes up with an example that combines the two: the workers in the field. And at that point, some of us may immediately be in trouble since the majority of Americans find themselves very removed from the farm. It was at least 25 years ago that my wife, a kindergarten teacher, began noticing that fewer and fewer children would give the "correct" answers that milk came from the cow and eggs from the chicken: now they come from the jug, the carton, and the supermarket. But hopefully, we at least know that in the farm field things grow, and that for the farmer work is ultimately never done, it is always in process. This year's harvest is followed quickly by next year's planting and so on. Think of the biblical metaphors that suggest process. There is the potter at his wheel in Jeremiah. There is the house built on the rock in the Sermon on the Mount. (Anyone who thinks a house is not a work in progress has never owned one.) We can see Paul using the analogy of a master builder. Paul wants us to understand that the Christian life, both at the individual and the collective levels, is very much a work in process.
Paul is able to come back to the untoward problem of divisions within the Christian community. It is unreasonable, ludicrous in fact, to quarrel about which apostle is the "top" apostle in the process of growing Christians. All three whose names marked the parties in the Corinth church were simply God's workmen on God's farm, and the Corinthian Christians were the growing plants on the farm. The famous sentence, "We are fellow workmen for God," or better, "We are fellow workers with God" (1 Corinthians 3:9), does not here mean Paul and the Corinthians, as sometimes misinterpreted, it means Paul and Apollos and Cephas.
Once again, this rich image reinforces all that Paul wants us to learn. Paul, Apollos, and Cephas were not trying to begin cliques or "denominations." They were servants working cooperatively, complimentarily, and recognizing their own ultimate powerlessness to bring about growth. They were, in other words, modeling their work as Christians in a way that eluded many of the Corinthians -- and unfortunately in a way that has always eluded much of the Christian church. The image was meant to be humbling. As great as modern medicine is, we know that doctors do not heal, they merely facilitate the healing process. Similarly, even the most efficient high-tech farms are subject to the forces of nature. So any of us who in any way strive to advance the cause of Christ cannot "convert" or "grow" another person in the faith. We can do our work of planting, like Paul, or watering, as did Apollos, but ultimately the growth, the increase, will come from God.
If there is a church in America that doesn't love a theme, an emphasis, an action plan, or a mission statement I haven't found it. All these tools are fine as aids in actually evangelizing and nurturing (planting and watering), but all too often they become the focal point of our efforts rather than a tool. I am so old, I was pastoring churches in 1973 when the whole of our country was set to be evangelized by the program "Key 73." Of course, the country didn't know it and history would indicate it didn't happen. According to the Wheaton College archives, "Key 73 evolved out of a meeting convened by Billy Graham and Carl Henry in 1967 at a hotel on the Virginia side of the Key Bridge." As an interdenominational evangelistic strategy for 1973, Key 73 encouraged joint evangelistic programs on the denominational level, individual denominational plans for witness, and local outreach tailored to specific situations. Key 73's executive director, Ted Raedeke, summed up the program goals this way in Christianity Today: "... To confront people more fully and forcefully with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, by proclamation and demonstration by witness and ministry, and by word and deed."1
I am sure that Key 73 had some positive results. But I sure do remember pouring an awful lot of time and energy into a series of programs and resources that did not transform the little Ohio churches I served. While I would not dismiss it, as has Robert M. Price, as "a much-ballyhooed evangelistic juggernaut," or a "token of failed religious triumphalism," it is, for me at least, a reminder of how easy it is to focus too much on tools and techniques, and not enough on simple servanthood that recognizes that real growth comes from God.
Here is the really sad and immensely sobering part. All the things Paul addressed, which are still concerns today -- factionalism, infighting, immaturity, placing too much stock in ourselves and not enough in God's power -- while they may be difficult for those of us immersed in the church to discern are immediately obvious to those on the outside. Immature, self-important people proclaiming themselves to be the epitome of Christianity appear as attractive and reassuring to a wondering world as my student's dad did, walking the guide dog through the airport. People searching for meaning in life and healing from its hurts find this a disconcerting sight. Humble servants, recognizing their own limitations, their own need for growth, and their absolute dependence on God are far more likely to see their labors blessed with increase. Amen.
____________
1. http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/GUIDES/020.htm#410.
