This is my second sermon, written for the Preparing to Preach course. I intended my first sermon for St. George's Episcopal Church, Dayton, Ohio, for the second Sunday after Pentecost (Year A), which fell on 25 May 2008.
I did not preach this sermon at St. George's, however, as it ended up being the first Sunday after Carol Hull's retirement and the first Sunday of Jim Larsen's ministry at St. George's. I did preach it as my final sermon for the course, however.
The primary text is 1 Cor 4:1-5, though I pull in a bit from the Gospel reading, from the Sermon on the Mount.----
A few weeks ago, I attended a training class for work. The class began by breaking up into small teams, with each team having a set time period to build a tower out of index cards. At the end of the exercise, our tower was the only one not standing.
Ultimately, the problem with our tower was similar to the problem in the church in Corinth. In today’s reading from Paul, we have a fight within that church, involving the followers of leaders such as Apollos.
In the case of our tower, each member of the team had an idea how we wanted to build it, and we argued about that until our time was nearly expired. We were still divided even as we built the tower, and that division made for a very shaky foundation.
Now, the division in the church in Corinth isn’t a over how to put together index cards, but over more serious matters, like what work the church will do, or what theology the church will believe.
As biblical scholar William Orr writes, this is a church in danger of schism. And there certainly have been schisms in the church since then. Schism is a word we’ve heard quite a bit recently in connection with our own church. The news media have swarmed about that word, like sharks smelling blood in the water. With headlines like “Division looms for Episcopal Church,” or “Church leader battles division,” the media pronounce the impending schism of our church. And many of the controversies of our secular society become controversies within our church.
Like the members of my tower-building team, we almost hear the threat: “Time’s up.”
But the Christian church has often been controversial, even from the very beginning. Christ’s earthly ministry was a litany of challenges to his culture and the hierarchy of the time. One only has to read the Sermon on the Mount for a few examples. We often call Christ ‘counter-cultural,’ for that very reason. Can we expect to be both Christian and part of worldly culture? Jesus challenged his own culture, why shouldn’t we challenge ours?
As Paul writes to the church in Corinth, we are “servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.” Following our baptism, the priest or bishop chrismates us, smearing oil in the sign of the cross on our foreheads and saying, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.” With this, we are bound to Christ.
And being bound to Christ makes us one.
As with my tower-building team, sometimes we just have to acknowledge our differences, so we can get something out of the class, and move on to more pressing challenges, even if we never finished the tower.
Great things can come of our differences, if we can weather them and learn from them, and let the Holy Spirit work through them.
For example, the differences in the early Christian church led, in large part, to the meeting of the council of Nicaea. Out of that came the Nicene Creed, which forms the statement of our core belief that we recite each week.
In her Pentacost letter, our Presiding Bishop writes, “None of us is alone. We cannot engage the fullness of God’s mission alone, nor know the fullness of God’s reality alone. Together as members of the Body of Christ, we can begin to try.”
As stewards of God’s mysteries, we have work to do.
We have changes to make—both in the world and in ourselves—if we are to be found trustworthy.
In this week’s gospel reading, from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Although my team wrote off our tower, we still became a team. We learned from our differences, finished the remaining team exercises, and completed the class.
Victor Paul Furnish, professor at Southern Methodist University, writes that the Corinthians are a “congregation ‘called’,” and that “God’s call is to be a holy people, ‘sanctified in Christ Jesus.’” Likewise, we should think of ourselves as a congregation called by God.
As we say responsively at the beginning of our baptismal liturgy,
There is one Body and one Spirit;
There is one hope in God’s call to us;
One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
One God and Father of all.
Amen.
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