Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 01.26.14
Scripture Lesson: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Every once in a while, someone will ask me what the whole Presbyterian thing is all about. Not often, mind you. The Presbyterian brand isn’t exactly front and center in the minds of Americans, even with all our ads during football games. But every once in while, I’ll have the chance to describe what it means to be Presbyterian, and how that distinguishes this little community from Baptists or Episcopalians or Discalced Carmelites.
And no, that’s not a beverage. You can’t order a tall half-caf discalced carmelite latte at Starbucks. It’s a mystic monastic order, one of the umpty-bazillion different types of Jesus follower. That’s one of the hardest things to come to terms with as a Christian. There are just so very many different ways to do this thing.
In point of fact, even saying you’re a Presbyterian doesn’t really give folks enough of a handle on who you are. What kind of Presbyterian, one might ask, because there’s a remarkably wide variety. It’s a veritable smorgasbord.
There’s the Presbyterian Church USA, which is us. Yay, us!
Then there’s the Presbyterian Church in America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which is not to be confused with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America. There’s the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which is a totally different thing than the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians. There’s the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, which is not the Reformed Presbyterian Church or the Reformed Presbyterian Church in the United States, none of which are to be for a moment confused with the Presbyterian Reformed Church.
Wow, one might say! It’s like a veritable Baskin Robbins for the Frozen Chosen! So many different flavors! What a remarkably abundant way of being Christian!
But there’s a problem. For every one of these different flavors of Presbyterian, there’s a fight. One group of people decides that they can no longer tolerate the flagrant way those people are misrepresenting the true heart of the Presbyterian tradition, and so they storm off. It happens over and over and over again, until the landscape of the church is as cracked and fragmented as the back of your iPhone. It can get crazy. How crazy?
Like, say, the Presbyterian Reformed Church, which split from the Free Presbyterian Church in the early 20th century over the issue of taking public transportation to church.
Seriously. That was their big church fight. Public. Transportation.
So here we have two groups of people who follow Jesus of Nazareth, and their heat and light and energy, the essence of their Gospel proclamation? Fighting about whether or not the Son of God minds if you take the bus. Sure, it’s like a Baskin Robbins, but every flavor is bitterness.
That painfully human tendency to look for any and every possible reason to get into it with one another was front and center in the Apostle Paul’s mind in today’s passage from 1 Corinthians. Paul struggled to cope with one of the most fractious congregations in early Christendom. It’s the heart of their problem as a community made up of human beings, all of whom are eager to prove their place.
The church in Corinth was notoriously troubled, riven with conflicts and gossip. More significantly, it was challenged by a form of hyper-competitiveness, as members of the church allowed the values of the city of Corinth to worm their way into the life and dynamics of the church. As a recently planted Roman trading colony, Corinth was a place full of hard-charging, self-made souls, proud of their place in the culture and eager to rise up the social ranks. They were driven, they were in it to win it, and God help anyone who got in their way.
And so as they’d received the Gospel, and heard it taught by some of the earliest leaders of the church, they managed to find ways to stand in opposition to one another. Who’s the most important teacher, they’d say to one another. Who does the best possible baptizing? Some would side with Paul himself. Others would side with an Apostle named Apollos. I know, there’s no named Letter from Apollos, but he was a big deal in the early church. He’s referenced in Acts 18, and some folks...like Martin Luther...have suggested that he might have been the author of the Letter to the Hebrews.
Seeing these people arguing about which teacher was the most important, still others would say that they just plain ol’ followed Christ. You’d think that would be the right answer, but from the way Paul describes it, it’s clear that it was just another thing people said to feel better about themselves. “You people with your arguing about Paul and Apollos. I follow Jesus. So nyah.”
To each and every one of these fractious souls, Paul suggested that they might not be quite understanding the point of what Jesus came to the world to teach. If manifesting God’s radical, transforming, and saving love was the point of what Jesus lived out, then to continue to cling to the desire for superiority is not a sign that you’ve gotten the point. You remain among the perishing.
How important is resisting division to the Christian walk? It’s hard for us to grasp, we whose freedom is so much a part of us. Division comes as easily for us here in our culture as it did to the Corinthians. We are, after all, a nation of fierce and rugged individuals, who measure our worth by our ability to stand out from others...or better yet, stand over others.
Division and conflict are just more interesting. We human beings are naturally drawn to tension, to the shimmering energy that comes when our fight or flight instinct is kicked in. It makes us feel fierce, gives us a sense of energy and engagement. It draws a crowd, and gives us a heightened sense of purpose. In the high school lunchroom, rarely did you hear a crowd of kids suddenly gathering around two adversaries chanting: “Mutually respectful conversation! Mutually respectful conversation!”
That’s the driving energy behind so much of our ‘net-based culture now, as our love of conflict stirs endless and meaningless chatter around which celebrity has said something catty about which other celebrity, or what one political pundit has said about another talking head.
In the absence of sniping at someone you disagree with, or saying something outrageous that starts a good fight, there’s almost nothing that you can do to make yourself interesting, or to distinguish yourself from the teeming throngs. But there’s something else about refusing to participate in division. It involves a far deeper level of risk.
The images fluttered briefly across my social media feeds yesterday, before being swept aside by a tidal wave of Bieberblabber. These were images from the Ukraine, where rioting and social unrest have been moving closer and closer to a terrible tipping point, to that place where signs and slogans are replaced with guns and bombs.
They were pictures of Orthodox priests and monks, holding crosses and icons as they stood in the streets of Ukrainian cities. They were pictures of a woman, holding a sacred icon, kneeling on a frozen, snowy urban street. Those streets were littered with rocks and debris. On one side of the priests and monks, riot police, shields at the ready. On the other side, an angry crowd.
And in between, Christians.
The sole point they were making, using their bodies and their faith, was that brokenness and the human tendency to attack one another is not part of God’s gracious intent for us. They would not side with violence. Don’t do this thing. Don’t harm one another. It was a peculiar image, and one I struggle with. It’s so much easier to yield to the desire to participate in conflict, to get deep into the passions and energies that are released when we go at it with one another.
It’s also paradoxically safer. If you stand with a crowd, with a gathering of those who are like you and sharing your disdain for others, then you are not as deeply at risk as when you stand against the conflict itself. It’s a risk that we personally struggle to take, but if we are to live meaningfully and actually as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, it’s a risk we must take.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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