The Common Good

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 01.17.2016

Scripture Lesson:  1 Corinthians 12: 1-11

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I didn’t win.

This last week, the single largest lottery prize in human history came and went, and I am reasonably sure that I didn’t win it.  Oh, sure, one of the three ticket purchasers might have dropped that ticket into an envelope and mailed it to me at random.  

The probability of that event is not zero.  So I suppose there’s always hope, right?

Although, honestly, I’m not sure I even wanted to win.  I haven’t played the lottery in nearly two decades, because I bothered looking around me at the 7-11 when the prize got big enough for me to notice.  Watching day laborers and retirees dropping fifty bucks on tickets just got to feeling too soul-sucking, because the lottery is kind of a desperation tax.  I know, it’s meant to fund schools and education and puppies and kittens or something, but honestly, it’s just about the worst way to go about that endeavor.  The less hope you have, the more likely you are to allow yourself to get lured into the illusion that you’ve got a meaningful shot at it.

I mean, I’m sure fabulous wealth has it’s advantages, and at around $700 million after Virginia taxes, my family could have lived like royalty on the interest off of one years interest.  There’s something else, though, something that I wrestled around with this last week as fantasies of an entire stable of motorcycles played around in my head.  And sure, it’d be nice to buy a Shinmaya US-2 ocean-going four engine turboprop seaplane and convert it into a fabulous intercontinental flying yacht, so that I could sneer at the other yacht owners. Hah. My yacht FLIES. But once I’d dropped 150 million on that, what to do with the rest?  Did I really want to win?  

And if I don’t play at $50 million, why would I play at $1.5 billion?  I’m reasonably sure that even my wildest avarice would be sated by a couple of million dollars a year, that I wouldn’t somehow feel put out.

But most significantly honestly, would my life be better in ways that ultimately mean anything?  Perhaps, if I didn’t have a roof over my head and enough food to eat.  But that’s not the case.  My family is fine.  We already have more than we need.  If I won, I’d just be rich, for reasons that would have nothing to do with me and everything to do with complete randomness.  Lottery winning confers no merit, any more than getting struck by a micrometeorite means you’re a bad person.

The Powerball, frankly, is irrelevant to your success or failure as a human being, because it has nothing at all to do with who I am as a person.  Winning it is morally neutral, and if living into your values matters to you, the Powerball becomes irrelevant.  It is immaterial to what matters.  What matters, as we should particularly remember on this Martin Luther King weekend, is the content of your character.

This was news to the church at Corinth, because as far as the city of Corinth was concerned, what had value was wealth.  

Being able to see people as anything other than their total net worth was a skillset in short supply in the congregation that had gathered in Corinth.   First Corinthians is, in all likelihood, not the first letter Paul wrote to Corinth at all.   Given the evidence in the text, it is probably the second is a series of letters to a church that seemed to need every little bit of help it could get.   

1 Corinthians is a brilliant work, a letter written by a mature mind in its prime, a mind that’s been pushed to it’s limit.  Given the clear gifts of rhetoric that Paul shows in this letter, it’s clear that he’s pulling out all of the stops for this community that he loves, and that at the same time makes him crazy.

Over and over again throughout the text, we read evidence that while there were those in Corinth who got it, who grasped what was most important about the Jesus-path Paul was teaching, there were just as many others who couldn’t figure out what was truly significant.

In this section, Paul is dealing once again with the tendency of the Corinthians to categorize human beings according to their worth in the social pecking order.  The Corinthians were big fans of shiny people.  If you had impressive credentials or showed the outward signs of wealth, you did well in Corinth.  If you had big impressive spiritual gifts, or could preach a firebrand sermon, you did well in Corinth.

And most of all, as was the case in much of the rest of the Greco-Roman world, if you had a rich and powerful person vouching for you with a strong letter of recommendation, you’d do well in Corinth.  Doors would open.  People would see you as a more important and more valuable human being.

Wealth and material success were the great virtues of Corinth, which made it not all that different from the rest of the Roman Empire.  If you look at where humanity stood two thousand years ago, about nine point eight percent of humanity living under the rule of the Roman Empire were economically secure.  They could reasonably expect that they would experience no significant hardship.  A tiny fraction--just under two percent--controlled most of the wealth.  An additional seven percent were functionally secure, consistently receiving enough income to maintain a surplus.

Twenty two percent were just above subsistence, meaning hunger was at bay and shelter was consistently present, but they were vulnerable.  And sixty-eight percent were either in poverty or scrambling day to day just to keep afloat, one accident or illness away from real privation.

But that was two thousand years ago, before industrialization, before science and technology, before the global economy and the dynamism of capital markets.

Which, if you look at wealth globally today, means that absolutely nothing at all has changed.

As Paul argues against this rather basic human tendency to value one person more than another, he expands his argument to talk about the way God values human abilities.  Unlike the wealth obsessed Corinthian morality, he offers up a completely different ethic.  

It was an ethic that challenged us to see our value in terms of both our individual gifts and the greater good.

If we are to be the lights shining in the darkness, then our task is not to let ourselves be deluded into thinking that wealth or intelligence or any human condition matters.  What matters is letting the light of grace and the Spirit shine from us.  That’s pretty much it.

As we wonder at the baubles our culture puts before us, and struggle to see human value in terms that are not defined by wealth and worth, Paul’s words are a necessary reminder.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.