Let me just begin by saying, it isn’t fair. I have been here for almost ten
years, and one of the most important things I try to work for in a church is a
sense of unity. The people of a congregation cannot work together, they can’t
function, they can’t make decisions, they can’t achieve a common purpose if they
are not unified.
I am not the kind of leader who likes votes. I don’t like it when a majority
wins and a minority loses. Smart church leaders try to build consensus rather
than win votes. While some folks may have personality differences with others in
the church, and that’s inevitable, there should be no major issues about which
people violently disagree.
All efforts to bridge those differences must be made so that a church can go on
being the church rather than fighting over those differences. All that is fine
and good. We’ve worked through all kinds of major issues and tackled lots of
serious problems and we’re all still friends.
That was, until last Sunday. I knew it was going to be a problem as I sat with
Linda Wellerritter and watched the Bears destroy the Seattle Seahawks at
Friday’s Restaurant after the Advisory Board meeting last Sunday.
The good part was that as I watched the game progress it became clear that
either the Bears or the Packers were going to the Superbowl. The bad part was
that the other team would lose. And I’m stuck I the middle.
For the first time since before my father was born, since the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, the Bears and the Packers will play each other in the playoffs. I’ve
been watching the Bears play the Packers every year for forty years.
How is it even possible that this has never happened? And why couldn’t it have
happened at a time when I wasn’t a pastor of a church in Wisconsin? Why does it
have to happen in a situation where I’m liable to lose parishioners if the Bears
win today? And do you know how much trash talk I’ll have to endure if they
don’t? I’ll never hear the end of it.
I only hope that next Sunday, whatever happens, we’ll be able to get together
and worship without letting our differences get in the way. I just hope our
divided loyalties don’t keep us from being a unified body of Christ. But I have
to honest and say that I’m pretty skeptical.
Whatever your loyalty is on this matter, it is true that divided loyalties
always have a tendency to hamper a group’s effectiveness at carrying out its
mission. And that tendency is as true in the church as it is in any other group,
be it a business, a family, a sports team, or an organization.
Fortunately we have some context in the New Testament that gives us some
guidance on the importance of unity in the church and the way in which it can be
maintained. That context comes from a church in the Greek city of Corinth. The
church was started by a follower of Jesus named Paul in the middle of the first
century, a little over twenty years after Jesus’ death.
Paul started many churches in his travels because he was convinced that God
wanted everyone in the world to know about Jesus. So he would start a church,
teach the people what they were supposed to know, establish a set of leaders,
and then go on to another city and start another church.
Paul would continue to keep tabs on the churches he started by doing a
combination of three things: First, he would send a representative who would
check on the church, correct any problems developing in the church, and bring
him back a report.
Second, he would visit the church himself to see what was happening, make sure
they were teaching the things he taught them, encourage them to keep going, and
discipline anyone who was acting in a way that was not consistent with his
teachings.
Finally, if he was unable to go himself he would send a letter to the church,
sometimes in response to a letter they sent or a report he received. In the case
of the church in Corinth, he had received a letter from them with questions for
him to answer. He had also received a report from at least one of the groups of
the church.
The truth was, there were probably a number of smaller groups in that church who
met separately in homes and came together on a regular basis to celebrate
communion. One of those groups, a group identified with a woman named Chloe, had
sent Paul a report about serious divisions in the church.
Rather than seeing themselves as all one church with different groups and
different parts working together for a common purpose, they began taking sides
and claiming loyalties to different church leaders.
Some of them claimed more loyalty to Paul. But others claimed loyalty to Peter,
another of Jesus’ disciples who did not work with Paul. Still others claimed
loyalty to a missionary named Apollos, a very eloquent missionary from Egypt who
had converted from Judaism to Christianity.
Apparently one or more of the groups of the church claimed to have more heavenly
wisdom or knowledge than the others, and they began to look down on the other
groups. Paul doesn’t come right out and say it, but Apollos’ background in the
kind of Judaism he must have learned in Egypt may have played a role in this
heightened sense of enlightenment.
You see, Apollos was from Alexandria, which, although it was in Egypt, became a
real center for Jewish thought. Remember that during this time Greek philosophy
was all the rage among intellectuals of the time. The Jews there had tried to
figure out a way that they could talk about Judaism while also responding to the
intellectual advances being made by Greek philosophers.
What they did was generally to take a look at the Old Testament and say that it
should not be taken so much literally as metaphorical. In other words, stories
about the Israelites being led out of slavery from Egypt were not literally
about libration from slavery, but about humanity’s liberation from sinful
tendencies, or something to that effect.
They did that with most of the Old Testament, and they came to the conclusion
that because they started from the Old Testament, their approach to philosophy
and religion was actually better than all the Greek philosophy.
However it happened, and we don’t know how, that kind of talk made it into the
church. And those who took that kind of an approach to their newfound Christian
faith considered themselves intellectually superior to other groups in the
church who didn’t.
Rather than talking about themselves as a unified group that was trying to work
together to be a witness for Christ in their community, they were fighting with
each other over who was more enlightened and whose leader was a better teacher.
When Paul heard about this kind of infighting, he wrote back to the Corinthians
to remind them that their first loyalty was to Christ, not to individual
leaders. Paul wasn’t crucified for their sins. They weren’t baptized in the name
of Apollos.
It was like Christ had been carved up and portioned out to each of these groups.
It was crazy. Paul sarcastically says that he was glad he didn’t baptized too
many of them because that seems to have been a factor in deciding loyalties.
Now he sounds kind of selfless to most people. It sounds as though he’s saying
that being a Christian isn’t about who taught you or who baptized you, but about
Jesus himself. But if you read between the lines here, Paul’s also trying to
remind them that after being under the authority of Jesus, they’re also under
his authority.
He reminds them that he didn’t teach them about all of the philosophical stuff
that they’re all excited about. He acknowledges that the message he taught them
sounds a little simplistic to some people. Some people think that a religion
simply centered on the death and resurrection of Jesus is foolish.
He says, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” In other words, anyone
who tries to minimize what I have taught you is going against God.
He goes on later in the letter to distinguish himself from the other leaders and
teachers who have come into the church since he started it. In 4:15 he claims
that while they have lots of leaders, whom he compares to nannies, he alone can
claim authority as their spiritual father because he was the one who first told
them about Christ.
In his context a father has full authority over a family. He outranks the
nannies and the guardians, most of whom were slaves anyway. So if in the church
family he’s the father, then he has the final word over what’s being taught, and
their ultimate loyalty must be to him.
Now I know that sounds very presumptuous to us today. If I were to go around and
say, “I am your spiritual father. You must do as I say around here” it wouldn’t’
even take a Packer loss today to get me fired. People in this country don’t
generally respond well to that kind of heavy handed leadership style in the
church.
But I can sympathize with Paul because there have been times in some of the
churches I’ve served where I just wanted to tell people to stop arguing and
backstabbing and undermining me and decide whether or not they were going to let
me be their leader.
Fortunately that’s not our context here. But the stresses of trying to be the
body of Christ in a society that is no longer primarily Christian, one in which
the church has been discredited require that you and I have a single minded
sense of purpose, even though we come from different experiences and traditions,
even though we’re at different places on our spiritual journey together.
And I think Paul has some important things to tell us about how we can avoid
divisions and keep our eyes on Jesus. First, Paul encourages people not to be
afraid or feel threatened by what we perceive to be “other”. That’s one of the
problems that churches often have.
We look at people, even those in our own church, who have a different experience
or a different outlook or a different set of beliefs and we categorize them as
other. And when we do that, then it’s easy to go on to where we get suspicious
of their motives, question their intelligence, and eventually try to strip them
of any power.
I’m not just talking about focusing on what we have in common and ignoring our
differences. I’m talking about taking the mindset that we are one with them.
They are not “other” any more than our right arm is foreign to our left hand.
We are part of the same body. That’s why it hurts so much when we lose someone
or when someone leaves. Sure, we can form close bonds with someone in the
church. There will certainly be people who we like at the church more than
others. It’s sociologically impossible for that not to be the case.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but those bonds of friendship can’t cloud the
fact that we are still part of one body, that we serve a larger purpose, that we
are all still on the same team, even if when we go home we cheer for different
teams.
A perfect illustration of this point, at least from a political perspective, was
at the inauguration of the governor Robert Bentley of Alabama this week. After
being sworn in as governor, he went on to tell the people of his state, “So
anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm
telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister.”
Now he said he would like to be your brother, but that’s only possible if you
convert to his religion. Now let’s be honest about what he’s really saying. A
governor has no need and really no place telling his constituents that they
should become Christians. Saying that borders on the unconstitutional.
What he’s really doing is not proselytizing, but saying to anyone who doesn’t
practice their faith as he does, “Hey, you’re not part of the in crowd. You’re
the other in our state. There’s us, and there’s you. Let’s be clear about that
from day one.”
There couldn’t possibly be any benefit in dividing people in that way. His job
is to get the people of his state to work together to solve their problems. All
he’s accomplished is to begin establishing a pecking order in society so that
“the other” knows it won’t have much of a voice.
We can’t afford to do that kind of thing in the church, even though the church
is notorious for dividing people up over what in the end are trivial matters. We
have to affirm our shared paths if we’re going to be the body of Christ.
The other thing I want to highlight is the fact that Paul doesn’t say, “Oh, all
these teachers you follow are wrong. You have to ditch them and all follow me.”
Paul doesn’t try to discredit Apollos. He doesn’t bad mouth Peter in this
letter.
Paul says “there are to be no divisions among you”, but he can’t say that there
are to be no differences between you. That’s impossible. Paul has to operate in
a situation where people come from different traditions. He can’t just stomp out
those differences. He has to teach people to value them in some way.
Now you can debate the extent to which he was effective in valuing the diversity
of faith backgrounds in that church, but his language shows that he knew he
couldn’t get rid of it, and he didn’t need to.
These days we tend to look with suspicion on the many different religious
traditions even within Christianity itself. There was a day not so long ago when
many people in this country, most people, understood their self identity in
terms of both race and religious tradition. Those two were intertwined because
of the connection between church and state in Europe.
My mother grew up in a Polish neighborhood, so everyone was Catholic. My Dad
grew up in a Swedish area, so almost everyone was either Lutheran or something
similar. Many of you can remember the days when those kinds of divisions
determined who you hung around, and most certainly whom you could marry.
There was a great deal of distrust between these different divisions. It was
almost anathema to say, “Hey, we’re all part of the body of Christ.” Most groups
had this pride which led them to have a sense that they had really found the
best way, the only legitimate way to be Christian.
Obviously those assumptions needed to be challenged, and eventually they were.
In fact, I think we went the other way. By the time I was in college most
Christians I knew thought that denominations were useless, that there was one
pure Christianity, the one the early church started out with before the church
became an institution with laws and a power structure.
In fact, the great religious traditions of the church, Methodism and
Presbyterianism and Congregationalism and Lutheranism and Catholicism were and
are seen as nearly idolatrous. They’ve been failed human attempts to define God.
Some of that sentiment is deserved. The legalism of some churches does get in
the way of people experiencing God. But if we learn anything from Paul this
morning, I hope we remember that he didn’t try to get rid of the different
traditions in the Corinthian church.
He didn’t say that Apollos was a fruitcake, or that Peter was overly legalistic,
or that everyone should abandon those guys and follow him. He reminded them that
ultimately their faith is rooted in the message he brought them, the message
that Jesus died to save the world. And because he lives, so will we.
People who grew up in other traditions of our faith or who have responded to
other expressions of it are not “other”. They are part of our own body, and we
have something to learn from all of them, even if we don’t turn into one of
them.
I want to end with a story about a clergy group that I participated in while I
was a pastor in upstate New York. I had always wanted to be a part of an
ecumenical clergy group, one that was made up of ministers from a variety of
traditions.
It isn’t always easy to get something like that started, but at one point there
were enough ministers in the area who wanted to do the same thing. My group
included a couple of local Methodist pastors, A Christian Church pastor, and a
pastor from an independent church.
Like them, I preached from the lectionary, which means I followed, as I still
do, a three years set of Bible passages for preaching, which is what the
majority of churches in the world follow. There are four Bible passages in the
lectionary each week.
We decided that every Wednesday we would get together at each other’s churches
and each of us would study one of the four passages on the lectionary for the
week. Then we would use what we learned from one another to prepare our sermons
for the next Sunday.
While those meetings were very informative, the best part of being together was
the camaraderie and the relationships we built up. We joked around, we vented
about the things in our churches that were frustrating, we celebrated each
others’ victories in life.
One time, after I had graduated and received my Doctorate of Ministry, I came
back and I was a little high and mighty about it. But I was younger than they
were, so they had to give me a hard time about it.
They started calling me “the bishop” now that I was a doctor. I explained to
them that we don’t have bishops in the Baptist tradition, but that didn’t
matter.
The best part of it all was that we were able to be the body of Christ without
abandoning our own way of approaching Christ. We held dozens of church services
together. We cooperated with one another to hold a Vacation Bible School one
summer.
We were part of the same body. They weren’t below me because they traced their
tradition to John Wesley. I wasn’t less of person of faith because our tradition
in the US was started by Roger Williams. Those things made us rich, they didn’t
pull us apart.
That’s the type of mentality I hope to develop and foster not only in our
congregation, but in our attitudes towards others of our faith. In the name of
Jesus let there be no divisions among you. May you all be in agreement. Be
united in the same mind and the same purpose.