Corinthians
Corinthians
1 Corinthians 12:12-26
Here’s what you need to know from the start this morning. The name of the town, “Corinth,” because of Corinth’s reputation, was the slang term for…fornication. (Yup…we’ll go with that word.) The worst insult that you could sling at a woman was to call her a “Corinthian.” To “Corinthianize" someone was to push them or tempt them past their moral limits. You get my drift here, right? Think of it this way… “Vegas, baby!” Do I have your attention?
How did Corinth earn this reputation. Well, they did have a temple dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, with a thousand priestesses who…again, you can connect the dots, right? More seriously, though, Corinth was a meeting ground for people from all over the known world. Corinth was a city of as many as 600,000 people in southern Greece that happened to be located on a narrow strip of land with seas on either side. They even had a paved highway and a transport system for carrying goods and ships over the land to save time for those who were in a rush to deliver their goods. Sailors from all over the world came through Corinth. Over time, many of those people settled there. The result was a melting pot of cultures and religions and practices. There were Roman citizens, former slaves, Greeks, Asians, and Jews, all living in close contact with one another. In another place, those different groups might never have crossed paths in a lifetime. In Corinth, these people were next door neighbors. Having seen all the other people and all the other religions and all the other moral codes first hand, the Corinthians grew jaded. Their shared conclusion seemed to be, “Whatever! Anything goes!”
Now, let’s take a breath and recall a parable that Jesus told, the parable of the sower. It is a parable about a man who sows seed. Some of it falls on rocky ground. Some of it is eaten by the birds. Some of it gets choked by the weeds. Some of that seed, though, falls on fertile ground and grows. The implication is that this is how it is with the Word of God. It gets “sown”—put out into the world and sometimes, it is heard by folks with open ears and an open heart. In that fertile ground, it grows.
This is why I want you to consider just how amazing it is that there was a church in Corinth of all places. This wasn’t anyone’s idea of fertile ground. Against all the odds, in a place filled with people from all over the world, people who were focused on making a buck, people who were hard scrabble sailors, people who found consolation for their hard life by also finding pleasure in all its forms, the Word grew. Of course, we have to be honest here. It’s not like the city converted. It’s not like one day “Sin City” turned into Mayberry. It’s not like all of a sudden there was a cathedral in the center of town. The thing was, though that Saul planted a church in Corinth and, astoundingly, that church grew.
It turns out that when that community of faith in Corinth gathered, they brought all of the challenges and problems of their world with them. (Churches always do.) The community was composed mostly of Gentiles, folks who had never been Jews and who had never had the commitment to moral integrity that was at the heart of Judaism. These were folks who had “gods” whom they worshiped in order to get things. Behaviors that seemed perfectly acceptable to them in their previous lives were now going to be challenged. It turns out that sexual norms matter when bad decisions affect the whole community. It wasn’t just those decisions, though. Every aspect of life seemed like a potential land mine of explosive conflict. And, of course, everyone’s bias was to keep doing what they have always done because people who do things differently, well, deep-down, they’re just wrong…right? They just don’t get how things are meant to be…
We should never underestimate the power of what is familiar and comfortable in people’s lives. We love the security that comes with knowing exactly how to do things. For the most part, we don’t really like to be challenged. It’s hard work to think. It’s even harder work to change. So, usually, we gravitate toward people who look like us and talk like us and think like us. Think back to the school cafeterias in your life. The schools might have proudly worked to be as diverse as they could be. However, when you went into that lunchroom, how did people group themselves? Jocks over here. Theater people over there. Jet setters over at that table. We sort ourselves all the time. When we do that sorting, we are drawn to what’s comfortable.
This is where things get very interesting for the early Christian church. Certainly, centuries later, Christians sorted themselves into comfortable groups: Lutherans over here; Southern Baptists over there; Norwegian Lutherans over here; Swedish Lutherans over there; Norwegian Lutherans who still speak Norwegian and eat lutefisk over here; those who have completely betrayed their heritage over there. (Sorry, Lutheran friends!) However, the primary experience for the earliest Christians was one of radical diversity. Nowhere was this more true than in Corinth. People who were foreigners and suspects a few days earlier were now your brothers and your sisters. Imagine how uncomfortable that was!
To this day, I think the Christian faith is at its most vital when, as a result of our shared faith, we are thrown out of our comfort zone. While it may be true that wherever two or three are gathered, God is present, it is especially true that whenever two or three gather who otherwise never would have gathered, God’s presence comes to life. Maybe a necessary condition of living our faith is learning to experience the stomach churning sense of “I’ve never been with someone like this before” or “I’ve never done this before” and recognizing such feelings and thoughts as the markers of something good. God’s not here to make us comfortable. God’s here to help us grow. If we’re ever going to grow, we have to make peace with feeling uncomfortable. We have to be willing to be with people who are genuinely different and not just tolerate them but actually cherish them as the people who can help us to see things we otherwise would have completely missed. People who are different are not a threat. People who are different who become a part of our life are an incredible gift.
Of course, all of this sounds great until the moment when you’re just exhausted and want to eat what you’ve always eaten. Diversity sounds awesome until you actually have to change how you see things or how you speak. Sooner or later, you just want to feel comfortable and secure and feel like you’re surrounded with what’s familiar once again. That’s when you run into your differences with your brothers and sisters and you just want someone to tell them that they are wrong and you are right. Is that too much to ask?
That’s really all anyone wanted from Paul—for him to tell those other people to get it together and think what I think or to get it together and do what I do. “Paul…here’s the situation. If you could just take a minute or two to write a letter and straighten this issue out. That would be such a blessing for all of us, especially the unenlightened others! Thanks so much!”
Paul ticks off a series of positions on sexual impropriety, and eating, and sharing communion and the resurrection, among other things. However, I don’t think he likely made anyone all that happy. I’m pretty sure that for each person who felt like they got a “win” on this issue, that same person probably felt like they lost on another. In fact, the thread that seems to tie all those positions together is the challenge that he sets before people to think of others, and not yourself, first. The threat wasn’t what you did or did not eat. No…the threat to community was when you made getting your own way your guiding principle. There are selfish ways to make sexual choices and selfish ways to decide what to eat and selfish ways to do just about everything else. Somehow, the challenge is to learn to put aside those selfish, childish ways.
Most interestingly, what Paul has to say most powerfully has to do with unity, itself. This is such a critical thing for all of us to hear. We all are familiar with the text we hear this morning about the church being like a body. Pause, though, first and think about this image given what we’ve learned today. Corinth was a place that was totally enthralled with bodies in the base, sensual sense. Paul speaks to the Corinthians and says, “Let me challenge you to think about a body differently. If you love bodies so much, let me challenge you to hear what a body teaches us.”
What does a body teach us? A body is made up of many different parts. Every one of those parts plays an essential role. Harmony for the body doesn’t happen when all the parts became the same. Harmony for the body happens when every part does what it was created to do. The eye doesn’t get to say to the other parts, “Aren’t you just dying to be an eye?” The ear doesn’t get to say, “An ear is the thing to be!” No, a body in harmony values every part of the body precisely for the different things which every part can contribute. And when one parts suffers, all suffer.
Unity isn’t about everything becoming the same. Unity is about everything doing what it does for the greater good. This is such a critical point! If we are going to be a diverse community, then I can’t make my goal be to tolerate you and your unfortunate differences. No, I have to appreciate you and value those differences and affirm who you are. “Literally, this community would not be what it is without you and the unique person whom you are.” Thank God we are not the same, that we don’t think the same things and do the same things. Thank God for the evidence that is all around us every day that diversity and differences are not a diversion from the way things are supposed to be but are, in fact, exactly the way things are designed to be! If we were all the same, the world would be incredibly impoverished. Why, then, do we spend so much time waiting for people to come to their senses and finally want to be exactly like us?
The most important contribution Paul makes in the body image in Corinthians rests in who he says is the head of that body: Christ. This is something deeply planted in our church. We don’t come together because we believe the same things. We don’t come together because we choose to do the same things or vote the same way or speak up about the same issues. What connects us to one another is not a set of doctrinal beliefs or any creed. No, what brings us together is the common desire we share to worship God together. We are grateful for the presence of our loving God. We are here not to tell each other how to experience that presence but to ask each other, “How is that loving God present for you?” The differences in how we answer that question are not a threat but a statement of just how amazing God can be.
The church is one body. There are many parts of that body, each of which is crucial for the body to be healthy and whole. What makes the body one is not the uniformity of its parts but the living, loving, gracious presence of God as its head.