It’s Good Friday–have an Epiphany post! 😉
I Corinthians 1: 10-18
Sometimes I think we get a little too attached to our denominations. Not that there’s anything wrong with having a different opinion from someone else, per se, but when we use our disagreements as a reason to keep ourselves separate from other Christians, we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face.
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Ah, the Corinthians. The dissidents. The troublemakers. There’s something so quintessentially Pauline in the palpable exasperation we read in this letter, perhaps because it’s one of Paul’s most quoted. He just wants to help these people grow, and they just keep getting caught up in their arguments, and all he can think is that it’s like dealing with middle school levels of drama all over again. He just wants to teach them, and they just keep missing the point, and he’s starting to wonder if they’re doing it on purpose, just to mess with him.
So, when he gets a letter from them, some time after he leaves to start another congregation, it’s no surprise that the main content is request for help solving a dispute among the congregation. Apparently, everyone’s been taking sides on various issues and it’s starting to get a little heated.
We know how they feel. Little did Paul know, that would kind of be the story of the Church’s life for…pretty much all of its life. A large percentage of the theology we profess in our creeds found its way into the creeds because of some big argument in the early Church. Council after council was held to resolve the debates among the early Christians, and creed after creed was put forth explicitly defining the new orthodox position to make sure no one got it wrong.
We’ve been arguing ever since. First, the Schism between the West and the East, then Luther and the other Reformers leave the Catholic Church, while Henry VIII invents a new denomination so he can get a divorce. We’ve argued over slavery, women, gays, over mysticism, war, hierarchy. We spend so much of our time waving our own banners that the one banner that unites us is decaying in the dust of our closets.
We don’t belong to Apollos or to Paul or to Peter. We don’t belong to Luther or Wesley or Calvin or Augustine. We belong to Christ.
That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have our own, genuinely well-considered opinions about what the Bible means or how to lead a Christian life. But it does mean that we don’t need to draw battle lines because we disagree. There are enough enemies to face outside our congregation–poverty, injustice, hate–that if we turn each other into enemies, we’ve lost before we can begin.
Paul says later in this same letter that all the members of the Church make up the body of Christ. When we fight each other, we tear apart that body. We need each other. The feet need the hands to tie their shoelaces. The hands need the feet to go where work is needed. And so on. A body united can accomplish far more than each arm and leg crawling off to complete their own agendas.
We don’t need to be clones to be one body. We just need to love. And that is good news.
Loving Christ,
Teach us this day and always to live together in peace, to treasure our differences as the beauty of the kaleidoscopic tapestry that is your Church. Unite us, that we may face the worthier foes of poverty, cruelty, and injustice in the world. Make us one with you and one with each other, that as one body we may be a light to a dark world. In your holy name we pray, Amen.
Plagal Cadence 