QUARRELSOME CHRISTIAN
A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown
Market Square Presbyterian Church
January 27, 2008
Scripture: Psalm 27 and I Corinthians 1:10-18
What an odd subject for a sermon on the Sunday in January when we are holding our annual congregational meeting—“Quarrelsome Christians.” It sounds like an invitation to join in a food fight at the luncheon that follows today’s service!
On second thought, I have found this a very helpful passage to reflect upon as we approach the rite of passage known in Presbyterian parlance as the Annual Meeting of Market Square Presbyterian Church. And Paul certainly offers us food for thought as we ordain and install officers for the coming year.
Let’s head back to Corinth in southern Greece. The year is probably 54 or 55 AD. Paul had planted a church Corinth two or three years before, and by now there were 200 or so Christians who met in homes to celebrate the good news of God’s love that had been showered on them in Jesus Christ. People from all walks of life were being melded into the Body of Christ: Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female—all made one through God’s call “into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ the Lord.”
Or so Paul thought. He was in across the Aegean Sea in Ephesus when reports were brought to him by members of a family headed by a woman named Chloe about things coming unglued. Paul’s reaction is to rush off a letter dealing with the crisis at hand. He gets right to the point with his fragile young flock in Corinth:
Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord
Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no
divisions among you., but that you be united in the same mind and
the same purpose.
Paul was writing in what was called koiné Greek. For us the equivalent would be something like “plain every day, ordinary English.” The Greek Paul used was the language that united people all across the Mediterranean world—it was the language used by traders, seamen, soldiers and politicians who transcended the boundaries of their own necks of the woods.
Nestled in the verse I just read is a word that came to haunt the Corinthian churches just as it has haunted the Church of Christ in every age and in every place for the last 2000 years. That Greek word is schismata. It’s translated “divisions,” but that doesn’t really suffice. We confront its darker meaning when we sing “The Church’s One Foundation:”
Though with a scornful wonder
This world sees her [the church] oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed….
It’s no wonder Paul is worked up. His new church development in Corinth is barely three years old, and already schism has reared its ugly head. The root to the word is to cleave or to cut. For Paul it’s as if someone has taken a meat cleaver or a sword to his beloved community and rent it asunder.
How can this be? Paul tells us what he has heard from Chloe’s people about the quarrels that are taking place. They stem from a kind of party spirit that has suddenly erupted.
What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,”
or “I belong to Apollos,” or I belong to “Cephas,” or
“I belong to Christ.”
The church in its infancy in Corinth is now dividing into camps gathered around individuals. I belong to Paul. That is, I think Paul’s message is the best. This camp could well have been made up of Gentile converts—persons drawn by Paul’s message of the breaking down of the walls of hostility between Jew and Gentile.
I belong to Apollos. We learn more about him in Acts. He was a Jewish convert from Alexandria in North Africa—silver tongued, charismatic, passionate. He was also a little lacking in some of the basics of the Christian message, and as we learn in Acts 18, two other leaders, Priscilla and Acquilla, at one point had to take him aside and fill him in on the meaning of Christian baptism. Now we find him in Corinth, revved up and gathering quite a following of his own.
Then there was the camp declaring, “I belong to Cephas,” the original Aramaic name of the Apostle Peter. He had his own following, most likely among some of the Jewish Christians in Corinth. By now all of this sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? “I belong to Calvin.” I belong to Luther. I belong to Wesley. We know full well what this is all about, don’t we?
What is not so easy to understand at first glance is the last camp of those who say, “I belong to Christ.” How could that be divisive? Is not Christ the One who grants us wholeness? Is that not what every Christian should say? “I belong to Christ.” Yes and no. Yes, as a general affirmation of faith, but No, if what is being said is what Paul picked up on in Chloe’s message. There were those saying: “We are the ones who really belong to Christ, but we are not so sure about you.” As Richard Hays notes, “Paul sees…that when ‘I belong to Christ’ becomes the rallying cry of one contentious faction within the church, Christ is de facto reduced to the status of one more leader hustling for adherents within the community’s local politics.”[1]
Paul is scandalized. “Has Christ been schismatized, chopped up in pieces?” Were you baptized in my name, or Peter’s, or Apollos’s? No, of course not, says Paul. He is reminding the Corinthians and us with all the power he can muster that the one uniting reality is the cross of Christ, the self-giving love of God poured out for him, for Apollos, for Peter, for you and for me.
I think you can see why this may in fact be an ideal text for a Sunday when we ordain and install officers and when we meet as a church family. I don’t believe for a second that we are being rent asunder by schisms or by heresies distressed. But I do believe that there is a tendency rooted deep within the human heart to lose sight of the central claim of the Christian Gospel about our unity in Christ and give in to party spirit. This has been a reality in the Christian Church from day one—or at least from year three if Chloe was right.
In our larger society today, we can turn on any one of a number of talk shows and news channels for five minutes any time of day or night to get a taste of party spirit run amok. We are poised at a moment in history when what the world needs now is careful, spirited, dialogue on the future of our planet, our children, our political institutions, on the reduction of armaments, on a surge in forums and institutions dedicated to mutuality and justice for all. Somehow all this seems to be getting lost in the battle cries of “I belong to…….” We each can fill in the blanks.
In the face of all this I sometimes wonder what it is that enables us to stay together as a united congregation when the larger church and world are beset by schisms of every sort imaginable. This was in the back of my mind on Friday night when we hosted the showing of the film, “For the Bible Tells Me So,” the work of Daniel Karslake, a gifted young filmmaker who grew up in Camp Hill. There were almost 400 people here in our sanctuary Friday evening, with a few protestors out on Second Street yelling at folks coming in the doors of our church.
The film is about faith and human sexuality, about the place of gays and lesbians in church and synagogue. It is built around case studies of families in which children discovered that they were gay—and the twists and turns in the road that ensued for these young men and women and their parents and their faith communities. The families include former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt and his wife Jane and their daughter Crissy who told them she was a lesbian the year Gephardt announced he was running for president of the United States. The love that radiated through the Gephardt family as the drama of their personal and public lives unfolded is an amazing thing to behold.
They modeled for me what I think Paul was after in the Corinthian Church, a foundation so deep, so strong, so grounded in God’s self-giving love that human families and communities of faith can remain together as issues as basic as human sexuality are sorted out in every generation. Down the road some Sunday we’ll come back to what Paul tells the church in Corinth about sexual practices. For now we need to heed his admonition that if we really embrace the good news of the cross, the good news that God is in the midst of our families and our church, then schism loses its power to destroy.
The Gephardt family stayed together because their love ran deep. I think that’s why we stay together. We don’t all agree on everything related to our life together at Market Square, but we are committed to the well being of the church and the brothers and sisters who make it up—all the brothers and sisters. I have to believe that the gift of unity is bigger than any of us—that it is part and parcel of what Paul calls the foolishness of the cross—God’s suffering love poured out with you and me in mind.
I’ll close with a story. I may have to fight back tears when I tell it, for my eyes well up every time I think of it. It has to do with the sharing of the peace that is part of our worship. It’s a simple thing. Like everything else we do, not all of you like this moment in our worship. Most of you do, I suspect, but some of us, on some Sundays, would rather not have to get up and move about during worship. Our life together is full of gentle compromises, about little things and big ones. In our worship and all we do together we continually work to keep our spirits open to the Spirit of Christ who unites us, differences and all.
Over the years I have come to see sharing the peace of Christ as part of our routine and confess that I pretty much just take it for granted. And by the way, I often don’t come down from the chancel in that I or Kelly use this moment in the service to give a special greeting to those worshiping with us though our radio outreach.
Not too long ago I called on one of our members who is in a nursing home. As always she told me how much she misses being in worship. But this time she told me that one of the things she misses most is the sharing of the peace. She remembers with such happiness sharing the peace of Christ with her friends and with strangers who sat near her, with any and all who came her way.
Do you know what she does on Sundays now, sitting in her wheel chair in the nursing home listening on the radio? As we share God’s peace here, God’s shalom, she closes her eyes, remembers us by face and by name, and shakes her hand up and down and up and down, greeting us as her brothers and sisters in Christ.
It’s a gesture like that that keeps us whole, that reinforces in us the conviction that nothing, absolutely nothing can separate us, can divide us from the love of God made known to us in Jesus Christ.
Paul has it that all this is made possible so long as we lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim, till all the world adore his sacred name, as our closing hymn will declare. If this is our ultimate priority, all we can ask or need will be given to us.
What good news this is in a quarrelsome time so much like the first century. What good news indeed!