First
Corinthians is hands down my favorite Epistle.
Paul is
trying to help the Church in Corinth
work though their human frailty
to become
the Body of Christ and carry out his Kingdom Mission.
Paul is
teaching the Corinthians how to be the kind of community
that attracts people to Jesus by
showing them
who Jesus’ followers
become.
Paul wants
people to see Christians and say two things:
“I want to be with them” and “I want
to be like them.”
Jesus said,
“This is how people will know you are my disciples.
By your love for one
another.”
St. John
said, “Dear friends, let us love one another for love
comes from
God. . . .
If we love one another, God lives in us
and his love
is perfected in us. . . .
God is love and those
who abide in love, abide in God. . .
Those who say, ‘I love
God’ and hate their brothers or sisters
are liars,
For those who do not love their
brothers or sisters
whom they have seen
cannot love God whom
they have not seen.”
200 years
later, the Father of Western theology, Tertullian,
summed up the basic strategy of how
to show pagans
the beauty of the
Christian way. He wrote:
“’See how
these Christians love one another,’ the pagans say,
for they themselves hate one
another,
‘and how they are ready to die for teach other,’
for the pagans are ready to kill each other.’”
But to turn
to another kind of Scripture,
in the words of Diana Ross, “Love
don’t come easy.”
It didn’t
come easy to the saints in Corinth.
The first
thing we hear about is the faction
over some folks being fans of one
apostle
while others were followers of
another.
Paul urges
them to put aside those divisions. He says,
“As long as there is jealously and
quarrelling among you
are you not of the flesh
and behaving according to human
inclinations?”
So stop dividing
up according to which apostle you like best.
Then he
turns to lawsuits between church members
and says it is better to be
defrauded than to sue a brother.
Then there
was the biggest fight of all.
It was about
eating food that came from pagan sacrifices.
1st
Century Christians were as worked up over what they ate
as 21st Century
Christians are worked up over sex.
Paul says
that the ones who eat the meat are right theologically
but he tells them to abstain anyway
out of love for those who are offended
by it.
And so the
letter to the Corinthians proceeds
petty issue by petty issue, church
fight by church fight,
until he breaks into a spiritual
aria to explain his point.
That’s the
famous 13th Chapter of 1st Corinthians,
the hymn to love we always read at
marriages,
but it isn’t about marriage.
It’s about
being a congregation.
“If I speak
in the tongues of mortals and of angels,
but have not love, I am a noisy gong . . . .
Love is
patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful
or arrogant or rude.
It does not
insist on its own way.
It is not
irritable or resentful.
It does not
rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth.
Love bears
all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things.”
That’s what
love means.
God is love.
Those who abide in love,
those who follow the discipline of
love
–
and
it is a discipline because Diana Ross is right
– love don’t come easy –
those who follow the discipline of love, abide in love,
God lives in
them and they live in God.
And when we
abide in love
the 87% of Nevadans with no faith of
any kind
will say, “I want to be with them
and I want to be like them.”
Paul never
again wrote anything so beautiful as 1st Corinthians.
But I’m
sorry to say they didn’t get it.
This story
doesn’t have a happy ending
When we get
to 2nd Corinthians, things have just gotten worse.
40 years
later, decades after Paul was dead and gone,
the Corinthians were still fighting.
By then,
Clement, the bishop of Rome, had taken over Paul’s job
and was still pleading with them to
just get along
and treat each other in Jesus’ way,
not the world’s way.
Corinthians
is pretty straight forward,
but the Epistle to the Romans gets
misunderstood
and misused most of the time.
Actually, it
isn’t the theological treatise people think it is.
It’s just
like Corinthians, an effort to smooth out a church fight.
In Rome the
Jewish Christians and the gentile Christians
were going at it.
It got so
bad the Emperor Claudius threw the whole lot
of them out of town kit and
caboodle.
Paul wrote
Romans to try to show them that it is better to be kind
than to be right.
The Romans
may not have gotten it right away.
But I think
the point eventually sank in.
Here’s why I
think they got it.
Between 165
and180, a plague swept through
the urban centers of the Empire,
killing one-third to one-half of
city populations.
The city of
Rome was particularly hard hit.
It’s named
Galen’s plague after Galen,
the Emperor’s personal physician.
Galen is
famous because he figured out
that people were catching the plague
from contact with each other.
It was the
first discovery of contagion in the Ancient World.
So Galen
told everyone who had the wealth and ability
to get out of town.
Well, that
was fine for the people who could do it.
But it left
the sick and the dying to their own devices.
It wasn’t
pretty, a city of the sick, the dying, and the dead.
And everyone
ran away – except the Christians.
The
Christians had an odd notion that the love of God,
that is God’s love living in their
own hearts, would protect them.
And if it
didn’t, then they’d just die in God’s service and go to heaven.
So the
Christians stayed and nursed the sick, prayed with the dying,
and buried the dead.
The pagans
looked on in wonder.
They said,
“See how these Christians love one another.
See how they even love us.”
Christianity
remained illegal in the Empire for another century.
But by the
end of that century, one third of the Empire
had converted to Christianity
largely because of the
love
Christians displayed during Galen’s
plague.
For us human
beings, love don’t come easy.
But you know
what G. K. Chesterton said,
“Christianity has not been tried and
found wanting.
It has been found difficult and not
tried.”
Nothing good
comes easy.
What is best
may be hardest of all.
But the
reward is to live in God
and have God live in us.
The hardest thing is the
thing most worth doing.
