A couple of
weeks ago someone asked a question on Facebook:
Can you be a Christian without belonging to a Church?
What
surprised me was how many people answered,
and with the exception of myself, it
was unanimous.
Yes, they
said with gusto, you can do it on your own.
In fact, the
folks in Churches are not Christians.
They are by
and large jerks.
Well
maybe. I have thought that myself on
occasion.
But just as
a matter of procedure, we become Christians
when we are baptized,
and when we are baptized, we become
church members.
But more
than that, the Christianity the Bible teaches
is emphatically a team sport.
hold in his head all by himself
is a modern Western invention.
It isn’t the
Biblical faith we read about in the New Testament.
Speaking of
the New Testament and today’s lessons in particular,
1st 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.
That’s what
Paul thought it meant to be a Christian:
part of the Body of Christ --
a co-worker for the Kingdom Mission.
Paul’s
Christianity is a team sport.
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. . . .
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 our basic strategy for
spreading gospel. 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 each other,’
for the pagans are ready to kill each other.’”
“See how
these Christians love one another.
But turning
to another kind of Scripture,
in the words of Diana Ross, “Love
don’t come easy.”
It didn’t
come easy in Corinth.
The first
thing we hear about is the friction
over some folks being fans of one
apostle
while others liked another apostle.
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 got as worked up over food
as 21st Century
Christians get 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 nosy 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. . . . .
Love bears
all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things.”
That’s what
love means.
But it takes
practice.
The church
is where we practice on each other.
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
In 2nd
Corinthians, things have just gotten worse.
40 years
later, when Paul was dead and gone,
the Corinthians were still fighting.
St. Clement 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.
The Epistle
to the Romans - like Corinthians --
is Paul smoothing out a church fight.
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 say: it is better to be kind than right.
The Romans
may not have gotten it right away.
But the
point eventually sank in.
Here’s why I
think they got it.
Between 165
and 180, 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.
Galen’s
plague didn’t discriminate.
It took down
pagans, Jews, and Christians alike.
And everyone
ran away – everyone -- 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.
It was like
jihadist suicide bombers only in reverse.
It was love
instead of hate.
So the
Christians stayed and nursed the sick, prayed with the dying,
and buried the dead.
The pagan
world 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.
That’s why
God gave us the Church as a practice field.
From the
Primates working out who gets to sit at the table
to the smallest issue in parish
life,
the Church is where we learn that 1st
Corinthians 13 kind of love.
We learn the
hard art of love here
so we can live it in the world.
Nothing good
comes easy.
What is best
may come hardest of all.
But the
reward is we get to live in God
and have God live in us.
The hardest
thing is the thing most worth doing.
The trick it
that there is only one way to do this thing: together.
