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Sermon: The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany (A) - 6th February 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7,8 &10 am
Readings: Isaiah 58:1-9a; Psalm 112; 1 Corinthians 2:1-13; Matthew 5:13-20
From last Sunday, until the end of February, the second reading will come from 1 Corinthians. Then from the First Sunday of Lent, until and including Palm Sunday, the second reading comes from other Pauline writings. Why is there so much from the writings of Paul? Much of what is to be read is to do with what it means to be a Christian.
For Paul, the Christian faith is lived in community. The individual is never simply and singly related to God. If "faith" is Paul's word for right relation to God, then "love" is Paul's word for right relation to others. Love, the proper caring for another, is the necessary expression of faith, the proper relating to God, because faith expresses itself in love. Caring for other believers, building them up, encouraging them, consoling and even warning them, are not options for believers; they are a requirement of faith. We can see this in 1 Corinthians because some of the believers there seem to have focused their attention on themselves and on God and ignored, neglected, or disregarded others; and Paul simply cannot abide it. In this sense, the whole of 1 Corinthians is a study in love.
Paul recognizes that the very constitution of community requires a sort of give and take relationship between the individuals and the community. To be a believer apart from community is inconceivable for Paul. Therefore, believers must be ready to accept the conditions of community. That acceptance always involves contributing to the enrichment of the fellowship by putting whatever gifts a person has in service to the common good. Perhaps, more of a problem for modern readers, sometimes membership of the community will cause the individual to give up their personal rights or the rather natural desire to seek what seems so clearly in their own self-interest. Paul's assumption is that all individuals in the church will share in the benefits of membership, such as care and support for one another.
Paul is so committed to the community as the way the life of faith should operate, that when he sees a conflict between the rights of the individual and the rights of the community, he will regularly recommend that the individual give up their individual rights and choose the community's well-being instead. 1 Corinthians shows this when Paul advises that the ones who speak in tongues withhold expression of them if no one is there to interpret and that when one is speaking and another receives a revelation, the speaker should give way. Paul shows this pattern when he himself expresses his willingness never to eat meat if it might cause another to stumble.
We must be careful, however, because in all of his concern for the health of the community, Paul never denigrates the importance of the believer's individuality. Variety and difference are not sacrificed for community. Rather, Paul strives to integrate the distinctiveness of individuals and relishes the importance of difference to the wholesomeness of the fellowship. Accordingly, he acknowledges that different people eat all sorts of different things while others have restrictive diets. Some people have homes in which to host the church, and, some have nothing; some have a few spiritual gifts, and others have many; some live with the law as the defining centre of their lives, while others do not. Some people plant, and others water and every person experiences testing as if it belonged to that person alone. Each one of these quite distinctively individual persons is welcome, is important and is even necessary to the body of Christ.
Paul assumes that believers should be responsible moral agents, that their lives are not simply driven from the heart, and that their minds should be integrated with their spirits in all of their moral reasoning. In his life, he models what he says, at once moral, deliberative, and spiritual. All of life, in every moment and in every situation, must be lived as ready for God's final judgment, not in quaking boots indicating a lack of confidence in God's grace active in one's life, but in thankfulness to God for great and abiding mercy, ever present in good and in tough times. A Christians conduct, therefore, must be weighed with regard to several considerations: how it expresses God's love for us, how appropriate it is to the strength of our faith, and how it affects others.
Different believers are of differing maturity. Some are "babies" in the faith; others are more mature; no one is completely mature. As surely as babies learn to crawl and later walk but can carry no additional load, and as more mature persons can not only walk but also carry burdens for themselves and for others, so also Paul thinks it is with believers.
Because of the conflict between their self-estimation and Paul's, his letter urges them to take careful stock of their standing and of their maturity. Some of the believers at Corinth have thought of themselves as having arrived at the fullness of what God can bestow; they have become "arrogant" or "puffed up" as he sometimes puts it. Their arrogance is having disastrous effect on their fellow believers, who seem altogether too ready to accept their compatriots' puffy self-importance and, with it, reinforces their own low a self-esteem. Out of that low self-esteem, the less self-important Corinthians live as if they have less to offer the community of believers. A considerable part of Paul's effort in 1 Corinthians is aimed at bringing all sorts of quite different people back into full and equal participation in the community
1 Corinthians sets out several features of the Christian life as it has been experienced through the centuries. First, the problems of unity because, after all, that is one of the major problems that arise in the issues reflected in the letter. Churches, like other social groups, are subject to divisions from all sorts of sources, and Corinth certainly has its share. Whether it is wealthy persons treating the poorer with disdain, or especially religiously gifted persons becoming arrogant, full of pride, and disdainful of those less gifted, or persons of whatever socioeconomic bracket who think first of themselves and little about the needs of others, or persons who overestimate how strong they are in faith, or persons who have low self-esteem and cower timidly before those they consider more advanced, the list could go on. The church at Corinth has them all, and so does the Church of today.
Likewise, Paul's response to those challenges of the Corinthian church’s unity, distinguishes genuine unity from uniformity. Paul labours to help the Corinthians see that they truly belong to one another in Christ, despite the differences of gifts and graces they exhibit. In fact it is precisely in the differences they bring to the community that he sees the creative, stimulating work of the Holy Spirit. The community's health and growth depend on each person contributing what the Spirit offers through him or her to the common good of all. Without the variety and distinctiveness that each one brings, the faithful community would be a pale imitation of what it ought to be.
We must not miss Paul's self-portrait as the stumbling, not-very-gifted speaker. We are all called, at various times in our live, to share our faith or to talk about the gospel. However, many of us are hesitant to speak because we feel insecure or inadequate. We can take some solace from Paul's self-portrait here. The power of our witness, if it is to have any, is ultimately God's power, and God has been pleased to make that power effective through all sorts of cracked, damaged vessels down through the ages, such as us, here in Epping.
Paul talks about judging, a very complex topic in this letter and no doubt inspired by a Corinthian readiness to judge one another in ways Paul found unacceptable. First, it must be said that Paul never assumes that believers "play God". It is God who judges; it is only the Lord who can discern the secret and hidden purposes of the heart. Others have no business meddling in what is divine prerogative, which, in Paul's view, will fully and finally take place at the return of the Lord. Paul knows that the Corinthian believers are immature because they bicker and are divisive; in fact, they are acting just like ordinary people, not believers. The Corinthians are the mother church of all subsequent squabbling churches. One of the great shames of the church is that the family of God has so many offspring who will not talk and commune with each other. Christians should find ways to honour the divinely inspired differences that we all bring to the common table without charging one another with being wrong. Different is not necessarily wrong. In the midst of our genuine differences of gifts and graces we should welcome one another in love.
This sermon prepared using The New Interpreter’s Bible, VolX, Abibgdon Press, Nashville 2002