February 5, 2012
Text: I Cor. 9:19-23
Some years ago there was an interfaith conference of Christians and Buddhists. At the conference the Christians went out of their way to avoid talking about differences and instead insisted in talking about what Christians and Buddhists have in common. The Buddhist response was that talking about our common beliefs doesn’t get us anywhere. They were more interested in the differences – in what makes you who you are and us who we are. They said that when we put that on the table we can really begin to talk.
This story speaks to me. It challenges me to look at the bigger issue which is how the Christian faith leads in a different direction than the dominant American culture. I don’t see Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism as threats to Christian churches. The threat is our culture – its competing beliefs, values and ways of thinking. The more we can distinguish ourselves from this culture, the more we are equipped to search for truth with people of other religions.
This morning let’s talk about who are we as a Christian community. What is special about us? By special I mean things that empower us and hold such promise that we are eager to pass this on to our children and grandchildren and invite people from elsewhere to come and see for themselves.
It is not easy to talk about ourselves, and frankly, I have struggled for weeks think and write about this question. Bear with me as I give it a try. I hope that this effort will inspire others to give it a shot in the coming weeks.
What has led me to what I have to say has been working with the lectionary text for today in I Cor. 9:16-23. I am focusing on the verses 19-23.
Paul writes as a man whose life revolves around a clear and compelling call. His call is to gather and build, from regions bordering the Mediterranean Sea, small communities of Jesus disciples like the one in this room. This suggests that his call is not first and foremost to get as many individuals as possible to convert from no religion or from another religion to the Christian religion. In Paul’s thinking, without active belonging to a Jesus community in conversion would have little meaning. In Paul’s mind belonging to Christ and belonging to a community grounded in the gospel were synonymous
Look at I Cor. 9:23 “I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” Here Paul lays out the motivation which drives him – to share in the blessings of the Jesus communities he is called to develop. He is speaking of blessings that are immediate in the here and now, not blessing to come in another life after death. Indeed the very existence of the Jesus community as a new creation is part of the gospel. Let’s chew on that – the community itself, where the new creation is occurring, in Paul’s mind is part of the gospel.
When I first became exposed to the Church of the Saviour what immediately impressed me was the presence of a lot of blessings – helpful preaching and teaching, heartwarming, healing relationships, laughing and having fun together, and seriousness about things that really matter. In this community there was the awareness and acknowledgement of pain along with contagious joy. The community was grounded in a reality bigger than itself.. I wanted what I felt and saw. In the Church of the Saviour something real and contagious was going on, and I wanted in on it.
What goes on in a church that is consciously being formed by the gospel is that there is something real to touch, taste, receive and even push against. However, as Paul implies in verse 23, sharing in these blessings can never be taken for granted.
The key to community aliveness is sharing the gospel and living the gospel. By gospel he means a story which is a counter story to what we understand today as the empire story or the dominant culture story. The empire story makes a lot of promises. It proclaims a savior who is on the scene. It promises salvation and human peace. The question is can you trust that story? What about the specifics. What does it mean by peace? What does it mean by savior and salvation? These are important questions for an ongoing conversation, but let me here focus on one particular issue.
The evidence is growing that more and more Americans are really lost when it comes to using the word God in a meaningful way. This is inevitable in the face of our radically different understanding of the universe. When I was a child in the l930s growing up in a small town in Kentucky everyone I came in contact with believed in the existence of God and thought of God as located “above us.” Today we are confronted with scientific evidence there are a lot of universes out there, perhaps beyond the counting, and the way we know this is not by sight, even by the most powerful telescopes but by mathematics. In such a plethora of universes, the word God is an issue, and the ground on which we think about God has shifted. How can we think meaningfully about God and the distinction between “God above us” and “God with us”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, languishing in a Nazi prison and writing as he pondered, said that we now live in a world come of age. The issue now is not belief in God as a cosmic parent, as the “God above” but where and how to understand “God with us.” This led Bonhoeffer to focus on “God with us” as revealed in Jesus on the cross.
As those of us in this room, who have been studying climate change and what it will bring in the future, understand, human civilization is headed for a cross experience of suffering and radical upheaval in which we too will cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
How do we prepare ourselves, our children, grandchildren and the world for the crisis of faith that has already started?
Paul’s answer for the culture of his day was strange indeed, as it is for our day. Paul let it be known that the answer to the question of “God with us” – that is to the crisis of faith – is to hear deeply the Christian story and how that story plays out in the space of Christian community.
Barbara Hall who taught for several years at the Virginia Episcopal Seminary wrote an in depth study of these five verses and made the striking point that when Paul writes to the Christian house churches he thinks of them as “eschatological communities”.
I am conscious of using a word that is too often bandied about without actually knowing what it means. What the term “eschatological community” means is a community that is grounded in a particular future – that is, the future when and where God has his way. Jesus prayed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”
- An eschatological community is where the power and intent of Jesus’ prayer is manifesting.
- An eschatological community is one that is being shaped by that future toward which God is working, the future that expresses God’s heart.
- An eschatological community is being empowered to give visible expression to Jesus’ message that the Kingdom of God is at hand; that we can repent and believe this good news.
- An eschatological community demonstrates that the good news of the Kingdom of God is breaking in – now in ordinary existence and among ordinary people.
I submit that from its beginning the Church of the Saviour has thought about the church as an eschatological community. We belong to a movement of eschatological communities scattered across the earth – from mainland China to the slums of Rio de Janeiro to Columbia Road
Paul’s call was to gather and build eschatological communities. The heartbeat of these communities was a living, ongoing encounter with “God with us” who did not replace the God who spoke through prophets in the Old Testament or even the God that resonated in the hearts of some of the Gentiles in Paul’s time. The story Paul lived in and shared wherever he went was that in the life and event of Jesus Christ the God we once thought of as “God above” is really “God with” humankind.
Some serious Christians have trouble using the dual name “Jesus Christ”, feeling comfortable using the single name Jesus but not the dual name Jesus Christ. The English name Christ in Greek is “christos” which means Jesus Messiah. The early Christians heard this as a counter cultural name. When they professed their faith with the simple claim Jesus is Lord they were bearing witness to a different story, a counter story from that of the Roman Empire. Our Lord, the one who embodies the power of God with us is Jesus Christos, Jesus Christ, Jesus Messiah, not Caesar - Augustus Caesar, Tiberius Caesar, Nero Caesar or any other Caesar.
Who Jesus is and how the eschatological community is shaped by his life, death and resurrection has to be part of our conversation if we are going to face straight up who we really are and what our special-ness requires of us in the time and place assigned to us.
The risen Jesus issued to Paul a call to gather and build a particular kind of community. Because of the power people noticed operating in and reflected by these communities, a wide assortment of people were attracted.. They were Jew and Gentile, affluent and poor, free citizens and slaves, male and female, young and old. Paul taught that given the nature of the Christian community these old distinctions no longer defined its members. The whole community represented a new creation. It represented God starting over and providing a fresh ground of salvation. People were safe here. People feeling safe grew from the way Paul taught and demonstrated understanding of the gospel with his own life. This is what Paul is getting at when he says that to the Jews he became as a Jew, to those outside the law and under the law, he became as they were.
As you can imagine with such a diverse collection of people shaping them into a community was a huge challenge. One way Paul did it was to work with their issues, their differences, their controversies in a way that drew them together instead of pushing them apart. For example, their weekly worship services included a pot luck meal. People who got there on time wanted to eat while their food was hot. If they did this the slaves who had to finished chores in the homes of their master before leaving there were consistently late. By eating when the food was hot, the slaves got the leftovers. Paul got them to see that this was wrong which in that culture meant a totally different way of thinking for people born to the privilege of being Roman citizens.
Another example – the Jews compared to the Gentiles were in their upbringing what many of us back in the day would call “straight-laced.” For them God’s will meant conforming to rigid standards – like in the south in my childhood no dancing and no mixing of the sexes at the swimming pool. Paul understood clearly that in this situation something had to give. In fact both sides had to give. The issue was food that had been offered in sacrifices to Caesar or pagan gods and later sold in the market place. The group Paul calls the strong, of whom Paul was one, when they went out to dinner felt no need to inquire whether the food came from the Roman or Gentile shrines. The people with tight scruples felt honor bound to abstain. Paul’s teaching was for the strong to go along with those with rigid scruples when this became an issue. He equally challenged the rigid to see their way in Christ to loosen up.
A footnote here is that in the eschatological community growth and change is required of every one. The fact is that the weak are susceptible to tyrannizing the strong the same as the strong tyrannize the weak. Some of you who have been in spiritual support groups and other setting have run across tyrannizing at work both ways.
Next notice in the text the repeating word “as” which I have italicized with respect to becoming as a Jew, under the law and outside the law. Then notice that before the word “weak” in verse 22, he says “I became weak.” What stands behind that expression is the example of Jesus and his submission to weakness on the cross which Paul made the controlling image for guiding the growth of love in these eschatological communities.
Are not these teachings embedded in the Church of the Saviour tradition – for example, the combination of call and radical commitment? To Paul and to our tradition, Jesus means freedom. What he called enslaving himself, we call radical commitment. Rather than draining us, call gives us energy. It stirs our imagination. As we say, “It calls us forth” which enable us then to attract others to share the call and in time to hear their own calls.
A few months ago Dottie Bockstiegel went with Mike Little and others to visit people in Wise County, Virginia who are fighting mountaintop removal and the devastation of their beautiful region. Something happened to Dottie on that trip. She identified with the people suffering from the abuse of their land and themselves from the coal industry. She not only identified but felt the call to be in solidarity with these folks. Dorothy is now using her gifts of poetry writing, speaking, and persuasion to share with other communities the plight of Wise Country and things we can do to be in solidarity with them. The call to which Dottie is reorganizing herself is to a radical identification and solidarity with others, in this case a group of people who are acting as the moral conscience of a land that in itself is being violated by a power group acting out the values of the dominant American culture.
In a self focused American culture this makes no sense. In the 8th Day culture and the culture of the Church of the Saviour tradition it makes a lot of sense. We call it “radical discipleship.” Our belonging here results from call, call that claims us in a way that frees us to be who we are. Hearing a call brings us alive. It is the road to freedom – the freedom to love God, to love ourselves, and to love other people. Reverence for the experience of call goes to the core of our being as Christians and as a Christian community.
Paul’s participation in the gospel and its blessings depended upon his response of identification with the people the spirit drew into the community. And he taught the same by word and example to the forming house churches. Membership is a process of getting grounded in the gospel and embodying that grounding through a radical identification with one another and those who are in need in the world.
In closing let us praise God that so much of the wealth of this text is embedded in the Church of the Saviour tradition. In the world it makes no sense. Here it enables us to see, think, and believe that the God we worship is indeed the God with us.