"Sewn Into One”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Hilary J. Barrett

Pleasantville UCC, July 3, 2011

1 Corinthians 1:1-17

“Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters,* by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose.”

(1 Corinthians 1:10)

We are two weeks into our summer preaching series on the letters of the Apostle Paul and this week we turn to Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth. But before we do, let’s remind ourselves of why Paul’s letters are so important to the Church.

The New Testament in comprised of 27 books: four gospels, the Book of Acts (which is really the second volume of Luke’s gospel written by the same author), the apocalyptic literature known as Revelation, and 21 epistles, or “letters.” Of those 21 letters, 13 of them are from Paul or his missionary associates.  The earliest gospel we have is the gospel according to Mark which was probably written around 70 A.D.   While it is difficult to establish the chronological order of Paul’s letters, we know that they pre-date Mark’s gospel by about 20 years and are, therefore, the earliest documents we have about Christianity.  These letters offer words of instruction, encouragement, guidance and correction to the churches and they allow us to overhear conversations between those early Christian communities and the man who founded them.

We want to remember that when we read Paul’s letters to the churches we are literally reading somebody else’s mail.  The letters we have represent his communication with fledgling congregations during the periods of his absence.  These are congregations he established or helped to establish on his missionary journeys throughout the Mediterranean.  Paul would arrive in a city, stay for a period of time to preach the gospel, convert Gentiles and Jews to the way of Christ, establish a congregation, identify leaders to carry it forward in his absence, and then move on to another city to do the same thing all over again.  The letters we have mark those occasions when one of his partners in ministry would report back that there were problems in the congregation; or that folks there had some theological questions that needed answering; or that the congregation faced persecution and needed a word of encouragement.  In those cases, when Paul could not return to these communities for a face to face visit to offer support, he would write a letter – and it is from these letters that we learn so much about the early church, about Paul himself, and about how we are to live as Christians.

Last week we looked at what we believe to be the earliest Christian document: Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians.  We learned that Thessalonica was a port city; it was located on a major Roman highway, and it was the capital of the province of Macedonia.  All of these things exposed its residents “to a wide variety of social and cultural influences.”[1] 

This week, we turn our attention to the city of Corinth and the congregation that Paul established there.  Corinth was a prosperous commercial crossroads located on the Isthmus of Corinth, which is a narrow land bridge linking northern and southern Greece.  The city strategically overlooked two harbors -- one harbor led straight to Italy; the other harbor led straight to Asia.  At the time, the sea voyage around the southern coast of the Peloponnesian peninsula was difficult and dangerous.  As a result, merchants who were shipping goods between Asia and Italy preferred to send their cargo by way of Corinth.   The narrowest part of the land bridge is just four miles across. Rather than sail around the southern coast of the peninsula, small ships were portaged across the isthmus and larger vessels were unloaded, transferred on land to the other side, and reloaded at the other port.  Corinth’s position allowed it to command a major east-west trade route between the Aegean and Ionian (or Adriatic) seas.  As a result, it was a very wealthy city.  

When Paul came to Corinth for the first time, he stayed for a year and a half. He stayed with Priscilla and Aquila and made his living by making tents which would have been used by merchants and others needing shelter who were traveling through Corinth along that trade route.  Paul founded the Corinthian congregation and while he was there he wrote a letter to the Christians at Thessalonica.  That letter is known as 1 Thessalonians.

The letter we know as 1 Corinthians was probably written between the years 53-55 A.D. when the Corinthian church had been in existence for only about five years. Paul had left the Corinthian community in a relatively harmonious condition; now he has learned, to his dismay, that quarrels are splitting the church.[2]  He has received a report from “Chloe’s people” that there is serious dissension within the community.  “Their report presumably also included alarming information about other problems within the Corinthian church: sexual immorality…legal disputes…abuses of the Lord’s Supper…and controversies about the resurrection of the dead…”[3]  The second reason for Paul’s letter was that the Corinthians themselves had written to Paul asking for his advice about several things.  They posed questions about sex within marriage, eating meat that had been offered to idols, the issue of spiritual gifts in the community’s worship and Paul’s collection for the church in Jerusalem.[4]  Paul intended to visit the community in order to sort out all the problems he has learned about but this letter is a stopgap measure “until Paul himself can get there to deal with the issues in greater depth.”[5]  After Paul’s opening salutation, the letter begins to address the heart of the matter. Reading from Eugene Petersen’s translation called, The Message:

I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends, using the authority of Jesus, our Master. I'll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common.

I bring this up because some from Chloe's family brought a most disturbing report to my attention—that you're fighting among yourselves! I'll tell you exactly what I was told: You're all picking sides, going around saying, "I'm on Paul's side," or "I'm for Apollos," or "Peter is my man," or "I'm in the Messiah group."

            It was the report of fighting in the congregation that led Paul to write his urgent appeal to the fledgling Christians at Corinth.  In his letter, Paul addresses each of the concerns that Chloe’s people raised, as well as the questions the congregation asked about how they were to live faithfully in the midst of tremendous religious and cultural diversity.  Another complicating issue for the congregation was that the new converts that made up the community represented a wide spectrum of “social and economic classes, ranging from prosperous household heads to slaves.”[6]  To gather the wealthy and the poor together in one place was high unusual.  Everywhere else in the Roman Empire, these different groups of people would have been highly segregated, but the church was a radical experiment; a place where the distinctions and divisions of the Empire fell away.  When Paul heard that the Corinthian church was not living out their unity as Christ’s body, he was greatly concerned.

The fundamental theme of 1 Corinthians is sounded in 1:10:

“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.”

Everything that follows is an elaboration of this appeal. 

The specifics of Paul’s letter are fascinating and worthy of study.  But for our purposes here this morning, it is his resounding call to these news Christians in Corinth that ‘there be no divisions among them; that they be united in the same mind and the same purpose’ that we must hear and heed, still, in the 21^st century.  And that’s a tall order.

It’s not easy to be of the same mind and the same purpose.  Some of us grew up in the Christian church.  Some of us entered the church as adults.  Some grew up in traditions which came to be n as the United Church of Christ, many more of us grew up in other traditions and found our way here because we were drawn to the vision of a Church where, “no matter who you are, no matter where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”[7]

We live in a world of ever-increasing diversity.  Diversity is a word that used to be “code” for racial and ethnic pluralism, but in reality our worlds are filled with vast diversity that include racial and ethnic difference, but also include religious pluralism, the urban, suburban, and rural divide, political and ideological differences, issues of class and gender and broad theological differences.  Being of the ‘same mind and the same purpose’ seems highly improbable; indeed it would take an act of God for all that diversity to live together in love under the same roof.  But there you have it: an act of God.

1Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,

2 To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord* and ours:

3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul, called to be an apostle by the will of God…
                        to the church of God that is in Corinth,
                                    to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus,
                                                called to be saints…
There you have it: the Church is an act of God.  And we are called to be “saints” – “those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus” – that is, those who are set apart to live together in Christ.

To be of the same mind and the same purpose does not mean that we all think the same way.  It does not mean that we walk in lock step.  It does not mean that we all vote the same way.  It does not mean that we all see things the same way. To be of the same mind and the same purpose means that despite our differences we remain one Body.  That, in the beautiful words of the Salem Covenant from 1629:

“We covenant with the Lord and one with another;
and do bind ourselves in the presence of God,
to walk together in all his ways,

according as He is pleased to reveal himself unto us

in his blessed word of truth.”

To be of the same mind and the same purpose means that we never forget that we are bound together.  And that changes everything. 

The more we get to know the early church, the more we can see that the Church has always been a place where people of vastly different perspectives and backgrounds have gathered together to seek the same mind and the same purpose.  We are, after all, imitating the Master.  It is that mind and that purpose that we seek.

Learning to live together in the midst of our differences is something that the Church needs to do and needs to get better at it.  And there’s a very practical reason for it.  If we, here, who are bound together in this place, cannot figure out how to seek the same mind and the same purpose, then there is little hope for our nation or our world.

Like those who gathered in the cosmopolitan city of Corinth two thousand years ago, we too are called to be ‘saints’ – called to be a people set aside for ministry.  By God’s grace, may we be given power to do just that -- so that lives can be changed and faith restored.

May it be so.  Amen.