…in more ways than one. The following is the first of our 2010 Lenten series messages on the cross:

I Corinthians 1: 1Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,  2To the church of God in Corinth, (a) to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, (b) together © with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours:  3Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 4I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. 5For in him you have been enriched in every way—in all your speaking and in all your knowledge— 6because our testimony about Christ was confirmed in you. 7Therefore you do not lack (d) any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. 8He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9God, who has (e) called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful. 10I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. 11My brothers, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. 12What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.”  13Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul? 14I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15so no one can say that you were baptized into my name.

It must have been an awesome sermon. That, or the Spirit did a mighty work of grace. By the time the preacher finished his message, the normally staid, proud, uptight and status-conscious congregation was cut to the heart. Tears rolled down their faces as the message struck home: that everything rests upon the grace and the goodness of God, and not their own merits; that compared to God’s mercy and faithfulness, we have no right to compare ourselves with each other, nor to look down on anyone else.

First one, then another, among the congregants began to cry out, “I am nothing; I have nothing, that was not given to me by grace!” People knelt at their pews, or came up to the altar to confess the sin of their constant absorption with status, their sense of superiority, their obsession over other people whom they worshiped and imitated in the business and celebrity magazines, or whom they hated or feared or put down.

Just then a man passed by one of the doors of the sanctuary. He was in that church building more often than any of the worshipers, or even the pastor. But he never attended worship. He was the church janitor. Because of his poverty and his lower social class, he didn’t feel comfortable worshiping with the very people he served. But the leveling spirit of repentance was contagious, and he found himself drawn inside. Struck by the same Spirit of “grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved,” he too knelt at the altar and began crying out, “I am nothing! I have nothing that was not given me by God’s grace!”

In the pews two rows back, one man, down on his knees weeping, prodded another man next to him, pointed at the janitor, and said, “Look who suddenly considers himself as much a nothing as we are! What gives him the nerve?”

There we see how subtle and stubborn is the most original of all sins: pride. Its that stubborn and subtle compulsion to justify ourselves by comparing and contrasting ourselves with each other. You hear it in that phrase, often offered after receiving criticism, “Well, at least I don’t…..(pick your pet peeve) like….(pick your favorite enemy).” I wonder if that wasn’t what Adam and Eve got from eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: 20-20 vision of their own good and a 20-20 vision for each other’s evil. You see it in the way they covered themselves with fig leaves, and in the way Adam said to God, “That woman, that you gave me, she gave me the fruit…..” and of course, I took a taste. Just to be nice.

This compulsion to justify ourselves by comparing and contrasting ourselves to other people afflicted the Corinthian Church, as we see in verses 12 and 13. There Paul writes: “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.’ The people named just now were not divided against each other, but the people who followed them were. The Corinthian Christians were using these different names and persons as separate boxes into which to segregate, compare and classify themselves. That always leads to the need to have enemies and inferiors, so that we feel better about ourselves by contrast. People may wear these self-appointed titles and their levels of worth and honor like the crown you see on the altar, next to the cross.

This need to make sense of the world, by contrast and separation, begins in childhood. That’s the first and easiest way children know how to understand themselves, and the world, and to find some security in it: by rigid and simplistic divisions and distinctions. Sometime around 3 or 4 years of age its common for children to say in the most rigid terms, “Girls this….boys that.” Some girls at that age will want to wear the same pretty, frilly dress every day, all week. You try to raise your boys to be peaceful, non-violent, and still they may pick up every stick around and play like its a sword or a machine gun. Because those are the gender roles and distinctions they get from the world. Hopefully they’ll grow up to see how much more they are alike than different, even while respecting their differences as men and women. Hopefully they’ll develop a greater sense of freedom as they mature.

But not if they watch too many Superbowl commercials.

When we try to justify ourselves by comparing and contrasting ourselves against each other, its like weighing ourselves on a scale that never resets to zero. Or measuring things with a tape measurer that won’t retract. Or hiking through the woods, off trail, with a compass that won’t point in any direction, let alone north. Our measurements will get meaningless, and of course we’ll get lost.

If that’s where we get stuck, then we’ll stay childish in every way except one: the power by which to carry out our judgments and comparisons against each other. War is always based on the knowledge of good and evil: the knowledge only of our own good, and the knowledge only of “their” evil. Whoever “they” are. Children may play war, but adults have the power to make real war against the people they fear and consider inferior. In the First Church of Corinth, you could say that the spiritual equivalent of war had come to them.

As we grow up, however, we hopefully learn a more mature way of making sense of the universe and finding our place in it. In fact, that’s where Paul starts his letter to the Corinthians. Before he gives a diagnosis of their problem—those Corinthians have a divisive, judging spirit—he prescribes the solution: know who you really, truly are. Know your true identity, in God. Its an identity that does more to unite you than it does to divide. In those first verses I find at least four things—four common markers of identity that Paul wants them to remember. They apply to all churches, in all times and places, including us.

First of all, they are in verse 1, “the church of God in Corinth,” even though they were composed of many house churches. So, even though they, as members and congregations, come in different sizes, shapes, languages and cultures, they are to remember, together, that they are Christ’s one and only church in Corinth. Today, what this says for “I am of Menno, of Luther, of Wesley, of Rome, of England,” I can’t say in one sermon, except to remind us that we and all our neighbor churches also comprise, together, “the church of God in Minneapolis.” That’s why I attend a local weekly pastor’s prayer group. So hold every current distinction lightly. They won’t be forever.

Secondly, they—and we– are, “sanctified by Christ Jesus and called to be holy.” Therefore, we are not sanctified or made holy by any goodness of our own. We are sanctified and called to be holy by the goodness of Jesus Christ. Now, sanctified” means the same as “called to be holy.” Its not a statement of where anyone has arrived, as though some of the Corinthian Christians are walking about with holy halos around their heads while birds alight on their shoulders, they are so perfect and so far beyond temptation. I haven’t met anyone like that yet, certainly not in the mirror. Rather, its a statement of how God sees us and where God is leading us: “sanctified” simply means we have been set apart and dedicated to God’s service, to God’s honor, like the bowls, the cups and the dishes in Israel’s ancient temple. Once dedicated to God’s service, they couldn’t be loaned out for common uses: like chariot delivery pizza.

Our third statement of identity is that we are not only the church of Corinth, or the church of Minneapolis. Paul says we are the church of God, set apart for God, “together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours” in verse 2. In other words, we’re part of something much bigger than the local scene. There are bonds of the Spirit tying us into a holy communion with saints all around the world this morning. Our loyalty to them must be as strong as our loyalty to our neighborhood, even moreso than to our country, for they too are key to our identity.

The fourth thing Paul tells the Corinthians about themselves is that they are a gifted people.” Not just “gifted persons,” individually, one by one, but, in verse 7 a gifted group. In fact, so gifted, Paul says, that, “you do not lack any spiritual gift,” any God-given power for ministry and witness. But he means you plural, together, “you all,” as a group, and not you singular, any one man or woman. In every church there is only one person who has all the spiritual gifts that Paul will talk about in this letter. But don’t look around for him or her, don’t look up here, we can’t see this all-gifted person, except when we see us gathered, in worship, love or prayer. He’s the Lord Jesus, and he distributes his gifts for ministry throughout his church, and throughout his churches, in such ways that everyone needs each other’s gifts in order to best use their own.

There’s a kind of West African folk tale that captures this sense of communal, interdependent giftedness, like the one about the father of four children with special powers who went hunting one day and never returned. A week passed, a month passed, even a year, before, finally, the youngest child asked, “Where’s Dad?” So her three older, specially-gifted siblings went off to find him. The oldest sister had the gift of reading tracks no matter how old they were. She tracked her father down to to a distant clearing, where all they found were his bones. Around those bones she read the tracks of a lion. The second oldest, a son, had the gift of sewing together anything he liked out of grass. So he pulled up some grass and wove a complete human body around the bones: the spitting image of his father. The third, another son, had the gift of blowing life into anything he wished, so he blew the breath of life back into his father’s likeness, and home came Dad, alive, with his three oldest children. Such stories end by asking, “So, who was most responsible for bringing father back home?” There’s enough value in everyone’s contribution to keep the discussion going all night. Don’t forget to include the baby daughter who posed the question everyone else was ignoring. Such stories, to me, are like parables of the church. Everyone is gifted, but everyone needs each other’s gifts in order to use their own to the fullest.

Once we’ve got those identity markers down, what point is there in making ourselves feel better by comparing ourselves to others? Wouldn’t we feel pretty good already? Aren’t those identities awesome enough that we can just get on with being ourselves, without constantly worrying if someone is ahead of us, or worrying that someone won’t stay beneath us and behind us? Again, among other things, we are: 1) the church of God, 2) part of the worldwide, universal church, 3) set apart and called to be holy to God and God’s purposes, and4) gifted with complementary, mutually helpful gifts……together.

Twenty-one centuries later, that’s still who we are in Christ. Don’t forget it, but not because we are facing the intensity of divisive forces and factions like what the Corinthian churches faced. If anything, this is a remarkably united and gracious church for all the variety of cultures, class and generations among us. But we have our differences here too. And that’s a good sign. Because it means that we take our calling in Christ seriously. And that God is gifting us in many different ways to carry out his mission in the world. For that we must be united. But unity is a journey, not a destination. Unity is not the absence of differences but how we view differences and deal with them. If we understand who we really are, by the grace of God, because of Jesus Christ, then differences don’t have to be scary. Many of them we can see them as mutually enriching.

This last week, while Becky and I were in Mexico, I attended an Ash Wednesday service. At that church in Zihuatenejo, I saw that their theme statement for the season of Lent was, “Repent and Believe the Gospel,” a simple declaration from the earliest, simplest preaching of Jesus. The Lenten season theme we’ll be following, with many churches across our conference and denomination, is “Holding On and Letting Go.” That’s just like the theme of our Mexican brothers and sisters: “Repent and Believe the Gospel,” but in reverse order. “Letting Go” means repenting: repenting and releasing anything that is holding us back from Christian maturity, even, anything that is holding us back from Christian faith. “Holding on,” is another way of saying “Believing the gospel.”

If we’re looking for anything to let go of this Lenten season, we can settle for the usual things, like chocolate or dessert or meat or some other indulgence. If those things have such a grip on us that they’re holding us back, then let’s help each other break free of them this season. But I decided to start this year’s preaching focus on I Corinthians during Lent because, in the first few chapters of I Corinthians, Paul points our attention to some subtle, spiritual, but no less pressing things we might need to look for and unload if we find them on us. And not just for Lent, but for keeps. Just as Paul had to have the scales fall from his eyes after his encounter with Christ, on the day of his baptism, so do we Christians often need to let scales fall from our eyes as they accumulate.

The scales I’m thinking about this morning, which Paul identifies in this chapter, are the false identities that build up and blind us, They are the false identities that build up every time we seek to justify ourselves by comparing and contrasting ourselves against others, by that reflex to seek worth and security first and always in our distinctions, divisions and differences. Differences are real. They deserve respect. Some of them cannot be reconciled, but only managed. But we must not let them become idols on which we hang our worth and identity.

(TO THE CROSS)

For there is something so big, so major, so game-changing, that it calls into question all the trophies and badges and hierarchies by which we seek to divide and distinguish ourselves over and against others: the cross of Jesus. It may look like a miniscule -t- but think of it as a giant question mark from heaven, that calls into question all the judgments and assessments and evaluations of worth and status among people, all the criteria of who’s up and who’s down, what’s wise and what’s foolish, what’s eternal and what’s temporary. Its a sign that shows us the depths and the extent to which God will go to unite us with himself and each other. On that cross died not only the Savior of the World, but also all the ways and the excuses by which we seek to justify ourselves, all the comparisons we make to distinguish and divide ourselves from each other.

(PULL OFF FIRST CLOTH)

As I hope to show in the next few weeks, its by looking to the cross that all such scales begin to fall from our eyes.

The following is our theme verse for the year:

I Corinthians 12: 12: The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

With the city of Port au Prince, Haiti, reduced to rubble by last month’s earthquake, many experts in various aid and relief agencies feared that the city would descend into some sort of Mad Max, everyone-for-themselves chaos and competition. In some times and places that was indeed the case. It wasn’t long before TV news programs did indeed feature mobs of young men with machetes and guns running about the streets, extorting what little they could from survivors and relief agencies.

But dig a little deeper into the newspaper and the internet and you also find amazing and inspiring stories of cooperation, mutual aid, sharing and sacrifice among even the most desperate of Haitian earthquake survivors. One of which involves a pizza restaurant in Port-Au Prince, called (and I’m not making this up) Munchees. Before the earthquake, most residents of Port-au-Prince would never have eaten a Munchees pizza. Munchees was too expensive for most of them.

But after the earthquake, the management of Munchees realized that, without electricity and only so much fuel for their backup generators, all their pizza ingredients would only rot. So they used their remaining food and fuel to start feeding free pizzas to survivors on the streets until it was all gone. Realizing they had a good thing going, people organized themselves and cooperated to keep scrounging up whatever gasoline they could to keep the generators going, and whatever food they could find to keep the pizzas coming. Unless the electricity is back on, Munchees may still be giving out free food, even as I speak, as long as others keep coming up with fuel and odds and ends like canned food, still intact, from the rubble.

And that’s not the only amazing, surprising type of cooperation we see going on in Haiti. There have also been inspiring examples of cooperation among many of the relief and aid agencies coming into the country. Perhaps the most surprising is that which has developed between U.S. Army medics and Cuban doctors, sharing supplies, space and expertise.

There we see one of the active principles of the world, a force for drawing things and people together in cooperation, interdependence and union. We see it in the way we have gathered this morning; you see it when people greet each other with hugs or handshakes. Even when taking leave of each other, people will hug as if to say, “Even when we’re apart, we’re together.” The basic steps of a two-partner dance, or a two-line contra dance, are together—apart—together–apart. But even the apart steps are done together. We each come into the world through the forceful desire of union. And even though birthing is spoken of as a parting from the womb, as in “post-partum,” it is yet true that, as the Malian proverb says, “other people’s hands carry us into this world, and other people’s hands will carry us out.”

This unifying force at work in our world, like at our conception or birth, or lining up outside the ruins of Munchee’s pizza, is more than a force. It has walked our world as a person: Jesus of Nazareth. He is present with us still through His Holy Spirit. We experience this person as love, and He expresses himself through us as love.

But Oh, how often we miss the workings of love, because we are more adept at seeing the other force and reality of life, the force that separates, divides, distinguishes and differentiates. Analyze the Greek name for Satan, the Evil One, and it translates as “dia-Bolos,” “Dia” for “Through” as in “through the window,” and “Bolos” for “throw,” as in “throw it out the window.” The devil is the “through– thrower,” like someone with an irresistible compulsion to throw rocks through windows, to break and to separate what should stay whole and together.

But the act of distinction and separation is not all bad. Though tigers and donkeys both have four legs and two ears, smart farmers have long known better than to hook one of them to a plow or a cart. The art of dissecting and analyzing everything down to its littlest parts have given us great powers in science, engineering and medicine. For nearly anything that ails us, we can find a specialist who can help us fix our livers, our gall bladders or any one of our glands. But its also getting harder to find the generalists who can tell us how we are doing, in total, in our bodies, our relationships or our communities. Our skills of dissection and distinction are so advanced, we don’t value or reward generalists the way we do specialists. And that tendency to separate and isolate things can also make us very lonely and fearful.

By contrast, many people in many different cultures start their thinking in terms of We, Us, and everything all together, before they start looking at separate, single things. The Dakota Indian word for harmony translates as “All my relations.” The Jula word that Becky and I learned in West Africa for bees translates to “honey children” in English. The word, “children” tells us how bees relate to each other. The other word “honey,” tells us what it is they work together to make, and one thing they contribute to us. Its a way of defining things in relationship to the wider whole, rather than in distinction and isolation. The cooperation we see then in the rubble of Port-Au-Prince, outside the ruins of Munchee’s Pizza should not surprise us. It wasn’t all Mad Max, law of the jungle, and everyone for himself before the earthquake hit, so it should not surprise us that it wouldn’t be afterward.

That’s where Paul is trying to move his Corinthian disciples in today’s Bible passage: toward a vision for the whole, rather than just the parts in isolation. If Paul were a doctor, he would be a generalist making a diagnosis of the state of the whole local body of Christ, and giving a prescription for the health of the whole, not just its separate parts. Or if he were a scientist, he’d be an ecologist, one who studies the connections and harmonies between different living things, rather than a scientist who only specializes in, let’s say, the hairs on bees’ knees.

From the drama you heard, you hopefully get an idea of what was going on, and going wrong, in the Corinthian house churches, that caused someone there to write Paul—probably the house church leader Chloe—and which caused Paul to write back. In the months to come, in the proposed annual theme and Bible focus of I Corinthians 12: 13, “By One Spirit Into One Body,” we’ll learn about some of the people and the factions in the fractious church of ancient Corinth. Some church growth specialists might look at the situation there and ask, “What did you expect, besides conflict and competition?”

One strength of the Corinthian church was also its weakness. There was no one church of Corinth. There were house churches. Perhaps a dozen or more. That was good for intimate and interdependent connections among the members of each small and localized house church. But it could also lend to segregation, between rich and poor house churches, or Jewish or Gentile ones. They could be self-selecting for ethnicity, language or class. Then there was the issue of slavery. How can they live in union and harmony when society is always treating them as separate and unequal?

On top of that, Corinth was a wealthy, cosmopolitan, commercially prosperous and important port city in Greece, and yet also a roman colony. All the more likelihood of the kind of education and world view that looks for differences and distinctions among people, and which constantly analyzes and categorizes things by what they are not, down to the littlest detail. We who have analyzed and split everything down to the level of the atom are true sons and daughters of Greece and Rome in that respect.

By the time we get to the twelfth chapter of I Corinthians, Paul has built up his case for seeing the whole of the church, the underlying unity that holds everything together to its supreme expression when he says: “we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” So, beneath all their differences and distinctions, at least three things hold these quibbling, quarrelsome churches and Christians together: The Holy Spirit, their baptism, and their identity as the Body of Christ. Take a time out, Paul says in effect, from obsessing over your differences and distinctions and look instead to the factors that unite you, that you share in common, again: your baptism, God’s Spirit within you and among you, and your common identity as the body of Christ. Now that you have specialized in splitting the fine hairs of distinctions and definitions among you, now become ecologists of the body of Christ, seeing how the component parts you have so carefully identified work together for the sake of the bigger whole, that you have missed.

Learning to see the whole, rather than just the parts, will involve something like getting used to a new pair of glasses. Before your eyes get used to the new lenses, you may have to go through a brief period of dizziness and disorientation, trusting that the eye doctor got the prescription right, before it becomes evident that she did. Once you get to that point, you can put on your old glasses, only to find out how much they missed. That new vision is even like an x-ray vision that looks at the separate peaks of a mountain range, and sees the connecting bedrock beneath them.

Underneath the differences of culture, outlook, opinion and spiritual gifts among the members of any church—and not just the corinthian house churches—are again the Holy Spirit, our baptism, and our common identity as the body of Christ. Let’s look first at how baptism united them, and us: For one thing, it started out as a Jewish ritual, the last rite of purification for converts, from one’s gentile past before being Jewish. By the time we get to First Century Corinth, its something common to both Jewish and Gentile Christians. Both Jewish and Gentile Christians understood that being baptized in public was like burning one’s bridges to their past, to start a new life together. In the act of baptism, both Jewish and Gentile believers made the same profession of faith–”Jesus is Lord”– and the same baptismal vows. So, wherever they came from, they all made, by baptism, a vow to move in the same direction from then on, and together.

That was only possible because of the work of the Holy Spirit, by whom it was ever even possible to truly confess with saving faith, “Jesus is Lord.” And though the Corinthian Christians would display varying spiritual gifts, even those were given by one and the same Holy Spirit, to serve the common good and the unity of the church.

Now when we talk about unity among a group of people, don’t we usually think of unity as simply meaning that we’ll submerge our differences so that we can submit to a common purpose and achieve it together? And usually just for as long as it takes to achieve that common purpose? All those separate, specialized analysts from different fields of science coming together made it possible for humans to walk on the moon, for example. So when we speak of unity we’re often still starting from an assumption of difference, distance and separation, that must somehow come together.

But that’s not how bodies work. Fingers, toes, livers and brains don’t search each other out and say, “Hey, let’s make a body together.” Our bodies start as one zygote, a fertilized egg, and then begin presenting different parts, like fingers, toes and a brain. In that sense is the human body a unity, or even, a unit: one thing with multiple expressions. Paul says, “And so it is with Christ.” Christ is the starting point, and he finds multiple expressions through the members he adds to his body, the worldwide church. We, the many members with different cultures, outlooks, gifts and ministries, are different expressions of the One Christ, through His One Holy Spirit.

That’s the way in which Paul uses the word, “one.” As in “one body, one Spirit, one baptism.” Where the Corinthian Christians see mostly differences and distinctions, Paul also sees One and the same Spirit at work in different persons and different expressions, inasmuch as they belong, by baptism, to Christ’s body. Paul’s vision for one-ness sees not just how we are different, but for how we are similar, even, for how we are the same; for how we connect and overlap, not only for how individual persons relate to each other, but for what thing from one person is in another, and vice versa. Not only for where we touch, but for where we overlap. Such vision would see the sum of all those contributions, the one big total result of the one same Spirit working through different people with different gifts.

In our time and culture, we tend to be like the fractious Corinthian Christians, in that our strengths and talents for distinction and analysis are so strong that they may be a weakness. We run the risk of having 20-100 vision, having strength in the eye that sees separate parts, while being nearly blind in the eye that sees the whole. We need 20-20 vision for both eyes. Paul had a radical change of vision when he met Jesus, first being blinded, then by having scales fall from his eyes. In the Bible teaching focus that I propose for this year, from I Corinthians, we will follow the Apostle Paul as he peels away the scales from the Corinthians’ eyes so they can see the whole, the realities and possibilities of unity and connection. Down will come the scales of pride, prejudice and power which reinforce our illusions of being separate, isolated and all-sufficient selves. Because that alone is the way of loneliness, fear and bondage to sin. When both eyes are working well, we can follow God and be all that he made us to be, individually and together.