I Cor. 6: 1When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous(A) instead of the saints? 2Or do you not know that(B) the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? 3Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! 4So if you have such cases,(C) why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? 5(D) I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, 6but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? 7To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you.(E) Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? 8But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even(F) your own brothers!

Well, I’ve done it again. For the second week in a row I have prepared a sermon on a really angry, anguished Bible passage. Last week it was Paul pulling out his hair over the abuses of the communion service in Corinth, and the humiliating treatment of poor and hungry Christians. Today’s passage comes a close second on the verbal pain and anguish meter, and again, the problem is about relationships, maybe even, again, the mistreatment of the poor and less powerful. Paul even says, “Yes, I’m saying this to make you feel some shame.” Ouch. Because their treatment of each other was shameless.

Read this passage in a Mennonite church and immediately a lot of historical baggage shows up in the pews and the aisles. One of which is a tradition of saying that we Mennonites will have nothing to do with the legal system whatsoever. No lawyers, no lawsuits, not even jury duty, according to some.

To the lawyers and law students among us I say: Stay with me to the end of the sermon, please.

Yet that absolute stance never kept us from incorporating our churches, or signing purchase agreements on a home, all of which are legal documents that can require lawyers and courts. So the inconsistency and impossibility of such a rigid position have led to some church splits and controversies. Like the one in Kansas some forty years ago, when a refinery was polluting a stream that ran through some Mennonite farms. The pollution was so bad it was killing livestock and even vegetation and trees along the stream. The Mennonite farmers contacted the refinery management multiple times, but it was like talking to a brick wall.

Finally, some Mennonite farmers went to court to sue the refinery, with two demands: 1) that they stop polluting the stream; and 2) that they compensate them for lost cows and pasture. With the result that the church was faced with a split between those who said that today’s passage forbids us from ever taking anything or anyone to court, and those who said, “This passage applies within the church, but not outside of it.”

What do you think? I’ll tell you what I think later.

But first, here are four things that I think this passage is not saying:

(One) I think its a stretch to make it say we should never have anything ever to do with the court system. Otherwise, we could never get a drivers’ license, buy a house, start a business, take out a loan or even sign a rental agreement. Nor could Mennonite Central Committee file friend of the court papers on behalf of Native peoples seeking redress from injustice, nor could we participate in victim-offender reconciliation processes. There’s just no avoiding the legal system. Instead, this passage forces us to consider how we are involved in the world’s legal system and why. Settling church disputes, or worse, taking advantage of anyone, let alone fellow believers, are not good ways for us to engage the legal system, to say the least.

Secondly, Paul is not saying there should never be differences, difficulties or grievances among Christians. He seems to assume that there will be such things. The question is, What will we do about them? We should be prepared for them, and not freak out when they rear their not-so-pretty heads. When disagreements or problems arise—not if–will we deal with them in ways that reflect the way Jesus rules the world? In love, truth and healing power? Or as adversaries in a winner-take all contest, the result of which is that someone must come out the winner, and the other one despoiled and defeated, thus destroying the relationship forever?

But thirdly, I’m not sure that Paul is just talking about the usual garden-variety conflicts or disagreements in the church. He says, “you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers!” “Wrong” and “defraud” are loaded legal words. Maybe the Corinthian courts had more than trivial disputes or doctrinal disagreements on its docket, whenever Christians showed up. As good as Roman jurisprudence started out to be, by the First Century, a lawsuit was often a legalized form of piracy, or a hostile takeover of someone else’s home, property and wealth, maybe even their freedom. Especially if the person filing the lawsuit was wealthier and better connected than the one being sued. Could it be that some wealthy, powerful and influential members of the Corinthian church were using their knowledge of people in church to pry them away from their wealth and property, even to enslave them, by means of lawsuits and their friends in high legal places? It was certainly happening back then outside the church. And stranger things have happened inside the church. Paul’s choice of words, “wrong and defraud,” makes me wonder.

Fourth, Paul is not saying that we must always take every injury, offense and disagreement lying down and say nothing. If so, he would be contradicting himself by even writing this letter. After all, he does not take the way the Corinthians abuse, humiliate and exploit each other lying down. He tells the truth in love. Do that, and we can keep a lot of differences and disagreements from festering into hostile, scorched-earth conflicts.

But he is saying the following three things:

First: Its better to take every injury and offense on the chin than to take it to the world and handle it in the way the world typically does, that is, in a way that is the legal equivalent of war or piracy.

Because, secondly: its not the disagreement that makes us lose, but how we handle it that can really make us lose. Or win. In fact, a conflict and a disagreement can be the prelude to a breakthrough, a solution, in which every party wins. Like the time, early on in the story of Mennonite mission work in a country that I won’t name, when the missionaries and the national church had some disagreements over their working relationship. The first constitution fused the national church and the mission agency into one single organization. Such fusion was a recipe for confusion. But when the missionaries brought up the matter to the national church and asked for a change, the new national Christians felt like they were being cut loose and abandoned. Relationships got strained, to say the least. It took some time and heavy lifting to work this all out. The result was a stronger and independent national church, which has grown in numbers and maturity, and is now giving some direction to the foreign mission agency, as well they should. Everybody won as a result of that conflict. But if it had been taken to a worldly court, in which somebody would have had to lose, everyone would have lost from the get-go.

And how sad. Because (thirdly) to the church is given God’s mission of reconciliation, the restoration of people and relationships, and conflict resolution. That’s what Paul means when he says that we, the saints, will “judge the world.” We’ll even judge angels, he says. I’m not sure what all he means by that. I don’t think it means that we’ll sit around on thrones, like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, pointing our scepters at people and saying “Off With His Head!” all the time. I think it means we’ll do more and better in the next life of what we’re supposed to be doing here and now: loving each other. Love is how God rules; love is how we rule.

For us, this means that: 1) The world should be looking to the church for examples, help and guidance on how to resolve disputes and restore broken relationships, rather than the church looking to the world. And the church has given some good examples in some times and places. Like the Moravian Church did in Nicaragua, when it helped end the civil war between the Sandinista government and the Miskitu Indians some years back. And now, in North America, Mennonites are heavily involved in alternative conflict resolution efforts like Victim/Offender Reconciliation Programs. When there have been non-violent property crimes, or breaches of contract, for example, Victim/Offender Reconciliation circles can help the injured parties find real resolution and care, and restore the things and the relationships they have lost, without having to send the offender to jail where he or she might become a worse criminal than when they came in.

Secondly, I wonder if such conflict resolution skills aren’t what Paul means in this passage by the word “wise,” and later on in this letter when he writes about the spiritual gift of wisdom. Wisdom does not mean that we have no conflicts, or avoid all conflicts. It means that we know how to avoid unnecessary and unfruitful conflicts. And for those that are necessary, and even potentially fruitful, wisdom means that we know how to transform them into growing and learning opportunities; that we know how to turn differences into doorways for greater love and understanding.

That’s how the apostle James sees wisdom, when he writes in chapter 3: “But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.” Such wisdom for the ways of reconciliation should be a key feature in the spiritual life, the spiritual growth, and the spiritual gifting of Christians and their churches. No wonder then that Paul is so shocked and appalled at the fact that “there’s nobody among you wise enough to settle a dispute among brothers.” For crying out loud, he implies, what is the church for? Where did you mislay that gift? he’s wondering.

Thirdly, if, as I believe, a ministry of conflict resolution is a crying need in the church and in the world, then its also a wide-open opportunity for sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, in word and deed. For what is the gospel that we preach but God’s peace initiative toward us, his gracious response to the conflict between himself and humanity, and between people and their tribes? But typically I find that in sharing the gospel with others, our guilt, our griefs, and our grievances against others, our personal histories as both offenders and the offended, our sacred identities as victors over others, or as the victims of others, stand as barriers to the healing, liberating grace of Jesus Christ. Conflicts, even long-buried and nearly-forgotten conflicts, can stand like blocks of buried ice, keeping hearts frozen against the spring-time warmth of God’s love. Or like brick walls impeding the flow of God’s healing grace. Those things between people sometimes have to be uncovered, and named, so that we might offer and seek forgiveness. When people’s hearts then begin to soften toward their enemies and offenders, when long-ruptured relationships begin to mend, then God begins to seem less distant, cold and scary too. Because, at heart, its God doing the thawing and mending.

As I have come to know more about this neighborhood and community, I have discerned that there is a lot of unresolved grief, guilt and grudges keeping people in many forms of impoverishment. Even rich and wealthy people. I doubt that’s unique to the Phillips Community. Some of it people brought from their countries of origin. Some of it is within families, between neighbors, or between landlords and tenants. Some of it is even between Christians and within churches.

So when I looked into the question of who is doing anything about conflicts and mediation, I found a few legal services, a few things in the public schools, and even at least one government agency offering such help. Which is great. But I’m still having trouble uncovering any sustained and intentional Christian church resources along that line. And our gospel is all about reconciliation! Go figure.

When I have asked some other local pastors about who offers such conflict transformation and reconciliation ministries among the churches of south side Minneapolis, many of their initial reactions were befuddlement and surprise. “You mean, churches do such things?”

Then it begins to dawn upon them: “Oh, Duh!” and “Cool!”

So, developing a Christian ministry of conflict transformation and mediation, based on the Holy Spirit gift of wisdom, could be a unique contribution that Mennonites could bring to the body of Christ in the Twin Cities. And that’s why I plan to take a week early next month in Chicago to study and learn about conflict transformation and mediation, under the auspices of the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center. Not that I’m suddenly going to change my job description from pastor to community peace keeper. I think that’s a job for more than one person in this church. But someone has to learn and to lead in this direction and encourage others, and I can’t lead anyone where I myself have never been. The buck stops with me.

Oh. And about the Kansas farmers and their lawsuit against the refinery: they won. And I actually approve of their action because a corporation is a creation of the legal system. It exists because someone filed legal documents. Taking a polluting corporation to court is like taking a child, who’s throwing rocks through your window, back to his parents. Somebody has to. Secondly, the farmers simply asked for the refinery to stop polluting, and to make restitution for their damages, the same as in any Victim/Offender Reconciliation program. I’m not aware that any of them went beyond that and tried to defraud the corporation and get rich off it.

Unlike some Christians in ancient Corinth, who were defrauding and demeaning some of their brothers and sisters. But Paul expected better of them, because so does God. And so does the world. Because there’s nothing less at stake than who rules the world, and how.

I Cor. 11: 17In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. 18In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. 19No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval. 20When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, 21for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry, another gets drunk. 22Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not!  23For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.  27Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. 28A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. 29For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. 31But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment. 32When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.  33So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for each other. 34If anyone is hungry, he should eat at home, so that when you meet together it may not result in judgment.  And when I come I will give further directions.

Focus verses: 29) For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself.

33 So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for each other.

Gee, do you think Paul might be upset? He says to his Corinthian disciples, “Your meetings do more harm than good,” and Whatever it is you think you are doing whenever you get together, “it certainly is NOT the Lord’s Supper.” More like the devil’s, he implies. Does he sound angry? Well, in all of I Corinthians, this is where Paul shows himself the most emotional, the most angry and upset. Elsewhere in this same letter he also deals with matters of sexual immorality, and with some crazy teachings like, “There’s really no resurrection.” But those he addresses with pastoral patience and tenderness compared to the pain and vexation he expresses so bluntly over……..food and the communion service.

To get an idea why he’s so upset, let me tell you about two communion services I know of, one from heaven, and the other from hell. I heard of the communion service from heaven in a story by Garrison Keillor. It had to do with the national convention of a tiny denomination, The Sanctified Brethren In Christ. All 37 members of this denomination were gathered in a small rural church sanctuary. Some time, mid-morning of the second day, someone gave a sermon that introduced a startling and divisive new teaching: If eating pork was forbidden for the Israelites, then its still unclean for the Christians. I don’t agree with that, and half of the members and delegates didn’t either. But suddenly they were looking at the possibility of a church split, a rupture running right through the middle of their friendships and families that would make it impossible to ever worship, meet and eat together again. The tension meter in that sanctuary would have read off the charts. Voices rose with the anxiety level as they discussed this surprising new matter, until a word was heard that stilled the rising storm:

“Lunch is on.”

It helped that the voice was that of the very well-known and trusted Sister Evelyn, whose specialty was fried chicken, mashed potatoes with onion-flavored chicken gravy, green bean hot dish, green jello salad with marshmallows and mandarin orange slices, peach cobbler and strong, Swedish-style coffee. The smell of these foretastes of heaven wafted up from the kitchen basement to the sanctuary, stilling all the anxiety and conflict. People who had been ready to walk out on each other, or even to strangle each other, were suddenly united in urgent, earnest prayer…… as Brother Bert prayed a blessing over the meal.

As they ate Sister Evelyn’s specialties, the thought of missing out on such food and fellowship together slowly overcame their anger and distrust of each other. Hearts melted and their vision softened with every bite. Those words, “Lunch is on,” may have led to a major item of church business later that week that was never discussed nor even seen by the delegates, but which was binding nonetheless: that Sister Evelyn’s recipes would always be the menu for every gathering of The Sanctified Brethren in Christ, none of which would ever include pork, not because everyone agreed about it, but because no one wanted to split over it, and miss out on Sister Evelyn’s cooking. Secretly, some of the members of that tiny denomination now call themselves, “The Sancti-Fried Brethren of Christ.”

There we see the unifying, barrier-busting power of food, especially when eaten together. We saw it almost a year ago, in the basement of this sanctuary, when many of us had dinner here one night with about fifty Somali people connected to the mosque just down Lake Street. I’m pretty sure that later that very weekend, phone calls went from Minneapolis to Mogadishu, spreading the news that Mennonites know how to cook really good chicken, too (There weren’t many leftovers, were there, Marilyn and Ernie?). Even though neither meal was billed as a Christian communion service, even though they lacked the words of institution (“This is my body broken for you…this is my blood shed for you”), they served at least something of the purposes of the communion bread and cup from the very time that Jesus first instituted it during his last Passover meal with his disciples: to symbolize our passover from sin to salvation, and to give us a picture, in plates, smells and tastes, of the coming wedding feast of The Lamb upon his return.

By the way, Sister Evelyn’s lunch spread, and our meal with our Somali neighbors, were more like the communion service that Paul had in mind, and that the early church commonly did. Its like our Maundy Thursday Love Feasts here every year. More than just a pinch of bread and a sip of juice, the early Christian love feasts began with the communion service of bread, and ended with the communion cup of wine. But in between was essentially a potluck meal, where members brought what they could, and shared food with others. This was especially striking when you consider that these meals were about the only places and times in that society where rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, for some, even men and women, would eat together from common loaves and dishes. For some of the poorest members, it was the one place and time where you were guaranteed a meal that week.

Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to be. Which brings up the communion service from hell. Whatever the original intention, it had degenerated into a competitive display of conspicuous consumption, where the first persons who got there with the most food ate the most, and any who came late found most of it gone. The richer members of the church seemed to have eaten by themselves, from their own food, while the poorer members who came with little or nothing could only watch, to leave as hungry as when they came. By the time dinner ended with the communion cup, some members had already drunk so much wine that they were disruptive, disrespectful, or asleep. All this seems to have happened in the First Church of Corinth, several years and some church growth after Paul, the church planter, had moved on. That’s why Paul says, “Your gatherings do more harm than good.”

That’s why I think Paul reserved his heaviest verbal artillery for their communion service from hell. Because communion was supposed to look backward, to the tender, gracious, generous way that Jesus hosted his disciples and would give himself, body and blood, for the salvation of the world. It looked even beyond that, to God’s intent for Israel and the law, when Moses said, “Do not harden your heart against the poor, the orphan, the widow or the stranger among you; do not withhold help from your needy brother….There shall be no poor among you.”

It was also supposed to demonstrate something about the present, how God was making one new humanity out of Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, reconciling them and establishing their equality, dignity and inter-dependence. And it was to look ahead, to be a foretaste of the coming feast of reconciliation and reunion between God and humanity, and between all the warring tribes of humanity, in the kingdom of God, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

That makes the Lord’s Supper like one of those beautiful Belgian tapestries, of the late Middle Ages, those giant rugs that hung on the walls, in many colors, that often display things like hunting scenes, market days, battles, but especially great feasts. Food and feasting seem to be a favorite theme of these tapestries. We might say then that every communion service is a living tapestry of a divine feast that has come and is yet to come. But in Corinth, the divine tapestry had become a human travesty.

No wonder Paul got so much more upset about the desecration of communion, and the humiliation of the poor and needy among them, than about any other problem in the First Church of Corinth. For a Jew like him, it was like desecrating the Holy of Holies inside the Jerusalem temple, where the glory of God dwelt above the mercy seat and the ark of the covenant. In effect, for us Christians, the sharing of our bread, the cup, and all the sharing of our lives, our space, our time, our substance, our love IS our Holy of Holies, where God and his glory are most visible to the world.

Can I make its importance any more clear?

But the Corinthians can get back on track, and we can stay on track, if we remember and do two things, two verb phrases, that Paul says in this passage. I invite you to take out a pen or pencil right now and circle them where you find them in the bulletin, as today’s focus verses. One is in verse 29: “recognizing the body of the Lord.” Circle those six words.

At the Tuesday morning sermon roundtable breakfast, as we looked over this passage, our attention went immediately to this phrase, “Recognizing the body of the Lord.” What does that mean? we wondered. With that question we touched on one of the key issues of the Anabaptist Reformation that gave us our start 500 years ago, even one of the Bible verses most fiercely fought over, one for which people shed their blood and that of others. It was a controversy between those who said that we recognize the body of the Lord in the bread itself, whenever the priest said the words during Mass, “This is my body,” and thereby was understood to change the wafer into the actual body of Christ, by authority of the Pope and 1000 years of tradition. And that’s how anyone expected to receive Jesus, only through the bread that the priest handed out.

Anabaptists at the time got killed for not agreeing to that. They insisted from the start that “the body of the Lord” is the people gathered to share the bread, more so than the bread itself. That’s how Paul uses the phrase, “the body of Christ,” or “the body of the Lord” in every other setting, to refer to people. That’s how I interpret Paul’s words, “Recognizing the body of Christ,” that we see Jesus in every person sharing the bread.

Since we are, as Paul said, “Baptized by one Spirit into one body,” the body of Christ, then how can we see each other as anything but interdependent and equally important parts of the same body? If we do that, doesn’t it become all the harder to neglect and abuse and humiliate each other the way the Corinthian Christians were doing? If that person sharing bread and the cup next to us is a physical, visible manifestation of Jesus in the world, how can we treat him with anything but the honor and respect that are due to Jesus Christ himself? What does it matter if his or her politics are at odds with yours, or his mannerisms and personality get on our nerves at times, if he’s still part of the same body with ourselves? So, in the course of a love feast, not only do I save something for him or her to eat, I’m beholden to say, “Serve yourself first,” just as I would to Jesus.

Which leads to the second verb and its object, in verse 33: “Wait for each other.” Circle that phrase too, if you like. On the very face of it, it most simply means, whenever you have a love feast, wait until most of you are there, and don’t gobble everything up so that there is nothing left for anyone else, especially the latecomers and stragglers. Restrain yourself and show some common courtesy.

But the more I dug into that phrase, “Wait for each other,” the more I realized that there’s more there than meets the eye. Some scholars and translators more gifted and experienced than I prefer to translate it as something more like “Wait on each other.” Not just, “hold your horses until the seats are full,” but more actively, serve each other like you were the slaves and they were the masters, like you were the hosts and they were the honored guests, go around and dish it up to each other, ask them if they want seconds and thirds and if they say No, then ask if they want a box for leftovers. In the kingdom of God, food gives us a chance to show each other and the world how much we love and care for each other, and how little we care about the usual barriers of race, class, language, gender and background. Around the Lord’s Table, as guests of honor and hosts to each other, we set the tone for all our other relationships and interactions in the church and the world. Thus, Paul’s words, “Wait on each other,” apply to so much more than food. “Waiting on each other,” becomes a basic orientation toward God, the church, and humanity. And so we become a living tapestry of the divine feast that was, and is and is to come.

I’ll close with a Chinese parable about a man who died and was shown around heaven and hell, to see which one he would choose. In both places he saw people seated around banquet tables piled high with the same choicest foods. And next to each person was a spoon with a handle six feet long. But no one was eating. Yet.

The man told the angel, “I don’t see any difference between heaven and hell. They both look great. What gives?”

The angel replied, “Watch and see what happens when the dinner bell rings.” Which it did. At one table the man saw people trying to eat, but they kept jabbing each other in the eyes with the other end of their six-foot long spoons and interfering with each other’s eating. Their anger and frustration rose until they started deliberately jabbing and stabbing each other with their spoons, and knocking the food off each other’s spoons, which then led to food fights, then to fist fights, and then, another meal wasted, with everyone left mad and hungry.

In the other banquet hall, the man looked and saw that the diners were happily and peacefully taking turns feeding each other across the table with their long-handled spoons.

Guess which room was heaven, and which one was hell.