What the cross says about wisdom, power and peacemaking.

I Corinthians 1:18For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written:  ”I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;  the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”  20Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

They were only arguing about shuffleboard. Not about any of the deep questions of belief or behavior that sometimes divide churches. Nor any of the big-ticket moral or theological matters that we’ll find were dividing the churches in Corinth, when Paul wrote these words to them.

Maybe you’ve seen the Jurassic Park movies. I wimped out and had to return the book to the library halfway through trying to read it. Paul was dealing with “Jurassic Church.” As we get further into this letter, we’ll see that cliques of members were dividing and attacking each other over some serious matters like whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead. Or whether Christian faith had anything to say about responsible sexual behavior. Or if and how Christians of different social classes could be brothers and sisters. So when an American church more recently had to deal with a difference among members over whether or not to paint shuffleboard lines on the floor of the downstairs fellowship hall and let children and youth play down there, you’d think that would be a piece of cake. But sometimes differences over issues are about more than just the issues.

So it probably was in the First Church of ancient Corinth. Their differences were about more than their differences. They were about bigger things than the issues themselves. And to help them out, Paul took them back beyond their questions and issues, even back beyond their own time and place, to a rocky hill called “Golgotha,” or “Calvary,” to a rude, wooden and bloody Roman execution stake, for a look at their very world view. When Paul writes in verse 22 that “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom,” he is not only commenting on an interesting difference between two groups of people, he is putting his finger on the very source of their fractious factionalism. He’s naming the root of their problems.

The problem with Greek notions of wisdom was what the Greeks would have considered their strength: they started their reasoning with the world as it appeared to them, according to self-evident, conventional wisdom. So the Greek way of wisdom was all about finding one’s way through the world on the world’s own terms. One school of philosophy at the time even focused on what you could or could not logically, reasonably, expect of life, and what life should or should not expect of you, depending upon your station and status in life. So if you were a slave, you could reasonably expect this, and you could be reasonably expected to do that. If you were a slave holder, by contrast, then you could expect something else, while being expected to perform different kinds of duties. But it never seems to have occurred to many of them to question the whole matter of slavery, status or station, as far as I can tell. Kind of like two Amish men in a casino discussing how to behave themselves there as simple, humble, plain and peaceable, without asking themselves a more important question: “What are we doing in this casino in the first place?” For those Greeks, Peace was a matter of understanding and accepting the customary duties and rewards of your status or station.

Now to be fair, we can thank these ancient Greeks for giving us early experiments in democracy—at least for slave-owners–as well as methods of questioning and exploration that have now enabled us to fly airplanes and fight cancer. So neither Paul nor I are advocating ignorance nor the rejection of scholarship, science or education. But as we’ll see later in this letter, Paul will use the upside-down, counter-intuitive wisdom of the cross to challenge the whole Greek and Roman type of wisdom, that different rewards and privileges and honors should come with different stations and status in life. Of course it looks so logical from inside, especially if our station is full of rewards and privileges. But if you step outside that world view and view it from the hill called Calvary, if anything, the cross turns such notions of worth and status upside-down and elevates not only The Crucified Christ, but the very people who might have ended up on crosses—the poor and slaves. Peace, from the vantage point of the cross, means coming to terms with and accepting the great and surprising reversal of wisdom and power and status that the cross signifies.

As for the Jewish understanding of power, I have even more sympathy. Of course they longed—and many long still– for the promised Messiah to come and blow away the oppressive world order of militarism, terrorism, poverty and injustice, and to make Zion the fountainhead of world peace and order, as the prophets promised. We pray for such a New Zion every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer. But so few of Paul’s comrades understood that God would do so peacefully, non-violently, even anti-violently, by absorbing the world’s violence on the cross and returning it with all- triumphant and forgiving love, as God had also promised through the prophets.

As different as Jews and Greeks were, they had this in common: Both groups started their reasoning with the world’s top down, one up, notions of power and worth, and sought to master and dominate the world on its own terms, by its own means, by measurements of success that the world would recognize and value. But this is not the wisdom by which God has chosen to act nor reveal himself in the world. Instead, into this self-enclosed way of thinking comes the cross, like a bolt out of the blue. As Paul says, of course the message of a crucified Messiah is “foolishness to Greeks and weakness to Jews.” That’s what the clown’s mask [or dunce cap?] on the altar signifies.

The First Church of Corinth was made up of people from both these backgrounds. When differences open up among any group of people, its common for these old, habit-formed, pre-gospel, cross-free understandings of power and wisdom to rise up and offer themselves as weapons by which we might seek to defend ourselves, to seek advantage over others, and even attack them, verbally and emotionally, at least. But they only turbo-charge the conflicts, making them wider, deeper and harder to solve.

Even though they should have known better, that’s what happened in the matter of shuffleboard, of all things, in that church basement. The idea started with the youth group and its sponsors. And for the best of reasons. Recreation and play are proven ways to build up relationships and community among people. And if children can have a space and time designated for play, perhaps they’ll get more out of time and space designated for listening and learning. To those who opposed the idea however, that very space where kids would be playing was also the space where they had attended many dinners after the funeral services of their friends and family members. It was also where many of them gathered to quilt once a week for many, many years. Most of them had grown up being taught that church was the place for children and youth to learn reverence and restraint. Let them play outside. If it sounds like a generational difference, I suspect that it was.

So who was right? Sometimes, that’s the wrong question. Or, at least the wrong question to ask off the bat. More importantly: What is the right way to approach a disagreement? What is the right viewpoint from which to start discussion and seek discernment? Let’s follow Paul as he takes the competing and conflicted Corinthian Christians back to the vantage point of the cross. The cross challenges the very notions of power, wisdom and winning that were turbo-charging that church conflict.

More than just a symbol, to Paul the cross even becomes a way of thinking and acting in the world. In fact, it is God’s stunning and surprising way of acting in the world. Because the cross says, in its powerfully symbolic language, that God engages the world not from the top down but from the bottom up. That God does not overpower us, or seek advantage over us, but rather, God identifies with us. That he identifies with us even in the lowest depths of shame, rejection, defeat and humiliation. There on the cross he also demonstrates his commitment to us by going with us even to the lowest of the lowest places, symbolized by the Roman way of execution, for the lowest of society. Therefore, Jesus’ disciples are to engage the world, each other, and their differences, in the same way, not from the top down, to see who has the most power to impose their will on weaker people, but from the bottom up, by identifying with each other on the lowest level of our common needs, our common hopes, our weaknesses, our limits and our vulnerability.

Had my friends with the shuffleboard conflict taken that approach, they might have asked each other questions like, “What is it that you hold most sacred?” One group might have said, “That we treat God reverently and respectfully by treating this facility that way; after all, its where I learned of God and often experienced God over the sixty or seventy years of my life, and where we gathered to commit scores of my friends and relatives to eternity, including my parents and a child.” Another group might have said, “I want youth and children to feel welcomed and included.”

Underneath those differences on the surface, can we hear what sacred things both groups have in common? Like how special church is to each group? Like how much both groups want their children and grandchildren to be part of the church?

And maybe they could have asked each other, “What is it that you fear?” One group might have said, “I’m afraid that this sacred space might be abused and denigrated; that children and youth will not learn to revere God adequately; and that quilters and people who come for memorial services will find their experience degraded by lines and numbers and scuff marks on the walls and the floor.” Another group might have said, “I’m afraid that children and youth will feel excluded by a church culture that says ‘children should only be seen and not heard’ and will eventually leave the faith because of such rigid expectations.”

Again, can we hear the similarities in their fears, as well as the differences? Like, How will people of different generations experience God together? What kind of faith will future generations have?

What if both sides really heard each other’s hopes and fears, and not with the intent to jump back in with a winning argument, but with the intention to really hear each other and honor each other, with the kind of commitment to each other that God demonstrated to us on the cross? And what if they really heard each other with the willingness to identify with each other, as the complex, vulnerable, scared and yet hopeful human beings that we all are? We can’t always agree with each other, but even in conflict, we can always identify with each other. At least with our basic humanity. Because the same needs, fears, weaknesses and hopes drive all our actions and opinions, even when they drive us in different directions. After all, even while we were yet sinners, God went all the way down to the cross to identify with us.

If the members of that church had started there, I still don’t know how the issue would have been resolved. I still don’t even know how it should have been resolved, whether there should be a shuffleboard court down there or not. Sometimes, the way we handle a conflict is more important than the outcome of the conflict. Unfortunately, the shuffleboard conflict came down to a my-way-or-the-highway kind of stand-off, to be resolved by a vote. That may be good enough for secular democracy. But when you’re talking about the future of relationships, voting is not always the best way to display the kingdom of God.

The pro-shuffleboard group won the vote, and several families left the church. One person even demanded several years’ worth of offerings back. And nobody plays shuffleboard down there, young or old. But quilting and fellowship meals still happen, with nobody even noticing all those lines and shapes and numbers on the floor.

The gospel peace position that we teach in the Mennonite church is not based on worldly notions of power, wisdom, and on how to win friends and influence others and achieve whatever you want, only with less mess and stress. If anything, the cross teaches us that when we love our enemies the way Jesus did, and the way he teaches us to do, we could very well end up carrying our own crosses with him. The gospel peace position is about demonstrating God. It only shows its strength as we learn the world view, the wisdom and the power of the cross. Yes, as Paul admits, it all looks backwards and upside-down, even weak and foolish to the world. Yes, it takes faith to believe that God is triumphing over evil by absorbing it and forgiving it, rather than by returning it in kind. But the alternative business as usual requires a lot of faith too, that currently looks unfounded to me.

The cross is the symbol of God’s world view, God’s wisdom and God’s power that we are called upon to communicate to a skeptical and scoffing world. But our most compelling witness to Christ anymore is in the cross-shaped ways that we relate to people, in and outside of the church. Not by the absence of differences or conflict—what planet does that happen on?– but by the cruciform ways we address differences and conflict. Our peace witness to the world begins in the church. In fact, a major part of our peace witness to the world IS the church.

So in this season of Lent, with its theme of holding on and letting go, can we let go of the emotional and relational swords we carry and invert them for crosses instead? Can we let go of the normal, business-as-usual preoccupation with who’s up, who’s down, who’s ahead? Instead, can we replace that with the wisdom of the cross, the wisdom by which we identify with others, and commit ourselves to others, even if we can’t always agree with others? If so, we will better understand and express the surprising peace-making power and wisdom of God, displayed on the cross of Jesus Christ.

I Corinthians 2: 1When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. 4My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

In my preaching and teaching from I Corinthians, I’m skipping ahead to chapter 2, because in its opening verses we learn something about Paul’s relationship with the Corinthian Christians. And because it contains a mystery, which is this: We read the letters and stories of Paul the Apostle and think of him as being confident, bold, sometimes even brash. With a job description like his, he had to be. So, why did he begin his missionary effort in Corinth, as he described it, “in weakness and fear, with much trembling?” And if first impressions are everything, as we often say, then how did a church get started if he came across to the Corinthians with so much “weakness and fear, and with much trembling?” Paul and the Corinthian Christians could agree that he had not put his best foot forward when coming to them. And yet Corinth was where the most fruitful results happened in his team’s ministry in Greece, so much so that he and his friends stayed there a year and a half, we read in Acts 17. How did that happen?

To make sense of that, we’ll have to back up a bit. The story begins with Paul and his fellow missionaries and friends, Silas, Timothy and maybe Luke, somewhere in eastern Turkey, trying to gain an audience, to preach the gospel, and start churches. But over and over, we read in Acts 16, they were strangely thwarted. They didn’t feel God opening up doors for them. Then Paul had a dream in which he saw a man from Greece, a day or two’s journey across the Aegean Sea, beckoning them to “come help us over here.”

From Turkey they booked passage east, and once in Greece, the doors opened up to evangelize and plant churches, beginning in Philippi. From there they worked their way through several cities toward a city so important, so strategic, that it was the cultural, political and religious capital of Greece: Athens, the city of philosophers, scholars, great art and literature. Get a positive hearing in Athens, win a few key people, plant a church there, and the rest of Greece would be low hanging fruit, ripe for the picking, wouldn’t you think?

After preaching in a synagogue and in some other public venues, Paul got an invitation that must have taken his breath away: to speak before the philosophers on the Aereopagus, a public forum on a hilltop shrine, named after Aries, the Greek God of War. His audience would be the highest, most senior leaders and teachers of the various schools of Greek philosophy and religion.

Paul seems to have appreciated and respected that. He appreciated his audience too and spoke to them in the most respectful way. He began with where they were at. He spoke of how, while walking about among all the shrines, temples and statues of all their many gods and goddesses, he saw a shrine to the unknown God. Tour guides can take us to that very spot today; archaeologists know exactly where it was. This “unknown God” was credited with even stopping a plague in the centuries before Paul.

Paul said, “I will proclaim that unknown God to you…. he made the world and everything in….but he does not live in temples built by hand…he himself gives all people life and breath and everything else….from one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth;…God did this so that people would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” Paul even quoted one of their best-known poets to say, “’For in him we live and move and have our being….and ‘We are his offspring.’ …In the past God overlooked our ignorance [of him], but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” At that point, some of them sneered, while others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” In other words, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

End of sermon, end of story in Athens. A few in the city believed, including one man from among the philosophers there. But if Paul had hoped to capture the strategic heights of Greek society, Greek thought and Greek culture, well, as Paul told the Corinthian Christians, he even seems to have come away from Athens shaken, weakened, disturbed and disappointed. Perhaps, disappointed with himself.

Which has left many people wondering why, especially if Paul did such a good job of talking with the philosophers on their terms, in their language. I think it had to do with the cross. Or the lack thereof. The closest Paul got to telling the Athenian wise men about Jesus was only by touching on his resurrection from the dead. He never even got around to naming Jesus or explaining how and why he died in the first place. He went straight to the resurrection, which certainly was God the Father’s undeniable stamp of approval on Jesus and his ministry. But resurrection was obviously not something those philosophers respected or cared much about. Perhaps some of them belonged to one of those schools of philosophy that saw matter and the body as inferior and even evil, from which you wanted to escape, not to live in forever. Or maybe they already had all they wanted in this life.

Besides, if Paul had gotten around to saying how it was that Jesus needed to be resurrected to begin with, those philosophers may have trundled him out of there all the more quickly and forcefully. A crucified leader, teacher, savior and deity? Did you say, Crucified? As in whipped, stripped bare and nailed to a wooden stake, under the sun, to be jeered at, mocked, and to die slowly and shamefully of shock, thirst and asphyxiation? If an Athenian citizen or philosopher got out of hand and was sentenced to death, it would be quickly, and with dignity befitting his status, like Socrates taking poison. But the cross was for slaves, the poor, prisoners, pirates, the rabble, traitors and others foolish enough to challenge their masters, their overlords and their lowly place in society. Twenty centuries later, they’d call that a lynching. Its hard enough to ask us to believe that the unknown God whom you claim to represent would allow his spokesman to undergo such humiliation in every sense of the word, socially, politically and physically. Ask us to trust and identify with someone who was crucified, that’s like asking us to identify with the rabble, the slaves, the poor, the bandits, brigands and rebels, even if this man was innocent and did nothing of their sort. The cross implies that, while we were going about the daily duty of keeping law and order in the empire, we murdered God! Why, to identify with a crucified God is to call into question the whole basis of Imperial Rome, even our very loyalty to it, and our citizenship in it.

Not only does the cross confront us with the brutal reality of human sacrifice in every culture, the very helplessness of the man nailed up to it implies our own helplessness. You mean our Judge had to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves? You mean to say that there is a debt of sin so big that we cannot pay it, but that someone else paid it for us? What does that say for all our efforts to figure everything out by ourselves? Or to be good and righteous and wise by our own wisdom and efforts?

Did Paul know that such ridicule and rejection might be likely responses to the very words, “cross” and “crucified?” And if so, is that why he mentioned the resurrection first, before he got to the cross? Even though they come in reverse order? We’ll never know. But the next stop, after his mixed results in Athens, was Corinth. And there, as he told the Corinthian Christians, “I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God,” like he had in Athens, to his audience of philosophers. Instead, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ… and him crucified.” No more good news/bad news routine, with the good news first, to soften the blow of the bad news. No diplomatic niceties to soften the appearance of anything confrontational, offensive, disturbing, scandalous or even potentially treasonous. Let’s cut to the chase and tell it like it is. The creator and savior and lover of the world was crucified by the world. Even by the very world that those philosophers represented, justified and upheld.

No wonder Paul could say, in verse 3, “I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling.” Why the fear and trembling? Was it because Paul was still working out what had happened in Athens, and the powerful and painful lesson he might have learned on the Hill of Aries? Or could it also be because Corinth was a Roman colony, the closest thing to Rome itself that you would find on the Greek peninsula? As loyal Roman subjects, they might also find the story of a crucified savior an affront, something that implicated them for all of the powers, pride and privileges they derived from Roman law and order. You might get a cold shoulder in Athens, but in a Roman colony, you could get a real cross, not just a verbal one. Similar things nearly happened other times Paul preached. In fact, members of the Corinthian synagogue tried to get the Roman officials to imprison Paul for his preaching.

But in Corinth, Paul obviously framed the message so that no one came away ignorant of the cross. And it worked. It helped that Paul found something of a church already there, in the form of Priscilla and Aquila, a Jewish Christian couple from Rome. It helped that the rest of his team, Silas, Timothy and maybe Luke, showed up later to help and lend moral support. So when the gospel went public, beyond the Jewish community in Corinth, the results of the bold, provocative preaching of the cross kept Paul’s missionary team busy much longer than in any other Greek city, for a year and a half, we read. Corinth, not Athens, became the nerve center of the church in Greece. And it remained so for many hundreds of years to follow. Go figure.

Paul credits this startling, counter-intuitive result to the Holy Spirit, and not to any wise or persuasive words on his part. That’s why you see the Spirit represented on the altar today in the form of a dove. Whenever we reach the end of our rope, the end of our own powers of persuasion and control, let’s take off our shoes, because we’re on holy ground, the sacred place where God’s Spirit does what we cannot do. The vehicle, the entry point, for the power of the Holy Spirit, was, and still is, the bold and provocative message of the cross: that on the cross, through the Crucified One, God did for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

I reminded us last week of how scales fell from Paul’s eyes several days after his blinding encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus,, and his sight was restored. Could it be that, on the road from Athens to Corinth, Paul had another experience of scales falling from his eyes, one not so forceful nor dramatic as the first, not so much a conversion as a course correction? But still sobering and soul-shaking, nonetheless? If so, that would certainly match my experience, and probably that of every Christian: that our conversion to Christ is the beginning of a commitment to a life of ongoing conversion, where we keep coming back, at deeper and deeper levels, to where it all started, back to the cross, there to let go and let die another false hope, another illusion, another false identity. And though I was not there with Paul on the road to Corinth, I wonder if, had the Lord Jesus appeared to him the way he had on the Damascus Road, he might not have said something like this:

“Its good, Paul, that you showed respect to those philosophers in Athens and made the effort to speak their language, in more ways than one. I’m pleased that you recognized and affirmed what they had of God, and that you used those things we have in common as your starting point. But let me ask you this, my beloved brother, Paul: How much did you have riding on their respect and appreciation for you? Was it so important to you that you and your message impress and entice them that you downplayed the cross, and all that it implies? Did you forget that the cross, and the question mark it implies over and against all worldly wisdom, titles and powers, just cannot help but be offensive to all who are seeking to justify themselves, to all who trust in their own goodness, rightness and wisdom? Did you forget that the cross cannot help but be an offense, a stumbling block and a dividing line? Did you forget that, when confronted by the cross, people must necessarily divide themselves according to whether they are trying to please God or to please the world, according to whether they are seeking to justify Christ to society, or to make society more just to Christ, according to whether they wish to be remade in my image, or to remake me into their image? My servant must seek to honor all people, as you did in Athens, and to offend no one. But my servant must not shrink from any truth that others might find offensive.”

This is not only true in regards to evangelism. It also applies to the life of the church. Several years later, when Paul learned about conflicts and competition among the various factions and house churches of Corinth, the place to send their attention, to straighten them out, was back to square one, where their relationship began, to the cross, precisely because of the leveling effect of its scandal and humiliation. And that before the cross had become prettified, and pasteurized, and rendered meaningless by its domestication to the powers that be, before the Emperor Constantine, in the 4^th Century, had his soldiers paint it on their shields before going into battle, before Crusaders and Conquistadors much later followed it into battle to subjugate Muslims and Mayan Indians, long before we today began getting glossy, colorful newspaper ads hawking diamond-studded, gold-plated crosses for Christmas or Valentines’ Day. When the last of the fabrics on our altar cross have fallen, you’ll see nothing so triumphant nor sanitized.

(move to the cross)

No, to get these Corinthian Christians to stop competing and mistreating each other, Paul felt it necessary, in the first two chapters of his letter, to turn their attention back to where it all began, back to the rude and rugged cross, in the face of which all boasts and comparisons must go silent, at the foot of which all ground is level, and where the wealthy philosopher king of Athens is rendered just as silent as the unlettered slave of Corinth, so that together they might tremble in holy fear just, as Paul had. A vision of the cross, he hoped, would cure them of the very scales that may have begun to cloud his own vision at Athens: even the tiniest need to be respected, appreciated or justified by society, any tendency to justify our faithfulness to God by its results in the world, any temptation to repackage the Crucified One into something others will accept without having to repent and convert. In this season of Lent, can we let go of all that….(pull off next layer)

..and embrace instead the awesome love that did for us on that cross what we could never do for ourselves? Better weakness, fear and trembling before the Cross and The Crucified One, than to fear and tremble before the world and its judgments.

…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.

For all of us who know the feeling of being spiritual exiles in our modern-day Babylon, while we “seek the peace of the city” to which God has sent us, the books of Daniel and Esther can give us insight and the comfort of knowing we’re not alone. The following is the first of my series of messages from those works of Israel’s exile:

LIFE IN THE NON-STOP IMPERIAL SPECTACLE

DANIEL, CHAPTER 1

At first glance, today’s Bible story is about a food fight: a fight between God-given fruits, veggies and whole grains, and a rich, royal diet. The story shows that, if you have a choice between donuts and a Slim Jim for breakfast, or oatmeal and an apple, pick the oatmeal and the apple and your body will be happy, hopefully also your taste buds. And so will your doctors.

But there’s also a deeper conflict happening in Daniel 1, and food is the battleground, or the weapon, of this fight. Its a fight between “singing the Lord’s song in an alien land” in the words of Psalm 137, and being bewitched and bedazzled by what I call “the non-stop imperial spectacle.”

This “non-stop imperial spectacle” is what greeted the few surviving Hebrew exiles, 2700 years ago, when they first saw the city of Babylon. There, they were treated to the supreme spectacle of imperial power for its age. The Hebrew captives were already in shock and awe from what Nebuchadnezer’s army had done to Judah, Jerusalem and their temple. But nothing could have prepared them for seeing city walls so tall and so wide that 4 chariots and eight horses could race atop the walls at the same time. There they saw massive towers, temples, monuments to emperors dead and living, and pyramids on the scale of anything known in Egypt or Mexico. On them were developed and practiced the imperial arts of divination and magic that underlie the daily horoscope in our local newspaper even today. Then there were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, known from China to Spain as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Imagine the Metrodome and the IDS Tower covered in trees and flowers, like a fifty story Chia Pet. Everyone within sight of such marvels would have been sore tempted to render up their worship, their loyalty, and their judgment to such self-evidently successful powers. That’s the point of the non-stop imperial spectacle.

The common wisdom of the time, among Israel’s neighbors, was that any nation, whose empire and armies were most victorious, prosperous, powerful and fearsome, had the gods most worthy of worship and loyalty. As warfare among the gods went in heaven, so it happened on earth, supposedly. In the year 587 BC, for all intents and purposes it looked as though Marduk, the supreme warrior god over all the Babylonian gods and goddesses, had proven himself in war to be more powerful and worthy than the God of the Jews. No surprise, said their so-called experts, the astrologers, and the diviners who read the signs of the heavens. Marduk’s eternal reign over all peoples and their gods was supposedly written in the stars.

That’s life in what I call, “the non-stop imperial spectacle.” Everything about the pomp, the pageantry, the architecture and the military might is meant to say to everyone, allies, subjects and enemies, in the words inscribed on one ancient Egyptian monument, “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.” The despair of the captive Israelites is recorded in Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept  when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” 4 How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?”

But not only does the nonstop imperial spectacle mess with the heads of the enemy and the prisoner. It can do a similar job on the subject and the citizen. Here’s a recent example: I don’t usually eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. But one night in March, of 2003, twenty-four hours into the invasion of Iraq, there was a conversation taking place in a seat right next to mine in the Minneapolis/St. Paul international airport that I just could not ignore. My neighbor was talking on his cell phone to someone about the invasion of Iraq. The tone of his end of the conversation made him all the harder to ignore. He was pretty much happy, even chortling with glee, about what a quick cakewalk this war would be over the hapless Iraqis, about whom he spoke with a bully’s contempt for the neighborhood ninety pound weakling. He even said that he had watched the opening salvos of the American attack on a wide-screen TV while engaged in—and I’m not making this up—cosmic bowling at a bowling alley. So what was I to believe but that, for him, knocking over Iraqis was as easy and entertaining as knocking over bowling pins, and of no more consequence?

I was sore tempted to tell him, once his conversation ended, that any glee is premature; history tells us that no bullet fired, no bomb dropped, is without regrets, consequences and complications. I would have liked to ask him, “My friend, do you derive your self-worth and meaning in life from the fire power of those who claim to represent you? Are you experiencing a vicarious thrill of power through this bloody assertion of shock and awe in your name? Have you become so intoxicated by self-identification with invincible power that you have lost all compassion for the men and women of both sides who will suffer and die, and for all their loved ones who will be united in grief?” But such conversation was not to be. He hung up by saying, “They’re calling my flight, so I gotta go.” With that he jumped up and ran off.

It was still a valuable experience for me. That was when I began to understand that this exercise in shock and awe perhaps was aimed not only at the Iraqis. It certainly had an intoxicating effect on many fellow citizens, like that man who celebrated the bowling over of Iraq by the bowling over of pins in a bowling alley. That’s the whole purpose of what I call “Life in the Imperial Spectacle:” to shock and awe all of us, friend and foe, into surrendering our common humanity, and into worshiping the beasts of human and diabolical power.

So whenever a country embarks on a crusade of imperial expansion, like Nebuchadnezzar did to all his neighbors, it has also effectively declared war against its own citizens. Not only a war of impoverishment, as bread and butter get turned into bombs and bullets, but also a war against our souls and the better angels of our nature. The country’s crusade becomes the subjects of our lives, rather than the love story between ourselves, our Creator and our neighbors. We are encouraged to seek our own humanity by denying it from others. Instead of finding our sense of worth and meaning in love and submission to God, we are encouraged to find our sense of worth, self and meaning in that measure of power we have over and against someone who is defined as our enemy. We are supposed to be so much in shock and awe over our own power that we boast, with the worshipers of the beast in John’s Revelation, “Who can make war against the beast?”

That was the temptation facing our Hebrew spiritual ancestors, in that year when the whole people of God, starting with Abraham and leading to us, was narrowed down to a pitifully small remnant of demoralized, confused and traumatized slaves and captives, whose despair is recorded in Psalm 137. Four of these captive Jews are mentioned in the first chapter of Daniel: the young Daniel and his comrades, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. They were soon given Babylonian names: Daniel became Belteshazar; his friends became Shadrach, Meshcach and Abednego.

As kings did at the time, Nebuchadnezzar added these four young Judean noblemen to his collection of interesting and hopefully helpful people, from among all the different captive peoples he had collected. The Babylonians tended to do that with conquered territories: to pull the native people up and scatter them around the empire, and to plant new peoples in their place, so that future generations would blend into the Babylonian melting pot. Then they’d put the people with the most leadership potential to work in the service of their own empire. That’s how many tribes, countries, cultures and religions disappeared into the voracious, expanding whirlpool that was the Babylonian Empire.

But not the Jews. Some of them must have said, “Well, in Babylon, do like the Babylonians,” and adopted Babylonian customs and speech and even their religion, because it appeared to be the most successful thing. But even in the belly of the beast, within the walls of the imperial palace, with a front row seat at the daily, grandiose, spectacle of empire, four young Jewish men decided that they would give up neither their God nor their identity, whatever the cost.

These four young men were not violent rebels plotting to kill the king and overthrow the Babylonian empire. They may have heard the prophecies of Jeremiah telling them that God had given temporary dominion to Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, and that they were to submit to his political authority, if not to his religion. They may also have read Jeremiah’s letter telling them to seek the peace of this grandiose and idolatrous city to which they were called, which they would do, as counselors to the king. That very command is our banner verse and theme for this year. So they were very willing to learn the Babylonian language, very willing to learn the art and skills of Babylonian law, administration and counsel, and to work for the well-being of the people in the empire through law and public order. After all, not everything about Babylon was evil beyond redemption. We benefit today from strides they made in agriculture and engineering. Despite his claim to godlike status and power, Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian subjects were just human, worthy of love and care. But these four Hebrew men were not willing to defile themselves or dishonor their God with anything contrary to their God, to God’s law and God’s Word. That would get them into several conflicts recorded in the book of Daniel.

Their first conflict was over food. Food was one of those things that reminded the Hebrews, every day, that they were chosen and called by God to be his priests and people among the other nations. The kosher dietary laws of Moses served as part of a cultural buffer against the paganism of their neighbors. There were other laws of dress, conduct, ritual and ceremony, and things like circumcision, which reminded them daily of who they are and whose they are. On the face of it, I take it that they wouldn’t eat from Nebuchadnezzar’s kitchen because the imported and elite food violated their kosher laws, while simple grains, fruits and vegetables would not. As it turned out, they made a wise choice for reasons of health, too.

But I wonder if they considered something else that strikes me about dinner at Nebuchadnezzar’s table: it may have been tainted with blood and tears. The blood of soldiers sent off to expand his empire’s borders, the blood of enemies killed, the tears of conquered peoples, and of slaves made to live and die as drones and pack animals, just to make exotic foreign delicacies readily available at the king’s table, things like Greek olives, Egyptian dates, Indian mangoes, Ethiopian teff and Sudanese wild game, Chinese plums and Italian wines. I don’t know what was on the emperor’s daily menu. But those were the delicacies available at the edges of his expanding empire. Even dinner then was a non-stop imperial spectacle. And this, strangely enough, in the cradle of civilization, where wheat was first cultivated and bread first invented.

For Daniel and his friends, this was the first, but not the last, of their exercises in conscientious objection to Nebuchadnezzar’s nonstop spectacle of empire. They remind me of the Danish people, during the German Occupation. When occupation troops would goose-step in the streets to the sound of a marching band, to show who was boss, Danes in the streets would all turn their backs on the imperial spectacle. Or when the occupiers requisitioned Norwegian factories and assembly lines for weapons production, everyone quit and no one would work there. One person could get killed doing that alone, but not when everyone did it.

One chapter into the Book of Daniel and you start to wonder who really is most powerful here. As tragic and terrible as the exile was, you have to wonder, has the God of Jacob done something like what the Greeks did to the Trojans some 700 years before? When the Greeks left a large wooden horse outside the gates of Troy, allegedly as a peace offering, at the end of a long and inconclusive war? They took it into their city, only to find, too late, that Greek soldiers hidden inside it got out that night and opened the city gates to the rest of their army. Were these Hebrew captives only defeated and powerless prisoners, or did God use their defeat and redeem it, to make of it something of a divine Trojan Horse, by which God would open the gates of the alien, idolatrous empire to his influence? Because that is soon what happened:: the invader was being invaded.

The same story happened in the history of Christian missions. Two Syrian Christians were kidnapped by pirates during the Seventh Century AD and sold as slaves to the royal court of Ethiopia. Their witness is credited with making Ethiopia a Christian country.

One criticism often leveled against us by the world is that “we are too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good.” And I suppose if people had to feed us and shelter us because we spent all our time contemplating questions about heaven that can never be answered here and now, when we could be working, that might be a valid criticism. But the story of Daniel and his three colleagues will show us they were most helpful to Babylon because their hearts were fixed in Zion. They loved the world best when they didn’t need to be loved by the world, because they were secure in God’s love for themselves, in spite of their recent national disaster. They were wise precisely because they were not bedazzled and bewitched by the non-stop imperial spectacle around them. In this conflict with King Nebuchadnezzar is proof that he chose the right people to be his counselors.

Not only did they go head to head with imperial policy and resist it, they also offered a positive alternative. And they did so in a way that was considerate and caring, winsome and hard to resist. If they’d just gone on a hunger strike or started beating their cups and plates on the table, innocent people, like their care-takers, would have lost their heads. Literally. Instead, they presented their alternative as an invitation and an experiment. “Give us some time to eat our fruits, grains and veggies, and then let’s see who’s healthier and happier. If we are worse for the wear, then we’ll go back on the imperial diet. If not, then we’ll all look good.” This is witness as “show and tell.”

Hopefully, in our witness to the world, we can also show and tell something practical and concrete about how God’s alternative to the non-stop imperial spectacle, God’s kingdom, has made real and visible improvements in our lives.

They also demonstrate to us how one might walk the tightrope of Christian discipleship strung between the seemingly contradictory commands, “Love not the world, nor the things thereof,” and the command to love our neighbor as ourselves. “Do not love the world or anything in the world,” writes John the Beloved in his first letter. “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.” What John describes as “the world and the things therein,” is what I mean this morning by “the non-stop imperial spectacle.”

But this same John tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,…not to condemn the world but to save it.” Either we have an impossible contradiction there, or the world that God so loves—and that we are to love, too—is something other than the non-stop imperial spectacle. The world that God loves, and that Daniel served with love and wisdom, and that we are to love as well, is the world that God created, a world of people, of communities, of animals, plants, rivers, rocks, mountains and molehills that God put together on this astounding and beautiful planet. We’re all in this together. God is working toward the redemption and renewal of all that he created and loves. And he’s doing it through people like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. And through you and me.

My job as a preacher is to exhort us all to do the same as they did: 1) not to let ourselves be bewitched and bedazzled by the non-stop imperial spectacle in which we live; but 2) not to give in to hostility either, rather, to love God’s world without needing to be loved by the human-created world in return; 3) to look to God for our approval and our justification, and not be playing to the world, or any factions in it, for their approval and applause; and 4) to present our witness and God’s wisdom in a wise, friendly, show and tell manner–”Let me show you what God has done for me and how his love has transformed me, and see how it works for you,” we say in our best moments of witness.

But that wouldn’t be fair unless I acknowledge the ways in which we already do that. We already do some friendly “show and tell” through partnerships like the Relief Sale, Ten Thousand Villages and Urban Ventures. We have members and friends who offer help and counsel to international students, and to immigrants seeking refuge and adversaries seeking reconciliation. “Look what happens,” we say to the world, “when we make our way in the world based on God’s kingdom values like compassion and caring, rather than on fear and competition alone.” When we gather for worship, it is first and foremost for God’s sake. But we are also saying to the world, hopefully in a winsome and inviting way, “Check out what happens when we give our love and loyalty to the Prince of Peace, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.” And when we host our Somali friends here at the end of this month, that is for God’s sake as well as theirs. But it also says to the world, as Daniel said to his caretakers, “Just watch and see what happens when we try this Christ-like way of relating.” If this is wisdom of the kind Daniel and his comrades showed, then, as Jesus said, “Wisdom is proven right by her children.”