Focus verse: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

1. The Christian life is meant to be a Festival, not a carnival, nor an Inquisition
2. Whether a carnival or an Inquisition, the same sin is behind all other sins at work: “proud” defiance, resistance against repentance and grace & dependence upon God
3. Our Passover festival is celebrated with bread of sincerity & truth, i.e. openness to correction and repentance, honesty, transparency and mutual accountability (not sinlessness and perfection)

When we looked at this passage over breakfast last Tuesday morning, two questions immediately popped up: 1) What does this passage have to do with today’s baptism and new membership, when its about kicking someone out of church membership?; and 2) How good do we have to be lest we too get dis-fellowshipped or expelled? Since none of us is perfect, wouldn’t this passage set us on some sort of feeding frenzy, at the end of which, no one would be left on our rolls, or in our pews, or…. in the pulpit?

Well, to answer the second question first, today I have commissioned several big, strong bouncers standing in the back who are going to go through the sanctuary this morning taking every known and suspected sinner out of the pews and escorting them out of the sanctuary, and….

Now, why do they seem to be heading for the pulpit first?

Just kidding.

But some of us here have had experiences with just that kind of judgmental feeding frenzy, and sometimes over the oddest of things, like the length of your hair or the color and style of your clothing. All the while that they were fixating on those things, they were overlooking the real sins of fear and hostility that fueled such a feeding frenzy. When I pastored in Kansas, I got to know many who were kicked out of the Holderman Mennonite churches for such alleged sins as having pictures of their family members up in their house or at their work sites. It showed pride, they were told. Some of them joined our Western District Conference Mennonite churches, while others were so badly hurt that they left church all together.

That kind of feeding frenzy is not what Paul is encouraging in us today. He’s encouraging us to think of the Christian life, and the Christian community, as a festival. In particular, the Jewish Passover Festival. The Passover is a festival celebrating God and his work of freedom, redemption, liberation, and the restoration of human dignity from Egyptian slavery. Its celebrated in family, with friends, with the sharing of food, love and faith. An even greater freedom, redemption, liberation and restoration of human dignity is now possible for all of us because of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the final, perfect Passover Lamb of God. We, his disciples, get to celebrate such a festival of freedom, dignity and liberation not just once a year but every day of our lives through eternity.

But somebody in Corinth had turned the new Christian passover festival into a carnival, worse than the most lewd and crude Carnival/Mardi Gras images you might ever have seen in the evening news from New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro. It was so bad that people outside of the church would blush and barf at the mention of it.

But it would be no better if we turned the new Christian Passover Festival into a Mennonite version of the Spanish Inquisition. That was five hundred years ago, when Catholic church officials were prying into everyone’s homes and lives and burning people at the stake who wouldn’t repent of being Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Anabaptist, atheist, agnostic, pagan or whatever. They don’t do this today; the Pope even apologized for it, so we shouldn’t hang it about the necks of our Catholic friends anymore, except to recognize that, in this day and age when anything goes, we are likewise tempted to circle the wagons in a fearful, defensive stance against the world, and to seek security by controlling all sorts of external things about each other.

I suppose that’s why I occasionally get phone calls from people who are interested in checking us out, as long as our church imposes some sort of dress code, especially upon women, and that we don’t do any contemporary, upbeat music. I understand their fears and can sympathize with them. But I don’t think that controlling dress or styles of music will get at the things they really fear most. “Come see the beautiful African clothing, especially around Easter,” I say. “And we have a pretty good worship band, plus a full string orchestra.” But they don’t come. I figure its better to tell the truth and disappoint them over the phone than to have them go through all the trouble to come and get disappointed.

As grievous as was the particular sin mentioned in Corinth, the there is a more grievous sin behind that sin. Paul tells us what it is in verse 2 when he says, “And you are [even] proud!” He means “you” plural. So it wasn’t just a person at fault; there was an entire church faction in his corner. With those words we look beyond the unmentionable sin to the sin behind all sins, the proud, willful, stubborn, defiant resistance to God and his gifts of counsel, repentance, forgiveness and restoration, manifested by pride in the sin and its acceptance. It was the sin of believing himself, against all evidence to the contrary, to be not a sinner.

That sin is uniquely dangerous and destructive because, unlike other sins, it amounts to slamming the door on community, counsel, forgiveness and reconciliation. It amounts to painting ourselves into a corner where the gifts of counsel, of repentance, forgiveness and a change of life cannot reach us, where we would remain alone, thumbing our noses at God and others. Because of his pride in the sin, and not just the sin itself, Paul calls for the de-membership of the Corinthian offender until the fruits of his conduct affect him and confront him with the need to repent and reform. After all, the person in question, by his unwillingness to receive counsel, by his certainty that he had nothing to confess or be forgiven, was already distancing himself from God, the community and its mission.

And, like yeast in bread dough, this defiance of God’s grace was contagious and had begun infecting others with this same spirit of defiance and divisiveness. Others in Corinth were boasting about their acceptance of his conduct. That boasting indicates something else more destructive than the sexual misconduct, as bad as it was: it means that they were turning their inner orientation away from God and toward the world, making themselves actors for hire on the world’s stage, seeking to please society, more so than God. Since no one can act toward all sides of a stage, some will then play to different sides of society’s audience, such as for the right or the left, for the revolutionaries or the reactionaries. When that happens, a bridge club can’t stay together, let alone a church. So, defiance of God’s grace leads inexorably to divisiveness in the church.

And this is just as true if we should also turn the Christian life into an Inquisition. Its just as divisive and destructive whether we’re drinking ourselves silly, or snooping in each other’s refrigerators. Whether we’re committing theft, or auditing each other’s check books. Whether we’re dressing immodestly, or whether we’re enforcing a dress code. In either case, its the same temptation and the same sin: to abandon our trust in God in favor of self-reliance and self-justification, whether through a carnival, or an inquisition.

So, to the second question, How good do I have to be to not get kicked out of the community of faith? Well, that would happen only if we weren’t sinners. Actually, when it comes to God’s household of faith, people really, finally don’t get kicked out. Or they shouldn’t. But people may eventually remove themselves, through this willful defiance I have described, to the point where the community must finally acknowledge their leaving, and grieve it. And the surest way for anyone to remove themselves from the community of faith would be if we stopped being sinners in need of God and each other. Or at least, if we were sure we were not sinners, like the Corinthians and their poster child. In the spirit of I Corinthians 5, church membership is only for sinners.

That’s even what our church’s Mission Statement says. It begins by defining us as, “a community of sinners redeemed from the guilt and bondage of sin by the grace of God and the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ.” No sinless people need apply.

But the other side of the coin is expressed in our annual membership covenant, where we promise each other “...the compassionate giving and receiving of counsel among all members and attendees…” So don’t anyone join this church, or attend it, if you don’t want to start growing from sinners toward sainthood. Don’t join if you don’t want to give and receive help along the way. The old saying, “Every saint has a past and every sinner a future” is the plot line of our worship, our songs and our hymns. Its our life stories. And that of the man who wrote today’s Bible passage. He called himself, “the chief of sinners.”

And that leads us back to the first question: What does this passage, about church discipline and expulsion, have to do with today’s celebration of baptism and a new church membership? Well, look again at the focus verses, 7 and 8: “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.”

At Emmanuel Mennonite Church, our baptismal vows and our membership covenants commit us to those two things: sincerity and truth. Not to sinlessness and perfection, because we’ve probably all missed our chance at those, but to sincerity and truth. The truth I take to be God’s Word. Sincerity I take to mean honesty, transparency and openness with each other in a spirit of care and compassion for each other. In our life-long Passover celebration together, our “bread of sincerity and truth” is made of our willingness to review our lives, honestly and compassionately, by the standard of God’s truth, to repent and make amends however often they’re necessary, to give ourselves and each other as many chances as we need to get up from our falls and failures and start over, and to accept the gracious, compassionate help of our brothers and sisters to do just that. It may not always be wise to spill everything about our lives before everyone all the time. But hopefully, to some trusted people in God’s household of faith, all of our lives are an open book to someone. Without this regular diet of truth and sincerity, our spirits starve and die.

I hope that every time someone is baptized and embarks on a new Christian life, all of us reflect anew upon our relationship with God and each other. Today, Rediet is joining the new Passover festival in Christ, to purge any of the old leaven of hostility and wickedness, and to share with us the new bread of sincerity and truth. She is committing herself to Christ and to us, to join us on the life-long journey of growth in godliness. Let Rediet’s decision today remind us to keep sharing and feeding on the bread of sincerity and truth, of honest counsel, repentance, forgiveness and newness of life. Its a matter of life and death. Especially for those who need it.

Any among us who have recently been to Rome just missed an opportunity to experience the following spectacle: to hear the bold, brash blare of trumpets, the stirring roll of drums, the rhythmic tread of marching feet and the deep clop-clop of horses’ hooves, the fluttering of broad scarlet banners with the golden eagle emblem, to the wild cheering of the crowds as through a special gate opened only for such occasions, the Porta Triumphalis, the army of a triumphant general or emperor, returning victoriously from war, marched up the street called La Via Triumphalis with his soldiers, his captives and his loot. Where the likes of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Marcus Aurelius rode their chariots, with laurel wreaths around their heads, at the front of their victorious and surviving soldiers, cars and buses now sit in the sweltering heat of summer traffic jams. Or people sit at sidewalk cafes cooling down with a cup of gelato, on that same street now called La Via del Forii Imperiali. (Sound familiar to anyone?) Anyone who was there recently just missed such a spectacle by only 2,000 years at most.

That is the scene that Paul the Apostle had in mind when he told the Corinthian Christians,.”..God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men. We are fools for Christ…We are weak…..we are dishonored!” Paul puts himself, and the other apostles, on the ancient Via Triumphalis, or today’s Via del Forii Imperiali in Rome. Except for the cars, the buses and the gelato of course. Paul and the other apostles are in the triumphal procession of a general’s victory parade. Only you’ll find them near the end of the parade, among the captured enemy soldiers, hands tied, feet chained, naked or clad in rags, marched off to the Coliseum to face wild beasts and gladiators, unarmed, to die for the entertainment of the masses. But the masses need not wait to take their seats in the Coliseum. Its perfectly permissible for them to jeer, taunt, curse and pelt the prisoners with rocks and waste from their garbage cans. Or their chamber pots. In fact, it would be taken as a show of public spirit, patriotism and good citizenship to do so. In the parade of worldly, imperial life, that, Paul says, is where God’s agents should be prepared to find themselves.

If these are brutal things to say or to contemplate, then we’ve just tasted the sting of the whip that Paul says he might bring when he visits the Corinthian churches, if they don’t take his warning and do an attitude check. When he concludes this section by asking, “What do you prefer? Shall I come to you with a whip, or in love and with a gentle spirit?” don’t think of a real cowhide whip, like what cowboys might use on horses or cattle. Think of the confrontational images, words and questions that Paul has just used to shake up and wake up the Corinthian Christians from their arrogant dreams of pride, and their desire for strength, status and wealth in the world.

Since arrogance, pride, envy and lusting for power and prestige are common to the human condition, in both the church and the world, we’re never done needing a sting of the occasional reality check to confront us and to interrogate us with some pretty basic questions from time to time. So as we ponder this passage, take note of three things it contains: 1) a confrontation; 2) an interrogation: and 3) an invitation.

As for (one) the confrontation, that’s in the apostle’s image of the Triumphal Entry, the wrong end of it, that is. I felt something of a similar confrontation this week when I heard the tragic news of the ten aid workers, most of them Christians, who were killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, for the alleged crime of evangelizing. One of them, Glenn Lapp, there with Mennonite Central Committee, was known to several of our own members and attendees. They weren’t evangelizing, and they had always served notice that they wouldn’t. But to the Taliban, just being a Christian, or in league with a Christian, is tantamount to evangelizing, a crime, under Islamic law, worthy of death. And in a way, they’re right. Not the death sentence part. But the actions and the conduct of those aid workers were evangelistic, in that they represented Jesus quite faithfully, even without them uttering a single evangelistic word. And that put them at the end of the Taliban’s victory parade, as targets of dishonor and death.

Their deaths, like Paul’s words, confronted me with some pretty basic questions, like: Why am I a Christian? Is it to garner the respect and admiration of polite society? That may have worked in the 1950′s, when church growth in America was nothing short of amazing, when church membership was part and parcel of postwar middle class, upwardly mobile, loyal American respectability, along with the new suburban home, poodle skirts and bobby socks, and the big car with tail fins. It was not unusual– even legal back then– for employers to ask potential employees during job interviews if they attended church and if so, which one. Such respect gave the pastor and the priest automatic access and success. So we got invited to pray over sessions of city hall and the commissioning of new nuclear submarines.

I think that many American Christians miss those days of triumphal Civil American Religion, and long for them back. But that was an odd, unusual and temporary moment in all of global church history. And they are long gone, especially now, when increasingly, almost any statements of Christian belief and moral boundaries are confused with bigotry, or labeled as much.

It seems from Paul’s words that such respect and respectability vis a vis their society is what some among the Corinthian Christians were striving for. In polite Greek society of the time, what was religion for, anyway, but to cultivate success and social access? That led people, as Paul put it, “to boast in one [apostle] over another.” Or to consider themselves different, wealthy, strong, honored, even kings and royalty…already. Or at least to put on such airs and appearances.

While this kind of social striving is normal, it is devastating to the church. We’re called to be God’s showpiece to the world of the coming class-free jubilee kingdom, in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first, no one will have too much and no one too little. The Corinthian arrogance and lust for honor and respectability led some of them to play fast and loose with Christian doctrine and with Christian ethics. Its why some of them taught that there was no physical resurrection, neither for Jesus nor for us, as we saw in Chapter 15. Because that would be scandalous in polite Greek society. Its why some people were porking out at their communion services/love feasts while the poor members just looked on, to leave hungrier than when they came, as we saw in Chapter 11. Because it was not chic in polite Greek society to share food and tables with slaves and the poor.

Before Paul could set them straight on matters of Christian belief and behavior, he had to confront this arrogance and social striving. “You can boast all you like in your apostle versus someone else’s,” he’s saying, “but notice where we apostles are in life’s parade: the very place you fear most, at the end of society’s Triumphal procession, not the head. So we work with our hands; we go hungry and thirsty, in ragged clothes; considered the scum of the earth and the refuse of the world; we are persecuted but we endure it, cursed, but we bless; a spectacle to heaven and earth.”

Confrontational words these are, with all the subtlety of a cracking whip. But notice the questions they imply (and this is my second point, the interrogation part): Questions like, Just why did we become Christians in the first place? Whose approval and acceptance count most to us? Whose honor and esteem were we seeking when we were baptized? That of the world, so that we might march at the head of society’s parade? What did we expect as a result of our confession of faith in the Crucified Jesus, some sort of victory parade?

Actually, our victory parade is coming. We can count on it. And even on being at the head of it, with the victor’s crown, or laurel wreath. For as Paul told the Roman Christians, “We are more than conquerors, through him who loved us.” That the Corinthians wanted to be at the front of the Victory Parade was not all bad. They just had their timing wrong. And the wrong sponsors. And with this I come to the third part of this message, the invitation.

Paul does invite us all to a victory parade, a triumphal procession, for Jesus, for himself and for us, when he says, in verse 8, “Already you are kings, and that without us. How I wish that you really had become kings so that we might be kings with you!” Because there will come a day when we and the apostles and all of Christ’s followers will be crowned and revealed for the royalty we really and already are. Christ himself is heaven’s king, come as a servant, to share our humble human condition. The good news today is that Christ conquered not people but sin and death, so as to lift us up, exalt us and make of us a nation of priests and kings like himself. When he returns, that will be his triumphant parade. And ours as well. You are invited to the head of that parade.

But Christ’s example also shows there are no shortcuts to the head of the parade. He was willing to put in his time at the end of the procession, dragging a cross among the jeering, taunting crowds. So were the apostles. So were the ten aid workers killed in Afghanistan.

And so must we. Will we accept the invitation in this passage to join Christ and the apostles there as well, at the end of the procession, as the potential target of the world’s contempt and dishonor?

As hard and difficult as that sounds, the end of the line turns out actually to be a place of great freedom. Remove from our calculation the desire and the cost of public approval and it will be easier to do what Jesus would do. Such as when Shane Claiborne, the speaker at last month’s youth conference, and his friends camped out with homeless families who found shelter in an abandoned cathedral in Philadelphia. They did so in order to stand in solidarity with the homeless, and to help focus resources from the wider community on them. Society expects little else, and hardly even notices when poor people and people of color end up on the streets. But when college-educated young adults from middle class homes get evicted with them, people of their class, family and background are more likely to see human beings among the people and families huddling over ventilation grates on cold winter nights. For this act of solidarity with people at the end of life’s parade, City Hall and the Archdiocese made threatening moves to arrest and evict them all. So did the Fire Marshall, who claimed that the cathedral was a fire trap. His coming inspection would prove that, he said. But Claiborne and his friends stayed, effectively taking their place at the end of society’s parade.

But they weren’t alone. Friends joined them there. The night before the Fire Marshall came, fire fighters showed up to install smoke detectors, fire extinguishers and other equipment, free of charge, so that the abandoned sanctuary would pass inspection for human habitation. And it did, much to everyone’s surprise, joy and relief.

So the end of the parade turned out to be not such a bad place, after all. In fact, it became a place of partying, with lots of friends. The fact that most of them were homeless and poor didn’t detract from anyone’s joy. In fact, the end of the parade was where God showed up with riches and resources, in the form of friends and free smoke detectors and fire extinguishers.

By contrast, the front of the parade, where the conquering general rides alone, is a lonely, solitary place. He had his chariot to himself, although some accounts say that he was accompanied by a slave who held an umbrella over him, to shade him from the hot sun. This slave was also said to whisper repeatedly in the conqueror’s ear, “Remember that you are mortal.” All the more proof that sometimes being at the head of the parade is over-rated.

Unless its Jesus’ victory parade, where we will be immortal. Will we join him there, by declaring and maintaining our loyalty and love for him, even though it might mean marching in the back with him, among the prisoners, the poor and the despised? Will we free ourselves of the need to be respected by the world, and stand with Christ whenever the world heaps contempt on him, and all he stands for? If so, then we can count on his promise, that “Whoever confesses me before men will I confess before my Father.” When that day comes, at that moment, he will be at the head of the parade. So will those who stood with him. And who walked with him, at the end of the procession.

Purpose: That we will embrace our Christian freedom from judging others, and being judged by others, because it is God who judges.

If I were promising us today freedom from gravity and a foolproof way of personal flight—not in an airplane, not even a jetpack, but by jumping up and flapping our arms—hopefully you’d be very skeptical. But today’s passage promises something like that very kind of freedom. By the time this message is done, I hope we will all understand and embrace its promise of freedom, a freedom even greater than freedom from gravity.

This promise of such great freedom is described in verse 5, when Paul writes, “Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes.” At first this kind of freedom sounds exactly like what today’s post-modern thinking considers freedom. “Judge nothing:” Doesn’t that fit right in with the contemporary mindset that says there is nothing to judge but judgment and judgmentalism, nothing to disapprove of but disapproval, nothing to disagree with but disagreement, because we’re past thinking that everything is relative. That’s so 1960′s! We’re on to “everything is good” now, except for saying that anything is bad. So we can tolerate everything except intolerance. See, its even in the Bible. Like Paul says, “judge nothing.”

And if you’re wondering, “Who are you and what have you done with the pastor?” you’re probably not alone. And if you’re thinking, Wait a minute, even saying “judge nothing” is passing judgment on something, at least on judging, then you’re a step ahead of the sermon. And if we should go on to say, “But this whole letter of I Corinthians is about judging or discerning between beliefs, behaviors and values, and that Paul himself passes judgment on all sorts of moral and spiritual options,” then good for you– you’ve been paying attention to this sermon series.

So what gives? How can we judge nothing, including the act of judging, according to a letter full of all sorts of moral and spiritual judgments and discernment? Well, it depends on what—or who—we’re judging. And on who’s doing the judging. We read in verse 6 that the Lord does the one supreme historical definitive and 100% accurate judgment when he returns. “He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. Then each person will receive his praise ….from God.”

For as rarely as we hear sermons on The Last Judgment, it’s a pretty basic feature of Christian faith. Of all prophetic, monotheistic and Abrahamic faiths, like Judaism and Islam too. One of the names given in the Q’uran for God is “Master of the Day of Judgment.” This name is repeated with every one of their five daily prayers. It wouldn’t hurt us Christians either to remind ourselves regularly of that feature of God’s nature, and of our accountability and responsibility.

But what God judges is something that neither you nor I have the capacity to judge: “what is hidden in the darkness [of each human soul] and the motives of people’s hearts.” That’s what is meant by “judge nothing.” Nothing by way of “what is hidden in the darkness [of each human soul] and the motives of people’s hearts.” Paul says that he isn’t even completely capable of doing that for himself. “I do not even judge myself,” he writes in verse 3. “My conscience is clear,” he adds, “but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.” The judgment that counts most will be done by the One who knows us better than we know ourselves, let alone anyone else.

So we must judge and discern among all the alternative values, behaviors and beliefs coming at us all the time, as if our lives depended upon them. For they do. As an example, I know people with histories of crystal meth and ecstasy use, whose brains have been so deeply scrambled that sometimes I don’t know if I’m talking to the person in front of me, or to residues of the chemicals. Maybe they got into that stuff thinking, Hey, its all okay, except for saying that anything is not okay. But as far as I know, they may never be entirely free of the temptation to use again, nor of the effects of the drugs that have abused them. So, we are responsible for for discerning between beliefs, behaviors and values, so that we don’t get into bondage like what I just described. Its not always easy, but its a life-and-death matter. And it is doable.

But judging—or discerning– what Paul calls “what is hidden in darkness” and “the motives of men’s hearts,” that is, judging people themselves, that we are neither capable of, nor responsible for. That is God’s business, not ours. On that day when all is laid bare and we shall know as we are known, we will be surprised by the darkness that was in the lightest and brightest of souls, and the light that was somehow yet there in what seemed to be the darkest and deadest of souls. Or as the little childhood ditty puts it, “There’s so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, it doesn’t behoove any of us, to talk about the rest of us.” So I hold out hope for all people, whatever they’ve done, whatever their past, not because of who or how they are, or who or how I am, but because of who and how God is.

Paul himself, in all the passages we have read so far this year, does not infringe upon God’s realm of judgment. Nowhere in this letter does he judge persons or evaluate their worth the way he does their teachings or their conduct. Their conduct might be just wrong, arrogant, destructive and divisive, and he’ll say so. But never does he label or reject them personally.

But isn’t that what we often do whenever a disagreement rears its head, or a question or controversy arises over some moral or spiritual matter? Such as the controversy in the church or conference over questions of sexuality, or church membership, or war, patriotism and politics? That, in fear and self-defense, we are tempted to go for the jugular vein and to question people’s motives, their character, their value to us, to the world and to God? That we judge not just what they advocate or do, but who they are and what they’re worth? Experience has taught me that no side in any controversy has the monopoly on such fear-based tactics. I’ve seen people who call themselves “non-judgmental” act very judgmentally against people whom they judged for being judgmental.

But two wrongs don’t make a right, nor can we arrive at clarity without charity. We may have one hundred good reasons to believe that a position we hold, or an action we take, is morally superior to all the alternatives. But that gives us no right nor reason to believe that we personally are morally superior than anyone else. Our position might be technically correct, like the computer that kept billing my father one year for an account balance of zero dollars and zero cents. By the third notice, it was threatening to charge interest if he didn’t send in a check for zero dollars and zero cents. It was technically very, very correct. But also lacking something very important. In Christian moral discernment, that most important part is always love for people, even if we can’t always love their beliefs and behavior, judgmental or otherwise. Our first and most important task in discerning right from wrong and good from evil is to love people with a love that is infinitely warmer, even more sacrificial, than what mere tolerance can muster.

We may know this, but sometimes fear and confusion can tip us back into childish or adolescent behavior, like wondering and worrying about who’s most popular, who’s most valued, who’s in, and who’s out? Whenever we uncover a disagreement, that’s the fear that raises its ugly head: I thought I was in, but am I now about to be out?

And that’s what Paul was up against in Corinth: something like high school cliques that never grew up. As we saw in the previous chapters, the churches of Corinth were preoccupied with a vicious, divisive popularity contest. “I am for Paul, I am for Apollos, I am for Peter,” some were saying. Not only is that trying to pit Peter, Paul and Apollos against each other, it obviously got turned inward, among the members. Many of us came out of our junior or senior high school years the walking wounded, wounded by such rejection, cliques, labels and scapegoating. And the trauma may come back, from time to time. Like for the guy who received information in the mail about his upcoming twenty-fifth high school reunion, read it, and found himself on the list of people whose whereabouts were unknown. Go figure.

But all that “Who’s In and Who’s Out and Who’s Who?” seems to have been like water off a duck’s back for Paul. “God judges, and I don’t even judge myself,” he said. He cares about the Corinthian Christians passionately, like the father that he was to them in the faith. But he doesn’t care about what they think of him or how much they like him. Or not. The only one whose judgment he cares about is God’s. And on that day of judgment, when all humanity is gathered before his Great White Throne, his verdict will prove so indisputably right-on and penetrating that “every knee will bow and every tongue confess” that he is Lord. What a relief that neither you nor I nor anyone else we see sits on that Throne.

And that’s the freedom that this passage offers us today. Not any freedom from responsibility for our actions, not any freedom so-called from the responsibility to discern right from wrong, or good from evil, and to order our steps aright. The failure to do so, or to do so correctly, can lead us into less freedom, not more.

Nor is it freedom from God’s judgment. That’s just a given. And I know, at first, that sounds like a recipe for enslavement to fear. To stand before the One who knows me better than I know myself, and to have him reveal all that he see in me, all that I have done and have therefore become….Scary. Because none of us is exactly on the inside what we are on the outside. And we know that.

But really, finally, the one and most important thing we will be judged upon is whether or not we embraced and accepted God’s love, God’s mercy, forgiveness and affirmation for us. As Karl Barth defined it, “Faith is the courage to accept that we are accepted.” By God. That’s what we’ll have to answer most for: Have we let God justify us through his compassion for us, or did we keep trying to justify ourselves to God and to the world by our works? Or did we try to justify ourselves by judging others? Did we rely upon the world and ourselves to judge us, with the usual harsh and punitive standards, or have we let God judge us, with his reliably merciful and compassionate heart? In effect, by that choice, we actually judge ourselves. The one choice is slavery, the other freedom.

If we’re looking for true freedom, then flee to the Judge who is also our Refuge, our Comforter and our Vindicator, and we need never fear either his judgment, nor that of anyone else again. That’s one kind of freedom that today’s passage offers us.

But there’s another kind of freedom offered to us: freedom from the hard work of climbing onto God’s Great White Throne and taking on the task of judging the world for him, of trying to discern what we cannot know about others, sometimes not even about our own mysterious selves. We can confess this: that there will be a supreme, definitive judgment; that God has the last word over human history and our histories. We can name Him who will do the judging: the One sinless lamb of God who took our most damning judgment upon his own back in the form of the cross. And we have heard how he will judge all who have fled to him for mercy. As he himself said, “No one who comes to me will I cast out (Jn. 6:40).” So, we’re free from the fear of judgment.

But when it comes to other people, even people with whom we disagree on major stuff, even people who may hate us and judge us, we stand at the threshold of a mystery whose depths and darkness only One knows and can judge, and it is not any one of us visible here this morning. We are free from the burden of trying to guess the motives and secrets of their hearts, or to determine their destinies and relationship with God. We can move on then to the first and most important task of discernment for which we are responsible, and of which we are capable: how to order our own lives aright, how to love others and display to them the tender mercies and the extravagant welcome of God.

I had such an experience last January, and it was beautiful. It wasn’t easy, but it stands out as a prime example of the disciple’s freedom that comes from leaving divine judgment in divine hands. It was when our regional district conference held a discussion on biblical interpretation and sexuality.

Since this conference was in Iowa, and since it was winter, it seemed the better part of reason to carpool our way down from the Twin Cities. In that van were people all over the map in regards to their understanding of sexuality and the Bible, even including one person in a major role in a major advocacy organization. So you can understand why I was a little nervous getting into that van. Once they knew what a dyed-in-the-wool classical orthodox biblicist I was, were they going to dump me out and leave me in a snowbank along the windy, wintry Interstate? On a cold January day, being in or out could be a life and death matter. But others in that car, with different positions, probably had the same fear about me. And we had ample opportunity during the conference to compare our positions and air our differences.

On the way back home, we stopped at a restaurant in Mason City, Iowa, and enjoyed good food and each other’s company. No one seemed to be holding a grudge, no fear held back the laughter and the witty repartees, and no one’s appetite seemed to be inhibited by having just done the hard and sometimes painful work of finding our way through the moral and spiritual thickets of this world, holding many of the same basic values, but going down different paths. I remember that friendly and enjoyable trip together, on a dark, cold January night, as a supreme example of what can happen when we separate the need to judge moral and spiritual alternatives from trying to judge what only God can judge: people.

I’m so glad that that is God’s task, not mine. That frees us to get on with doing what we discern, and what he reveals, his will to be, free from fear of either God’s rejection and condemnation, or that of anyone else. Free as well, from the burden of doing God’s job of judging others. That’s the freedom I wish for everyone here.

Focus verses: “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.”

Yesterday, I was gassing up the car at a filling station, when I read the following words: “Do not leave the pump unattended; all spills are your responsibility.” Next to it I saw the corporate logo of the service station: BP. “Oh Man, I thought; now they’re blaming me!” If that wasn’t scary enough, once the tank was full and the gas stopped flowing, the digital read-out said, “Please see station attendant.” Too late to run or hide; my face is probably on the security camera already. I was feeling picked on, put upon, and put down.

I mention that because many of you may also have the same feeling in response to today’s passage, of being picked on, put upon and put down. I’m referring to the words, “Women should remain silent in the church.” As I hope to show, these words probably don’t really address the issue that we often make it try to address. But I hope that over the course of my message you pick up on my excitement about two things that this passage does address. One of them we discerned as a church, in the year before we moved here, as being very important for our church’s future: small groups. Although the passage doesn’t use the words, “small groups,” hopefully I can make clear what this passage implies about them. The other thing this passage addresses is ministry. Not just my ministry, not just ordained ministry, not just women in ministry, but everybody’s ministry, yours, mine and ours. So, small groups and our ministries: those are what I’m most eager to address today, because those are what I think this passage is really addressing.

But first, we have to deal with the question of women’s leadership in the church. Last week I spoke about a minority report and a majority report about what constitutes the gift of speaking in tongues. I told you that the majority of me goes with the majority report on that. This week I’ll give you the majority and the minority report on women in public, visible, verbal leadership in the church, and tell you why all of me goes with the minority report.

The majority report, when you add up all the voices over twenty centuries of Christian history, has said that this passage, and at least one other, effectively forbids women from clergy leadership roles. But when you ask just what do you mean by ministry and clergy, the answer so often has been so institutional, so hierarchical and so authoritarian, I have to agree: women should not be in ministry. But then, neither should men. Nobody should be in ministry, not if ministers and clergy are supposed to stand between people and God, or between people and the church institution, and mediate the flow of grace and forgiveness and salvation between them and God. That’s a recipe for keeping people childish and dependent upon experts and authorities. That is directly at odds with the definition of pastoral ministry that Paul gives in Ephesians 4:12-14, “to equip God’s people for [their] works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” That is a servanthood kind of power, a power under, rather than power over, a power that serves to encourage and grow everyone else’s power. Beyond that kind of power, no one should go, not in the name of God. But I would wager this morning that many of us can name women in our personal histories who have exercised exactly that kind of supportive, nurturing, empowering servant leadership that Paul describes.

To say that women shouldn’t exercise visible and strategic ministry roles is also at odds with what Paul says to women, and about women, in other New Testament passages, including in this very same letter. In Chapter 11, Paul gives instructions about when men and women do pray or prophesy in the church. He obviously assumes they will, and even affirms it. In the first chapter of the letter we read that Paul has learned about the problems in Corinth through correspondence with a woman, Chloe, who must be some sort of leader among the house churches there. He obviously respects what she has to tell him. Read the list of church leaders whom Paul greets in his letter to Rome and some of them are women. The same with some of the church leaders he mentions in his letter to the Philippians: women.

Telling women that they cannot exercise certain gifts in church also goes against the main thrust of the biblical witness about women: that from the very creation of humanity, that “In the image of God he created them male and female.” So it takes men and women together to reflect the image of God. It also contradicts the respectful and inclusive way that Jesus related to women. He did not make them apostles; sending women by themselves into that world as the first cross-cultural pioneer missionaries would have done them no service. But there were women, like Mary, who sat at Jesus’ feet to learn, the posture of a disciple.

So, we’ve established that Paul respects, consults and corresponds with female church leaders, like Chloe in Corinth. And then he says, “Women should remain silent in the church.” What gives? Well, first of all, dispense with notions and questions about where men and women fit into ranks and hierarchies of church power, because church as Paul describes it in this very same passage is definitely not about that kind of hierarchical or institutional power.

Secondly, disengage the question of silence from the whole matter of praying or prophesying or teaching. Paul doesn’t use those words in the passage under question. Maybe the silence he recommends refers to something else. That’s what a growing minority report of scholars are saying, some of them with missionary experience.

I read recently of missionaries, long ago, to the interior of China, who planted new churches among a people for whom very few women had ever had any kind of formal education, or experience in a classroom, educational setting, before becoming Christians. The men had, but not many women. When men and women sat together in these new churches, the men knew how to conduct themselves during formal teaching and worship, how to listen and process what they were hearing, formulate questions and wait their turn during discussion. The women did not, because they had never been given that opportunity before becoming Christian. So the teachings and proceedings were being interrupted by these inexperienced women, often by questions like, “What did he say? What did he mean by that?” or by other business that would intrude, such as, “I’m glad to see your son is doing better,” or “How did it go at the market, yesterday?” This happened in those new Chinese churches, but only because these women, with no previous formal education, were suddenly thrown into a new situation, without preparation, with a new set of protocol for speaking, learning and listening.

Was that the problem in the ancient Corinthian house churches? Like with those women in China? Women in ancient Greece were regularly denied the kinds of educational opportunities that men were given. Now, in the new churches that Paul has planted, men and women are seated and learning together, which is already quite revolutionary. Is Paul just saying, “Women, don’t talk and interrupt the teaching, prophesying and praying during your gatherings, because, among other things, its disgraceful?”That they shouldn’t be interrupting the proceedings with questions or distractions, but wait till they get home if they want to review the teaching with lots of questions and different directions? I have no 100% fool proof evidence to that effect, and it doesn’t answer all the questions. But it best answers for me the most important question: why and how Paul can elsewhere acknowledge and affirm certain female leaders, as does the rest of the Bible, and here tell women to be silent. He doesn’t say or use the verbs for teach or preach or prophesy, just the verbs, “be silent” and “speak.” Otherwise, where women had the gifts and the training and experience to be teachers and servant leaders, like Chloe, Paul treats them as part of his team. Same with Priscilla and Aquilla, a husband and wife team he first met in Corinth. That’s the minority report on Paul and women in leadership, its where I stand on what Paul says about women in church leadership, and its getting less lonely of a minority all the time.

The minority report also best fits with the thrust of this whole passage, the whole context of I Corinthians chapters 12-14, indeed the entire I Corinthian letter: Whatever gifts the Holy Spirit has given you, use them, for the edification of the whole church, whoever you are, whatever your sex. That’s all that the word “submission” means. If you do this out of love, for the love of your brothers and sisters, then God will make these gifts work together beautifully, harmoniously and interdependently, because, “God is not a God of disorder but of harmony,” in verse 33.

So when you get together for worship, Paul says in verse 26, “everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.” Just as you shouldn’t interrupt, so you shouldn’t monopolize the time. Paul adds, “If a revelation comes to someone who is sitting down, the first speaker should stop. For you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged (vv. 30-31).” In that way, everybody is “submissive” to each other, not just the women.

Consider with me just how revolutionary this kind of advice was at the time. Most of the Corinthian Christians were coming out of a pagan religious background where the spirits were allegedly most accessible only to trained, initiated and uniquely gifted prophets, priests and shamans. When they went into a trance and said or prophesied or demanded something, you had to take whatever they said by faith. In effect, your faith was as much in the prophet or priest as in his or her god or their teaching. What’s more, there was no telling what those spirits would do with the priest or the shaman: he had no control. It could be quite dramatic. Or embarrassing. Or entertaining. By contrast, in the Christian gatherings, the Spirit and his gifts are equally available to all members. And our gifts are of equal value, even though they’re different. And if the Spirit inspires or instructs you in some way, you can still take your time, take your turn, listen and treat each other respectfully because, as Paul says, “The spirit of the prophets is subject to the control of the prophets.”

And remember that the Jewish members were coming out of synagogues where the men sat in front and participated in the rites and ceremonies, while the women sat in back with the children, behind a lattice screen, and could only listen. But in the church, the question was not so much if women participated in worship, prayer and teaching, but how they participated. That shows just how much God and His Spirit are creating a new community that is harmonious, yet without domination and hierarchy.

Therefore, when we gather, Paul says, “everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.” Gee, why don’t we worship the way Paul describes? Why don’t we dispense with the bulletin, the order of worship, the sermon, and just see what people come with, what the Spirit might have given them to share? Well, if we tried that here on a Sunday morning, with average attendance bumping past 70 people, we could be here all day. I would hope so, because hopefully our spiritual lives are such vibrant, living things, in which God is teaching us all sorts of things and we feel eager and compelled to share them with others, that we would need all day for everyone to contribute their piece.

Actually, we do some of that in this church already. Just not on Sunday mornings. We do some of that in our sharing, yes, and some of that in Christian Education. But we do it most and best in our small groups. We have two of them now. We have the people for more.

And those small groups are more like the kinds of church gatherings that Paul was addressing in today’s passage. History and archaeology both tell us that the church of Corinth, of Ephesus, of Rome, of Jerusalem for that matter, was not one big church meeting in a time and place like this, but a collection of house churches,with a total attendance of maybe 10 to 20 people, men, women and children. The details of this letter, I Corinthians, bear this out.

But those small house gatherings weren’t the only places they met. The First Church of Jerusalem, in Acts chapter 2, was meeting in two places: in the big Jerusalem Temple for a large-scale worship event that was more planned and scripted, and, we read, in their homes, for more intimate fellowship, teaching, prayers and the breaking of bread. In effect, they had big group worship events, and small groups. And so can we. This Sunday morning worship service is like that Jerusalem temple gathering. But among us are enough people for five or six small groups. If we’re not in one, think about joining or starting one if you wish to experience the kind of spiritual connectedness, accountability, interdependence, maturity and mutual up-building that Paul is encouraging on us today.

So, while we fixate on the words, “Women should be silent in the church,” the main point of this passage really is, “let everything be done decently and in order….For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.” Today’s word then challenges us to recognize, respect and give space to the development of everyone’s gifts for ministry. Someone has said that the true measure of a church is not its seating capacity but its serving capacity. When you think of the ministries and gifts of the Spirit already in this congregation, its fair to call us “little big church.” Now that we’re in this new location, think also of the possibilities for us to have a ministry of ministry development for all believers, including and especially young, emerging leaders, from whom new ministries may emerge, maybe even new churches. Every time a leader and servant and gifts and ministries emerge among us, will we recognize them in him? And in her? May it be.

“Through men of strange tongues  and through the lips of foreigners
I will speak to this people, but even then they will not listen to me,” says the Lord.  22Tongues, then, are a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers; prophecy, however, is for believers, not for unbelievers. 23So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and some who do not understand or some unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind? 24But if an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all, 25and the secrets of his heart will be laid bare. So he will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, “God is really among you!”

1. What is the gift of “tongues,” and how do they serve believers and non-believers?

2. Since this was an issue mentioned only in the Corinthian churches in the First Century AD, how does this gift, and Paul’s advice, apply to us today?

This sermon comes about thirty-five years late. But I hope you’ll listen anyway. Many of us may remember how, during the 1970′s, the Charismatic movement broke onto the scene and affected more than the usual Pentecostal churches, but also mainstream Protestant and even Catholic churches as well. There were and are also some Mennonite churches that were touched by the Charismatic movement, some of which are still going and growing. But there were concerns and controversies about the Charismatic movement similar to what Paul addresses in today’s passage, twenty centuries before.

For those of us who weren’t there, the Charismatic movement was a renewal movement in which the more extraordinary and spectacular gifts of the Holy Spirit were manifested, most notably, the gift of speaking, praying and worshiping in previously unknown languages. I’m not aware that any were documented to have been languages of other human tribes or nations, and therefore, that the person so endowed went on to preach the gospel in such languages to such people, as what happened in Jerusalem on that first Pentecost after Jesus’ resurrection. But that’s why this movement was also called “Pentecostal,” because, like that first Christian Pentecost, it involved “speaking in [unlearned] tongues.” And that’s why that gift in particular is a key feature of Pentecostal belief, practice and churches today.

People touched by such a gift say that it connects their spirit directly with God’s Holy Spirit, in such a way as to bypass the normal language processes of our minds, thereby touching us at a level beyond human words. It is, they often say, “their spirit language,” or “the language of heaven,” and praying or speaking in that way deeply enriches and renews their spirits.

That is also the answer that the majority of Bible scholars gives to my first question, “What is the spiritual gift of speaking in other tongues?” That also answers the second part of that question, “How does this gift serve believers?” Paul himself says, “If I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays,” But he adds, “but my mind is unfruitful.”

Its not only the classical Pentecostal theologians who say that about praying and worshiping in unknown tongues, by the way. Its the majority report of other Bible scholars who are definitely not Pentecostal nor Charismatic, who are high church people like Bishop N.T. Wright, or ancient Orthodox or Catholic thinkers like St. Augustine, or even great Protestant heavyweights like Martin Luther, and, of course, Menno Simons, even though none of them seem to have practiced that gift.

Now I am not in a position today to argue for or against what they say. Advocating for or against the charismatic movement is not the point of this message. As Paul himself said, “Who am I to judge another man’s servant?” Furthermore, I do not want to put myself in the position of telling the Holy Spirit what gifts he is going to give his church or not. Because this is His church, not any one of ours. If praying in other, unlearned language, of heaven or earth, is part of someone’s spiritual practice, and it has the effect that I have described on them, I’ll take them at their word.

Where I do draw the line, however, is whenever anyone says that speaking in other tongues is the only, or the primary, sign that we have the Holy Spirit. Or that those who speak in tongues are better or more God-pleasing Christians than those who don’t. And most Pentecostal or Charismatic theologians worth their salt don’t say that, either. After all, this Corinthian letter is the only one where tongues are listed among the spiritual gifts, and the Corinthian churches seem to be the only ones among the churches Paul planted where that gift seemed to operate.

But Paul also says, in verse 22 that tongues are for unbelievers. That’s a little harder to understand. Because he then goes on to say that if non-believers come into a church service where everyone is speaking in tongues, they’ll consider everyone to be crazy, and look for the quickest way out of the room. Over the years I’ve heard a number of people talk about their experience in a Charismatic or Pentecostal service in that very same way. They were looking for the first exit out, because it seemed so strange and chaotic to them.

So, how can speaking in other tongues be a sign for unbelievers, when, as often as not, as Paul himself admits, it freaks them out? Well, that’s where the minority report comes in. There’s a minority of Bible scholars who say that all that Paul is referring to, when he writes about speaking in other tongues, is the problem that urban, cosmopolitan churches of the First Century must have had with all the different languages represented by their members. To worship together, they would have had to use some language commonly used for trade, government and entertainment, in effect, pretty much everyone’s second or third language, a language that didn’t reach as deeply down into their hearts and spirits as did the language they learned on their mothers’ laps, what we call “a maternal language.” In the case of Paul’s churches, that common language was the Greek of our New Testament.

Pray or meditate or prophesy or teach in the language you learned in the home, and it will touch the deep, deep recesses of the heart. And so a pastor I knew, at a Mennonite Church in Ontario, said that, as he attended aging and ailing members on their death beds, as they prayed their last prayers of release and commitment to God, they often reverted to the Low German of their childhood. The last words uttered with their last breaths, were often in Low German, even though they had functioned throughout most of their lives quite well in English.

But if everyone in those churches prayed and taught and worshiped in their maternal Low German and English, and, let’s see, let’s add the Mohawk Indian members, plus French Canadians, plus members who might have joined from the Chinese and Indian and African and Spanish-speaking immigrant communities, and have them all praying and worshiping and teaching in their own languages, visitors there might indeed walk out shaking their heads and saying, “They’re stark-raving loony!”

Is that all that Paul was addressing in this passage on speaking in other tongues? That some are more gifted than others by the Spirit with the ability to learn other human languages and to translate them for the sake of the church and its mission? And to preach the gospel and translate it into other languages? Like Paul himself, who says, “I speak in tongues more than all of you.” Or maybe he means, “I speak in more languages than all of you.” Which would have been true for him as a missionary.

If so, that would certainly explain how and why “tongues are for unbelievers.” Because Christian mission often involves overcoming hurdles between people and cultures, like language. There’s a big part of me that would like to say that this is all that’s at stake in Corinth: that the Corinthians must accept the fact that, if all of them with all their different maternal languages are going to get along and edify each other, many of them will have to operate in another “tongue” or language besides the one that speaks most deeply to our spirits: our maternal languages. And if we do speak or pray or worship in our maternal language, then pray, or make sure, that someone interprets for the others. Or translate for yourself. In the world of Biblical scholarship, that would be what I call “the minority report” on the gift of tongues.

But while that explanation answers a few questions (like How can the gift of other tongues be for non-believers?) it raises a few others. Like, how can Paul say, “if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful,” when the mind is made quite fruitful by anything said in our mother tongue? And then, as I read and researched on this passage, I kept wondering, who am I to differ with the likes of N.T. Wright, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, Menno Simons and perhaps a quarter of a billion Pentecostals and Charismatics worldwide and counting? That would be beyond saying, “We have a disagreement here,” to saying, “You’ve deluded yourself.” I’m not ready to go there, not on that matter at least.

Especially not since the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches have often had a noteworthy and powerful history of mission. They seem to have the most power and impact upon societies in which sorcery, magic, divination and other occult arts are rampant. Also in areas where such things are tied in with political and economic injustice and oppression, like Haiti, much of Africa and Latin America. Their dramatic clashes between devil power and Holy Spirit power seem to do more to rescue prostitutes, dope dealers and career criminals than do polite and intellectual coffee klatches about the latest book on spirituality. Then there’s the indisputable historic fact that, whenever Charismatic renewal has happened, it has often shaken up and broken down barriers of race, class, education and ethnicity among Christians and denominations. When the modern Pentecostal movement began in Los Angeles, in 1906, the Azusa Street tent meetings were one of the few places in the country where you would find Anglos, Mexicans, Native Americans, Asians and African Americans together, in warm, friendly and equal ways. That first generation of Pentecostals was even pacifist, even during the war hysteria of World War I.

In fact, it would be safe to say that Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians and even the Mennonites in much of the Two-Thirds World in the Southern Hemisphere today are Pentecostal. Not that they all speak in tongues and buy the whole doctrinal Pentecostal package. They don’t. But being face-to-face with the undeniable realities of spiritual “principalities and powers and wickedness in high places,” demonic and human, they’re half-way Pentecostal in practice. Having no economic or political resources to defend themselves and overcome these challenges, they rely on the Holy Spirit through dreams, and discernment of evil spiritual presences and powers. They rely on Him just as much for courage and healing and power for witness, where half the time, for them, Christian witness is something done under duress. And so our Mennonite brothers and sisters in Ethiopia are often called, “Pentes,” for “Pentecostal.” As we also enter a society that is increasingly magical, mystical and spiritual in neo-pagan, occultic and shamanistic ways, we too might just need to become more “Pente,” that is, like our African brothers and sisters in our reliance upon the Holy Spirit for special gifts of power, discernment and witness.

So I’m not about to challenge the majority report on what constitutes the gift of speaking in other tongues. For now, suffice it to say that the majority of me, personally, goes along with the majority report: about 55 to 44%. Five to four if I were the Supreme Court. But let’s imagine, for a moment, what it would be like to go along with the minority report and say that this passage is really about the problems of teaching, preaching and worship in a common language when there are so many maternal languages represented among a church’s members. Now, where have we ever encountered a church like that?

Let’s see, in the back of our hymnals is an insert that we use once a year, the closest Sunday to Christmas. Its the song, “Silent Night,” and it has the first verse in seven languages including English: Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Vietnamese and Amharic. These represent the maternal languages of many of our members. Next Christmas we could have the numbers to sing an eighth and ninth verse– in American sign language, and Portuguese. We have members who could also sing it in Chinese and Arabic, and in the African languages of Tigrinya, Fulani, Yamba, Hausa, Kiswahili and Dioula, to name a few. Among our neighbors are those who could sing it in Somali, and in the Native American languages of Dakota, Lakota, Ojibwe, Mohawk, Guarani, Mayan, K’ichua and K’echi.

Going with the minority report this morning, this church is very strongly endowed with the gift of speaking in other tongues. And maybe we’re under-using them. We have at least six fairly fluent Spanish speakers among us, with others pretty far along the way toward fluency. Could some of them be in ministry to our large, Hispanic community? Could one or more of them even help form the nucleus of a new Spanish-speaking church some day? Are there other missionaries to other language groups and cultures yet to emerge from among us?

Barring that, what about learning at least a few words of the every day polite greetings and thanksgiving in, say, Spanish, Hmong or Somali, so that when you know you definitely are dealing with a Somali or Hmong or Hispanic cashier or neighbor or nurse or police officer, we can at least greet them or thank them in their language? Most of the time, whenever we do that, they beam with delight, even if we botch it up terribly, just because we’ve honored them by making some effort, taking some step, to honor them, their language, and their culture. Many of our newest neighbors are hearing things from long-term residents like, “Why don’t you go back to your country?” and “I shouldn’t have to press 1 on my telephone for service in English.” Those attitudes are getting more visible and more strident lately. We can break a lot of ice, show a lot of respect, and gain a hearing for ourself and for Christ by showing we care enough to at least learn how to say, “Hello” and “Thank you,” and “Goodbye.” That reflects well on the Christ who gives us such love and concern.

That moves us in the direction that Paul points us in verse 20, when he says, “Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.” By that, he means what he said in the passage before, about all the spiritual gift, when he said, “Try to excel in gifts that build up the church,” and the church’s mission.

Some gifts work best at building us up personally, individually. Paul includes tongues in that category. So its best to practice it that way: personally and individually. Other gifts work to build us up together, corporately and communally, like the gift of prophesy. So share it with the community. But any gift can become a grief when it is misused just to build up our own personal honor and status. The greatest of all spiritual gifts is love. And love is the truest sign of being spiritual adults.

Focus Statement: “Since you are eager to have spiritual gifts, try to excel in gifts that build up the church.”

Fourth of July content-free sermon: Questions to address: What is prophecy and why is it so important?

What is humility and why is it so important?

What do we do with that longing for belonging when it can divide us just as often as it unites us?

Someone I knew in college claimed to have seen Jesus, in a vision or a dream. So naturally we asked him, “What did he look like?” His answer: “He looked Middle Eastern.” Whatever that means.

But we don’t need to have dreams or visions to see the face of Jesus today. Ever since the Pentecost outpouring of Jesus’ Spirit, the Holy Spirit, Jesus appears to the world like the quilt on our altar. Notice all the connected pieces doing together what quilts do: providing covering and beauty. The pieces are different, but they each serve a common mission in their own unique way. And they do so by staying connected, and yet staying themselves, too. As long as the pieces don’t start fighting and tugging at each other and tearing at their threads and opening up holes between themselves. Then the quilt-like face of Jesus would be obscured in the world.

But that’s what seems to have been happening in the First Church of Corinth. The different pieces of the quilt were working against each other, with the differences in their spiritual gifts and qualities being used to tear the whole thing apart. Now the quilt pieces I have in mind were the different spiritual gifts the members brought to the Corinthian churches. In today’s passage, Paul talks about how the spiritual gifts of prophecy and speaking in other languages fit in together. They each have their place. But today’s passage reflects how one gift—the gift of tongues—was overshadowing the gift of prophecy, when it should have been the other way around.

Which raises my first question: What does Paul mean by prophecy? I’ll try to deal with the gift of speaking in tongues in next week’s message. But today, let’s stay on prophecy. Does Paul mean that people in the First Church of Corinth were suddenly getting seized by the Holy Spirit in such a way that they suddenly had a divine revelation about the future and couldn’t resist standing up to say, “Spain will win the World Soccer Cup over Netherlands, three to two?”

I doubt it. I was rooting for Ghana. Shows what kind of a prophet I am. But Paul himself gives us two definitions of prophecy. In the previous chapter, he says, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and knowledge, but have not love, I have nothing.” So prophecy must be something of a uniquely God-given insight into divine mysteries and knowledge. Like when I heard a priest speak about Zaccheus, the little man who wanted to see Jesus. When he kept saying, “To Jesus, there are no unknown, little people,” I was struck in my spirit by having the secrets of my heart exposed, and yet being given hope and relief. Because that was exactly how I had been feeling at the time: little and unkown. It was as though he had been reading my mail. But he hadn’t.

Paul gives us another angle on prophesy when he says, in today’s passage, “everyone who prophesies speaks to [people] for their strengthening, encouragement and comfort. He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but he who prophesies edifies the church.” So not only is prophesy something God-given, its people-directed. Directed toward the strengthening, encouragement and comfort of their souls, but also toward the strengthening, encouragement and comfort of their relationships. So that their gifts, talents, perspectives and contributions work together harmoniously, and beautifully, like the pieces on our altar quilt today. In that sense, I hope that in this message there’s something prophetic for someone, and not pathetic.

But this gift of prophesy is not just for preachers and sermons. I’ll go out on a limb this morning and make this promise, based on the Bible and experience: that if we put ourselves out there to try and strengthen, encourage and comfort people, we will find ourselves having prophetic moments. Make enough phone calls or send enough cards or make enough visits to the sick, the shut-ins, those facing major life crises, and some day, someone will tell you, “My friend, something you said once made all the difference for me between a long, dark, lonely and sleepless night, and sleeping like a baby.” Or, “your expression of concern was all that stood between me and giving up the Christian life.” Or, “that challenging question you put to me straightened out my life.” Put yourself out there, in those places where the gift of prophesy is needed, and if you don’t hear such responses in this life, you’ll surely hear them in the next. You may not remember having said such divinely-inspired things, but others will, for the powerful effect they had on their lives.

So that’s my answer to the first question: What is prophesy? And why is it so important? Its God-given insight for our strengthening, comfort and encouragement. Its God’s gift for the building up of persons and relationships.

Next question: What is humility and why is it so important, especially to our task of displaying the quilt-like face of Jesus? Well first, let me say something about what humility is not. We Mennonites make a big thing about humility. Good for us. We should be proud of that. Woops. But we have too often understood humility to mean the rejection and suppression of ourselves and our gifts. Sometimes we did that in big ways, like when some churches said, “No musical instruments in church—the ability to play one only draws attention to oneself.” As you can see, we blew through that one without blinking. Or it came across in more subtle ways: “I’ll remember your concern in my prayers, brother. And by the way, wasn’t that the second time you’ve stood up and asked for prayer this year?” Again, if that’s pride, well, then we take pride in letting people ask for prayer as often as needed.

Paul doesn’t mention the word humility in this passage, but I hear it calling for our attention in the twist that he gives to the whole matter of how and when we use our gifts. He doesn’t say, “Don’t seek to have spiritual gifts, because that’s prideful.” Nor does he say, “If you have spiritual gifts, keep them private; don’t draw attention to yourself,” even though that’s exactly what the Corinthians seemed to have been doing: drawing attention to themselves. Instead, Paul simply says, “You are eager to have spiritual gifts.” He assumes that they’ll want to have spiritual gifts. He admits it. He even seems to commend it. And he re-directs that desire to be spiritually gifted when he says, so “try to excel in gifts that build up the church.” Not just gifts that build us up personally. Not just gifts that might build up our own reputation, our status, our power and our honor in the community, but gifts that build up the community itself. Whatever gifts we have, use them with the freedom that comes from forgetting about ourselves and focusing on the needs of others.

So Its not a question of whether we’ll want to have gifts and talents and put them to full use. I hope we do. Its a question of how and why we use them. Its not a question of if we seek to excel in something and stand out, but what we seek to excel at and stand out for. Humility is not the suppression of our gifts but the submission of our gifts to a greater good than our own status or power. Humility is not about denying our gifts, but about deploying our gifts for the benefit of our neighbors and our relationships with them. That’s what humility is about.

My third question was, and always is: what will we do with our longing for belonging, and this desire to excel, to count and to contribute something in this world? Something unique to ourselves and worthy of notice? Because we will do something. That’s how God made us, because that’s how God himself is: supremely endowed with all good gifts, and ever ready to bless us and to grace us with them. The youth who’s slouching around in an alley, wearing gang colors and smoking dope, might look to his teachers and his parents like someone who’s never going to contribute to society, never get ahead and never excel at anything. But he’s actually working quite hard, sacrificially even, at great risk to himself, to contribute, belong and excel. At least to contribute to the gang, and excel at gang-type behaviors.

The kingdom of God is like that young man’s gang, in that it gives him and us a place to belong and ways to excel. But God’s kingdom gives us good, eternal, healthy places to belong, and good, eternal and healthy ways to excel. As when Paul says, “try to excel in gifts that build up the church.”

And if that still sounds just a little prideful, then I would add that this desire to excel and to contribute in our own unique way can be, but only once we start making comparisons. Its only prideful when we feel the need to show that we are more gifted than someone else, or that our gifts are more important than those of someone else, and when we can’t celebrate someone else’s gifts and affirm them because we’re afraid they’ll overshadow our own. As was happening at First Church of Corinth. Like when the Amish family was returning home from a church gathering and the father turned to his family in the buggy and said, “You know, I think we were the plainest, most humble people there today.” Making comparisons is what turns gifts into grief.

But if we just have to make comparisons, then let’s make them between ourselves and Jesus, who holds all the spiritual gifts. If we need to make comparisons, let’s make them between ourselves and ourselves, between what we once were and what we now are; and between what we now are and what we could yet be. That should keep us humble, because that is humility.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., best expressed all this in his sermon, “The Drum Major Instinct.” He called it that because, he said, we’re all made by God with a desire to join life’s parade and to hear the cheers, to step proud, high and happy, and take our turn marching up front and waving the baton. To me, King’s “The Drum Major Instinct” sermon has proven prophetic in every biblical sense of the word, including that of building up my person and strengthening my relationships. He gave it just a few months before his death, in 1968, preaching from that passage in Mark’s Gospel, when the two brother disciples, James and John, came to Jesus and said, “Grant us, Lord, to sit on your right hand and on your left, when you enter into your kingdom.” Through the gifts of today’s technology we’ll bring the voice of Dr. King to our sanctuary, for just a snippet of that sermon. See how Dr. King’s take on that James and John relates to our passage, especially the words, “try to excel in gifts that edify the church:”

“What was the answer that Jesus gave these men? It’s very interesting. One would have thought that Jesus would have condemned them. One would have thought that Jesus would have said, ‘You are out of your place. You are selfish. Why would you raise such a question?’

“But that isn’t what Jesus did; he did something altogether different. He said in substance, ‘Oh, I see, you want to be first. You want to be great. You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. If you’re going to be my disciple, you must be.’ But he reordered priorities. And he said, ‘Yes, don’t give up this instinct. It’s a good instinct if you use it right. (Yes) It’s a good instinct if you don’t distort it and pervert it. Don’t give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. (Amen) I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity. That is what I want you to do. And he transformed the situation by giving a new definition of greatness. And you know how he said it? He said, ‘Now brethren, I can’t give you greatness. And really, I can’t make you first.’ This is what Jesus said to James and John. ‘You must earn it. True greatness comes not by favoritism, but by fitness. And the right hand and the left are not mine to give, they belong to those who are prepared.” (Amen)

“And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness. If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. (Amen) That’s a new definition of greatness.

“And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, (Everybody) because everybody can serve. (Amen) You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. (All right) You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. (Amen) You only need a heart full of grace, (Yes, sir, Amen) a soul generated by love. (Yes) And you can be that servant.”

Someone recently wrote to AskYahoo.com and asked, “What is meant by ‘eye transplants? Is it really possible for people born blind to get complete eye transplants so that they can see?” The answer, that I found confirmed on several other sites, was: No, its currently not possible to transplant an entire human eye. But for almost a hundred years we have done corneal transplants, transplants of the outer lens of the eye, and those are mostly successful. But they’re successful in part because the optic nerve, from the brain to the eye, is still there and working. If that’s not working, then to get it working, would currently require nothing short of a miracle.

Today we’re talking about something akin to the miracle of an entire eye transplant, not just improving the eyesight through a new outer lens, but something akin to completely new eyes, from the brain to the outer lens, or even a whole new kind of sight. Sight and eyes, that is, for seeing what is invisible, what is eternal, in effect, for seeing God. To see the invisible and eternal God, we don’t have any physical senses. With these physical eyes, and with all our physical senses, we can see, taste, touch, hear and feel the works and the wonders of God. Like what we see in a garden or the Grand Canyon. Like ourselves and each other. With our human logic and senses we can also know things about God. But seeing and knowing such things about God is not the same as seeing God and knowing God.

For that we need something on the scale of a transplant, even, the transplant of not just two eyes but three. Those three eyes for seeing God are listed in today’s Bible passage: faith, hope and love. Those three things are our direct connections with God, or more likely, God’s direct connections with us. That’s why I liken them to a transplant: because we wouldn’t have them on our own, if left to ourselves. We can seek them of God, and we must, but that only underscores that they are gifts. What hope, faith or love anyone has is a gift of God.

At the end of the previous chapter, chapter 12, Paul tells us to seek the greatest of the spiritual gifts. By the end of chapter 13, we know what those greatest gifts are: faith, hope and love. They are the greatest gifts because, of all the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives for Christian life and ministry, Paul says only these three will remain. They will be necessary and powerful in all times, places and situations. The other ones, like prophecy or speaking in other languages, or mercy, administration and service, are temporary tools, given as needed for the church’s mission in some times and places, but not others. But all these other spiritual gifts depend upon the three greatest gifts: faith, hope and love. Without them, we would not even seek other spiritual gifts in the first place. Or we would seek them for reasons other than faith, hope and love, such as for power, control or pride. To impress people with our giftedness. There was enough of that going on already in Corinth.

So “faith, hope and love,” are the gifts—the transplanted eyes– by which we “see” the invisible God, the ways in which we “know” God in ways beyond what our brains and bodies can do. Of these three, love is the greatest, Paul says. And I can think of two reasons why love is the greatest.

One is because love is so necessary to the other two gifts. Think of faith and hope without love. A loveless faith, or a loveless hope. A loveless faith would be nothing more than an ideology, and a mean one at that. Like the folks who show up at the funerals of soldiers or people who die from HIV/AIDS to proclaim that they deserved their deaths because God hates homosexuals, allegedly. They may call their beliefs “faith” but I’d call them an ideology. Sure, a religious ideology, but a mean one at that.

Or what are Communism or Islamic jihad but ideologies with all the fervor and organization of religion, but without the saving grace of love? To approach the kind of faith that Jesus would commend, to which he would say, “Great is your faith,” or “your faith has saved you,” there must also be love.

Or think of hope without love. Then you’d just have wishful thinking and mere optimism. Someone may hope to win the lottery. We may hope that our country’s team wins the World Soccer Cup (or at least that we get a decent referee), but we can’t credit the Holy Spirit with such hope. Because its lacking the kind of love this passage enjoins upon us. Love of money, or love of country won’t abide forever, because money and countries won’t abide forever.

God’s kind of love, for godly and eternal things, is the difference between living, saving faith and mere ideology. And its the difference between godly hope and mere desire or wishful thinking.

The second reason that love is the greatest of all three is that love is the one thing that carries over into eternity. Once we’re standing on the other side of the Pearly Gates to the New Jerusalem, we won’t need hope anymore. Our hope will be fulfilled. We won’t need faith either, because our faith will have become sight. But however great our love is on this side of the veil, it will ramp up an infinitely higher notch on the other side. Heaven is pure love. Think then of all the love we show in this life as training for the love we will give and know in the life to come. Or think of all the love we know and show in this world as an appetizer and an advertisement for the world to come.

Love is how we grow up, in this life, into our eternal, heavenly selves. In all our works and acts of love today, we are like children playing dress-up with their parents’ clothes. They may seem awkward and too big for the children now. But whenever we see them in shoes twice as big as their feet, and in suit jackets or dresses that drag on the floor behind them, we don’t usually tell them to knock it off. Don’t we usually want to pull out the cameras and cheer them on? So it is with love.

You can tell what people are nervous and insecure about by what they laugh and joke about. One of the richest sources of humor is heaven and the afterlife. Because we’re uncertain about the details, and therefore a bit nervous, especially about the process of getting there, even when we have the assurance of salvation. So we tell stories about people smuggling satchels of gold bricks into heaven, only to get busted by St. Peter, who says, “O good; here’s our latest shipment of paving stones. Its been a bad year for potholes.” Or ones in which we can tell how good and godly people have been by the size and glamor of their cars. You get a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Not bad. Mother Teresa was finally seen in a stretch limo. Oh, and there goes the pastor!

On a tricycle.

Well, if we’re wondering or worried about what endures from our lives, and what we might carry with us from this life to the next, look no more. “And now these three endure: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” In part, because its the greatest in duration. Like really, really, really great. Like forever.

You know, we could waste our lives and our resources worrying and running around looking for foolproof investments that will grow and pay dividends without fail (real estate? Stock market? Grain futures?), and miss the one and only foolproof investment that’s right in front of us: people, through acts and lives of love. Not only will those kinds of investments pay off in heaven, in a way, they are heaven. Love is even how heaven comes to us, long before we go to heaven. There’s nothing in God’s heaven for anyone who loves anything more than love.

Sometimes these investments pay off on both sides of the Pearly Gates. Sometimes they even pay dividends in hell. Like in the hell that was Rwanda, recently. But there, Pastor Gratien Mitsindo two years ago received a down payment on heaven. Fourteen years earlier, during the genocide of 1994, Pastor Mitsindo, though a member of the Hutu tribe, saved the lives of over 300 Tutsis by giving them refuge in his church sanctuary. When the Interahamwe militia found out about them, they came to the church building demanding access to the refuge seekers, to kill them, and him, for having sheltered them. Pastor Mitsindo, though unarmed, stood up to them with the force of his will and character. When the militia backed down and threatened to come again, for him as well as for the Tutsis, Mitsindo organized hiding places for the refuge seekers in other homes and locations, as well as a system of sneaking food to them.

Two years ago, a public ceremony was organized to honor Mitsindo. The surviving refuge seekers presented him with two cows and a motorcycle. Some of them had even become his adopted family members, even though they were from different tribes. So with two cows, a motorcycle and more importantly, all that family, Mitsindo is set for life. They are his social security. And if they are giving out wheels in the New Jerusalem, on which to zoom around the golden streets, for love like that, I’m pretty sure he’ll get more than a cow or another motorcycle. Not because he earned it: God’s love is not about accounts and rewards. It will be because whatever he drives in the next life, he learned to drive in this one.

And that’s my Father’s Day story today.

Love like that, you can’t even keep it out of the hell that was Rwanda, in 1994. Love is how the future keeps breaking into the present. Its God’s way of showing up; and it is our way of growing up. Since God and heaven and we are forever, so then is love. That’s why love is the greatest of the greatest three big-time all stars: faith, hope and love. With such 20-20-20 vision, we will even see God.

13: 1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8Love never fails.

If you can almost repeat this passage word for word, its either because you memorized it—in which case, good for you!–or because you’ve been to a lot of weddings over the years. Which is also great. This passage is read at so many wedding ceremonies precisely because what Paul says about love applies so well to a marriage and a family.

But it was a church that Paul had in mind when he penned these words, not a couple about to be married. If he was thinking of them, he might have written, “Love does not leave dirty socks on the floor; love does not leave the toilet lid up; love does not start out a question with the words, ‘Why do you always….?’ and love does not give your spouse the silent treatment; love always helps with the dishes and the diapers and takes initiative to arrange dates and please the other, and yet also knows when to give each other some space.”

Instead, when Paul says that “Love is patient, love is kind. ..it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud,” and so forth, we can safely assume that he is writing to a church in which people have not been patient nor kind to each other, in which, in fact, they have been quite rude, self-seeking, easily angered, keeping record of wrongs, and delighting in evil–” each other’s evil. That fits with everything else we find in the letter.

Its not that these Corinthian Christians weren’t great and gifted people. In fact, quite the opposite. These words on love come in the middle of Paul’s lengthy words to the Corinthians about their spiritual gifts, which were quite impressive. The words we’ve heard about tongues and prophecy and special knowledge make sense only if some of those Corinthian Christians could indeed speak in the many tongues of people and even of angels, perhaps. Some of them must indeed have had the gift of prophecy and could fathom all mysteries and knowledge. Some of them must have had mountain-moving faith and were brave enough to give everything to the poor and even face a martyr’s death in the flames. So these Corinthian Christians were superbly gifted people in every way.

Except in one particular way. The most important one. The one without which all the other gifts are no longer gifts but dangers and liabilities: Love. Love is “the most excellent way” that Paul embarks upon showing them. It is the most excellent of the Holy Spirit’s gifts that they are to seek.

I say the word “love” with some reluctance, fear and trembling this morning. Because in our culture and our language, the word “love” is filled with so many meanings that it has almost become meaningless. If you love your country, we’re told, you’ll willingly kill people from another country. The ancient Greek king Midas loved gold above all things. So when the gods in the ancient Greek story gave him the power to turn everything he touched into gold, he inadvertantly turned his beloved daughter into a lifeless statue. Kind of like what’s happening to the Gulf of Mexico, only for love of oil. So the mere feeling of love, of desire and delight, does not justify everything. But that’s most often what we mean by the word “love.”

In today’s reading, Paul defines love in a way that is active and behavioral, not just abstract or emotional. Its about what we choose to do, and not do, and not just what we feel or want. Twenty centuries later, we are like the Greeks, in that we prefer verbal and abstract definitions of things like love. So here’s an attempt: If we desire anything, love is when we desire God’s best for someone, whether that is someone else, or the person in the mirror.

But Paul, good Jew that he is, understands love in terms of choices and actions, in flesh and blood. So he describes not just our desire for God’s best for someone, but our actions toward God’s best for someone. This may involve active demonstrations of love, as in “Love is patient, love is kind….. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” It may also require of us the negative, our restraint and refusal to do something, as in, “Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.”

Which is not to say that no feelings or desires are involved. But in Paul’s vision of us as the promised people of God under formation, in the process of becoming, feelings and desires are just as likely to follow actions, as vice versa.

A pastor once told me of a couple who came to him for marriage counseling. The husband wanted a divorce. He said, several times, “I just don’t love her anymore.” As depressed and neglected as she appeared, she didn’t look all that loved either. The counselor gave them this assignment, addressing the man: “Before I see you again to help you work out your divorce, I want you, Sir, to plan a date for both of you, one that includes doing something with your wife that she is most interested in.”

Two weeks later they returned, having completed the assignment. The husband said, “I’m reconsidering this divorce thing. I’m willing to give this marriage another try.” The counselor chalked up the change in the man’s feelings to the change in his actions, not vice versa. And that’s one part of the message that Paul is trying to get across to his Corinthian friends: love is a choice, love is an action. Even if it begins with feelings of interest, desire and attraction, it can only continue with choices and action.

And now I’m going to say something quite opposite and sound like I’m contradicting myself. Maybe I am. Its happened before. But if I am, then so is Paul. Just before he talks about our choices and actions of love, Paul also calls love a gift. “Desire the best gifts,” he says. And then he adds, “And now I’ll show you the most excellent way,” that is, the most excellent of all gifts. And then he talks about love. That permits me to say that while love is a choice, it is also a gift. The most excellent of all spiritual gifts. The most important of them. Its so important that this gift of love is the difference between whether our other gifts, like tongues or prophecy or faith, are banes or blessings, whether they are helpful or harmful, whether they build up community, or whether they divide it and destroy it. So important is this gift of love that, no matter how gifted we are, no matter how heroic and sacrificial and right and intelligent we may be, Paul says, “Without love, I am nothing” and “without love, I have nothing.”

So what is love, a gift or a choice? Ultimately, love is our choice to accept God’s gift of love. God’s love for us, and God’s love through us. Because not only does God want to love us, God wants to love others through us. And to love us through others. Which brings me to the most important definition in the Bible for love: “God is love (I John 4:8).” At heart, then, love is a person. This person is the source and fountain of all love between persons. When we give and receive love, God is giving us himself, and nothing short of himself. Love is how we receive and share God. Love is the only capacity we even have for knowing and experiencing God.

I read a letter in the New York Times this week, in which someone wrote and said something to the effect that, “I don’t need any faith, any church, any religion or any God because I have people like my five-year old son to love me. And he’s just woken up this morning and come in to hug me even as I write this.”

Blessed are he and that child. Good for them.

But as a Christian, I have to believe that the writer is missing the most important evidence of God literally right under his nose: the love between himself and that child, and his good morning hug. Such love is so much more extravagant than what we need for the mere survival of our species and our genes. It has to be God.

These signs and presences of God are nothing if not surprising and persistent, even in the face of tremendous odds. Well into the late 1970′s, two men had long become such good and close friends that they and their families regularly visited each other, even though the trip was costly, involving air fare and the crossing of at least two international borders, and hundreds of miles, or kilometers, in their case, so deep was their friendship. It all began when both of them had actually been trying to kill each other, in April of 1945, in the last days of World War II. A young German soldier saw an attacking British soldier crumple up and fall to the ground in front of him, wounded and immobilized, in the line of fire. So the young German man crawled out of his trench, with bullets and shrapnel flying all around him, and dragged his wounded enemy to safety. As the medics carried the man away to an army field hospital, both soldiers had the other one’s name and address in their wallets. Leaving aside the question of whether either of them should have been there shooting at the other, you have to marvel at the care and mercy that suddenly overwhelmed the one soldier’s fear and hatred of the other. How to explain their enduring friendship in spite of the hatred and violence that had previously separated them? I believe that the power and tenacity of love to emerge even in situations like that is nothing short of God giving himself to the world, and showing himself to the world, as he did most clearly through Jesus. It can happen anywhere, to anyone, in or out of the church. The advantage of being a Christian includes knowing where such love comes from, and that we can therefore trust such love to assert itself in even the most unlikely of places. Like our graves.

We love because God first loved us. And God won’t stop loving us, no matter how hard we might try to make him stop. One day eleven years ago, we were shocked and disheartened by the tragic and stunning news of the shootings at the Columbine high school in Colorado. The next morning, still sick at heart and fearful, I was parking the car at a shopping mall near a Brueggers Bagel Restaurant, when I saw a young teenage man just a little under the age of the high school killers. I found myself wondering, “Could he too be so alienated and violence-prone that he might be led to violence and vengeance like those two high school seniors?” He did have a certain slouch and slump to his shoulders that made me wonder about him. How many hours has he logged on shoot-em-up video games, or listening to head-banging screaming death metal music with hopeless, violent and women-hating lyrics? I wondered. Then I and my fear-based stereo-typing were put to shame as I saw his sister and his father get out of the same car he had left, as they took their places together, with Dad in the middle, putting his arms around both son and daughter, as they walked into Brueggers’ Bagels for breakfast together before school. Oh me of little faith, I thought. I was ready to despair and write this young man off. But God was not, as we could see through his father.

Love: Nothing can keep it down or out of our world. It is the most important of God’s gifts, without which all other gifts can do more harm than good. Through the gift of love, God gives us nothing less than himself.

I owe the main point of today’s message to a theologian I heard recently, when he spoke at a local seminary. He’s Justo Gonzalez, a Cuban Methodist pastor and theologian, who served many years as a teacher and leader of a seminary in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I heard Dr. Gonzalez speak about the very passage we just heard this morning. In his talk, he told about a big ecumenical celebration at the seminary, when representatives from all the Christian denominations of Puerto Rico came together for worship, and to celebrate their unity in Christ. As he read verses 22-25, it was all he could do to keep himself from laughing out loud as an oddball and slightly irreverent idea struck him. Here he was reading this passage about giving special honor to the weaker parts of the body, about how we protect and even dress up the most vulnerable and least presentable parts of the body, and listening to this were all these cardinals, bishops and arch-bishops, metropolitans and reverends and Right-Reverends, in their gold-brocaded robes and pointy hats, with their ornate, golden crosses and shepherds’ staves. Even lowly pastors and conference ministers of low church denominations were wearing robes and stoles and big, golden crosses on their chests. In the midst of this glamorous ecumenical fashion show, it was all he could do to keep himself from interrupting the Bible reading to laugh and to ask, “Is that why we’re all decked out like this and have these grand, honorific titles like Father, Right Reverend and Your Holiness? Because we the clergy are actually the weakest and least presentable parts of the body of Christ?”

I’ll let you decide on your own answer to that question.

In today’s passage, Paul draws our attention to the different treatment that we give to different parts of our own bodies. Its all one body, but it doesn’t all get the same treatment, decoration or coverage. Construction workers don’t wear their work boots on their ears, just as the Minnesota Vikings don’t take the field wearing athletic supporters on their elbows. Of course that’s not equal treatment for the body parts. But its necessary and strategic. Without getting too graphic, suffice it to say that our particularly tender, vulnerable and private parts get the most protection and care, because they need it.

Dr. Gonzalez went on to say that this ironic twist, that we give the most honor, protection, covering and even decoration to the weakest, most private and least presentable parts of the body, is the very hinge on which this passage turns, on which it turns even in a surprising new direction. Its a new idea about their relationships that he most wants the Corinthians to get their minds around. Its where their customary body talk has suddenly jumped the rails and gone in another direction.

Up until verses 22-25, while Paul compares the church to the human body, he is not telling the Corinthians anything they had never heard before. Comparing a community to a human body was common to the day and time, whether that community was a family, a city, a country or even the empire. But it was usually used to explain why the emperor was the emperor, why the middle class was in the middle, and why the slaves were slaves. Because, supposedly, the gods had so arranged the parts and pieces of “the body politic” to serve the directions of the head, just as the liver, the lungs and the heart serve by the signals of the brain. That was the conventional wisdom of Greek and Roman society in the First Century: how and why everyone was arranged in order of status and power, from top to bottom, so that the strongest and most presentable parts of the community body got the most honor, decoration, power and protection.

The whole focus and orientation of this kind of “body politic” was the person at the pinnacle of power. In that kind of arrangement, the weaker parts of the body politic, like slaves, soldiers, women, Jews and unskilled free men and women, were quite dispensable, and easily abused or neglected.

And not much has changed. Inequality of power, wealth and opportunity are growing around the world, with disastrous results for health, peace and happiness. Just around the corner from us this morning, on 24^th Street, between Park and Chicago Avenues, are two starkly different symbols of how we organize ourselves in response to human weakness and need. One is Hope Academy, a faith-based school that serves inner city children, many of whom are at risk and in need. Next to it, in the grounds of the Eye Hospital, is an abortion clinic. As much as that saddens me, I’m not recommending we go march over to the abortion clinic and block the doors. At that point and place, I think its too late to do something about abortion. Every so often, I see protesters from both sides of the issue out there in a tense stand-off, and their relationships—or lack thereof– make me sad. Its like watching some highly scripted dance with very predictable sound and motion, but little real communication, creativity or human connection on either side.

But I find that juxtaposition of a school with an abortion clinic, on the same block, deeply symbolic, in a disturbing way. A school is a prime example of a community that is organized and oriented toward the weakest, the neediest, the most vulnerable: children, and their needs. Especially a school like Hope Academy. The abortion clinic, on the other hand, speaks to me of the tragic ways in which those same children might be unwanted, their conception and birth considered a disaster. For that I blame men, as much as mothers, for the very tragedy at the heart of this conflict: that a human life, real or potential, would be unwanted in the first place. The position of these two organizations on the same block to me is a visible parable about our common ambivalence toward weakness and need, including our own. On one hand we want to turn, with compassion, toward those in need. On the other, something tempts us to run from the fist sign of our common human vulnerability. Its what prompted some cities to actually pass laws a century ago that prohibited persons with diseases, deformities or amputations from being present on the streets: the fear of our weakness, our vulnerability and our dependence one upon one another. Its what prompted the question that Cain posed to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The rest of the Bible is God’s answer to that unfortunate question, including, and especially, Paul’s surprising words about the body of Christ.

But ever since Cain tossed that defiant question at the face of God, human societies have tended to orient themselves toward the desires and dictates of the most powerful and privileged members, as we see with warlords like Hitler, Mao or Pol Pot, or when corporate raiders raid company assets and pensions and walk off with more wealth than they know what to do with, while leaving others unemployed, or with the mafia, or in the pre-packaged celebrity people product industry, in which people live vicariously through the escapades of tabloid magazine subjects.

Every human society that is oriented towards the top always and eventually requires sacrificial victims, whether in the womb, or when of the age of military service, or whether they are identifiable by their language, their skin color, their country of origin, or by the documents they don’t carry. Then no one is safe from the possibility of an ever-widening feeding frenzy. Like Pastor Martin Niemoller said, during Hitler’s regime, “When they came for the Communists, I said nothing, because I’m not a Communist; When they came for the labor unions and the Socialists, I said nothing, because I’m not a union member or a Socialist; when they came for the Jews, I said nothing, because I’m not a Jew; and when they came for me, no one said anything, because no one else was left.” As I read I Corinthians, I get the impression that Paul was trying to put a stop to the feeding frenzy that was happening in those churches. It was a feeding frenzy over who was the most spiritually gifted, and who had the most power, honor and liberty among them.

Now we might say, “But wait a minute! Christ is the head of our body, the church, and we give all honor and obedience to him.” Doesn’t that mean we’re oriented toward one supreme leader too? I hope we are. But the head of this body is is the Christ who says, “Whatever you have done for the least of these, my brethren, you have done for me.” Christ identifies himself with the lowest, weakest and neediest parts of our body politic, and is most often to be found by loving and serving them. Whatever we do to honor, serve, cherish and protect them, we do for Jesus.

Today’s passage then speaks of an opposite organizing principle than the one found in most societies, one that’s truer to the human body, and the body of Christ: that no part of the body is dispensable, especially not the weaker parts, and the most care and protection go to the most vulnerable and least presentable parts. That’s the surprise twist that Paul adds to the conventional social body talk of his time. If such an orientation toward the most vulnerable, the weakest and their needs sounds burdensome and unfair, remember that the most vulnerable, weak and needy include ourselves, if not now, then some day. Yes, Paul says that “the body parts should have equal concern for each other.” But that only happens when a group is oriented toward seeing and serving their weakest and most vulnerable members. Otherwise, we drift back into the human default mode of serving, fearing, envying and even worshiping the most powerful and privileged people. Rather than a burden, this new organizing principle is good news for all of us.

We do this already at Emmanuel Mennonite Church in several ways. One is with our policy for preventing abuse and responding if ever, God forbid, there should be even any hint of it. Then there’s our top notch Christian education program and teachers. We also have a deacon’s fund to respond to financial crises and emergencies, or to help people with needs they might not be able to afford, like utilities or counseling. Our denomination and conference, and other church agencies, stand ready to help us deal with the inevitable issues of physical and mental disabilities, and of mental and emotional health needs that we all face. Some day I’d like to see us address the issue of accessibility in this building for those with physical impairments. No one’s knees are getting younger. Remember, whenever we talk about organizing and orienting ourselves toward the needs of the most vulnerable and weak, we’re not talking about “them,” we’re talking about “us” and “ourselves.” That makes us, the Body of Christ, God’s answer to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

There’s a message in this passage for anyone who has ever felt lonely and isolated. Today’s message is also for anyone who has ever felt like they could use a little bit more loneliness and isolation, a little breathing space from all the pressures of society, family, school or the workplace, to conform to something and someone other than our true selves. In fact, today’s message is for anyone who has ever felt both feelings. Because to be human is to need both space and closeness, to belong and to be oneself, to have to manage both kinds of needs, sometimes at the very same moment. Life is like a community solitaire team: being responsible for ourselves……together.

This delicate dance of belonging and being oneself starts out early, and unfolds as we age. Babies see themselves first in the eyes and faces of their parents. Their unique bodies, brains and souls develop as they mimic the movements, sounds and expressions of people interacting with them, and as people mimic them.

A wonderful book title captures the delicate dance of negotiating the shoals of dependence, independence and interdependence as we grow up. Its entitled: “Get Out of My Life, Mom and Dad!—But First Will You Take Me and Cheryl to the Mall?” Or as one person once put it, “I just need other people to appreciate me for the independent person I really am.”

Today, life in America probably errs on the side of isolation and individualism. The author Robert Putnam summed it up best in the title of his book, Bowling Alone. Yes, people can and really do bowl alone. It chronicles the near death of community forums and opportunities like Parent-Teacher Associations or community block watches. That may be hard to believe in civic-minded Minneapolis, but when Becky and I lived in the Detroit area, a couple living next door to us went to ridiculous lengths to avoid us, to never even acknowledge our existence, even though we had two drop-dead cute daughters whom no one else in their right mind could possibly not want to know and play with. In that relationship, or lack thereof, separation gave way to fear. Is this going to end up like some Alfred Hitchcock movie? Do we need an alarm system? Nothing happened, fortunately. But I hope they changed their ways before they discovered the bitter truth that Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame catcher for the Yankees expressed so well, when he said, “If you don’t go to other people’s funerals, they won’t come to yours.”

In keeping with this individualism and isolation, a quick glance through the movie ads of the newspaper, or at the latest new computer games advertised at the bus stops (“Red Dead Redemption?”) shows that the most compelling, best-selling heroic epic stories are those about courageous, principled, solitary, tragically misunderstood heroes at war with a corrupt and cowardly community. Anyone remember the Billy Jack movies? On the other extreme you get stories about villains so inhuman, so sociopathic, so antisocial, without any redeeming features, and so incurably at war with a virtuous, peaceful community, that blowing them away is the only possible relief and resolution. Neither of those extremes strike me as real to life. Lately, the plot lines are about the war between a crazy and corrupt community, and loners and oddballs who are equally as crazy and corrupt, on TV shows like Survivor or The Office.

All these story lines have in common the assumption that there can never be peace in this tragic but unavoidable war between the individual and his or her wider network of relationships. Almost totally lacking in either our language, or increasingly our experience, are relationships between the individual and the community that work to the benefit of both. Gone from many mental radars is even the possibility of a community that maximizes the health and growth of the individual members, and how individual members might grow and become their best by serving other people and relationships—a community. Is there any way to be ourselves and to be in relationship, to develop those talents, gifts and interests that just want to bust out of us, without having to burn our bridges, go it alone, and wind up lonely, isolated and bitter?

Yes. Paul draws our attention to an example of this kind of harmony between the parts and the whole that is literally right beneath our noses. It even includes our noses. Its the human body. In verse 12 of First Corinthians 12, he says: “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.” For example, the liver can best serve the brain, the heart and the lungs by acting like a liver, and not like a lung. Lungs put oxygen into the bloodstream, and that helps the liver. Oxygenated blood also goes through the liver, but to take out wastes and put in sugar. And that helps every other organ be and do what they’re supposed to do. In our own bodies, then, is God’s picture and promise of a world in which people can also be their true selves by being in harmony, connection and accountability to each other, and in which people can contribute most to a better world by becoming and being their own best selves. In fact, it can’t be any other way than both ways.

That’s is what true unity is: not when we act the same, think the same and are the same. What planet does that happen on? Rather, unity is when all our different gifts and perspectives and experience function together to bless each other and the world. Total agreement on everything is not necessary nor even helpful to that.

That’s how Paul wants his Corinthian disciples to relate to each other: they need each other in order to become all that God means each one of them to be. Paul mentions the different gifts they brought to the Corinthian church: speaking in tongues, interpreting them, prophecy, healing and other miraculous works. I won’t explain or define all of them now, partly because I’m still figuring out what they are. But the principle behind them is clear: We need each other’s gifts in order to best develop and use our own, just as we must best use our own, if they are to work well together with those of others.

If that sounds like an impossible balancing act to manage, well, it is a miracle: the miracle of Christ within us and among us. “So it is with Christ,” Paul says. In saying that, Paul compares the church, with all its different but necessary and interdependent parts to the human body. Then he takes us beneath the skin of the church, the body of Christ, to show us that it is Christ who is expressing himself in the world through a diverse unity, and a united diversity, of people who share one mission, but who bring different tools to it, people who share one vision, but who have different gifts; one Lord, one loyalty, one love, but different roles, perspectives and expressions: just like the human body.

This all began when, “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” (that’s our banner verse for the year, again). I take it Paul means our baptism as individual members into the Christian life and the church. So we must respect the unique capacities, backgrounds and identities that each person brings to the church, the body of Christ, in their case, Jewish or Gentile, slave or free. Which was daring to say, because nowhere else in that day and time did Jews and Gentiles, slaves or free people expect to interact and relate in such equal and interdependent ways, than in the churches that Paul was planting.

But why should we be surprised by such miracles? Right from the Creation account of Genesis 1, we meet a God who engages chaos not to create uniformity but harmony, a God who speaks forth a world that is diverse and yet interdependent. Ours is a God who is revealed and glorified by harmony, not conformity, by a cooperative diversity, rather than a monotonous uniformity. A God who works not just through persons, but through partnerships.

That’s why our church growth plan, developed a few years back, begins with spiritual growth—our own personal spiritual growth– but it also includes relational matters like partnership and hospitality. To have the most effect on the world, we must let God have his effect on our selves. To be the most magnetic, compelling and effectual church we can be together, we must surrender ourselves personally, intentionally, daily and constantly to the magnetic, compelling and effectual work of the Holy Spirit on our souls. And yet no one can sustain that stance of surrender and cooperation with God for very long on their own, not without other people to help us, and whom we can help. That means that the knowledge and love of God, the knowledge and love of self, and the knowledge and love of others, are the three parallel rails on which are lives are moving toward the New Jerusalem. If our wheels become disengaged from any one of those three rails, the wheels on the other two rails will grind to a halt, too.

So let’s lay hold of this delightful paradox: that we can only be our true, unique, God-intended selves in relationship and community, and that we can only be in true, God-intended relationship and community by learning to be and to value our true selves and each other. That’s how God made the human body, and the body of Christ—the church– with unique but interdependent parts. That’s also how God made the planet, and even the universe. In such unity and community there is even a picture of God himself, Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.