A respected colleague, author, and friend recently posted on social media that President X was worse than President Y. He based this purely on body count, and by that measure, he was correct, but it seemed to me a bit like saying the Black Death was worse than Ebola, which might be true as long as you are a scholar and don’t happen to live in the Congo, where you might actually die from Ebola, but are unlikely to contract Bubonic Plague. I tried to gently remind him that better and worse are a matter of perspective, measured from our own location. A female colleague was rather less gentle, posting that his statement was an extreme example of white male privilege. She was, of course, correct. Our colleague has every single mark of privilege in our culture except extreme wealth, but he has a good education and a good job and does okay.
Fortunately, he is also capable of listening, so while social media isn’t exactly an ideal platform for this sort of dialogue, he was able to hear that some of us feel remarkably less safe today then we did X number of years ago, especially those of us in communities all too often the victim of hate crimes, Jews, African-Americans, Latinx, and LGBTQ folks among them.
Now, I’m not interested, at least in the context of Sunday morning worship, in debating the relative merits of politician X versus politician Y, nor am I particularly interested in a debate about identity politics. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, a radicalized political correctness that makes us afraid to speak at all or those who have privilege and still refuse to admit it, who deny that identity can matter when it comes to opportunity and to justice. At this point you have to attribute the latter to willful ignorance, akin to the NBA player who insists that the world is flat and those who deny the global climate chaos we see on the news every night.
I am, however, very much interested in this idea of division and unity and location, that last the great mantra of every business person and real estate agent. And we’ll get there, not to a particular location but to an idea, by way of Paul and his position as a follower of the Hebrew religious tradition.
Paul’s letter to the church gathered at Corinth is widely considered to be authentic, which isn’t true for all of the text traditionally attributed to him. There are some obvious scribal errors, and at least one controversial addition, but as a whole, 1st Corinthians is believed to represent Paul’s thinking around the year 55 C.E., after his first letter to Thessaloniki and before his great theological treatise to Rome. The letter is an intervention from the church’s founding pastor, for Paul led the mission to Corinth, and while we tend to focus on the passages that are universal in scope and much beloved, the epistle was particular in addressing problems in that congregation, including class divisions. The letter contains a significant intervention, for example, around how communion is to be celebrated.
However, if you spend anytime studying Paul, or even if you read the entire epistle, you will see this opening passage for what it is, a false protest. While he opens with this claim to equality, this dismissal of his personal authority, he then spends the entire rest of the letter alternating between asserting his apostolic authority and laying out doctrine, doctrine completely dependent on that authority. He doesn’t go so far as we find in the late texts falsely attributed to him and called the pastoral epistles, which claim specific authority for clergy and scripture, but Paul’s appeal is obvious. I am mindful of that expression of maternal discontent, “I brought you into this world and I can take you out,” for Paul reminds them that he is the one that brought the gospel to Corinth.
Cephas is the Aramaic name of Peter, and the great debate that was going on, the struggle between these two men, Paul and Peter, and the movements they represented was whether someone had to become a Jew in order to follow Jesus, an issue that plays out in the dramatic, like the question of circumcision, and the mundane, like dietary law. Paul ultimately prevails, so his version of the story is the one we hear, and within a couple of decades the Pharisees, who were evolving into early Rabbinic Judaism, would throw the Jesus followers out of the synagogues anyway, so the break between this new form of Judaism and this now predominantly Gentile movement of Christians would become permanent.
I particularly love Paul’s whole “who did I baptize” bit, which, more than anything, reminds us that these are real people communicating with one another with all the flaws and forgetfulness and awkwardness that most of us experience every day. Paul is making the point, of course, that we are not followers of a particular leader who baptized us or a particular church community, but followers of Jesus. In fact, this is the apostle who will take the language of the Last Supper and turn it into a paradigm for the whole church, the church as a body, and as Paul writes, one with many different parts, each with a role, each important in its own way, diversity within unity.
There is a paradox contained in Paul’s approach. Paul claims that the gospel of Jesus is wider than the Hebrew religion, that it is meant to be universal, that is has room for diversity, but Paul spends tremendous energy trying to get everyone to understand the gospel in exactly the way he understands it.
And for all of these debates, for all of the beloved passages in 1st Corinthians, for all the rich harvest we find in this ancient text about how we are to be with one another as community, it still misses something essential in the gospel, for the gospels were not yet written, and Paul never knew Jesus personally. It is an idea that has analogues in other religious traditions, in Judaism and Hinduism, and especially in Buddhism, but there is no good word construction in English that quite captures it, especially the form articulated by Jesus the street rabbi. It is the sense of other-orientedness, in a radical way, seeing from the position of the oppressed, but also seeing the holy, the possibility of the divine, in the other, even the most broken.
The Torah instructs followers of Yahweh to be economically just and to welcome the immigrant, reminding them of the unjust conditions under which they lived in Egypt, when they were immigrants working in a foreign land. But nowhere is the teaching more radical, more clear, than in Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats. It can make us uncomfortable, the notion of judgment, and really, what is wrong with goats anyway, but the point is stunningly clear. When did we walk by you when you were hungry, Master? Every single time you walked by a homeless and hungry person in the street. When did we fail to visit you when you were in a detention camp on the border? Every single time you kept your head down, didn’t risk offending your neighbor, friend, brother, while children were held in detention camps at the border. I was that hungry homeless person. I was that child dying of influenza on a concrete floor.
This is radical and demanding and exhausting, and we can’t do it all the time, for even Jesus says we will have the poor with us always. We have to build time in for sabbath, we have to cry out for justice like the psalmist, but we also have to have time to celebrate and to praise, like the psalmist!
Paul is trying to address factions in the church. Paul is trying to create a unity that has room for diversity. Paul calls us to be a body that recognizes there are different parts that have different roles, and to honor and celebrate all of them. But Paul is still about what is happening internally, in the local Jesus community in Ephesus, where he is when he writes to Corinth, in the Corinthian church specifically, threatened by factions and class, in the wider Jesus movement, struggling with the question of Jewish practice and the assimilation of the other, the Gentile, with their strange customs and foreign tongue.
This is a private letter. He wasn’t writing theology. He was just trying to help them be the community they might become.
But the message of Jesus, the location of Jesus, is so much bigger than what Paul is preaching, as wonderful as Paul’s preaching is. It is radically more than just “be nice” and generic do—gooderism. So many want to reduce who we are and what we do, want to reduce the message of Jesus to “be nice” and “do good.” And that ain’t it. And that ain’t enough. It is way more radical than that. There are plenty of civic organizations that do good. Kids get taught be nice in their homes and in school. If that is all there s to religion, what are we doing? Why bother?
Religion is meant to be more than ordinary life. It is meant to pull us out of ourselves, beyond ourselves. The Judeo-Christian tradition isn’t about being nice or doing good.
Hitch a ride on that great power behind all that is, behind serendipitous creativity expressed in art and most of all in sacrificial love, and it will change you. You will be bigger. This is what the good news is about. Our justice is transactional and retributive but God’s justice as revealed in our tradition is transformative and redemptive.
Paul is right that there can be diversity within the unity of faith community, but he misses the mind-blowing challenge of radical other-orientedness. We are made of star-stuff quite literally, and there is holy in you and there is holy in me, and God bless, there is even holy in X and Y, though it is going to take better eyes and a bigger heart than are in this feeble body to see it in that particular case.
Location, location, location! There is nowhere that God is not. You took a pay cut in Egypt even as the boss demanded ever more bricks. You sang songs in the fields under the brutal Alabama sun. You are struggling to learn a new language and a new culture for your children, because you want them to have a future they did not have in your home country.
You sing songs, bring cans of soup, and sit through committee meetings. And God is there too.
Be nice? Big deal. Being nice didn’t resist Hitler, and certainly didn’t defeat him. Do-good? It took more than doing good to get the government to pay attention to the AIDS crisis, and it is going to take more than that to make sure the planet is livable for your children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. We are more than that. We are called to more than that. Let us burn with sacrificial love, step outside of ourselves. God will be there with us, and I guarantee you, these pews will be full, and so will our hearts.
Amen.