22 January 2023: Gangster Paul

The text we know as First Corinthians is generally considered to be mostly authentic. You’ll note a double hedge in there. Some scholars will question the authenticity of anything, which accounts for the “generally,” and pretty much everyone who prefers scholarship over misogyny agrees that the verse directing women to “sit down, shut-up, and put on a hat” is a late alteration to the text inconsistent with Paul’s actual teaching, which accounts for the “mostly.”

There are all sorts of wonkish reasons people think this letter is the real deal, authentically Paul, but I’m not interested in most of those this morning, which would be more lecture than sermon. The main thing for me is that it feels real, feels like real human, especially that “who I baptized” bit. Every time I read it, in my head, I hear Paul as a gangster. 

“I didn’t baptize none ‘a yous guys. Oh, except for Joey Three-Fingers. And Little Vinnie and his crew. Maybe some other guys, I don’t know. But I didn’t baptize all ‘a yous.”

Could that tent-making thing have been a front, with a little numbers racket at the back of the shop? What’s the over/under on the number of people the Romans will crucify today?

But seriously, Paul’s letter begins with an appeal for unity. The Corinthian church is already divided into factions, and can I just note that there are still folks walking around who actually knew Jesus, and already there are these divisions, within the church at Corinth, as well as between Paul’s growing flock of Gentile Jesus-followers and the original Jewish Jesus movement. 

Paul is all “I’m not in competition with Apollos or Peter” here in the opening of the epistle, but then spends almost the entire rest of the letter trying to convince his readers that he is right and Apollos and Peter are wrong. Because Paul is actually human.

It is easy to lose this humanity, Paul’s humanity, the humanity of any of the authors of scripture, because the fundamentalist heresy insists every word in the Bible is holy utterance. If God is writing the text, then the humanness found in the text is a con, mere artifice. 

But their arbitrary decision that the parts they like are literally true is a relatively new heresy, as heresies go. You can’t erase humans from religion, for religion is what humans construct when we encounter the holy, and even the most precious memories of our encounters with the transcendent and inexplicable pass through us, primates that are mysterious and wonderful… and a red hot mess on our best days.

Paul worries that the Corinthians are allowing class divisions to creep into the church, especially around the remembrance meal, communion, who gets the good wine and who gets the Thunderbird. 

He offers that beautiful teaching about love that you have heard at pretty much every Christian wedding you’ve ever attended. And yeah, he urges them to unite around his idiosyncratic interpretation of Jesus, a man he never actually met.

Jesus prayed for unity too, at the Last Supper praying for his disciples “that they all may be one.” But both Jesus and Paul talked about the Day of the Lord, the divine re-ordering of creation, as happening at any moment. That was 2000+ years ago, and for the record, as a theologically-educated type, I’m pretty certain this is not what they imagined as the Kingdom of God, though it may well be what a living God imagines. 

What is unity anyway, that we should desire it? We are never going to all want the same thing or think the same way. That is not the way creation works. Futures branch off in a million different directions every second, and while it may mostly be cause and effect, we know the cause less than we think, understand the effect less than we want. 

You are you because of everything you have experienced, good and bad, the infinite chain of events and people and places that created your experiences and the infinite chains of events and people and places that created those events and people and places, and so on and so on back beyond knowing to the first divine utterance.

Norman Maclean’s writing about rivers and words and the basement of time is about fly-fishing in Montana with a long-lost brother and is also a profound and resonant statement about being itself, for we are divine song, and the river that runs through all is a mystery we choose to believe is good, is love, a mystery we name as God.

Unity as uniformity, so often the goal in human enterprise, was a lost cause before we ever conceived of the word. We only achieve it artificially, by creating smaller and smaller boxes, beating out difference, or pretending not to see it. 

Unity of that kind is a violence that is in opposition to the holy, and those who insist upon it have committed the gravest of sins, for they have placed themselves as the answer to the question that is God.

The closest I get to endorsing unity is a saying attributed to St. Augustine and often quoted in our United Church of Christ tradition: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, diversity; in all things, charity,” with charity simply being another word for love. And even here, I would draw the circle of what is essential very very small, and label it love. Love at the beginning and end of the equation

Not that I blame Paul for wanting to convince people of something he deeply felt to be true, something he felt would save them. It takes a certain amount of crazy to believe you can make the world a better place, but it’s a good crazy. Maybe even a little hubris, from the prophet in the streets smashing pots and telling the king to stop making bad geo-political decisions to the community member on a mission to catch and spay feral cats. Believing you matter and the world matters is believing and may be the bravest thing any of us can do, being for what is not us as a tiny little reflection of the divine urge to create and nurture and care.

Unity is appealing because it is simple, because we engage the world in the most superficial of ways, but Maclean’s river running through it and the holy song that sustains us and the Christ found in the least of these, the poor and oppressed requires deep seeing, deep listening, requires knowing beyond what is on the surface, requires learning and time and vulnerability.

There is order in the universe. It is just not our tiny hammered box order. It is holy order, holy unity, beyond our knowing, and may it always be so.

The story that is so often told is of an Abrahamic people that sometimes misbehaved but were always homogenous in their understanding of Yahweh, and that simply is not true and never was true. It is of a Christian movement that worked out some practices in the early years then settled into centuries of unity under the Bishop of Rome and that was never true.

The religion of ancient Israel was evolving and changing, with movements and reformations, for as long as it existed in the ancient age, and continues in the same way today in Rabbinic Judaism because it is a living faith, and what is alive changes and is mysterious and beautiful.

The religion of Jesus has been evolving and changing, movements and reformations, for as long as it has existed, Peter and Apollos and Paul, the four ancient patriarchs who never agree to be ruled by the fifth, Jan Hus and Francis of Assisi and a troublesome monk in Germany and an equally troublesome pastor in Zurich. Because ours is a living faith.

This is a dance, and our unity consists of making space for one another in that circle of love, atheist and traditionalist, queer and privileged, all that we are and might yet be, trusting that the One big enough to see the pattern sees beauty and loves us completely in our moment on the floor.

God loves all a’ yous. Even Joey Three-Fingers. And in that, in being loved by Holy Mystery, we are all united. Amen.

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