University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

KINSHIP AS GIFT AND ASPIRATION

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Trinity Sunday              May 18, 2008

(This meditation draws substantially from a sermon I preached May 22, 2005, and from the work of Rick Spalding in a paper he presented to the January 2005 meeting of the Moveable Feast in Austin, Texas.)

            There is no question that the apostle Paul loved the Corinthian congregation.  It is also true that no one got under his skin… or tried his patience… or pushed all his “hot buttons” more than the Corinthians.

            Of course, one could read very selectively in the Corinthian letters and not get such an impression at all; ask many people what they know about Paul’s Corinthian correspondence, and most will remember only the “love chapter” from First Corinthians, chapter 13: “Love is patient; love is kind….” And if that is all they know of the Corinthians, they may well conclude that the letters are nice collections of sublime reflections on human and divine love. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Paul’s letters to the Corinthian Church are urgently addressed to a church in grave conflict, in the midst of a huge struggle, in the middle of a community in turmoil, where people were being anything but “patient and kind,” where everyone seemed to be trying to outdo one another in being arrogant and rude and jealous and boastful.

            The Second Letter, from which we just read, suggests that not much has changed since the first. It’s hard to know exactly what occasioned the letter, because letters often obscure the events to which they refer. Paul knew what was happening in Corinth, and the Corinthians knew, but the outside reader can only imagine some things.[1] There are details in this letter of Paul to the Church at Corinth that even biblical scholars do not claim to understand.

            But this much we know: the last few chapters of the Second Letter to the Corinthians make it clear that Paul is angry with the church and with its leaders and teachers. He had wanted and expected more from the Corinthian congregation than they had given.  He had wanted maturity of faith; he had wanted a community that mirrored the Christ he had proclaimed to them; he had wanted them to be strong enough to reject false teachers who had tried to pawn off a different Jesus on them.  Now he wonders aloud whether indeed the Corinthians are actually up to the task. He challenges them… pleads with them, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith.  Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? – unless, indeed, you fail to meet the test!” (13:5)

            Rick Spalding understates the obvious when he says, “Clearly something more troubling than death-by-boredom had been going on in the Corinthian church by the time of the writing of this letter… [it is nothing short of] a crisis of values.”[2]

“Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” Paul implores the Corinthians.  Now, we live in a world where we tend to think more individualistically than did people of Paul’s time, and so we hear that question, ‘Is Christ in you?’ and we think Paul is summoning each Christian to an individual examination.  More likely, though, Paul is reminding the church in Corinth that as the body of Christ it is the temple of the Spirit and that Christ dwells in it. He’s not appealing to individuals; such an appeal would only increase the existing divisions within the church. Paul’s question is not to be confined to matters of… personal salvation; the whole community needs to take a critical look at itself.[3]

To help with such community self-examination, Paul extends to the Corinthians some strong words of exhortation.

Put things in order, he says.  Be mended.  Pull yourselves together. Get a grip! In short, be restored one with another.

Agree with one another, and live in peace, he says, which was apparently about as easy for Corinthians in Paul’s day as it is for Presbyterians in ours, or for Democrats in our time. Be of one mind, Paul says – at least, put on the mind of Christ.

Greet one another with a holy kiss.  This is the kiss of reconciliation, and it is the reconciliation that makes it holy.

These words of exhortation are words we all need to hear in our time – in our nation, in our denomination, in our church family, in most every place where we live our lives together.  But make no mistake; they are hard words to live into in our day.  The culture wars have affected us all.  The pursuit of common ground and common good is often lost in the midst of strident voices claiming the sole truth or seeking personal or partisan advantage.

Paul’s words are so important to us because, despite all the intervening centuries, the Corinthians seem remarkably our contemporaries…like so many people we know, and maybe not unlike those whom we encounter each morning in the mirror: scrappy, opinionated, not shy about expressing different points of view, not withholding passionate disagreements – and it may be tempting to see the increasing polarization in both church and state as just another sign of our contentious and competitive American identity.  But what, asks Rick Spalding… what if it’s more serious than that?

We’ve built our life together – as a community of faith would – on some points of consensus.  But what if that consensus isn’t bedrock? What if, in the acid bath of polemics and intolerance… the complex structure of our consensus were to break down, as perhaps it was beginning to do in Corinth – sort of like what happens to a tooth if you leave it overnight in a glass of Coca-Cola?  Pieces of the consensus that used to make it possible for us to live together – the separation of church and state and the freedom of/from religion, the sense that we are one nation among many, the implicit trust of institutions like the [church] and processes like elections, the conviction that we are all created equal, the “live and let live” spirit – [such consensus pieces] no longer serve as the rock on which this civic house is built. And the ecclesial house is in similar shape; [it took] a dozen of the very smartest and most faithful people we have [in our denomination] three years [on a unity and diversity task force] just to name the content of whatever faithful consensus it is that’s [been] holding us together – if, indeed, it is [and already we seem to have let go of that task force’s vision].[4]

In the midst of the disappearance of such consensus, Paul’s admonitions and exhortations – “put things in order… agree with one another” – may seem woefully inadequate. But what if, on this Trinity Sunday, we were to take to heart the rest of this passage… that is, what if we appropriated not just Paul’s words of  exhortation, but also the promise and the benediction he offered the Corinthians… and so offers us? 

The promise: And the God of love and peace will be with you.

And the benediction: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

How might such a benedictory understanding of the Trinity speak to us of the need to re-found and rebuild and hold fast to our consensus?

What is there for us to see about ourselves in the way we’ve come to see God – as one whose intimate solidarity with our human predicament offers us, of all things, grace – as one whose overarching creative presence presides over our days and over the millennia of the universe with, of all things, love – as one whose restless intention for our lives takes the form of communion, insisting on involvement, intent on making introductions? What does the shape of the key that opens our hearts, our minds, our lives to each other show us about the shape of the hole in the redeemed community to which we’re called, to which we’re sent….?[5]

            At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says to his disciples – then and now – “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  It is a call to create community, a charge to discover and rediscover a place to stand together, to imagine and re-imagine a way to stand together.[6]

            “What the disciples are sent to do,” says Tom Long, “is not to hurl gospel leaflets into the wind or hold a rally in a stadium. They are called to the harder, less glamorous, more patient task of making disciples, of building Christian communities, [of fostering the kinship they’ve been given by God]… [And] this is no cold, mathematical Trinity [in whose name they are sent]; this is a divine family, full of gentleness and blessing.  To become Christian is not to be converted to an ideology; it is to be drawn into kinship with God and with all those who love God.”[7]  It is a kinship of love and grace and communion, a kinship to which we return week after week in this place.

            In this week’s Day 1 radio broadcast, Episcopal priest James Lemler tells a story about a family in his parish. “I had a couple of parents telling me the story about their family’s Sunday morning experience of a sermon that I had preached. They had gone home and during Sunday lunch were talking about my sermon (something that warms the heart of a pastor, to be sure). In the midst of their conversation, the second-grade daughter sitting at the table chimed in: ‘Oh, Father Lemler’s sermons, they're always the same. You know...blah, blah, blah, blah ...love.’ Well, I was amused [he said] and thought to myself, ‘Hey, this little girl really got it...the message, the repetition, the core, the redundancy.’”[8]

Blah, blah, blah, blah… love.  Here in this place, I would hope everyone might similarly know the repetition of the word “grace” … and the word “peace” … and the word “community.” On this Trinity Sunday, on every Sunday, they are the common threads that hold us together, worthy of repetitive stress and celebration. Again, Spalding:

One of Paul’s [best] promises, as he concludes his last letter to people who may have been nearly exhausted from that “less glamorous, more patient task,” is that “the God of love and peace will be with you.”  It echoes the words of Jesus at the apex of Matthew’s gospel: “Lo, I am with you always…” This presence to which Paul points … is not a reward for good behavior or an incentive for certain kinds of ecclesiastical progress or an explanation of how certain things will finally come to pass. It is, simply, a statement of unaltered reality. There have been ecclesiastical headaches, and there will be more.  There have been crises of values, and they may take a heavy toll. There has been one terrible death, and there will be others…

Even so, the community will continue, following its most elemental instruction from the One who loved it into being in the first place: Go, therefore. Go to put things in order.  Go to imagine one-mindedness.  Go to be completed, and to complete. Go in the company of the One who walks beside you, whose gift to the wound in your memory or the sting in your conscience is grace. Go in the towering presence of One who is above and before and beyond every step of your going, whose gift to the fear in your heart or the anger in your gut is love. Go in the thrall of One who is in every breath you take, whose gift to the loneliness of your days or the limits of your imagination is [communion,] participation, fellowship, the divine stirring of the holy insurrection in your marrow.  [Go, therefore… go, he says.] Go, and the God of love and peace will be with you.[9]