Belonging In Turbulent Times

Ephesians 2:11-22

Americans are living in an intense time, or at least, anticipating one. After half a century of political peace in this nation, there is brewing a kind of turbulence we’ve had in our past and other nations have experienced more recently or frequently.  And we kind of don’t know what to do with that. Let’s just say, it’s nicer to feel invincible as a country, to assume that what happens other places won’t or can’t happen here. It’s preferable to at least pretend that things will always remain stable no matter what. 

When things get intense, we humans amp up a favorite sin, which is to other each other. To hunker down into our silos of shared ideology and use shorthand labels to sort who’s in and out, who’s an ally we can count on and who’s an enemy we can despise or ignore. We can sum up a whole person in a single word, words like MAGA, woke, immigrant, anti-vaxxer, lawyer, widow, trans, white, sick, retired, Evangelical. We can boil down an entire human being into a simplistic stereotype. And once the label defines who we are, we’d better stick with our own group, because how else will we belong?

Which brings us to this letter, written several decades after Jesus died, to people who are doing what people do – they are othering each other. The recipient community is made up of both Gentile and Jewish Christians.  And according to this letter, shorthand labels have been slapped on the groups: “the circumcision” and “the uncircumcision.” 

Why those words? The offspring of Abraham were chosen by God to particularly, knowingly, intentionally, participate with God in caring for the world. This covenant identity and role was marked by circumcision. Called to be the people of God for the sake of all the other nations, they were agents of belonging in and for the world.

And so, this ancient symbol of belonging to God to care for the world is now being used inside a community of Christ-followers to separate and alienate, the very opposite of its original meaning.

Fourteen generations after Abraham, a young, Jewish woman was invited by a messenger of the Divine to be what some ancient Greek icons call, “the container of the uncontainable.” Through her body, God came into this fragile human life of living and dying to reconcile all things to Godself. Born a helpless infant needing to be cared for by those he came to save, Jesus came to break down all divisions and bring all people into the family of God.  

The Magi from afar, kneeling before this impossible child, were the first to worship a Messiah they did not grow up anticipating, (I suppose making them the original “the uncircumcised.”) Then thirty years later, after Jesus died and was resurrected, the party burst the seams and spread everywhere, and people of all languages and cultures were drawn by the Holy Spirit into the covenant family of God and transformed into agents of belonging for the whole world.

We’re now 81 generations after God came in Christ reconciling all people to Godself. But the malicious custom of othering others is alive and well in us. Every culture and people is adept at dividing, blaming and condemning, with their own short-hand labels and dismissive ways to signal who’s in and who’s out, and we are certainly no exception. Nor do we hesitate to use the language and symbols of our faith to do so. Why do we do this?

All human beings share the longing to feel safe and seen, to matter, to contribute. All people feel pain and joy, welcome new life, and experience aging and death. All people suffer. All people long to belong. But with our limited imaginations and seemingly unlimited susceptibility to fear and insecurity, we mostly can’t fathom that the belonging of God includes us all, or that there is no limit on love, no quota on forgiveness, no ranking of human value, no lifetime maximum belonging a person experiences or offers to others before it's all used up. 

Remembering our shared humanity feels easier when life is going along smoothly and we have spare reserves of equanimity and Zen. And perhaps some of us here now do, thanks be to God if that is you today. 

But many of us are a bit worried and raw, a tad edgy and tired, and collectively there’s a looming sense that things are just beginning, whatever that means, whatever those things turn out to be. So, it’s safe to say, even without a lot going on on the health front, or job front, or kid front, or parent front, most of us are already not operating at full capacity. 

For my part, 11 days ago, our jet-lagged family welcomed a new, wildly disruptive puppy who we are already in love with, but the sleep deprivation and vigilant attentiveness is no joke.  My kids keep telling me I’m mean. I don’t feel mean, just tired. But I’m told I walk around all the time sounding mean. 

So, if the message of this text today was: Go be kind and love all people, it would be impossible for me. Because right now, I can barely be kind to the people I already love. 

Add to the fatigue and caffeine a steady flow of news and commentary about political conventions and the horrors in Ukraine and Gaza, and fretting about the future of the planet, and there is no way I’m an agent of love and belonging in the world.  

The way of fear is loud, and I listen to it. And Paul seemed to know his readers did too. So the answer to our petty division and deep anxiety isn’t just to tell us Quit it and be nice!

We are simply, clearly, not capable of that. 

Thank God Paul wrote this letter and not I. Because here’s what he has to say, (aka, hear the good news of the gospel): 

First, the peace, goodness and wholeness we long for so deeply? It is not of our making. Christ does this, is doing this, has done this, will do this. Jesus Christ “proclaimed peace to those far off and peace to those near,” giving us all access to the very heart of God. Well-being within, well-being between, well-being everlasting.  We don’t do this, Christ does.

Second, Paul writes earlier in this letter that it is God’s “plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”  Meaning, this world, and everything in it, belongs to God. We are held in a greater love and a deeper story that outlasts time itself.  So, we can with confidence answer the “what if?” of fear with the “even if!” of hope. This is a lesson we learned during the pandemic when we left the building in Lent and returned two years later having learned the Lenten lesson still hanging on the wall, “Fear asks, What if? Hope answers, Even if!” Even if the worst thing we can imagine happens (like the whole world shuts down in a pandemic!), God is still God. Love is still love. This is all heading somewhere unstoppable. Even if. Always.

So we can look at the world truthfully, without hiding or covering over evil, upheaval, suffering or general disappointment. We will name the reality, “This is part of the story.” But then we’ll keep going, naming also the deeper reality, “This is not the whole story. The world belongs to God.” 

Third, Paul says the divisions we think exist - Christ has shattered them. Christ abolishes hostility and alienation between us and makes out of the fractured bits one human race. We don’t choose this, or create this, and we can’t make it not true (even when we try). In Christ, God reconciled us all to God and each other, and complete wholeness and connection is where this whole story is heading. We can deny it or defy it. Or we can join it, by taking up our calling to participate with God in caring for this world. 

This is not done through our stellar intentions or superhuman efforts, but by our honesty, our humility, our presence alongside, with and for one another. We live the belonging by our vulnerability. By seeking to see others and be truly seen. By asking for, and offering forgiveness. Pursuing invincibility and chasing safety won’t bring us well-being. We live into fullness of life, this peace Christ offers, by opening up and welcoming our shared humanity with those who – no matter how different than us- are also just like us. 

Finally, Paul tells us we are “no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.” 

We, the Church - that is, you and me and all those everywhere formed by the death and resurrection of Christ and drawn by the Holy Spirit into the covenant family of God - we are transformed into agents of belonging for the whole world. And we are marked for this covenant identity and role by our baptism. 

When we live in the actual, particular, singular life we’ve each been given, committed to be in this place with these people, today, no matter what tomorrow brings or the day after that, something happens to us and through us that we can’t control. The Holy Spirit makes the hodge-podge, imperfect collection of ordinary people a holy dwelling place of the Divine. We become “the container of the uncontainable.” Jesus Christ is actually here, among and between us, drawing us into the beloved world where he continues to break down all divisions, and bring all people into the family of God.  

So take a breath and let it out. Settle into the love that holds us all. 

May we trust God, care for others, and live the gift and calling of our shared belonging. Come what may, even if, and always.

Amen.

What I can and cannot do

 

Ephesians 4:1-16

I have close family members who are refusing to be vaccinated. I have weathered lots of disagreements before and still find a way to stay connected, but for whatever reason, this vaccination thing is a biggie for me.  I went the direct approach and talked about it with them and it created a huge rift between us and they asked me to stop bringing it up.  So now I sit with this rift and have a really hard time ignoring it, which is my preferred method of moving on.  I am angry. I feel trapped in anger. I am captive to anger. 
 
But here’s my modern advanced human being mistake: We think unity means ideological agreement. We think being united, connected, belonging to each other, means thinking, or knowing, or believing the same things.  Especially when our beliefs have real consequences in action – and we’re literally pulling in opposite directions. 
 
We also think unity is up to us. It’s our job to get each other to agree with us, then we will have unity. Then we will be connected.  And these days the way we build union is through anger or through fear.  Anger feels stronger than fear. So we let that fear turn into anger, anger that galvanizes union through violence. “Those people are doing this to us” we say, and we build whole communities around anger and fear, bonds that define ourselves over and against others, “We are not like them.” 
 
But at the core of it all, the unity we yearn for and are angry that we can’t have is to protect us from our fears.  Fear of loss, fear of perceived danger, fear of what will be taken away from us or done to us.
 
But in our scripture today Paul is talking about a different kind of unity.  Paul’s message is that we don’t have to be afraid. We were dead and made alive in Christ. Like the mantra that guarded my children from nightmares and reminded them of their baptism when they were little, we can remind ourselves, “Death can’t get me because Jesus has got me.”  We can give ourselves over to a union of life and for life without fear.  
 
The way of fear objectifies others and takes away personhood, both theirs and our own. But in the way of God, unity, belonging and connection is as persons with and for each other. God came as a person, for persons, to be a person with us and uphold our personhood.  
 
I can’t just snap the fingers of my heart and quit being angry, or fix my feelings by deciding to suddenly be ok with choices I see having damaging consequences in the world. And all my strategies for this are failing me.  I am imprisoned by anger.  I need to be freed by someone else. Paul says Jesus made captivity itself a captive.  “He who ascended, also descended” - God came into our death alongside, with and for us, so that by going toward the death we find life, and we find the one who sets us free from fear, and free from anger. Not by fighting them but by feeling them and opening them to God.  Christ makes a space for us to go toward our fear and anger, confessing them, again and again, and find in our places of death a God with us who give us life we cannot give ourselves.  
 
Fear and anger killed Jesus, and yet that fear, anger and death itself could not break the cosmic union that now holds us our deepest belonging to God and each other.  Our union is so secure in the love of God that nothing can separate us from that.  
 
What gives us unity is not ideological agreement but the very cross of Christ.  
This is Christ’s Body, not ours. We are set free to be with and for each other in love, to speak truth without fear, to call out lies that damage and divide, and in grace and gentleness, to grow up together into Christ, to more and more live as the one body we already are.
 
Yes, the pandemic could get worse. Yes school could be affected. Church could be affected. Vaccinated people can spread this.  “The war has changed,” the headlines read this week about the delta variant. And, friends, I am not down for more change or more war. I am not on board for this. I was looking forward to things getting better and better with no more surprises. I looking forward to mostly vaccinated, completely unmasked, shoulder-to-shoulder, boisterously singing, indoor worship on Labor Day weekend.  I was counting on it.  I was telling myself we were on our way out of this thing. I was feeling like I had about hit my limit of adjusting and surely we were finished with all that.  As Andy just said to me on a walk Friday night, “For people who watch the news, yesterday was a hard day.” 
 
But hearing that the war has changed and we are still deep in it doesn’t have to stoke me toward anger, or push me toward fear again, and we don’t have to let any of it drive a wedge deeper between us all.
 
Up against our impossibility and loss, we can confess our anger and fear and our exhaustion with it all, and let Christ meet us there, in and through one another. 
 
And we can “bear with one another,” as Paul says, we can “build up the body in love” and remind each other of what is true. So here are some things that are true that I want to remind us of: 
 
This, all of this, is part of the story. This is not the whole story. The world belongs to God. Church is who we are, not where we go.  Worship looks all different ways. So does gathering. We are good at adapting – even when we don’t like it. We’re scrappy and creative.  We’re also tired and probably sad. And it’s ok to grieve. Again. It’s ok to grieve again. Grieving is a need we can meet.
 
Also: Worry is practicing fear. Rest is practicing trust. We can choose what we want to practice.  
 
At last weekend’s Women’s Retreat we talked about different types of rest. (Sacred Rest by Sandra Dalton-Smith goes into detail about this, summarized in this article). Physical rest, like sleep, or stretching sore muscles, or walking circulation back into jarred nerves.  But the rest many of us need right now might not be physical; it might be emotional rest, or social rest, spiritual rest or sensory rest (or all the rest!).  We may need to take an extended break from the constant barrage of intensity in the news and social media.  We may want to set a regular coffee date, or morning walk, or evening phone call with a friend. Maybe we need to commit to reading a really good novel every week of August.  We might want a visit to a body of water, or the Landscape Arboretum, or to pull out a lawn chair each night and not miss a single sunset for a week. 
 
This month we will continue to meet over zoom for worship – Pastor Lisa will lead services that focus on awe, beauty and wonder in God’s creation.  And we are still planning to be together in-person (and via zoom, both) beginning September 5.  Because all we can do is just keep moving forward, knowing that things might - and likely will - keep changing, and as they do, we will keep adapting.  We don’t yet know what worship will look like on September 5. Will we be indoors or out? Will we all be masked? How will singing and music work?  When it’s time to have those answers, we will have those answers.  God always shows us the next step in front of us, and sometimes not very much further than that.  But we don’t actually know anything very far ahead of time these days.  And that’s ok. We are going to practice trusting. We are going to rest. 
 
Starting on Monday, I will be away for three weeks. For the past year and a half, it has been hard for me to step away – even when I was away.  I have carried worry with me, practicing fear.  I have not completely rested.  But I am going to be very intentional seeing about this time as sabbath time, to let this time reorient me back to God, back to trust.  This is God’s world.  We are held in God’s love, no matter what and always.  
 
Yesterday, while I was both breathing in the smoky Canadian Wildfire air into my aching, scratchy throat, and also watching an extended family pile out of cars with coolers and picnic blankets and set up next to a basketball court with tiny and big people getting ready to play together, I found myself praying the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  So, I can’t make the air better, or make people get vaccinated – not even people I love.  I can’t make covid not be so relentless and contagious.  And I can’t even make myself not feel angry or sad or worried or scared.  

But I can remember that I belong to God and everyone else.  And I can take in the moments of joy and connection. And I can practice noticing and being present. And I can grieve.  And I can confess my fear and anger instead of letting them consume and trap me.  And I can rest.  I can be deliberate about practicing trust.  So I pray for the courage to rest.  And I invite you to rest this month too.  
 
Just before Paul says to live in unity, belonging and trust, he says why and how we can.  
I invite you to receive these words as a benediction:
 
I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
 

The True Wisdom

1 Corinthians 2:1-16

A week or so ago, I sat in a few lectures by a neurobiologist (Tina Payne Bryson), who described how when we are healthy, we exist in a “river of well-being,” that flows between the banks of chaos on the one side and rigidity on the other. Sometimes we can get trapped, stuck on the bank of rigidity or of chaos, marooned out of well-being.

It seems to me this is a perfect description of our world today. We are generally either stuck on the bank of chaos: fear, reaction, mayhem, name-calling, flailing, finger pointing, blaming and frantically trying to get our feet underneath of us. Or we are stuck on the bank of rigidity, trying to control others, setting stricter rules and higher walls and bigger boundaries. Naming enemies, organizing factions, eliminating adversaries. Judging who is safe and who is dangerous, who is right and who is wrong, who is with us and who is against us.

Last week we talked about how easy it is to fall into factions – and how Paul warns the Corinthians about this temptation. And they had the obvious pitfalls they were trying to avoid falling into – wealth, class, race - but in striving to avoid those, they cooked up some new ways to divide themselves, whose crew are you? Which leader do you follow? because dividing ourselves from one another is one of the oldest, strongest and surest ways sin rears its ugly head.

We all belong to God and we all belong to each other.

All of us. All the humans. Without exception.

There is no more fundamental truth than this, nothing more real in all the world, actually.

But oh, how we doubt it and disguise it and deny it. How we cover it up with layers of interpretation and competition and hedging our bets and building our coalitions and hiding our true selves.

And soon this hunger for belonging - this absolutely core, unshakable reality that we yearn to feel because we know it in our depths as the truest thing and most real thing - soon it becomes something we commodify. We dole it out in tiny amounts, and sell to the highest bidder, we seek it relentlessly, addictively in harmful and dehumanizing ways. And we make it probationary, or provisional, shutting out some in order to welcome in others.

And this connection to God, this belonging to the very source of life, our identity, our purpose, our human-made-in-the-image-of-the-Creator-core-being – we long so badly for it that we set up rules to mediate it, to say who has it and who doesn’t and how to earn it and who can dispense it and what can make you lose it or gain it. And oh, the chaos and the rigidity we can strand ourselves upon in our efforts to gain or earn what already defines us!

We forget- in that deep existential kind of forgetting - that belonging to God and belonging to each other is something hidden before the foundations of the world, decreed before the ages for our glory, utterly true and unchanging. 

So here Paul goes again.

There are two wisdoms, friends. He says.

There is the wisdom of this age.  We’ve called it “the way of fear.” This wisdom tells us that might makes right. It says that salvation can be found in smart leaders, wise investments or the careful construction or dismantling of isms. It says we can be saved by weapons, or by legislating against weapons, by this candidate or that party, this act of piety or that specific prayer, this way of seeing the world or that list of beliefs.  It says that violence or moral rightness can force others to respect you, or can earn you worth or a place at the table.

And we put stock in that kind of wisdom, we pay money to it and educate our children in it and take it in through our televisions and computer screens and phones and radios, so many words: his words, her words, their words.

And like the dingy beam of a dying flashlight, we hold up this worldly wisdom before us, and we squint into the darkness, letting it guide us. And we’re killing each other. And we’re blaming each other. And we are finding more ways to divide into ever smaller and more homogenous camps, until there will be no belonging left and it will be just me against you – all the mes and all the yous against all the other mes and all the other yous. Despairing. Alone. Afraid.

But there is another wisdom.

Ancient and true. Secret and Hidden. Decreed by God before the ages.

The wisdom that spoke the world into being with a single word, the wisdom that bound it all in harmony and order, a delight to its creator, functioning in love and cooperation. The wisdom of the Word made flesh when the Creator of all came to dwell among us. Stupidly. Weakly. Foolishly, to live without power and to die alongside us, on our behalf.

There is no worldly wisdom in this. It is “the deeper magic from before the dawn of time”, as the Narnians would say. It is unbreakable and strong, absurd and powerful, and it comes concealed in weakness to stand with the weakest among us.

Paul was a Roman citizen from a prominent Jewish family, well-established with an impressive pedigree. He studied under the most prominent rabbis of the day, and was fluent in classical literature, philosophy and ethics. Paul was educated in the wisdom of the world. He was a successful, powerful, influential figure, and a zealot.  He knew how to speak the wisdom of the age, in the language of the rulers of the age.

But when he comes to the Corinthians, he chooses to leave all that behind. He sees it as a distraction, a shiny diversion that might keep people from seeing the real reality. I did not come with all the methods and the political skills of lofty words or persuasion. He says.  I came in weakness and fear, with much trembling. I wanted you to see God’s actions instead of focusing on my words -  So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God.

In other words, he says, I vowed to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Paul uses this language -  Jesus Christ and him crucified, “the cross,” the foolishness of the cross, again and again, as a kind of shorthand to refer to The whole of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus- that is, that God came in this completely backwards, upside down way to share this life with us, taking all that separates us from God, even death itself, into God’s very being, and letting it destroy him. 

And then, Jesus rose from the dead and everything we thought was real about the power of death and division and destruction is exposed as utter fraud by the unquenchable light of the world, the wisdom hidden before the ages shining forth, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. It’s settled and final. 

We belong to God, we belong to each other; this is what Jesus trusted, and embodied, and died for and rose into and referred to again and again as ‘The Kingdom of God.’

And yet… and yet we choose sin. We choose self-protection and division and destruction and existential forgetting. We choose to tear others down and to fear, fear, fear that anything, everything, could tear us down.

And here is the free gift of salvation, friends. Right here: You belong to God. you belong to the rest of the people in this whole big world.  And they belong to God, and they belong to you. Fact. Done. All that is needed is to say yes. Yes, I accept that. Yes, I receive that.

Which wisdom will you live by?

Which words will you listen to?

Which messages will you internalize and let direct your actions, your thoughts and words and habits?

You, sisters and brothers, you have the mind of Christ. That is to say, Jesus who embodied completely belonging to God and to each other here on earth, whose Spirit actually inhabits us and makes us into his body here on earth so that we embody belonging to God and belonging to each other – this mind is our mind now.

We can think this way. We can trust in this. We can see it around us. We can recognize it and understand, as Paul says, “the gifts of God bestowed on us.” We can point it out and celebrate it. We can hold it up in the midst of the worst kind of suffering and despair. It should make us brave. Brave to face the truth. Brave to tell the truth. Brave to live the truth. This sucks! This hurts so bad! it’s terrible and I hate everything about it! And also, it’s not the end. It’s not the real, final, and true word about all of this or all of us. And right here, in the midst of it, we keep belonging to God and we keep belonging to each other.  Because that’s the real reality. And that will not change.

This neurobiologist also talked about the usefulness of storying experiences as a way of helping people cope with trauma, whether big or small, by telling what happened – saying it aloud, naming the feelings, recounting the events and then saying what happened next. Every story ends with some kind of redemption – even if it’s just, “and I survived,” or “and the community came around them in their loss,” whatever it is, the story doesn’t end with the incident of trauma. That is not the final definer of a person or of reality.

I saw this in action that very day when Theresa’s two-year-old Eleanor was on my deck on a sunny day, and she walked barefoot onto a black mat. She pulled her foot back and with tears streaming down her face she exclaimed, “That’s HOT! I burned my foot!"

“Oh Eleanor!” I said, and I picked her up and hugged her. I asked her where it hurt and I kissed it. We stood there feeling sad about it for a minute longer and then she noticed a bird flying past and commented on it. After a moment she turned her face to me, and pointed to the mat and said, “Tell the story.”

Thankfully, I had been in the lecture and knew what she wanted.

“Ellie walked over to that mat and she put her foot on it and it was HOT. It hurt so much! Eleanor cried and Aunty Kara picked her up and kissed the owie on her foot and asked her how she felt. Then we saw a bird flying right there.”  She nodded along. Her face pinched in sadness at the burning foot part and softening to a smile at the flying bird part.

She asked twice more for me to tell the story in the next few minutes, and twice more I recounted what happened. And each time I watched her body relax. Yes. Yes, that is what happened. It’s real. It happened. It still stings, but it can’t hurt me any longer. You are holding it with me; I am not alone.

And I thought of all the times we tell each other oh, it’s ok! When it’s not ok. 

Or we move on from the pain and try to avoid it. 

I thought of the wisdom that says if you don’t talk about how bad it is maybe they wont notice they’re hurt. Or the more pervasive move: their charged emotion feels threatening, and it’s making me uncomfortable and afraid, so I will do whatever I can to silence, redirect or change it. Be it flailing in chaos or bringing the hammer of rigidity down, I will escape this.

But if we belong to each other and we belong to God then there is nothing that happens to us that God doesn’t share.  And sharing it with each other is how we experience that. 

Pain? It’s uncomfortable. I will hold it with you and help you name it. 

Stuckness? Fear? Addiction? Anger? Worry? Loss? We are in this together. I will help you tell the story of it and you will help me remember that the story keeps going and doesn’t stop right here. 

But I don’t get to just jump to the end because it’s making me uncomfortable. I have to go with you through the experience and see and bear with you, because that is where Jesus is. Bearing with us, already. 

That is the wisdom of the Spirit  - that God doesn’t swoop in and sweep all of it off the table triumphantly, God sets a place for each person and sits down alongside us. God offers God’s very self to us, broken and given, so that we might be made whole.

None of the rulers of this age understand this.

And why should they? It makes no sense.

Its logic is love; its wisdom is Spiritual: It is the mind of Christ.

Biblical scholar Mary Hinkle Shore describes spiritual wisdom like a pair of lenses at an eye exam, where click, click, click, suddenly the fuzzy blur is sharp and clear, the chart in focus. You can see what was there all along, only obscured by the various lenses that interpreted it for you. She then manages to sum up the whole of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians when she explains: “The actions of those with the mind of Christ will be characterized by self-giving love. The leaders will act as servants (3:5). The strong will refrain from exercising their freedom at the expense of the weak (cf. 1 Corinthians 8-10). Love will prove greater than prophecy, tongues, and knowledge (13:8).”

And then she concludes, “To have the mind of Christ is to be able to imagine the new creation and participate in it before it has come into focus for others. And as God’s Spirit calls and equips the church for that imagining and participating, the new creation actually comes into focus for the world.”

Here’s the really good news about all this. It remains true whether you remember it or not. Whether you look for it or embody it or whether you’re stranded on the banks of rigidity or chaos, this fact remains: there is a real reality. There is a deeper wisdom. There is a truer truth: We belong to God. We belong to each other.

So this week, amidst whatever chaos and bedlam, or intolerant rigidity you may encounter outside or within, I invite you to stop, breathe, and listen to the stories underneath. The ones that say, this sucks, and it hurts, and I feel alone and afraid.  Don’t turn away from those stories; take them in and bear them, Jesus is there. You belong to these people and they belong to you. 

Tell their stories to yourself and add the parts that come next.

Our faith rests not on human wisdom but on the power of God, so watch for that power in the midst of the suffering parts and in the parts that come next – the helpers, the sharers, see the people embodying love and connection, hope and belonging, living the real reality right alongside and in the midst of whatever and everything.

Watch for the wisdom established before the foundation of the world – the Kingdom of God. It plays out mostly in weak, gentle and surprising ways, but it is steady, persistent, real.  Underneath and behind and inside everything, this reality is the heartbeat that keeps the whole world alive: 

we belong to God; we belong to each other. 
We belong to God; we belong to each other.
We belong to God; we belong to each other.

Let it pulse through you.  

Let it bring you back to life.

Amen.

The Path of Least Resistance

1 Corinthians 1:1-3, 10-18

Maisy’s best friend Elsa was over the other day, the two of them alternately building a space ship out of boxes and stabling horses in the great wide ranch of our backyard.  Into the middle of their limitless imagination dropped some real world advice when Elsa sagely observed, “Maisy, watch your thoughts, because they become your words, and your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your character and your character becomes your destiny.”

Maisy's best friend Elsa was over the other day, the two of them alterna “Ok.” Maisy responded. And they continued mucking out the dirty stalls.

Andy and I looked at each other and grinned.  But Elsa’s words have echoed in my head this week thinking about Paul’s exasperated words to the Corinthians.

We are bombarded with the message, from very young childhood on, that it is me against the world. We are trained in self-protection, competition, honing our herding instinct.  So we congregate with those we know, those we have something in common with. 

I know I do this. I show up at an event and I look for my friends. If my friends aren’t there, I look for someone I know. Barring that, I look for other moms, women, people around my age.  We seek out those that appear to be most like ourselves. I heard a social scientist this week describe it as “the path of least resistance.” We know those like us, they’re familiar. It’s easy, intuitive. But with people different than me, I have to work. I have to extend myself differently, to listen and pay attention. I have to draw on different stories than the shared stories, different assumptions than the shared assumptions, different awareness than the easy non-thinking groove I can get into with those of my “group.”  Left to our own devices, we might try to get away with living our whole lives on the path of least resistance.  Thoughts, words, actions, habits, character… and so it goes.

We are so immersed in this way of seeing and functioning in the world that we import it into the church. We forget, and not just at a mental level but deep in our being – in our habits and our unthought actions, we fall back on the path of least resistance even when we are consciously trying to live otherwise.

The Corinthian church was a congregation of dozens, not hundreds. And perhaps they were a bit like us –when people ask if we have a 3^rd grade Sunday school class or a young, single adult ministry or something fancy and specific like that, I sometimes tell them that we’re more like “one of everything,” all together in community.

They too had just a few of everything. The church at Corinth was smallish, with an astonishing range of cultural, religious and socioeconomic diversity: slaves, free people, Jews, gentiles, wealthy, poor, men, women, no one “group” in charge, all fully involved in the life of the church and serving in church leadership. With all these groups represented, on the one hand, it was a little cross-section of the cosmopolitan port city of Corinth, a microcosm of life in their larger community. 

But on the other hand it was the opposite - a little cross-section of the Kingdom of God, a microcosm of life where all are One in Christ Jesus, valued and honored, where the labels used in society to define and restrict people had no power to sum up or limit them from full belonging and participation. 

Out there, things were one way, as though it was a fact that some were better than others, and that differences defined their worth and roles. 

But when they came together, when they crossed the threshold into wherever they were gathered that day, or encountered each other on the street the next, they saw sister, brother, equal, child of God, fellow believer, friend.

We are one in Christ Jesus.  The labels and categories we use every day to rank and divide and separate and compare, in the truth’s unflinching light they are exposed as lies.  We all belong to God.  We all belong to each other. 

Corinthians: You’ve believed this. This is changing you. You are glad to be church with each other.  You are forming a community around new shared stories, shared assumptions, shared awareness.  The message of Pentecost has penetrated your hearts and has transformed you – one faith, one baptism, one Body. All are welcome at the table, and you’re on board with that message. Done and Amen.

But when you show up, where do you sit?  

Who do you chat with about your annoying boss or your teething baby, your citizenship application or your brand new boat? 

Who do you call when your embarrassing heap of a car breaks down again?  

Who do you ask to watch your kids in a pinch?

Path of least resistance: Find someone like you.  

Sin is insidious, and it doesn’t stop at the front door to the church building, or the edge of conscious thought. The Corinthians are aware of the obvious trip wires (though, as well see later, that doesn’t stop them from stumbling over those either). They are consciously already doing the work to see and accept one another despite society’s overt divisions of rank and race and class and gender; that is on their radar.  

It might even be what compelled many of them about the gospel to begin with, what brought them to this community in the first place – the shocking witness of God’s love in seeing human beings blatantly disregarding what seemed to be set-in-stone distinctions, facts about who people are and what they are worth, instead these people welcome each other freely and wholly.

But nevertheless, thoughts, words, actions, habits, character… the path of least resistance…

Being intentional about seeing each other takes work, whereas falling into factions is effortless.  And if the regular possibilities are clearly not options, then a tantalizing new division prospect arises: Whose crew are you? 

I was converted by Paul. 

Appollos was my Evangelist, his stuff is better; you should hear the guy preach! 

Cephas is the best, actually. I belong to his way of thought.

Look how petty you all are! I belong to Christ.

Sin – as Paul will blast them for in many other forms later – Sin is that internal bent to separate ourselves from God and each other, and even our very true selves. To silo and bunker. To hunker and protect.  To compare and compete. To degrade and destroy. And sin doesn’t often look like blatantly terrible stuff. It often hides inside pretty good stuff. Loyalty, camaraderie, carefulness, ease and support.

I recently saw an encouragement to fiction writers that said something along the lines of, “You can never write a true villain until you understand how he is the hero of his own story.” We are all heroes of our own story; we all think our motives good, right and true. 

One of the hardest and greatest gifts of community, of relationship with other people, is what these Corinthians are in the process of finding out: it holds up a giant mirror. This mirror reveals that we are not all good, our motives are not all right and true.  Being in community exposes the places where our own inability to see ourselves and the world honestly makes us collaborators in behaviors we’d never overtly choose.  

It strips off the layers and the lies and forces us to see how our actions impact others, how, even despite our good intentions, our thoughts or words or habits might, in fact, separate us from God and each other. 

In other words, being in this together with others reveals our sin. 

But, by the grace of God’s foolish wisdom, revealing sin’s hold on us creates the possibility for death and new life to emerge.  Being in relationship with others who are not identical clones of ourselves creates the fertile ecosystem for God’s truth to bloom and grow, because where there is offense, there is also the possibility of forgiveness. 

Where there is pain, there's the bearing of that pain with each other, and healing. 

Where confession, there’s grace. 

Where honesty and heartbreak, there’s true, shared joy.  

It is here, in community, that the Kingdom of God is tangible, that the real reality can be experienced: that everyone is a precious child of God; we all belong to God and we all belong to each other.

The Corinthians’ keep mixing the way of fear with the way of God, falling back into paths of least resistance, that make us behave as though others are objects or barriers instead of sisters or brothers, or that God favors certain of us over others. 

And as we will see going forward in this letter, Paul has no problem, over and over again, calling out specifically where he sees them ruled by the messages of the dominant culture, and calling them back to the true community of Christ.

In his opening telling-off, Paul is calling the Church in Corinth to be vigilant about divisions. To notice the seemingly innocuous way divisions creep in and invade, and then dig them out before they take root in our thoughts and our words and actions and habits.  

We can testify to what it looks like when they take root. 

We could show Paul what happens centuries later when good things like loyalty, camaraderie, carefulness, ease and support cover for the path of least resistance, and actions become habits become character. 

The Church today often defines itself by factions and litmus tests that allow us to claim that while we may be one in Christ, some of us are closer to Christ than others, you know who you are.

How long, I wonder, would it take him to notice how much more welcoming and gracious we are to those outside the Church than we are to each other?  Paul, Appollos, Cephas, conservative, liberal, fundamentalist, progressive, Evangelical, Mainliner, who do you belong to?  

We are not that kind of Christian, or the more subtle, This is the kind of Christians we are.  (finger pointing strongly implied). 

Has Christ been divided? 

Was Evangelicalism crucified for you?

Were you baptized in the name of the progressives?

I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, Paul writes, to be united in the same mind and the same purpose!  

To be one body, to be united in the same mind and the same purpose, is a great and intimidating prospect, but it is also the most true thing, the real true thing.  And yet, we treat it is as impossible. We act as though our divisions and factions are more powerful definers of us than Jesus Christ and the wisdom of the cross’s foolishness.

But this is God’s Church.  

WE are God’s Church.  

One in Christ Jesus.

Being One in Christ Jesus doesn’t mean having the same faith heritage or the same theological tradition; it doesn’t mean liking the same music or way of praying, it doesn’t mean believing exactly the same things, even, or living out your faith in exactly the same ways.  

It means, trusting Jesus Christ, who claims and forgives and transforms, and who calls the whole human race back to God and back to each other. 

It means being led and compelled by the Spirit who makes unity real among us, and draws us into deeper truth, 

and deeper faithfulness, 

and deeper letting go of the lies we hang on to protect and divide ourselves, 

and deeper connection with God and each other. 

It means knowing we are all in this together: sister, brother, equal, fellow believer, child of God, friend, knowing that despite all the many differences between us, the love of Christ is at the very core of each of us.  

In other words, as Paul would say, it means being united in the same mind and the same purpose.

Falling into factions is effortless. 

Being intentional about seeing each other takes work.  

But our unity is not just so we get along. 

It is actually a defiant promise to a world steeped in division and feeding on factions.  

In the face of entrenched tribalism, and stomach-turning animosity, unity is a fragrant taste of truth, a clean glimpse of the real reality. 

It is hope.

You are going to hear these phrases a lot this summer: the kingdom of God, the real reality, the big picture, the truth that we all belong to God and we all belong to each other. 

Because the whole book is a letter Paul writes to a church community dealing very directly and practically with how to be Church, and how to remember whose they are and who they are.  

He breaks it down. He gets mad, he rambles, he loses his train of thought sometimes, but this message keeps getting pounded home – You belong to God. You belong to each other. Your living this truth is a vivid witness to the world. 

The Spirit who now shapes and defines them as Body of Christ gives them new shared story, shared assumptions, and shared awareness. These are the thoughts, words, actions, and habits that Paul is wanting to cultivate in the Corinthians, and that we will be actively cultivating together this summer.

May we take to heart the gift of being in world-witnessing, faction-busting, sin-exposing, pain-sharing, hope-trumpeting, truth-telling community with one another, One in Christ Jesus. May we welcome the Spirit’s work in and through us. 

Amen.