Chloe's a Tattletale

This morning’s second scripture reading is 1 Corinthians 1: 10 – 18, and can be found on page 807 of your pew Bibles.
Listen now for the word of God.
I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought.
My brothers and sisters, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; and another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.”
Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?
I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized into my name. (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel – not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
-The word of the Lord
-Thanks be to God.
Sermon
My grandmother is one of those people who only use Duke’s Mayonnaise. My grandfather told me he learned that lesson the hard way, having come home from the store with one of the inferior brands, and been sent back to exchange some lesser mayonnaise for the real thing. You might say that my grandmother has made up her mind on mayonnaise, and hasn’t changed it in a very long time.
In today’s world that same kind of dedication seems to be a rarity. People seem to like change, and it is not often some deep seeded commitment that stirs our decision making, but passing whims, sales, or flashy new advertising.
Of course, no one would think it a serious problem if our inability to commit to things were limited to what we put on our sandwiches or in our potato salads, but lack of commitment has infiltrated more serious concerns.
The standards of our faith that once seemed to be written in stone, immovable and unchangeable, now seem to be under the sway of movements and philosophies of the day. The standards of “truth,” seem to be less certain than they once were, and we find ourselves just like Pilate before Jesus, asking, “What is truth?”
Like tapered jeans, feathered hair, roller-skates, and tie-dye shirts, commitment and certainty seem to have gone out of style.
Today even “the church,” at least in the way that Paul speaks of it, has changed, and is changing dramatically.
Some groups have broken away, seeking something pure and a truth un-wavering to the winds of time. These days Presbytery meetings are the forum for debate, or simply the place for announcing who has moved on from the PC (USA).
There are some who would say that they are leaving a denomination that has faltered, that has failed, that has compromised too often, that doesn’t seem to stand for anything anymore.
And those who leave might say that they are seeking the truth of Christ – acting as the true church, unlike those who in the Corinthian church said, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; and another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.”
But I wonder often what such divisions are really all about.
Anyone who has been paying much attention to the Presbyterian Church recently knows that our current divisions have a lot to do with ordination – who can be ordained – what standards for ordination really exist? This debate brings up new questions – questions that Paul probably didn’t deal with directly, but dealt with in his own way nonetheless.
In our passage for today, Paul wrote, “For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel – not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.”
With the crafting of such a sentence, Paul addresses the problem that those from Chloe’s household let him know about; maybe not directly, but in a way that disarms the argument, making a statement that’s hard to disagree with, but which steals the foundation from any quarrel, saying, I have been called here, not to baptize, “but to preach the gospel – not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.”
For Paul, the cross stands as the judge of all human wisdom – and for Paul, it was this one truth that held his commitment fully, making human knowledge appear to be foolishness.
But to the Priestly Leaders of the Jews—a group also called the Sanhedrin—and the Romans, at the time of Jesus’ trial, it was Jesus who appeared to be foolish. The Sanhedrin and the Romans were two groups who could not compromise together, but were, like politicians vying for a Presidential Nomination, unified by a common enemy in Jesus.
The Sanhedrin, committed to a truth they believed lied in their interpretation of the Law, and the Romans, equally committed to the truth of law and order, were both offended by the man who preached that the truth could not be in either of these places, but in loving your neighbor as yourself. The Romans and the Sanhedrin were both sure that truth did not lie in the words and essence of the man who stood before them both, condemned as a criminal.
And Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
They assumed that Truth lay in their interpretation of the Law; that Truth lay in Empire, in order, in human wisdom. And their opinions, held so strongly – unwavering, uncompromising, unapologetically standing for something they thought to be true – crucified the truth, the light to our shadow.
So Jesus died, like a child torn apart by two warring parents both too obsessed with being right to see the failings of their argument – more dedicated to winning the fight than to the love that once joined them together; or like a denomination torn apart by churches convinced they are the true manifestation of all that is good and right that they have forgotten that the essence of Christianity is not the standards of faith that can be agreed upon, but our common call to the foot of the Cross – binding us together as one body of broken people who admit their need for a savior; or like the Corinthian congregation segmented by leaders who all believe they have all the right answers tearing apart a church – the very body of Christ, torn apart by the Roman Court and the Sanhedrin, unable to see beyond their the words to see the truth.
The Cross stands before us all – not as something to fight over or to defend, but as a sign that should humble all of us who think that we are right. Here we see that we don’t have the answers, and we can only hope that Chloe will tell on us before we tear ourselves apart.
In a world so broken by war fueled by fundamentalism and the fear of retreat, it seems that we have gone too far trusting in human wisdom so that we may never make it back.
We want to stand for something, we want to believe that there are answers lying in our hearts or hands; but the Cross shows us that the truth does not lie in the faith of the Sanhedrin, the wisdom of the Greeks, the order of the Romans, the Patriotism of the Republicans, the Hope of the Democrats – but that the answer lies in those hands nailed on the cross.
At the cross we see that faith does not mean forging ahead according to what we believe is right – but walking humbly with our God and neighbor, expecting to make mistakes, but walking together, bound by cords that cannot be broken. And we’ll be singing, “Bind us together Lord, bind us together, and bind us together with love.”
-Amen.