Earth Day

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, February 3, 2019, "What are the new ways we 'glue' together intentional community?"


C Epiphany 4 2019
I Corinthians 13
February 3, 2019

            At a former church where I was not serving as the pastor, the congregation was listing the number of missions and ministries to which our church had given money or to which individual folks in our church had given time, money, and effort.  They were many and varied and represented almost every individual’s pet project.  The facilitator was trying to help us develop some focus for our mission and ministry, some common goal or unified plan.  By the end the facilitator was exasperated by the unwillingness of our group to come together. 
          After our time working together had come to an end, I overheard a church member sidling up to the facilitator to snidely say, “See, you’ll never get us together with all the different things we have going on.”  And maybe the church member was right. 
          Sometimes I think one of our downfalls as Christians is that we would rather be right than loving.  We stand out in the forest, all alone, proclaiming ourselves to be right rather than doing the hard work of evangelization to bring others on board and build community, or engaging others who might disagree with us or prove us to be wrong.  We would rather avoid conflict than be in real relationship. 
          We never invest for fear that we might find something out about ourselves and why we believe as we do.  We never take the chance that we might be transformed by another, or that we might have the leadership gifts to transform others.  It is almost as if we are an Olympic judge at one of the ice-skating events or even the audience.  We want to shout our desires, needs, wants, and critiques from afar as others do the skating.  When we all should be out on the ice skating.  The Russian judge is always giving me low marks.
In our Scripture reading for today, Paul addresses the early churches he founded in his second missionary journey to the seaport city of Corinth.   Paul sees in Corinth, a church deeply divided over issues like leadership, sexual immorality, personal conduct, spiritual gifts, and questions concerning the resurrection.  In one of his opening letters to the people in Corinth, 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, he undercuts all claims to greatness by saying what we preach as Christians is Christ crucified.  Christ did not win.  He was not successful.  He was brutally tortured and executed.  This is not Paul romancing Christ’s suffering, or as might be heard popularly, suffering for our sins.  This is undercutting the Roman pyramid which only sees people as valuable and divine if you are on the top of that pyramid.  Creator places no value in striving to be top dog, bending to the frame of the pyramid.  Preaching Christ crucified means that the gospel’s value is not in carrying the day or being on the side of the winners.   God in Christ is not about being successful or winning. 
In Paul’s time, around the year 50, these folks called “super apostles” had arrived with a gospel that created a hierarchy of being in Corinth and distrust among the community.  Armed with mystical and spiritual powers like speaking in tongues, some Corinthians had elevated themselves to the top of the spiritual pyramid.  As it was in Egypt with Hebrew slaves, so it was in Rome as an occupied people.  Paul believed that love did not allow for this hierarchy of being or this spiritual pyramid.  Pyramids always have this structure with a few running the show at the top while there are many on the base doing the real labor.
Paul writes to try and break the arrogance of those who claim to be greater because of their gifts.  He suggests that faith is a journey in which we can only prophesy, know, and see in part or dimly—there should be a humility which recognizes that we cannot know it all.  And knowing it all, or having superior knowledge, is not what Paul values.  Love should be the stuff that transcends whatever differences there are to hold the community together.  The opposites of love are arrogance and violence, a power over.  Notice that Paul does not write, “Love wins,” a common misunderstanding that leads us to hopelessness in the face of violence and trauma.  No, Paul writes, “Love endures.”
When Paul wrote to the churches in Corinth, he saw plenty of diversity--with all of that diversity jockeying for position as to who would win out in the end.  Rather than squash their diversity for something a little more orderly, he praises the great diversity he sees among them.  He does not want them to be a little less diverse so that they can be a little more unified.  No, Paul wants them to find their unity on the far side of diversity. 
          Paul defines love as the willingness to work through diversity to find their unity or their common cause, for the building up of community.  That’s why the first word Paul uses to define love is “patient.”
          If you have special gifts alone, who cares?  If you have spiritual powers alone, who cares?  If you are willing to sacrifice to show your devotion alone, who cares?  If you are not engaged and invested in one another, who cares?
Image result for clanging cymbal          This chapter, the love chapter, begins with Paul remembering a Jewish tradition instituted by King David.  David ordered that loud music would be played to connote the presence and habitation of God, the Ark of the Covenant, being restored to the Jewish people.  Musicians playing nebels (medium-sized harps) and kinnors (a type of lyre or stringed instrument), kettle-drums, cymbals, and pipes would accompany the Ark of the Covenant in a processional of joy and thanksgiving.[1]  The instruments were to be played in unison as the procession continued.
          When the Temple in Jerusalem was dedicated, musicians played cymbals, nebels (those medium-sized harps), kinnors (those lyres or stringed instruments), and trumpets.[2]  The book of Nehemiah relates that musicians playing cymbals and kinnors having psalteries (a psaltery is like a dulcimer) were also a part of the rededication of the Temple when Jewish people returned from Exile.  Having been a percussionist myself, I was interested to learn that the cymbal player was rightfully considered the head musician in this musical ensemble. 
          The point is, in these celebrations to announce and process with the Temple as a representation of God’s presence in their midst, the cymbals are never played alone but always accompanied by other instruments, singing, and words of praise.[3]  Biblical scholar Anathea Portier-Young  believes Paul is deliberately using imagery from these Hebrew Scripture celebrations to talk about the “building up” of God’s dwelling place among the community much like the Ark of the Covenant was built up, the Temple was built up, and the walls of Jerusalem were built up once again after the Babylonian Exile.[4]
          Paul writes to those churches in Corinth, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”  The problem is not that cymbals are noisy or clanging.  The problem is that they are playing all alone.  A signpost that communities are being built up in love is when trumpets, lyres, harps, dulcimers, drums, cymbals, and voices are all raised in praise together—when the whole band is playing, when the whole body is interdependent, when they are truly one in the spirit of the song.
          Love holds the whole structure of the community symphony together.  While we use the word “justice” in Judeo-Christian tradition to define God’s activity in overarching systems and structures, the word we use to define God’s activity in community is “love.” 
          Love is engagement and investment in people who are different than we are.  Love is, brace yourselves, glue.  Love is glue.  Don’t think too hard about the ingredients that go into glue or the meaning of the sermon will gross you out or lose meaning altogether.  Love is glue.
          When love is defined as engagement and investment in one another, nobody gets to stand on the sidelines, hold a judge’s scorecard, mumbles or critiques, even applauds, without talking about themselves.  We all recognize that we are into this Christian enterprise for one another.  Love is standing across from someone in all their faults and foibles, greatness and goodness, joys and sorrows, beauty and scars, and not turning away.  You recognize that you are connected.  You are glued.
          My belief is that if we can recognize our connections to one another, slow down to invest and engage, play our instruments together in the grand symphony of community (I got cymbals!), we might actually find that there are others in the struggle who are celebrating our joys to multiply them, sharing our struggles to divide them.  So that when I play my cymbals, they are not noisy or clanging, but part of a beautiful symphony that is held together in love.  And it is music to God’s ears.
          Rabbi Sandi Eisenberg Sasso wrote a children’s book some years back that had a small community sending a man and woman out to the four corners of the earth in search of God.  The man and woman went to the mountain top to find God.  They went to the deepest ocean in search of the Almighty.  They coursed across the driest desert.  They entered the deepest and darkest of caves.  The man and woman returned unsuccessful in their search for God.  They did remark, however, that whenever they worked together, they began to see God, “wherever we are.”  The man and woman saw God in the “in-between”—in between the two of them.  Rabbi Sasso titled the book, “God In Between.”
          Last week our congregation decided to go forward with the risky enterprise that is this church.  I have spoken often about how Sunday worship is an important part of our life together but may be fading as the most important form of intentional Christian community in this day and age.  Ed Gulick affirmed he senses that for his own life.  The question for our discernment then is how we can then express intentional Christian community in a myriad of ways.  To practice love, to express love between us so that we are strengthened and encouraged, I want us as a congregation to be thinking what are some of the new paths, the new ways we can practice and express intentional Christian community?  For I get a charge out of this congregation when I see the incredible joy experienced during the Passing of the Peace, when we share in a Sunday potluck welcoming strangers, or when we share pie, cake, eggs, or vegetables with one another out in the narthex.  Not what replaces that but what augments that, supports that, offers more diverse opportunities for intentional Christian community.  Help me with that.  Let us all discern how that might be for the future of this blessed church.  I am no super apostle, and I need your collective wisdom.
For I am . . . alone—a noisy gong or clashing cymbal.  But love is glue.  We are . . . together—the Body of Christ.  We are . . . together—a beautiful symphony.  Hear in that definition of love the hard work it takes to knit together community among a diverse group of people.   We are . . . together—the place of God’s spiritual joy.   We are . . . together with each other and along with the plants, trees, sea, sea creatures, and animals, the manifestation of the divine in the world, God’s epiphany.  And weeeeeeeeeeee, burst forth.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.
         



[1] 2 Samuel 6:5; 1 Chronicles 13:8
[2] Under King Solomon, 2 Chronicles 5.  King Hezekiah also had these musical instruments play in service of the Temple (2 Chronicles 29).
[3] Anathea Portier-Young, “Tongues and cymbals:  contextualizing  I Corinthians 13:1,” Biblical Theology Bulletin (Fall 2005). 
[4] Ibid.

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