The four Lutheran churches in the area take turns hosting midweek Lenten services, and the pastors and lay leaders also rotate preaching. This year our theme is “What St. Paul Says About Being a Christian”. Following is the homily I preached last evening, Wednesday, March 4, at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Highspire.
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Tonight, we begin our series on what the Apostle Paul says to us about being a Christian. And I want to start by telling a story about a conversation I had with my father when I was home visiting my family in Florida after Christmas. My father, and this is not the first time I’ve heard him say this, claimed that the Apostle Paul acted “holier than thou” and did nothing but tell people what to do and not to do. My father said that he “wants to hear more about Jesus and less about Paul”. Now, my guess is that this probably has to do with the way that my father has heard Paul preached in the congregations that he’s been part of throughout his life, and maybe some of you have felt the same way. But it makes me sad because, while I admit that Paul’s ego does come through rather forcefully in his letters, those letters are still part of our Holy Scriptures, and, if we were to speak with Paul himself, I have a feeling that he would say that in all of his letters, he is, in fact speaking about Jesus. I think another factor that is playing into my father’s attitude about Paul is this: The fact that Paul was spreading the word about Jesus long before any of the Gospels were ever written down is not mentioned very often in our congregations. The earliest Gospel written down was most likely Mark, and that did not happen until somewhere between the years 66 and 70. Paul’s earliest letter, on the other hand, was 1 Thessalonians and was written somewhere around the year 51. So, Paul was spreading the word about Jesus long before the story of Jesus’ life was ever written down. In Paul’s words we hear about Jesus and how we are to live as followers of Jesus.
So, with that framework, let’s turn to some background information on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Corinth is a city in Greece, south of Athens, and is located on a narrow strip of land that connects parts of Greece together. At some point, someone figured out that it would be easier and safer to haul boats over this strip of land from the Adriatic Sea to the Aegean Sea and the reverse, rather than sail around the southernmost point of Greece, and so Corinth was built as a port city. And all those things you’ve heard about that sailors do when they’re in port? Well, it’s been going on at least as long as Corinth has been around. In fact, Corinth became a synonym for loose sexual morals among the Greco-Roman world; there was a temple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, located there, and one way that people worshiped Aphrodite was to have relations with the temple prostitutes.
And somehow, in the midst of this culture, the Apostle Paul managed to form a small congregation of people who followed Jesus Christ. As was his habit, once Paul had established the congregation, he moved on to a new town to start up another congregation. But all was not well back in Corinth. People had divided up into factions. There were disputes going on about what kind of sexual relations were permissible, and whether or not one should get married. People within the congregation were suing one another. They were arguing over whether it was okay to eat food that had been sacrificed to idols. They did not know how to properly celebrate the Lord’s Supper. And, in today’s portion of Scripture, they were arguing over which spiritual gifts were the best. This is one reason why I love this letter: it makes me feel better, when we encounter problems in our congregations today, when I realize that this stuff has been going on since the first Christian congregations were founded!
So, let’s come back to spiritual gifts. And really, to understand what Paul is saying about this, we should be reading chapters 12, 13, and 14. But, we don’t have time for that tonight, so I will try to hit the important points. As I mentioned before, the Corinthians were arguing over which gift was best, and in chapter 14, from what Paul says, we can see that they thought speaking in tongues was the best thing ever. If you’ve ever experienced it, there is a certain glamor to it. Yes, sometimes people make it up to get attention. But I have experienced others genuinely speaking in tongues, and from what I have seen and heard, it is an ecstatic experience. The person is so overcome with love for God that words come out of the person’s mouth that are somehow intelligible to that person, but not to anyone else. And basically, Paul says, in chapter 14, that yeah, that’s pretty cool, but if you don’t have anyone to interpret what you’re saying to everyone else, then what good is it going to do the community? And so, to get to that point, he lists several spiritual gifts in chapter 12, emphasizing that they are all given by the Holy Spirit and no one is better than another, and that as a community, we need one another and the gifts that we each have to help the community function.
Each one of you here tonight has one or more spiritual gifts given to you by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps that is the gift of wisdom, or the gift of knowledge: and yes, there is a difference between those two! Perhaps one of you has the gift of faith that you can use to strengthen someone else who is faltering. Maybe there is someone among us who can work miracles: maybe not miraculous healing, but other kinds of things that seem impossible. Perhaps someone here is a prophet: and prophecy does not mean foretelling the future, but that’s a whole different sermon that we don’t have time for right now! And maybe there are some here who can speak in tongues and others who can interpret those tongues to the rest of us. And the spiritual gifts that Paul lists here are just a sampling; the Spirit gives what and where the Spirit will. The point is that these gifts of the Spirit, whatever they are, are to be used to build up the community of Christ. Christianity is not a you-and-me-God religion. It is a communal religion, one of being different but united in Christ.
If you are interested in finding out what your spiritual gifts might be, there are tons of inventories out there, and Pastor Mike and I can look into doing that study with you all at some point; maybe at a future SOHL meeting. But here’s the main point about spiritual gifts that Paul makes. 1 Corinthians 13 is the love chapter that gets read all the time at weddings. But he’s not talking about romantic love! He’s talking about love in the context of all of these spiritual gifts. Listen: “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. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” He is using those spiritual gifts that he just named to make his point! I could be the best preacher in the world, but if I do not speak in love, it does not matter. Rose could go out and tell everyone about Jesus, but if she does not do it in love, then so what? And the love that Paul describes is that kind of love that motivated Jesus to live among us sinful human beings, to teach us how to live, and then to die on the cross for all of those times when we fail at living a Christ-like life.
This is what Paul says to us in tonight’s reading about being a Christian: Discover your spiritual gifts, and yes, all Christians have those gifts. Use them to build one another up as the body of Christ and to reach out to others with the love of Christ, both in word and in deed. Do everything in love. And remember that no one gift is more important than another. We are all members of one body, and we need one another and the gifts that we bring to the table. Amen.
Moving North 