Sometimes want to cry when hear non-Christians say that they have rejected the church because of its divisions. They may mean denominational divisions on occasion, and that is bad enough. But more frequently they mean the internal strife that characterizes all too many congregations. For it is, after all, on the local level that most people encounter the church, and when they see discord and argumentation marking a congregation, they want nothing to do with that.
I want to cry because the very body of believers who should be attracting the unbelievers by their life together in mutual support is betraying its Lord, creating public offense of such a nature that it is actually destructive of the cause it proposes to promote.
At other times, I must admit, I want to laugh when I hear this "excuse," for I know very well it is only one of many excuses that can be given at the drop of a hat for nonaffiliation with a church by many people. It is, in itself, a form of "self-righteousness." I recognize many valid reasons people may give for not being Christian, and they are not mere "excuses." This particular kind of alibi, however, hardly holds water, for it suggests that somewhere they know of groups that do not have strife.
It must be granted, of course, that some groups do have little negative activity because they either drive out dissidents or else do little which is worth arguing about. Wherever a group of people gathers together, though, one has the making of interpersonal difficulties. To suggest that this reason by itself keeps people from church, then, is either false, or else it will keep people from practically any group in society. As much as strife may be deplored, we must learn not only to live with it but to deal with it in some constructive fashion.
Yet there is a certain proper intuition when people say that, and we cannot squirm out from under the charge quite so easily as we might wish. Much as we may justify our divisions and discord, the world rightly looks to us for a modeling of unity, a place where people can live together for the common good and mutual sustenance.
It is to this that Paul is pointing in our Second Lesson for the day. Here we see for the first time what one of the root problems is in the Corinthian congregation to which Paul must address himself. It has created a number of difficulties as the fallout from this problem settled across the congregation, so Paul must strike hard and fast at the crucial question of why the unity of the congregation has been so severely severed. How did the congregation come so "unglued" in such a short time, and what are the implications of the separations they are experiencing?
"I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment." (1 Corinthians 1:10) He is plain and straightforward from the beginning, going on to tell of the reports he has received about their subdividing internally around leading personalities of the church. We do not know much of what characterized each of the cliques, but it seems quite apparent that somehow they saw each of these leaders as having a different emphasis, and the varying emphases created divisions within the congregation. A not unheard of problem for the church throughout the ages, we might note!
Perhaps we should pause and discuss briefly what might be meant by the phrase, "unity in the church." For some people, I am sure, it means everybody thinking the same thoughts, doing the same things, and in general, parroting some ideal raised before the congregation. Too many people equate unity with uniformity and immediately charge anyone with breaking the unity of the church who does not conform to a particular kind of standard raised (usually rather arbitrarily) by some one or some group within the church.
That is not what Paul is asking for. Nor is it unity. Unity is nearly always held in the midst of diversity. It is a bringing together of many ideas, perspectives, personalities, and thoughts around a common, unifying, over-arching concern or theme. There is room for much variation of opinion and feeling when one is seeking unity, so long as all that variation is given over to the achievement of the common goal, the adoration of the common center of all these variations. Artists, for example, may have great differences of opinion about how to paint, about styles of work, about color and texture and a host of other things they are concerned with. But their unifying theme is the love - the adoration, if you will - of good art. That is a driving compulsion with them - to bring forth the best of all possible artistic endeavors.
Within the church the same understanding of unity holds. Many people out of many backgrounds with many likes and dislikes are gathered and called by God to be saints. (Remember last week’s theme born of the verses just preceding the ones before us today?) They bring with them a variety of gifts, something Paul has just commended in the Corinthian congregation - the wide disparity of gifts given them by God. They have varying emphases they feel important to set forth, which apparently coincided in some ways with things they had heard particular people say as their "party" divisions indicate. None of these things are in themselves bad.
They become bad only when this great disparity of gifts, interests, and emphases causes them to schismatically subdivide and turn their interests into power plays, their emphases into self-serving quests for a personal following, and their gifts into good works. Paul must address himself to fallout like this that comes from inner dissension in the congregation, and he takes it up with the core question: "Is Christ divided?" To elaborate on that, he turns the question inside out and asks, "Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?"
In short, he asks: what lies at the heart of their life together? Is it personal interest that feeds on particular emphases they have heard from Apollos or Peter or Paul? (Amazingly enough, some even dared, apparently, to be a "Christ party"!) Or is their full intention, the whole of their passion, given to glorifying Christ? The questions, of course, are rhetorical, self-answering. Christ is not divided, and if you serve him, then how can you permit these divisions to ravage your life together? Keep before you the one center for your life together, and submerge your gifts, your interests, your emphases, your concerns under him.
Note again, that is not to say they were to ignore their gifts, forget their interests, lay aside their emphases, permit their concerns to be disregarded. No, all those things could remain so long as they were submitted to the lordship of Christ, and that all life together was lived in the light of the grace offered them in Christ. Is not this, after all, a long way of saying what in shorthand terms we always say when characterizing life in Christ: Live with love for one another. The word "love" is so abused in so many ways and is so used in such a wide variety of circumstances that sometimes it almost gets to be unmanageable and nonunderstandable. But in its lowest common denominator it is here spoken of as a way of holding great diversity together in a strong bond of unity devoted to the glory of God and the welfare of the body of Christ.
That is, of course, far easier said than done. What was true in Corinth is true in this congregation today. We have a wide variety of gifts, of interests, of emphases, of opinions, of desires among us. How to maintain all these in one congregation with unity while defending the integrity at the same time of anybody’s opinion, like, dislike, gift, interest, is most difficult.
That is why we need again to listen carefully to the core question Paul places before them when confronting them with this predicament: "Is Christ divided?" Were we to attempt to hold this wide diversity together by our own human effort, it is questionable how long this congregation (or any congregation) would hold together. Human associations have risen and fallen by the hundreds and thousands in the time the church has been sustained. Some human institutions can stand the strain for longer periods of time and others barely see the light of day before they collapse. Sometimes, by suppressing alternate views and differing opinions, a human enterprise can be sustained for a fairly long time. Democracies are much harder to sustain than dictatorships, and that is part of what makes America such an amazing model for the world. Yet one constantly hears voices suggesting we should silence a given group, we should jail dissidents who openly oppose public policy, we should suppress the unions or the laborers, the poor or the wealthy, the government or the people. Always the urge is present to have our way at the expense of others, to divide the house so that we can re-unite it again - in our own best interests, of course!
This is not foreign to the church, for humans make up the membership in the church, and as humans, we too frequently forget that it is not our church to begin with. It is God’s church, and he calls us as its members to be the doers of his will on earth. That is hard enough when we have the mutual support of all of God’s people, but when that support is eroded by the wash of divisions and strife, our task is all but impossible. We need one another to do the will of God, and when the church is turned over to the will of humans, it is detoured from its intention and will fail of its own inner weight.
That is why we are not asked to keep the church going either by uniformity of ideas (which would be unattainable) or by hierarchical decrees that this is to be done. The church is not a human institution to be run by humans for human ends.
Granting all the human hands needed to sustain it and all the human minds necessary to make decisions for it and all the human lives necessary for its presence to be known in the world, it is still the Christ who is the head of the church, his body. It is still from him that it has gained its life. It is in his cross that the people of God have their hope and forgiveness. It is in his presence among us that we have our direction. We live only by the grace of God in Christ. As Paul describes it in the text: "For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power." (1 Corinthians 1:17) This is not to belittle baptism nor is it to say that eloquent sermons are bad, but at this point Paul is set upon dismissing these causes for division in Corinth. To get rid of this dissension Paul says plainly and simply that the cross of Christ must be the key to it all "Whatever you do," he is saying to them, "do not empty the power of the cross of Christ." By direct implication, he is saying that destructive divisions within the church do exactly that.
So Epiphany is a very good time to consider a text like this, for the suggestion is clearly made that God’s glory is seen in the unity of the church. Any time the church engages in its own internal power-plays and argumentation, the church is betraying its Lord and emptying the cross of Christ of its power to unify the people of God by exposing them to the unifying love of God. Any time our eyes leave Christ, and we are left on our own resources, we can bank on the strife breaking out again. To keep our eyes on him is to find the common source of our gifts, the common goal of our hopes, the common purpose in our lives out of which ideas and opinions are shaped.
Granted that is much easier said than done, it has some very practical ramifications not only for the life of the church but also for our individual lives and for our family lives and for our community lives. For in each instance we are called on to show forth the glory of God in Christ by the way we handle our gifts and opinions and ideas and hopes. If they are shared with the understanding that no one person has the ability to see all angles, no one person has the gifts to do all things, no one person can hold him/herself up as the model for what ought to be, we will know that in our common life together a richness can he found. There we are gifted by others to the glory of God as we in turn gift others with what has been given to us. It will call forth a respect for the dignity of each person’s ideas, gifts and opinions since each has received them through the gifting of God in the experiences to which he/she has been exposed. We will know about the contamination of our best ideas with sin but will also know about forgiveness and renewal. So, as we must live by forgiveness, we will know about forgiving others and not forcing them to live as though they (or we) are always right! That leaves room for some give and take, some movement toward unity out of a common sharing, a sharing sometimes that is at completely opposite poles, but the beginning of a movement toward what will glorify Christ - without the need to run over and bully others who do not agree with us.
The results may not please us, frankly. The interesting thing is that the same results may, if true sharing and a common will to serve God were pursued, not please the other people either. The question, however, is not whether it pleased any of us, but whether it pleased God. For what God wants is by no means always what we want, as our sin readily testifies. That is why it would be disastrous if we always had our own way - that may well be further removed from God’s way than the way of mutuality born of the common vision of all of his people gathered together in his name!
Perhaps the classic example of how such a vision and hope can stop disunity and bring people of such diversity together is suggested in an embryonic way in today’s Gospel. There we hear, first of all, how the light has dawned in the land of the shadow of death. Isaiah’s words in the First Lesson, referring to the way God was working with his people at that time to bring light into the chaotic darkness that surrounded them at the moment, is now applied by Matthew to Jesus as the true and full light shining in the darkness. In him the people of the world, given to lovelessness and self-seeking that only propagates darkness to cover the struggles we all engage in to get our own way, have seen a great light. The light of love has poked through the darkness of our separation from God and each other. When people grope in darkness, a light is a point to gather round. For light signifies hope, and for people who are desperately lost, the light of hope is a most precious thing.
Jesus gathers to himself the first four of his disciples, then, the first gathering of people around the light. He will gather still eight more. If ever you have paid much attention to this band of men, you will know that disunity is a constant threat to them.
There are the "sons of thunder" as Jesus called them, James and John (Mark 3:17). Evidently they were men of strong opinion and vehemence about what they considered right and wrong. There is Peter, so headstrong and impetuous. There is Levi, named Matthew, the tax collector, and one must remember how hated the tax collectors were among the Jews, for they were considered collaborators with the Romans. Alongside him was Simon "who was called the Zealot" (Luke 6:15), and assuming the name signifies his political position, he had been dedicated to violent overthrow of the Roman rule. Simon the Zealot must live with Matthew the traitor! Peter and James and John, each opinionated, must get along with one another. Add another seven personalities, perhaps a number of them equally volatile, and Jesus must have had his hands full!
But the secret lies in keeping their eyes on the task and not on themselves. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," Jesus proclaims. And all eyes are turned to the coming of the kingdom. Perhaps each of them looked for it and waited for it in his own way, and there is no sign that any of them were quite ready for it in the way it came through Jesus’ crucifixion and Resurrection, but they had to live together in unity under the gracious presence of the Rabbi, their Teacher, the Lord Jesus.
If unity could be had among men like these (and we read in Acts 15 of how hard it was, on occasion, to maintain this unity, for things constantly threatened to fly into a million pieces), then surely we can hear the address to the Corinthians in a way that also addresses us in our day and in this congregation and in every part of our lives, wherever God leads us to go: "I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment ... Is Christ divided?"