JOURNEYS OF PAUL: CORINTH OFF THE WALL

After Paul had proclaimed the gospel in Athens (with little success), he and his friends traveled on about 30 miles to Corinth. He would have walked along what was called the “sacred way.”

Remember last week how we quoted Paul as saying the Athenians were very “religious,” meaning superstitious? They officially worshiped the whole pantheon of divinities from Mount Olympus, and unofficially worshiped ancestors and spirits and just about anything else. The “sacred way” to Corinth was the route of the procession of the spring festivals of Demeter and Persephone, mother and daughter divinities, and the focus of Greek mystery rituals of decay and renewal.

Remember last week how we talked about ways that we and people we know can make faith into a superstition? During this next week we will shut down a festival that has been running all summer and prepare (with Persephone) to spend our five months in the shadow world of Hades until that glorious ritual of spring we call “opening day.” We, too, travel the contemporary equivalent of a sacred way.

I’m taking you on this ancient travelogue with the Apostle Paul because, as we have noted many times, every geographical journey in the Bible is also a….spiritual journey and we have our own contemporary equivalents. Do we learn, do we grow in spirit as we move through the cycles and journeys of our lives?

So Paul walks the sacred way, noting all the shrines and traditional stops along the way, until he arrives in Corinth. He goes to the synagogue, his one respite from the idols and the superstitions, to talk to those who share his traditions and the worship of one God. And for a while he meets success. People respond, several are baptized. Leaders are found. Then a backlash sets in that will ultimately drive Paul out of Corinth and out on the road again. He left behind him a thriving congregation.

If you look at the ports of entry in our world today, you find some crazy places: a Babel of languages, exchanges of currencies, swapping of misinformation and disinformation. Remember the setting of the Broadway song “Anything Goes”? It was a ship.

So Corinth was a crazy place even without religion. It was built on a narrow isthmus of land that separates the Ionian and the Aegean seas. North is the mainland; south is the Peloponnesus. Various attempts were made before and after Paul to cut a canal through the five miles of solid rock. Only about a hundred years ago was it successful. In Paul’s day, boats could be put on rollers and hauled by mules to avoid the long dangerous journey to the south.

Corinth was (and is) a town of commerce. Anything and everything can be bought or traded there. Anything was for sale. You can understand how a little synagogue could be sensitive to any new doctrine that would disrupt the carefully maintained barriers against the lowest common denominator of pagan values. You can understand how Paul would want to differentiate the gospel of Christ from the wild lawlessness of polytheism. (When Paul’s letters get into some places we find awkward and socially wrongheaded, he was trying to keep Christians from behaving like pagans. Just because you don’t keep the law of Moses doesn’t mean that anything goes.)

So Corinth was that kind of town. And after Paul left, the new little Christian congregation went bonkers. Surprise! And so Paul wrote to them, to try to get them back on track. This first letter to the Corinthians is one of the great monuments of our faith. It’s the Declaration of Independence. It’s the Constitution. It’s the Bill of Rights. It’s the Articles of Union of the Ballard Vale Church. It’s big!

I’m going to summarize just a few points to place over and against the craziness of times ancient or contemporary: One, faith can’t be based on personality. It seems that a gifted preacher named Apollos had shown up, and some people were saying that their faith was better because they got it from Apollos. Apollos baptized them. Others were saying they got it from the original apostle: from Paul.

And Paul wrote that the foundation of faith is not Apollos and not Paul. Our foundation is Jesus Christ. Apollos or Paul is just a function of timing. We’ve had 2,000 years to learn that. So when a pastor leaves a congregation and another arrives, and people drop out of church because of the change of the personality, what part of “our foundation is Jesus Christ” is not clear?

I know that some pastors are more fun to be around than others. It might surprise you to know that some of you are more fun to be around than others! But Jesus Christ is our foundation and our rock in this life. Jesus is the one who brought us God’s love. And if we miss that because of personalities, we miss the point. So said Paul; so say we.

Two, in this richly diverse market place of a city, members of the congregation were aware of the differing spiritual gifts they had been given. Paul made up a list of them: (1) the utterance of wisdom, (2) the utterance of knowledge, (3) faith, (4) healing, (5) miracles, (6) prophecy, (7) the ability to distinguish between spirits, (8) speaking in various unknown languages, (9) the interpretation of these languages. He did that because some were arguing that their gift (referred to today in some churches as “speaking in tongues”) was the most special. In some settings you can find sincere Christians who babble away and never got the memo from Paul that the church needs all of the spiritual gifts, just like body needs all of its parts. The elbow isn’t better than the hip; it’s just different. Working miracles isn’t better than having strong faith; it’s just different.

Elsewhere Paul made a similar list; they were close but not exact. Today we might make a list of spiritual gifts needed by the church that might be the same or similar. Making use of our spiritual gifts is one of the things this church does best (not perfectly, but better than most other congregations.) So that if you have a yearning or a calling or sense a movement of the spirit, tell somebody. Tell me. We’ll find a way to nurture your gift.

We have every spiritual gift we need….because God is God, and God doesn’t call us to do something without providing the spiritual base. Just like we as a congregation have all the money we need…because God is God and God doesn’t call us to spend money without providing a spiritual base: that money… it’s in our check books. (I’m not getting a amen on that.)

After talking about the spiritual gifts and how we need all of them, Paul said there was a more excellent way (and it’s not the UCC reorganization plan, even if it calls itself that.) The more excellent way, the way that puts all the spiritual gifts in their proper relation, is the way of persistent, patient, humble, self-giving love. If you’ve got that, you can live in a world as crazy as Corinth and still be a follower of Christ.

Three, some people were distracted by the delay in the promise that Christ would return, and the promise of resurrection was growing dim. So Paul finished his letter by reminding the Corinthians of the witnesses to resurrection day and urging them to keep resurrection at the core of their faith. His reminder became the first Christian creed. We have it in the back of our hymnals.

We don’t know what to do with resurrection today. We either ignore it and make it the poor step-sister of our theology and let it live in the closet under the staircase, or we get goofy and sentimental and make our whole faith a pie in the sky comfort food.

God sent Christ, God’s only son, so this precious opportunity called life would not be lost to estranged and unjust relationships while in our bodies, or to the cold void of space when our spirits leave. God so loved the world. That spirit which God so caringly nurtured for 80 plus years is not suddenly cast away.

These are our articles of our declaration of independence from the cycles of paganism. These are the sections of our constitution, the structure of our community of faith. This is our bill of rights in the face of all that is profane and crazy. Our faith is not based on personalities but on Jesus Christ, the sure foundation. Our life together is not based on personal gifts but on spiritual gifts, to be used in love. Our hope is not an embarrassment on the one hand or a fairy tale on the other, but the promise of Christ that we would endure with him to the end of the universe.

Now that’s a destination worth seeking, and that’s a sacred way worth walking.