Do What?

Do What?
Genesis 17:1-16, 23-27
Lent 2
February 28, 2021

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.”

God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring. Both the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money must be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

 Then Abraham took his son Ishmael and all the slaves born in his house or bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham’s house, and he circumcised the flesh of their foreskins that very day, as God had said to him. Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. And his son Ishmael was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. That very day Abraham and his son Ishmael were circumcised; and all the men of his house, slaves born in the house and those bought with money from a foreigner, were circumcised with him.

 

Of the many foolish things that I’ve done over the years, at the top of the list is a sermon that I preached on this text. I was the guest preacher at a national conference in Philadelphia. Over a thousand Christian Educators had gathered in the convention center. About eight hundred were women and I preached a sermon about circumcision. What was I thinking?

Given the audience, the sermon went better than it should have. Most of them were gracious, or at least polite. The four pieces of hate mail that I received that day all had a legitimate point: what does this have to do with us? That is often the American church’s question. What does the Bible have to do with us? And that was the theme of the conference. As we look back into the archives of the scriptures, what are the hidden treasures to bring forward here and now?

Admittedly our Bible text sounds like a text for men, and men only. It’s a risky text to read to a congregation that has always had strong female leadership. You can get the clear impression from the text that faith is passed along only to the men and the ladies aren’t included. Maybe that’s why the practice of circumcision gets spiritualized a little later in the Bible. The specific action becomes a spiritual idea. The practice becomes a principle. It happens by the tenth chapter of Deuteronomy, as Moses says, “Circumcise your hearts and do not be stubborn any longer.” (10:16). That is a text available to everybody.

Of course, some aren’t convinced. This is Jewish text about a Jewish covenant – and the argument is, “But we are Christians.” That is an old argument, as old as the country of Turkey in the late 50’s, in an area called Galatia. As the Christian movement spread westward, some Christians insisted the uncircumcised pagans had to become Jews before they could become Christian – specifically, that they had to be circumcised before they were baptized. The apostle Paul said, “That’s ridiculous.” He wrote an angry letter to those people and said, “Who bewitched you? Christian faith is about freedom.”

Well, we can guess what happened. Once his letter to the Galatians was printed in a Bible, a lot of Christians have said the Jewish covenant has nothing to say to us on us. One early Christian trimmed away all the Jewish references from his Bible. To the church’s dismay, there wasn’t a whole lot left. So the church decided to keep the Jewish material in its Bible, recognizing the Christian church comes from the Jews, as Jesus comes from Sarah and Abraham.

So I’m wondering what to say about all this. On the one hand, something that gets us much Bible ink as all this seems ancient and archaic. And yet, this is an ancient practice that could be a corrective in the church. The key is what God speaks: “This is my covenant, for you and those who come after you.” The promise is broadly inclusive. It begins with one household and extends sideways to all connected to Abraham. When the covenant is “cut,” it includes the slaves and servants and resident outsiders in Abraham’s house. When God commands it, it comes with a holy blessing.  

The covenant also reaches into the future. God says, “No longer will your name be Abram, which means ‘father.’ Now your name will be Abraham.” That means ‘big daddy of an enormous multitude.” Old Abraham, ninety-nine years old and dry as an old dead stump, is promised offspring through surgically altered equipment. It’s no wonder Sarah laughed when God announced she would have a baby. Either it was too sad to be true or too impossible to comprehend. God gave them a child anyway, a child named “Isaac,” the Jewish word for Laughter.

The point here is the ritual is connected to the promise. What the Jews say of circumcision is the same thing that Christians say about baptism. This is when we are marked and claimed as the children of God. In the words of Rabbi Jacob Neusner, the great Jewish scholar, ‘A minor surgical rite of dubious medical value becomes the mark of the renewal of the agreement between God and Israel…It is meant to accomplish a specific goal: to secure a place for the child, a blessing for the child.” [1]

So it’s more an action. Words surround the action! We learn this from the Jews. A table blessing recognizes a meal as a gift. The prayer at death, the kaddish, announces God is holy and the Messiah is coming. At a circumcision, at least ten Jewish men gather around a male child on the eighth day of life. They verbally bless this child into the covenant that God has made.

Like baptism, the ritual offers a sign that is both deeply personal and profoundly communal. It announces you belong to the God who brought you out of slavery in Egypt. You belong to the God who promised Abraham and Sarah that they would flourish as parents. Through this outward sign and the words that go with it, you belong to God. The story of your belonging is marked in your skin. It is a continuing reminder of who you are. It was done before the child can say no. As I think about it, that might be the most important insight of all.

I have friends who grew up during the sixties. They were raised to question every other authority. So when they married and had children, they decided to give their kids a choice about whether they or not wanted to go to church. They let the kids sleep in until they were sixteen, and then said, “Do you want to go to church?” The offspring had never sung with other people, or prayed with other people, or listened to the scripture, or even sit and be quiet for any longer than ten seconds. So guess what the kids decided?

I have two daughters who had no choice about what they did on a Sunday morning. It’s only fair; nobody gave me a choice, so I didn’t give them a choice. I chose for my children to be baptized in the name of the Trinity; it was my responsibility to make sure they know what that means. As they were shaped by scripture and the practices of the church, they have been shaped to make choices that honor the Lord Jesus Christ. If I had given them no guidance in how to live their lives, that would have made me an unfit parent.  

So this is what the Jews do: they circumcise and say, “You belong to God.” Your story is God’s story. You were in Egypt, and God freed you from Pharaoh’s brick quota. You were wandering in the desert, and God gave you a teaching. We were in the Promised Land, and God gave you milk and honey, and all along the way, God said, “Don’t forget who you are.”

All of this brings us to the primary benefit of circumcision, which is also the primary benefit of baptism. Are you still with me? Are you writing this down? The primary benefit is this: when you wake up in the morning, you don’t have to wonder who you are.

Your identity is given to you by a community that says, “You are God’s child.” You are given a story that is greater than your own stories of pain and despair and loneliness. Your life is enrolled in a story that is greater than some advertiser telling you what you should want or what you should buy or what you should consume.

That’s why we always celebrate Christian baptism. The Christian life is rooted in the moment when the church says, “You belong to God, because we belong to God.”

And I know as well as you, there are times when faith wavers, wanders, or even evaporates. The journey of the heart does not always travel in a straight line. Along the road there are detours, potholes, and the occasional dead-end. Things happen. Life happens. But that does not mean the journey is over. The road is still beneath our feet and it is God’s road. Every step we take is on the firm foundation of God’s love. Every step is a response to the claim God has on our lives.

And who knows? Maybe what we thought was a dead end is actually a new beginning. Maybe if we fear we have wandered too far off the holy highway, it could be an invitation to venture onto new land.

The greater truth is that wherever you go, wherever you find yourself, you are a child of God. God’s story is your story. God chooses you to be part of that story. God's choices precede all of our choices.

• We didn’t choose for Jesus to be born. That was God’s decision. It was made for us.
• When the human race chose to get rid of Jesus, God chose to raise Jesus from the dead. That wasn’t our decision. God did that, so Jesus can keep interfering with us until we know who we are.
• We didn’t choose “church.” Church was God’s idea. Church is God’s experiment. God sends the Holy Spirit to fill, and inform, and commission. We didn’t choose all of this; it was chosen for us.

Now, if you’d rather do it your way, and go on your own, there’s no tell how that will turn out. Just like Adam and Eve. There’s a great line by Frederick Buechner, when he describes Eve after she and her husband got thrown out of the Garden of Eden. He says, “Like Adam, Eve spent the rest of her days trying to convince herself that it had all worked out for the best.”[2] I suppose we can convince ourselves of anything we want. As for me, I’d like to spend my time convincing you that belonging to God is more important than anything else, in life and in death. 

On the eighth day of life, God says, “You shall mark the Jewish child as a sign of the covenant.” It is the eighth day, I suppose, because that’s the first day of a new creation. The top of our baptismal font has eight sides: one for each day of the first creation, and the eighth for God’s new creation. The covenant is God’s new creation, by which we are shaped and given direction. It is God’s announcement that we matter and that we have a purpose still unfolding. It is God’s blessing, given from one generation to the next, so that when our days are over, or if our days are still going on, we know that nothing separates us from God’s steadfast love.

From this day forward, we belong to God. That’s what we believe and what we teach. Through the grace of Jesus Christ, all of us are adopted into the family. And the word for our belonging is covenant.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Jacob Neusner, The Enchantments of Judaism: Rites of Transformation From Birth Through Death (New York: Basic Books, 1987)

[2] Buechner, Peculiar Treasures (San Francisco: Harper and Row)

The Bow in the Sky

Genesis 9:8-17
Lent 1
2/21/21
William G. Carter

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

 

God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Years ago, my Uncle Fred built an ark. He didn’t use the kind of lumber that Noah did. Mostly he used scraps of wood from around the garage. And it was an impressive little project! The front door swings down to become a ramp. It’s sturdy enough for the elephants and tall enough for the giraffes. Up on top, there are living quarters for Noah and his family.

With a jigsaw, Uncle Fred cut out the animals from a large piece of plywood. He produced them two by two. When he finished, my Mom painted each one and put faces on Mr. and Mrs. Noah. For years, this was a cherished gift for my children. When they moved on to other pursuits, we brought Uncle Fred’s project to the church nursery, where other children have continued to imagine the Bible story.

All of this was intended by my uncle. He attached a brief note when the ark first floated into my home: “This is for the kids to enjoy.”

This is how we often regard the story: as a gift for children. It is the subject of Vacation Bible School lessons and youth choir musicals. Kermit the Frog sang about rainbow connections. A famous comedian who goes unmentioned these days had a great comedy bit: “Hey Noah, how long can your tread water?”

And I'll tell you what: during this sermon, you could go online to order the Fisher-Price version of Noah and the ark. For only $41.99, you get two elephants, two zebras, two lions, two giraffes, a 600-year-old man, and a big plastic boat that won’t sink in your bathtub. Additional animals sold separately. It's something for the kids to enjoy.

Except that it’s not. The story in Genesis is a dark story, a terrible story. It’s the story of how God intended to get rid of all the people of the world.

Certainly, God had his reasons. God made the world, but it was turning out poorly. One day, God looked around and saw the cruelty and the violence that people inflict on one another. God said, “All they think about is evil. All they do is hurt and destroy.” And God had enough. God was heartbroken about making an imperfect world.

Since God has been around before making the world, God didn’t need a world full of wretched people to feel complete. So God decided to wipe the slate clean. Wash everything away. God would be free to go other places and do other things.

The only kink in the plan is that God looked down and saw Noah. God remembered him and said, “Well, Noah isn’t so bad. In fact, he’s rather good. His wife, his sons, and his daughters in law are good too.” Thanks to the eight of them, that’s why you and I are here today. If it weren’t for Noah, the human race would be extinct. But God remembered Noah, and God said, “Maybe there is a glimmer of hope.”

When we read this story as adults, we hear all kinds of legendary touches. Noah was five hundred years old when he became a father. He was six hundred years old when the rain started to fall. At that advanced age, he was able to build a huge boat, line up the crocodiles and tigers without getting hurt, and make room for the mosquitos. And I imagine Noah and his family made the voyage as vegetarians; there’s no use in eating your cargo.

Just for the record, I happen to believe all of this without having to take it literally, because I happen to believe the deeper truth: that God had every reason to wipe out every person until he looked down and remembered Noah.

It must make God sad to create a world that doesn’t turn out very well. God creates people with the capacity to love and their hearts are bent on destruction. God gives them seeds to plant gardens, and some of them hoard the produce while others go hungry. God gives them hands to work with metal and they build spears. God gives them land of incredible beauty, and they sell tickets for admission and strip-mine every available mineral. 

God made the humans good, but they turned out worse than the animals. In the jungle, at least, animals survive by being fit. Human beings, on the other hand, manipulate, exploit, scheme, and plunder. They don’t have to sink their claws into one another, but they do. Unlike the wild animals, grown-up humans torture one another, teenagers play mind games, and grade-school children humiliate their classmates. No doubt, God has always had every reason to be incredibly sad. In the words of one rabbi, “The great flood was supplied by God’s tears.”

But through the tears, God looked down and saw Noah. And God saw Noah’s wife, whose name was Mrs. Noah. And God saw their three sons and three daughters in law. Something softened in the Creator’s heart, and God thought, “Maybe I can work with them after all. Maybe I can make something of them without having to start over from scratch.”

Several years ago, Bill Moyers brought together a lot of different voices to talk about the stories of Genesis. This is a text held in common by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Moyers thought it would be fruitful to host conversations around the ancient stories, and he was right.

For the Noah story, Moyers asked his panel what kind of headline they would write to describe it. A newspaper editor said the headline should be, “God Destroys World.” Across the table from him sat the Rev. Dr. Samuel Proctor, for many years the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the leading church in Harlem. Dr. Proctor said, “Oh no. The headline ought to read, ‘God Gives Humans Second Chance.’”

Proctor said, “I learned the Noah story from my father, a Sunday school teacher. When we grew up, we laughed at the far-fetched details, but we didn’t try to rewrite the story. We drew our lessons from it what it said. And it held before us the possibility of another opportunity to get things right.”

He said, “Every Wednesday, my daddy would press his trousers and go down to the Philharmonic Glee Club rehearsal. These sixty black guys – table waiters, coal trimmers, truck drivers – would give one big concert a year to the white population. Even though our daddy was singing, we had to sit in the back. But in the midst of all that rejection, hate, and spite, they went. And every concert they ended by singing the same song: ‘Yesterday the skies were grey, but look this morning they are blue. The world is singing the song of the dawn.”

He said, “That’s the story of Noah! Sixty black guys in tuxedos in the 1920s, with lynching everywhere and hatred. But they had something we need to recover right now. I can’t let go of this story of Noah and the flood because after all of the devastation, there’s a rainbow. I’m not going to live without that kind of hope.”[1]

Here is the hope: after every thunderstorm, there is a rainbow somewhere. God takes his archery bow, the very weapon of war, and hangs it up in the sky. The point is: there will be no more arrows from heaven to earth. God has promised to deal with us by another way. God will influence us without resorting to intimidation or wrath. God decided to wash away the world once before, and realized it was a bad mistake. Why? Because there’s always Noah, that interesting 600-year-old man whose very presence is proof that the human race is worthy of a one more chance.

Our text today is the conclusion of a three-chapter story. God is doing all the talking. Noah can’t get a word in edgewise, and he doesn’t dare interrupt. After forty days and nights of rain, after the terrible washing-away of sin and sinful people, after the better part of a year floating on a flooded earth, God gives a speech to the eight human survivors and a whole lot of animals. The speech is summed up in a single word, a word God uses seven times in nine verses. The word is “covenant.”

“Covenant” begins as God’s word. That’s our word for this season of Lent. A covenant is an agreement. When God makes a covenant, it sounds like God says, “This is the way it’s going to be.”

As we hear the scriptures today, the very first covenant is given to Noah and his children. That means it’s a covenant with us, an agreement with the whole human family. Every person alive today is not only a child of Adam and Eve, but also a child of Noah and his wife. All of us are great-grandchildren of the flood.

The first covenant that God makes is a self-imposed restraining order: “I won’t use nature to wipe out the human race and the animals around them.” That is God’s commitment. What we do with that is up to us. If we choose to poison the environment, we must figure out what to do with the consequences. If we change our own climate by putting toxins in the air, we have a responsibility to thaw out Texas. There is continuing evidence of short-sighted human behavior and self-destructive tendencies.

But sometimes we see Noah – and we remember we have a second chance to get it right.

All the while, God promises to stick with us. “When I look at the rainbow,” God says, “I will remember my steadfast love and self-restraint.” No more annihilation. No more holocaust. No more fury and destruction. Not from heaven, at least. That rainbow is God’s eternal Post-It note. It is the continuing reminder that the Creator of all things is in favor of all people, in favor of the whole rainbow of different colors that make up the light of the world.

Elie Wiesel once said, “God created us because God loves good stories.” The story of the human family keeps on. No doubt, God is regularly disappointed with some of the plot twists. As God knows so well, a flood never did wash away the all-too-human tendency to goof up our lives. Sometimes we get stuck in the mud. Yet God chooses to keep living with all of us.

This is the promise of God’s covenant. God is the beginning of our story. God will be the end of our story. And in the middle of it all, as we heard today in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus steps out of the water – the water of his own baptism - and his faithfulness saves the world from drowning. This is the Good News.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved. 

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[1] Thanks to Carlos Wilton for passing along the story.

Sermon for Ash Wednesday

Ephesians 2:12-13
February 17, 2021
Ash Wednesday
William G. Carter

Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 

 

Generally speaking, I am not a fan of lifting Bible passages out of context. But these two sentences shimmer in a way that we can understand the whole.  

Paul is writing to people who were strangers. They were strange to him, Gentiles who had no connection with the faith of Israel. They did not experience God as the One who led them out of slavery. They were ignorant of the Ten Commandments. They had never heard one of God's prophets calling them back to faithful living, because they had no interest in whatever faithful living is all about. So Paul can assume that those Gentiles were not only strangers to him; they were strangers to God.

But something had changed. Through the love of Christ, a love that pushes people beyond their tidy boundaries, Paul came to understand how God loves all who were strangers. That God wishes to include all who had stood outside of Israel and its "commonwealth." What was offered to Israel is now available to all God's people.

The key event to announce this inclusion was the crucifixion of Christ Jesus. From a distance, it looked like the political murder of an innocent man. People who believed in God (the Jews) convinced people who didn't believe in God (the Gentiles) to crucify a good man, a teacher and healer. They conspired to kill Jesus, but God brought him back from the dead.

Even more astonishing, neither the insiders nor the outsiders were punished by heaven for doing their worst. Rather, God used that capital execution to announce forgiveness and to invite all people - insiders as well as outsiders - to come home, to form a new humanity where all are welcome and none are strangers. This is the heart of the Gospel preached to the Ephesians.

It is a Gospel for us to unpack week after week, season after season. God has shown great mercy by not obliterating those who crucified the Christ. Heaven's invitation to earth persists: God calls us to put away all hostility and welcome Christ as our peace. We are invited to welcome the graciousness of God and to show this graciousness to all people. "Remember you were without Christ," he says, "and now you have been brought near."

To signify what has changed, Paul says, "Once you were strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world." That is an evocative phrase: "strangers of the covenants of promise." We did not know about the promises that God had made. We were not aware of the various forms of hope that connect us to God's activity in the world. But thanks to the grace of God in the work of Jesus Christ, the covenants of promise are extended to all of us.

We will spend the Sundays in the season of Lent to explore these covenants. There are many of them: promises of God set in a rainbow of the clouds, in the cutting of flesh, in the carving of words on stone and the sealing of words on the human heart. The new covenant in Jesus is extended to us through his self-sacrifice on the cross and offered through a gift of bread and wine. One covenant after another, after another, as God binds himself to us and invites us to respond in kind. 

Tonight we begin the journey of Lent through the simple affirmation of who we are. We are creatures. We have limitations - limited power, limited energy, and a short span of time. Ash Wednesday reminds us how God formed the human family from the dust of the ground and blew living Breath into our nostrils. We regularly forget or ignore our total dependence on grace. So Lent begins with a re-calibration, the scriptural reminder that "you are dust and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). It is a reminder to not reach too high, nor to shrug off the mercy that first created us and ultimately welcomes us.

And from beginning to end, we are invited into God's covenants. These are holy promises that give us hope, that name us as God's children, that offer direction for living and connect us to God's purposes for the world. We will revisit the promises in our Lenten worship together. We will encourage one another to welcome God's grace.

I look forward to taking this journey with you, and pray that God will grant you an open heart, a settled mind, and a sanctified will, that together we might to see God more clearly, to love Christ more dearly, and to follow in the power of the Spirit more nearly. May you have a blessed Lent!  

 

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Never Ends

1 Corinthians 13
Transfiguration
February 14, 2021
William G. Carter

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. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrong-doing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.


It will come as no surprise that this is our text for today. This is a favorite passage from the Bible, long cherished and well kept. Some of these words are printed on valentines that loved ones are trading today. And when the last day of a winter sermon series on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians lands on February 14, we can expect the preacher to read this text.

Most of us know it well. It is recited at many of the weddings we attend. In recent years, I have heard it read at a couple of funerals. At first, that seemed to be an odd choice. But no, there is something about 1 Corinthians 13 that was deeply appropriate. People had gathered to say farewell to someone they loved. This is the Love Chapter of the whole Bible. It’s not the only one, but it is the one that everybody remembers.

We know this text. At least we know the central part. Paul is defining love, right? Actually he is describing love. He never defines it. He tells us what love is: it’s patient and kind. Mostly he tells us what love is not: it’s not envious, it’s not boastful, it’s not arrogant or rude. Love doesn’t insist on its own way. Love is not irritable or resentful; your lover might act that way, but that’s not love.

And then, in a phrase that resonates deeply this week, love does not rejoice in wrongdoing. Love doesn’t enjoy hurting other people, or destroying them, or committing criminal action. Oh no, love rejoices in the truth. If we could ever know the truth, if the truth could ever be known about every one of us without fear or shame, it would open us to the reality of love.

You have to wonder why the apostle Paul is writing these words. But you don’t have to wonder very long. That little congregation in Corinth was struggling. They were trying to follow Jesus in a town that didn’t care about Jesus. They were trying to make their way through the world as faithfully as possible. It wasn’t working. The Christian faith was only twenty or twenty-five years old. There weren’t a lot of road maps to guide them. Paul himself had floated across the sea to the big city of Ephesus (16:8).

And it’s easy to tell what some of the problems were.

From chapter 14, some of the church people were caught up in ecstatic speech. They would babble out whatever they thought the Lord was laying on their hearts. Others were breaking into song, any song they were inspired to sing. If the leader called for order, the first group started shouting over everybody else. The second group sang even louder.

Paul says, “If you don’t have love, you are merely making a lot of noise.” You sound like a smashing cymbal. Take note: He is in Ephesus, Ephesus is in modern day Turkey, and over there, cymbal-making is an ancient art.

But that wasn’t all. We know from this letter that little church was full of “experts.” Archaeologists believe there were only about 40 or 50 souls in the congregation, but with 40 or 50 souls, you might have 50 or 60 experts – because some folks have more than one opinion.

Now, that doesn’t happen here, of course. Not like last week, when our congregational meeting was on Zoom and the moderator had a mute button. But I have been to churches where the experts stand up and tell everybody their expert opinions. Some have even “insisted on their own way. Like Paul, I wonder, “Is this about love?” Is this about building up the Body of Christ? Or is this about bullying? You may be able to move mountains, but if you don’t do with love, you are merely pushing around dirt.

And then, in this letter and in the second letter that follows it, we discover that church had a few Super Heroes. Christian Super Heroes. That is Paul’s nickname for them.[1] The Greek word is “huper,” as in “Super Duper.” They wanted to show how devoted they were, how sacrificial they could be, how they could leap from the pinnacle of the Temple and impress everybody with their spiritual success. Just hear them say it, “I had thirty-seven answered prayers last week, and I’m so humble.”

Paul says, “What are you doing? What do you think you’re doing?” You take a vow of poverty as a way of showing off? You think you want to be a martyr, a Super Duper Martyr? Get off the cross, we need the wood! If you wish to make a show of your spiritual superiority, but have no love, you have gained nothing.

I can almost hear him shouting when he begins the words, “Love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” It has taken him a number of pages, but he is now digging into the bedrock. The Christian life – the life in Christ – is saturated in love. Not love as an oozy feeling, like those chocolate-covered cherries I gave to my wife. No, this is love that integrates mind, heart, and will in service to all around us. It's more than an emotion. Love is what you do. Love is how you treat one another. Love is how you lift one another up. Love is reveling in the truth, with no need for shame or embarrassment. And we know all of this.

It is then that Paul says one more thing: “Love never ends.” He didn’t need to say that. He could have kept love in the present tense, declaring, “God wants you to love one another.” That’s what the apostle John does. In the first letter of John, he admonishes his little flock to love one another. No less than thirty times, John teaches love as a present-day ethic.

But Paul pushes us toward eternity. Love is not merely for here and now. Love is for “always,” for all time, for whatever comes after the end of human time. Love “never ends.”

It’s a mysterious thing for him to say. I have stood before the casket at an open grave. The widow who chose 1 Corinthians 13 to be read at her wedding now looks at the casket through scalded tears. She whispers, “I will love you always.” “Always” is pretty close to “eternity.”

The hard truth is that those who marry make their vows “till death do us part.” In this sense, every marriage concludes when our life concludes. If we have lost the one we love, we can keep remembering and keep loving until our days also come to an end. That persistent love is an extraordinary gift. We cherish it.

But Paul is pushing us even further. When he declares, “Love never ends,” he is speaking of the love of God. He is pointing to the love that continues even after God’s children live and die. We see this love only from a distance, he says. We might have powerful experiences of love, but they are only a little piece of the Whole Thing. The love we have known is a partial glimpse of the grace that creates the world and the mercy that redeems the universe.

I spent some time in the greeting card aisle this week. I was there to survey the messages of one red, heart-shaped card after another. After ten or twelve, it seemed they were all falling short. Some were sugary sweet, some were alluring, a few were arrogant and rude. As I recalled today’s Bible text, they all sounded like “baby talk,” childish words that could only point to fullness of a love that “never ends.”

Paul is pointing us to eternity, to the coming day when the fire of God’s love will consume all things. As Eugene Peterson translates the text, “When the Complete comes, our incompletes will be cancelled.”[2] When will everything be complete? When will the “perfect” come? On the day of Resurrection!

For resurrection is another revelation of God’s love. Resurrection was not only something that happened just for Jesus. A couple of chapters after this, Paul tells us the first Easter was the first glimpse of what lies ahead for us all. The ultimate expression of God’s love is this: that God loves us enough to wake us up after the very last time we go to sleep. That God desires our friendship so much as to keep us around Forever. That God pledges to work in us until the final, final day when we are completely lovable.

Love points us toward the eternity of resurrection. Whatever tough issues we have in this life will be worked out. Whatever mistakes we have made will be forgiven. Whatever sins we’ve done will be washed clean. Whatever injustices we have committed will be corrected. Whatever we have broken, or whatever has been broken in us or among us, will be healed. For as the apostle Paul declares, “Love never ends.” Can you believe it?

When I was school, we had a professor in historical theology, Dr. Edward Dowey could be a stern and demanding teacher. He taught the writings of John Calvin. Calvin wrote a lot of ink, so Dr. Dowey’s course on Calvin required a lot of reading. Maybe 120 pages of reading every week.[3] He didn’t want his students to skim the pages. He wanted them to absorb them, ponder them, discuss them, and write long papers about them.

He thundered, “We are reading Calvin because we are seeking to comprehend the mind of God. This is not lightweight fluff.” Fair enough; but some of his students struggled to keep up.

One day in class, he was lecturing on Calvin’s understanding of the doctrine of divine election, the concept that God chooses his people. Suddenly our professor started to cry. The tears were pouring. His eyes were red. His cheeks were puffy. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

Then he said quietly, “I make no apology for my emotions. Sometimes I am overwhelmed to know that God wants us because God loves us.” He blew his nose and added, “This is why I teach, so you would know this, too.”

Where did he learn this? In those thick volumes of theology? In forty years as a professor? Was it during the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ph.D. from the University of Zurich, or the Navy chaplaincy in World War Two?

No, he learned it as a child in the Presbyterian Church of Dunmore, Pennsylvania, where his father was the pastor. That’s where he discovered his human destiny was to receive the love of God and to pass it along.

That’s why we are here. To discover our destiny in the name of the God whose love “never ends.” All the love we receive from one another is a gift through Christ from the God who loves us. All the love we share is a rehearsal for Eternity . . . when we’ve been there, ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun.

 

 
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

[1] See 2 Corinthians 11:5.
[2] 1 Corinthians 13:10 in The Message.
[3] McNeill’s translation of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion runs 1800 pages in two volumes.

So Much Winning

1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Ordinary 5
February 7, 2021
William G. Carter

If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel.

For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.

 

 

The Bible is a venerable book. It has been around for a long time. As a venerable book, it has been the source of many venerable quotations. Today we hear Paul say, “I have become all things to all people.” That phrase has come to mean all kinds of things to all kinds of people. It's a statement subject to many misinterpretations. And I don’t know which misinterpretation I like the best.

If Paul is saying, "I have become able to do all things," we could compliment his versatility. It is the motto of a true Renaissance person, able to do many things and wear a variety of hats. We

We are impressed with such people. I remember the sunset cruise on Lake Champlain. At the pier, a weathered old salt sold tickets in a small shack. At the appointed hour, he rang a bell and pointed us toward the gangplank. The engine fired up. We pulled away from the dock. A few minutes later, the cabin door opens, and our ticket seller is wearing a captain's hat. He described the shoreline on a fifteen-watt amplifier as he steered us toward the middle of the lake.

As we admired the golden glow of sunset, our captain opened the snack bar. He sold Coke, coffee, champagne, pretzels, and Dramamine. We returned to shore, he waved good-bye, and began to tidy up. I thought, "This guy can do it all. Booking agent, sea captain, tour guide, soda jerk, medic, and deck swabber."

All things to all people. Some people think that’s what Paul is saying, if only to tell us how capable he is.

Others of us don’t this is a positive statement. Rather, it reveals a character flaw.

In my family, we have a catchphrase to describe a people-pleaser. We say, “How does she like her eggs?” It’s a reference to the old romantic comedy, “Runaway Bride.” Julia Roberts plays Maggie Carpenter, a beautiful young woman who leaves a string of fiancées at the altar. She fell in love with the rock and roll mechanic, the sensitive dude, the scientist, and the high school football coach. Each one fell for her, popped the question, gave her a ring, and planned a wedding. Before she could say, “I do,” Maggie ran away.

 A journalist named Ike Graham travels from New York to investigate the story. He interviews all the jilted men and discovers Maggie never stood up for herself. Ike asks, “How did she like her eggs?” Each guy gives a different answer. She was so desperate to be loved, she gave in to whatever they ordered. All things to all people; or at least, a different thing for each person.

We know this is impossible, if not exhausting. The marketing expert tells the business, “Pick your audience, and play to them.” The community college declares says, “We have a specialized niche in the educational market.” Some successful companies have gotten themselves into trouble when they tried to sell things they had no expertise in selling. That’s why Krispy Kreme does not sell computers. They can’t be all things.

It is true of churches. A seasoned old pastor was talking serving a church in the suburbs. He knows the expectations are high: people want this program, they want that ministry, and so on. “I would get some flack when someone would discover that it’s impossible for a church to meet all their unchecked, unwarranted needs,” he said. “Finally I declared, ‘We are the church for the people who want to be here.’” There’s a wise man.

And it is true of every human relationship. Ninety years ago, Harry Warren wrote a pop tune titled, “You’re My Everything.” It was a work of fiction. Nobody is everybody’s everything. Special, yes. Committed, certainly. But relationships collapse when they suffer under the burden of perfection. Love is a wonderful gift; forgiveness is even better. We cannot be all things to one person, much less to all persons.

So it’s no wonder that the apostle Paul caught some criticism from the church in Corinth. They waited until after he left town, you understand. Criticism always bubbles up when they discover you are not all things, that you cannot be all things. A gap opens between what you expect and what you receive.

After Paul left the city of Corinth, people started to say, "Paul is inconsistent. He preaches different sermons to different people. To the Jews, he goes on and on about circumcision, Torah, and the Messiah. To the rhetorically minded Greeks, he preaches three logical points and recites a poem. To the downtrodden, he says ‘Take heart; Christ was weak on the cross, and he is revealed in the midst of suffering.’”

His opponents say, “Listen to that. Paul can't make up his mind. He changes the message to suit the audience. He wants everybody to like him." 

And how does he respond to the criticism? Paul says, "I have become all things to all people." But it sounds different when he says it. According to the context, it is an expression of his freedom.

Here in chapter 9, he stands up for himself. He says, "I am not bound by anybody's opinions or expectations. My preaching does not depend on what people think of me. Neither am I bound by anybody's money. I am free. The Gospel came to me free of charge. I have been awakened to what God is doing in the world through Jesus, the Risen Christ. So I will speak of the love and justice of God wherever I can. In feast and famine. In comfort or hostility. I will go anywhere, and I will talk to anybody, because I am free."

Let’s remember how rare this is. Many Christian churches say, "Everybody is welcome here." That's what they say and what they want to believe. But when you get to the bottom of the page, the small print says, "We'll take anybody as long they look like the rest of us." What is so rare and refreshing about the apostle Paul is that he did not have any guarded turf. There was no place he would not go. No stranger that he would not engage. The Gospel news was so good that he would do whatever he could to share it.

I find this to be a remarkable expression of love. Paul held the essence of the Gospel – but he offered it in a way that it could be heard. To the Jew, he could announce the Messiah had come and he knew who it is. To the philosophical Greeks, he could speak of the Christ as the center that holds all things together. To those who were suffering or sad, he could say, “Let me tell what Jesus has endured for all of us.”

More than translating the age-old verities, he offered sympathy, compassion, and understanding. He cared enough about those around him to take them seriously. He earned a hearing by listening first. By paying attention to whomever God connected him.

Someone pointed me to an article about Jane Goodall, that remarkable anthropologist who has spent much of her life learning about Africa. We think of her as the scientist who was photographed with chimpanzees. She has been that, and so much more.

For twenty years, she had been working with the villages of Tanzania. Her chief concern was deforestation, the decimation of the habitat. The villagers, however, were worried about food, water, health care, and survival. And the writer noted, “Only when she listened to their concerns, rather than preaching hers to them, were the (Goodall) Institute and the villagers able to discover together what a harmonious kinship could look like.”[1]

That’s the important line: “only when she listener to their concerns, rather than preaching hers to them…”

Paul says, "I have become all things to all people." What he means is, "I choose to meet people where they are." He does not swoop in as an expert, dead set on improving other people whether they want it or not. He does not stand over them and declare what they are missing. No, he stands among them, listens to who they are, and then shares what he has found.

“I do this for the sake of the Gospel,” he says. Not for his sake. Not to collect more scalps, pelts, or light sabers – but to “win” them for the sake of Jesus. “To the Jew, I speak like a Jew, I use the words of a Jew, I share the concerns of a Jew, in order to win the Jew.”

For those “outside of the Jewish Law,” he eats the food that they eat, discusses the matters that matter to them, relates to them as fellow children of God, all according to Christ’s law of love. He wants to win those outside of the Jewish Law.

So the issue today is how we “win” people. It’s a different kind of winning. It’s not like a football game, where the team wins by putting more points on the scoreboard, as a display of superiority. More likely, it’s winning by accompanying, by traveling beside rather than racing ahead.

When it comes to our life together as a congregation, or as Christians who live in this affluent town, or as citizens of a shared commonwealth, we will win others by being real, not by being better. We will win others through kindness, not aggression. We will win others by taking them seriously and naming the common ground that we already share.

Ultimately, we will win others by showing them that they are loved. We cannot be “all things,” not all the time, but we can aspire to love one another. To build up. To listen. To refuse to perpetuate another person’s pain. To forgive and heal and restore what can be restored. It is the work of service. It is the work of Christ, the Christ who desires to work in “all things.”  

 

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] L. Roger Owens, “Why Jane Goodall reminds me of Dorothy Day,” The Christian Century, 30 December 2020 https://www.christiancentury.org/article/film/why-jane-goodall-reminds-me-dorothy-day